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”.