informal coalitions

A passionate 'muddler througher'

    

Every Sunday, during the Pienaar's Politics programme on BBC Radio 5Live, there is a section entitled, Backbenchers Questions. Yesterday, it was the turn of Bob Stewart, MP for Beckenham and one-time Colonel in the British Army, to take the hot seat.

At one point, stand-in host Chris Mason asked him whether or not he was confident about the forthcoming negotiations on Brexit.

"In the end," he replied, "We always muddle through and get something."

"Is muddle through good enough, though?" challenged Mason.

"That's what happens in life," said Stewart, with a hint of incredulity in his voice that anyone should ask such a question.

And so it is.  Muddling through is what happens in life.  It's what all of us do. All of the time.

Mason signed-off the section by describing Colonel Stewart as, “A passionate ‘muddler througher’”. 

The folly of promising a ‘cast-in-concrete’ future

In today’s copy of The Times, Matthew Parris comments on the outcry that has followed the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer’s decision to raise a particular tax on small businesses. Under the headline, “When it’s right to break political promises,” he supports the rationale for breaking the Conservative Party’s 2015 commitment not to raise National Insurance Contributions (NICs) for the self-employed. At the same time, he criticizes what he sees as the inept manner in which the change in policy has been introduced.

Surely, though, there is a wider issue here. The real problem is not so much with what Philip Hammond has done in policy terms. Or the fact that the proposed changes break a promise in the manifesto. It is with the very notion of making firm manifesto commitments in the first place.

In the run-up to the 2015 election, candidates of all parties were constantly asked by interviewers to explain precisely what things would be like at the end of the five-year parliament, based on the pledges made in their party manifestos.  In the main, they duly obliged (as politicians always do!). 

As things turned out, of course, their inability to predict what would happen in the future was laid bare on election night itself.  Politicians, pundits, and pollsters alike all expected the election to result in a so-called “hung parliament”, with a coalition between the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties being the most likely means of forming a viable Government.  In the event, the Conservatives gained an overall majority and a triumphant David Cameron put together his Government, with a seemingly unobstructed path ahead of him and his colleagues for the next five years.  Eighteen months on, the rest – like David Cameron’s premiership – is history.

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?

Pledges, promises, and policy commitments – How not to run the country

With less than eight weeks to go to the UK General Election, Ed Miliband yesterday unveiled Labour’s “five pledges” to the British electorate. These are not the first statements to be made by the leader of a political party during the current campaign. And they won’t be the last.  As usual, politicians of all parties are falling over themselves to out-promise each other, as they go in search of media headlines, people’s votes, and what they see as the ultimate goal of political power.

The five ‘straplines’ on Labour’s pledge card are so vague and anodyne that the words would not look out of place if they had been issued by the Conservatives or Liberal Democrats. But, as Election Day gets closer and manifestos are launched, Party Leaders and other senior politicians will not be backwards at coming forwards with ever more specific “We will…” commitments.

So what does this implied belief in their own ability to deliver on detailed promises – come what may - say about their grasp of the complex and uncertain dynamics of everyday life?  Or of how the world works in practice? Not a lot, it seems to me. Either that or it’s all bluff and bluster, designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator of so-called “public opinion”, and to satisfy the constant demand from TV interviewers and media commentators for “straight answers”.

On financial regulation and the complex social dynamics of organization

A recent discussion in the Complexity in Organisations group on LinkedIn drew attention to comments made in June 2010 by the then head of the Financial Services Authority, Hector Sants. In a speech to members of the Chartered Institute for Securities and Investment (reported here), he expressed his view that regulators should have their brief extended to include oversight of the cultures of those organizations that were subject to their regulation. According to Sants,

"Unacceptable culture within firms was a major contributor to the financial crisis and so regulators should play a greater role in judging how culture drives firms' behaviour and impacts on society as a whole, according to the chief executive of the Financial Services Authority (FSA)."

He made great play on the need for prudence in managers' decision-making, before concluding that,

"Determining an ethical framework is for society as a whole, not an unelected regulatory agency. However, it is, I believe, our role to police behaviour and expect firms to have the right culture which facilitates the delivery of the outcomes we expect."

For Sants’s prescription to make sense, though, the following statements would need to be true:

• The “prudence” or otherwise of a manager's decision is obvious at the instant that the decision is made.
• There is a direct causal link between managers' decisions and “societal outcomes”. 
• “Culture” is the product of a manager's intentions (i.e. something that they can design, build, and change at will).
• There is a direct causal link between an “unacceptable culture” and the “outcomes [that] that drives”.

So do these stack up?

Yes or No? The fateful question

A week today, the votes of people in Scotland will determine the future of the United Kingdom. As an English Brit, I have no choice but to wait, fingers crossed, to see what they decide. Hopefully a majority will see the sense of staying part of the UK and reject independence.

But therein lies the problem for the "Better Together" campaign. Because of the way that the question has been formulated, they have been dealt the "No" card. And No is, by definition, negative! Its role in language is to point out where things don't make sense; not to 'pull at the heartstrings' or create positive vibes. Nor does "No" sit comfortably alongside creative new visions of the future. It's about continuity, rather than change. Preservation rather than possibility. Being against something, rather than for it.

Unsurprisingly then, the pro-union voices have been accused of scaremongering and negativity, as they've sought to counter the speculative claims of the Independents. And, most significantly, they've inevitably struggled to match the positive, emotional appeal that is implicit in the word "Yes". 

Politics and muddling through

In recent posts¹, I've suggested that "muddling through" most accurately describes what managers - all managers - do in practice. whether done well or done badly. With this in mind, it was interesting to come across a Financial Times article of 28 February, in which Simon Kuper extends this idea into the political world.

Reflecting on the nature of politics and human fallibility, Kuper concludes,

"... promising the moon no longer persuades anyone. Politicians might try offering muddling through instead."

His observation provides an important health warning ahead of the policies, promises and pledges that will rain down on us from politicians of all parties, as next year's UK General Election gets ever closer.

The tyranny of the explicit

Great observation and commentary from Johnnie Moore on our obsession with formal enquiries and the presumption that we are able to model the complex dynamics of real-world interaction:

"It seems a default setting in this country to demand enquiries, led by authority figures and typically lawyers. These take a long time and produce dense, thick detailed written reports. It all sounds sensible, but I think the whole grammar and style of these things is seriously disconnected from the way people actually function in the real world ... We get seduced by the idea that if we work hard enough, we can produce a sufficiently detailed model of the system and figure out what’s wrong."

He calls this "the tyranny of the explicit" - a great phrase, which I've 'half-inched' for this post's title.

Read Johnnie's full post and onward links here.

Are cricketers, officials and commentators getting their Snickos in a twist?

Today we hear that members of the International Cricket Committee have ruled that the now infamous Decision Review System (DRS) will continue to be used in the remaining Ashes Test Matches.

Whether or not the DRS leads to "better" decisions and fairer outcomes is a matter of opinion, of course. It can't be answered definitively. And the only people whose opinion matters on this are those committee members who were asked to pronounce on its continued use. If people don't like what they have decided, it's too bad. There is no appeal to a 'third umpire'. No technology to scrutinize their decision-making.

In any event, technology is incapable of replicating the ways in which those who made the decision perceived, interpreted and evaluated the 'evidence' before them. And it's on the basis of those perceptions, interpetations and evaluations that, in the opinion of the ICC, the DRS is deemed to be 'not out'. There is no 'reality' that exists in any way separate from the committee members' opinions on the matter - just other people's opinions. And those other opinions have no relevance to the decision that has been taken. it's down to them to decide. And decide they have.

Keogh report comes closer to recognizing the complex social dynamics of hospital practice

In my recent paper, Taking Organisational Complexity Seriously, I criticised Sir Robert Francis’s recommendations arising from his inquiry into the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust. I argued that these were too focused on “the system” and not enough on the everyday, local interactions between practitioners, patients and others through which outcomes emerge in practice. I suggested, that a better response might have been,

“… to encourage, assist and enable those involved to explore their current experience of their individual and collective practice: the situational specifics and taken-for-granted patterns of thought, feeling and behaviour that are organising that practice and which might tend to undermine the dedication and commitment that has long come to be associated with ‘the caring professions’”.

Thankfully, the subsequent review of practices in a number of other NHS Trusts by Sir Bruce Keogh seems to have adopted just such an approach – at least for the most part.  Most importantly, his recommendations appear to be focused on the specific needs of those staff in each hospital and Trust whose job it is to deliver the necessary quality of “clinical effectiveness, patient experience, and safety”. 

Although the shameful bickering and thinly disguised point-scoring that took place in the House of Commons in the immediate wake of the report’s publication might have suggested otherwise, the language in Keogh’s report is measured. And, pleasingly, his grasp of the complex nature of the dynamics involved in ensuring high-quality care is laid bare in his report:

“… our analysis of these 14 hospitals proves that understanding mortality (and concepts such as excess and avoidable deaths) is much more complex than studying a single hospital-level indicator. There are many different causes of high mortality and no ‘magic bullet’ for preventing it.”

In his covering letter to the Secretary of State for Health, Jeremy Hunt, he further seeks to debunk the idea that such abstract measures as the Summary Hospital-level Mortality Indicator (SHMI) or the Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratio (HSMR) can be used to quantify actual numbers of “avoidable deaths” or to relate these to inadequate levels of care:

“However tempting it may be, it is clinically meaningless and academically reckless to use such statistical measures to quantify actual numbers of avoidable deaths”.

Despite this, of course, this is precisely the use to which such measures have been put by politicians and media commentators alike!

So, at first sight, Keogh’s review offers the hope that more recognition might be given to the complex social reality of everyday hospital life through which care is ultimately provided. At the same time, though, he fails to challenge the need for the plethora of organisations that surround the provision of health-care services ‘on the ground’. In doing so, I feel that more emphasis is still likely to be placed on the checking-up of practitioners’ compliance with generalized rules and standards imposed by these 'arms-length' bodies than on helping them to deal with the specific realities that they face in the midst of ‘live’ practice.