Policies must constantly evolve lest they become stultified

When you understand why we have policies, it’s a lot easier to see the intrinsic tension between those who swear by them and those who curse their very existence.

Jon Foster-Pedley is associate Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University of Reading and dean and director of Henley Business School Africa.

Every policy is born as a solution and dies, if nobody is watching, as a superstition.

There are major ongoing debates about the worth of policies intended to radically transform South Africa. There are diehards on both sides, detractors who want to tear them down and evangelists who want to make them even stricter.

There doesn’t seem to be any middle ground in the debate, and yet, ironically, that is exactly the life-cycle of a policy, a continuous helix irrespective of the policy’s founding rationale.

I always imagine policies in the context of someone tasked with making their way through virgin bush. Getting from point A to point B requires you to hack at the undergrowth with your machete, only to arrive exhausted at the end, if you succeed. Yet the bush will grow back.

If you make a pathway behind you as you go, others can follow without having to learn it all over again for themselves. They get there without the effort. And that is fundamentally what policies are: a pathway to help those behind you get the right route efficiently.

This is where policies come in, to cut out the tedious, repetitive and expensive learning curve. The problem is that just as a glass can be seen as half full or half empty, policies can be seen as either dumbsizing or an efficiency heuristic. A policy is a frozen experience, and the danger is that it stays frozen long after the weather has changed.

Ikujiro Nonaka, the father of Knowledge Management, tells the story of the brilliant artisanal chef who made perfect noodles. The problem was that his understanding of the exact stretch, feel, and elasticity of the dough, the hydration ratio of the flour, and the perfect simmering time of the broth based on the day’s humidity was tacit.

When the restaurant was bought, the new owners wanted to get other chefs to learn how to make noodles like this, because if the chef got ill or died, their investment would go with him. Knowledge that lives only in one person’s hands is not an asset, but a single point of failure and a hostage. They wanted to make that knowledge explicit and shareable. They tried asking the chef, and he couldn’t explain. They tried watching him and copying him, and they could never get it right.

In the end, the only way was to get an intern researcher to work