Ideologue managerialists

The confession by Elizabeth Campbell, the new leader of Kensington Council, that she has never been in a high-rise flat has led to allegations that she is out of touch, and is seen as confirmation that rich and poor are “two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones.”

There is, though, another inference. It starts from the fact that Ms Campbell was for years both in charge of the council’s children’s services and on the board of Kensington and Chelsea’s TMO. You’d imagine that either role would require her to know a little of the reality of life in a council flat.

That Ms Campbell escaped such reality is not an idiosyncratic failing. Instead, she embodies a feature of today’s management described by Robert Protherough and John Pick in 2002:

The achievement of modern managerial goals generally involves a high degree of mental abstraction, but little direct contact with the organization’s workers, with the production of its goods or services, or with its customers and users. As the admirable Professor Mintzberg says…most modern managers are “capable of manipulating symbols and abstractions but ill-equipped to deal with real decisions involving people.” (Managing Britannia, p32)

The danger of this was pointed out 42 years ago by Kenneth Boulding – that bosses will become out-of-touch:

All organizational structures tend to produce false images in the decision-maker, and that the larger and more authoritarian the organization, the better the chance that its top decision-makers will be operating in purely imaginary worlds.

This is no mere theoretical possibility. It’s exactly what Chilcot says happened with the Iraq war: ministers didn’t know the ground truth. And we’ve seeing the same thing with Brexit; Brexiteers wibble about mental abstractions such as sovereignty but are ignorant of nitty-gritty ground truth of how exactly to negotiate the countless minutiae of Brexit.

This leads me to sympathize with John Gapper’s lament that politicians lack practical knowledge of science and industry. What’s most missing though, is the scientific method, the essence of which is the collision between theory and fact. If you make no effort to discover ground truth (or in Ms Campbell’s case, 15^th floor truth) you’ll never test your beliefs against the facts and you’ll never learn.

And this is just what happened. Blair’s war in Iraq wasn’t so much a moral failure as an intellectual one; he failed to learn not just the messy truth about Iraq but also the vast evidence on cognitive biases. Likewise, Brexiteers failed to learn from Blair that it’s not a good idea to embark upon a risky foreign policy without a detailed plan or strong evidence.

Herein lies what so appalling about Ms Campbell. In being wilfully out of touch, she is actually typical of so many policy-makers. Today’s dangerous ideologues are not Marxists but managerialists of all parties who are constitutionally unable to learn.

Comments

[Simon]

This is a really important point, and the trend is every bit as damaging in business as in government. Mass management of any kind is predicated on the myth that people will behave in certain predictable ways, when all the evidence points to the opposite.

Just one tiny nitpick, though. Marxists also have a weakness for abstract theory over messy reality. True, they're not as dangerous as managerialists at the moment, but that's not necessarily for want of trying.

Not knocking Marxism, just sayin...

[Martin]

Nice

[Mark]

I think this is largely an Anglo-Saxon affectation: the hero leader in his or her ivory tower, distant from the workers, customers and suppliers. In Asia there's a strong culture, exemplified by the Japanese term Gemba ('the place where things happen') of managers spending time at the metaphorical coalface. The insights that can be achieved by this approach are beyond value.

[derrida derider]

A good post.

If you haven't already you should put it into your day job's publication. It translates to good advice for investors trying to judge which of their shares are likely to do well (ie they should look for companies that practice at every level what used to be called 'management by walking around').

[Asher Dresner]

I'd say the same about the Taylor Review.

So many of its recommendations were about legal changes, or changes to tribunals, and so on. Useful, but the abstraction of the law misses the ground truth: it is patchily enforced, millions who need the law's protection don't know when it's being broken to report it, wouldn't know how to report it if they knew what it was, or - as you said in your post Chris - don't feel they have the power to report it even they know they're being treated illegally.

[Arthur Murray]

I vaguely recall something from years ago that Bulmer's cider (Ithink) required its directors to spend one day a month riding in the lorry delivering the cider to their wholesale customers.

[Botogol]

"Nobody from head office liked visiting Acton. They hated the factory with its peeling cream and green frontage, halfway between an Odeon Cinema and an East German bus station. It reminded them that the firm didn’t only make plans and decisions, but also jellies and creamed rice. It reminded them that it owned a small fleet of bright red lorries with ‘Try Sunshine Flans – they’re flantastic’ painted in yellow letters on both sides"

[Blissex]

«Blair’s war in Iraq wasn’t so much a moral failure as an intellectual one; he failed to learn not just the messy truth about Iraq but also the vast evidence on cognitive biases.»

What?????????????? If anything the opposite:

* It was an intellectual success, in the sense that support of/complicity in the USA's foreign and military policy is the price pay to have the USA's "protection", and since Attlee and Churchill made that choice, that is part of the national consensus.

* Arguably is was a moral failure, because to successfully buy the USA's protection by support of/complicity in their activities has made the UK participate in a probably unnecessary and quite cruel war on another country.