What is it You Want Me to do?

Governance at any level encompasses the many and ever changing sets of relationships between the people who make up the government and the interest of citizens, who interact with public institutions both as individuals and as participants with mutual interests. Governance therefore is about processes of making decisions. In other words, it is concerned with developing processes that are focused on the distribution of public responsibility across multiple stakeholders.
Over the course of history, societies have employed a variety of mechanisms for making social choices. We have settled on a democratic republic. The problem is that voting isn’t a perfect system for aggregating individual preferences either directly through referenda or indirectly through a surrogate decision-maker.
Decision-makers are also faced with a lot of complexity involved in the legislative and administrative processes that determine what services citizens want and how to provide them on a day-to-day basis. Our current standard for communications is already difficult because there are major potentials for communication error. Social psychologists estimate there is usually a 40-60% loss of meaning in the communication between sender and receiver. Because the language we communicate with is a symbolic representation of an experience, room for interpretation and distortion of the meaning exists. Meaning has to be given to words and many factors affect how an individual will attribute meaning to particular words. It is important to note that no two people will attribute the exact same meaning to the same words.
Now, through a highly inclusive set of processes, managers are suppose to design and manage a broad scope of services amidst the conflicting priorities of competing stakeholders whose conflicting expectations are potentially mutually exclusive. Mutually exclusive is defined as being related such that each excludes or precludes the other. Stakeholders’ expectations become more intensified as economic conditions worsen and public agencies are under pressure to maintain or improve quality while expanding access because public welfare issues are increasing. This means management often is being asked to attempt to complete sets of activities that by definition excludes or precludes each other.
Our unrealistic and conflicting expectations of managers set up internal conflicts that make their jobs increasingly difficult, considering the many other issues they must deal with, such as the complexity of today's technologies, changing values and demographics, and increased regulations. As these almost impossible working conditions persist, managers wonder more about what they're doing wrong than what they can do right. They become autocratic machines or detached cynics.