Those Clever Romans – the tactical Playbook of the Corporate Elites

That’s half a dozen posts I’ve done in a row on the apparent increased divisiveness in our societies – without any real attempt at either explanation or prescription. Indeed the blog’s focus on political frustration can be traced back to the first mention of the pending election in Bulgaria at the beginning of April. The posts since then have argued that -

- few (if any) societies can any longer claim to be democratic

- we need, very loudly, to be exposing such claims to be the falsehoods they are

- a better vision of democracy needs to be articulated

- pressure groups should coalesce around the demand for citizen juries – initially at a municipal level to demonstrate their benefits

- political parties no longer serve any useful purpose

- we should be insisting that governments start focusing on the big issues - which governments currently seem incapable of even attempting to deal with

- using citizen juries

- governments, in other words, should govern

So let me try to pull the posts together by questioning the way the media has placed the issue of political polarisation on the agenda. It’s clear that social media have increased the rancour of the tone of conversations - - certainly since Twitter started in 2006.

But can we really blame the social media for the strong and sustained political divisions? The fact that 70% of US Republican party members still cannot accept the validity of Jo Biden’s victory in the 2020 Presidential elections certainly indicates not just a very significant shift in the US political mood but a major question about the resilience and legitimacy of that country’s basic political system. This may or may not be part of “American exceptionalism” but is certainly very serious.

But the wider populist backlash against elite rule is part of something much deeper – and was there for anyone with any sensitivity to see some 20 years ago. I don’t profess to have any particular skills of foresight but in 2001 I drafted a short note which forms the first seven pages of this longer paper (written a decade later). I summarised the basic message at the time thus

·       The “mixed economy” which existed from 1950-1980 was an effective system for the West.

·       It worked because power was diffused. Each type of power – economic (companies/banks etc), political (citizens and workers) and legal/admin/military (the state) – balanced the other. None was dominant.

·       deindustrialisation has, however, now undermined the power which working class people were able to exercise in that period through votes and unions

·       a thought system has developed which justifies corporate greed and the privileging (through tax breaks and favourable legislation) of the large international company

·       All political parties and most media have been captured by that thought system which now rules the world

·       People have, as a result, become cynical and apathetic

·       Privatisation is a disaster – inflicting costs on the public and transferring wealth to the few

·       Two elements of the “balanced system” (Political and legal power) are now supine before the third (corporate and media power). The balance is broken and the dominant power ruthless in its exploitation of its new freedom

·       It is very difficult to see a “countervailing power” which would make these corporate elites pull back from the disasters they are inflicting on us

·       Social protest is marginalized - not least by the combination of the media and an Orwellian “security state” ready to act against “dissidence”

·       But the beliefs which lie at the dark heart of the neo-liberal project need more detailed exposure

·       as well as its continued efforts to undermine what little is left of state power

·       We need to be willing to express more vehemently the arguments against privatisation - existing and proposed

·       to feel less ashamed about arguing for “the commons” and for things like cooperatives and social enterprise (inasmuch as such endeavours are allowed) 

But the elite - and the media which services their interests - noticed something was wrong only when Brexit and Trump triumphed – 5 years ago. But that was simply the point at which the dam broke – the pressure had been building up for much longer.

If we really want to understand what is going on we have to go much further back – not just 20 years but probably at least 50 years – as Anthony Barnett, for one, most recently argued in his extended essay “Out of the Belly of Hell” (2020)

The demos have been giving the Elites a clear warning – “your social model sucks”. Some may not like some aspects of what the crowd is saying – for example the border restrictions….but we ignore its message at our peril. So far I don’t see a very credible Elite response. Indeed, the response so far reminds me of nothing less than that of the clever Romans who gave the world Bread and Circuses. Governments throughout the world have a common way of dealing with a problem – which runs like this –

-       Deny the problem

-       Rubbish the critics

-       Blame the victim

-       Marginalise the issue – concede a little by suggesting that the problem was caused by “just a few bad pennies”

-       set up an Inquiry

-       But ensure (by its composition and direction) that it goes nowhere

-       Compartmentalise the responsibility – to confuse

-       Sacrifice a few lambs

-       Bring on the games and spectacle

-       clowns and jesters

-       Feed the dogs with scraps

-       Starve any programme conceded of serious funds

-       Take the credit for any eventual concession that there was indeed a problem

Suggested Background Reading

We are so  swamped with books these days that someone like me can offer only what catches his eye. But the OECD, Lakoff and Tarrow are significant sources which should be taken seriously!

Catching the Deliberative Wave (OECD 2020) Executive summary of recent important book Innovate Citizen Participation and new democratic institutions - catching the Deliberative Wave which tries to help the global elite make sense of the latest challenge to their rule

Macron’s Grand Debat; useful article about the French approach

citizen jury experience (2016) german; rather academic

Creating Freedom – the lottery of birth, the illusion of consent, the fight for freedom Raoul Martinez (2016) Fascinating book which starts from the proposition that the current failure of our social systems must lead us to question our foundational beliefs

Can Democracy be Saved?  - participation, deliberation and social movements; Donatella Della Porta (2013)  Too much of the discussion on democracy is conducted by anglo-saxon political scientists. Here an Italian sociologist makes the connection to the social movement literature

The New Machiavelli – how to wield power in the modern world ; Jonathan Powell (2011) Tony Bliar’s Chief of Staff does some musing about the government class thinking

Moral politics – how conservatives and liberals think; George Lakoff (1996) an important psychologist sets out our tribal thinking

Power in movement – social movement and contentious politics; Sydney Tarrow (2011 edition – first in 1994) one of the key writers in this field

Metaphors we live By  George Lakoff (1980) our very words betray us

What’s Transitional Justice – when it’s at home?

I continue to think about the increasing divisiveness in our societies – and the apparently minimal efforts being made to repair the divisions. Or is this just a mirage – something created by a 24-hour media system which exults in scandals and bad news? Perhaps, under the surface, all is much better than we think. Perhaps the optimists like Stephen Pinker are right after all?

It is, of course, impossible to generalise – the world looks very different from a Chinese point of view. Each country needs its own assessment – ideally from a combination of internal and external sources. The UK, for example, perhaps suffers from a surfeit of such appraisals – of both sorts - starting with the prescient Suicide of a Nation edited by Arthur Koestler in 1963 which attracted Olympian disdain from none less than Philip Hobsbawm

After the Obama years, the USA has had, over the past 5 years, only its negative side portrayed - but two recent books offer the country some ideas for how it might rebuild. They are

- The Upswing – how American came together a century ago and how we can do it again by Robert Putnam (2020) – the country’s best-known sociologist and

       -  A Time to build – how recommitting to our institutions can revive the American dream; Yuval Levin (2020) which builds explicitly on an important but neglected book written in 2009.

For the moment, my interest is focused on Bulgaria and Romania – and how such countries might extricate themselves from the vicious circle of hopelessness into which their citizens seem to be locked.

Political leaders of these countries, of course, would not agree with that description – but any reading of the annual Eurobarometer poll of EU citizens is inevitably drawn to the conclusion that the political institutions of central and south-eastern Europe lack legitimacy and public trust. One of Romania’s foremost political analysts – Dorel Sandor – wrote in 2018 a powerful article in which he confessed that he had given up any hope for the country - with this reliable source giving evidence for the loss of trust in the country.

A recent book - Romania Confronts Its Communist Past: Democracy, Memory, and Moral Justice; by Vladimir Tismaneanu and Marius Stan (2018) – reminds us of what lies behind this. Just over a decade ago – after some 15 years of the country being in denial about its past - a maverick President set up a Commission to investigate the communist era. This is the book in which its chairman recounts the experience and impact of the Commission.

I asked a young Bulgarian friend who is a journalist with an interest in Romanian affairs about what efforts either country had made toward “conciliation” in their divided societies – and was, of course, then made immediately aware of the fragility of the words we use when he asked for an explanation of what I meant by the term. I was aware that it is normally used to reference family and minor commercial disputes but I had forgotten that a new field has arisen – of Transitional Justice – into which academics (both Eastern and Western) have been crowding in the past decade. This includes the field of property restitution, lustrace and memory

And I have the feeling that few Bulgarians or Romanians have been let loose with what I would call “mediating skills” of the sort practised by Adam Kahane of the last post

A Short Reading List on Romania

Key Articles on Romania

2020 Freedom House report on Romania; written by reputable Romanian experts

Romania Redivivus (2017) an excellent summary of the social and economic changes since 1989 

A Guide to Change and change management for Rule of Law practitioners (2015) As it says

Hijacked modernisation - Romanian political culture in the 20th century; Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (2007) The country's finest analyst

Poor Policy-making and how to improve it in states with weak institutions; Sorin Ionitsa (CEU 2006) pity this hasn't been updated

“Fatalistic political cultures” Alina Mungiu-Pippidi 2006 (chapter in Democracy and Political Culture in East Europe in which she argued (a) that it was too easy for people (not least the political elite themselves!) to use the writings of Samuel Huntington to write off countries such as Romania; and (b) that we really did need to look more closely at what various surveys (such as The World Values Survey) showed before jumping to conclusions

Books

Europe's Burden - promoting good governance across. borders" Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (2019) which looks at the nature and impact of European technical assistance on the development of institutional capacity in central europe and "Neighbourhood" countries

Romania Confronts Its Communist Past: Democracy, Memory, and Moral Justice; by Vladimir Tismaneanu and Marius Stan (2018) – both Romanians. The first who left Romania in the 1980s and returned briefly in the early 2000s to chair a Presidential commission into the impact of communism on the country, the second who still works in Romania. The book is a very personal take on how that Presidential Commission fared.  

In Europe’s Shadow – two cold wars and a thirty-year journey through Romania and beyond; Robert Kaplan (2016) - a fascinating book by an American journalist who has had a soft spot for Romania since the beginning of his career. It has an element of the “Common Book” tradition about it with its breadth of reading

The Great Rebirth – lessons from the victory of capitalism over communism ; Anders Aslud and Simeon Djankov (2015) which tells the story from the view point of some of the key actors at the time – with all the strengths and weaknesses that genre involves

Ruling Ideas – how global neoliberalism goes local Cornel Ban (2016) which is a left-wing Romanian critique of how neoliberalism got its grip on countries such as Romania and Spain

A Concise History of Romania; Keith Hitchins (2014) Very readable analysis by the American historian who knows the country’s history best.

Mapping Romania - notes on an unfinished journey; Ronald Young (2014) See section 7.2 at page 31 and all the annexes for the political culture references

Romania and the European Union – how the weak vanquished the strong; Tom Gallagher (2009) great narrative

Theft of a Nation – Romania since Communism; Tom Gallagher (2005) powerful critique

Romania – borderland of Europe; Lucian Boia (2001) Very readable and well translated study by a Romanian historian

RGY posts

Crowds and Power

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2018/11/plus-ca-changeplus-cest-la-meme-chose.html

When will it ever change? (July 2017)

Can Outsiders ever understand what’s going on in Romania? (Jan 2017)

Impervious Power (Jan 2017)

A Divided Country – dangerous times (Feb 2017)

Are Nations really masters of their fates? (April 2017)
Is it people who change systems - or systems which change people? (July 2017)

Against Binary thinking

I generally don’t like to see it suggested that the world consists of two sorts of people – us and them; insiders and outsiders; left and right. Perhaps it’s my mugwump, “on the fence”, instinct but, if there’s a Third Way, I’ll opt for it. Even better - a matrix choice eg grid-group theory or the 6-7 Belbin Team Roles. We are, after all. complex individuals – if sometimes not as original as we would like to think.

But there are always some exceptions…I’ve always liked McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y which divides us on the basis of whether we trust others or not.

And I’ve had to recognise that I am very much an “Ideas” – as distinct from “People” – person. I focus more on that WHAT than the HOW – I am particularly weak on the human aspect of issues. That’s not to say that I underestimate the importance of implementation – but my strength – when I was pursuing a political career - was networking and forging alliances with like-minded people rather than trying to persuade the recalcitrant. 

I never enjoyed the “glad-handing” which was such a feature of Lyndon Johnson’s success. Gordon Brown had a similar upbringing to mine – and suffered for his patent inability to suffer fools gladly…So the books on conciliation I have been looking at recently are quite a revelation. The author of Power and Love – a theory and practice of social change (2010) has for several decades led multi-stakeholder groups as they work together on complex, intractable problems eg projects involving siloed organizations in the global food system; the post-1991 South African reconciliation process; warring Israeli and Palestinian factions; and antagonistic Canadian stakeholders wrestling with climate change. 

Originally trained as a physicist, economist, and energy policy expert, Adam Kahane worked for years at Royal Dutch Shell PLC’s renowned group planning department — the part of the company that developed much of the current-day practice of scenario planning.

When people from warring factions come together they bring with them a strange mixture of very human strengths and weaknesses – not just interests but perceptions. Kahane’s book suggests there are two sides to power – the positive “power-to” and the negative “power-over”. And the same for the softer side – which can be almost inviting domination or more assertive.  

His book on “Power and Love” he wrote apparently to counter what he felt was an insufficient emphasis on the “power” aspects in his first book “Solving Tough Problems – an open way of talking, listening and creating new realities” (2004)

This interview has a good exchange about the need to keep the forces of power and what he calls “love” in balance  

KAHANE: I’d say 70 percent of the senior people — in business, government, and the nonprofit world — fall into either the power camp or the love camp. Those in the power camp think that compassion and empathy are soft emotions, that they don’t matter in the working world, and that they should be relegated to the home, family, and romance. They see the weak, degenerative side of love — which certainly exists.

But they fall into a trap. The exercise of power without love becomes reckless, abusive, and ultimately counterproductive and fragile. When businesspeople focus relentlessly on finishing the mission, getting on with the job, at the cost of their connection to employees, communities, or the environment, they lose their long-term legitimacy and viability. When I worked on regional development problems in Houston, I had a number of encounters with Ken Lay, then the CEO of Enron, and I saw first-hand the phenomenon of entrepreneurialism without responsibility. There are many Enrons, practicing power without love and suffering less-dramatic versions of the same fate.

But love without power is equally prevalent — and equally dangerous for people trying to accomplish something. It’s just not as widely understood.

 KAHANE: Nothing happens without the dirty, nitty-gritty recognition that everyone in a complex problem situation is asking, “What’s in it for me?” I’ve made the mistake of overlooking those interests, and therefore getting stuck. At one tough workshop of South African leaders, my co-facilitator Ishmael Mkhabela turned to me and said: “Adam, [these attendees] are not nuns, they are not priests; they have not taken vows not to have interests. People’s interests are not the problem; it is only a problem when those of one overpower those of others.” We see the same issue come up in climate change work, and in any work on social governance; people try to make the conversation nonpartisan. But you’ve got to let everybody bring up their partisan interests openly, and see what you can do once you know what they are. You’re not just looking out for the good of the whole system. You have to attend to the parts as well, because that’s where the power — the ability to get things done — resides. 

A number of people have observed that the worst conflicts about power tend to occur in idealistic organizations, such as those in the fields of healthcare and education. Maybe this is why. Just when you’re getting to the really tough issues, somebody stops everything by proclaiming, “remember the patients” or “remember the children.” That’s not helpful. Nobody had forgotten the patients and the children, but these statements obscure the necessary, difficult work of dealing with particular interests. 

S+B: Why do people find it so difficult to keep both power and love in mind?
KAHANE: Because of deeply held beliefs. As a power person, I tend to hesitate to open myself up because I think if I do, I’ll get hurt. And I know a lot of people in the love camp who say, “Well, I don’t want to assert myself because I think I’ll hurt someone.” 

A fair number of people — maybe 10 to 30 percent of those in a typical company — are skilful at both. Many of the people I admire balance the two imperatives, and all of us can become more conscious of it and consistent at it. ….Organizations also have difficulties maintaining this balance. Aren’t there organizations that, under stress, revert to power or revert to love? Aren’t there societies that do the same?

Attempting the Impossible

The last post suggested that few authors had dared tackle the question of national success – choosing instead to focus on how nations fail. Of course, there are numerous books about economically successful countries – Ruchir Sharma is an investor who followed up his 2013 book Breakout Nations – in pursuit of the next economic miracles about the BRIC countries with 10 Rules of Successful Nations. And Turkish economist Murat Yulek recently produced a very thorough analysis How Nations Succeed – manufacturing, trade, industrial policy, economic lopment (2018)

But these focus exclusively on economic factors – or rather on the mix of policy, commercial and financial considerations which get an economy going.

The question which I want to explore is how the wider social system - consisting of the key government, business, trade union, media, academic, NGO, religious figures etc - might be persuaded in a polarised society to come together to forge a new beginning. But one with a reasonable chance of success…

I start with a particular interest in Bulgaria and Romania whose citizens, 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, feel a strong sense of hopelessness captured, for example, in a despairing article in one of Romania’s cultural journals summarised here – with a follow-up explanatory note here. My understanding of a situation for which both external and internal actors are equally to blame is described in a longer 2018 post- 

- in the early 90s everyone (particularly outside Romania) expected too much although Ralf Dahrendorf - unique in his experience as both a German and British politician and one of the first academics in the 50s to explore the nature of the social changes which took place in Germany in the first half of the 20th century (Society and Democracy in Germany) - had warned in 1990 that real cultural change would take “two generations”. This means 50 years!

- Absolutely no preparations existed in 1989 for the possibility that communism might collapse and for the choices this would present for political, economic and legal systems …..Everyone had assumed that the change would be in the opposite direction. The only writings which could be drawn were those about the south American, Portugese and Spanish transition ….

- The EC stopped treating Romania as in need of “developmental assistance” in 1998/99. The PHARE programme was phased out - the focus shifted to training for EU membership and the implementation of the Acquis (using the TAIEX programme). Talk of differences in political culture was seen as politically incorrect – eastern countries simply had to learn the language and habits of the European social market and, hey-presto, things would magically change……

- 30 years on, the names of Bulgarian and Romanian institutions and processes may have changed but not the fundamental reality – with a corruption which is nothing less than systemic.

- The billions of Euros allocated to Romania since 2007 under the EC’s Structural Funds programmes have compounded the systemic and moral corruption which affects all sectors.

- The Cooperation and Verification Mechanism is, after 14 years, deeply resented – despite the increasingly clear evidence of the collusion between the Prosecution and the Secret services…..

Historians of different sorts have, of course, published numerous books mapping what happened in each of the countries after 1989. Tom Gallagher is particularly good on the political aspects of Romania with “The Theft of a Nation – Romania since Communism” (2005) and “Romania and the European Union; how the Weak Vanquished the strong” (2009)

But I know of only two English-language texts which have tried to analyse both economic and political aspects -    

The Great Rebirth – lessons from the victory of capitalism over communism ; Anders Aslud and Simeon Djankov (2015) which tells the story from the view point of some of the key actors at the time

Ruling Ideas – how global neoliberalism goes local Cornel Ban (2016) which is a left-wing Romanian critique of how neoliberalism got its grip on that society

I’m using this post to signal an interest in pursuing this issue - working at the moment with the following sorts of questions -

- how do we confirm that these countries have polarised systems? Presumably with the annual Eurobarmeter reports?

- how do we find out what conciliation efforts have already been attempted - let alone lessons learned in BG and RO? South Africa had hundreds of such efforts 

- how would effective and "trustworthy" mediators be identified? There’s an Association of Conciliators here in Romania presumably for commercial and family disputes but perhaps they have relevant resources?

- who are the key actors who would be involved in any such meeting?

- how do we identify the positive lessons from other efforts throughout the world to bring societies together? Latin America clearly has had many such efforts

- how do we deal with the cynics who dismiss such experience as irrelevant to their country?

How does a country go about constructing a hopeful future?

It’s been fashionable recently to write about how countries fail – but the challenge of finding countries which have put together a winning formula and emerged as both economic and socio-political successes has proven much more difficult. Germany, Japan and South Korea are about the only cases quoted – with tiny countries such as Estonia and Singapore also being acknowledged.

But all, save Estonia, go back to the post-war period…..

Right now Bulgaria is without a government since the populist who carried the most votes wasn’t interested in forming a government and  - despite the flashy cars and new office blocks - neither it nor its northern neighbour, Romania, have made any sustainable progress in the 30 years since the Berlin Wall fell.

A couple of decades ago, global bodies were shoving “good governance” down the throat of recalcitrant countries as a precondition of admittance to select clubs such as the EU – although any efforts to comply were immediately relaxed on admission.

And progress in countries such as Hungary and Poland has been in a consistently rapid backward direction – with others such as Bulgaria and Romania not even trying very hard in the first instance. Both are still (after more than a decade) subject to the “conditionalities” of the Compliance monitoring of judicial systems – with the efforts Romania has certainly made in that sector being consistently challenged in recent judgements in the European Court of Justice in what increasingly looks to have been collusion between the country’s Prosecutor and its Secret Services.

All this I have covered in posts in the last decade. But I have – like most of the literature – devoted almost no space to how such countries might end the vicious downward spiral and find ways to return some hope to their despairing citizens. Alasdair Roberts put it very well in his “Strategies for Governing” - 

We must recover the capacity to talk about the fundamentals of government, because the fundamentals matter immensely. Right now, there are billions of people on this planet who suffer terribly because governments cannot perform basic functions properly.

-       People live in fear because governments cannot protect their homes from war and crime.

-       They live in poverty because governments cannot create the conditions for trade and commerce to thrive.

-       They live in pain because governments cannot stop the spread of disease.

-       And they live in ignorance because governments do not provide opportunities for education.

Almost 3 years ago, one of Romania’s foremost analysts shared a despairing article but was least convincing when he tried to offer a way forward  

I have a list of what to do – starting with the need for an exploration of what sort of Romania we should be aiming for in the next few decades. Such a process would be moderated by professionals using proper diagnostics, scenario thinking and milestones.
It would be managed by a group with a vision emancipated from the toxic present.  

 At the time I indicated my support for such approaches embodied, for example, in the Future Search method. It’s how I started my own political journey in 1971 – with an annual conference in a shipbuilding town facing the decline of the trade on which it had depended for so long….But any venture would have to demonstrate that it can deal with the astonishing level of distrust of others shown by the fact that, in 2014, only 7% of the Romanian population could say that “most people can be trusted” (compared with about 20% in Italy and 40% in Germany)

For my money Social Trust is one of the fundamental elements of the soil in which democracy grows. From the start of the transition countries such as Bulgaria and Romania have been caught up in a global neo-liberalism tsunami which has been corroding that soil….

South Africa is the country people select when they want a recent example of positive reconciliation. Clearly Nelson Mandela was an exceptional visionary – but he did not work alone. He brought with him the support and assistance of the sort of people Dorel Sandor was referring to – professionals not associated with the “toxic present”.

But where are they to be found? What professional, religious or other groups can inspire the trust that Bulgaria and Romania need?

Earlier this year I indicated some of the toolkits available for those seriously interested in building a country back together.

But they can be used ONLY when a country has taken the first step and brought together the warring factions to forge a new future together.

Futures Work anyone?

“How to restore the capacity for effective and responsible action in a world we no longer understand and cannot control” 

That’s how IFF expressed its mission statement all of 20 years ago when it held its first three-day session – remembered here. 

Coincidentally, a whole world away in Uzbekistan, I was at that very moment completing a short paper exploring 5 questions –

·       why I was pessimistic about the future and so unhappy with the activities of the programmes and organisations with whom I dealt – and with what the French have called La Pensee Unique, the post 1989 “Washington consensus”

·       who were the people I admired

·       what they were achieving - and what not

·       how these gaps could be reduced

·       how with my resources I could help that process

That paper was called “Window of opportunity for ordinary people” which morphed after a few years into the 30-odd page “A Draft Guide for the Perplexed” (2013) - incorporating a friend’s feedback and further thoughts and notes. Since then the thought-piece has got out of hand – with a slimmed-down version being available here   

Needless to say, I am no closer to answering particularly the last of the five questions! I still don’t know where to put what time, energy and resources I have left remaining to me…..Whereas a body such as the International Futures Forum (IFF) has used that time to develop very strongly – as you will see from their rich website. There’s a lesson in there somewhere..

I was able this morning to take part in a zoom meeting to which IFF had kindly invited me – my first ever such zoom meeting. 

I must confess I froze a bit when we were invited to share something about ourselves and our expectations….What we say in such moments is generally so meaningless – a combination of self-promotion, buzzwords and flattery

I naturally mentioned the capacity development work I had been doing since 1990 in about 10 countries - but failed to mention the path-breaking strategic work I had been doing since 1975. Nor did I share just how important my writing is – the various efforts I’ve made to make sense of the reform of the State….or of the breakdown of our current economic system (the “Dispatches” doc in the list of E-books in the top-right corner)   

IFF are in the business of helping organisations face up to the challenges of the future – which raises several fundamental questions viz –

-       How can this be most honestly done?

-       What are the pitfalls to avoid?

-       Where has this most clearly been written about?

As you might expect, I can answer the last question most easily. Two books spring immediately to mind – Can we Know Better? Reflections for development by Robert Chambers (2017) one of the best writers in the development field; and The Collected Papers of Roger Harrison, a rare organisational consultant willing to share his concerns.

Organisational consultants don’t have a good reputation – too many charlatans have spoiled their pitch as spelled out in at least two highly critical studies “Management Gurus” by Andrzej Huczynszki (1993); and “The Witch Doctors” by Micklewait and Woolridge (1996) which suggest a world of senior executives subject to fads and fashions and given to imposing their will on the work force in an autocratic way. This is even more likely to happen in public bureaucracies which have the additional problem of a political layer on top.

Development writers emerge as the most thoughtful of the bunch – with the OECD publishing a couple of interesting guides to the field a few years ago

Supporting small steps – a rough guide for developmental professionals (Nick Manning; OECD 2015)

A Governance Practitioner’s Notebook – alternative ideas and approaches (Whaites et al OECD 2015)

Mary Parker Follett

I was intrigued by a couple of pages in Ian Leslie’s book on the value of “productive conflict” - which extolled a management thinker active a hundred years ago whose arguments have a powerful resonance and made me wonder how we have managed to forget the wisdom of Mary Parker Follett. 

“The best disagreements, she showed the author, neither reinforce nor eradicate a difference but make something new out of it. Persuasion is a noble and necessary art and I like it when I make someone think again. But my ultimate aim is not to get you to agree with me – I want your thinking to improve my thinking; your experience to modulate and enrich my own. I want us to disagree creatively to make something new and better out of our diverse opinions that is better than either of us could have conceived of alone. That way we both win” 

I had, of course, heard of Follett but Leslie’s tribute has had me exploring her writing. Interestingly, the very first essay in volume III of her Collected Papers (Dynamic Administration”) is one on “Constructive Conflict”. There is even a Mary Parker Follett Network which contains her original work – as well as commentaries on its continued relevance. One of the latter papers has a partial explanation of why she has for so long remained hidden from view 

It has been hard for management studies to place Follett, historically. She was never quite forgotten, but, at the same time, the scope of her work was never fully appreciated. She was a social scientist, a practical philosopher, a lecturer- author-teacher with a surprisingly wide-ranging body of work. She was a woman.

She neither focused on corporations, nor on factory production, like her peers, at the height of the industrial age. Instead, she was a long-standing manager-entrepreneur in the not-for-profit sector. She was neither an academic (because academia would not allow her to be one) nor a consultant. 

The philosophical and linguistic quality of Follett’s writing and speaking has made her work age less than that of probably any other business writer. It seems as though Follett speaks to us today very much within our own language, even after 100 years or so. This characteristic also has likely contributed to the problem of ‘placing’ her, historically

The paper then goes on to make a fascinating point - 

Management science does not, as it is usually depicted, begin with Taylor and Fayol, continuing through the Human Relations movement, in the meanwhile coalescing into the classical school, and eventually diversifying into different post-classic branches. Instead, the history of management is, and has been the story of two distinct, opposing schools of thought that emerged side-by-side, at the dawn of the 20th century.

The conceptual foundations of these two parallel threads of management science were laid by two iconic, but very distinct trailblazers: Mary Follett (1868-1933), on one side, and Frederick Taylor (1856-1915) on the other. These two separate varieties of organizational philosophy have co-existed alongside each other, within management science ever since. Around the beginning of the 20th century, engineer Taylor pioneered his approach of industrial production. In 1909 this approach would be named Scientific Management. It would later evolve into command-and-control, or the dominant brand of management, which we will also call Alpha here.

Simultaneously, another, very different pioneer, a social science researcher and practitioner, Follett was fleshing out a decentralized-democratic, or Beta approach to organizing that was informed by political studies, psychology, philosophy and sociology. While Taylorism, resonated strongly in industries and corporations, early-on, and immediately gained avid followers and enemies, Follettian thinking took root somewhat more silently 

Follett’s early experience was in neighbourhood (or community) work – which gave her powerful insights into democratic thinking and indeed an early little book was actually called “The New State” (1918)

False Prophets – the gurus who created modern management and why their ideas are bad for business today by James Hoopes (2003) has a positive chapter on Follett. Peter Drucker was also a great fan…

The Uses of Conflict

I may sometimes fancy myself as a contrarian, challenging the “conventional wisdom” but, temperamentally, I am not cut out for confrontation. The blog occasionally refers to my growing up in a bit of a class-less “No Man’s Land” in which I became painfully aware of the power of conflicting group loyalties; and keen to search for ways beyond polarised simplicities…

And these are very polarised times – with people apparently unable to resist the temptation to strike out at others.

We know that people argue very differently in different cultures – the French (and Romanians) are classic “disputationists”, with a perhaps apocraphyl guide being issued to British soldiers before the Normandy landing warning them that loud verbal disputes amongst natives should not be mistaken for conflict – it was just normal French conversation.

Japanese and other Asian cultures have much more subtle ways of conducting disputes which a delightful new book Conflicted – how productive disagreements produce better outcomes tells me demonstrates the distinction between Low Context (direct and explicit) and High Context (indirect and implicit) cultures. Although the English like to think of themselves as open and direct, the way they use language in negotiations and everyday conversation has sufficient aspects of High Context to confuse their interlocuteurs about the real meaning of their words.

I learned a lot from the book – which is useful not only for couples, families and teams but for more specialised work in reconciliation, hostage-taking and even addiction.

I generally dislike the psychology books which detail experiments to persuade us of their thesis but, somehow, Ian Leslie’s use of this device works. He weaves theory nicely into the text and then brings it all together at the end to leave us with 10 Golden Rules.

But before then, I had been bowled over by how he had dealt with what he argued had been a great decline in our argumentative style since Socrates invented his method of probing for clarity and truth. Disputation, he argues, has been institutionalised in medieval universities but people like Descartes ridiculed such scholastic disputes – after which Guttenberg and the Reformation made the pursuit of knowledge an individual rather than social matter.    

“For intellectuals, the purpose of reason was to gain knowledge of the world – but reason often seemed used to entrench whatever we wanted to believe, regardless of whether it was true. For the “interactionist” reason hasn’t evolved to reach truth but to facilitate communications and cooperation”

“The myth of the individual who can think his way through any problem in magnificent isolation is powerful….but misleading”

The book then goes into the more specialised field of conflict or dispute reconciliation and summarises what are, of course, complex issues in some interesting (if necessarily simplistic) injunctions  

Injunction	Translation
First connect	Look for opportunities to make a personal connection with the “other” in an argument, try to establish “trust”
Let go of the rope	Don’t try to control what the other person thinks or feels
Give face	Don’t engage in status battles. Make the other feel good about themselves
Check your WEIRDNESS	Probably the most important. Don’t assume you share cultures! WACO
Get curious	Show genuine interest in the other
Make wrong strong	Use mistakes to apologise
Disrupt the script	Introduce novelty and surprise into the conversation
Share constraints	??
Only get mad on purpose
Be real