Round up the Usual Suspects!

One of the questions which nags away at me is why “progressives” don’t spend more time trying to seek a consensus agenda which can halt the downward spiral into which our societies have plunged since the 1970s.

Since the global crisis, it has been obvious (to most) that the economy (if not society) was broken – trouble is that people could not agree what the causes were. Energies ( and time) were wasted in parading "the usual scapegoats".

But there was too ready an assumption that those responsible would be contrite and change their behavior; and/or that governments would enact strong measures (in the style of the Roosevelt New Deal of the 30s). Only slowly did it seem to dawn on people that, far from slamming the brakes on, corporate power and the political class were driving relentlessly on – imbued, it appears, with an ideological fervor for what, rightly or wrongly, we call neo-liberalism. Colin Crouch dealt with this question in 2011 in his The Strange Non-Death of Neo-Liberalism - although the book it a bit theoretical. 
Philip Morowski gives a more trenchant (and political) explanation for the survival of the neo-liberal dogma in his Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste (2013) - arguing that progressives have failed to understand that the neo-liberal rhetoric about the market cloaks a continued build-up of state power (bolstering corporate interests).

The economists have had at least six years to publish their analyses of the process of collapse; to identify the reasons and to suggest measures – both rectifying and preventive. Most serious accounts look at least 15 causes….and the guy was chairman of the British Financial Regulatory body actually produced 39! 
But, as Morowski argues, the vast bulk of economists adhere to a fallacious doctrine and are incapable of producing relevant prescriptions.

Immediately someone puts his or head above the parapet and suggests concrete actions, they are labelled and dismissed. – whether by those in power or, more discouragingly, by other progressives. This presumably is one reason why such voices are rare.

But there must be other reasons which discourage the mass of discontented people from uniting under a common banner.

Most people are confused; some are just skeptical if not fatalistic; but a significant number of highly educated people are infected, I suspect, by the social disease of individualism which lies, I feel, at the heart of our malaise.

We simply no longer believe in the possibility of effective collective action. And too many of the big names who write the tracts about the global crisis present their analyses and prescriptions with insufficient reference to the efforts of others. They have to market their books – and themselves – and, by that very act, alienate others who could be their comrades in arms. For example, I'm just beginning to look at David Harvey's latest book - Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism - and can see no mention of alternative ways of dealing with the crisis.  

That’s why I suggested that Henry Mintzberg was one of the few people who seemed able to help create such a consensus - a set of minimum requirements. He is a management guru from whom one does not readily expect to hear the message that the world has gone mad. More usually management theorists celebrate the bosses. But Mintzberg (like the discipline’s founder, Peter Drucker) know enough about the real world of business to know when things have got out of hand.

I am not a fan of Malcolm Gladwell but his popularisations have included the important notion of the Tipping Point 

Gladwell suggested (in 2010) that there were three key factors which determine whether an idea or fashion will “tip” into wide-scale popularity - the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context.

The “Law of the Few” proposes that a few key types of people must champion an idea, concept, or product before it can reach the tipping point. 

Gladwell describes these key types as Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. (And a maven – in case you didn’t know - is a trusted expert in a particular field, who seeks to pass knowledge on to others. The word maven comes from the Hebrew, via Yiddish, and means one who understands, based on an accumulation of knowledge).

If individuals representing all three of these groups endorse and advocate a new idea, it is much more likely that it will tip into exponential success. The other 2 concepts are, frankly, not so well dealt with – and  need to go the wider literature of change management and social marketing to get the whole picture.

My point is simply that most writers on the global crisis seem to focus their thoughts and text on the WHAT rather than on the HOW. – the ideas about the causes of and remedies for the crisis rather than the process by which “change for the better” might be managed. 
Of course we are still missing the "shared agenda" - the identification of which requires a "maven-like" character. And then the networkers and the organisers. 

The Centre Cannot Hold.....

I’m delighted to report – however belatedly – that management guru Henry Mintzberg has duly published his long-awaited pamphlet Rebalancing Society – radical renewal beyond left, right and centre which mounts a strong critique of the direction the Western world has taken in the last 25 years and suggests (but all too briefly) an agenda for change. It is the key part of what is to be a series of pamphlets which he has been encouraged to embark by people like me talking to him as one of the knowledgeable and sane voices in a mad world.

I had contacted him last year after re-reading his 2000 “Management in Government” paper which started with the assertion that it was not capitalism which won in 1989 but "the balanced model” ie a system in which there was some sort of balance between the power of commerce, the state and the citizen. Patently things have got badly out of balance in the intervening 15 years!

The push to privatise everything will, he asserted, lead to the same disease of communist societies. His discussion is particularly helpful for the distinctions he draws - first the 4 different roles of customer, client, citizen and subject. Secondly the 4 types of organisations - privately owned, state-owned, “non-owned” (?) and cooperative. Then four models/metaphors of state management - government as machine, network, performance control and normative. In between he explodes 3 basic management myths. I had the full paper on my website but was forced to remove it when someone from Harvard complained…Oddly, however, some of my blogposts still have a link to the paper which must be buried somewhere inside the hidden intestines of the website. My E-mail to him said simply that

This concept of re-balance is crucial and you are one of the few people in a position to try to pull together all the disparate voices which have been searching over the past 5 years for a coherent programme which will attract a strong and active consensus. Few of those who write on this issue bother to deal with the other writing on the matter in the required detail. We need a proper typology; and critique of the literature to justify the specific steps in any ‘better way’ 

I was amazed to get a positive response and a request to allow him to include the comment in his pamphlet. For a sense of his writings see his article on managing quietly and his ten musings on management.

Mintzberg's analysis is one of the best reads on the global crisis - and will get pride of place in the update of the paper I was writing about earlier in the day whose title I am still disposed to make "Draft Guide for the Perplexed"  .

 He also has an interview about the pamphlet here

The heading is, of course, taken from the famous Yeats's poem which also contains these lines-

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

What is to be Done?

Since 2001 I’ve been worrying away at a long essay variously entitled “What is to be Done?”, “Living for Posterity” and “Draft Guide for the Perplexed”

The original note was written around 5 questions (which are in the opening page of the "Living for...".link) relating to the fundamental question of what someone with my experience and resources could and should do to contribute to an improvement (rather than destruction) of the human lot.

That basically involved a quick sketch of global conditions and assessment of the impact of a variety of (the obvious) agencies to those conditions of injustice and powerlessness.

Ten years later, with the global meltdown confirming the grip of neo-liberal theft, I readily confessed not only that I still didn’t have an answer – but (in section 6) that I had whittered away some of my allotted time…

In an update I added that I was struck with the absence of realistic and critical studies of the efficacy of the British governance arrangements at this point in the 21st Century – although most Brits (or rather English) accept that their political system is in a dreadful state.

I have thought long and hard – and can produce only four analyses which might be read with benefit by the concerned and perplexed in that country. Two are 10 years old – the other two 5 years old…..We have, of course, countless academic studies of the operation of the British Parliament, of political parties, of voting systems, of local government, of devolved arrangements, of the civil service, of public management (whether Ministries, core executive, agencies), of the Prime Minister’s Office, of the European dimension etc – and a fair number of these are reasonably up-to-date. But most of it is written for undergraduates – or for other academic specialists who focus on one small part of the complex jigsaw. There is so very little which actually tries to integrate all this and give a convincing answer to the increasing number of citizens who feel that there is no longer any point in voting; that politicians are either corrupt or hopelessly boxed in by global finance and corporate interests.

The four studies I picked out were by a journalist (George Monbiot), a consultant/academic (Chris Foster) and two commissioned by a charitable foundation (Rowntree Trust) – although 2 real academics( Colin Leys and Allyson Pollock) did get honourable mentions.

The question today is whether the last four years has seen any significant additions to our understanding of power in Britain - let alone Europe - and how it might best be challenged. These years have seen the various "Occupy" movements but have they seen a clear agenda for change emerge? 

In a future post, I want to look in particular at the extent to which political scientists have tried to deal with this question…..

For the moment I would have to say that there seems only one serious challenge – that that is the very serious possibility that Scottish voters will vote to break away from the rUK in September. That would set off an earthquake – and who knows what would fall down and be built in its place……

Stalking the Big Beasts

For the past few days, as I’ve commuted between the mountains and the plain, I’ve been considering starting a(nother) series of posts – this time on the lessons I feel I’ve learned during the 45 years I’ve been working on the promotion of democracy and the building of the appropriate institutions, first in Scotland and latterly in Central Europe and Central Asia. This was going to build on various papers I’ve written over the years – not least the draft “Search for the Holy Grail”  But I then came across some recent academic valedictories and realized that there was bigger game to stalk – namely the anglo-saxon political scientists who have shaped how we perceive the political system in the post-war period.

Readers will know that I have always had a problem when I’m asked what I do – even my mother had a problem understanding this after, in 1985, I quit the respectability of academia and became first (for only 5 years) a full-time Regional Politician and then something called a “consultant” working in various countries which, until then, had highly dubious reputations. But her brother had been a famous British academic in political studies (Wilfrid Harrison) so I was allowed my louche inclinations….My focus was more mundane – an idiosyncratic combination of traditional public administration and more radical urban studies.

But, suddenly I was in Central Europe in the early 1990s - nobody had ever lived through a triple transformation (Markets, nations, democracy) ever before. People had been writing profusely about the transition from capitalism to communism – but not the other way around. The collapse of communism was a great shock. Few – except the Poles and Hungarians - were at all prepared for it.

And understanding such systems change requires a vast array of different intellectual disciplines – and sub-disciplines – and who is trained to make sense of them all?

In the 1990s I basically used my experience of Scottish local government (described, for example, in this paper) to draft advice notes to those trying in Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and Latvia to decentralize power…..But I understood only too painfully how I lacked a real understanding of the processes of change in those contexts – and did rapid “teach-yourself” exercises in both European systems of local government and in organisational change….

I was also reading what anglo-saxons were writing about both democratization (in The Journal of Democracy) and about public administration reform. And there was so much writing – not least after the Clinton/Gore initiatives and the 1997 New Labour programmes…..

The names of Donald Savoie, B Guy Peters, Chris Hood, Chris Pollitt and Chris Foster became particularly important to me – I grasped their work like a drowning man…..

A paper I drafted and presented to a couple of Annual Conferences of the body which brings together specialists in training and public administration reform in Central Europe tried to summarise a critique I had been developing for a decade - it was called The Long Game - not the LogFrame. 

Those of us who have got involved in these programmes of advising governments in these countries had a real moral challenge. After all, we were daring to advise these countries on how to construct effective public organisations – we were employed by organisations supposed to have the expertise in how to put systems together to ensure that appropriate intervention strategies emerge to deal with the organisational and social problems of these countries. We were supposed to have the knowledge and skills to help develop appropriate knowledge and skills in those in charge of state bodies in these countries!
But how many of us could give positive answers to the following 5 questions? -
·         Do the organisations which pay us practice what they and we preach on the ground about good organisational principles?
·         Does the knowledge and experience we have as individual consultants actually help us identify and implement interventions which fit the context in which we are working?
·         Do we have the skills to make that happen?
·         What are the bodies which employ consultants doing to explore such questions – and to deal with the deficiencies which I dare to suggest would be revealed?
·         Do any of us have a clue about how to turn kleptocratic regimes into systems that recognise the meaning of public service?  

Identities

In 2011 did a post about identities which recounted how, when I was going through some difficult times, a friend tried to help by encouraging me to explore the various roles I had – father, son, husband, politician, writer, activist etc. I didn’t understand what she was driving at. 

The penny dropped only those few years ago – when I realized that I had become a collector – and could also add the word “explorer” to the list of more conventional epithets such as - lecturer, politician, maverick, leader, writer, consultant, resource person

I was reminded of this earlier this week by a review of a collection of Stefan Zweig’s stories in which Zweig was described as an 

“affluent Austrian citizen, restless wandering Jew, stupendously prolific author, tireless advocate for Pan-European humanism, relentless networker, impeccable host, domestic hysteric, noble pacifist, cheap populist, squeamish sensualist, dog lover, cat hater, book collector, alligator shoe wearer, dandy, depressive, cafe enthusiast, sympathizer with lonely hearts, casual womanizer, man ogler, suspected flasher, convicted fabulist, fawner over the powerful, champion of the powerless, abject coward before the ravages of old age, unblinking stoic before the mysteries of the grave.” And this is only a partial catalogue!!

Departure

Death we prefer not to face…I’ve reached that age where I understand the essayist Joseph Epstein when he wrote the other day that 

I now not only read the obits, but do so before all else in the paper. A good day in the obituaries for me is one in which everyone who has died is above 90; a poor one is one in which everyone listed is younger than I. Henry James remarked that, at the age of 50, someone he knows dies every week. With the increased longevity since James’s time to our own, I’d say the age currently is closer to 70. I cannot say, like James, that someone I know dies every week; someone I know dies every month is closer to it. Sometimes people I know die in clusters of three or four. My friend Edward Shils, who died at 85, used to warn on such occasions, “Be careful, Joseph, the machine-gunner is out.”
I find myself thinking of the dear friends who have died, with foreknowledge that they will soon enough be followed by many more. If one turns out to be long-lived, part of the deal is that of the friends one most cares about more are likely to be dead than alive…….(but he later asserts that, at most, 4 people will really care when he is gone!)

Perfectly natural to think about death, to be befuddled and anxious and even terrified of it, but it would be a mistake to let it spoil your day.Truth is, most of us don’t. We keep our appointments, cherish our small victories, suffer our defeats; if moderately well-balanced, we recognize our true insignificance without letting it interfere with attempting to realize our dreams. If we are serious about our religion and we feel we have lived decent lives, the question of the afterlife will have been settled. For those of us—I include myself here—who do not closely follow the dictates of a religion yet believe in a higher power ruling the universe, we have to seek such wisdom on the subject of death where we can find it….

I have had a good and lucky run, having been born to honorable and intelligent parents in the most interesting country in the world during a period of unrivaled prosperity and vast technological advance. I prefer to think I’ve got the best out of my ability, and have been properly appreciated for what I’ve managed to accomplish. One may regard one’s death as a tragic event, or view it as the ineluctable conclusion to the great good fortune of having been born to begin with. I’m going with the latter.

I don't know why the site had clothed this post in a white shroud! I've tried to get rid of it - but can't!! Que sera, sera! Anyway RSA Blogs chose a similar theme today!

Surprise and Delight

I notice that I’m not reading other blogs as often as I once did. Of course I’ve been busy writing a lot – and also dealing with the pile of books which have arrived over the last couple of months but, somehow, the blogs which used to delight me have palled a bit. There are almost 20 such blogs on my blogroll – as well other, more cultural links – where I can access the thoughts of people such as Craig Murray, Ann Pettifor, Yanis Varoufakis, Matt Taylor, for example, but rarely do. The more intense Boffy ("theory of the crisis" part 103 for god’s sake!!), John Ward and Eva Balogh in Hungarian Spectrum no longer invite me in (how do they keep it up?) – nor do the more academic and technocratic sites – such as Fistful of Euros or Stumbling and Mumbling 

A few still retain their interest – the RSA blogs which come to me almost daily from a variety of people offering insights into aspects of the projects in which they are engaged are always fresh; and European Tribune is also a team effort bringing different angles.

Too many blogs, it seems to me, are ploughing the same furrow over and over again. 

We need more surprise and delight….In the past week, I;ve come across three such delightful blogs – the first, More than Wine, has a passion also for paintings and….motor bikes (with the latter taking up too much space for my liking)

Jost a Mon is a guy with great maverick tastes –  whether for buildings or mores….

But my favourite at the moment is Rio Wang whose raison d’etre completely escapes me but seems to have central European/Spanish/jewish provenance. But just great, eclectic stuff  wherever you go – whether it’s sketches from the  Petrograd revolution; photos of Maramures; photographs of an early 20^th century german photographer or of even more harrowing scenes from Warsaw. 

One of the posts called Brave Old World does offer a list if you scroll down the page.....

The delights are the painting blogs on my blogroll - and my friend Keith's photography and text about his amazing mountain walks. His snaps capture remote Scottish lochs and superb perspectives from the mountain tops ..... 

Reflections on my years in Kyrgyzstan

The curiously named William and Mary College in the US contacted me today to invite me to take part in a survey about the development of Kyrgyzstan – where I worked as a Team Leader from 2005-2007. 
My first inclination was to decline – not just because of US imperialism (or of the connotations of William and Mary - "King Billy" as he was known in our neck of the woods !) but because of the risk of the attachment being spam. 
But my second thoughts were more generous – and I took the risk. 
The site was genuine - and indeed offered the most interesting (and interactive) internet questionnaire I have ever taken part in. It automatically honed in on my answers to probe them more deeply.....

I had only one small criticism - once the questionnaire software had identified me as a European "Commission" consultant, it then didn't really ask questions about the EC programmes, choosing instead to focus on the other development bodies I had identified in the country - US Aid; World Bank; UNDP and Swiss-Aid.

Presumably the designers assumed that I could not be objective - but I have in fact been very critical of EC programmes - as should be evident from this long paper I drafted for a NISPAcee Conference a few years a back...

And I did volunteer quite a few thoughts about the Kyrgz experience in several extensive papers - also on my website - first on the experience of developing a Roadmap for Local government in the country; then one on Municipal Capacity Building; and a final, shorter one on Building Local Government in a Hostile Climate.

Only the Roadmap was part of my terms of reference - and even that was not quite a normal technical paper; I wrote them because of my commitment.....something in short supply, I have to add sadly, amongst consultants!!

There were few open questions in the questionnaire - I would like to have put on record my appreciation of the open way these other external development organisations worked with one another in Bishkek in that era. And the great support I got from the EC Delegation - and from the German Ambassador....

Not a typical experience in my experience of working in 10 countries!!!

I should also add that the EC commissioned a very full report on the EC experience of decentralisation globally and included KR in the survey. Their report - commissioned by ECDPM - was published in 2007 with the title Decentralisation and Local Governance and is a useful reference......

I was there from 2005-2007. It was the third project in almost a decade I  spent in Central Asia and the Caucusus - and have to say that these years gave me the most professional satisfaction. In 2 of the countries I was working with the Presidential Office - who ruled the country with a tight grip. But in Azerbaijan I was given my head - and managed to turn a hopeless situation around...And in both I was working with people who seemed to appreciate getting a sense of how things worked ( or didn't) in other countries. Consultants were thin on the ground....  

Kyrgyzstan was, of course, more "fluid" with the President in fact escaping to Russia a few weeks after I arrived!