The experience of strategy

I found myself sitting among a large group of experienced managers who were being updated on the strategy process by the deputy CEO of their particular organisation. He proceeded to explain how he had gone about developing the next corporate strategy in terms which I have critiqued extensively on this site. In critiquing systemic managerialism previously I have always been anxious not to caricature, not to set up an easy straw man opponent in order to knock it down. I have been concerned that if no-one these days really proceeds to explain strategy as vision-mission-values, sets up working groups to develop organisational values to underpin the vision, and then suggests that members of staff who don’t follow the values may have to go and work elsewhere, then there is nothing really to critique.

But what I found on this occasion was a text book example, perhaps a text book still in its first edition, of what I engage with elsewhere as idealised design. Originating in cybernetic systems theory and developed in the thinking of Russell Ackoff, idealised design assumes that fomenting excitement in staff who work in an organisation towards an idealised end point, increases motivation, commitment and performance. There is very little evidence for this claim, and given how long these methods have been used in organisations with change-weary staff, it would be just as easy to make the opposite claim that such abstract idealisations are just as likely to call out cynicism, negativity and disbelief particularly in the UK. Judging from the conversation which took place later at coffee, I think the group in which I was sitting may have been strung out along the spectrum from enthusiasm at one end, to bafflement and frustration at the other.

Visioning backwards

On Wednesday 16^th October Mary Ward and Jo Collins, the founders of the Chickenshed Theatre, were interviewed by BBC Radio 4 presenter Jenni Murray on Woman’s Hour. They were invited onto the programme to celebrate the forthcoming 40^th anniversary of a theatre which was set up to involve young people in theatre, irrespective of their abilities. Both founders had a shared belief that they could produce excellent theatre with young people if they could encourage everyone to accept what young people bring, rather than what they don’t bring. They argued, for example, that young people are often much less judgemental about other young people with disabilities than adults are: they simply accept the disability as a given and proceed from there, without fuss. They argued that discrimination is a learned, social behaviour. That commitment, and the continuous improvisational ability to involve other people in the undertaking, has created an institution which has lasted 40 years although it has never received Arts Council funding.

‘What was your vision for Chickenshed?’ Jenni Murray asked. ‘We didn’t have a vision as such, we didn’t sit down and say “this is our vision”’, Mary Ward answered arguing that they had both felt impelled to include as many young people as possible, ‘but we just did it, and as we did it we became more and more committed to this idea that everyone can contribute to the production, the final end.’

Conforming and resisting. Thinking with and within institutions

In her book How Institutions Think (1986) the social anthropologist Mary Douglas, who died in 2007, struggles with the paradox of the individual and the social. On the one hand, she argues, it is unreasonable to assume that institutions can think and act as though they had some group mind and body. These are only figures of speech, shorthand, because only individuals can think and act. But on the other hand, the institutions which we form, with their organised ways of doing things, their procedures, rules and sets of values, are one way of organising to promote specific categories of thought, certain choices, and particular values:

Our social interaction consists very much in telling one another what right thinking is and passing blame on wrong thinking. This is indeed how we build the institutions, squeezing each others’ ideas into a common shape so that we can prove rightness by sheer numbers of independent assent. (1986: 91)

One of the things that she is concerned to do in this book is to illuminate more clearly the ways that individuals come together to shape organisations, and consequently the way that individuals in their turn are shaped by the sustained processes and functioning of institutions. She draws on the work of Ludwik Fleck, who coined the term ‘thought collectives’ to describe the way that particular approaches to science become institutionalised so that it becomes impossible to think or argue in a different way. For a more thorough treatment of Fleck’s thought, see Ralph Stacey’s post here. Similarly, institutions constrain individuals in the way that the price of belonging may rely upon obedience to particular ways of understanding the world.

This brings Mary Douglas hard up against the age-old difficulty for the social scientist: how can we possibly think of ourselves in society except by using the classifications established in our institutions? For Douglas this is a necessary task to secure some degree of autonomy and freedom of thought, because institutional concerns are not necessarily our concerns:

They fix processes that are essentially dynamic, they hide their influence, and they rouse our emotions to a standardised pitch on standardised issues. …For us, the hope of intellectual independence is to resist, and the necessary first step in resistance is to discover how the institutional grip is laid upon the mind. (Ibid: 92)

Intellectual independence, which may take the form of resistance, is particularly important in times of crisis such as we are enduring economically and socially at the moment in the UK and throughout most of Europe, and more broadly and deeply in the less developed world. Things need not be the way they are.

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The loneliness of the dying

The Health Ombudsman in the UK, Ann Abraham, recently published a report documenting the ways in which some elderly patients over the age of 65 had been poorly treated in the NHS. These were some of the examples:

• Alzheimer’s sufferer Mrs J, 82, whose husband was denied the chance to be with her when she died at Ealing hospital in west London because he had been “forgotten” in a waiting room.

• Mrs R, a dementia patient, who was not given a bath or shower during 13 weeks at Southampton University Hospitals NHS trust. She was not helped to eat, despite being unable to feed herself, and suffered nine falls, only one of which was recorded in her notes.

• “Feisty and independent” Mrs H, who had lived alone until she was 88, was taken from Heartlands hospital in Birmingham to a care home in Tyneside but, when she arrived, was bruised, soaked in urine, dishevelled, and wearing someone else’s clothes, which were held up with large paper clips.

Abraham’s report prompted much hand-wringing on the part of the Royal College of Nursing,  government ministers and the press. The care services minister Paul Burstow saw the report as further proof that ‘modernisation’ of the NHS was needed, which presumably means the major ‘reforms’ that his own government is proposing. He added that ‘leadership’ was needed in the NHS to ‘drive out poor practice’, and mentioned a forthcoming initiative of the Health Quality Commission NHS regulator to carry out spot checks to identify malnutrition and dignity in older patients. Inspecting older patients for dignity is an interesting proposition.

Surviving in times of cuts

Increased competition, endless tendering for contracts, cuts to service, downsizing, paying people less: these are the things that a group of directors from a not-for-profit organisation supporting vulnerable people in the community  tell me they have endured during the last three or four years. Although contractors, usually local authorities or public health bodies, want greater and greater quality, they pay less and less money for it. This is what ‘efficiency’ in the provision of community-based services has come to mean. An experienced worker supporting many vulnerable people in the community with complex needs might take home £17k a year, and then might need a second job in order to earn enough money to support themselves.

So how had the directors of this particular organisation kept themselves going during the period? What did they think about the way they had been working?

Negotiating caring at the AoM

The annual Academy of Management (AOM) conference in Montreal this year was entitled: ‘Dare to care: passion and compassion at work’. I attended a symposium which had been established to critique the idea that caring would necessarily result in the good, which was implicit in the conference title. The symposium was called ‘the dark side of caring.’

The session proved to be much more popular than the organisers had anticipated, and as people filed in the chairs filled up quickly. New arrivals started bringing additional chairs or began to sit on the floor at the back of the room, which was now quite crowded. Five minutes or so after the session was supposed to have started the chair introduced the seminar and the principal speakers, but said she was also interested in hearing about everyone who had come. She was doing this, she said, in recognition of people’s rich experience and to make the session more democratic.  She invited participants to introduce themselves, which they did sequentially in a clockwise direction. However, new people filing into the room began to disrupt the introductions, and sometimes the turn-taking had to stop and go backwards to accommodate someone who had not been introduced. Sometimes a group of three people would come in at once and would be missed entirely.

Being scientific about science

The historian of science Steven Shapin, currently Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, produces this list of what he terms meta-scientific claims, ‘meta-scientific claims’ being statements about science:

1  There is no such thing as the Scientific Method.

2  Modern science lives only in the day for the day; it resembles much more a stock market speculation than a search for truth about nature.

3  New knowledge is not science until it has been made social.

4  An independent reality in the ordinary physical sense can neither be ascribed  to the phenomena nor to the agencies of observation.

5  The conceptual basis of physics is a free innovation of the human mind.

6  Scientists do not find order in nature, they put it there.

7  Science does not deserve the reputation is has so widely gained…of being wholly objective.

8  The picture of a scientist as a man with an open mind, someone who weighs the evidence for and against, is alot of baloney.

9  Modern physics is based on some intrinsic acts of faith.

10  The scientific community is tolerant of unsubstantiated just-so stories.

11  At any historical moment, what pass as acceptable scientific explanations have both social determinants and social functions.

The interesting thing about these statements is that Shapin draws them all from eminent practising scientists, some of whom are Nobel prize winners.

Social development as economic rationality

In a recent report which was published to coincide with the election of the new coalition government in Britain, New Philanthropy Capital (NPC) has brought out a report entitled Scaling Up for the Big Society. The report argues that if the voluntary sector is to respond to the challenge of decreased government spending, and increased participation of civil society in the solution of society’s problems, then civil servants, philanthropists and other funders will need reliable ways of telling whether a successful social project can be scaled up or not. NPC’s guide is intended to offer such a guide, and turns on the idea of achieving ‘results’.

Three guiding principles inform NPC’s thinking. The first is that charities should be assessed according to how they perform and what they achieve: ‘there should be no room for sentimentality, valuing charity simply for their existence.’ The second principle is that government can contract out service delivery to charities in areas where the state has traditionally failed to make a difference. And the third is that charities can also ‘deliver’ value for the taxpayer. Based on these three principles, NPC then goes on to identify the ways in which the civil servant/investor might go about choosing which charities to fund and scale up.

Both the guiding principles and the methods offered in the report give a very good example of what the scholar Barbara Townley refers to as economic rationality, where social phenomena, in this case social development, is reduced to a means to an end. It becomes a matter of rational calculation only whether to persist with a form of social development: practitioners, and the objects of their practice, almost completely disappear.

How the ‘ought’ obscures the ‘is’

Over the last few years I have come across a number of examples of the way in which the current managerial preoccupation with abstractions, often expressed as policies, procedures or putatively comprehensive ‘systems‘, severely inhibits managers from discussing and dealing with important organisational events which occur right under their noses. This is not to mount a case against having policies and procedures, but is a warning about the false sense of security and comfort that can arise from talking about things in the abstract rather than paying attention to organisational experience.