Two snapshots that makes one think a little about command-and-control in complex systems.

The first - what seems to be the beginnings of a successful turnaround:

The Power Development Board (PDB) has made a significant improvement in power supply in the last two months mainly by improving day-to-day management where officials and technical experts are encouraged to take independent decisions, sources said.

…

Now the margin of load shedding has dropped from 1,200MW to a mere 100-200MW.

The country experienced load shedding by a massive margin of maximum 2,000MW a day last year.

Against an official maximum demand of 4,240MW, the PDB is now supplying more than 4,100MW of power from 100 different power units of 27 power plants by improving plant efficiency.

But there is still cause for concern in the approach that underscores the need for accountability, both at the top and at the decentralized decision-making nodes.

While the official power demand is shown at 4,250MW, unofficially this demand stands at maximum 5,200MW. But this additional demand is underplayed by not accommodating the full power demand of the Rural Electrification Board (REB) that doubled its distribution network during 2001-06 period.

But credit, where credit’s due. This is largely good news.

We don’t seem to be learning from our mistakes. And we also don’t seem to be learning from our successes. In a week where violence has broken out over the cartoon non-issue, there are ominous signs of what may be the beginnings of yet another period of rioting and street violence. BBC reports:

Thousands of garment workers in Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, have defied a ban on public protests to demand better pay and conditions.

The dispute had been brewing for days, but became more serious and violent when the workers discovered that they had been locked out of their factory.

The tendency is to think about “controlling” such unrest through centralized decision-making. The centralized decision maker, in this model, decides what emotions are worth conceding to and what emotions deserve to be crushed. May be it’ll work, for a while, who knows? But surely, when your system is composed of 150 million individuals living in 147570 sq km, it has to be conceded that no centralized decision-maker has or ever will have enough information for effective decision-making over a sustained period of time. The only workable alternative is a value-infused decentralized system with accountable nodes of decision-making. And to be able to perform the necessary work of information-gathering and processing effectively, the system has to be a participatory one.