Social Dilemma

Wednesday, April 21, 2021 (Six days before its nearest-to-earth rise of April’s full Pink Moon)

The world has avoided street riots following a jury’s decision that Derrick Chauvin is guilty on all counts of murder. Most everyone immediately breathed normally again.

Achieving that difficult victory has been the easiest part of achieving social needs versus institutional practices. Ahead, America faces the challenge of reforming a long-standing key organization. Worst, it stretches coast to coast with a highly entrenched workplace culture.

Huge changes must start with top management. It requires muscle to redesign, readjust, and effectively monitor revised institutional policies, practices, and procedures. America’s leaders publicly recognize these needs. They’re promising to alter the entrenched and complex processes of policing.

Changing a long-standing institution means revising its top vision and the missions to support that vision. From those come goals for line personnel to embrace and adhere to. They must work with new hiring agreements, new methods to assess job candidates, and support clear work guidelines by ably assessing and rewarding performance.

An effective culture is circular. Goals from the top are directed to line managers. Those understand how to lead, support policies and procedures, oversee training processes, and measure and document performance fairly. Plus line managers must communicate well and negotiate actively with subordinates. Fulfilling the circle is reporting accurately up through the chain and back to top management.

Modifying America’s police work is a challenge that equals our leadership’s long-time attempts to modify another entrenched, but related, culture: America’s too-little control over sales of lethal weapons.

Dear Friends: Drawing on experience, we look forward with an abundance of hope and caution. Diana