Still, the water was cold. Thus, in 1889, the Norwegian Edwin Ruud invented a heater that could store hot water. So, naturally, we humans again redesigned our sinks to accommodate two faucets. Still, the hot water came out of one pipe and the cold water out of the other, scalding the left hand while freezing the right. Damn inconvenient.
It did not take long, however, for someone else to come up with the last real innovation in indoor plumbing: two faucets but only one pipe. This gave each of us the ability to personally control the temperature of the water. Brilliant.
Yet, our world still contains hotels -- modern hotels -- with the old two-faucet, two-pipe system with the dual capacity to both scald and freeze your hands. Had not the architect, or the interior designer, or the contractor learned from personal experience the value of two faucets but only one pipe? Did none of them observe a lot of two-faucet, one-pipe fixtures at their hardware stores? Why did they fail to replicate this obvious innovation?
Replicating an innovation in hardware is not intellectually complicated. The benefit of the innovation is usually very obvious. Moreover, the physical nature of the innovation makes the cause-and-effect connection between the core characteristics of the innovation and its benefit very clear. With the two-faucet, one-pipe plumbing innovation, a child can easily determine what causes the benefit.
For innovations in government, however, such cause-and-effect relationships are rarely evident. The benefits may be clear: Results are up. Costs are down. Citizen lives are better. But why? What caused what?
Indeed, what exactly is the innovation in policy, or in management, or in governance? Who did what that might have created the benefits? Is it a simple, single, physical innovation -- some kind of hardware that the innovation's plumber can install in every governmental jurisdiction or every public agency? Or does the innovation consist of two elements that interact with synergistic subtlety to create the benefit? Or does the innovation include more than two elements -- perhaps many more -- so that it is extremely difficult to untangle the key cause-and-effect relationships?
And what about the cultural, political, and organizational context? Is there anything about the circumstances in which the innovation was conceived or implemented that is essential to understanding the causal connections?
This is the replication dilemma: Unless someone can somehow determine how exactly an innovation is producing the benefit, this innovation is impossible to replicate.
The innovation could, of course, have been the consequence of pure serendipity. Someone stumbled across something, and it worked. Or the innovation could have been carefully crafted by a team dedicated to solving a specific, important and annoying problem. Regardless, before the innovation can be replicated, someone has to answer two questions.
First: What are the core characteristics of the innovation? To employ the innovation in a different jurisdictional, political or organizational context, the replicators obviously need to know what, exactly, are the driving features of the innovation.
Second: What are the cause-and-effect interactions among the core features of the innovation, the context within which the innovation was implemented, and the consequences that it produced? Because the context in which any innovation will be replicated is bound to be somewhat different from the original set of circumstances, it is necessary to understand how its driving features work. After all, to make the innovation work in a new setting, it will need to be adapted in some way(s) -- perhaps conspicuously, perhaps subtly. Yet, to be effective, such adaptations need to maintain not only the core features of the innovation but also the cause-and-effect relationships among these features and the context to ensure that the adaptation still produces similar benefits.
Innovating is relatively easy. Specifying the core components of the innovation and the cause-and-effect relationships among these components in such as way as to permit other jurisdictions to replicate the innovation is, however, a significant challenge.
