Move fast and break things – this is the poster that one of the Tech Giant CEOs is supposed to have in his office. The invitation to ignore social conventions, perhaps even to avoid consulting people and talking things through, is a signature of managers in a hurry. Thinking, talking can disrupt progress and slow everything down. In UK politics we have some very vivid examples of this attitude, when the current government prorogued parliament to prevent any more deliberation, or when they use procedures intended to facilitate anti-terror legislation to rush through changes to Education policy. Enough talk getting in the way, we need to deliver things.

So politics, the way that people living in groups make decisions, is under particular strain at the moment, and so too in organisations.

The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa has commented at length on the way that ineluctable and amplifying social acceleration puts political processes out of kilter with the fast pace of change and creates double binds. The more complex the issues we face, the more we need to deliberate; the more time we take to deliberate the more the complex issues we face escalate and evade our control even further. Acting fast and breaking things is not just the first recourse of technocrats and demagogues, but may also be a response to the pell-mell pace of change where we find ourselves, as Rosa points out, in a state of frenetic standstill. Many organisations are in exactly this position, particularly if they have committed to the ideology of transforming things. But the one constant is change, so despite the fact that everything changes, nothing changes.

Contemporary management discourse has always had a bit coy about politics and its role in making decisions in groups, particularly with the erosion of traditional forms of authority. The exercise of power in organisations, particularly when your leader is supposed to be authentic needs to be a bit more subtle than command and control. As the psychological contract between employer and employee has attenuated, so we need more sophisticated ways of bringing about coherence, and sometimes obedience, in organisations.

There are various forms of charismatic appeal to cover over politics, the invitation to believe in the vision, or to follow the transformational leader. These might take the form of mystical appeals to the ‘purpose’ of the organisation as they do with Laloux, which is thought to be above and beyond the interests of any individual or group of individuals. This is a familiar trope of pathetic fallacy where the organisation is understood as a ‘living, breathing whole’ to which its employees should submit. Another form of idealism would be any understanding construed in the social constructionist or appreciative schools of thought, which consider power and politics as ‘just another discourse’ and ones which can be airily waved away with a more positive perspective. It is quite unusual for particularly North American scholarship to deal explicitly with questions of power and politics in organisations. We may be invited to leave our politics at the door, or to refuse to gossip about each other, or always to be open and transparent.

Next there are various forms of categorisation of politics, sometimes into the usual two by two Cartesian co-ordinates familiar in business school teaching. Scholars in this tradition acknowledge that there is inevitably politics in organisations, and that can even be a good thing. But there are good politics and bad politics. Bad politics are those which prevent us from achieving our goals and making us more effective, while bad politics is dysfunctional. The role of the manager, then, is to stand outside what is going on, identify what is helpful and what isn’t and steer politics towards effective organisational ends. This might be by setting clear and measurable goals, and thematic organisational objectives. Or scholars may even take the Goldilocks position: not too much politics, not too little, but just right. A similar argument is often used with complexity, where there is an assumption that managers can control complexity in the organisation by steering ‘it’ towards organisational ends, and/or that the complexity does not implicate them, or that ‘just enough’ complexity is required, or even that complexity is always good and creative. Managers are assumed to be above the politics which they are trying to influence, and as with much of the realist managerial discourse. They are reflexively mute, unable to take their own position, and their own limitations and interests into account, because they are assumed to be the same as the organisation they steward.

Alternatively there are various methods arising in Organisational Development (OD), which claim to design politics away. They do so by proceduralising employee engagement, while making the moral claim that these ways of working produce greater democracy, harmony and effectiveness in organisations. The various manifestations of sociocracy or holocracy, claim to work against the traditional limitations of top down bureaucracies by creating explicit, rule-governed ways of working which distribute power, thus allowing workers, and the organisation as a whole, to be more entrepreneurial and ‘agile’. One way of thinking about these developments is that they simply replace explicit and formal power with implicit and shadow forms of power, where the most obvious social capital is gained through a commitment to the ideology itself. The ideal of trumping politics, the messy, uncertain human process of exploring how we might go on together, with rational and technical methods, is as old as humanity itself, and certainly was one of the principal informants of the rise of scientific management.

If we return to the original definition of politics above, the way people in groups make decisions, and think about it from a complexity perspective, then as members of groups there is no standing outside what we are all engaged with, all of the time. Managers cannot control how people respond to each other to get things done: there is no political ‘system’ to be manipulated, no procedures which will be complete enough, or obvious enough without a lot of political negotiation and interpretation. Nor is there any point in trying to ban gossip,  or inviting people to be totally open and transparent. This is not an argument for doing the opposite, of course, but how transparent to be and when will always be a matter of judgement. It matters that senior people in organisations appeal to colleagues to work for the good of the organisation, but exactly what that means in particular situations will always need to be negotiated through. The person who gets to decide what is good for the organisation is in a very powerful position.

So managers are also part of the political game, and have their own interests, more or less legitimate, and more or less explicit, and more or less ‘aligned’ with those of the organisation. We are caught up together because we are interdependent, and there can be no taking the next step together unless our interdependencies are at the heart of the matter. It is not at all obvious in advance what productive or positive politics looks like. We can certainly take a view about what unproductive politics looks like, since we will all have our stories about having been caught up in them. Our relationships can be influenced, people can be persuaded and cajoled, they can be threatened, or they can be invited to follow the dream of a better world. But the alternative to some kind of political, deliberative process is to move fast and break things, a shattering which can lead to tyranny and violence, or at the very least to people feeling unrecognised, or misrecognised. If politics is the art of the possible, a negotiation of the uncertain, then, as Hannah Arendt warns, the outcomes of tyranny and violence are even more uncertain. Perhaps politics is the least worst option.

Complexity and Management Conference 5-7th June 2020

If collaboration was that straightforward, wouldn’t we all already be doing it? Collaboration is another one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie words which are hard to argue against – is there anyone not in favour of collaboration? At its most simplistic, the invitation to collaborate can be an idealisation which encourages the belief that if we only put aside our differences and work constructively and positively, then everything will turn to the good – as if that were an easy thing to do. But to what extent does the taken-for-granted idea of collaboration encourage setting aside the very differences and conflicts which promote movement and novelty? Is the naïve discourse on collaboration really rather unhelpful? 

The Complexity and Management Conference 5-7^th June 2020 will explore in greater depth what it means to collaborate together, with the intention of developing a more complex understanding. For example, from the perspective of complex responsive processes of relating, we do not start out by assuming that collaboration can just be based on harmony and achieving greater ‘alignment’. Rather it is likely to involve the interplay of identity and group membership which may complicate the process of staying in relation with each other, no matter how much we yearn to collaborate.

To help us reflect further we are delighted to have Barbara Simpson, Professor of Leadership and Organisational Dynamics at Strathclyde University, to be our keynote speaker. Barbara started out studying physics and working in geothermal energy, and then proceeded through international consultancy before embarking on an academic career. She specialises in studying processes of creativity, innovation and change in organisations and in particular in pragmatist philosophies in process research.

Before the formal start of the conference in the evening, this year we are offering two, one day workshops on the Friday 5^th June. The first is an introduction to the key tenets of complex responsive processes, which is suited to participants newly or not yet exposed to the ideas taken up on the Doctor of Management programme. The workshop is offered by Prof Chris Mowles. The second workshop will be on the use of improvisation and theatre techniques in organisations, and is run by Prof Henry Larsen and Prof Karen Norman. This second workshop is more suitable for participants who already have some grounding in complexity and management.

The conference itself comprises a keynote by Prof Simpson on Saturday morning, then workshops in the afternoon offered by conference delegates on aspects of organisational life related to the theme of the conference. On Sunday will we sum up key themes from the weekend and offer opportunities for further reflection.

The conference lasts from 7pm Friday through to lunchtime Sunday, and the price of the conference includes all board and lodging. The booking site will go live in early January 2020. Prices will be maintained at this year’s rates.

Give me a still point,  and I will move the world, Archimedes is reputed to have said by Plutarch. The idea is that finding a fixed place and using mathematical reasoning enables a relatively small amount of force to move a very large object.

The word leverage (sometimes known as gearing), is originally a financial term meaning to borrow money in order to finance the purchase of an asset. Borrowing to buy allows for a return to investors bigger than the sums involved in financing the debt: it also allows for counting the purchased asset to be used as collateral in other financial transactions. Anyone who supports Manchester United football team will be aware that this is the financial model that the Glazer family have used to buy the club and pay themselves and their investors large sums of money on an annual basis. But, as an example of the ways in which organisations have become permeated by financial language, it has come to be applied to all manner of management practices. As instances, managers might claim to be able to leverage talent or creativity in their organisations, or perhaps they might intend to leverage knowledge. Recently I heard a colleague say that they were leveraging their relationships with others.

Leaving aside the implied instrumentalization of highly intangible abstract concepts, the idea of leveraging implies two clear intellectual assumptions.

First is the idea of ground. For Archimedes to leverage the world implies a fixed place to work from, what the poet TS Eliot referred to in The Four Quartets as ‘the still point of the turning world’. We might consider the longing for ground as part of the human condition, a yearning which works against the daily experience of being blown about in a world of ceaseless change. Perhaps we all crave some stillness and certainty in our lives as the pace of change gets faster and faster. Ground helps us find ourselves again.

The concept of ground shows up in the world of Platonic thinking, with the idea of pure forms, or as Plato’s highest form of knowledge, mathematics. It also reveals itself in religion, where the still point in the turning world is God; and again in certain forms of natural scientific thinking and reasoning, where one established fact leads in linear and logical fashion to the next. We add, in cumulative fashion, to the stock of knowledge in the world. This way of thinking is sometimes referred to as foundationalism, the idea that we proceed in our reasoning from something fixed and certain. Perhaps naturally enough, the postmodern reaction to foundationalist thinking is anti-foundationalism, the idea that there are no fixed points from which to proceed, no grand narratives in which we can believe: there are only competing truths.

The second clear assumption is the idea of managerial control and a god’s eye view. Somehow the manager is considered to be outside the processes of creativity, or knowledge, or even relationship, and is in a privileged position to act upon them to achieve what they want. In order to instrumentalize something implies fully cognizing what it is one is trying to instrumentalize, along with a degree of predictability and control of the object to be manipulated. The object will behave according to prereflected rules. The predominant theories of management taught in most business schools imply this privileged position, that managers can control and manipulate (to manage – to put under one’s hand) sometimes highly complex and intangible human processes like culture or knowledge using instruments and tools, levers if you like.

If we take away the assumption of firm ground, and the assumption that we are in a privileged position to cognise and manipulate, then what is left for managers to do? If applying ‘levers’ to human affairs is only ever a probabilistic undertaking, then what’s the point of taking an MBA? Taking an interest in complexity and process can indeed be a wounding to the managerialist soul.

One way of thinking about rehabilitating managers and what they might achieve would be to consider that there are more options than having ground or no ground: there could be good enough ground for now. This is sometimes called a post-foundational position, and is one adopted by the pragmatist tradition in philosophy. We might achieve a clear enough understanding of what’s going on in order to take the next few steps together. Once we have done so we might change our minds about what the situation demands. It leads managers to abductive thinking, rather than induction or deduction, a process which starts with surprises of puzzles and draws on the full gamut of human reasoning, including imagination. It does not necessarily assume that reasoning just proceeds in linear fashion from firm ground.

Secondly, to say that managers have no privileged position is not the same as claiming that they have no influence at all. Managers are often highly influential players in the game of organisational life, and what they say and do, and don’t say and do, will affect the way the game is played. Although in no position to ‘leverage’ anything, managers often have considerable power to persuade, to cajole, to reward, to punish, to inspire those for whom they have responsibility. Rather than thinking about these processes of influence as instrumental, levers of power, they are instead rhetorical and processual.

In the current Brexit debate in the UK politicians from the Conservative Party repeat certain words and phrases ad nauseam until the message is drummed home to an exasperated electorate on the expectation that they have a limited attention span: the Conservatives are the party to ‘get Brexit done’  because they want to ‘unleash Britain’s potential’. The latter phrase is often also used in schools and universities about young people to describe the institutions’ plans for them, and is widely deployed in organisations undergoing some kind of transformational project. The idea of potential, a latent ability which has yet to be realised, together with the word ‘unleash’, or to release from constraint, implies enormous energy, like water behind a dam, which is somehow prevented from reaching its full expression. When the UK exits from the EU the whole of the UK’s creativity and energy will suddenly burst free of the constraints currently hemming it in and will flood the world with Britain’s greatness.

The phrase is common to the humanistic and positive psychology movements as well as neoliberal groups suspicious of government regulation or any impediment to what they see as the free functioning of the market. Shared amongst all adherents of unleashing potential is the link with confidence and optimism. And as such the phrase has all the characteristics which should pique the curiosity of critical inquirers into contemporary organisational discourse. It is future-oriented, it is positive and it is simplistic.

Humanistic psychology was a response to what its proponents saw as the limitations and preoccupations of Freud and psychoanalysis. Rather than concerning itself with pathology, themes of repression and the darker side of human nature, the death instinct, aggression, rivalry, humanistic psychology is inclined more towards individuals’ self-actualisation in the belief that humans are inherently good. If we could only rid ourselves of pathological, past-oriented thinking get in touch with our true selves then we could return to a healthy path of human flourishing oriented towards the future. Among its more famous early proponents were Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers. Along with positive psychology, which arises out of humanistic psychology, the principle focus is on an individual’s goals, health, happiness and productivity. Consistent with bodies of theory which concentrate on the individual, is the idea of personal responsibility and individual choosing. Humanistic psychologists support individuals to make choices which help them to be ‘the best versions’ of themselves, and have previously been preoccupied with self-esteem. The focus is predominantly on the individual and their choosing rather than on relationships with others.

Future posts will deal more fully with the emphasis on positivity and individuality in contemporary organisations; there is a lot of thinking to be done about an orientation that pushes the responsibility onto individuals to be positive, resilient and make good choices about their well-being in the face of inequality, shrinking resources and possibly bad management. But for now let’s concentrate on the assumptions underpinning the idea of unleashing potential, which has both naturalistic and redemptive appeal. Our current misery and dysfunction, in our society or in our organisation, can be lifted if we can only burst free from our chains and become the fully realised society/organisation/team we know ourselves to be.

The first assumption is that that the potential self/organisation/society is already there impatient to get out. We are currently constrained by something else, or someone else, and in one bound we can be free. The movement implied seems to be one which relieves us of constraint in relationship to being independent and liberated. This evokes strongly the Freud/Bion perspective on groups, that the course of human independence lies on the path of liberating oneself from dependence on others. To be free implies being an autonomous individual: our principle reference point is our self and the kernel of ‘us-ness’ which is already there fully formed.

The second assumption is that unleashing our potential can only be the potential for the good, and will inevitably lead to our flourishing. This is consistent with bodies of thought preoccupied with positivity on the assumption that inquiring into the good can only lead to more good things happening. This is a strong thread in contemporary political and organisational discourse which matches this kind of magical thinking: to get through difficult circumstances involves believing hard enough and proceeding confidently enough to push through the barriers. This is no time for doomsters and gloomsters, as the UK’s current Prime Minister is wont to say.

I offer two alternative interpretations of how we might understand the idea of unleashing potential. The first is based on the idea of the highly social self: we are who we are because of the groups we belong to and our history of being together. To remake ourselves means to remake our relationships with others: we are fashioned by one set of interdependencies or another. If we find our current sets of relationships constraining then we are obliged either to renegotiate them, or make relationships with others. Since we are often more dependent on others than they are on us, particularly if we need them more than they need us, then if we follow the second course we will simply be constrained in a different way. Our choices are one set of constraints or another – there is no such thing as a completely autonomous life where we ‘hold all the cards’ or get to dictate all the terms.

Secondly, human activity has the potential for both good and bad outcomes depending on who makes the judgement and when the judgement is made. We are capable of being both creative and destructive, which are often two sides of the same coin. If we consider ourselves members of long chains of interdependent people, our power to determine just positive outcomes for changing  our behaviour, or our sets of relationships is limited. We can proceed with the best of intentions and with expectations of the good, but the outcome depends upon what others think and do along with unexpected and often unwanted twists of fate. Unleashing our potential may also involve unleashing our potential to do harm to ourselves and to others.

The idea of unleashing our own, or other’s potential is uplifting because it appeals to the idea of a better life and to the concept of human freedom. Who wouldn’t want to unleash their potential for the good? But like all forms of utopianism it paints a world free from constraint, the very constraints which are necessary to make us who we are.

If management is understood as a discipline which tries to control things, to place things under one’s hand (manus), then the concept of complexity poses something of a dilemma. The phenomenon one is trying to control is, by very definition, uncontrollable. This doesn’t prevent thinking about it, describing it, noticing its effects, positing what might or might not be helpful in dealing with it. But the question is when these attempts to identify, clarify and name tip over into hubris and begin to suggest that a complex world isn’t really so complex, or can be managed, or with particular tips and tricks, subdued to the will of the rational manager. Complexity is assimilated as another novel and/or fashionable real world phenomenon which will succumb to management science and clear thinking. Complexity is something a manager acts on rather than acts in.

The idea of acting on is the other route to taming complexity, to suggest that sometimes the world is complex and sometimes it isn’t, and it is up to the manager to decide. I will come back to this way if thinking later when I discuss some of the intellectual assumptions which are revealed in VUCA discussions about complexity.

The coining of the concept of VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) as a way of introducing complexity helps us investigate how radically the idea of a complex world challenges that notion that we can predict and control. And noticing how the concept is mobilised and described by particular traditions of thought gives us insight into how management discourses sustain and renew themselves, sometimes consuming everything in their wake.

So on the one hand, it is quite helpful to have a simplified acronym to grasp a concept which can otherwise generate a proliferation of defining sub-characteristics. Too many characteristics can be confusing for hard-pressed managers who are trying to assimilate something difficult. We might credit the coining of ‘VUCA world’ with helping complexity be more widely accepted (along with the idea that there are ‘wicked problems’, a term I will treat in a future post). This is a reason to be grateful for it.

But notice how the framing also domesticates the concept. Why does it need to be four characteristics, for example? Well, because this produces the neat Cartesian co-ordinates so beloved of business schools and consultancy companies. It creates something familiar and comforting. The two by two grid is a staple of many management seminars (think Ansoff matrix or Boston matrix), and in this sense it is symbolic currency. It is, to a degree, reassuring that complexity can also fit to a grid, even if the four given characteristics are lazy (doesn’t the term complex comprise the other three anyway? And what about emergence, for example?), and ill-defined.

It is also interesting to note how breaking down the idea of a complex world into four pieces quickly leads to highly abstract and anodyne prescriptions for dealing with each of them, which are then presented causally, in and if-then manner. For example, if you find yourself in a VUCA environment it’s important to be ‘open to uncertainty’, to ‘embrace change’, to take a ‘balanced approach to risk’. These prescriptions turn on the usual notion of the ideal of an equilibrium state, and offer superficially helpful advice about how to achieve it: through embracing, being comfortable, becoming self-aware, and of course, being transparent. Conventional management wisdom is only ever one step away from self-help literature. It shares many similarities in that it is individualised, it tends to the positive, and it is reassuring and uplifting. You can be your best VUCA self. If we were to turn to a psychodynamic interpretation of the function of VUCA and its advocates we would recognise that the literature and advice is aimed at containing anxiety rather than provoking insight and the movement of thinking.

Perhaps more troubling is when prescriptions for dealing with VUCA environments allow for representing very familiar management tropes dressed in complexity clothes but bearing managerialist ideology. Given that there is still an overwhelming presupposition that every organisational dilemma turns on a question of leadership in more orthodox management scholarship, there can be no surprise that some VUCA advocates consider that it requires a particular style of leader. However, the VUCA leader is not so different from ordinarily ideal leaders. For example, the way to deal with a VUCA environment, is for leaders to set out a Vision, develop Understanding, achieving Clarity and be Adaptable and agile (a parallel VUCA back in civilian clothes), of course encouraging everyone else to be adaptable. Change is good and it is important not to resist, rather than asking change for whom and who benefits. All credit to management scholars for sweating their assets, but exactly what is new about this dependency theory of leadership?

In the course of this post I have been considering the way in which the packaging of complexity as VUCA has in some ways helped to take complexity into the mainstream, but at the cost of taming it and making it amenable to the orthodox tropes of leadership and management.  These are presented as familiar anodyne abstractions in linear terms. At its worst, it allows for the smuggling of highly managerialist ideas, that complex environments give even greater justification for the need for particular leaders invested with the usual exceptional abilities of prophecy and a unique insight into the human condition. One of the clearest functions of the discourse, then, is for the preservation and representation of what we might think of as the current orthodoxy. There is very little which is radical about it in terms of deepening our understanding of what complexity means for everyday organisational life.

One further thought about discourses on complexity and the move to domesticate the radical implications of taking complexity seriously, which I mentioned earlier. This is when scholars suggest that deciding when things are complex and when they are not is matter of management choice: sometimes they are chaotic, sometimes complex and sometimes they are just complicated or even simple. Before deciding on how to respond, managers need to determine which quadrant of the grid they are in.  To a degree this distinction does speak directly to the complexity science literature where a lot of work has been done to think about how we might define a complex system as opposed to one which is just complicated. Definitions are important to advance the field and to be clear what we are talking about.

But in terms of the complexity of nature I find myself siding with Karen Barad, the theoretical physicist, on this one. In her book Meeting the Universe Half Way she rejects the notion that quantum physics is only applicable when investigating the minute, atomic particles, but not at grander scale, in astronomy, for example. She argues that mathematically quantum physics is applicable at all degrees of scale irrespective of whether we can measure the quantum effects. Equally I argue, nature, including social life which is part of nature,  is always complex. Complicated and simple ways of describing phenomena may be helpful, they may even be necessary, but they will always be insufficient. One of the functions of two-by-two girds which separate out 4 states from simple to chaotic have the function of restoring what John Dewey described as a god’s eye view. They reinstate the fallacy of managerial control with a vantage point outside the environment which is considered complex: the manager acts on something which is somehow separate. But in my view complex or reductionist understandings of the world are not simply two equal choices to make which one can oscillate between at will, because they are contradictory.

So perhaps there is a role for concepts like VUCA if the prospect of a complex world is paralysing, or is taken to mean that there is no point in managers doing anything. Perhaps the most disturbing thing of all about complexity is the decentring effect of taking the phenomenon seriously: as a manager you are not in control, but you may still be in charge. Repackaging and representing something destabilising as familiar may certainly contain anxiety. So too may the notion that you can choose when something is complex and when it isn’t. What is most interesting to me is how some management scholars promoting a discipline predicated on notions of predictability and control will go to huge lengths to put managers back at the centre and back in charge when confronted with a radical challenge.

The UK government has tied itself up in knots over metrics. The Health Secretary Matt Hancock originally promised 10,000 Covid-19 tests a day by the end of March, a target not reached, and then replaced this with a more ambitious target of 100,000 tests a day by the end of April. Under pressure, perhaps embarrassed by the low rate of testing in comparison with many of our European neighbours, particularly Germany, the government had to be seen to be acting, and to be doing so seriously. Every subsequent press conference has seen government spokespeople claiming that they are straining every sinew, working night and day to make sure that staff in the NHS have everything they need. We are offered quality, “we’re working very hard”, and quantity, “we’ll deliver you 100k tests”.

At no point do we enter a discussion about why we might not have met the first target before reaching for another abstract ideal, a new target, or whether the new target has any relation to what we actually need.

When questioned about the complaint that there is not enough Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for frontline health staff, government spokespeople come up with more numbers. There are X million pieces of equipment in the system; they have spent Y million pounds procuring it. We’ve spent money on the health service like we have never done before.

The whole episode has made me think about the role of metrics in general, and targets in particular, as hedges against the anxiety provoked by uncertainty. In a situation where there is a high degree of anxiety about the future and when people look to authority figures for reassurance, there might be a tendency to pick a number, any number, in order to contain and soothe and to pretend that our politicians are in control. We are asked to put our trust in numbers and the authority figures offering them. Numbers are grasped at and repeated like a religious incantation. Perhaps the assumption by those repeating the numbers is that there is proportionality between the size of the number and the reassurance experienced. If the government is spending more money on the NHS than ever before, then this must be good, right? Millions and millions of pieces of PPE requisitioned has got to be helpful for frontline workers, hasn’t it?

At the risk of comparing the banal with the extreme seriousness of what the world is facing in terms of the lethal pandemic, in the same week that the UK Health Secretary announced a new set of targets for testing, my own institution announced new metrics for researchers throughout the university in terms of research income, publications and PhD completions. These are universal, irrespective of the intellectual discipline of particular school they are imposed on, and their record to date of achieving anything similar. One can only suppose that the idea of imposing the same targets across all schools in the university has some attachment to the notion of ‘fairness’, which is a cult value for all bureaucracies. The directionality is different though: this is not the management of the university under scrutiny telling us researchers what they will do, but setting a set of metrics for what they expect of us. I am guessing that they won’t be impressed with a qualitative argument that we are straining every sinew, working night and day, to achieve them. They are a means of disciplining and punishing.

The literature on metrics is now wide and deep. We know, for example that targets make a difference in organisations not because they work but because they are made to work.[1] Making them work might mean staff massaging the numbers, gaming the system, or doing work-arounds, particularly if there are sanctions attached to not meeting them. There are now a number of egregious examples of how public institutions have met their metrics and have been deemed good organisations by regimes of inspection, only for this judgement to have covered over poor practice. There are many similar examples of institutions hitting their targets but missing the point. We know that because targets are informed by cybernetic systems thinking they oblige workers to pay attention to aspects of service which politicians or authority figures deem important rather than what their local situations demand.[2] Instead of asking how the work is working and dealing with the situation in hand, we are obliged to work to what someone who usually sits somewhere else considers to be important. We know that experts in their field can experience them as tyranny that undermines their professional judgment and can cause the opposite of what they claim to prevent[3]. We know that despite the deluge of metrics, there is no greater trust in public government as a consequence.[4] And we know that metrics don’t just measure reality, they shape the reality to be measured and what gets noticed.[5] ^[6] We can no longer imagine a world where there are no metrics for organisational life, and our numbers and audit regimes are methods of trying to organise and sytematise our uncertainties.[7]

None of is to denigrate those areas of public life where numbers are important for modelling, for telling us about health and social outcomes, and for reassuring us that a particular medicine is effective and safe to use. Instead I am dealing with organisational performance targets, often built on proxies and sometimes arbitrarily arrived at to convey certitude, to exculpate, to discipline and control.

So one of the central functions of metrics is to reassure, to claim authority and to assert control, either for authority figures to claim they are in charge, or to establish control over others. It serves as a defence against anxiety and unpredictability and is a claim on authority.

One interesting argument from the economist John Kay’s book Obliquity[8] is that goals are best achieved indirectly. The happiest people are not necessarily the people who strive for happiness, and the most successful companies in Kay’s experience are the ones who care about what they are doing, rather than the ones who focus on targets. So if my university followed Kay’s advice we would spend more time thinking about research, discussing our research, and uncovering what it is that gets in the way of our doing more and better research. The numbers would then follow. Equally, the answer to the question, ‘how many tests should we carry out in the UK’ is as many as we need depending on the circumstances in which we find ourselves. This might involve paying attention to our current situation and extrapolating from that rather coming up with an arbitrary figure. This would demand humility and honesty to talk about how the work is working, what we are able to do and what we are not, and why.

[1] Townley, B (2008) Reason’s Neglect, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[2] Seddon, J. (2008) Systems Thinking in the Public Sector, London: Triarchy Press.

[3] Muller, J. (2018) The Tyranny of Metrics, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

[4] O’Neil, O. (2002) A Question of Trust, The Reith Lectures, BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2002/

[5] Scott, J.C (1998) Seeing Like a State, Yale: Yale University Press.

[6] Beer, D. (2016).  Metric Power.  London: Palgrave Macmillan.

[7] Power, M. (2007). Organized Uncertainty: Designing a World of Risk Management, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[8] Kay, J. (2011) Obliquity: why our goals are best achieved indirectly, London: Profile Books.

In many ways leadership has emerged in all kinds of encouraging and unexpected ways in this current crisis to break our sense of dependency on idealized individuals. Young medics have gone to work in hospitals just as they are graduating, supermarket workers have continued to turn up to help feed us every day, underpaid carers have continued to care for the vulnerable despite lacking the support and PPE they need; com

munity groups have rallied in their communities to support and aid their neighbours. Leadership doesn’t always emerge from leaders.

Rather than obsessing about leaders and leadership, the pandemic and resulting crisis has given us ample opportunity to notice how leadership is a co-created

pattern of relationships which arises in a group. It tells us as much about our own expectations of and projections onto authority figures, as it does about the authority figures themselves. We all play into some dominating emotional patterns which catch us up again and again.

It’s important to pay attention to this social and emotional perspective on leadership because it is underrepresented. The mine of leadership scholarship which has focused on individuals and how they behave, what they should be doing, has been dug very deep and every time one anticipates that there is no more digging to do, along comes another variation on a theme: transformational leadership, servant leadership, relational leadership, leadership and followership, clear leadership, dialogic leadership, leadership, leadership, leadership. It becomes hard to think about power and authority without having the word leadership somewhere in the sentence as though every societal problem can be reduced to one thing.

The alternative to further refinement and differentiation is the tendency simply to pour old Dr Feelgood in new bottles and claim that the particular crisis X institution or Y society is facing shows that there was an absence of leadership, requires more leadership, or simply needs a doubling down of the same kind of leadership recipes that we already know. There is nothing wrong with transformational leadership, it just wasn’t transformational enough in this particular context. It was insufficiently visionary.

But let us turn to consider the conditions into which leaders are invited to act when a group is anxious, with the help of psychiatrists Wilfred Bion[1] and Pierre Turquet[2], it may help us reflect upon how we are all caught up in social and emotional patterns which are hard to resist. I explore this as an underrepresented aspect of group life in much leadership literature, rather than claiming that it is the only thing going on.

Bion contrasted what he described as the ‘sophisticated and rational functioning level of behaviour’ present in a group focused on a task, which he termed a ‘work group’, with a ‘basic assumption’ group. Bion’s three basic assumptions, dependency, fight/flight and pairing are emotional states which seize the group when it becomes anxious and interferes with the group’s ability to function. Turquet added a fourth basic assumption, oneness. These basic assumptions may alternate, or one basic assumption might take hold of the group for long periods of time. I explore all of these below in relation to the current situation in the UK.

Dependency is pattern of relating in an anxious group, which then looks to an idealized leader to help them out of a crisis. The group itself may become passive and docile and overly respectful of the leader. In the UK our principle authority figure, the Prime Minister has been largely absent for the past months for good reason and bad. Leading up to the crisis he didn’t attend cabinet meetings planning for the crisis. During the beginning of the crisis he ignored his own government’s emerging advice about not getting close to Covid-19 sufferers and contracted the virus himself and nearly died. Subsequently he has been absent through recovery and paternity leave. Johnson’s return was greeted by politicians within his own government as a ‘boost for the country’, where Johnson’s body and the body politic become synonymous.  In the meantime and in the UK we co-created an amplified idealization of Captain Tom Moore, a 99 year old who has raised more than £30 million for the NHS by walking 100 laps of his garden in anticipation of his 100^th birthday, and has subsequently had a song which went to the top of the charts. In microcosm and in my institution, a relatively mundane e-mail from a manager to all staff setting out what the department should be working on elicited some members of staff to reply that they found the instructions ‘inspirational’.

In situations of crisis, according to Bion, we are likely to become highly dependent on our leaders and to invest heavily in their actions and words. They may become idealized figures for us. Or if they are unavailable, we may to look to others to lead us. This can be dangerous territory for leaders if they come to believe in this idealization of themselves. It is also dangerous territory for us. Bion comments on the kind of leader that an anxious group might look to:

“In my experience most groups, not only patient groups, find a substitute that satisfies them very well. It is usually a man or a woman with marked paranoid trends; perhaps if the presence of an enemy is not immediately obvious to the group, the next best thing is for the group to choose a leader to whom it is.” (2011: 67).

Can you think of any leaders who easily find enemies to blame?

In terms of finding enemies, the basic assumption fight/flight is where group members fight among themselves, avoid talking about what is important, disrupt the functioning of the group and become aggressive. They are likely to rally round a leader who can mobilize this hostility, for example against the virus, against the Chinese, or against those in the community who are considered not to be ‘socially distancing’ adequately. Recently PM Johnson described the Covid-19 virus as an invisible mugger which needed wrestling to the ground, a metaphor which reveals a lot about attitudes to class as it does towards the illness. In organisational life teams which find it difficult to function might find that members don’t turn up to the meeting on time, become rivalrous with each other or argue about the task in hand.

Pairing is an expression of hope for the future of the group, and occurs when members look to two people in the group to produce offspring, in Bion’s terms perhaps the Messiah, who will save the group. Let’s hope that British people can scale down their expectations of Wilfred Lawrie Nicholas Johnson, and that he merely becomes a future leader of the Conservative party, like his father. Of course it is only human to wish the parents of new babies well and to be pleased for them, but in group dynamic terms Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds couldn’t have timed the birth better as spectacle and group nourishment.

Oneness is a basic assumption in a group which encourages an undifferentiated feeling of wholeness in order for the group to preserve itself. At the same time this feeling makes it difficult to examine assumptions or call things into question. Many organisations make an appeal to oneness with their values statements, where all employees are expected to ‘share the values’. Equally, in times of crisis like the present, we are encouraged all to pull together, not to criticise the government, which is said to be doing its best. We are constantly reminded that ‘we are all in this together’. Even a cursory scan of the statistics reveals that this is not the case, however. BAME communities and health professionals have suffered a disproportionate numbers of deaths, as have poor areas of the country, as have the old and vulnerable, and not just because they were old and vulnerable. Poor communities without good accommodation and facilities have suffered more in lockdown, and poor countries will suffer the crisis more than rich ones.

The appeal to oneness is not just enjoined by authority figures, but we are likely to encourage each other not to let the side down, and not to be negative. The price we pay for falling into this basic assumption is an absence of critical thinking.

In all of the above I am in no way claiming that these group patterns are the only thing which are shaping our expectations of leaders and leadership, nor that individual leaders play no part in what is happening .

References

[1] Bion, W. (1961/2011) Experiences in Groups and Other Papers, London: Routledge.

[2] Turquet, P. M. (1974). Leadership—the individual in the group. In G. S. Gibbard, J. J. Hartman & R. D. Mann (Eds.), Analysis of groups, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Recently the Prime Minister of the UK, Boris Johnson, set out a ‘first sketch of a road map for reopening society’. Meanwhile, Nicola Sturgeon the First Minister of Scotland set out a route map and the Northern Ireland Executive announced a ‘pathway to recovery’. These spatial metaphors of maps, routes and pathways are common currency in organisational life, and sit comfortably within the ‘life as a journey’ cliché. They make intuitive and bodily sense because they are metaphors we live by, language which helps us make sense of the world and helps structure our actions. Map and journey metaphors can be so taken for granted and seem such common sense that the conceptual assumptions they cover over become hard to identify and articulate. After all, it’s obvious you can’t make a strategy unless you set a destination, and once people know the direction of travel then they’ll get on board the train/bus. Often it requires a visionary leader to see where we need to get to in so many months/years’ time.

Implicit in the metaphor are foresight and control, and the ability to recognise in advance what the destination is. Thinking/planning comes before action. It is a claim on both knowledge and authority, and conveys a degree of certainty that we can trust to the driver to take sequential action and be in charge of our journey. In the context of national politics in the time of crisis, then conveying some degree of certainty may be helpful: if we are going to get aboard Boris Johnson’s bus, then we need to have some confidence in his driving skills and ability to know the route. To a degree the job of all people in positions of authority is political and demands good judgement about when to be more certain and when to disclose not knowing. There are few occasions in an organisation where the authority figure can state candidly that they have little idea about what to do next.

However, in conditions of radical uncertainty, when we don’t know what we don’t know and are so blindsided by the unexpected then it becomes much harder to work out in advance what is the right course of action. To extend the metaphor, we are in unknown territory completely without a map, and what has happened to us has changed us as travellers. Where we wanted to get to yesterday may be different to where we want to get to today because who we are and what we value has changed.

In these circumstances the pragmatic insight that experiment, fallibilism and engagement with each other becomes particularly important. Whatever we need to do, we need to do it in a way that doesn’t separate means and ends. If we are to  find a way to go on together, then careful consideration of a variety of points of view, taking in as large a sense of the competing goods as is possible in the time and circumstances, will be vital. This is likely to involve finding out what others are doing to cope with similar circumstances, but also working out what that means for us. It is likely to mean continuing to work out who the ‘us’ is, given that there are competing interests in any group. No one definitive view is likely to be enough to help us work out what is required, not ‘the science’, nor someone’s vision, not a roadmap. It requires both an experimental approach and an attentiveness to what the experiment tells us.

Philosophical pragmatism is not the same as just busking it, making it up as you go along. Nor is it an excuse not to plan when planning is required: there are likely to be occasions where what needs to be done is obvious, a bit like testing, tracing and isolating cases of Corona virus in the UK. A complex reality can nonetheless be made up of islands of firm ground that we recognise and can know how to proceed. Rather, it involves a systematic commitment to acting, listening and negotiating, and hard work and adaptability in the face of what our experiments with brute reality, and the lives of other people, tell us.

From a pragmatic point of view, what’s required when our previous experience is inadequate for the circumstances in which we find ourselves, then, is not so much a visionary leader who tells us our destination and sketches a route map to get there, but rather a process of engaging with each other. A rigorous, exhausting combination of acting, making meaning of our action with those whom our actions affect, paying attention to the consequences of what we’re doing, then acting again. It will mean making our differences explicit, rather than claiming that we are all in this together. There are likely to be winners and losers in any particular course of action, and the majority will need to recognise themselves in any suggestion of how to go on together. We can learn from other people’s experience, but we need to tailor what we learn to our particular circumstances and work out what it means for the variety of groups which make ‘us’ up. To find out what to do, we need to make the path in the walking, as the Spanish poet Antonio Machado observed:

Traveller, your footprints
Are the path and nothing more;
Traveller, there is no path,
The path is made by walking.

By walking the path is made
And when you look back
You’ll see a road
Never to be trodden again.

Working with roadmaps in uncertain times

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Challenge, to invite someone into a competition to establish who is superior, a call to prove or justify something, or to dispute the validity of something is now used universally in organisational life as a substitute for problem or difficulty. Originating as one of the key concepts of positive psychology, that crises reveal character, the trope works something like this: there are no problems in life, only challenges, and every challenge can be turned into an opportunity if only we try hard enough. It’s just a question of how we frame things.

In a way there is nothing unusual about the sentiment: in everyday speech we might encourage each other that every cloud has a silver lining (or more mischievously, Monty Python fans might invite us to ‘always look on the bright side of life’). Perhaps what is disturbing is its ubiquity, and the implication that we can never say that something is unachievable, unrealistic, or too damned hard. There is nothing wrong in the invitation to stiffen our resolve as long as it isn’t at the expense of fantasy thinking. When does the injunction to enter into positive engagement turn into a denial of legitimate resistance and contestation, the triumph of the maniacally upbeat over the ‘doomsters and gloomsters’?

At the start of the lockdown when the pandemic really took hold, social media were awash with entrepreneurs in particular recommending that now was the time to start a new business, to learn new skills, or to consider how to be more productive. It wasn’t a disaster, but an opportunity to reinvent ourselves. As is usually the case in the nexus of positive psychology and organisations the question often turns on worker productivity, achieving organisational goals, and developing skills that employers will find attractive. There is an opportunity to be your best productive self at work.

Notice how, in common with much cognitive psychology responsibility is placed on the atomised individual to achieve this reframing. It’s about changing your mindset, it’s about taking personal responsibility, it’s about being courageous (forthcoming post) and taking risks, it’s about not accepting failure. In a way it could be considered an extreme form of social constructionism, that we can remake the world in our descriptions of it: the only reality is one which we make through language. Being able to rise to life’s challenges marks you out as an inspirational and heroic individual bending reality to your will. Despite the appeal to the idea that the inspirational individual is free to fail however, there lurks the potential double bind that if you can’t reframe, can’t see a challenge as an opportunity, then you have failed terminally. You are free to fail as long as long as you eventually turn failure into success.

The principle theoretical weakness of the recommendation to turn problems into challenges is methodological individualism, a belief that society is made up simply and only of individuals making myriad choices. There is no such thing as society, as one UK Prime Minister said, there are only individuals and their families. If you believe that society is merely the aggregate of lots of discrete atoms making myriads of choices, which many neoliberals do, then you would become preoccupied with individuals and their psychological states and how to influence them. You might even set up a nudge unit in government to persuade people to make the ‘right choice’. (Who gets to decide what the right choice is, is in a very powerful position).

What you would concern yourself less with is broader ‘structural’ social phenomena, like poverty, or widespread discrimination concerning race, gender and disability, for example. In extreme form methodological individualism claims that poor people are only poor because they have made the wrong choices; if you are discriminated against because you are a woman or because you are black, then it’s up to you as an individual robustly to push back and not be defeated. You turn a problem into a challenge, into an opportunity. Failure to get a job has nothing to do with structural mass unemployment, but has to do with having the right mindset, of really, really wanting a job, a phenomenon Barbara Ehrenreich has written about. Similarly, two UK-based academics Lynne Friedli and Robert Steran (2015)[1] have researched ‘workfare’ programmes in the UK where job-seekers are encouraged to look for work and are exposed to the reframing argument about their jobless predicament. One job seeker kept a diary of the edifying texts they received while on a training programme sponsored by a government department:

• Go hard, or go home
• My only limitations are the ones I set for myself
• Failure is the path of least persistence
• Success is getting up one more time than you fall down
• It’s always too soon to quit
• Nobody ever drowned in sweat
• No one can make you feel inferior without your consent

This is a very clear and extreme example of blaming the victim for a predicament they may have little control over.

However, like many thought-annihilating clichés, the problem/challenge/opportunity triptych does contain a kernel of insight. Anyone who meditates, who has sat in group analytic psychotherapy, or in a reflective group will have noticed how continuous engagement with a set of difficulties, particularly in a group setting, can reframe both the difficulties and the person/people experiencing them. One might understand meditation or reflection as a similarly social process like sitting in a group, if, as GH Mead’s colleague Edward S Ames expressed it, we live in ‘a cloud of witnesses’. That is to say, when we engage in the private conversation we call thinking, we may be better able to take the viewpoint of multiple different others to ourselves and perhaps free ourselves up from repetitive and narrow ways of thinking. Reflection, discussion, reflexivity may create the potential for making a narrow problem plural – this doesn’t make it disappear, however. Sometimes brute reality is impervious to our positive feelings towards it.

Creating greater comfort with the sometimes unresolvable difficulties of the human condition is not the same as being able always to spin wool into gold. Nor does it depend necessarily on an act of will and assuming that everything can be instrumentalised. Rather, it involves engagement with our predicaments in detail, and in all their plurality with others similarly affected, paying attention to how they may call out in us and in others the full range of human responses: hopelessness as well as determination, fear as well as courage, noticing how we are acted upon and shaped by society, as well as acting in society. We might achieve what we need to through attempts to bend reality to our descriptions of it, or we might, like the Hong Kong protesters only survive our predicaments by ‘being like water’.

[1] Friedli, L. and Stearn, R. (2015) Positive affect as coercive strategy: conditionality, activation and the role of psychology in UK government workfare programmes, Med Humanit, 41:40–47. doi:10.1136/medhum-2014-010622

Vision, the faculty or state of being able to see, the ability to think about or plan the future with imagination or wisdom, is one of those grand words of contemporary leadership discourse which is nonetheless used on a daily basis. Vision is cheap, it is everywhere, and yet somehow it is still lacking.

As we find ourselves facing more periods of semi-lockdown, so we look to our leaders to find some reassurance and to guide us to a better future. There are well known psychological reasons for our amplified preoccupation with our leaders: the more uncertain we feel, the more we look for certainty from authority figures. Certainty can soothe our feelings of anxiety, even if it is misplaced or overblown. Remember President Trump’s mantra during the 2016 election: ‘there’s nobody who knows more about tax (or race, or poverty, or the economy, or whatever you want) than me’. This isn’t just narcissism, but a significant gesture of containment to the highly anxious or distressed, which in his case clearly worked well enough to get him elected. Whatever we think of Trump, he took a big enough proportion of his audience and their fears seriously. He acknowledged fears in order to promise hope.

More than 30 years of scholarship about leadership has left us with many contradictory views about what makes a good leader. It has also stimulated critical appraisal: how the leadership discourse tries to make the mundane extraordinary[1], how every grand claim for transformation carries its dark side[2], how leadership and transformation has been captured by neoliberalism as a way of masking the goals of corporate power[3]. But in the end we know a good leader when we experience one. Experiencing is different from thinking passively that vision is something a leader ‘has’, like some kind of X factor that they are born with. Optimism and charisma only take you so far. Instead we can understand leadership as a social and group activity, a relationship that involves the leader and those they lead in an evolving performance of  mutual recognition.

In a similar vein, last week Boris Johnson took an opportunity to address the Conservative Party conference to reassure his party and the nation that he is in control and that he can offer a better future for ‘Global Britain’. In looking to the future, Johnson is doing what all political leaders are supposed to do: ‘setting out his vision.’ However, the key to the future lies in the present. The extent to which I trust to Johnson’s vision, no matter how shiny and appealing, will depend upon the degree to which I feel he recognises my experience of the here and now: if I feel recognised, then in turn it makes it easier for me to recognise him as my leader.

It’s worth taking Johnson’s speech to the party conference as an example of what I mean as visioning as a performance in the present that involves a relationship of mutual recognition. Beginning his speech, he acknowledged that he would be highly constrained. He wasn’t really in Birmingham, and he wasn’t really in a conference hall, so there was no one to clap or heckle. Johnson continued to doubt his audience and their feelings: ‘I don’t know about you but I have had more than enough of this disease’…Arguably, it is precisely a leader’s job to know about those he or she is trying to lead, rather than claiming the feeling territory for himself. Only in the last paragraph of the speech does Johnson openly acknowledge the suffering and anxiety of British citizens in the present. The disease has brought indignities and cruelties. Shiny future first, current suffering last, as though the present is grudgingly acknowledged. Johnson clearly shies away from being a gloomster and a doomster, but in doing so he left a hole in the heart of his speech.

Compare and contrast this with Jacinda Ardern’s speech to her party conference in August to launch her election campaign. Admittedly, Ardern had a much easier job of it because her audience was live. But she began her address in te reo, or Maori, an immediate act of recognition to the indigenous minority (which of course would be considered by some as a divisive act). Threaded throughout her speech are references to her audience based on an imaginative interpretation of what they are feeling. Here is one example of mirroring of the value of kindness, when she refers to her government:

I want people to feel that it’s open that it’s listening and that it’s going to bring kindness back in everything that we do…… if people see that they have an empathetic Government, I think they’ll truly understand that when we’re making hard calls that we’re doing it with the right goal, and the right focus in mind..

Ardern states that it is not just lists of achievements her government is aiming for, ends, but a way of relating, means. The kindness she wants to show in government she recognises in the people she governs. Referring to three big disasters which have befallen her country, an earthquake, a terrorist attack and the pandemic, she says:

They drew out a sense of collective purpose, of determination, of kindness. They are all values we will need as we take on our next challenge – and our next challenge is huge.

Ardern is charismatic in her own way, but she works hard at disclosing what she is feeling, finding a variety of ways to acknowledge her audience, and to recognise in them what she aspires to for her government. Christine Lagarde, head of the European Central Bank, attributed women leaders’ success in dealing with Covid across the world to their relational and caring attitude.

A performance of mutual recognition has no particular link to political persuasion, nor does it necessarily recognise what is good and noble in us. Leaders like Bolsanaro, Dutarte, Modi and Orban are also good at engendering mutual recognition in a significant proportion of their electorate, but by appealing to those sides of our characters which lead more to hatred against and division from other groups. But just as important as sketching out an inspiring future is an acknowledgement of what is going on in the here and now, the fears along with the hopes. Without this acknowledgement a vision is just a puff of hot air.

[1] Alvesson, M. and Sveningsson, S. (2003) Managers doing leadership: The extra-ordinarization of the mundane, Human Relations,  Volume 56(12): 1435–1459.

[2] Tourish, D. (2013) The Dark Side of Organizational Leadership: a Critical Perspective, London: Routledge.

[3] Learmonth, M. and Morrell, K. (2019) Critical Perspectives on Leadership: The Language of Corporate Power, London: Routledge.