By Dr Don Grant
Land Administration Programmes often endure fraught passages due to a range of obstacles. These can include a lack of focus on the cultural issues, a sometimes over emphasis on technology, the reluctance by institutions to change and the perceived or real impact on special interest groups.
Traditionally, good aid project design has been more art than science. It has relied on project designers and appraisers having considerable depth of hard-won land administration experience. Techniques along the lines of the Log frame approach became almost mandatory. They were simple to comprehend and brought what seemed to be order to the design of projects. Attempts at monitoring were made and again formulae were adopted which gave some credence to evaluation of progress. However, little science has been applied to design, and to monitoring and assessing the likely outcomes of Land Administration Programmes.
Ken’s book shows how more science can be added to designing land administration programmes by using the “Strategy Dynamics” approach developed by Dr Kim Warren. This approach enables the “testing” of designs for efficacy and sustainability before committing funding. Another contribution of this book is its focus on the achievement of management performance improvement objectives, rather than the technical tools of the land administration trade. By applying Strategy Dynamics to the land administration conundrum, Ken has revealed the detail of how land administration operates as a system, and where and how performance can be improved.
To my knowledge, there has been no previous application of system dynamics to the often ignored complexity of Land Administration. Emeritus Professor Ken Lyons has done this. Scenarios can be developed and project outputs and outcomes examined, not only during the short term when aid assistance is provided, but also most importantly for the long-term post aid sustainability of benefits.
The Strategy Dynamics approach can be carried out in country in cooperation with managers. Jointly developing schematic diagrams of the core structure of the system to be improved is effective for group learning and for gaining an in-depth understanding of the issues and proposed improvements. This enhances buy-in from those in country who are the key to a successful project, as they must live with the results. The resultant quantitative models can be used after design as Living Business Models to help evaluate progress and assist in managing and modifying the land administration improvement effort.
This book provides steps for applying Strategy Dynamics and demonstrates its use in a number of typical land administration situations. A strength of the Strategy Dynamics approach is that if the logic, schematics that Ken has developed do not fit your situation, then you can develop an alternative by using the principles of Strategy Dynamics.
This work is a major contribution. It meets a need which, from my knowledge, has not been addressed in the Land Administration arena. It is comprehensive and relevant with mind-blowing detail and supporting illustrations. It is a hand-in-hand passage through the intricacies of Land Administration from a clearly and newly evolved approach. It is a worthy additional tool in the land administration toolbox.
Dr Don Grant AO, RFD, FRICS, FIS, FIE
Surveyor General of New South Wales for 14 years
Chair of Public Sector Mapping Agencies, Australia for 10 years
Holder of Honorary Doctorates from three Australian Universities
Consulted to nineteen countries on Land Administration
By Dr Kim Warren
The method Ken has used in this great book has a long and distinguished track-record of contributing actionable insight across a wide range of social, economic, environmental and business domains. "System Dynamics" was developed at MIT in the 1960s, and it works powerfully well because it applies the essence of engineering control theory to any system. The essential principles are not too complicated.
First, things accumulate and deplete over time - such as the number of people with a disease, employees in an organisation, personal or Government debt, criminals in a city ... or records in a land registry. Next, those processes depend on each other; the rate people catch a disease depends on the number who already have it, the rate criminals are caught depends on the number of police officers ... and the rate that land registry records are added to depends on the number of skilled staff. Connect up these links and you have a model of how the system works. Better still, that model can be quantified - we can work out how fast each element of the system changes, due to the factors on which it depends.
This method has helped clarify, and mostly solve, some extremely demanding challenges. It has provided the basis for protecting endangered fishing stocks, informed the World Health Organisation's strategy to eradicate polio, provides the platform for the maintenance of the US navy's vessels. It even presaged the global environmental crisis as far back as the 1970s through the work of the Club of Rome. It is regrettable that political leaders have chosen to be in denial of those insights ever since, although system dynamics models are currently used to support inter-governmental negotiations regarding climate change.
In this book, Ken has used a particular approach to developing and using such models, known as "strategy dynamics". This was developed to make the system dynamics method more accessible to organisational leaders, initially business executives. This is achieved by making explicit more of how the real-world system is behaving - not just the model's results, but why those results arise. And this makes clearer how management can change that behaviour and those results. Models also track real-world data alongside simulated results, giving great confidence in both the model's validity and in the likely success of the policies that it informs. You can take many of Ken's models and, with limited changes, adapt them to capture your situation and improve the results you want to achieve.
Dr Kim Warren
Principal, Strategy Dynamics Limited
Author, Strategic Management Dynamics (2008), John Wiley& Sons
Holder of the 2005 System Dynamics Society's Jay Wright Forrester Award for a most important contribution to the field.
Former strategy Director at Whitbread PLC and faculty-member at London Business School. Visiting Professor at Universities in the USA, Taiwan and Austria