Amended text of a letter published in the Welwyn Hatfield Times, 28 April 2021, No. 5517

In 1961, a book called The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs appeared. Despite that title, Jacobs begins her exposition on this side of the Atlantic, with a thoughtful critique of Ebenezer Howard and the Garden City movement.

In essence, she argues simply that the paternalistic separation of function that Howard promulgated does not create a meaningful community. The approach stands in contrast to the messiness and busyness of the streets of organic cities, which Jacobs sees as the motor of urban living. Over ten years ago, when I first moved to the town, I felt this very strongly: it was as if I was walking across a draughtsman’s table rather than through a living place.

Jacobs also targeted the forced high-rise city masterplans of Le Corbusier for precisely the same reason. We were moving from city as organism to city as finely tuned machine – and that runs counter to the simple biological needs of human beings. Instead, she spoke of the “sidewalk ballet”, a rich mise en scène of actions, interactions, and observations amongst people in a locality.

Latterly, Mindy Fullilove, a social psychiatrist, published work that moved Jacobs on a little further in terms of the vitality of the human relations that undergird community as it manifests itself in a locality. Fullilove exposes the fact that urban renewal in the US, where the authorities identified a neighbourhood that they defined as deprived and so decanted the population away from their home and into newly built projects, was not as progressive an act of social policy as it might have appeared.

In so doing, it is argued, they dispersed that community – and shattered all the infrastructural developments (social and community groups; political associations; and corner stores, pharmacies, and undertakers) and the slow build of capital that was taking place.

And so we come to the embarrassing developments here in WGC. Over the course of the ten years that I have lived here, I have set aside that sense of walking along a pencil line. In the course of the pandemic, I have been even more grateful for that combination of red brick and greensward that makes the townscape so refreshing.

On the other side of the tracks, of course, we see a development that owes more to Le Corbusier than Howard, in terms of Jacob’s analysis; an estate driven by density with not a thought to what living “up” means, particularly to families. A stacking of dwellings, one upon another, with limited attention given to the footprint of the development, lacking – by all accounts – the sort of sidewalk about which Jacobs speaks, where people come and go and constellate around the essential services that offer nodes around which communities coalesce.

In 1972, they blew up the Pruitt Igoe projects in St Louis. (Charles Jencks refers to this as the official end of modernist architecture. Apparently not, Charles, as we are seeing in Welwyn.) These modernist monstrosities had been erected by well meaning urban planners and architects in response to that cities urgent need for housing stock. The original plan – back in the 1940s – envisaged two to three storey blocks. Instead, they ended up in 1955 with hi-rise, hi-density properties, which were impressively razed to the ground just seventeen years later.

This is a salutary lesson about architectural hubris. Jacobs had spoken so persuasively at how the cityscape in its most localised form flourished through the observability and connection of people on the street. She underscored the importance of that street being of mixed usage – and that it maintained its visibility due to its human scale. The overbearing edifices of Pruitt Igoe provided boxes in which to live – but no community in which to grow and to flourish. And that criticism can be powerfully levelled at the dire proposals for development in our town.

There was an intrusion into Welwyn’s private grief last week in The Economist magazine. The piece forensically articulates our predicament. People need affordable homes – and we should, as a town, work to accommodate that need. Yet WGC, as the article argues, is held by the noose of the Green Belt, which is slowly tightening. So, to borrow the song title, “The Only Way Is Up”.

This disregards the systemic problem around housing, of course. Property is one of the few commodities that increases in price with age – and it is traded in a market that bears no relation to the reality of the human need for shelter. These days, that market remains grotesquely hyperinflated – and our rental sector is seen as a poor relation, driven largely by profit hunting by an opportunistic caste of rentiers. (This is in sharp contrast to the experience on the wider continent.)

To conclude, applying a Lego mindset to the creation of human habitation – just loading one storey atop another until forced to stop – neglects the reality of living up in the sky and not close to the ground. Focusing on density rather than community leads developers to disregard what makes urban space come to life and stay safe, as Jacobs so richly describes. To deliver on mixed usage, that community is even more important – otherwise you end up in a situation akin to those seen in large cities in Brazil, where there is a hard border between favelas and the properties of the rich.

So, to stay true to the Garden City vision, this proposed development cannot be allowed to proceed as planned. (If it does, then take down the new statue of Ebenezer in the town, because the irony will become too unbearable.) Instead, go back to your drawing boards – and put people rather than square footage at the heart of your thinking. Lastly, beyond the confines of our town, stop unthinkingly adding products to an already overheated market – and rethink the market from the ground up.

During our recent half term family holiday in a stunning barn conversion near the North Wales village of Nannerch, alongside visits to the beach, exploring a castle and taking a steam railway, I started to read Slavoj Žižek’s The courage of hopelessness.

The sun burning off morning frost in the valley near Boffins Barn

 

As a writer, he invariably lures me into a false sense of intellectual security, with reassuring and interesting cultural references and teasingly oblique observations about the day to day. He then interrupts that smooth flow with (for me) somewhat impenetrable chunks of Hegel and Lacan, just to throw me off the trail (so it seems).

However, an early observation that he makes in the text resonated with me in terms of my work with leaders and the challenges of embracing the idea of working differently in order to engender genuine transformation.

Borrowing from an essay by an author called Zupančič, it is suggested by Žižek that, in respect to the case of smoking,

(M)y awareness that I can stop smoking at any time I want guarantees that I will never actually do it – the possibility of stopping smoking is what blocks the actual change; it allows me to accept our continuous smoking without bad conscience, so that the end of smoking is constantly present as the very source of its continuation (Page ix)

This chimed very strongly with my experiences of encouraging leaders to acknowledge and embrace the idea that traditional ways of managing may no longer have currency in a systems context and that a radically different approach would be worth exploring.

In nearly every conversation I have one on one with these leaders, they recognise the need to work differently and oftentimes are supremely capable of articulating ways in which their practice would be different.

Yet, like the recalcitrant smoker, they never actually give up the old ways because they know that new ways do exist. The fact that they have choice prevents them from embracing it. The old ways of leading – like smoking – are habitual, reassuring, and possibly pleasurable. And they can be enjoyed, secure in the knowledge that there is a constant and immediately accessible possibility of giving them up.

Out of this reflection came a somewhat despairing (on my part) conversation with my friend and colleague John Higgins about making an impact as a practitioner working in this area. We headed off in the direction of exploring whether there might actually be additional constraints that inhabit and inhibit leadership practice – and alighted on what we take to be three management myths that create this effect, premised on wider societal issues.

We are at an early stage in this inquiry – but eager to get deeper into conversation about what it is that seems to prevent leaders from doing things they privately know to be right in favour of continuing to do the same old things over and again with no discernible improvement and progress.

Please contact us via this site for further information – or to offer a contribution to the developing debate.

 

 

I cross the River Mimram on my walk to and from the train station. The other morning, I paused to take a photo. On my return that evening, I decided to take another shot of the scene.

The two pictures, of course, look largely the same. But, of course, just over 10 hours have passed. The river is patently not the same as it was in the morning, as Heraclitus observed so well. Much has come and gone across this span of time.

It illustrates how intrinsic change is to worldly existence – and how it is intimately tied to our human experience of time. It is slow and organic and none the less profound for that. It helps to reinforce that – if we are aiming for change – it is worth getting into the flow of change around us, in the way in which a carpenter, in seeking to create something from wood, aims to work with the grain rather than against it.

If our starting point in respect to organisational change is to assume a plannable and sizeable imposition of an anticipated transformation, we may find that we unravel the warp and weft of the space in which we seek to work, rather than engage sympathetically with it, accepting the shape and style of the fabric and acknowledging that this sort of thing takes time.

To an extent, this is an echo of my reading of the work of Robert Chia, who explores organisational change from a deeply philosophical position. In his view, change is something in nature, whereas organisation is an artificial phenomenon. For Chia, supporting change is about working to release the ties of organisation rather than hubristically planning a programme of change (as if such a thing could exist in real practice).

Finally, the river reminded me of the observation that my colleague Ben Fuchs makes in this regard. He envisions the point at which a stream is joined by a smaller rivulet. As they come together, they produce an eddy of gentle disturbance of the flow. While ultimately that change is absorbed by the mainstream, it remains the case that the main river is changed deeply by this assimilation.

For me, this is significant change – but it is a change that is locally generated, delivered at a natural pace, and creates meaningful effect without huge disruption.

Much is being made of what is being described as the 70th birthday of the National Health Service. There are are a good many panegyrics being published, alongside occasional more critical perspectives (such as the Bagehot column in this week’s edition of The Economist).

To my mind, it is unreasonable and unhelpful to talk about this landmark as a “birthday”. It smacks of Disneyfication, where anthropomorphism ascribes human characteristics to cute cartoon animals.

Quite simply, the NHS is not a person – nor indeed, in any meaningful sense, a thing – that can celebrate a birthday.

Instead, let’s consider context of that date of 5 July 1948. A Conservative leadership had pulled us through the second world war; Liberal thought had defined the vital need for welfare, and a Labour government was granted a significant mandate to build a socialized state that met that need. The demobilized soldiers and the women now in the workplace recognized that much had changed – and that those changes would beget further change at the wider socioeconomic level.

Its arrival on 5 July 1948 was the result of slow and deliberate building on the part of a wide range of people, rather than an act of gestation. Silver had to be stuffed into mouths to make it happen – and a service that was to be free at the point of need was very quickly forced into levying charges because of the economic circumstances.

Above all, it required leadership and it required leverage to build a structure that was capable of beginning to meet the health needs of the population.

Little by little, it was constructed on top of the debris of the war, slowly and diligently, by myriad people, working at all sorts of levels…but all of whom were committed to a higher purpose of seeking to alleviate the five evils highlighted by William Beveridge in his report of 1942: want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness.

To speak of a birthday in this way seems in some fashion to disguise the motivation, the effort and the determination that was required to give shape to the post-1945 settlement, of which the NHS is simply one part.

And to indulge the fantasy of a kind and delightful elderly relative, entering their next decade at a big family party, is to blind us to the faults that persist (reports of the event at Gosport sit uncomfortably with this anniversary) and the limitations that are carried implicitly in the model that was chosen back then.

Worse than that, perhaps, is that it veils the fact that current leaders in health and social care – political and managerial – will need similar reserves of motivation, effort and determination, alongside considerable vision and courage, in order to design and deliver a high quality and cost-effective system of socialized medicine for the next 70 years and beyond.

Let’s celebrate not some sense of longevity but what the NHS has achieved over its existence, certainly. Let’s give credit to those who work to deliver health and social care to our young, our sick, our injured, our elderly. At the same time, though, let’s acknowledge the limitations of the NHS and the organisational and political challenges that exist in the current context (and what is likely to happen over the medium to long-term).

And let’s use 5 July 2018 as a day not to dwell on a supposedly halcyon past but instead to take a serious look forward and to think – deeply, honestly and creatively – about what radical responses we can offer at this time to address the challenge of building ways of holding Beveridge’s five evils at bay.

We face a circumstance wherein corporate culture is focused on “busyness”, an expectation of 24/7 attention to work issues (especially via technologies such as the ubiquitous smartphone), and an unbridled concentration on the measurability of the delivery of things in the tightest possible time frames.

Ideologically, though, that same corporate culture emphasizes a positive, almost neo-paternalistic, orientation towards everyone who is an employee. Much is made of attending to staff well-being, of work-life balance, and to mental health in the workplace. This, however, seems to be considered at a distance, at once removed from the quotidian experience of most people. The reality – even if we just take the NHS as an example – is a command and control structure that piles expectation upon expectation on its people and, as a matter of general course, focuses on “failure” rather than celebrating achievement.

A paradox in organisational life

So, we are faced with what appears to be a paradox: organisations seem as though they need to do more and to do it more quickly. At the same time, however, they are notionally attending to the very human need not to be put under undue pressure and (possibly) levels of stress that might be deleterious to health.

At worst, of course, this is not a paradox at all: it is a deliberate managerial strategy to engender an illusion of compassion whilst blithely maintaining a climate of managerial oversight that staff survey after staff survey suggest is experienced as bullying.

The place of the “line manager”

In the midst of this melee sits the line manager. Charged with wrangling their people to maximize delivery, as measured through abstract notions such as key performance indicators, arbitrary targets over which the individual has little or no influence (let alone control), and behavioural expectations (realized through oftentimes explicit requirements for individuals to align themselves with organisational values), the line manager is also – at the same time – expected to “contain” their team and attend to their essential human needs.

This, then, is Barry Oshry’s “torn middle” writ large…and it offers those middle managers no respite, merely pressure upon pressure. If we persist with the already stated assumption that this might actually be an act of organisational dishonesty to say one thing but to behave in an altogether different way, then these people are the physical manifestation of that – and so the object on which disgruntled workers are likely to project their discontent about the situation.

At a more positive level, one might offer a more generous interpretation of this conflict: the old way persists (pressure, demand, control, constant oversight) while the new way is developing and still finding its feet. Much is made of the fact that an engaged workforce will deliver performance better than one managed in a traditional way. In which case, we need – in our organisations – to encourage all managers to engage in a special kind of attentiveness, one that will help the relationships between people in the work place to develop beyond the groaning constraints of our ridiculous performance culture.

The idea of attentiveness

The idea of attentiveness is premised, of course, on the notion of attention, about which, unsurprisingly, there is quite a literature within psychology and philosophy. This from William James seems to set a foundation upon which to build a richer understanding of the wider practice of attentiveness,

“Every one knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. (James 2010, p. 403)”

Cited in Carolyn Dicey Jennings (2012) The subject of attention. Synthese. 189. pp535-554

To my mind, on the basis of my work in workforce, people and organisational development, there are three components to genuine attentiveness for those who manage others in the workplace:

1. CONVERSATION – The manager needs to be present and heedful, giving attention to those around them and being fully attuned to their being in the workplace.
2. HUMANITY – The manager avoids all aspects of objectification and categorization, maintaining a perspective that sees people as people and not as human resources, human capital or indeed as assets. They concentrate on the individual and what it is that they uniquely bring to the workplace.
3. IDEAS – The manager is constantly alert to fresh thinking and new ideas as and when these things appear, which means that they are finely attuned to the dialogic exchanges around them. This means that they are able to follow the thread of myriad conversations as they flow through and around them and support the surfacing of salient elements.

Overall, then, this attentiveness requires a manager to be immersed in the life of their team and the lives of those who make up that team. This requires that manager to extricate themselves from the epiphenomenal in order that they can authentically attend to that which truly matters. This makes absolute business sense, of course, and – at the same time – makes real the notional ideological commitment of organisations to their “people”.

Attentiveness in practice

So, what would line management practice actually look like if it were genuinely seeking to work in this way? A recent knowledge cafe that I had pleasure in hosting, working alongside the splendid David Gurteen, came to a number of tentative conclusions in this regard – which I selectively reproduce here.

Interestingly, the starting point for me in this regard comes in the form of a phrase that is often seen in a pejorative sense, namely the vital importance of “small talk”. For most organisations, this type of exchange is often seen as displacing a strictly defined notion of what constitutes legitimate work activity. Yet it seemed clear as we spoke in the cafe that small talk serves two purposes: it lubricates wider conversational practice; and it connects people in a meaningful way, so that they feel linked as human beings rather than mere components of production. If people are to build rapport and be confident in exchanging their views, the foundational work for such relationships is “small talk”.

Now, some people exercise a careful separation between the public and private domain, of course. Such a position can be about merely preserving a distinction between those spheres for the individual’s particular psychological satisfaction, which is an entirely appropriate personal response. In some cases – and at least one person in the room hinted at it – it can be an adverse reaction to the cloying attentions of a management that has clumsily donned the vestments of genuine staff engagement – but haven’t actually got beyond a purely performative manifestation of that sort of approach.

The second big issue in regard to attentiveness relates to the question of power in the workplace. Outwith critical management studies, very little attention is paid to this crucial question. In most instances, it is tacitly bracketed off and set aside, like a grubby family secret. Subsuming the topic in this regime of silence renders it not simply unspeakable but broadly unthinkable. Yet, one cannot fully understand the workplace without attention to power: it is intrinsic to those relationships, whether one takes a traditional view of it as a zero-sum (the manager has it, so I do not) or a more complex perspective, in which it is not so much a resource as a simple intrinsic characteristic of humans being together.

Thirdly, there is the issue of recognizing individuality, specifically within groups that share great similarity. Each person to which one is attending is unique, although we oftentimes lapse into categorization, as that is the default of the human mind. In a recent conversation at a session on “Complexity & Leadership”, Professor Chris Mowles from the University of Hertfordshire, the facilitator for the day, critiqued the notion of organisational values and the expectations that each and every individual therein should align with them.

This sort of homogenization is dubious from two perspectives. First, there is a strong argument – best expressed in an article from 1993 by Hugh Willmott – that sees this type of intervention as expressly ideological at best – and, at worst, totalitarian. From a more practical position, however, it might also be argued that it stifles the diversity of voice that engaging and innovative organisations desperately require. New ideas spring from points of friction rather than where difference is smoothed off and subsumed.

Worthy – but realizable?

There is a growing field of work that seeks to humanize leadership and management, one that can doubtless be traced back to Elton Mayo and the birth of what we now tend to call organisation development. I consider giving attention to attentiveness in the way described here as an important element of making the workplace a more tolerable, engaging and adult location for everyone, regardless of the position they hold. While some head down the track of the illusory Valhalla where managers cease to exist (but management persists, oftentimes double-fold, as Bernstein et al have suggested), I think that a more honest approach is to call out the power that resides in organisational life – and encourage everyone in that space to begin to interrelate in a more authentic way, their position in that context notwithstanding.

Encouraging attentiveness among managers in particular – and, more generally, across the entire workforce – could also go some way to making organisations better places to inhabit and to start to erode the dominant organisational dispositif, which consists of elements such as structures of command and control, heroic leadership, the privileging of action for action’s sake, linearity and the illusion of planning, all of which serve to infantilise us all rather than to release our thinking, creativity and practical ingenuity.

 

 

I am moving house on Friday.

The very idea of this significant change is filling me with dread, which is interesting insofar as I spend so much time in my professional life promoting the positivity of change and the ways in which people might embrace it. And this has led me to think in a more reflective way about this – and the way it is making me feel.

So, why do I feel so antagonistic towards this notionally positive shift in my circumstances? After all, while the house is probably not that much bigger than the one that we are vacating, it meets a number of key aspects that we highlighted for ourselves as we began to look for a new property nearly 18 months ago.

My first issue is familiarity…

I am deeply connected with where I currently live – and that connection leads me to think that, regardless of how positive the future might seem to be, my life now runs extremely smoothly and very easily given how much I know about where we currently live.

For example, if I go to make a sandwich, I almost unthinkingly know where the plates are and the knives to butter the bread. This creates a sense of contentment for me – as well as one of dread, in that I will have to relearn all my ways of doing things in light of the new circumstances. I sense that the seamlessness of my existence – and the effectiveness of how I live in this domestic setting – will be lost in an instant.

Second, I am concerned about intimacy…

All that I have invested in my current house over the past nine years or so will be rendered mere memory by 6pm on the day of our move. My relations with neighbours, the tiny pencil marks on the wall indicating the increasing height of my three-year-old son, the changing seasons observed from the trees on the green outside the kitchen window, all these emotional bonds will be rent asunder in just a few hours.

The third concern for me is around disconnection…

There is a vision of the future – my wife is better able to articulate it than me, has a greater commitment to it than I can currently muster – but, for the moment at least, this picture of new beginning does not feel in the least bit compensatory for the loss that I am already beginning to feel. And, because I have chosen to distance myself from the vision, it is patently clear that it does not feel like something that I have helped to craft, so buying into it feels much more of an effort.

Finally, there is the subtle question of how I relate to the opportunities that this change might offer…

At a superficial level, I can rationally acknowledge the benefits of the new house – downstairs toilet, detached property, excellent primary school nearby, potential for extension – but my engage with this change from an emotional perspective is undermining my commitment to it. I can speak from the head but not from the heart, which is not a good place to be at this point.

From home to work…

So, this leads me to consider how FIDO– the slathering monstrous dog that haunts our personal relationships to change – should be considered by people hoping to support change in the workplace. More than anything else, it is a reminder that change is not merely a technical process to be run through – a RAG-rated, milestone-studded project plan for delivery – but something that has an extraordinarily powerful human dimension that we neglect at our peril.

Oftentimes, we explain away those human and emotional reaction with appeals to intellect: “life around here will be so much better after we introduce these changes.” At our worst, we pathologise this essential human reaction by targeting those who experience it most profoundly as “change resisters”, people who need to be pushed aside to allow the juggernaut of change to pass.

Where we seek to open up space for transformation in the workplace, a number of precepts follow from an acceptance that FIDO will impact all of those implicated in that change:

First, never underestimate the fact that – as Kierkegaard reminds us – there is no choice without sacrifice. To choose the new (or to be compelled to accept it) is to lose the here and now, which is somewhere in which many will have been content. A proposed transformation might make every sort of sense on paper, easily explained and offering what seem to be demonstrable benefits. But those new benefits have to be developed in practice…and, as they gestate, the benefits of the existing situation are all immediately and painfully lost. A caesura appears where a promise was given around instant improvement.

Second, no matter how “persuasive” a case for change might be, there are inevitable emotional dislocations and ruptures as a result of moving from one state to another. That sense of loss will be real and very much felt by those implicated. Don’t imagine for one minute that a managerial justification for the change – the business dictates, it’ll help us improve, life will be easier – can overcome the emotional impact that people will experience.

Third, the whole vision thing counts for nothing, by and large. Unless everyone has played some part in thinking of a fresh future, then the vision of a senior leadership team or a project manager is nothing more than someone else’s dream – and most of us (other than Freudian analysts) know how boring it is to ensure descriptions of other people’s dreams. And the imposition of that dream onto our reality can lead to us seeing it as a nightmare, from our very particular personal perspective. As Myron Rogers explains in one of his five maxims, “People own what they help to create” – and that applies as much to the imagined future as it does to the practical issue of shaping and crafting change in practice.

Lastly, it’s important to be mindful of the fact that people who don’t want to be pathologised as obstacles to organisational change are likely to default to a supportive position, albeit one that relies on a cerebral relationship with the proposed transformation rather than a deeper emotional connection to the vitality of the project. The presence of social compliance, of docility in the face of power/knowledge (to use a Foucauldian term), and of the constraints that prevent people from speaking out or speaking up to power, all have a tendency to lead to a false consensus where agreement with the change is superficially expressed through intellect rather than heart.

Repositioning humanity

Robert Chia reminds us of the implicit nature of change in terms of our very existence as human agents. He observes that organisation is the unnatural thing, an attempt to resist the inevitability of change, and so efforts to support change in the workplace are best directed towards loosening organisation rather than instituting change.

Alongside this vital insight is the important observation that both change and organisation are experiences where human subjects – replete with their particular and personal ideas, opinions, thoughts and feelings about all manner of things – reside. To disregard this vital dimension of change – the essentially ontological experience of change for human beings – is to resort to a mechanical view of the world where people are effaced. Such an approach is not simply anti-humanist; it might actually be seen as inhumane.

To return where we began, I recognise that I have a particular responsibility to manage and moderate my reactions to the change that I am facing this weekend. I take that commitment very seriously – and can’t help but feel better prepared to undertake that vital reflective work by having spent time analysing my own attitudes to this in the first place. And this serves as a reminder that human subjects have an existentialist responsibility to engage in the widest possible sense with change.

I need to focus on that downstairs toilet…

I was excited to have the opportunity to be one of the three presenters on a webinar on 28 July 2017, exploring inclusion and compassion from a leadership perspective in the NHS. Here are the slides with my notes from the presentation…

This is my 90yo father, whose name is John, with my three year old son, called Thomas.

Any thoughts that I might have about health and social care tend to pivot around the experiences of these two. Whether I am considering how care wraps around the client or how education might support the delivery of powerful messages around health promotion, Dad and Thomas help me to focus on the truly human dimensions of these vital – but oftentimes abstract – considerations.

From the core issue of how the systems that exist around these two can be made to work effectively for them both through to how they each might experience care when they need it in reality, whether from a home care company or a GP practice, this orientation is vital in order to ground those deliberations.

Notwithstanding my opinions as to the effectiveness of care and the quality of the experience for Dad and Thomas, there is a post-Francis recognition of the need to redirect our systems, organizations, teams and individuals to the keystone of good health and human services, namely compassion. This recently published document makes a strong and persuasive case for the importance of improvement and leadership as key facilitators in the delivery of better care.

Condition 2 in this document stipulates that there should be

Compassionate, inclusive and effective leaders at all levels

By which it means that,

‘Compassionate leadership means paying close attention to all staff; really understanding the situations they face; responding empathetically; and taking thoughtful and appropriate action to help.

‘Inclusive leadership means progressing equality, valuing diversity and challenging existing power imbalances. It may sound a ‘soft’ and timeless leadership approach given current urgent pressures. But evidence from high performing health systems
show that compassionate, inclusive leadership behaviours plus established improvement methods create cultures where people deliver fast and lasting improvement in quality and efficiency.’

West et al (2017) suggest that ‘Compassionate leadership enhances the intrinsic motivation of NHS staff and reinforces their fundamental altruism.’

I’m going to look at the intimate relationship between these three elements; in particular, the idea that, for compassion to flourish amongst people who work alongside each other (and thence to the people for whom they are offering care), leadership practice needs to engender self-compassion as a way of being for our people and to create an organizational climate that is, in itself, compassionate and thereby supportive of compassion.

Towards the end of the session, I highlight some practical actions – from my experience working in a mental health trust in London and on the basis of my time at the London Leadership Academy – that help us to understand what compassionate leadership might look like.

I could’ve chosen any site, of course, but this is Northwick Park, a large acute care provider in London. I wanted to use this image to begin by underscoring how and where we tend to deliver care in the NHS. Michel Foucault spoke, in The Birth of the Clinic, of a move away from a domestic setting to a clinical one in medicine, from the bedside in the home to an environment created specifically as somewhere for care to be delivered.

One issue with this is the way in which such places tend to be industrial in terms of scale and process – and I’m using Charles Sheeler’s 1930 painting entitled “American Landscape”, which is a rendering of the Ford Motor Company plant on the River Rouge near Detroit, Michigan, to underscore a visual similarity between a large hospital and a production site.

In such a context, it can be argued that people become objects of care rather than subjects navigating their way through illness and wellness. Both settings are examples of form following function – and both are built around process. In such a context, it becomes a specific challenge to all to hold onto the idea of compassion as a core element of their practice.

So, what can we usefully say about compassion, with this idea in mind?

The very notion of compassion is far from straightforward and can be seen to have a challenging provenance. Karen Armstrong, a noted author on this topic, states in her Charter for Compassion that,

‘The principle of compassion lies at the heart of all religious, ethical and spiritual traditions, calling us always to treat all others as we wish to be treated ourselves. Compassion impels us to work tirelessly to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there, and to honour the inviolable sanctity of every single human being, treating everybody, without exception, with absolute justice, equity and respect.’

Importantly, the idea of compassion extends beyond merely feeling sympathy; it commands action to address the suffering of others, wherever that manifests itself. Moreover, its relationship with religious and spiritual practice can problematize it in the rationalized and diverse practice sphere of health care. It is perhaps for this reason that notions such as “intelligent kindness” have arisen, defined in the following way:

‘Kindness implies the recognition of being of the same nature as others, being of a kind, in kinship. It implies that people are motivated by that recognition to cooperate, to treat others as members of the family, to be generous and thoughtful. The word can be understood at an individual and at a collective level, and from an emotional, cognitive, even political point of view. Adding the adjective “intelligent” signals, first, that it is possible to think in a sophisticated way about the conditions for kindness and, second that clinical, managerial, leadership and organisational skills and systems can be brought to bear purposively to promote compassionate care.’

[Campling P (2015) Reforming the culture of healthcare: The case for intelligent kindness. BJPsych Bulletin. 39. 1-5]

This, then, speaks strongly of how we relate to one another – and has implications in terms of diversity, inclusion and engagement.

There is a strong argument to suggest that compassion cannot simply be an externally facing attribute of human existence: an acknowledgement of suffering, a connection with it, and the development of a will to alleviate it should apply both in terms of our relations with others and in respect to our reflective selves. It is argued that this self-compassion has three components: self-kindness; common humanity; and mindfulness, specifically being aware of one’s thoughts and pain but not overwhelmed by them.

[Neff K (2003) Self-compassion: An alternative conceptualization of a healthy attitude to oneself. Self and Identity. 2. 85-101]

If a leader is expected to be an exemplary figure, then they should be showing self-compassion – as well as compassion to those with whom they work. An HBR blog recently cited research that had found that the more employees look up to their leaders and are moved by their compassion or kindness (a state termed elevation), the more loyal they become to him or her. So if you are more compassionate to your employee, not only will they be more loyal to you, but anyone else who has witnessed your behaviour may also experience elevation and feel more devoted to you.

The article suggested that leaders, when facing employee mistakes, should avoid reprimanding and instead: take a moment; put yourself in their shoes; and find the power to forgive.

The second key element to this is engendering a climate of organizational compassion, which speaks to how people interrelate in the workforce – how thoughtful they are about the suffering of those with whom they work and how they respond to that – as well as how well leaders create a workplace that is inclusive, engaged and supportive to all who work there.

In this space can be found the ideas of value-based leadership, a practice that gives reality to compassion in an organizational context by demanding of leaders that they work with an underlying but explicit moral, ethical foundation [Copeland M K (2014) The emerging significance of values based leadership: A literature review. International Journal of Leadership Studies. 8:2. 105-135.]

In the health context, it expects leaders to act as a connection between the organizational values and those of the workforce, which may have become detached in light of the expectations of the work context.

Increasingly, however, we expressly reference compassionate leadership. A recent Kings Fund publication on this topic made an express connection between this type of leadership and innovation, not least because ‘Compassionate leadership is inclusive in ensuring that the voices of all are heard in the process of delivering and improving care’ – and where space is offered without judgement or imposition for staff to experiment around doing things differently and better [West M et al (2017) Caring to change: How compassionate leadership can stimulate innovation in health care. London: Kings Fund.]

Importantly, as well, compassion may be under pressure in the workplace when, as recent research by Roffey Park suggests, ‘…the pressure for performance, productivity and efficiency […] reduces the capacity of employees to notice another person’s suffering.’ [Poorkavoos M (2016) Compassionate leadership: What is it and why do organisations need more of it? Horsham: Roffey Park Institute.]

It’s vital to acknowledge that compassion in leadership is not a bolt-on, sitting alongside all the other facets that are seen to be intrinsic to solid and effective practice in this area. It forms part of the wider picture of leadership in the contemporary health and social care context, where transformation, integration, systems thinking, wicked problems, innovation, inclusion and engagement are all in play, when one is considering how to enhance effectiveness and support improvement.

So, I want to finish with a few practical things have I been engaged in that contributed to this, over the past couple of years.

At Camden & Islington NHS Foundation Trust, we piloted a revised approach to performance appraisal, which asked managers to meet their direct reports for an hour on a quarterly basis. It asked those managers to think about their whole team, rather than simply the individuals (and their defined job roles within it), and asked managers to look back and look forward on a ninety day basis, rather than a full year.

Managers were supported in respect to running these conversations from a coaching perspective, with the emphasis being on the team’s challenges over the coming three months and the staff members contribution to helping the collective to meet those expectations. To that extent, managers were introduced to the GROW model and the important notion of situational leadership.

The success of the pilot has seen this model rolled out across the whole trust this year, with some adjustments. Importantly, it presages a climatological shift in the organization as part of a wider commitment to move from a directive to a supportive management style across the whole trust. Importantly, it connects with the vital notion of offering positive feedback, something which can oftentimes be unjustifiably in desperately short supply in the health and social care context.

At the London Leadership Academy, we are offering a five day programme spread across three months to allow leaders to consider their practice through the lens of compassion. An immersive and profoundly reflective experience, the first cohort has offered very positive feedback on the course, delivered for us by Katy Steward and Byron Lee, although we are keen to explore with participants the extent to which they have been able to lead differently in respect to their oftentimes difficult circumstances. The second cohort of this programme will launch in September and we already have a great deal of interest in it.

Our flagship work in this respect related to the vital issue of speaking truth to power – and, in particular, to ensuring that individuals, particularly senior leaders, offer a space where a polyphony of voices, representing diverse opinion and experience, can be heard to be freely filling the organizational space. Working with Ben Fuchs and John Higgins, we offer a full day for people to explore notions of speaking up and listening up – and, more recently, have provided participants with the opportunity to encourage their team, department, trust or system to undertake an anonymized survey on this issue – and to then have a facilitated conversation off the back of the report generated by this.

The LLA and our collaborators are continuing to explore and enrich this offer: we are committed to work to bring the issue of trust into sharp relief in regard to this…and similarly are keen to help organizations to explore, understand and adjust the quality of their meetings, in order that there is a truly compassionate and inclusive approach to hearing the voices from across the workforce.

All of the above serves to reestablish the individual at the centre of any leadership practice, to take a humanistic view of the business of managing busy and complex services at a time of great change. Leadership is a constant in regard to overseeing the delivery of goods and services: it is the context that changes, insofar as we are aware that the best outcomes in this regard will derive from practising leadership in a compassionate and inclusive way, from the perspective of systems challenges.

The centrality of knowledge, connection and conversation to staff engagement, job satisfaction and organizational effectiveness has been discussed here over recent weeks. In respect to this concatenation, the three elements are interconnected with one another to the extent that they lock together systemically. In seeking to substantiate this theoretical assertion, one might say, then, that connections appear and flourish through quality conversation; that knowledge can only flow freely where connections exist as channels; and that knowledge is expressed and explored in conversation.

While conversation in and of itself is intrinsic to the act of organizing – and I will be exploring the relationship between organizing and organization in a podcast shortly – the nature of the conversation is patently important. In light of this, I have been using the term “purposeful conversation”, which intimates a sense of purpose and a clarity of focus to these workplace exchanges.

Now, partly this refers to the quality of that conversation. In this respect, there is something to be said for Nancy Kline and her Time to Think approach. Certainly, she specifies ten elements that are critical to giving people the time to think and to articulate those thoughts in a supportive forum.

For me – and for many practitioners – the three crucial elements are those of ease (that is, being able to think without the sense of urgency that can prevalent and so destructive in the workplace); attention (by which is meant that people are given the space to speak and are actively listened to by those with whom they are working), and equality (meaning that everyone in the room gets air time to give voice to their freshest thinking about an issue).

Certainly, this method generates meetings that are substantially and qualitatively different to the standard corporate formats with which many of us are depressingly familiar. They open up what Kline calls a thinking environment. Conversationally, however, it is not an approach that feels intrinsically dialogic: its dynamic is different to that which one might expect to find in a rich and deep conversation.

That said, at root, the Time to Think method promulgates the notion of genuinely and authentically taking time to listen as well as feeling licence to give voice to your thinking, regardless of whether that thinking might be judged as “complete” or in some sense definitive. And these aspects patently undergird high quality conversation between people as they occur in practice.

However, while it is important to envisage how purposeful conversations might take place, it is equally vital to give thought to what might be the subject of a purposeful conversation. That is not to be prescriptive in this regard: a purposeful conversation is likely to be lively, relevant and focused…and will occur spontaneously in context. (Think of a team discussion informally arising to address a particular and immediate sticking point in respect to their collective practice.)

That said, in the ebb and flow of actions and reactions around organizing, it would doubtless be helpful to have a notion of how best to support conversation that can be purposeful in this way. It is in light of this that I continue to work in order to craft a framework that uses seven elements of organizing to enable this, each of which – individually; in combination, or in the liminal spaces that exist between these aspects – offers interlocutors material to prompt purposeful conversations about their organizing and how it might best take place. The framework is in its third iteration, following an extremely useful critical exploration of this thinking by colleagues in the OD Innovation Network (ODiN).

Elsewhere, I have been enjoying a correspondence with David Gurteen, whose focus is on the vital human importance of conversation in and of itself. While coming from what might be broadly described as a knowledge management background, David is, for me, a humanist who sees conversation as intrinsic to our personal wellbeing and self-development, as well as to the effectiveness of our organizing.

Taking the three questions I spoke about in a recent post here as his starting point, he has built upon these in order to introduce fresh elements. For example, he factors in the rich linkage between passion and responsibility, while also urging people with shared passions to forge relationships, and to think through how those relationships might be sustained.

I am very much enjoying our exchange and the potential that it offers and look forward to it continuing. It strikes me that, even though this is being conducted via email at this time, David and I are enjoying (and hopefully both benefiting from) a purposeful conversation about conversations. The opportunity to contribute to that is open, of course, to everyone who reads this and is moved to make a comment.

I have had great fun working up a paper for publication in a peer-reviewed journal over the past nine or so months, which looks at the challenges around organizational learning and development in our contemporary context.

The key observation of this article is that all work around supporting people to make their organizations better needs to build around three elements:

1. Opening up channels so that knowledge can flow more freely and hence pool where it is needed;
2. Encouraging as much connection as possible across the organization (and the wider system in which it sits); and
3. Facilitating meaningful and impactful conversation between the widest range of people (which, in turn, supports connectivity and the spread of knowledge).

As with all academic publishing, the published paper is a little less than what I wanted to write and a little more of what the reviewers and editors wanted to read…and it is doubtless none the worse for that.

However, I am mindful that the editing process saw two features drop which I still feel useful from the perspective of a practitioner. As a result, I am offering those elements here, supplementary to the main paper.

Our Four Challenges

I started with a consideration of what the four main challenges might be in respect to helping contemporary organizations to work more effectively through engagement with their people. To an extent, these challenges both precede the idea that knowledge, connection and conversation are central to improvement in this regard – and, to an extent, allow a practitioner to think creatively as to how those three elements might be realized in the context of organizations.

I am of the opinion that these four distinct challenges, expressed in this fashion, offer a reflective space wherein practitioners can consider how best to work on this vital agenda. For example, in regard to Challenge #1, it seems apparent to me on the basis of experience that knowledge resides in practice – and that practice occurs within an organizing context. To think of knowledge resonating in any other setting – in the training room, the classroom or in e-learning – is, to my thinking, problematic and is one of the reasons that so much is spent on “training” with so very little to show for it.

Incidentally, I deliberately use the term organizing in this respect rather than resorting to speaking about “organization”. This is because I am very much minded to privilege the idea of people exchanging knowledge, connecting and conversing in an active and fluid context, that is to say, where people interact and organize together, rather than focusing on the organization, which – accepting this premise – is a reification of past organizing rather than the realization of current organizing between people. In short, the organization is the ossified remnant of past organizing, undertaken by the people seeking to work together – and so can act as a hindrance to the current organizing efforts of those individuals.

Three Learning Questions

So, the challenges represent a prism through which a practitioner might actively consider how best to explore helping people to organize together better, primarily through the notion of knowledge, connection and conversation. And it is important to reinforce the idea that this is a responsibility of everyone in an organizing context, whether they be performers, managers of performers, managers of managers, or specialists in the areas of improvement, development or effectiveness.

Hence, for everyone in the context, having a simple set of three questions means that they will feel better able to surrender the traditional notions of how people and organizations develop in favour of this more nuanced thinking in this regard. Those questions for me are as follows,

 

This allows everyone in the organization to think about knowledge, connection and conversation from the personal perspective of their own practice (and, indeed, of the practice of those with whom they work or with whom they work alongside). Instead of the stilted appraisal conversation – in particular, the element where notionally people are asked to define their “learning needs” – these three questions are intrinsic to the work people do on a day to day basis – and seek to focus on practice rather than on “training” as the means of ensuring that knowledge flows through the organizing that people do and thereby makes that organizing more effective.

Ultimately, the more reflective supports that can be offered to encourage people to think of organizing rather than of organizations and to ensure that, within this vision, those seeking to organize find means to consider how best to let knowledge flow, connections form and conversations flourish, the more chance there will be for people to experience a richer organizational life and to enhance effectiveness in that context.

 

I recently completed a two-day accreditation for the Team Dialogue Indicator (TDI), a way in which teams can acknowledge, explore and improve the conversations that they have. As ever with such instruments, the art sits in the facilitation of a session where those team members get to converse about their conversations, off the back of their survey report.

I was much taken by TDI in that it was formed of six elements, one of which was power. This key aspect of organizational life is often neglected or, worse than that, willfully effaced to ensure that the work remains palatable in the complex contexts in which human beings find themselves at work. One often has to move into the somewhat arcane realm of critical management studies to find power acknowledged like this, so seeing it writ large in a team-based instrument was refreshing – and yet also challenging.

To be candid, I stowed away the challenge until I came across this little gem outside a pub called The Boot, which is on my route from Russell Square to King’s Cross Station…

Now, this is patently a jocular way of marketing the pub, which will appeal to many people. And yet, and yet… somewhere in there is the kernel of truth about the lived experience of people in this specific workplace that renders the remark comedic. It’s funny insofar as we know intrinsically what motivates the writer not least because it resonates, to a greater or lesser extent, with our own experiences.

So much current organizational development practice takes place where the idea of power is packaged up and cast outside of the discussions. We work as OD experts in a way that seeks staff engagement and a notional democratization of the workplace – and yet to pursue such an ambition without acknowledging the presence of power is to find ourselves practising in an ideological way.

Ultimately, the question is this: what would staff engagement look like if it was able to supplant and extent beyond the attitude to economic engagement in a capitalist economy that lies behind the comment on this board? Yes, it’s a joke: yes, it is designed to make us chuckle. But don’t we secretly know that a night on your feet on a busy bar, dealing throughout with a demanding public, is only motivating when it stops and you receive that pay packet.

How can you raise issues of engagement and involvement when, at root, it is the dull compulsion of the economic that drives people to the workplace on a daily basis? If you refute this somewhat harsh judgement – and there are myriad grounds so to do – my response is simple: how many of us deride those winners of hefty lottery payouts who publicly declare that they will not be giving up their daily work?

And before my interlocutor cries “ah-ha” and points out that such people are clearly motivated by more than money, in terms of what they derive from work, I raise two issues: first, I fear that it may be the case that such people are habituated into work and cannot imagine how their time would be spent without it. (My own father is something of a case in point here, but that is to generalize from the very particular, I concede.)

Second, and with a slightly less elitist tang to it, it is undeniable that work offers us comradeship, connection, banter, conversation, stories…as well as the vital pounds and pence. Yet, work is also a space where we are inscribed in power – and where, as a result, the very discussion of the notion of engagement for staff is suffused with power.

I am not even subscribing here to the notion of power as a broadly negative commodity, one that exists in a zero-sum relationship that means that, for someone to be in possession of it (so that they might instrumentalize it in some fashion), someone else needs to be denied access to it.

Indeed, I am taking power in this context to read as a productive element that courses through the warp and weft of our lives, the lives of others, and the connections that we all share. But this power crafts the human subject (usefully Althusser describes becoming a subject in the instant that a police office calls “Hey, you there!” at you across a street); it generates notions of normalcy and hence defines what we collectively then think of as the Other.

Where power used to feel hard – the graphic representations of the torture of the character of James Delaney in the recent BBC series called “Taboo” are illustrative in this regard – it is now softened and works through the capillaries of our daily lives to define and shape us, as a support to the wider fiction that we exist now in a liberal democratic context. Yet it remains power – and its presence and effect remain significant.

And so I come back to the idea of the way in which our work as OD practitioners might see us unwittingly subscribing to a fictional notion of engagement and such like, when workplace experience for many cannot be truly ameliorated and is determined largely (and doubtless in some cases exclusively) in terms of economic instrumentalism. On top of that is the wider question as to whether our role in this context is ideologised, in light of the fact that the very idea of engagement in the workplace is a fiction that we are actively promoting.

The work of Michel Foucault – whence a good deal of this thinking derives – is often seen as a counsel of despair. However, later writings by this philosopher intimate the capacity for human subjects to develop themselves in terms of their exploring their subjectivity through their interior world, using a range of personal activities such as journalising. This correlates with my belief in the centrality of reflection and conversation in organizational practice and affords an opening wherein it is possible to begin perhaps to visualize a new means of working in organizations.