Categorie archief: Essay

Lessen uit de Noord/Zuidlijn

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Nieuw beleid van de gemeente Amsterdam inzake majeure projecten

Eberhard van der Laan | april 2011

Inleiding*

In oktober 2002 wordt een bestuurlijke GO gegeven voor de bouw van de Noord-Zuidlijn in Amsterdam. Al snel stapelen problemen zich op voor de contracten, de organisatie, de planning en de financiële middelen. In 2009 volgden een rapport van de commissie Veerman Bouwen aan Verbinding en een raadsenquête en een rapport van de enquetecommissie Noord-Zuidlijn. De geplande datum was 2005 tegen een begroting van 680 miljoen. Het werd 2018 en bijna 4,1 miljard euro.

Bij zijn aantreden greep de Amsterdamse burgemeester Eberhard van der Laan de problemen bij de Noord-Zuidlijn aan om het leren van fouten en het trekken van lessen op de agenda te zetten. Na gesprekken met de meest betrokkenen bij dit project én andere risicovolle projecten werd dit beleidstuk opgesteld: een brief met bevindingen én 10 lessen die voortaan als een set van uitgangspunten geldt voor alle majeure projecten van de gemeente Amsterdam.

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Public values and risks in Strasbourg

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The birth of Public Risk Management Organisation (PRIMO)

Jack Kruf* | May 2005

Last month, on April 1, 2005, the Executive Committee of UDITE, the network of local government Chief Executives across Europe, met in Strasbourg to discuss ‘public risk management’ as a new idea. City managers from across Europe looked forward to a newly proposed approach, which Alan Vendelbo, president of UDITE, put at the top of the agenda.

It was clear from the start that they believed it could strengthen their role and function in supporting politics, society, and their organisations. Current events, social attacks, and out-of-control budgets or projects have raised the importance of proactive thinking about public values, targets, and their risks. Here is a short personal impression. I was there on this day.

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Resilience of what to what?

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Jack Kruf | April 2024 (update from August 2016)

What is resilience? Well, there is no simple answer to this. Especially not regarding a city’s ecosystem. The concept, you might say, is in development across different sciences and has recently entered the public governance domain related to society’s social-ecological system.

Can resilience be measured as an indicator of an ecosystem’s state? How are the living and non-living factors of the measured system calculated? Can it create true insight into the tone of the city, society, and nature?

Resilience is the new buzzword among public leaders and managers, but it has played an essential role in natural ecosystems for millions of years. It was launched in 2013 with 100 Resilient Cities as a relatively new concept of thinking and acting from the government’s perspective. But what is it about? The ability to endure stress and still perform, or the capacity to recover after a catastrophe? Maybe both.

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Value & Risk Dictionary

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PRIMO Res Public

To understand what is happening, make sense of the publications (from different sciences and schools), interpret the frameworks and translate the myriad of languages related to public governance of value and risk, it is wise to reduce the dictionary with concepts as are starting points of our organisation and for our members and network.

It serves as a compass in diagnosis, design, and decision-making. These tools are theoretical concepts and practical aids that help to get not lost in translation. Especially the dictionary of risk is a thick one with hundreds of interpretations. Many pretend to be or want to be the standard.

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De kansen van het regeerakkoord

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Geert Haisma, Robert ’t Hart en Jack Kruf * | april 2007

Den Haag, Parkhotel, 13 april 2007. Dit essay bespreekt de uitkomsten van de ronde tafel georganiseerd om te spreken – vanuit gemeentelijk perspectief – over de uitvoerbaarheid van het nieuwe regeerakkoord Samen Werken, Samen Leven. Immers in dit akkoord wordt ‘de gemeente’ 49 keer genoemd.

Den Haag, Parkhotel,

Tijdens de ronde tafel is er door een vijftiental gemeentesecretarissen, VNG-directeur Ralph Pans en VGS-voorzitter Piet Buijtels onder leiding van Yourie Albrecht openlijk gediscussieerd. De algemene bevinding van de bijeenkomst is dat, bij de huidige wettelijke en financiële afspraken tussen kabinet en gemeenten, circa een kwart van de voornemens niet en een kwart moeilijk uitvoerbaar is.

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Lessons from Archery

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What can a governor learn from an archer?

Jack Kruf | April 2019

What can the world of public governance learn from archery? Archery is a mature sport that has developed dramatically since its inception. Because of this, the sport itself has undergone many changes and improvements.

De Lieksa-vlag (Lieksa lippu) is de officiële vlag van de Finse stad Lieksa (bron: Wikipedia)

In governance and public administration, we may learn from the archery world to select and curate the basic skills perceived as essential by professional archers. After all, governance is a form of archery, metaphorically spoken.

There are parallels:  a good governor has the skills of a good archer in effectively reaching the target. After all, both professions are about precision. Here, we focus on the archer. I collected some skills from the archery world. I leave it to the reader to find similarities with the governance world.

A summary of skills

Archery is a broad set of fundamental skills necessary to be an experienced archer. Among the skills and abilities archers need are mental strength, aerobic endurance, balance and coordination, reaction time, motivation & self-confidence, skill/technique, agility, flexibility, strength & power.

The most obvious is the need for a high level of upper body strength and flexibility. An archer needs to be able to shoot arrows accurately and repeat that action without suffering fatigue. We elaborate on some of the skills.

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Back to the Future

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Temporal perspective in the explanation of events

Deborah J. Mitchell, J. Edward Russo, Nancy Pennington | March 1989

Prospective hindsight involves generating an explanation for a future event as if it had already happened; i.e., one goes forward in time, and then looks back. This research found that “imagining that an event has already occurred, increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%”  (Klein, 2007)

In order to examine how shifts in perspective might influence people’s perceptions of events, we investigated two possible factors: temporal perspective (whether an event is set in the future or past) and uncertainty (whether the event’s occurrence is certain or uncertain).

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