A New Guide to Change

We’re overdue a serious study of change. The subject has been hugely compartmentalised in the past few decades – with scientists focusing on technology; psychologists on the individual; economists on the organisation; and sociologists on society as a whole. When I last looked I could find only one (14 page) article which did justice to change in the round – by Scott London. And that’s in a period of some 25 years! 

So I’ve now produced this Updated Annotated Bibliography on Change as a replacement for something I produced some decades ago. The earlier version consisted of short notes I had made about the range of books my assignment from 1990 in countries recently liberated from communism had required me to become familiar with – the challenge of transitioning to new systems of accountability and public management, European systems of local government, the variety of civil service systems, the nature of organisations and the management of change.

Those interested in this range of subjects can access the original version here

 

This new updated version focuses less on the governmental aspects of change and more on the intrinsic issues of change – as it affects individuals, organisations and societies. It’s 50 pages long but doesn’t pretend to update Scott London’s original paper (which constitutes the middle section of the Guide). Although it’s reasonably strong on the management of change, it remains an illustrative guide – with a nod to some of the other interesting texts published recently which try to bridge the three levels eg Life and How to Survive it R Skynner and J Cleese (1993O; The World We Create Tomas Bjorkman  (2019); and Unlearn – a compass for radical transformation Hans Burmeister (2021)

 

So here it is again A commentary on - and guide to - Change (2022)

A Recent Convert to Twitter

 Twitter has a lot to answer for – it makes screeching dervishes of the most sane individuals. I realised this when an erstwhile friend whom I thought the very epitome of rationality used his Twitter account to release bitter diatribes against public figures. One of the reasons this blog doesn’t cover current affairs is that you are expected to take sides (with a bipolar choice) and I find that reality is too complex for such simplification.

But I found myself enrolling on Twitter a few months ago and am actually enjoying the experience – for two reasons.

First, it forces you to be brief. My posts tend to be both long and complex. A couple of years ago, the blog started to use tables which I found a very useful discipline forcing me to summarise what I was trying to say in a couple of sentences, And Twitter gives that same discipline. So far I’ve only seen Ian Leslie recognise this positive feature. And it is, of course, only a potential – which requires skill and experience to develop. But brevity is, of course, something to be encouraged in all writers – as this blog has emphasised in recent years.

 

But there is a second, equally powerful reason which may smack to some of the “echo-chamber” argument of which social media is (justifiably) accused. By blocking the rubbish which assails us when we start to use Twitter, I’ve found amazing new worlds opening up to me Of course I have a few of the same websites I have long known about - but they’re feeding me with new material. And as I select the first few individuals to “follow”, I’m alerted to others who don’t have blogs but have a book to market and interesting comments to make.

And it can also help improve my French and German – I can follow journalists from those countries and get a much better sense of what’s going on there than sticking within the Anglosphere eg https://twitter.com/carstenknop

And virtually all of is positive – it’s referring to books, articles and discussions which are considered worthwhile. This I hadn’t expected. I had been put off Twitter because of the level of outright venom it seemed to encourage. But here are thousands of twitter users who are using the platform to point us to a healthy world.

It just needs us to make the right choices.

an interesting political map

Dave Pollard has a terrific discussion here which puts our current ills in a great perspective 

A lot of people who profess to be atheists or pantheists in their youth, tend to adopt religions when they get older. More than anything else, this seems due to their running out of capacity for feeling responsible for all the world’s ills. Deciding to believe in some higher power and authority — a god, a guru, a Gaia — to some extent gets you off the hook.

Most of my friends throughout my life have been salvationists of one stripe or another (right half of the chart above), and the lion’s share of them have been what I would call Humanists — people who, in wikipedia’s words have a “philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential and agency of human beings”. They believe that humans can and must exert social and ethical responsibility for our personal and collective actions, and the stewardship of the entire planet. More importantly, they believe, mostly, in the myth of progress, and that there is almost nothing that humans cannot accomplish if we set our minds to it.

This can, of course, be exhausting, especially when things are going particularly badly for the human experiment, as they are now.

Religions offer the comforts of tradition, rigour, continuity and ritual, all salves for the exhausted and disenchanted. 

https://howtosavetheworld.ca/images/The-New-Political-Map-2015.png

Dervla Murphy RIP,

There are some writers who defy categorisation – listeners, accessible, principled, strong on research. The Irish travel-writer Dervla Murphy who has just died at age 90 was one such. She was one of my favourite writers – covering the globe on her famous cycle rides – particularly countries (for me) such as Cuba, Gaza, Russia, Yugoslavia and Transylvania. Her accounts were highly political – she didn’t just talk with people, she listened to them. She had done her homework on the places she visited and wrote fascinating accounts – totally sensitive to the context and, on that account, so unlike most of such visitors.

The book which perhaps best embodies her careful research was probably “Through the Embers of Chaos – Balkan journeys” (2002). I have a lovely first edition of "Transylvania and Beyond" (John Murray 1992 - with a superb jacket) from one of the Bucharest 2nd hand bookshops...

An amazing woman https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2022/may/25/dervla-murphy-an-appreciation-of-the-great-irish-travel-writer-who-has-died-aged-90

What exactly IS a “theory of change”?

Everyone these days apparently needs to have a “theory of change” – although such an expectation has been with us for only a couple of decades. It’s something we can largely thank the development field for – although I suspect the “change management” literature had a big hand. None of the many documents available when you google the term bother to give a history of the term – and it is Wikipedia that comes up trumps with a fascinating history of the phrase 

I spent April musing about “change” because a friend had invited me to do some zoom interviews about the significant change strategy I had been responsible for in Scotland’s largest Region for more than a decade. Here's the first interview - which may take a few minutes to download.

The subsequent posts covered a lot more than the strategy – exploring such things as the wider social, political and context of post-war Britain; the influence of the Johnson’s “War on Poverty”; issues of power and powerlessness; how those with power manipulate us; and the curiously compartmentalised way we talk about change.  

I’m still trying to make sense of what was an important series of posts and offer one of my tables to help me (and my readers) in that process. Just click on the relevant title and you’ll get the post  

Title	Issues covered
Talking of change	Change is normally discussed in a highly compartmentalised way – with psychologists looking at individuals; consultants at organisations and sociologists at entire societies. Only recently have a few people tried to make the connections between these levels
Theories of Change	“Pincers”, “windows of opportunity”, “contagion” and the “laboratory” have been useful metaphors
Tools of Manipulation	The seven ways in which we are kept in line - as citizens, employees and consumers. And the variety of methods used to do so. Although there’s been a huge interest in past decade in behaviour, I haven’t seen anyone else  attempt such a tabulation.
Speak, memory	Recalling the spirit of the 1960s – the UK version of the US war on poverty – participation
The powerless	How the US debate on “community power” helped shape Strathclyde Region’s “Social Strategy for the Eighties”
Pragmatic idealism	the texts which influenced my generation
There are no experts	Offering a tentative explanation of how and why we developed the Strategy – and what its main planks were
Reviewing the strategy	Using a “change management” writer’s checklist to test the Strategy – it works!
Healthy societies	We’ve forgotten the wisdom of 30 years ago

 For those interested in how new strategies are developed - particularly at a sub-national level, here's the recent interview I did with a former colleague in Strathclyde Region about early initiatives

Google erases history.

We all know that “history is written by the victors” – although a more literal translation would be that it’s “written by victorious scribblers” since it’s the academics who do the writing. As long as we relied on our memories, this wasn’t a problem.

But now that Google increasingly makes our memory redundant, it is academic texts we unearth when we google. The new gatekeepers are the academics. And with that come new responsibilities for truth, neutrality and fairness for which they are simply not equipped.

This was brought home to me recently when I was trying to check my memory of events in the late 1960s and 1970s when I was involved in initiatives which swept across Scotland and had influences further afield. But as far as Google is concerned, these events never took place. If you have the patience to search long enough, you will find a few academic references to the events but they are generally schematic and show little understanding – let alone interest – in the conditions of the time.

“So what?” I can hear you say. It means basically that we are writing out of history the struggles of ordinary people. It’s only recently that social history started to be respectable – thanks to people such as David Kynaston although Ralph Samuel was an important forerunner    

Life is lived in our localities. But the life has been sucked out of our municipal institutions by a process of power grabs over the past half century. Time was when people felt they had some control over their lives but a fixation on central systems of power has been insidiously encouraged by journalists and politicians alike.

A lot of lip-service is paid to the need for decentralisation and “localism”. But it’s only –lip-service