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Political conflict between individuals, interest groups and political parties is as old as politics and government. For much of the history of the United States, in fact, this conflict has been essential to social stability, serving as a means of avoiding more dangerous forms of conflict.

In the past few decades, however, the public has become increasingly impatient with partisan politics - for good reason. While politicians have been attacking each other, fighting highly emotional battles over symbolic issues of little real substance, undermining or reversing whatever progress had been achieved by the other party, they have been doing little to address a mounting list of serious long-term problems that face this nation. These problems - which include declining economic competitiveness, an educational system that is failing our youth, a mounting national debt, exploding health care costs, a trade deficit, a growing technology deficit, and global warming - remain ignored or inadequately addressed because such problems require political agreement and long-term cooperation, two things that our current system of politics cannot provide.

A New Economic Environment That this is happening now is no accident. It follows from the fact that we have just passed through one economic era (based on mass production) and entered another (driven by innovation and rapid technological change). Under mass production, companies used high volume production of standardized products to compete based on price within national economies. During this period, the public was focused primarily on material goals and advancing the nation’s standard of living while the primary role of government was to regulate the economy and settle disputes between interest groups over material resources. Within this role political conflict was not particularly harmful - in fact, it was used as a means of sorting out who should get resources. Those individuals, interest groups or political parties that pushed the hardest for their interests were rewarded with economic resources in the form of government programs, legislation and/or tax breaks.

Under the new economics, however, all this has changed. Instead of using mass production to compete nationally based on price, companies now use innovation to leapfrog their global competitors with new or essentially new products. This means government has a much different role to play. First, conflict among interest groups is no longer focused on material resources so much as issues perceived as justice, rights, and morality: civil rights, environmental protection, pro-life, welfare, gay rights, abortion. This means our traditional means of settling disputes - letting the groups fight it out and distributing resources and programs to those that shout the loudest - no longer works. Instead it simply leads to endless shouting matches between interests and ideologies. Second, the need for government is shifting from regulation of the national economy to a strategic role of coping with global competition and rapid technological and environmental change. In this role, government must respond much as companies have had to respond: by anticipating future needs, agreeing upon strategies to deal with them and cooperatively working to build the capabilities and systems needed to implement those strategies.

Learning From Business To better understand what is required to fulfill this role, it is useful to review how this new economic era arose. One major piece of this evolved out of the quality movement in Japan just after the war. This story is familiar to most business people: how “made in Japan” went from being synonymous with poor quality to excellent quality; how American quality expert W. Edwards Deming taught Japanese engineers the principles of statistical process control (SPC); how Japanese executives as well as engineers embraced quality with an enthusiasm that had been lacking in the United States; how Deming emphasized the need for top management to establish “constancy of purpose” and Dr. Joseph M. Juran called for top management to establish quality processes and systems throughout the organization; and how the Japanese went on to teach the world how to build quality into manufactured products like automobiles. Out of this emerged the first element of the new competition: by introducing what were essentially new products (products with higher quality, new features and lower prices) ahead of their competitors, the Japanese had changed the nature of competition.

Meanwhile, within U.S. companies, accelerating product innovation was changing their method of competing in a similar way. Emerging initially from the invention of the transistor in the late 1940s, by the mid-1960s, the semiconductor revolution was well underway. Not only had the huge and costly computers given way to the mini-computer by that time, but Gordon E. Moore was prompted to write his famous article describing what later became known as “Moore’s Law,” namely that the number of transistors on integrated circuits was doubling every two years and could be expected to continue. Again, most of us are familiar with the history. Today, computers, cell phones, flat screen TVs, and all electronics continue to get smaller, faster and more powerful.

Although we tend to see process innovation and product innovation as very different things, the effect they have had on competition is essentially the same: they both allow companies compete, not merely by undercutting competitors prices, but by racing them to market with new or essentially new products. Whether it is Toyota, using product and process innovation to repeatedly introduce new model automobiles, or Intel, doing the same with computer chips, this method of competition is very different from that used under mass production.

So what important lessons can be learned from this that applies to the new politics? There are a number of principles and tools now used by business that need to be applied to government and politics: constancy of purpose, systems thinking, a systematic method for defining goals and measuring results, and open systems planning. I expect to touch on all of these eventually. But the one I want to emphasize first is what Deming called “constancy of purpose.” The logic of this comes out of statistical process control in that a process cannot be improved until it is first brought under “statistical control,” meaning that it is subject only to common-cause rather than special-cause variation. More than anything else, this is the reason we need a new kind of politics. If we expect government to ever become reliable - and it has to become reliable if we are to survive the 21st Century - we have to replace decision-by-conflict politics with a new kind of politics that allows us to agree on what long term challenges we face, develop a strategy for dealing with them, and work together on implementation of that strategy.

Stay tuned for Why We Need a Third Party: to give politics constancy of purpose.

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