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.
Today a client emailed me with a small anxiety about setting up a meeting room in a circle. The work we will do together is about rethinking relationships in a social movement and the concern was that it was already unfamiliar enough territory to work with. Setting up the room in a circle might cause people to “lose their minds.” I get this anxiety, because that is indeed the nature of doing a new thing. But I replied with this email, because I’m also trying to support leadership with my client who is doing a brave thing in her calling:
Back in the fall I got to finally do some work with my friends Peggy Holman and Stephen Sliha (and Carol Daniel Kasbari too!) with the fabulous organization Journalism That Matters. I was able to do a little process hosting and participating in the developmental evaluation that was going on during the two day conference in Portland.
Last month Peggy published an overview of what we learned in that conference. Embedded in that report is this video made by some of the students on the evaluation team. It contains interviews with many of the participants who had epiphanies about what else journalism could be.
It seems obvious to think that journalists, being storytellers, can help communities tell their stories and represent themselves. But I’m interested in the “weak signal” of journalists actually doing the convening of conversations. Journalists don’t only have the power to tell stories, they also have the power to call together people in conversation. They do it whenever they call up a source for a comment on a story. They do it on radio or TV when they call a panel of people to discuss or debate something. They do it in print or online when they host opinions and curate comment sections (and they DON’T do it when they just leave comments sections open). Why don’t journalists call community meetings? Why don’t they host larger scale gatherings where people discuss their communities issues, even come up with solutions, find each other and work together? Sometimes journalists “moderate town halls” but that’s really not the same thing.
I think the new frontiers in journalism are not only in using their media tools in novel ways. I think journalists can now think about how to extend their hosting practice in new ways too, to help communities find the resources they need inside themselves to address the challenges they face. And that would be another way that journalism could matter.
This morning I’m listening to a lecture from Naheed Nenshi, the mayor of Calgary, who recently gave the Lafontaine-Baldwin lecture on “Doing the Right Thing.” Nenshi shares his thoughts and stories on citizenship and on how that is changing in Canada. And he doesn’t pull punches.
The lecture is divided into two parts. The second part talks about citizen action, but the first part talks about our history of racism.
There is a deep thread of racism that runs through Canadian society. As a white skinned man, I grew up hearing racist chatter. “Privilege” in Canada – being an “Old Stock Canadian” to use Stephen Harper’s egregious phrase, accords you a special window on people’s real views about things. It’s as if you can be confided in to keep the dirty little secret that racism is rampant in this country. And I’m not merely talking about the obvious and official outbreaks of racism like the Komagata Maru or Japanese internment or the Chinese Exclusion Act or None is Too Many or Africville or residential schools or carding or any other of the historical and official policies of racism. No, I am talking about the mindset that simmers beneath it all, the permission given to an attitude of micro-aggression and othering that is constantly stoked by “wink wink nudge nudge” conversations between light skinned people when they think no one else is around. I am talking about a widespread practice of refusing to be reflective on one’s own racism and privilege, leading to misplaced outbursts of outrage that have the odd effect of white people claiming victimhood while at the same time disparaging others for their adoption of an “entitled victim mentality.”
The way Canadian society works is that this simmer mindset among the privileged stays out of sight and below the radar. Anyone who dares to state it out loud and publicly is usually disowned right away as a crazy crackpot. If much of what is said on newspaper comments sections comes out of the mouth of an ordinary citizen in a public setting, you’re supposed to call them out even as you nod along and your inner voice says “damn rights!” The mindset is always there, but you’re supposed to refer to it in code: “those people,” “offshore owners,” “I’m not racist, but…” “one law for all,” “honest, hardworking Canadians,” “Old Stock…”
But what is happening now – and this is something that Naheed Nenshi points out in the first part of his lecture – is that kind of talk is becoming normalized. Over the past ten years, what is supposed to be a secret set of conversations between privileged people is becoming shamelessly public. We are seeing candidates running in this election that have no qualms stating outright racist stuff. We are seeing public debates in which refugees as a class are slandered as potential Islamist terrorists, the 21st century version of the yellow peril scare. Call them racist and they declare you out of order for making an ad hominem attack. In the most openly racist era of my life, one is left wondering when and where we get to have this conversation about how racism informs public policy. Anyone? During the election? Calling another candidate racist is now a gift to the racist candidate. They can rally their base supporters behind the slanderous accusation that they are racist.
And while I’m all in favour of having racism out in the open where we can deal with it, it’s also clear to me that this normalization has the effect of legitimizing racism as an acceptable rationale for policy making. People seriously use terms like “cultural suicide” to discuss the effect of admitting Muslim refugees to Canada and no one seems to blink an eye. We have seen our federal government openly use racism to drive a wedge between citizens in Canada and raise the suspicions between Canadians. We have witnessed the government create two classes of citizens with two different standards of justice for Canadians who were born here or whose grandparents were born here – “the Old Stock” – and others (like my wife, or my children), who can be deported to another country and stripped of their citizenship for committing certain crimes. We have seen the passage of a Zero Tolerance for Barbaric Cultural Practices Act which outlaws things that are already outlawed, but has the effect of also making “barbaric” an official standard by which we can cast suspicion on people. Have any of you reading this pictured in your mind a white man beating his children and justifying it by saying “a man’s home is his castle and no one can tell me how to parent?” Because that is a pretty barbaric cultural practice, but I will bet not a single white man will be brought to court under this act for that offense.
Racism has become normalized. We are making actual laws again in this country on that basis. Our history tells us that what comes next will be inhumane and unjust and that we will eventually look back on it with regret and dismay. Future generations will ask us how this could be allowed to happen. And no one will say “I let it happen.” We will all declare powerlessness in the face of politicians or elites or whomever we can separate ourselves from. Especially those of us granted the privilege of being “Old Stock” Canadians. If history is any teacher, something powerful and tragic will happen, a denouement will occur, and the conversation will go back underground to simmer along as it always has. Disrupting this cycle is important. It is the critical work of citizenship.