A treatise on our present discontents

Today’s literary discovery – thanks to one of my favourite websites - - is an essayist called Joseph Epstein who muses about the approach of death in a very elegant yet simple essay - Symphony of a lifetime - . And some civilised reactions from readers
I googled him but found only one of his 19 books - On Friendship – which looks delightful. Amazon has a few – and I have put a couple of his collections of essays on writers in my basket.

The day has dawned bright – but still chilly. No signs here of the volcanic ash (from an Iceland volcano) which has grounded half of Europe’s planes. Political leaders are stuck all over the place – Angela Merkel having to drop into Lisbon (shades of Candide) on her way back from the States; the Portugese President in Prague; the Swedish PM apparently ruling the country by twitter in another airport! John Cleese makes a 3,500 euros taxi journey. The UK running out of fruit. Shows you the vulnerability of our systems these days.

Tony Judt’s ILL fares the Land – a treatise on our present discontents is a stunning essay by one of our best historians on how far western societies have fallen in the last 30 years in the pursuit of efficiency. Doom and gloom books are ten a penny these days – full of ecological disasters, commercial greed, academic simpletons and political pygmies. Prescriptions are rather more rare (Will Hutton and David Korton are exceptions). Probably only a historian can give us this sort of perspective on how the model of “social democracy” which seemed to have emerged a stunning victor in the ideological struggle of the 20th century so quickly was consigned, in its turn, to the waste basket. And with what catastrophic results. Of course, we have heard the story of neo-liberalism and its legacy many times before. But, generally, from journalists, economists or campaigners in a fairly strident manner. Judt suggests the story is a bit more complicated – with the new left having to shoulder considerable blame for its stress in the 1960s on “rights”. However legitimate the claims of individuals and the importance of their rights, emphasising these carries an unavoidable cost; the decline of a shared sense of purpose. Gated communities are the result.
The book’s language is simple to the point of elegance – probably because his debilitating illness required it to be transcribed from his spoken word. But the words (and chapter headings and sub-headings) reflect the vast range of his reading and knowledge. This is a very rare book in which a highly intelligent and sensitive historian takes stock of what he has learned in his life - in an effort to give the younger generation both a memory and some hope.
I was initially disappointed at the smallness of the book – but its contents and message and the format given to it by the publisher make it a book to treasure and consult for a long time to come.

understanding and acting

The object of education is not to learn but to unlearn (Chesterton)

To see what is in front of one’s nose requires a constant struggle (Orwell)

Two nice quotations – the first from the Grey book on studying organisations, the second from Tony Judt’s ill Fares the Land which I read with great enthusiasm. I'll come back to it another day

The book on “studying organisations” finished by recommending eleven books (a football team?) “about the things discussed in the book”. It has encouraged me to try to produce a list of recommended reading for those who want to (a) try to fathom what makes their organisation tick and (b) change it. (As “someone” (!) once said “philosophers have hitherto merely interpreted the world in various ways, the point is to change it”).
I will need time to make the selection – so I will start today with some of my favourite writers in “the field”; then flag up some criteria for the selection; and, finally, make some initial nominations.
And the books and writers will hopefully do justice to all types of organisations (public; commercial; non-profit)
Obviously a book which someone finds insightful reflects both that individual’s experience and the wider context of that moment or zeitgeist. And it is impossible to keep up with new publications in one field – let alone the several I trespass across......

Writers
My (Eleven) Recommended Books on organisations will almost certainly contain a book from the following writers – although it will be difficult to select just a single book for each.

Robert Greenleaf – one of his books on stewardship
Charles Handy – perhaps not so much his Understanding Organisations as one of his more autobiographical books. Gods of Management is perhaps a good start.
Roger Harrison – whose Collected Papers represent a rare study of an organisational developer in action and willing to show how his ideas have changed
Hutton, Will - whose last 3 books (The State We’re in; The World We’re in; and The Writing on the Wall) have been a marvellous exposition of the wider socio-economic and ideological systems which give organisations their legitimacy.
Korton, David – When Corporations Rule the World (1995) opened my eyes to the history of the commercial company. His later writings are more disappointing (eg The Great Turning)
Lessem, Ronnie – from whose prolific output it is difficult to choose. I chose Management Diversity through cultural diversity (1998) in my blog of October 23 about the books which had made an impact on me in the last 20 years.

Criteria
To make the final selection, a book needs to satisfy 4 criteria –
• Offers a richer way of looking at the world – whether by introducing a new perspective or setting out typologies which allow us to understand differences
• Be written clearly and simply
• Be open-minded, non-dogmatic, generous
• Inspire and encourage action

Nominations
First nominations -

Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organisations - for the way he demonstrates that our thinking about organisations is governed by metaphors (as machine, brain, organism, political systems, instruments of domination, psychic prisons, flux and transformation and cultures)

Then 2 books which each offer typologies of thinking about ways of organising government systems -
Guy Peters The Future of Governing – four emerging models – which first describes the classic modern assumptions about government which have been challenged in the last 3 decades by "market models", "the Participatory State" , "Flexible Government" and "Deregulated Government".
Chris Hood’s Art of the State offers four models - hierarchist, individualist, egalitarian, fatalist and is particularly good in exploring their typical policy responses.

Harrison and Bramson’s The Art of Thinking (1982) suggests that people have very different ways of approaching problems and that we will operate better in teams if we understand what our own style is and that others think in different ways. He offers 5 styles - synthesist, pragmatist, idealist, realist and analyst (and combinations thereof).

Skynner and Clease’s Life – and how to survive it. A therapist and leading British comic have a Socratic dialogue about the principles of healthy (family) relationships and then use these to explore the preconditions for healthy organisations and societies: and for leadership viz -
- valuing and respecting others
- ability to communicate
- willingness to wield authority firmly but always for the general welfare and with as much consultation as possible while handing power back when the crisis is over)
- capacity to face reality squarely
- flexiblity and willingness to change
- belief in values above and beyond the personal or considerations of party.

Deborah Stone’s Policy Paradox - which critiques the rationalistic way policy analsis is generally undertaken and then shows the different meanings which can be given to the 4 of the principles governments try to pursue - equality, Efficiency, Security and Liberty. The final part of the book looks at the type of language used by groups for portraying policy problems - symbols, numbers, causes, interests and decisions.

JQ Wilson’s Bureaucracy – what government agencies do – and why they do it

S Zuboff’s The Support Economy about which I’ve written in this blog already.

studying organisations

I have now finished “A very short, reasonably interesting and fairly cheap book about studying organisations” by Chris Grey and, frankly, am disappointed. It promised much at the start – with iconoclastic attacks on the types of writing about organisations - but left me, at the end, only with the impression sociologists generally do and which indeed the author anticipates half way through in a paragraph entitled - Why are you always carping? “You may well be thinking, he says, something along the lines – will nothing ever satisfy you? Older approaches to organisations have been condemned as dehumanising and degrading. Human-relations-type approaches are manipulative. Culture management is brainwashing. Now we have non-hierarchical, personally-focused and trust-based organisations (he attacks Richard Semmler’s writing about Semco) and you are still whinging”. Quite!
I know you can’t say a great deal about the study of organisations in 180 pages – but the book's de-constructivism is a bit repetitive.
And I was shocked to see no references to those whose study of organisations were practically grounded and focussed – eg those associated with the Tavistock Institute such as Emery and Trist; or Revans (action-learning). No mention of Eliott Jacques who was associated with Glacier Metal. Nor of the OD consultant, Roger Harrison, who worked with Charles Handy (also not mentioned) on the idea of organisational cultures (The Gods of Management). Ronnie Lessem was also a fascinating writer.

One of Grey’s central questions is why writing in this field is so boring – but he has missed so many individuals whose writing IS interesting. Perhaps because the focus of his book is on the study of organisations in business schools (about which he has a separate chapter). And he does make the point that American writers are considered there the guru figures. Most of the people I have mentioned are British! The title therefore is misleading – he should have added that qualification.
And a lot of money and energy is spent on the study of organisations in the public sector – which hardly figures in his book. Granted the models people use for this work draws on the fashions of the private sector - and perhaps it deserves a separate book. But some references would still be appropriate.

DIY Government

The UK Conservative manifesto apparently contains a commitment to give citizens more of a say in running government – introducing Swiss-style referenda; election of police chiefs; allowing parents to take over failing schools. Jon Henley of the Guardian suggests that this is part of the larger trend of DIY in society which, he argues, is creating mediocrity. The piece is worth reading. He would appreciate this picture of Kyrgyzs in the office of the President they had just helped oust!

I don’t, however, agree with his argument and found my own thoughts chimed more with this reaction to another article on the issue -
My heritage is old Labour friendly and mutual societies and co-ops and the Workers Education Association, and Mechanics Institutes. It's about people volunteering to be school governors, or magistrates or simply keeping an eye on the old lady that lives on her own. It's about the old miner that gets his mower out to do the bit of grass at the end of the road that the council always forget - because he has pride in his community. It's about self help and helping others. It's about communities deciding to do something for themselves rather than waiting to have something done for them.
It's a community idea. It should be our idea. If we were really left wing it would be our idea and we wouldn't have left a hole there for the Conservatives to fill with this version. Why have we now decided to tell people that they can't run anything themselves and they need some bureaucrat to provide services for them. And why do we wonder people don't bother to vote.
For more see here

Yesterday we paid our local taxes at the village municipality– 25 euros for the house and 20 euros for the acres of land we have around the house and up the hill. The latter is about double what it was last year – and about time! The village needs more resources. Still no resolution of the water metre and installation issue which the mayor promised us would be settled at the start of the year.
Then drove to Predeal for Daniela to catch the train – via one of the antique shops in Rasnov. As a result, I am now (again) the proud owner of a music keyboard. I bought a new one 15 years ago in Mojmirovce (Slovakia) and donated it to the Methodist Church when I left. This one I negotiated for 100 euros. There was also a very solid armchair for 40 euros – but too large for the Cielo. It will have to await the new 4-wheel!

A few blogs back I said some kind words about Ploiesti – here is their municipal website
Despite the latest Amazon delivery, I’m waiting for the next box which will contain Tony Judt’s latest book “Ill fares the Land”. The new issue of New York Review of Books has just arrived in my electronic mail and contains an excerpt from the book.

what makes us tick?

More Amazon books and the return of our car – which was getting a last fit-out before the big trip from one of these car mechanic treasures you meet only once in a lifetime. He has a garage in Bran and has such a positive and open attitude.
The latest books are challenging – two radical perspectives on organisations - A very short, fairly interesting and reasonably cheap book about studying organisations by Chris Grey and Against Management by Martin Parker. Then Basic Instincts – human nature and the new economics by Pete Lunn.
For light relief I have The Collected Dorothy Parker; and Perry Anderson’s latest collection of political essays - The new old world - which this time deals with Europe.

Twenty years in foreign fields makes you more aware of the assumptions organisational designers make (generally without realising) about the motives of staff and others whose behaviour they are trying to change. For several years, I’ve been playing around with a table to illustrate the point I generally try to make to my local counterparts that change requires using more tools than just diktat or a new law. The latest version is hidden as table 13 in my 2008 paper Learning from Experience. I’ve now extracted it and uploaded it to the website as a separate short paper – entitled Fitting policy tools to motives.
I was delighted to come across a recent paper from the UK National Audit Office which looks in considerable detail at the use and effectiveness of sanctions and rewards The Guardian has published the Labour and Conservative Election Manifestos – with commentary

turning failure around?

A frequent theme on this blog is the "performance" culture which has overtaken British government. Target-setting, measurement, reward and punishment sometimes sound like the Fordist management which we were supposed to have left behind.
In relation to Gordon Brown's threat of having 1,000 "failing" schools "taken over", I said I would summarise the 3 year research project which ran from 2002-05 in th UK following the attempts to "turnaround" 15 or so English municipalities which were judged to be failing. I will cheat a bit - and use text from the project's First Annual Report of 2004. The italicised references show the confusing fequecy with which government has introduced new and better programmes. Little wonder that there has been cynicism and confusion - this was happening at the same time municipalities were being hit with other bright ideas from above - new governing arrangement, scrutiny processes etc

"The desire by central government level to improve the performance of local authority services has increased in the last 20 years. Policy initiatives moved from the relatively simplistic assumptions about the power of market forces that were inherent in Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT) through more comprehensive service review and procurement approaches in Best Value and then into a range of demonstration and incentive initiatives including Beacon Councils, and Local Public Service Agreements.
The introduction of a nation-wide performance assessment process - the Comprehensive Performance Assessent (CPA) – has revealed that some councils are unable to respond effectively to the improvement agenda. Councils are classified into one of five performance bands (excellent, good, fair, weak and poor. Councils classified as poor are subject to special monitoring by central government and the Audit Commission, and may be the focus of legal intervention to direct them to undertake certain tasks or transfer responsibility for a function to a nominee of the Secretary of State".

"The evidence that a group of councils that is under-performing relative to national expectations raises two important questions:
1. Why do local authorities becoming poor performers?
2. What approaches to recovery (or turnaround) work most effectively and in what situations?

"There is little scientific research into these issues as they bear on the public sector. What literature there is tends to focus on failures in policy implementation (i.e. why a given policy is not delivered as intended or does not have the effect that was intended, e.g. Bovens, et al 2001; Bovens and t’Hart 1998; Wildavsky 1984) rather than weaknesses of organisational performance. The research into organisational performance in the UK public sector primarily concentrates on schools, reflecting the school effectiveness/school improvement debate (e.g. Gray et al 1999; Willmott 1999), although there is also some with a broader base (e.g. Anheier 1999).
"In contrast to the paucity of public sector research there is a voluminous and largely US-oriented private sector literature. This tends to focus on the way in which organisational leadership fails to respond to environmental changes affecting business profitability, and prescriptions are largely related to chief executive changes or organisational restructuring (e.g. divestment, re-financing, re-positioning, etc.) (e.g. Barker and Mone 1998; Boyne et al 2003; Mellahi 2002).

"‘Learning from the Experience of Recovery’ - was commissioned by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM), Local Government Association (LGA), Audit Commission, and Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA). The evaluation was undertaken by the Institute of Local Government Studies (INLOGOV) at the University of Birmingham in association with Cardiff University, MORI and other partners. The study commenced in December 2002 and ran until summer 2005. It involved:
1. evaluation of the recovery process and its impact in five poorly performing case study councils, together with a more limited analysis in another 10 councils
2. a study of the implementation and impact of the policies of government and national agencies in relation to poorly performing councils
3. action-learning sets with managers of the recovery process and recovery projects
4. policy papers on themes and issues related to recovery in poorly performing local authorities
5. dissemination to a range of policy-maker, practitioner and academic audiences.
The first annual report provides early findings from the study, drawing on baseline studies of five ‘poorly performing’ case study councils and on the response of central government and national agencies".

The report certainly gives very useful background history to the efforts of UK central governments to get improvement in both local services and municipalities. And it is relevant to note that the keyword for the past decade has been "improvement". Indeed the Scottish training and consultancy body for local government is actually called Improvement Services

threats as a policy tool

Britain and China are more similar than I thought. In their toolbox of policy measures, fear and threat are favoured tools. Yesterday Gordon Brown promised (threatened) to have 1,000 “failing schools taken over”.
He promises that inadequate schools, hospital authorities and police forces will all be subject to forms of takeover if either objective results or parental ballots demand new leadership. In education this could mean being taken over by successful state or private schools, education chains, or universities.
"The days of take it or leave it public services are over," Brown says. "The days of just minimum standards are over. The days of the impersonal are finished. It has to be personal, accountable and tailored to your needs, and with a mechanism to trigger change if the service does not meet your needs."
He says the aim is to unleash the highest quality providers, whether public or private, so that they can meet needs, not just in their local areas, but to turn around performance in other areas too.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/apr/11/gordon-brown-labour-manifesto-general-election

And trust in training in leadership and the market is still evident -
He also claims Labour has built a generation of public service leaders capable of running difficult schools, and sharing their leadership skills with other schools. He told the Guardian that his plan was better than the Conservative proposal to introduce a wave of new schools built on the Swedish model, since the Tory system required a costly surfeit of places. He said: "The Swedish free market school experiment has not been successful. The evidence of the Swedish equivalent of Ofsted is that it has led to lower standards and growing inequalities."

I was reminded of some articles on the experience of identifying failing PSOs (public sector organisations) and activating a process whereby they were “turned around”. After some searching I found them – on the sites of (a) the European Group of Public Administration and (b) the Office of the UK Deputy Prime Minister. In the early part of the decade, the UK government sponsored a research projects on “Learning from the experience of recovery” – which focussed on about 15 "failing" municipalities. The papers from the project can (at the moment) be found at http://www.communities.gov.uk/localgovernment/localregional/servicedelivery/learning/
I’ve downloaded them and will do a summary shortly.

No comment;
Communities and Local Government is a website of the British government - which contains guidelines and research papers for local authorities. Apart from the above paper, I also found a strategic guide, Improving Public Access to Better Quality Toilets.According o the site the guidehighlights some innovative approaches taken by local authorities to public toilet provision, although it does not prescribe what approaches they should take. Local authorities are the ones who are best placed to determine the mix of approaches most suitable to their area, and this guidance is intended to support them in making that decision.
This guidance is primarily intended for local authorities and partnerships wishing to explore the feasibility of setting up a Community Toilet Scheme. It provides an overview of the Community Toilet Scheme developed by the London Borough of Richmond-upon-Thames, as well as a step-by-step guide on how to set up a similar scheme.
In addition, the toolkit includes a case study of the SatLav text messaging service operated by Westminster City Council, which makes use of mobile phone technology to help the public locate their closest accessible toilets

organising local services

Another interesting organisational perspective from BBC World Service – in the first part of a series on the Ganges River whose “magic” qualities have been worshipped by pilgrim bathers for centuries. But all is not well since many dams have been built for purposes of irrigation or general water management. You’ll forgive me said one polite Indian – for saying that the English have a lot to answer for! Water resource management apparently used to be handled by small communities along with many others such as cultural life, etc Then the English came to India and split everything into specialised functions – with irrigation being a separate function from water resource management and from cultural traditions. A crucial holistic dimension was lost as a result. A nice “take” on the silo mentality I referred to yesterday – introducing an important “systems” dimension to the discussion.

If you look at local government systems, the Brits certainly seem to have caught the rationalistic addiction much more strongly than their European neighbours. I have to confess that I was part of the first such on onslaught in the 1960s when – as part of the critical mood then in the air about our institutions - independent commissions in England and Scotland examined the local government systems in those countries and came up with radical solutions which found their way into legislation.

Scotland’s was more radical – Adam Smith’ ghost of specialisation perhaps? 625 municipalities of different sorts (large towns, small towns, Counties and communes) were converted into a two-tier system of 65 municipalities.
Literally a decimation – with 9 Regions, 53 Districts and 3 Island Authorities coming into being in 1975.

As a councillor in a large burgh of 65,000 souls (whose educational, police, water and sewage requirements were taken care of by a County Council – coveting about 300,000 people), I was a strong advocate of their replacement by a District of 110,000 people and a Region (Strathclyde) of more than 2 million whose destinies had been strongly linked by the River Clyde.

But people believed then in “economies of scale”.

In fact, the Region functioned remarkably well – with the development of a new strategic dimension into policy-making which tried to pay proper respect to political, professional and community perspectives; its scale making it the first municipal body to forge a relationship with the European Commission and also making it easier to advance the internal arguments for experimentation and decentralisation at both the county and community level.

Recently Kenneth Roy suggested that the leakage of power from the Scottish towns was responsible for the poor shape in which they find themselves now – and he made a good case (as he always does). I was glad to see, however, that Alex Wood at least put up a rebuttal, arguing how corrupt and complacent town government had become. And, he might have added, the County Councils had already taken their power away – and were not directly elected! This was the critical note I struck in my contribution (What sort of Over-government?) to the Red Book on Scotland which Gordon Brown edited in 1978.

However, it is true that Scotland is now at the far end of the spectrum of the European scale as far as municipal size is concerned – with a one tier system of 23 Districts having been introduced in 1999. A major restructuring every 25 years does not seem a good approach! The French have a reputation for excellent public services – and have held on to their small communes. And their engineers, of course, are still held in higher regard than managers!
However French and German municipal services are now threatened by the credit crunch.

By the way, for further analysis of the Kyrgyzstan developments see an article on the excellent Open Democracy site -
http://www.opendemocracy.net/od-russia/boris-dolgin/kyrgyzstan-what-will-happen-to-tulips

ps - the picture above is the Ploiesti Clock museum - with the Boulevard Restaurant to its right