Made2Measure

We face unprecedented threats to our survival – including increasingly sophisticated adversaries with deadly chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive weapons, cyberattacks, global warming, artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons, deforestation, the decimation of animal species, and the list goes on. If we are to survive, an “all-of-society” response to these existential threats is urgently needed. These are the conclusions my colleagues Katharine Jennings, Susan Ehrlich, Caroline N. Broun, Kathryn H. Floyd, and Michael L. Buenger reach in an article to be published next month in The Court Manager (“Courts Have a Significant Role to Play in the Whole-of-Government Approach (WGA) to Our Safety and Security,” Winter 2019 - Vol. 34/4). The Problems of Complexity and Hyper-Specialization In his posthumously published 2018 book, Brief Answers to Big Questions , Stephen Hawking, the world-renowned physicist and cosmologist, who we quote in our article, wrote that

Suppose you have embraced one or more of the organizational performance measures of the Global Measures of Court Performance of the International Framework of Court Excellence, and let’s say, for example, it is Measure 9, Employee Engagement. The short definition of the measure is the percent of the employees of a court who, as measured by a court-wide survey, are passionate about their job, committed to the mission of the court and, as a result, put discretionary effort into their work beyond their assigned. You know, of course, there will be variation across courts and tribunals, across several courts in one jurisdiction, and across the 20 questions in the employee engagement survey, and so forth. Our common approach to using the results of such a measure is to focus on the average – the central tendency – and immediately identify the laggards, the poor performing courts, regions, and countries. And then we immediately speculate about what we believe may be the causes of the