informal coalitions

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”.

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". 

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.

“There is no such thing as society” - An informal coalitions perspective

Around 25 years ago, the then Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously said,

"There is no such thing as society."

Clarifying her view, she went on to say,

"There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves."

Women's Own magazine, October 31 1987

In an apparent contradiction of this position, her latest successor David Cameron has put what he calls "the Big Society" at the centre of his party’s political philosophy. However, according to the Conservative Party website, its aim is to help people,

"To come together to improve their own lives. The Big Society is about putting more power in people's hands - a massive transfer of power from Whitehall to local communities. We want to see people encouraged and enabled to play a more active role in society."

In ideological terms, then, there appears to be little difference between the two positions as regards the sought-after action ‘on the ground’.  In Lady Thatcher’s terms, though, this represents a denial of the very idea of society and a belief in the sovereignty of individuals. Whereas today’s Prime Minister sees it as the essence of society in action. So which of them is right?

The focus of informal coalitions is on the underlying dynamics of human interaction, rather than on the ideological stance that such interactions might reflect. And, viewed from this perspective, they are both right. And both wrong.

Ignoring the complexity and humanity of organizational life

I never expected to be writing a post in Informal Coalitions based on the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury. But yesterday morning I caught a snippet from Justin Welby’s first Easter sermon, as this was being reported upon during an early-morning radio programme.

It was the following extract that particularly caught my attention:

"I wonder how many people here think that the future will be better than the past, and all problems can be solved if we put our minds to it. There is a general sense that if that is not the case then it ought to be, and someone must be doing something to stop it. Illusion is replaced by disappointment, both wrong.

The hero leader culture has the same faults. A political party gets a new leader and three months later there is comment about disappointment. An economy suffers the worst blow in generations with a debt crisis and economic downturn, and the fact that not everything is perfect within five years is seen as total failure. Complexity and humanity are ignored and we end up unreasonably disappointed with every institution, group and policy, from politicians to NHS, education to environment [my emphasis]."

It struck me that these words of the new head of the Anglican Church provide a much needed ‘reality check’ on the widely held assumptions about how things happen in organizations and wider society. Assumptions, for example, that there is a ‘right answer’ to all of the problems that we face; that ‘doing things better and getting them right’ is all that’s needed to realize the desired future; and, most pervasive, that our fate hinges on the actions of a few ‘special’ individuals.

Has criticism of football referees crossed the line?

Another weekend, another chance for commentators and fans to vilify the country's football referees.

“The referee was a disgrace. How he failed to see the incident [which was patently obvious to me, having viewed it three or four times from a number of different camera angles] is beyond me.”

Comments such as this (minus the bit in parenthesis, of course!) increasingly dominate live commentaries of football matches and post-match phone-in programmes. Intoxicated by the heady mix of multiple camera angles, slow-motion replays and computer-generated virtual images, TV and radio pundits increasingly call for this same technology to be used to prevent the so-called ‘errors’ made by the game’s officials.

But this seemingly unquenchable thirst to get to the ‘truth’ of what actually happened is based on a false premise.  That is, that technology can prove whether or not a referee has made ‘the right decision’. It actually does no such thing.  The superficial gloss of apparent objectivity provided by technology’s ever more sophisticated bag of tricks is an illusion.

"When did you know?" - The new question of choice

Over the past year or so, what appears to be a fairly mundane and inoffensive question has become the question of choice for Select Committee members; Public Inquiry chairmen and their QCs; Opposition MPs in the Commons; and, at the front of the queue, BBC presenters.

Those subjected to the interrogation are invariably senior members of Government, public institutions or private companies, summoned to account for themselves in the wake of the latest in a seemingly never-ending series of issues of public concern. In the firing line yesterday were the CEO of security firm G4S and the Governor of the Bank of England. The former had been charged to attend the Home Affairs Select Committee, to explain the failure of his company to provide the contracted numbers of people to secure various Olympic venues. Meanwhile, the Bank of England chief was being quizzed on the banking crisis in general and the manipulation of the inter-bank lending rate in particular. Other recent examples include inquiries into the take-over bid for BSkyB, and the phone-hacking scandal.

In all of these cases and others, "When did you know?" has been used relentlessly, and with accusatory zeal, in an effort to 'prove' the incompetence or, worse still, dishonesty of those on the receiving end of the question.

Don't put all your 'X' in one basket

On 5 May 2011, electors in the UK will be asked to vote on the relative merits of the UK's current, "First Past the Post" electoral system (FPTP) and the "Alternative Vote" (AV) for UK General Elections.  

The "No to AV" and "Yes to Fairer Votes" campaigns are now in full swing, both trying to stimulate interest in the topic amongst a largely indifferent electorate.   Whatever your views on the referendum, it seems to me that some very dubious arguments have been deployed by those who support the retention of FPTP.