Taking the pledge

The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) has now launched its Better Managed Britain campaign. The institute asks managers and government to pledge their support and sign statements about how well they will manage and support managers. Will the campaign work? A strategy based on ‘If only we push harder this time’ while the broad message remains the same is unlikely to prove transformational. More importantly, it’s worth noting that lots of managers managing well or better does not on its own produce a better managed organisation (or even Britain).

The discipline of Systems Thinking propounds the principle that one cannot optimise the whole by breaking down the parts and then optimising those separately (as the systemic leadership model explains). Competency frameworks for individual managers, better qualified managers, and more use of training fails this test. That is not to say that these do not make a contribution, but if they are necessary they are not sufficient. To use a familiar analogy, you cannot improve a fishtank by improving the fish. If that was possible, we wouldn’t need organisation development as well as management development.

It’s like wine. If a group of friends come round for dinner and drink a lot of really good wine, it helps but of itself it doesn’t produce a good evening. The wine is just one ingredient. What matters as well is what complements the wine, of which food is a vital element. But even that doesn’t suffice. If a dinner party is to be successful we need a host. The host chooses who is there and provides the reason why they come together. It’s then a matter of the quality of relationships and ‘connection’; what conversations take place in the spaces between the participants? What do they have in common? What do they value? What do they want to happen? Organisations are like that. If the CMI wants managers managing better to result in better management for the organisational 'host' it needs to heed that lesson.

It’s the system, stupid!

In last Tuesday’s Guardian newspaper, Eileen Munro of the London School of Economics (LSE), made a telling comparison between the public’s acceptance of systemic explanations for failure in the case of aircraft accidents versus those concerning breakdowns in child protection of the kind that cost Baby Peter his life in the London Borough of Haringey (‘Beyond the blame culture’, 3 November). Munro points out that, in social work, the assumption is that blame can be laid at the door of individuals who are “stupid, malicious, lazy or incompetent”. In the case of aircraft accidents the assumption is that a system fault (e.g. confusing instrument layout) offers a more likely explanation than a bad pilot. Hence, investigations into aircraft accidents are systems based, but in social work they focus on individuals and someone to blame. The public, media and politicians have a need to find scapegoats in one case, but not in the other. Guess which.

Professional management institutes have done shamefully little to wean their members, the public, the media, regulators, and politicians off instinctive assumptions of individual manager responsibility, (in)competence and culpability. In cases of high-profile systemic failure this has sustained baying calls for summary dismissal of managers (such as Sharon Shoesmith, Haringey’s former Director of Children and Young Persons Services) or naïve faith in their retraining (those left behind). High pay for top executives has served only to reinforce the mythical status of the individual leader either as saviour, or as dunce when the system fails. But leadership is only as good as the system of which it forms a part, and on which its improvement effort should be focused.

At its heart lies a basic confusion between what managers do and the concept of management. The former emphasises the skill, qualifications and training of managers. It assumes that more and better managers will result in better management. But successful ‘management’ of a complex system depends on attending to the gaps and spaces. Hence the importance of Munro adopting a systems perspective for conducting serious case reviews to improve child protection. The simplistic equation between managers and management has bedevilled attempts at improving public services for years. The National Skills Academies are offering ‘learning for leadership to transform their services’; they are in danger of repeating this basic attribution error. For those seeking a systems perspective, there is a tool for diagnosing, understanding and remedying instances of systemic shortcomings and failure in management and leadership.

Where’s the evidence?

It is a political requirement to state that policy decisions should be ‘evidence-based’, yet ‘policy-based evidence’ is what politicians actually want. Professor Nutt claimed that his views on drug classification were evidence-based, but the Home Secretary rightly argued that scientific evidence was just one factor. Building large prisons isn’t evidence-based, while ‘restorative justice’ methods of rehabilitation are, yet are not politically acceptable. What is politically acceptable plays a big part, as does what is affordable. Intuition and common-sense have a rightful role. Myths are powerful but may mislead, as in belief in ‘economies of scale’, where the evidence runs contrary.

Any organisation’s management likes to believe it manages rationally. But there is a more powerful, non-rational side, as the above shows. This includes prejudices, envy, departmental rivalries, networks, groupthink, etc – all more powerful than edicts, rules, codes, databases, targets, budgets, etc. In The Search for Leadership I identify 35 rational components and 40 non-rational ones.

There is scientific evidence that evidence itself is socially constructed. We see what suits our purpose. The banks have evidence that supporting arms manufacturers is profitable, but is that the right question to ask? George Bush ‘saw’ that Saddam Hussein was a friend of Al Qaeda; his ‘evidence’ supported the need for the US to have a strong commander-in-chief – himself.

By all means try to seek out evidence, but please consign the language of ‘evidence-based policy’ to the dustbin of history – or should that be hypocrisy?

No expense spared

Today sees the official publication of Sir Christopher Kelly’s proposals for getting out of the MPs’ expenses quagmire. As further evidence that this sorry mess is as much a system problem as it is one of personal morality, Baroness Shirley Williams spoke out on last Friday’s BBC Radio 4 Any Questions programme, saying “… governments have been completely complicit in this, by refusing to raise MPs’ salaries, by asking them, telling them, to claim the maximum expenses they could, which was, in fact, an invitation to behave in a dodgy manner … Government has to stand up and take part of the blame for all this."

Returning to the story in yesterday's post concerning Professor David Nutt’s views on drugs, I had a chance to read selective extracts from his paper. I must say that it was a model of measured professionalism. I could find no overt criticism of government policy, double dealing or hurt feeling. While most people take a strong view either for or against Alan Johnson’s sacking of Professor Nutt, one wise soul simply advised ‘I think he [Johnson] could have let this one go’. That’s how it seems to me. Keep your powder dry for the most egregious cases of reprehensible behaviour.

How to have your Nutt roasted

Following the subject of yesterday’s post is the continuing story of the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, sacking Professor David Nutt from the Government’s Advisory Panel on the Misuse of Drugs, of which Nutt was chairman. The spat has polarised around Nutt’s rights (‘freedom of speech’) to continue to speak out against the Government’s drugs policy, especially upgrading cannabis (it had earlier been downgraded by Caroline Flint, another government minister), after the then Home Secretary had rejected Nutt’s advice. Nutt had gone on to publish his views that tobacco and alcohol – and even horse-riding – are more dangerous than many drugs, including ecstacy, LSD and cannabis.

There are several issues here, including whether it is reasonable to require the scientific panel to ‘support’ the government. But a question facing dissenters (in any organisation) is how, when and where you go about voicing it. Is it a responsible dissenter’s place, indeed duty, to voice criticism vigorously but only up to the point when a decision is taken? Should the criticism be voiced in a formal but private setting with colleagues present, but not shared publicly in the national press? Is it acceptable and possible to continue to express one’s viewpoint without at the same time saying that one’s employers/masters are stupid for disagreeing? Is the argument more about method and style than constitution?

Stephen Fry gets the message

Tweeting a million followers ‘Hurray, curry’ is boring, some said. The medium has become the message, as Marshall McLuhan foretold. Never mind the quality, feel the celebrity. But stopping might be difficult for Fry. He needs to tell, and his musings range from the ridiculous to the sublime. Take this from his book Paperweight (Quality Paperbacks Direct, 1992) “Education means freedom, it means truth. Training is what you do to a pear tree when you pleach it and prune it to grow against a wall. Training is what you give to an airline pilot or a computer operator or a barrister or a radio producer. Education is what you give to children to enable them to be free from the prejudices and moral bankruptcies of their elders. And freedom is no part of the programme of today's legislators. Freedom to buy shares, medical treatment or council houses certainly, freedom to buy anything you please. But freedom to think, to challenge, to change. Heavens no. The day a child of mine comes home from school and reveals that he or she has been taught something I agree with is the day I take that child away from school.”

I remember attending a conference at Henley Management College in the 1980s. The Head of Management Development at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), made a presentation. At that time DEC was one of the mainframe computer giants, but it was struggling against its competitors (not least because its boss, Ken Olsen, had said ‘People won’t want a personal computer on their desks’). The presenter stated the aim of the MD programme: ‘To ensure that the board is supported’. I stood up and asked pointedly: ‘Isn’t that the exact opposite of what it should be?’ Stephen Fry would have been proud of me! The choice facing organisations between education- and training-led approaches to management development is discussed in The Search for Leadership.

But what is responsible followership in an organisation? Is Professor David Nutt (the UK Government's former drugs tsar) showing how or how not to do it?

How will the system treat Sharon Shoesmith?

Many readers will know that Sharon Shoesmith was summarily dismissed without compensation from her job as Director of Children and Young Person’s Services in the London Borough of Haringey following the death of Baby Peter. She has taken her case to court, which is expected to announce its judgement any day now. Just remember the precedent: not only did Victoria Climbié’s death happen only a few streets from that of Baby Peter, but the disgraced social worker in that case, Lisa Arthurworrey, also took her case to court. She won: Haringey’s system had failed her, and not the other way round.

PS: A follow-up to yesterday’s post: on BBC TV’s Question Time, when asked about the Parliamentary expenses scandal, an MP on the panel said that staff in the Fees Office were unclear what their role was when presented with a claim by an MP.