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

 

The Future isn't what it used to be!

When I had a high profile – as a change agent in Europe’s largest Region in the 1970s and 1980s – I would quite often receive invitations to join discussion/advisory groups or write articles for journals (generally one led to the other). One of the first came from the Tavistock Institute and was to join the Advisory Group for a 3 year project about Networks in which my Region was taking part in the late 1970s.

John Friend was the key player in the Institute of Operational Research which ran the project but Eric Trist and Fred Emery were big names associated with the systems thinking which lay behind the work. The planning theorist Andreas Faludi nicely situates here John Friend’s contribution to the planning field. An article I contributed to the Newsletter they ran gives a very good sense of the wider context in which the work was taking place - “Local government, learning and social change” (Linkage newsletter 3 of Institute of Operational Research (IOR) 1978)

Involvement with the Institute gave me a chance to look at my work using a different perspective or lens. Wherever we are, we tend to get too used to our routines – and it helps to be jolted out of that and get the chance to see things though different eyes…..(hence the title the blog has carried this past year or so)

In the 1980s, the invitations came increasingly from Europe and were focused on the processes and lessons of urban change. It was through a network with the acronym R.O.M.E that I met the indefatigable Riccardo Petrella who became a great campaigner against globalisation and for the importance of public water provision

My role as an institutional development consultant from 1991 brought a reduced public profile – although the European Centre for Development Policy Management did invite me for discussions about my local government work in Kyrgyzstan - when I was wrestling with the concept of capacity development about which, with the support of people like Pete Morgan, they did a lot of work. Here’s a typical example

The most recent invitation is from the International Futures Forum – based in Scotland whose mission statement reads simply 

to enable people and organisations to flourish in powerful times. We address complex, messy, seemingly intractable issues – local, global and all levels in between – fostering practical hope and wise initiative. 

We support people making a difference in the face of all that stands in the way of making a difference, rising to the challenge of the moment.  We develop their 21st century competencies for thriving in complexity and their capacity for inspiring and transformative innovation.  We offer resources to support this activity through the IFF Practice Centre.  We work with governments, communities, businesses, foundations and individuals.  

We offer people a space for reflection, thoughtful engagement and mutual support and we freely share the powerful ideas, tools and frameworks that result. 

I am apparently one of some 50 ex-pats who are being invited in a couple of weeks to take part in a zoom session to explore how we might become more involved. I like the idea and could access some of the material which is available in their IFF Practice Centre.

But I prefer a slightly more independent approach and have therefore identified some books which I will try to flick through in preparation…

I start in 1971 with the full edition of one of Futurology’s greats – Wendell Bell whose contribution to the field is superbly described in the first half of an article by Barbara Adam, the author of a 2007 study which figures in the list of about a dozen books

Title	Author’s background	Comment
The Sociology of the Future – theory, cases and annotated bibliography; ed Wendell Bell and James Mau (1971),	One of America’s foremost futurologists	The book was a real challenge to the prevailing quietism of Talcott Parsons’ sociology
Futures we are in Fred Emery (1977)	Renowned Australian organisational thinker – with background in psychology	But rather elitist and technocratic style
New Thinking for a new Millennium – the knowledge base for future studies; Richard Slaughter (1996)	a well-known Australian futurist.	Superbly written
Foundations of Future Studies; Wendell Bell (1997)	See above	The editions of 2004 and 2007 carry great overviews of work since
Future Matters – action, knowledge, ethics; B Adam and C Grove (2007).	British sociologists	a clear and thorough analysis
Foresight – the art and science of anticipating the future; Dennis Loveridge (2008)	A british analytical chemist with strong working experience in industry who took up an academic post on future studies in 1991	Has the style and insights one would expect from someone with his background
What is the Future? John Urry (2016) only in epub format.	Urry was a great British sociologist	Comprehensive treatment strong on bib references
Superforecasting ; P Tetlock and D Gardner (2016)	Paul Tetlock is an American economics Prof who focuses on finance and statistics	And has a reputation for scepticism about forecasting
Future Studies and Counterfactual Analyses – seeds of the Future; T Gordon and M Todorova (2019)	futurologists – the older an American with a scientific background, the younger a Bulgarian with a cultural studies background
Critical Terms in Future Studies; ed Paul Heike (2019)	An interesting collection of 50 international academics whose subjects are generally in the humanities
From What Is to What If – unleashing the power of imagination to create the world we want Rob Hopkins (2019) only in epub format.	Climate change campaigner	This is, admittedly, Rob’s latest contribution to his “Transition Towns” series and therefore not quite an example of future studies
Uncharted – how to map the future together ; Margaret Heffernan (2020) epub	Serial entrepreneur American-born but currently living in UK	A curious book – strong on stories – generally sceptical but strong on scenario planning

The pandemic, we are told, is one of these critical junctures which shake the world from time to time and can move it in surprising directions….After the global financial crash of 2007 a lot of people’s predictions about government roles strengthening were proven false. The power of Big Capital increased – as did inequality. It took the populist revolt to begin to bring western liberalism to its senses.

The Covid pandemic has demonstrated new possibilities for government that people will not forget in a hurry - but has equally consolidated the power of the global AI and IT monopolies and intensified our fears of a future without work.

Futurists should therefore be at a premium these days….       

Postscript; interesting that, within days of this post, I was invited by the Centre for Public Impact to complete a questionnaire about ways of improving government which focused on the sort of information I got from internet platforms.

I had to respond quite strongly that it is only books which help me understand realistic ways for improving government – particularly those written by people such as Gerald Caiden, Chris Hood, B Guy Peters, Eduardo Ongaro and Alasdair Roberts.

But the website is an interesting one – and pursuing a very worthwhile objective

Scribbling – the professional writings since 1990

I thought my HEALTH WARNING would discourage readers – but, curiously, it seems to have had the opposite effect with daily clicks hitting the 400 mark today after the last post on the central Asian experience…

This post is a record of my professional writing over the past 30 years and included largely to ensure that I have easy access to such source material

It does not include the material about my travels in places such as Bulgaria, Germany and Romania and other material you can find listed in the top right corner of the blog…

“In Transit – notes on good governance” 1999 book	in which I tried to capture for my new colleagues in ex-communist countries what I felt we in the West had learned, between 1970 and 2000, about managing change in the public sector My initial projects in CzechoSlavaki, Romania, Hungary and Latvia were all a bit scrappy and it was the 3 Central Asia projects of 1999-2007 which gave me the real satisfaction
Transfer of Functions – European Experience 1970-2000. Uzbekistan 2002	The experience of transferring functions in Europe to different levels of government in the latter part of the 20th century
Policy analysis for Slovakian senior civil servants - a manual	One of my least successful efforts I need to add a bibliography and update it a bit eg Paul Cairney
Public Admin Review in Azerbaijan as at 2005	This was the first project since I had left Scotland whose results left me totally satisfied – what seemed a hopeless situation when I arrived in 2002 started slowly to give hope, culminating in the setting up of a Civil Service Agency
“Missionaries, Mercenaries or Witchdoctors?” Paper presented to 2006 NISPAcee Conference	A fairly biting analysis of the shortcomings of Eiropean Technical Assistance in its efforts to develop the capacity of Ministries and state bodies in ex-communist countries
Road Map for Local Government under threat 2007	I had experience of helping run a municipal authority – but not designing a local government system. Romania, CzechoSlovakia, Hungary and Latvia gave me certain insights about this in the 1990s but it was a 2year project in Kyrgyzstan which helped me produce this detailed RoadMap
Administrative Reform with Chinese Characeristics 2011	China still haunts me – 11 years later. I was invited to lead a 4 year EC project in the country but had culture shock very quickly…I produced 17 reasons for my resignation – but still learned enough to write this piece….
“The Long Game – not the Logframe” paper presented to 2011 NISPAcee Conference at Varna	critique of EC technical assistance to PAR – presented to NISPAcee Annual Conferences of 2007 and 2011
Training that Works 2011	100 page paper based on what I felt I had learned in the last decade particularly in Kyrgyzstan and Bulgaria. It challenges a few myths
Blog 2009-2021 www.nomadron.blogspot.com	See the annual collection of posts for the last 2 years – as well as E-books on administrative reform, Bulgarian art, Romanian culture, Germany etc
No Man’s Land; journeys across disputed territories (2018)	A first effort at my personal story
Just Words -  a Sceptic’s glossary	EC reports always gave an opportunity for provocative writing and I started this habit of caustic definitions early in my career with them
Change for the Better? A Life in Reform; (2021)	the present version of my effort to make sense of the challenge of admin reform in a variety of countries

For those wanting to see the earlier writings -

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/04/50-years-of-scribbling.html Part I

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/04/my-scribbling-from-1975-1990.html Part II

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/04/scribbling-from-foreign-lands.html Part III

Scribbling from Foreign Lands

I still remember the autumn morning in 1990 when I stood beside my car at the Hull docks waiting to board the ferry that would take me to a port on Denmark’s west coast with a subsequent drive to WHO HQ Copenhagen. On the basis of my strategic work in the West of Scotland, the Head of European Public Health division had invited me take up a short assignment helping her develop a health promotion strategy for the newly-liberated countries of central and eastern Europe.

Ilona Kickbusch was a formidable German lady who didn’t appear to need much help but I was desperate to explore new horizons – having rather boxed myself career-wise. And so it proved – with a new career in “institutional development” in central europe quickly opening up first in Prague, then Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Brussels and Latvia.

The projects were, however, largely an apprenticeship as I learned to deal not only with a new role but new subjects (transitology; a national rather than local government focus) – as well as a way of presenting ideas which took account of interpretation needs. Thus I would always try to give interpreters advance briefing – particularly for any conference papers…. 

But in 1999 I became the Leader of a fairly large team in Uzbekistan on Civil Service Reform although there was little or no pressure for any real change from the Prime Minister’s Office (our beneficiary) which gave me the luxury of being able to write material for the small number of officials who did seem to be interested.

I took to doing regular – and highly interactive - sessions with middle-level officials at the Presidential Academy of Public Administration – in a training centre set up by the project.

I learned quite a lot as a result – about European systems of local government; privatisation; and that dreadful thing called “human resource management”. I was particularly proud of the little series of publications I left behind eg the 60 page Transfer of Functions – European Experience 1970-2000. 

All of this was to prove invaluable to me in the two projects which immediately followed. 

In Azerbaijan I was Team Leader from 2003-2005 on a Civil Service project which worked with a network of personnel managers and, very much against the odds, managed eventually to have a Civil Service Agency set up to introduce new-fangled merit-based appointments. It’s apparently still going strong…..

The early days were difficult – a civil service Law had been passed by Parliament but no one knew what to do with it…..A previous Team Leader had resigned in frustration. Instead of an office in the prestigious Presidential Office Building, I was offered rooms in the nearby Presidential Academy of Public Administration. There I befriended some staff with whom I started to work on lectures and 3 books…… totally outside my Terms of Reference. I like to think that my method of working won friends and influenced people…. Although it did cause some problems with the European Commission monitors who watched with bemusement…

But the European Office supported me and I began to acquire friends in the President’s Office and Parliament who actually encouraged me to campaign publicly – with lots of press interviews and even a television hook-up with the public!

The three books I co-authored were published with European funds and the first on public management and the civil service to be available in the Azeri language. So I was proud of that too….

I had no sooner finished that work than I was flying to Bishkek to take up a two-year project as Team Leader in Kyrgyzstan (2005-7) which helped establish a Local Government Board; did a lot of training of municipal people….and also left three books behind – one of which tells a good story about learning and strategic change - Developing Municipal Capacity and strongly challenged the prevailing assumptions in the capital about whose capacities needed developing!

Only one of these had been in my terms of reference - Road Map for Kyrgyz Local Government (2007) which I regard as one of the best things I ever produced…  The more I worked on it, the more I appreciated the potential of this device. The opening page warns that - 

A road map does not give a route – YOU choose the route. A roadmap simply locates the key features (mountains, rivers and swamps) you need to be aware of when trying to travel from the A to the B of your choice. So this is not an attempt to force foreign models on the local situation

Another point about a road map is that it cannot cover every changing detail nor tell you how you should approach certain situations – sometimes a large bump in the road or impatience can have fatal consequences! So a road map is only a guide - local knowledge, judgment and skills are needed to get you to your destination! And, like a map, you don’t have to read it all – only the sections which are relevant for your journey!

So don’t be discouraged by the size of the booklet – simply dip into the sections which seem most useful to you

Such projects always have an “inception period” (generally a month) to allow the team and beneficiary to take stock of the situation and make adjustments…which even paymasters realise are needed when a President flees the country – as happened in March 2005 as I was completing my round of visits not only to “beneficiaries” but other “stakeholders” such as UNDP, The World Bank and US Aid. I took full advantage of that period (which involved my own flight – back to Baku for a week of safety) to ensure the “maximum feasible flexibility” in the project. 

One of the high points of the project for me was when, at a Conference of the municipalities, I invited the participants to play a game similar to “Pin the Tail on the Donkey”. As you will see from the annexes of the Road Map, I simple reminded people of

·       the main elements involved in making a successful car trip (features of the car; geography; roads; petrol stations);

·       listed the key players in the local government system (politicians; laws; citizens; lobbies)

·       invited them to pin the appropriate label on the map

At that point, I decided that it was time to see how the newest members of the European Union were coping. I had acquired an old mountain house in a remote village in the Carpathian mountain which my Romanian partner took from a shell in 2000 to a warm habitable home with superb vistas from front balcony and back terrace of two spectacular mountain ranges……

I got the chance to spend only one summer there in 2007 there before being tempted by one of the last Phare-funded projects which bore the highly poetic title – “Technical Assistance to the Institute of Public Administration and European Integration - for the development of an in-service training centre network linked to the implementation and enforcement of the Acquis”. The project’s aim was to – 

 “ build a system for in-service training of Inspectors and other stakeholders to satisfy clearly identified training needs and priorities in the field of acquis communautaire implementation”. Five fields were selected by the Institute for the initial development of training and training material – Food safety; Environment; E-government; Consumer protection; and Equal opportunities. The project appointed Bulgarian specialists in these fields to manage this process of designing and delivering training. In six months the project was able to -

·       Produce 18 training courses

·       Draft Guidelines for assessing training; how to carry out assessment which helps improved training.

·       Produce a Training of Trainers’ Manual; and a Coaching Manual

·       Run 30 workshops in the 6 regions for 500 local officials

·       Draft a Discussion Paper to identify the various elements needed to help improve the capacity of Bulgarian state administration. This offered examples of good practice in both training and implementation.

“Procurement issues” (for which read a combination of Bulgarian and Italian corruption) delayed the start of the project by some 4 months…….and continued to plague us for the remainder of the year. But it was, for me again, a marvellous learning opportunity during which I learned so much about both the fundamental issue of “compliance with European norms” - as well as how effective training could and should be organized……

All my material can be accessed at -

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/04/50-years-of-scribbling.html Part I

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/04/my-scribbling-from-1975-1990.html Part II

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/04/scribbling-from-foreign-lands.html Part III

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/04/scribbling-professional-writings-since.html Part IV