The three-year Commission to Inquire into the Dublin Archdiocese investigated hundreds of incidents of abuse and showed the ways in which decades of exploitation of children had been covered over by the active participation of the legal authorities and four archbishops. Bishops, priests and religious orders in the diocese had clear knowledge of allegations and practice of abuse going back to the early 70s and there were complaints made against 28 priests, some of whom were known by the church authorities to be abusers even before they became priests. The report concludes that:
The Archdiocese was pre-occupied until the mid-1990s with maintaining secrecy, avoiding scandal, protecting the reputation of the Church and preservation of assets.
I listened in horror to radio reports by those who had been abused who either felt unable to raise their voices, or if they did raise them they were accused of trying to undermine the authority and dignity of the church and of spreading malicious rumours.People who raised their allegations were often publically vilified.
Such an enduring tale of abuse over such a long period of time can only be sustained by people in all positions actively or passively colluding in what is going on. Every day, in small ways and in large, the way these matters were discussed and acted upon undermined or amplified those processes of abuse which were being suffered by children. It may not always have been clear what was going on as the brilliant film Doubt starring Meryl Streep illustrates so well, but there are enough accounts in the report to make it clear that this exploitation was not only known about but that people actively covered it over ‘for the good of the church’.
In much more minor ways one can experience similar abusive processes taking place in organisations. read more…
I recently served on an interview panel for a senior management post for a small not for profit. It was an interesting experience for encountering in condensed form how a sample of candidates, all with pretty good experience and qualifications for the job, understand the practice of management. 
The first thing three of the five candidates picked up on is the fact that the organisation’s strategy document is not written conventionally. It does not have a vision, mission and values statement from which all work is understood to flow. Instead it sets out an overview of the work currently undertaken, has an assessment of some of the difficulties the staff have encountered in carrying out the work and goes on to set out some areas of future work, grouped under themes, which staff would like to find out more about over the next year. There are areas for concern, exploration and research, but no targets, no KPIs, and no performance indicators. The candidates were asked to review the strategy critically, and for three of them the strategy was inadequate if there was no vision, mission and values. How could you know where you were going if you didn’t set a direction? What was interesting about this for me was not so much their orthodox understanding of what a strategy should be, but their lack of curiosity. So one of the things they might be telling the interview panel is that if the organisation wants to be recognised in the community of other organisations also producing strategies, then it would need to produce a document that looked similar to everyone else’s. And it might be good advice. read more…
In a further twist to Tolstoy’s famous quotation that ‘Science is meaningless because it gives us no answer to our question, the only question important to us: “what shall we do and how shall we live?’” the climate scientist Mike Hulme has recently been commenting on the hacking of e-mails at the climate research unit, University of East Anglia. He argues that : ‘Science offers unique insights into how the physical world works and the potential consequences of different policy choices. But scientific enquiry is no substitute for political argument.’ In an article that echoes some of the postings on this site (see below: ‘Being evidence based’) about politics and evidence he goes on to argue that just as politics clouds scientific disciplines, so politics can appear to subvert politics. ‘Producing the trump card of science to settle a dispute is not healthy for democracy,’ he says. ‘ We owe it to our fellow citizens to listen and understand the reasons for their scepticism over man-made cliamte change. It is not all irrational fundementalism.’ Hume calls for both good quality scientific practice as well as robust political debate. Making a claim that political action need only be armed with peer reviewed science, as the protesters at the Heathrow climate change protest in 2007 did, undervalues the strength of their moral argument, Hume argues.
Recent press stories about low standards in some NHS hospitals, where up to 12 hospitals have been judged inadequate by the semi-autonomous body Dr Foster’s, have once again raised questions about targets, inspection and standards. We have been treating similar themes in this blog (see below The Tyranny of Targets and Performance Measures). The discussion has become much more animated in a context where standards of hygiene and care have more than just nominal implications, but can make the difference between life and death for patients. The debate seems to swing between two poles: on the one hand, the argument goes, it is no longer enough to rely on self-assessment, since some of the failing hospitals judged themselves excellent. Therefore the right approach must be more stringent, on-the-spot inspections. This is an argument for adding to the bureaucracy of inspection. The more free-market argument is to encourage the public to vote with their feet, and to stop using hospitals that fail to meet basic standards. As consumers we are encouraged to exercise our right to ‘exit’ the service. Neither approach seems to ask what kinds of work practices allow highly trained professional staff to ignore what must be very obvious to them in terms of low standards. To what extent does the practice of government ‘naming and shaming’ and the anxiety that this evokes in top NHS managers encourage them to prevent staff pointing out the obvious for fear of jeopardising the hospital’s reputation? How possible is it to speak out in hospitals even if what one has to say is unpalatable? Neither inspection nor consumer exit deals with the ethical responsibility of staff in situ, both managers and health professionals to find ways of talking about and dealing with the difficult situations they find themselves in together.
The American sociologist Howard Becker has just written a book called ‘Do you know…’ which is a study into how jazz musicians improvise. Becker is himself a jazz pianist. He was interested to know what happens when jazz musicians, who may not ever have met before, start playing. He noticed that negotiation is the beginning, middle and end of the improvisation process, as the musicians draw on a shared background repertoire.
Similarly, in an article on reflection-in-action, a term coined by the architect-cum-organisational theorist Donald Schon, academics Yanow and Tsoukas wrestle with what it means to improvise with others in a professional context. In the article they argue against the more individualist and cognitive aspects of Schon’s theory, although they go on to point out how influential and helpful it has been. Improvisation is a collective enterprise drawing on skills and knowledge which have been learnt in social settings. It draws on a repertoire which has been rehearsed and practised over time, although it may look to onlookers like it has been made up in the moment. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu made a similar point when he remarked that excellence is improvisation on collectively understood norms and standards. Although experts appear to be making things up on their own, actually they are responding to collectively constructed codes of practice and professional norms. read more…
The man commissioned to write a review of UK banking governance, Sir David Walker, was interviewed on the radio and asked why he had not recommended naming names of bank employees earning over £1million. He said he had carried out research and had found ‘not a shred of evidence’ that naming names would be constructive. As noted in previous posts (see below Politics, Power, belief and Evidence) Walker is using the word ‘evidence’ here as a way of closing down discussion. People submitting to the review were self-selecting, so if he was unable to find ‘evidence’ in his submissions of reasons why naming names might be a good idea he could also ask himself about his sample. What kind of people are they and why might they have the opinions they have? Other countries do publish the names of bankers earning big money. This might, for some researchers, also count as evidence.
Despite the fact that the literature on strategic planning has diminished considerably in the last fifteen years or so, still most organisations do it. So argues a recent article in the Journal of Management Studies by Jarzabkowski and Balogun. It has become what GH Mead would term a social object, and in terms of the social game of organisational practice lots of people do it because lots of people do it. Strategic planning still has its academic adherents, but probably the scholar who has done most to drive a stake through its heart is the Canadian academic Henry Mintzberg. With his two books The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning and Strategy Safari the second written with two colleagues, he has done more than most to call the practice into question.
Equally Ralph Stacey, from a complexity perspective, has argued that strategic planning must serve some other purpose than being a means of predicting and controlling since they so signally fail to do so in an unpredictable world. Most organisations seem to get by despite their strategic plans rather than because of them. At his most laconic Stacey has considered strategic plans to be like an organisational rain dance.
So what is going on in organisations when people are trying to plan strategically and what kind of thinking do they get caught up in? read more…
The conventional and dualistic way of thinking about leadership and the tendency to believe that leadership qualities such as ‘inspiration’ can somehow be distilled, bottled and tested for, has resulted in a proliferation of training and consultancy firms offering courses on inspirational or transformational leadership. These range from courses focusing on charismatic individual qualities, through to approaches which are more critical of the idea of the leader as Great Man, offering instead a skills and competency based training . Visionary leadership has become something that can be taught, or otherwise coached and mentored. For example, in 2005 the Department of Trade and Industry of the UK government (DTI) commissioned some research to produce an ‘inspired leadership tool’ (2005) available both face to face and online for leaders to develop their skills with a view to ‘closing the inspirational leadership gap’ in the UK. The following is taken from a slide show for use by Sector Skills Development Agencies (SSDAs), government agencies charged with developing skills for businesses. The first attribute of an inspirational leader is the following: read more…
In previous posts we have considered how difficult it is to experience the otherness of others. According to the philosopher John Dewey, to listen requires an ability to take different valuations into consideration, to enlarge the sense of self.
This is a theme taken up by Karen Armstrong with others in a new initiative they are calling the Charter for Compassion. The idea of the Charter is to encourage mutual understanding and to learn to sit beyond one’s natural tolerance level of difference and otherness. The word compassion, Armstrong reminds us, means to experience with. This requires listening and then listening further. She considers this to be a very different process from the current enthusiasm for ‘dialogue’, if by dialogue we mean simply listening to the other person until we have a chance to restate what we already think. She draws on Socrates to speak to the need for being able dispassionately to enquire into the complex situations we sometimes find ourselves in, which also means being able to take our own positions into consideration and be more detached about those. read more…
