Should we focus less on Change – and more on healthy organisations and societies? - Part X of a series

As I try to pull these notes about change together, let me start with Donald Schon’s 1970 Reith lectures, called “Beyond the Stable State” which caught the mood of the times very well – 

we’re experiencing a general rather than an isolated or peripheral phenomenon. The threat to the stability of established institutions carries with it a threat to the stability of established theory and ideology, because institutions like the Labour movement, the Church, social welfare agencies, all carry with them bodies of theory, ways of looking at the world, and when the institutions are threatened, the bodies of theory are threatened as well.

Most important, when the anchors of the institution begin to be loosened, the supports that it provides for personal identity, for the self, begin to be loosened too. We’ve lost faith, I think, in the idea of being able to achieve stable solutions to these problems. 

This was, of course, the same year that Alvin Toffler published Future Shock

But it was during the 1970s that the critique of both democracy and of government started – coinciding curiously in the UK with talk of greater democracy being one of the purposes of the massive reorganisation of local government which took place in 1975. 

Coincidentally this was the very year the Trilateral Commission produced its infamous The Crisis of Democracy – report on the governability of democracies which effectively argued that democracy had gone too far - and was endangering the very stability of the system. This was the report carrying the names of Michel Crozier and Samuel Huntington that made respectable such phrases as “state overload” and launched neoliberalism.

But that took time - which Strathclyde Region used to fine-tune its Social Strategy for the Eighties – while continuing to have no real guidance on how to do this effectively. The first book on the management of change appeared in 1988 and Rosabeth Kanter’s recipe for effective change was published only in 1992. Kanter’s checklist suggests that we got it right. 

I want to link this to the remark made earlier in this series about how little has been written about the generality of change - proving my point by suggesting that “Life and How to Survive it” (1993) by R Skynner and J Cleese (a psychologist and a comedian respectively) was the only book I knew of which attempted to build a bridge across 3 very different types of literature – the personal, organisational and societal. Interestingly the issue they tried to address was not about change per se but what it took to create healthy individuals, families, organisations and societies. Perhaps, therefore, the focus of our concerns should not be change as such which, in a sense, we can only celebrate (eg Blair) or regret.

Perhaps it would be far more fruitful for us to be exploring how we might be able to develop healthier families, organisations and societies. It would certainly allow us to focus more on how to rid ourselves of the toxic leaders we find in so many organisations and societies. Google “bibliographies on toxic leadership” and you’ll be amazed at the number of references you unearth – particularly in the managerial and military literature.

Intriguingly, in view of the scare Trump gave us, there doesn’t seem as much as you might have thought in the political science literature. Earlier this year a post on Leaders we Deserve gave pride of place to a book of that name published as far back as 1983 by Alistair Mant who explored the psychological aspects of the phenomenon.  It starts by making a fascinating distinction between binary and “ternary” personalities - the central binary question is: ‘Will I win?’ The central ternary question is more intelligent: ‘What’s it for?’ The latter term was introduced by anthropologist Geoffrey Bateson to describe those grounded by what Mant calls “the third corner” or a belief outside of themselves. Binary leaders are “raiders” – ternary leaders are “builders”

This series has used a case-study of a successful strategy in Strathclyde Region which started with a system of dual political leadership – one who handled the public side, the other who handled the internal discipline behind the scenes. They were both “builders” - but later group leaders were “raiders”.

Reviewing Strathclyde Region's Social Strategy - part IX

Rosabeth Kanter is one of the most famous management writers and suggested in 1992 "Ten Commandments for Executing Change" which are worth reading in detail (click on link)

1.             Analyse the organisation - and its need for change

2.             Create a shared vision and common direction

3.             Separate from the past

4.             Create a Sense of Urgency

5.             Support a Strong Leader

6.             Line up Political Support

7.             Craft an Implementation Plan

8.             Develop Enabling Structures

9.             Communicate, Involve People and be Honest

10.           Reinforce and Institutionalise the Change 

This gives us a useful checklist which I'll use to test the approach we adopted in 1982 -

·         The shocking 1973 “Born to Fail?” report identified the West of Scotland as a UK leader in “multiple deprivation” and a few of us – instead of acting defensively - saw this as an opportunity to ensure that the Region, set up in 1974, recognised this need as its basic priority - and it certainly did establish and sustain a shared vision.

·         “Separating from the past” was easy at one level since the Region was starting from scratch but enormously difficult at another since it was an amalgamation of six large powerful bodies – each with its distinctive style – let alone the strength of the professional cultures to be found in departments such as Education, Police, Water, Fire and Social Work

·         That indeed had created a lot of potential enemies for the new Region – its very scale made it difficult to defend and its power left a bitter taste in the mouths of the politicians and officials working in the lower tier of local government. There was an urgency in the Region having to prove itself – which gave us the incentive to do things differently.

·         For the first 4 years, leadership was shared by 2 very different characters – a community minister being the public persona and a miner being the behind-the- scenes deal-maker. It allowed a rare combination of practicality and idealism to flow in the wider leadership

·         And community activists were brought into that

·         With the implementation plan taking several years to evolve

·         With the appropriate enabling structures – at both political, administrative and community levels

·         Communication was intense and continuous – as you would expect of a democratic system

·         And appropriate strategic changes reinforced and institutionalised 

A couple of years after I had left Scotland I had an opportunity to present the Region’s strategy to an OECD committee and it’s interesting to recall the 5 points I made - 

"(a) RESOURCE the Priority Programmes with "MAINLINE" money

Urban Aid money from central government was essential for the strategy – but ran out after 5 years. Senior departmental management did not feel a strong sense of ownership - and the subsequent project management generally had its problems. Not least because of

·       the relative lack of experience of those appointed 

·       the complex community management arrangements of the projects

·       the uncertainty about funding once the 5 year point was reached.

 

"(b)  SUPPORT CHANGE AGENTS !

No self-respecting private company would introduce new products/systems without massive training.  The more progressive companies will pull in business schools and even set up, with their support, a teaching company. The time was overdue for such an approach from the public sector; for a new type of civic "entrepreneur". And certainly the reaction of much of the public sector in the 1980s to the various threats they faced - not least privatisation - has been to put new life into the public sector. We do appear to be amateurs in many respects compared with the United States as far as managing change is concerned.

Many organisations exist there for training and supporting these, for example, in community economic development corporations. At least 3 levels of training need can be identified for urban development - political, managerial and community. And the most neglected are the first and last, particularly the last.

One of our recent reviews of Strathclyde Region`s urban strategy decided there was a need to give more support to the development of local leaders - for example by giving them opportunities to travel to see successful projects elsewhere - not only in the UK but in Europe.  This had multiple aims - to give the local leaders new ideas, to recharge their batteries, to make them realise their struggle was not a solitary one: to help develop links, as Marlyn Fergusson has put it, with other "con-spirators" (literally - "those you breathe with").

Such a venture by an elected agency required some risk-taking - sending community activists not only to places like Belfast but to Barcelona ! - and one too many was apparently taken with the result that it was quickly killed off !

 

"(c) Set DETAILED TARGETS for Departments to ensure they understand the implications of the strategy for them

Information is power.  It is only the last few years that information has been collected systematically about how the local authority resources in areas of priority treatment relate to the needs.  Without such sort of information - and a continual monitoring of the effectiveness of action taken in relation to clear targets - any strategy is just pious good intentions.

 

"(d) Establish FREESTANDING Community Development Agencies

The combination of social, economic, environmental and housing objectives involved in regeneration requires local, free-standing agencies operating from a position of equality and self-confidence: and able, as a result, to challenge the narrowness and inertia which, sadly, tends to characterise normal public bureaucracies.

 

"(e) Be realistic about the TIME-SPAN the change will need!

The task we are engaged on is the transformation into a post-industrial world: the changes in skills and behaviour - and in organisational forms - cannot be achieved in less than 20-30 years. Hence the need for a learning strategy." 

To cut this long story short, the Region got it about right. Our management of the strategy may not have met everyone’s standards but least we were spared Gordon Brown’s infamous target-setting!  

Recommended Reading

Chapter 6 (Change Management) of In Transit – notes on good governance (1999)

There are no experts - being Part VIII of a series

The beauty of a series of posts is that you get the chance to see an issue from several points of view (that indeed explains the blog's title). Although the focus of the present series of posts has been a strategy covering half of Scotland’s population for 20 odd years, the underlying question has been whether it had an appropriate “theory of change” and that is the one I want to pursue today.

Of course, no one used such a phrase in the 1970s – nor indeed “managing change” which became so fashionable almost 2 decades later as you can see from the Annotated bibliography for change agents I wrote at a much later stage. But I do remember reading Managing Change and making it stick by Roger Plant when it first came out in paperback in 1989/90.  This was indeed the very first book I came across on the topic - and note the date! It was only in the 1990s that the “management of change” exploded into fashionability – with The Expertise of the Change Agent - public performance and backstage activity (1992), for example, offering some fascinating insights. But it was 2000 before Robert Quinn gave us the deeply impressive “Change the World”-  which coincided with the outbreak of unrest from social movements globally.. 

How, then, did Strathclyde Region develop its particular “theory of change”?

The following is, I think, a fair description of its key elements -

·         we understood that what we initially called “multiple deprivation” was a complex phenomenon and that, as put it. “there were no experts” as was evident when we round the various institutions of higher education to seek their help

·         we knew that this would be a long-term effort

·         we started gradually with a draft deprivation strategy in 1976

·         which designated 45 areas for priority treatment

·         in which community activity would be encouraged

·         took an experimental approach

·         reviewed progress after 5 years – using community conferences attended by about 1000 people

·         submitted a draft “Social Strategy for the Eighties” to a final conference

·         and then to the first Council meeting after the May 1982 Regional elections – giving it a fresh legitimacy

·         realised that the political conditions required a further tweak after another few years with a new dialogue to strengthen partnership with Glasgow District and to develop relations with the private sector 

The keywords, for me, are uncertainty, experimental, inclusive, participative, legitimacy, community structures, openness. But the question remained – what could we actually do? How on earth could we develop a strategy that could inspire?  The full story of the strategy is here – and a short version here. Here’s an excerpt -

 

In trying to develop a response we knew we faced strong resistance from two sources - first the left within the Labour Party who argued that economic realities meant that there was nothing that could be done at a local level (and in this they were joined by Keynesians). Growth and redistribution were matters for national Government and would have therefore to await a reforming Labour Government.

The second difficult group was the staff of the public sector whose loyalties were to their particular profession rather than to a local authority, a neighbourhood or policy group! And many staff had deeply-held prejudices about the capacity of people in these areas - and the desirability of working participatively with them - let alone with other professionals or local politicians.

How we devised a policy response - and its focus - had to be sensitive to these attitudes. The search for policy was also made immediately more difficult by the absence of any "experts" in the field. We knew there were none within the Council: and appeals to the local Universities produced no responses in those days.

We could, however, vaguely see four paths which had not been attempted –

 

·         Positive Discrimination : the scope for allocating welfare State resources on a more equitable basis had been part of the "New Left" critique since the late 1950s (Townsend). Being a new organisation meant that it was to no-one's shame to admit that they did not know how exactly the money was being allocated. Studies were carried out which confirmed our suspicions that it was the richer areas which, arguably, needed certain services least (eg "pre-school" services for children) which, in fact, had the most of them! And, once discovered, this was certainly an area we considered we had a duty to engage in redistribution of resources - notwithstanding those who considered this was not for local government to attempt. 

·         Community Development : one of the major beliefs shared by some of us driving the new Council (borne of our own experience) was that the energies and ideas of residents and local officials in these "marginalised" areas were being frustrated by the hierarchical structures of departments whose professionals were too often prejudiced against local initiatives. Our desire was to find more creative organisational forms which would release these ideas and energies - of residents and professionals alike. This approach meant experimentation (Barr;  Henderson; McConnell).

·         Inter-Agency Cooperation : there needed to be a focussed priority of all departments and agencies on these areas. Educational performance and health were affected more by housing and income than by teachers and doctors! One agency - even as large as Strathclyde - could not do much on its own. An intensive round of dialogues were therefore held in 1976/77 with District Councils, Central Government, Health Boards, Universities and Voluntary Organisations: it must be said that considerable time elapsed before there were material results from this eg it was 1984 before the Joint Area Initiatives in the larger Glasgow Housing Schemes were up and running and 1988 before central government was stirred to move.

·         Information and Income-Maximisation : the Region could certainly use its muscle to ensure that people were getting their entitlements : ie the information and advice to receive the welfare benefits many were missing out on. The campaigns mounted in the late 1970s were soon pulling millions of pounds into these areas: and served as a national model which attracted the active interest of the Minister at the time (Linda Chalker).

to be continued

The Pragmatic Idealism of Strathclyde Region – part VII

Retracing one’s steps can be both frustrating and dangerous - frustrating when you are looking for something and not quite sure what it is; and dangerous if you discover things about yourself that might better be left concealed. I’m stuck in the 1970s – exploring how a few of us managed to develop a “social inclusion” strategy whose vestiges can still be seen in Scotland almost 50 years later - and not sure whether what I’m exploring are tools of change or changing contexts or changing perceptions (not least my own)

My original idea had been to list some of the texts I’ve found useful in thinking about how to undertake planned change – covering my life both as a political reformer and, from 1990, a neutral consultant. But then some material demanded to be included in the list, such as Gilding the Ghetto – the state and the poverty experiments (CDP 1977), which had been important voices as we drafted “Social Strategy for the Eighties”. And so I threw away what was an overly technical list and replaced it with one which tries to identify the books which influenced my generation – which was, of course, a younger one than my colleagues in the Region.

Our focus at the time was thoroughly pragmatic – it was what precise steps we should be taking as a Council to show that the strategy of urban deprivation Strathclyde Region had approved in 1976 was meant to be taken seriously. Our audience was clear – mainly the teachers, policemen, engineers, social workers who formed our 100,000 strong staff. These were the people we had to convince – both that we were deadly serious and with the message the document contains about the need for change. 

Bear in mind that we no longer had a government sympathetic to our endeavours. Margaret Thatcher had started in 1979 what was to be an 11 year reign. But Strathclyde was not one of the overtly leftist councils which aggressively flaunted its opposition to government policies. We played a very different game and were assisted by a sympathetic Scottish Office and Ministers such as George Younger and Malcoln Rifkind

And it was shortly after the launching of the Strategy and combining my academic and political roles that I brought together a diverse collection of officials and councillors of different councils in the West of Scotland, academics and others to explore how we could extend our understanding of what we were dealing with – and how our policies might make more impact. It was a regular monthly forum called “the urban change network” and it was probably the single most effective thing I ever did. I still have the tapes of some of the discussions – one, for example, led by Professor Lewis Gunn on issues of implementation! 

So, for what it is worth (in my case a huge amount) here are the messages my generation had been absorbing up to the point of publishing the Social Strategy in 1982. 

The Open Society and its Enemies- Karl Popper The book which made the biggest impact on me and to which I owe my scepticism….A lot of it (particularly the sections on Plato, Hegel and Marx) went over my head – but its assertion of the importance of subjecting assertions to tests of evidence has stayed with me my entire life…..

The Future of Socialism- CAR Crosland (1956) the key revisionist text for the UK left in the 20th century…

The End of Ideology– Daniel Bell (1960) the author who introduced us to post-industrialism

The Death and Life of American Cities Jane Jacobs (1961)

On Becoming a Person - Carl Rodgers (1961) The figure who most clearly expressed the mood and feelings of my generation….

The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin (1962) I absorbed at the time more the poetic than the political message

Silent Spring– Rachel Carson (1962) The first environmental book!

In Defence of Politics– Bernard Crick (1962) Along with Popper, the book which changed my life!

Capitalism and Freedom- Milton Friedmann (1962) I may not have agreed with it but I had to recognise its power

The Feminine Mystique– Betty Friedan (1963) Interesting that it took almost 15 years for de Beauvoir’s message to find wide expression….

Unsafe at any speed- Ralph Nadar (1965) the first sign of the new consumer power

Modern Capitalism – the changing balance of public and private power– Andrew Shonfield (1966) legitimising the mixed economy

Dilemmas of Social Reform – poverty and community in the US by Peter Marris and Martin Rein (1967) which I treated as the bible

The New Industrial State – JK Galbraith (1967) The only author to get 2 books in the list reflects both the importance of the subjects he dealt with – and the accessible and wryly humorous style of his writing

The Costs of Economic Growth – EJ Mishan 1967. A book so in advance of its age…..

The Active Society– Amitai Etzioni (1968) A book whose importance I was aware of without having the tenacity to read……

Deschooling Society- Ivan Illich (1970) One of several Illich books which made me sceptical of organisational power…

Future Shock– Alvin Toffler (1970) The first of the books which alerted us to the scale of the change underway in our societies.

Beyond the Stable State – Donald Schon (1971) No book made more impact on me than this one whose core arguments I vividly remembering listening to on the family radio as Reith Lectures in 1970…..This when I became seriously interested in organisations…..

Rules for Radicals; Saul Alinsky (1971) the follow-up to Reveille for Radicals which  had been published in 1946 and became THE handbook for generations of activists

The Limits to Growth– Club of Rome (1972)

Small is Beautiful – Ernst Schumacher (1973)

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism– Daniel Bell (1976) one of the first books to talk of post-industrialism

Gilding the Ghetto – the state and the poverty experiments (CDP 1977) No wonder the Labour government regretted opening the Pandora's box of community development!

Orientalism– Edward Said (1978) The book which made us aware of our eurocentrism

The Breakdown of Nations – Leopold Kohr (1978) A personal favourite….which somehow made more impact than the earlier “Small is Beautiful”

The Culture of Narcissism– Christopher Lasch (1979) which first drew individualism to our attention

Urban Political Analysis – the politics of collective consumption Patrick Dunleavy (1980) which forced me to grapple with neo-Marxist analysis

Speak, Memory - the UK in the late 1960s – part VI of the current series about “Change”

 This post has proved quite a challenge – forcing me to confront the question of the reliability of our own personal memories compared with the sort of collective accounts you find in post-war social history which has become so popular in the last decade  with publics everywhere – eg in the UK David Kynaston and Dominic Sandbrook. Speak, Memory is, of course, the title of Vladimir Nabakov’s autobiography

Take 1968 - which was, in 2018, the subject of celebrations for, and disputations against what it was assumed to stand for – freedom and disdain for authority and tradition. But for me, 1968 was significant more for my election as a councillor for the municipality of a Scottish shipbuilding town and my appointment as a Lecturer at Paisley College of Technology.

After all in 1968 I was 25 – no longer a student - and had more important things to do than tear up Parisian cobbles. Community action was very much in the air and chimed well with “the community power debate” which had been an important one for me during university just a few years earlier. In 1956 C Wright Mills had produced his famous “The Power Elite” - a radical critique of the structure of power in US society – which pluralist political scientists such as Robert Dahl tried to take down. And it was probably Steven Lukes who settled the debate eventually in 1974 with Power – a radical view in which he argued that 

Power has three faces –

·         the public face which Dahl, Polsby and others had studied,

·         a hidden face, which served to keep issues off of the agenda of decision making arenas (Bachrach and Baratz 1962), and

·         an even more ‘insidious’ third face, through which the relatively powerless came to internalise and accept their own condition, and thus might not be aware of nor act upon their interests in any observable way.

 

Lukes’ analysis of what he called the three ‘dimensions of power’ has spawned a series of debates and studies about how power affects not only who participates in decision making processes, but also who does not, and why. 

Those who want to know the details of how that debate has gone since have only to consult the magnificent website kept by William Domhoff for the past 50 years – Who Rules America?

And one of the first books I called for in 1968 - with the library facilities at Paisley College at my full disposal - was Dilemmas of Social Reform – poverty and community in the US by Peter Marris and Martin Rein. This had come out in 1967 and was the more analytical complement to the  activism of Saul Alinsky as I took my first steps in community action.

The promise of change was heavy in the air we breathed in those years - Harold Wilson’s Labour Government of 1964-70 had started well with official and open Inquiries into so many fields which had been causing deep concern – not least the civil service, local government and devolution – and was sufficiently influenced by Johnson’s War on Poverty to set up its own Community Development Programme which is described in this short article.

It also to set up an enquiry into public participation in planning led by Arthur Skeffington, a Labour MP and Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister for Housing and Local Government, Tony Greenwood. It arose from growing interest in the idea of ‘participatory democracy’ (that ordinary people need to be engaged in decision-making rather than simply voting for representatives to make decisions on their behalves). What became known as the Skeffington Report or “People and Planning” published its report in 1969 with a famous review by Sean Damer and Cliff Hague giving an excellent sense of the issues and prevailing context. The review mentions only at the end Sherry Arnstein’s famous ladder of participation

But all good things have to come to an end – and the Labour government duly ran out of steam. 

Recommended Reading

1968 Memories and Legacies of a global revolt (Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Washington DC 2009) Trust the Germans to produce the best account of the global wave of protest!  This detailed account looks at all corners of the globe and includes a fascinating last chapter involving a discussion between New Left Norman Birnbaum and Tom Haydn

Gilding the Ghetto – the state and the poverty experiments (CDP 1977) The most famous of the titles which came from the UK anti-poverty programme

local government and the local state – from crisis to crisis a submission as a Conference paper on austerity which gives a good sense of academic discussions a decade ago

Telling Stories about post-war Britain; the crisis of the 1970s (2017) a very thorough and superbly referenced long article which gives a great sense of this turning point in UK history

From the Bronx to Oxford and not quite back Norman Birnbaum (2018) Memoir of a sociologist who helped found “New Left Review” and was in the middle of an amazing global network of intellectuals and activists

Aftermath – life in the fallout from the Third Reich 1945-1955 Harald Jaehner 2021 a German journalist covers the period with the harrowing stories I remember from Heinrich Boll’s novels

Social history of post-war Britain; a few books selected by David Kyanston.