How are you feeling?

The call by the Chartered Management Institute for managers to sign a pledge “to develop the way I manage and lead, setting the example for others” reminds me of what my boss in British Airways used to say about edicts. He didn’t think they made much difference to what actually happened (he was less polite than that). A good test for anyone who has made the pledge is this: what are you now doing differently? Or even, what do you expect to do differently?

Organisations have two faces. One is rational (the side that’s taught in business schools); it consists of policies, structures, directives, strategies, standing orders, budgets, plans, etc. The other is non-rational; it contains politics, greed, ambition, the grapevine, friendships, jealousies, power, etc. This second ‘shadow side’ better explains what really happens. Edicts are part of the former; they are an expression of intention, wishfulness and hope, usually flying in the face of humanity’s self-interest and weakness. Pledges fit here too.

Pledges make people feel warm. We all need some of that. It’s an important emotion. Yet when I think about the banks and look out on the state of the economy, politics, climate change, criminal justice, global warming, Afghanistan and think about leadership, a more appropriate emotion right now would seem to be anger.

Raise them up and knock them down

Picking up from where we left off last time, the Chartered Management Institute runs a blog site for its members’ network. Based on its ‘manifesto’ for a Better Managed Britain, the call for strong managers and leaders has inevitably surfaced. There are several reasons why I argue against this, not least that an organisation’s services are provided by systems, not individuals. A systems thinking perspective puts the leadership focus back where it belongs: the aim is to have a well-led organisation.

Hence I say to the CMI blogging community ‘Management and leadership come about when the organisation gets its collective act together. Management and leadership result from attending to the spaces between managers and also between their personal, departmental and company agendas. Management and leadership come about when all the gaps down which talent and energy is wasted are plugged. … strength is needed by the system to control and channel the dangerous tendencies of overly strong managers. Wars and battles (even within organisations) are usually the result of too little restraint, not just self-restraint but that which comes from the system – for example, cabinet leadership. A strong leader doesn’t necessarily equate to wise or competent; it may just mean loud, over-confident and dominant.

Look at the example set in the failed banking sector by Royal Bank of Scotland and Northern Rock. Fred Goodwin and Adam Applegarth were too strong, and the system that surrounded them was too weak. Examples of hubris from the United States were as extreme or more so. Excessive power corrupted their judgment and the decision-making process.

So my response is: give the strength and the glory to the system, not to the individuals. However, there is a problem, as shown by the torrent of invective that followed my article ‘Sometimes it’s the workplace that’s stupid, not the staff’ (Guardian, 11 November). A child psychiatrist explained readers’ response this way: “Systemic thinking is infuriating to the paranoid mind (to all our paranoid minds!) precisely because it doesn't blame an individual. It's public hangings versus democratic discourse. No contest?”

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?