Best Practice: The Business of Postal Services

Sustainability is an information issue to be dealt with judicious use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), to break two informational-type of constraints, one logistical and one technological, towards meeting the daily operational requirements of the around 200 democracies that elected public officials run in most existing countries and states. The logistical constraint occurs because most humans live in the area of the world, in the Global South, where there is no easily accesible formal information on how to use public-service resources efficiently. They do not receive printed monthly billing, meaning that systemic poverty of The Global South can be traced down to a billing problem. More precisely: A massive global billing bottleneck is the root cause of most of the poverty around the globe. In regards to the technological constraint, most humans are oblivious to the mechanism that would enable them to influence public decisions.

Equipped with a clearer view of what lies ahead, the network has also found that sustainability ultimately depends upon best practice; the application of the right techniques through the technological interface that some sectors, that is, some residents of successful countries use nowadays for exercising their democratic power. The correct use of this technological interface needs to be optimized, scaled up and then systematized globally so that human society can streamline its collective intelligence and eliminate the constraints to sustainable development.

 Although usually unbeknownst as best practice there, the only countries in which  citizens employ best practice today are developed countries, precisely one of the  key factors that makes them rich and developed. Once that sociotechnical platform  becomes scaled up to the rest of the globe, such communication processes  will allow the synergistic interaction between the constituent and legislative  functions of the state, which in System of Systems parlance, is run by elected  officials through a Legislative System of Systems. Of course, rich countries are  more advanced in this aspect than poor countries.

In practical terms, constituent-legislator communication, or the lack of it, is an issue that can create situations akin to the virtual representation scenario that brought about revolutionary acrimony two centuries ago between the British Empire and its American colonies. It´s also a matter of correcting the situation of representation without constituent-legislator communication in the Global South, and of some but not enough -and not systematic enough, communication between constituents and their legislators in developed countries.

Because constituents own the decisions made by their legislators, they should assume ownership by eliminating their  technological constraint. Each constituent can do this by carrying out the sociotechnical task of articulating the conflict-relevant information he or she owns, and communicating it to the relevant legislator through the teledemocratic infrastructure. From the Systems of Systems perspective, a national teledemocratic infrastructure consists of the complete infrastructure of a national postal service, including existing old post or royal roads, and the Internet, when those communication channels are used to communicate with legislators.

It's no coincidence that the Internet offers business advantages that has brought accelerated growth to the sector. Not so with postal services, which have been termed as slow and old fashioned. Postal services of the Global South have suffered from indifference and inattention to the point that they have become inadequate to satisfy basic institutional needs, such as serving as a transport medium for municipal, utility and housing-authority billing systems.

Because they are the weakest link in the supply chain for mobilizing local resources, the network has identified developing-country postal services as creators of the logistical constraints that have stymied all efforts that have been made to somehow deal with the shantytown and slum issue of the Global South. The giant billing bottlenecks of the Global South come alive because without adequate postal services, households cannot receive monthly bills for consumption of basic public services or to pay rent for social housing. Without that information, they have no way of knowing how to control their use of services, nor can they compensate the service provider for the consumption of the service or pay the agreed price for subsidized housing. On the other hand, if beneficiaries are somehow aware of their obligations, the lack of economic and formal methods of communication makes it impractical to create and enforce sanctions for late or no payments.

At the end, the public-service customer and/or public-housing tenant can waste the service (leave lights on all day and night without concern, or not worry about faucet or other water leaks, et cetera, et cetera.) and live rent-free. Concurrently, the service provider does not maintain its infrastructure for lack of funds, whilst having to rely on subsidies to avoid becoming bankrupt for lack of income, and the public housing administrating body cannot build enough public housing to meet the demand. The same goes to other local authorities that cannot bill for property and other taxes, and therefore, e.g. cannot offer police protection or develop or service the infrastructure, bringing the homeless closer and closer to jumping at the opportunity of invading public lands. This goes to show that contrary to popular belief, the strategic function of postal services is not the transport of letters and packages. Postal services are in the business of helping make democracy work because to govern itself, apart from freedom of information, human society requires a habitat with good public services and public infrastructure plus affordable housing, which are expensive in themselves and must somehow be billed for.

So it is unfortunate that at the beginning of the 21st. Century, Global South postal services are inadequate for improving tax and other revenue that would help in the process of financing basic public services, and the upgrading of the nowadays crumbling public infrastructure, including the construction of affordable housing, and in general just stopping the whole slum-urbanism abomination of human civilization and human dignity.

As part of protracted efforts to obtain results, Global South governments and ODA donor countries have been following the reductionist script of the international development community, and have been providing blanket subsidies without end. So it is also unfortunate that those subsidies have had the unintended consequence of making the overall public-service and infrastructure sector a giant slum-urbanism incubator for mismanagement, systematic corruption, and emergent poverty, while draining away or redirecting resources that are otherwise critical for health and educational concerns.

In that context, slum-urbanism poverty can be viewed as a measure of entropy caused by the dispersion and loss of ODA, but mainly local, resources as the lack of effective billing systems impedes the growth of the tax base and hinders the development of the whole national financial system. In general, the effect that lack of effective billing systems has upon the size of the tax base, and then on the slum-producing logic Professor Pieterse lays out in his UN-Habitat video, affects national fiscal and monetary policy and percolates through the whole national economy as the low investment and productivity, and low income typical of emergent economies.

The Oxford Dictionaries define entropy as lack of order or predictability, or a gradual decline into disorder, and The Global SoS Network has found that the quality of postal services, in turn, is related to a precise level of entropy in democracy. This looks like a coinciding set of results from using Physics PhD. Eliyahu M. Goldratt's Theory of Constraints (TOC), and Management Guru Peter Drucker's views that if you can measure a variable and control it, you can manage it.

From the Complex Adaptive System of Systems (CASoS) perspective, the dramatic implication of this concurrence is that Global Poverty, conflict, etc. are attractors of democratic systems in which the agents of the systems -humans- cannot adapt or learn because they cannot use the right channels to resolve inter-agent conflict, so they descend towards the attractors. Another case in point is the faulty logistics interaction between the component of the SoS impeding the agents -again, humans- either from investing or from having sufficient income to maintain a certain standard of living. There is another attractor there: Emergent productivity is limited to a fraction of productivity in developed countries.

However, aside its usefulness for conceptual learning, the whole attactor perspective could become a moot point because controlling and eliminating slum-urbanism poverty in the Global South calls for a strategic thrust that will generate a system reaction from which it cannot recover. Benchmarking and regulating the quality of Global South postal services will reduce entropy on one side. On the other side, the benchmarking act will be the key ingredient for breaking, that is, eliminating, the forementioned logistical constraint.

It was thus an auspicious beginning when the President of the Russian Federation, Mr. Vladimir Putin, decreed Russian Post a strategic enterprise: He triggered a powerful tectonic shift in the economic paradigm of the emerging world by realigning it, and then ushering the entry of postal services into the realm of best practice for mobilizing the local resources required for the development and upkeeping of the built environment.

Mr. Putin´s visionary intervention is also aligning the tectonic motion of those sociocultural forces towards the creation of teledemocratic mailstreams, through which self-organized constituent work teams will streamline the approach to local, regional, national and global challenges as they determine the systematic and environment-friendly:

  Image: © Benetton Group S.p.A.; with Adequate Technology? caption by Globalsosnet

An Engineering Design Process for Meeting the SDGs On Time, and Under Budget

Further operations research The Global SoS Network has carried out indicates that the streamlining of collective intelligence, that is, systematic constituent-legislator communication, is Best Democratic Practice (BDP) because it helps create a solid sociotechnical platform for meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The sociotechnical platform is solid because it ensures broad public participation in decision making. By promoting strong institutions, BDP is intrinsically embedded within SDG 16. Thus it is to great avail that Inter-Parliamentary Union Secretary-General, Martin Chungong, said "Goal 16 is the powerhouse from which all other action will follow."

Operations research has, in turn, led to a CASoS Engineering Design Process with a Theory of Change that aligns the projected results of the teledemocratic processes that will emerge around the world, with appropriate entry-level targets of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Very importantly, the versatility of the network's Strategic Planning Framework allows the use of the minimax principle as a viewfinder that will help identify which SDG Targets will:

• Break the logistical constraint, in order to minimize the cost of eradicating existing and emergent slum urbanism in the Global South (SDG Target 11.1), and


• Break the technological constraint, in order to maximize the effect that the usual minimal yearly gains in agricultural and labour productivity will have on a) inducing sustainable economic growth on a global basis (SDGs 2 and 8); and b) accelerating the overall process that will eradicate Global Poverty (SDG 1).

Nonetheless, temperature records were broken in the years 2014, 2015 and 2016. Furthermore, Dr. James Hansen, who is a Columbia University Adjunt Professor, and was NASA's top climate scientist, has stated that a tipping point was reached in April 2008. And although Dr. Hansen has managed to somehow modify his worrisome landmark, in some quarters the jury is still out as to whether the unprecedented continuous increase of global temperature constitutes the first manifestation of catastrophic climate change, or just a fluke.

Either way, it could be said that were BDP not to be given priority, it is highly likely that the SDGs will run the same luck as the Millennium Development Goals, which offered less than stellar results. Considering the stochastic underpinnings of human affairs, the eventual outcome could be the end of the capacity of the ecosphere to sustain human civilization as we know it.

MIT Professor Thomas Malone does state that in the end, we will probably make choices that save the Earth. This means that focusing the collective intelligence towards the meeting of habitat SDGs 13 and 14, should be given the highest priority. And considering that the UN weather agency found 2016 to be the hottest year ever, the Affordable and Clean Energy-seeking SDG 7 should pioneer the way towards sustainability.

Influencing The Machinery of Government

The conceptual framework contained in this webpage helps visualize the diminishing returns of the the zero-sum-game mindset residing in traditional political processes, in which some people and social groups use personal points of view as weapons for clashes of opinion, and where they 'hunt' for legislative resource-allocating power. Such antagonism helps bring up yet another reason for viewing partisan politics a form of art, rather than a science, mainly because the results of political processes cannot usually be predicted with accuracy -probably excepting either of two doomsday scenarios: a) The Runaway Greenhouse Effect, or b) The stark realization of eventually having rocket and nuclear engineers bring forth Mutual Assured Destruction and its corollary, Nuclear Winter.

If the machinery of government is to deliver predictable results consistently, then starting from school-age, the national population should learn and know how to 'operate' it correctly, something that brings importance to know-what, know-why and know-who. Thus macroergonomically speaking, citizens should acquire tacit and explicit knowledge of the task at hand, as they meet the stress-releasing operational needs of the mechanisms that make the overall democratic system work in their behalf. There should be no doubt that there is work involved. Democracy is always a work in progress in need of tending, but the tending task is not being done by the citizens of the world. And although the task is intermittent, it is also eternal.

Consequently, by using teledemocratic collective-intelligence techniques, citizens can enhance and accelerate the natural adaptive capacity of the democratic system. And in spite of the scarily complicated, hi-tech and expensive-sounding names, the streamlining of collective intelligence is refreshingly simple, very convenient, and surprisingly economic.
 

In favor of streamlining the collective intelligence and meet the SDGs in a cost effective way and on time, CASoS methods engineering prescribes that constituents around the globe would first self organize by employing their permanent role as stakeholders in voluntary ad-hoc cooperation with family members, friends, co-workers or peers. Once they have formed an opinion on a subject, or agreed on a suggestion regarding constituent conflict, they would interact individually -in a formal way- with the legislative function of their Legislative System of Systems. To interact formally, they would use at least four tools to initiate a simple three-step communication method. The tools are a pen, a sheet of paper, an envelope, and a postage stamp. The method consists of writing periodic letters to the pertinent legislator, having them delivered, and obtaining feedback through each subsequent reply.

Some national and other legislatures, and a few NGOs, usually promote Best Democratic Practice under 'Write to Your Legislator' and 'Write to Your Member of Parliament' motifs. While human factors deals with the psychological aspects of the know-why and know-who, CASoS methods engineering and business-system analysis techniques are the way to go for the know-what and know-how of keeping the task simple, convenient and economic, while maintaining transparent communication between the contacting constituent, and the responding legislator. No one wants legislative offices flooded with handwritten and typed or printed constituent correspondence.

To a certain degree, and depending on variables such as intrinsic motivation, technical capacity and stress, it is likely that neither will citizens be interested in exercising their democratic power as a regular course of action if it involves any protocol, rite or complex password routine beyond writing and posting an undersigned letter to the pertinent legislator. Teledemocratic communication need not and should not contain any overt or hidden stressors for constituents because according to sociotechnical theory, the daily social and technical operational aspects of democracies need to be balanced and optimized. If there is any unbalance, then changes should be made to the technical system to obtain joint optimization.

By opening a conduit through which each constituent can channel and then release civic stress, the streamlining of collective intelligence creates teledemocratic communication processes that feature total social inclusion. With the proper arrangements, all adult cognizant -literate or illiterate- residents of a country or nation can influence, and ultimately establish, the outcome of public policy for the good of all stakeholders, and of the environment.

Once constituents have established such processes, then the same constituents, now in their role as workers, will feel more empowered on the job, at work. This will translate in more meaningful tasks thus more horizontal organizations accompanied by more quality and productivity. From then on, increased trust in the objectives of management will cause the emergence of unity of purpose at work, the resulting boost in quality and productivity will also boost wages and eventually, the global standard of living.

THE GLOBAL CONSTRAINTS TO SUSTAINABILITY... ...get smaller each time a postal worker delivers a formal reply from a legislator to a constituent. "Constituents comprise the world's most powerful social groups, and teledemocratic techniques make self-organized Constituent Work Teams the most versatile of social networks. As teledemocratic techniques spur technical progress towards the optimization of human-computer co-evolution, the streamlining of collective intelligence will always foment unity of purpose that will emerge in all cultural, economic and environmental spheres of human activity" Image: © Kira Sheveleva, Russian Post worker in Bely Yar, Siberia.

Deducing that the logistics of transporting teledemocratic information require the existence of postal technology that is adequate for the task, the focused collective intelligence of constituents now creates nationwide teledemocratic mailstreams towards the legislatures. Subsequently,  legislators will use traditional parliamentarian procedures in order to resolve constituent conflict in the forums human society has designed for that specific undertaking.

Because it is the task of legislatures to allocate resources to the executive function of government, the deliberation of the much better informed perspectives will in effect result in the allocation of resources with much less or no adversariness at all. Improved constituent data will result in a more managerial and systematic approach, not the partisan mentality where the gain of one individual, group or nation is perceived as a loss to another individual, group or nation. It is not really a devolution of responsibility, because citizens have always held it. Rather, it is the devolution of authority to constituents for the more efficient, and much more effective, resolution of conflict, meaning that the overall quality of public decision-making will improve systematically.

Keeping in mind that constituent conflict could represent any aspect of the civic domain, from gaping potholes to inadequate housing, education, medical care, relationships between the facets of myriad social groups, or any environmental problem; only when business managers note improved government effectiveness will they become more motivated to invest in sustainable technology.

This would take the form of more efficient machinery and methods that will help make small gains in labour productivity and wellbeing. The complex-adaptive result is that improved government performance begets the emergence of improved quality of life as the standard of living improves, meaning that everyone involved, and the environment, win. 

For the Global South, in addition to serving as a medium for constituent-legislator communication, adequate postal services allow for institutional focusing of adaptive capacity in order to address pressing social needs. As the expressed need for adequate postal services helps create a 'climate for change,' it serves as motivator for the rollout of municipal, utility and affordable housing billing systems wherever needed, which is in most countries at the beginning of the 21st century. The resulting income streams are key for the local development and upkeep of the public infrastructure necessary for meeting social needs such as world-class quality education and medical services, and for all-important trade.

The Internet is a very convenient venue for establishing teledemocratic processes. But until poor countries become affluent, the cost of each computer or cellular phone, in addition to installation costs (electric supply, fixed or cellular-line or Internet hook-up fees, modem, batteries, printing ink, etc.) plus monthly payments, maintenance, upgrading, training, and other hidden costs, must be compared to the cost of  a few stationery items and that of family mailboxes, which are usually made of low-cost sheetmetal. Home letterboxes only need a key and lock, require no periodic expenses, and practically never need maintenance.

Then there are psychological, legal, and various other issues, such as the matter of the lack of formality, deference of the public servant to citizens, and the perception that electronic SMS and e-mail billing systems just do not have the necessary etiquette. For example, if a family receives only electronic billing from utilities and tax authorities, the question could arise that if the matter is not important enough for the sender to take the trouble of printing a formal bill, then, Why should the payer feel that it is so important to pay up?

Using either type of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), postal services or the Internet, when social groups such as constituents use teledemocratic methods, then the collective intelligence has the capacity to regulate the activities of the Public Sector System in benefit of the common good, and of the environment, while steadily increasing the level of productivity.