"We the People" need to change the game to fix our nation's governance

We can't fix the major issues we face as a nation until we fix our governance. The current governance structure hasn't enabled us to do that. It's time to change-the-game of how we are approaching the problem.

I've been working on the question of how to significantly reduce the number of people of the U.S. while at the same time reducing costs of aid efforts. The solution is going to require restructuring the system that we have in place for addressing these issues. Accomplishing that is going to require restructuring parts of how we work as a nation which, fortunately we already have efforts underway as a nation to fix including for example, our education system.

One of the most critical of these is fixing our governance process. Right now our governance is not working for the success of the nation as a whole and our interests collectively as citizens.

This is already a recognized issue, and there are many efforts underway to address it. However, as far as I can tell, none of these has the scope, scale and resourcing to bring the bear sufficient force on our behalf, to solve the problem. What we need to do is consolidate our efforts and concentrate them to fix the issue.

I’m not an expert in our political system and governance and how it works in detail. I do have extensive experience in restructuring large and complex organization systems so they perform differently and at significantly higher levels. This includes figuring out how to make such systemic improvements happen.

Some of the issues that I see as a citizen are:

The focus of governance is on political party supremacy. It’s not leveraging the best knowledge and judgment of all of our representatives and working together to come up with solutions that work for the nation as a whole. There’s no incentive for the political parties today to do that. Their focus is on winning not doing the right thing for our nation. Currently, they are generating constituency support by exacerbating and inflaming the differences between two poles of the political spectrum. This is not helping. We need to find a way to decrease the power that the political parties have. One of the examples that I believe I read about was eliminating the power of the parties to select the members of key committees

We need to reduce the influence of money on the political process. It’s ridiculous that it’s possible to buy a Senate seat simply by spending more than the competition

Part of this is that we need to greatly reduce the power of corporations to influence policy relative to citizens. Giving corporations some of the same rights to influence the political process as individuals treating them in someways like people is ridiculous

Another is that we need to increase the direct influence that we are citizens have. Right now, it feels like I have very little influence on the political process. We need to change that so citizens can be actively involved on a day-to-day basis in a way that fits within the context of their lives to bring their influence to bear.

e nation and I wanted to increase my strength relative to the U.S., I would be laughing because I wouldn’t have to really do anything except sit back and watch because right now we’re tearing ourselves up and dividing ourselves from the inside. There’s no way that this is going to result in positive outcomes. It will be impossible for either political end of the spectrum to dominate all aspects of the nation. Citizens are too balanced across political beliefs. Further, neither end of the spectrum has the solution that will work best for the nation. Parts of both, if they’re working together, will produce a far better result than either individually. As a nation when we come together, we’ve been able achieve great things.

One thing we are almost certainly going to need to do to make these improvements, since they will act against what gives current government representatives and the parties power, is going to be to create a new mechanism to fix how they work. Ultimately, we are the governance of the nation. We need to work together to fix it. I think we’re going to have to go outside the political process, and use some sort of direct mechanism like they did in getting our constitution enacted. It was necessary for the leaders to go outside the state governance structure and go directly to citizens through assemblies in order to get it ratified because it was too much of threat to the power of the state governments. We may have to do that.

But one thing that I found in researching how to restructure the system for aiding those in need, is that the current approach for addressing these issues is far too fragmented and individual initiatives have insufficient scale to solve systemic problems. The net impact of having so many conflicting efforts is to both increase the barriers to making the improvements by increasing the complexity and number of stakeholders involved and reduce the effectiveness of improvement efforts because they compete with one another for scarce public attention and resources. We need to overcome this in addressing these governance issues by working together across efforts to bring the focus, scale and concentration of resources we need.

As I said, I’m not an expert in our governance structure. I am an expert in figuring out how to make significant changes in complex organizations, including fixing governance and leader ship issues,

If someone would like to take the lead in fixing this problem, I would be willing to contribute my expertise to figuring out how to make it happen. I already have a number of ideas given the work I’ve done on the system for aiding those in need. I would do it, but my main priority now is finishing the work I’ve been doing on figuring out how to restructure the system for helping those in need, including identifying the other structural changes that need to happen in related systems and how we need to work as a nation. This is only one dimension, but it is an essential one. We need a system that works for all of us and makes our strong country stronger versus dividing us.

If you’re interested, please contact me at 914-215-2771 or psleeman@org–builders.com

It’s possible.