I’ve been reflecting on the UK referendum results obsessively for the past couple of days. While most of my friends and colleagues voted to remain, I can also understand a little the desire to “leave.” What I find awful is the manner in which the Leave campaign used racism and xenophobia to generate support for its position. As a result we can’t really be sure what the actual decision was as the debate was caught in irrelevant issues and there seems to be a great deal of regret over it.
What I love is internationalism. What I think needs to change is globalization. Confusing the two is common but it’s important to unpack them.
Globalization is the mechanism of standardization that makes is possible for capital to move quickly around the world. Like any fluid, when capital moves quickly it erodes structures and often acts like a tsunami or a flash flood. You see it in “boom towns” in northern Canads where capital rushes it and destroys the local land and community in pursuit of energy profits. It leaves a devastated result in its wake.
By contrast, internationalism is essentially what we have in the community: a slow exchange of ideas, creative collaboration that both respects borders and cultural realities and transcends them as well. If I would ask how many people I know speak more than one language, we would see a high number. (And as an English speaker with a little French, I feel both grateful and frustrated that our primary language is English…but that is another conversation). In internationalist relationships we take the time to slow down and learn and work together. It is in some ways the antithesis of globalization.
The EU was born on the twin pillars of internationalism and globalization. It was made for both peace and a common market. Since the financial crises though, it feels like we see which approach is more important. And Greece has paid the dearest price for that.
Despite that, perhaps the internationalist aspect of Europe still holds hope for peace. The free travel of people is important.
In North America out relationships are entirely held within global trade agreements with very little internationalization takes place. Capital finds easy pathways across borders but people do not. As a result, in Canada and the US global capital interests are able to manipulate election narratives with fear to keep their interests in power while preying on the fears of “the other.”
I think this is what happened in Britain this week. To counteract the waning influence of capital as the financial system begins to erode itself, a move was made to enlist people’s fear of the other to consolidate the interests of a few. Of course the collateral damage is immense and the result means that Britons have cut themselves off from the world’s people’s. But rest assured that globalization forces will easily find a way to make this result for them.
The EU may not be the best answer for a community of nations but I believe that until it became an instrument of financial colonization and exploitation it had, in its deep architecture, the promise of global community. What I lament for is that this promise seems to be under attack. We are on a fast track to more global deals with less internationalism what we really need is a radical rebalancing the other way.
Sometimes people see that I’m a dialogue practitioner and the assume that I am not a fan of quantitative measurement. I think this has to do with the fact that the dialogue practitioner community has been a kind of antithesis to the “measure and manage” world of empirical scientific management.
In any endeavour both qualitative and quantitative measurements are important. The issue isn’t whether or not numbers are to be more trusted than meaning making; the issue is whether we are measuring thing properly.
The issue is whether or not we use measurements as targets or gauges.
Again, this is helpful in understanding the distinction between summative and developmental evaluation and sensemaking. In a linear system, you are aiming for certain end states and targets. In a complex and non-linear system you are aiming to keep to vectors. So using technology to increase production by 5% and decrease expense by 15% can be achieved and you can look back and see how well you achieved that target. You can also do tests and host conversations with workers and customers to discuss the quality of your product, aiming for a general score of “happy” which in turn might be reflected in numbers like sales, returns, recommendations and so on.
In a complex system, lilke an organization’s culture however, you are not managing for a target, but rather you are managing a kind of balance and a direction. You get to choose that direction from your own moral and ethical sense of what is right to do. For example, maintaining an organizational culture of openness, respect, creativity and support requires monitoring your culture in real time, a lot, and noticing how things are shifting and changing. Dialogic methods play an important role here, especially in perceiving patterns and making decisions about what to do, as well as engaging people in the endless negotiation about what those values look like on a daily basis. As a management tool, developing skillful dialogue tools allow you to manage the day to day issues with departures from your preferred set of values, beliefs or practices. Being complex, things like organizational cultures won’t always act they way you want them too, and so good leaders do two things well: they help resolve the inevitable violations of standards and practices in a manner that reflects the preferred way, and they gather together people over time to discuss what everyone is learning about the way the culture is working.
It’s not good enough to convene an annual meeting about the organization’s values and culture. That simply gives you a snapshot in time and tells you nothing about how an organization is evolving and changing, nor does it provide information about promising practices. To monitor over time, you can use a tool like CultureScan or a series of other regular ways of documenting the small observations of daily life that together help provide a picture of what the organization is doing.
This morning, I’m reading this article. It’s a review of two books charting the changes in fishing practices in the north eastern Pacific over the last century. I’ve been witness to some of these changes, directly involved as I’ve watch abundant fish stocks in British Columbia become concentrated in the hands of a few corporate owners, with most of the economic activity associated with those fish moving off shore. Fishing communities in British Columbia are a mere shadow of their former selves, our coastal waterways (and wild salmon migration routes) are dotted with farms that grow invasive Atlantic salmon using a bevy of damaging industrial farming practices. Aboriginal rights are constantly challenged and whittled away even as individual non-indigenous owners grow rich and the fish that are critical to healthy indigenous diets are rendered scarce.
Largely this is due to a practice of creating Individual Transferable Quotas, which is basically an amount of fish that you can transfer to someone else through a lease. You can read a detailed piece on this here. Bottom line is that the nature of the system has shifted the wealth generation in fisheries from food production to ownership. You get rich by leasing your quota to someone who barely makes a living catching your fish.
This is much like the way the financial system works too. The fastest way to get rich these days is to trade in financial instruments, whose value is propped up by management practices that make companies so efficient that they return a healthy profit on their capital investment. This means that to create a profitable financial instrument like a share or a bond, you need to suppress or eliminate your company’s costs. Obvious candidates for this include limiting wages, cutting corners on safety and environmental protection and either doing the bare minimum to comply with regulations, or investing in a lobby effort to reduce the burden of regulation that protects the public interest from your efficiency mandate. Managers and leaders in the private sector are told to return value on the investment before everything else.
The mantra of efficiency is so widely accepted now, that it appears increasingly in the public sector as well:
[British Columbia] Premier Christy Clark riled school trustees Wednesday by referring to the $54 million in administrative cuts facing districts as “low-hanging fruit.”
“…there is no reason that in the back office — the part that has nothing to do with delivering educational programs on a local level — there’s no reason we can’t find savings there.”
B.C. School Trustees’ Association president Teresa Rezansoff said Clark’s comments ignore the fact that school districts have been making cuts for years.
“It’s inaccurate to say that we haven’t already been doing this stuff and it doesn’t reflect the reality in school districts,” she said. “It also is not a fair recognition of the really tough decisions and hard choices that have already been made in school districts across the province.”
Rezansoff said districts will continue to look for efficiencies, but she questioned their ability to find $29 million this year and a further $25 million in 2016-17 as stated in the provincial budget.
“I don’t believe, and I don’t think anybody in our sector really believes, that the $29 million is going to be found in shared services,” she said.
NDP Leader John Horgan said Clark’s comments reflect her fuzzy thinking on the issue.
“Low-hanging fruit usually gets picked in year one or two or three of a mandate,” he said.
“We’re in year 14 and I think school boards appropriately are responding by saying, ‘How many times are you going to come to us saying we’re the bottom of the tree?’ ”
Management practices these days manage for efficiency which on the surface is widely accepted as a good thing. But there are things in human experience for which efficiency is devastating. Love, care, community, and attention are all made much worse by being efficient. Where those things intersect with the “efficiency” agenda is where you will find the thin edge of the wedge for social breakdown, erosion of community and poor physical and mental health. An efficient education system does not produce learners. An efficient health care system does not create wellness. And efficient economic structures don’t produce vibrant local economies.
In this sense the thing that drags upon efficiency is the commons: that which we share in common, which is owned in common and governed in common. Resources like fish and trees and pastures and water and air and minerals and energy all used to be commons, and some are still commons. Other intangible commons include human knowledge, culture and community. In order to keep these commons, you must make their exploitation inefficient. Inefficient economies are costly, and the reason is that there are many many hands through which money passes. In economic terms (and in other living systems) this is actually a good thing. The more people you have involved in something, the more the benefits are spread across a community. Efficient use of the commons enables enclosing and privatizing the commons to streamline its exploitation. An efficient pipeline of wealth is established between ownership and benefit with very little wealth going to those that add value. In other words, the those who can own things get richer and everyone else loses their common inheritance.
Efficiency is the spiritual practice of the religion of scientific management. Under its spell, we have not only privatized once abundant shared natural resources, but we have also privatized our intellectual and cultural commons. Even as we beat the drums for more and more efficiency, we lament the loss of community and local economies, the loss of personal attention and care in education, health, social work and public services. We despair at the high cost of post-secondary education (where we have privatized the costs and made banks profitable from funding the system with student loans from which students can never escape, even if they go bankrupt). We complain that the fish are gone, that our natural assets are depleted. We call for individual rights to usurp public interest, because a fallow public interest is seen as economically wasteful.
Technology has enabled a massive level of efficiency to serve the rapacious appetite of profiteers and neo-liberal policy practitioners. It has also enabled us to begin to re assert the commons, enabling networking, participation and gifting to re emerge as tools by which people can make a living. It is only a failure of imagination and will that requires us to continue down the path where everything is owned. Participatory technologies, including social technologies like dialogue and collaborative learning and leadership, enable us to reintroduce inefficiency into our world to invite participation in the commons. Slow down, participate and benefit. We don’t have to end private ownership, but we do need to get much better at imagining community, economy and stewardship.
Continuing on from my post yesterday, I find that Henry Mintzberg has been up to his good, outraged trickster self, and has published a redux of what is wrong with Public Management as a whole:
There is no one best way to manage everything. These practices have done their share of damage to many government departments, and beyond. Many corporations and NGOs have also suffered from what can reduce to a contemporary form of bureaucracy that discourages innovation, damages cultures, and disengages employees.
In essence, the New Public Management seeks to (a) isolate public services, so that (b) each can be run by an individual manager, who is (c) held accountable for quantitate measures of performance, while (d) treating the recipient of these services as “customers.” Let’s take a look at all this.
Am I a customer of my government, or a citizen and a subject? I am no customer of my government, thank you, buying services at arm’s length in the marketplace of caveat emptor (let the buyer beware). Do I really need to be called a “customer” to be treated decently?
I worked in government for three years, doing third party consultations on the British Columbia Treaty Process. It was coalface level democracy. I was talking to citizens – some of them with truly odious opinions – about a historic public policy initiative that had the possibility to permanently change their way of life. They were not customers, but citizens, with every right to expect that we would treat them the way citizens should be treated in a democracy. It was not about getting them to “buy in” to what we were doing; it was about operating from the fundamental premise that, collectively, they required a place to express their ownership of their country. That doesn’t mean that everyone gets what he or she wants, because in a democracy you have to balance rights and interests. But anyone who thinks that treating citizens is basically just providing good customer service has been sold a bill of goods. Yes, even in the provision of services.
Evaluation is such an influential constraint in organizational and community life. When resources and attention are tied to evaluation results, a kind of tautology gets set up. One begins managing projects towards the evaluation outcomes, in order to give the best chance of an initiative surviving and continuing to attract resources. One of the things I appreciate about developmental evaluation is its deliberate engagement with emergence. Making sense of emergence however can be a really time consuming affair, and so I’m thinking about how we can use good use of time to use dialogue and collective meaning making to help make sense of data and direction.
Developmental evaluation is for the complex domain. That means that we are not working with evaluating actions against desired end states, but instead noticing and paying attention to vectors and directions – intentions and hypotheses that help shape emerging strategy. Developmental evaluation is the process of gathering information about our work to give us some intelligence about what we are doing.
Think of the information needs of two different kinds of athletes. A golf player relies on solid objective data (how many yards to the hole, where the wind is coming from, the nature of the lie of the ball and so on) and interprets that data through her own self-knowledge (I hit a five iron 160 yards. Adjusting for wind and lie and the target topography, I should hit a 4 iron with backspin…) Of course the better a golfer one is, the easier it is to execute a plan and understand exactly where one succeeded or failed.
By contrast soccer players work in a dynamic environment. The information available to them only becomes apparent as they begin to play the match. They may know something about the other team, but they learn rapidly in the first ten minutes or so how the game is going to go. A team will discover where the opposition’s weakness is, or what its attacking strategy is, or where the open spots are on the pitch. Making good use of this information requires excellent communication in real time to share what is being learned. It requires players to play with potentials and patterns rather than certainties. Every move provides yet more information. The better a team works together, the faster they can adjust their strategy to take advantage of potentials.
When we are evaluating work there is a mix of these two types of approaches at play. Summative evaluation will look at the gap between expected outcomes and what actually happened and suggest how to adjust for next time. Budget planning and auditing is a good example of this technical kind of results based evaluation. Count the money and compare against projections. Look for causes. Some of these causes will be technical and some will be down to culture.
Developmental evaluation requires a different strategic approach, and simply put, it might fall into these four things (I’m trying for simplicity here, to try to be able to describe this in an easy way):
- Data points that give us the ability to capture information about a current state of an evolving system. This can render a series of pictures that will allow us to see patterns and trends. You need multiple snapshots over time to make sense of what is happening. One photo of a soccer game in progress tells you nothing. You need to monitor indicators not manage end points. Soccer is much more than just putting the ball in the net, even though that is the desired end result.
- Feedback loops from data to human sensemaking so that data can be used in real time to develop strategy and adjustments to the directionality of work.
- A facilitated sensemaking process to bring together multiple perspectives to interpret what is happening. In a complex system the data won’t give you answers. It will provide information to form hypotheses about the patterns that are emerging, and that information can give you guidance for action.
- A way of acting that doesn’t over commit resources to emerging potential strategies, but which gives enough momentum to see if we can shift things in a desired way. Snowden calls this “safe-to-fail.” This is tricky and calls for good context dependant leadership, but it is the essence of good decision making.
There are all kinds of ways of implementing these strategies. You can use surveys to discover what people are accessing on your website and you can use interviews or sensemaking tools to find out HOW they are using that information. You can use a strategic group to interpret these results and see how they are either coherent with our intentions, or at odds with them. You can then create new initiatives that support what is emerging or figure out ways to abandon what is not working. There are thousands of dialogue methods and processes to use to ask questions about and develop action around the data that is emerging.
Importantly, developmental evaluation needs to be a part of the way you work strategically. It needs a rhythm and a cadence to it, so that you know you are coming back on a regular basis to the emerging picture of what is happening. You need outsiders occasionally to come in and disrupt your point of view and offer alternative views of the patterns, and you need to choose a longer rhythm to continue to develop and refine your evaluation strategy as a whole.
I want this to be simple as a process to use. Strategy without information is just a wild guess. But if we tie our decisions too closely to the data emerging from dynamic systems we can get equally stuck making decisions that try to game the system towards desired results, with sometimes disastrous results for clients, customers and ultimately, organizational integrity. It’s a balance and a practice. How can we make this easy?
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