informal coalitions

Leadership secrets of Jeremy Corbyn...

 

 

Following Jeremy Corbyn’s startling victory in the UK Labour Party's leadership election, we can no doubt look forward to a number of articles and blog posts that claim to have identified what it is about 'Corbyn the man' that accounts for his success - and what leadership secrets we can glean from his achievement. This, though, isn't one of them.  Wrong focus. Wrong question.

If we really want to gain some insights into the dynamics of leadership from Corbyn's win, we need to look elsewhere. Being a "principled", "authentic", and "honest" individual (all adjectives used to describe him during the election period) is worthy of note. But this is not the main thing that managers, politicians and others might most usefully take from the events of the past few weeks. So what is?

The “And they all lived happily ever after” fantasy – Technology, complexity and the human condition

I  recently came across a LinkedIn blogpost by Tim Rogers entitled, Who should we insist wear Health Tech?  In it, he advocates the use of various wearable technologies as ways of improving individuals’ health, and then speculates about the potential benefits that these could bring to wider society. On the face of it, it all sounds reasonable and straightforward.

However, I find the use of the verb "insist" in the post’s title revealing. As often seems to be the case, there is also a "we" doing the insisting of some unnamed others.  So power and politics are very much in play here (as they always will be, of course)  even though these underlying dynamics of human interaction will rarely if ever be acknowledged when the use of such technologies is advocated. The same could be said about the morality of the whys, whats, and hows of their deployment. In a similar vein, the word “opportunity” usually features prominently – as it does here. But one person’s opportunity is another person’s threat, as they (almost) say.

Unquestionably good?

What concerns me most is that proponents seem to take it for granted that all such developments are unquestionably good - invented by 'good' people, with the intention of doing 'good' things, for the 'good' of other individuals, and thereby enhancing the common 'good'. The real-world dynamics of human interaction are conveniently ignored, in favour of a utopian view in which there is universal wellbeing, co-operation and harmony.  A similar pattern can be found in relation to a lot of the stuff that is advocated as a way of ‘dealing with’ complexity.

Management by muddling through - It’s science, but not as we know it

On Sunday, it will be a year since Carly Chynoweth’s piece on Management by muddling through was published in the Sunday Times. Her interest in the topic had been sparked by my blog post entitled, The 'beautiful, ugly truth' ... of organization and management, in which I had referred to, "... the muddling through nature of real-world management practice."

This notion of management as muddling through sits uncomfortably with established thinking on how organization works and how performance happens.

In particular, this perspective runs counter to the view that professional management practice is marked out by its pursuit of scientific rationality, predictability, and control.  We see this reflected in the calls for practice to be “evidence-based”; the moves by representatives of professional bodies to standardize all aspects of the roles of managers and other organizational specialists; and the requirement for organization-related academic research to demonstrate a measureable benefit, if it is to be considered to be worthy of investment.

Underlying assumptions

All of this presumes, first of all, that the scientific method is capable of discovering universal, ‘if you do this, you’ll get that’ truths. Secondly, it takes for granted the idea that this same methodology can be applied to the complex social process of human interaction that we call “the organization”.