Being Disciplined
“An individual is disciplined to the extent that she has acquired the habits that allow her to make steady and essentially unending progress in the mastery of a skill, craft, or body of knowledge,” says Gardner. Having entered the discipline of regulation, what then does the disciplined regulator do? My suggestions:
(A) To avoid overdependence on interest group arguments, find objective sources. Know whom to consult for advice on rate design, energy efficiency, return on equity, performance measures, gas hedging options, water conservation options, the risks of large construction programs.
(B) To avoid intellectual ruts and error repetitions, identify one’s knowledge gaps—knowledge gaps about technology, legal developments, jurisdictional boundaries, corporate motivations, and customer behavior. The key words here are humility (the state of realizing that one knows less than one should) and curiosity (the state of wanting to know more than one does).
(C) To salvage one’s ability to think independently, avoid the distractions, like one more plane trip to one more stakeholder-dominated conference, in favor of daily blocks of quiet reading and study time.
There cannot be discipline without self-criticism; there cannot be self-criticism without humility and confidence. Humility and confidence, seemingly in conflict, are in fact interdependent. Confidence comes, circularly, from experiencing the self-improvement that comes from self-criticism, which in turn depends on humility.
Regulators, and regulation, have experienced all these phases. Even the rare regulator with many years’ experience finds the swirl of statutes, case law, engineering limits, and innovation options humbling. Imagine the reaction of new regulators (who continuously constitute the supermajority of state decision-makers) to their revenue requirements spreadsheet, whose cells have 10 digits.
Self-criticism comes, we hope, after experiences like the billion-dollar cost overruns of nuclear power’s first era, and the billion-dollar clean-up cost we now face from our fossil dependence. In these two cases, the self-criticism must be more institutional than personal, since nearly all of the individuals responsible for these regulatory errors left their posts decades ago.
Given these experiences, decisional overconfidence should be in short supply, replaced with confidence in our ability to respond skeptically to those offering easy answers. That skepticism is essential for independence, for, as Gardner writes, people unable to engage in disciplined thinking “are completely dependent on others when they must make decisions about their own health and welfare or vote on issues of importance for their time.”
—Scott Hempling, a regular contributor to MANAGING POWER, is executive director of the National Regulatory Research Institute, based in Washington, D.C. Reprinted with permission from NRRI.
Share
Email
Comments
Print
BlinkList
Blogmarks
Del.icio.us
Digg
Favoriting
Furl
Google Bookmarks
Netscape
Newsvine
Reddit
Simpy
StumbleUpon
Technorati
Twitter
Windows Live
Yahoo! My Web