more like people

‘Sharing, Long Tails, and Organisations that Look Like Social Movements’

Friday, July 13th, 2012

Today I did a webinar for the London Campaigns Forum. The theme is ‘sharing’… but more accurately, the theme is ‘how can our organisations learn to operate more like the social movements we have seen springing up all around us?’

The talk is about 20 minutes, a bit long by internet standards, but would be keen to continue the debate on here, if people are interested.

Cheers,

Liam

…And the (much longer-seeming) text of it, for those who prefer to read 🙂

Sharing vs Distributing

Let’s talk about sharing… you know, that thing you do on the internet? With pictures of kittens and videos of kittens and stories about… kittens?

Oh, and actions to change the world! Those ones that other campaigners work very hard to ensure pop up in your Facebook or Twitter feeds at least a few times a day?

In which case, is this still sharing, or have we moved into the realms of distribution?

To distribute, as a verb, is a centralised, concerted effort to push something specific out to the masses, from a particular source, for a particular reason. Much as a distribution centre supplies many individual stores with a product to sell… Or as those stores go on to sell their customers those same products, within their locale.

Sharing, on the other hand, is a characteristic of networks – any number of people, acting independently, to connect any number of different things they value, with people they know who might also value them, no strings attached. Like you would lend a friend a book you’ve read, or tell them about an event you’re going to, because you think they’ll also enjoy it.

While often similar in effect at a certain scale, in that lots of people receive something – the ideas and motivations that underpin each of these actions are very different from one another. If our organisations want to share, there are a few more fundamental shifts they might have to make first.

When people share things, we derive some kind of immeasurable value from doing so. Knowing we’ve filled a gap, giving others the chance to experience something we’ve appreciated, or offered someone something new feels good. Others appreciate the effort we’ve made in doing so, everybody wins.

But is this what our organisations tend to do?

Maybe, maybe not.

‘Agendas’ and trust

Because organisations have ‘an agenda’ beyond ‘the share’.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. At some level the agenda is as simple as ‘create good in the world’, but as all of us who’ve spent any time in organisations know, there are a lot of secondary aims that we often end of placing before the ‘change the world’ stuff. Build the mailing list, converting donors in to activists, demonstrating value to funders, etc.
We have lots of reasons why we do these things, but that’s not really the point.

Here’s why.

Hate speech, porn and credit card scams aside, the internet is built on trust.

Trust is built in a number of ways.

In an organisational sense, we associate it with terms like ‘brand loyalty’ and ‘credibility’, which are important in certain contexts, but the kind of trust that the internet is built on is something else.

It’s more like the trust that exists between friends that says: “I know you wouldn’t intentionally suggest I click a link to something you didn’t really believe that I, personally, should click.”

It’s the kind of trust that comes from believing the person offering you something has nothing to gain except the satisfaction of knowing that whatever they’re offering you has improved your life in some small way, even if that’s a matter of giving you an opportunity to do something good. There is definitely flexibility within this, in that those you call your friends can push this definition from time-to-time, without it ruining your friendship, but it’s definitely a fine balance to be struck.

And it is also a point where our organisations often run afoul of the internet, in the same way so many corporations do: people sense the bigger agenda, whatever it may be. It is not the ‘gifting culture’ that has been prevalent in most of our major religions and countless indigenous communities for millennia, and which has made a public resurgence via the social web in recent years.

For better or worse, our organisations have agendas; the strategies upon which we expect change will occur. So when we say we’re sharing, it doesn’t always feel that way to those on the receiving end.

But this isn’t an inevitability working for social change. In fact, we’re living at a time when the alternatives are all around us.

Organisations and movements

Lately I’ve been writing about the differences between organisations and movements, and why the things that help one thrive, are as likely to be anathema to the other. Two kinds of groups, working towards the same ultimate goals, but organised to do so in almost diametrically different ways.

Movements are self-directed – people joining-up around something that is immediately relevant to them, with of a feeling of shared purpose and the freedom to pursue that purpose in whatever ways they feel inspired to do so.
Alternatively, organisations are hierarchical – people following steps set out by a relative few, to achieve something that is (hopefully) in all of their best interests, on the time scales that the organisation decides.

And the types of environments that nurture each of these forms are rarely the same. At the most core level, organisations have always liked to be in control, whereas movements thrive on individual autonomy. These differences can be challenging ones to reconcile.

What can we be offering the broader movement?

And when it comes to a cause that you really care about, would you prefer to be told how you can contribute to it, or have only the limits of your own imagination to determine how you will be a part of something bigger than yourself?
While we can often offer a few cookie-cutter volunteer or ‘take action’ opportunities, we don’t currently have the organisational will to allow everyone access to everything they would need, to be completely free in how their support our issues.

…So if we can’t open our structures up enough to let people come to us, take what they need, and make something happen with it, we’re left with distributing an opportunity. ‘Here’s your opportunity, take it or… take it – it’s all we’ve got on offer!’

Whereas people can show up at an Occupy camp and run a workshop, cook some food, paint a banner or organise a march, if we shared that much control with the people surrounding our organisations, we’d probably fall apart. While it might be uncomfortable to think about it this way, the organisation is the membrane that keeps resources away from the movement and world beyond it.

How do our organisations currently compare?

Meanwhile, movements are increasingly providing both stronger democracy and accountability than our own social change organisations, and also remaining flexible enough to allow people to be a part of them, in whatever ways they chose to be.

Are we at risk of our organisations becoming the homes of those who ‘kinda, sorta care about the issues’, while the more active activists are primarily making their voices heard elsewhere?

…UK tax justice and cuts activists moving with the latest UKuncut action?

…Canadian civil liberties activists starting or joining a local Casserole (pots-and-pans) protest?

…Mexican students organising massive #YoSoy132 actions without student organisations or political parties involved, much like their British counterparts did over the EMA cuts in 2010?

While there have always been ultra-committed activists who’ve organised themselves outside of the big organisations related to their causes, more-and-more of us are able to be a part of something meaningful and collective, outside of organisations and without having to start something new from scratch. The barriers to entry for wide-ranging, independent activism have never been so low.

The activism long tail

Nearly a decade ago, Clay Shirky and Chris Anderson identified the ‘long tail phenomenon’; a concept at play in more-and-more successful businesses in the age of the social web, which describes the shift from generic to niche production and consumption.

Anderson looked at this phenomenon in relation to business models, with companies increasingly selling relatively small amounts of many different products, rather than massive amounts of a few, more generic ones.

Shirky applied the notion to activity in the blogosphere, noting that the vast majority of blog links were distributed across a vast array of blogs, as compared to the proportion that linked to the very most popular ones. Basically, while some blogs will always stand out above the others, the vast majority of blogging activity is actually taking place amongst niche communities, read by a relative few, but collectively comprising the vast majority of blogging action.
Occupy and countless other self-organising movements are creating an activism Long Tail as we speak.

While the relatively few campaigning actions we offer still have greater individual uptake than the self-organised campaign opportunities within non-hierarchical movements, the cumulative involvement of those self-created opportunities seem poised to account for the lion’s share of ‘stuff done for social and environmental causes.’
In other words, our handful of engagement options are the peak, while the infinite involvement possibilities of the grassroots movements are increasingly the long tail, where more-and-more is going on.

So where do we focus our organisational energies?

…If our organisations did become more focused on the less-active activists (at least, as they related to our particular cause), I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a bad thing. I know I’m peripherally active with far more causes, than those I am very active on. I’ll sign a petition, occasionally write an email, very rarely go to an event or action…. But I’m still glad to be a part of them, even if I’m not currently willing to put huge amounts of effort into each of them at the moment.

Those voices – which would otherwise remain quietly isolated – can and should be amplified and respected as a part of our broader push for social change. The cumulative value of sheer numbers is still a political force to be reckoned with on almost any issue.

This route would allow us to essentially keep doing more of what we’re doing; to tweak, to amend, but to broadly stick with the approaches we developed when media was a one-way broadcast channel.

But it’s not our only possible path.

As best I can tell, our organisations have a few combinations of three main paths they can choose to walk, when it comes to campaigning in the 21st Century:

1) ‘Clicktivism’ and its offline variants – enabling and consolidating the voices of those who ‘kinda care’ about what we do and would be unlikely to engage with the issue proactively without these kinds of specific in-roads.

2) Network support for the stuff that people are doing on their own; linking and connecting wherever relevant activism is taking place, and offering specific, relevant organisational resources, contacts and information to help people organise themselves, even if they are doing so in ways we can’t quite get away with.

3) Opening-up shop for people to do whatever they choose for ‘the cause’. Confronting our fear of loss of control, what if we swung open the gates and made our primary work welcoming committed activists through our literal and online doors, helping them make themselves at home, and giving them the run of the yard to make change happen, but with our resources?

The last choice is clearly the most radical and would involve the most fundamental changes; charity status, boards of directors, staffing, would all need to be re-imagined. But to put it into context, it’s not that different to some of the reimagining that has been and is being required of newspapers, record labels, and ad firms as of late, as the internet increasingly cuts out the need for a middleman.

An organisation without walls…

…So humour me for a minute and imagine that the metaphorical walls of your organisations were torn to the ground. You can keep your jobs, but they’re about to get pretty different.

• For one, there might be a whole lot of new people there. They might be using desks, holding meetings, building campaign props, working on unrelated projects which have a loose connection to your organisation’s campaigns. But they are as welcome there as you are – from the scruffy hippies, to the business people, they are all parts of the movement that your organisation is lucky enough to call home. There will still need to be collective efforts made to reach out to those who wouldn’t naturally walk in through an open door, but an open door would be a positive step to widening the demographics of those involved in our work.
• For two, those people might be able to make proposals on how money is spent. Perhaps there’s a democratic forum where a range of activists make these kinds of decisions? Participatory budgeting is working for local governments around the world, why not for us? The resources are for the cause, and ‘movements’ don’t have strategic direction to worry about, in the same way our organisation used to. They pay attention to what’s going on around them and continually respond, based on the circumstances.
• For three, the organisational logo, brand, and name might become open-source, available to anyone who cares enough about the cause to want to use them. ‘X’ org might start popping-up in all kinds of places it never used to, but you can always just defer to whoever was responsible for what was put out there, if people’s actions for your cause should come back to haunt you… Plus, activists usually do things for the right reasons; if we don’t have this much trust in how people would use our brand, we might have deeper problems to address. But that’s the stuff for another talk altogether…

Now these are just a few random examples of what might change. If we open-up what we’ve got and trust people who care enough about our issues to get constructively involved, I suspect they will do the kinds of amazing things we’ve seen them doing with the social movements beyond our walls.

This is sharing: opening our doors and saying ‘we trust you enough to take what you need’.

If that was that a bit much…

The second option is considerably less out-there, but would still involve a fair bit of re-thinking and re-prioritising. While some of our organisations have tried to position ourselves as ‘hubs’ – i.e. – right in the middle of networked activism – we might be better-off if we went for the more realistic role of ‘cross-pollinators’. What if we re-envisaged ourselves as the people who helped connect activists and moved resources, information, and maybe even funding around a network, as it was needed at a particular moment?

We would stop issuing press releases, stop speaking to the media, stop building the capacity of activists, and start buzzing around our movements, sharing a bit of value from A) and a bit of value from B), with C), or putting out a call whenever a request came our way, to allow others to step up and have their voices heard. We would make every effort to slip into the background and help ensure other people were front and centre, other actions amplified and other campaigners connected directly with one-another. We wouldn’t feel responsible for every little thing that happened in the organisation’s name, any more than we would feel responsible for everything that happens in the name of our cause, more widely, today.

Outsourcing radicalism: Is this a possible stepping stone?

Now, as I’ve been preparing this talk, an interesting action appeared on my radar from London – you might have seen it.
Move Your Money – a campaign encouraging customers to close their accounts with the high street banks and transfer their funds to somewhere more ethical – shut down a Westminster Barclays, as Bob Diamond, the bank’s disgraced and recently ex-CEO was speaking to a Treasury Select Committee about his banks interest rate fixing practices.

Now in a period of occupations and encampments around London, this isn’t that noteworthy… except when you look at the people – or more notably – the organisations, that back Move Your Money.

…The Co-operative Bank, NUS, the New Economics Foundation, among others. All good, established organisations, but not the kind you’d expect to associate with non-violent direct action!

Knowing people personally within each of those organisations, at one level, I’m not totally surprised. But knowing a bit more about each of the organisations themselves, I’m stunned to find their names even hidden in the background of this MYM action.

But maybe they are opening up another possibility? An in-between step from the top-down organisations of the past, to the looser networks of the future?

By part-funding a separate company, are they relieving some of the fears of their own funders or stakeholders, freeing them up to use organisational resources for something they couldn’t do on their own, or with their logos plastered all over?

I’m not sure, but it seems to me that there is an experiment going on to see how these organisations can adopt both some of the radicalism and more of the networked self-organisation that have been a part of the kinds of campaign successes that are coming from outside of our organisations more-and-more regularly.

Getting past the risks

I’m sure we could talk all day about the risks associated with these new approaches; all the potential media faux pas, the attempts to explain things to funders, the very real possibility that we couldn’t control how our cause was advanced… but my feeling is we could spend even longer addressing that which is at risk if we don’t start to shift how we work in some pretty major ways. Namely, the risks of stagnation, and even potentially irrelevance.

Sharing is one sign of the ways our world is changing, but broadly speaking, our organisations are not.

What can you open-up to offer the widest range of opportunities possible for campaigners to take action for your cause? In geek-speak, what is the ‘source-code’ of your campaign, and what would happen if you made it public, like so much of the open and free software communities have been doing since the 80s, and which offers some very different models of how we relate to our work?

If we want to keep distributing things, I’m sure there will continue to be a role there, but if we want to really share what we do, let’s start to find the parts of our respective organisations we can open-up to make it possible.

Thank you for all your time – for putting up with me talking this much, and for the conversation that I’m sure we’re about to have.

Also big thanks to a few people who helped me out a lot while I was preparing this talk – Paul Barasi, Veena Vasista, David Pinto and Adam Ramsay.

If we don’t all get a chance to say hello now, I hope we can connect on the internet later!

Five reasons – in no particular order – why hierarchy sucks

Thursday, June 7th, 2012

While writing a piece for the book on just this subject, I realised I’d never put all the things I don’t like about hierarchy in one clear place… nor seen it done succinctly elsewhere. So here’s my non-comprehensive polemic on why I think hierarchy is about the worst default setting we could pick for our organisations…

FACT: Organisations that build pyramids are less resilient than their counterparts

Few concepts are as ingrained in our institutions as that of hierarchy. We assume that someone will have final say, that we always report to someone, that someone should be earning more than someone else…

But when it comes down to it, hierarchy doesn’t sit that well with the core values of most progressive people, even if we practice it in countless settings on a day-to-day basis.

I don’t think we need to accept it as a ‘necessary evil’, undermining our lived visions of the world any more. But that’s what the book’s about. Here’s why hierarchy sucks:

It assumes the worst of people, and thus is likely to foster the worst in them

From the basic premise of having to ‘start at the bottom and work your way up’, hierarchy doesn’t give any of us the credit to be able to do the amazing things that people constantly demonstrate the ability to do, irrespective of where they might fall on an organisational chart.

More practically though, hierarchy denies us the autonomy to use our judgment and figure things out in our own ways.

Formalising accountability – especially when it only flows in one direction – breaks down trust, because it assumes we won’t be honest about our strengths and weaknesses.

If we can’t be honest with each other, this is what we need to look at understanding, rather than creating structures that make it harder to develop a shared sense of collective accountability for what we do.

It creates power dynamics that foster dishonesty and poor information sharing/coordination/learning

By centralising power and control, you distribute the desire for power and control. When power and control are more evenly shared, there is less reason for most people to want more of it.

Everyone needs to make themselves look better than someone else, if they want to progress their career, improve their income, etc. The hierarchy pits individual interest, against the shared/collective interest, which can’t be a good thing for any organisation that hopes to have some kind of future.

It expects its leaders to be superheroes

It elevates individuals to positions in which the unattainable is expected of them. Because their job title is ‘x’, they are expected to do ‘y’… A promotion to ‘w’ means they are expected to do ‘y+1’… which makes sense… until it doesn’t.

Many argue that the people in leadership positions of massive multinational institutions can in no meaningful way know enough about their organisation to justify the difference between their salaries and the salaries of those below them. The rises follow a linear progression, but have no grounding in practical reality. At a certain stage ‘y+1’ becomes the straw that broke the camel’s back, surpassing human ability, or the number of hours in a day, and becoming inherently unachievable. But we pretend this isn’t the case, and all the ‘failed’ leaders have failed due to their own shortcomings, not something inherent to our expectations of them.

It pretends we live in a linear and controllable world that only exists as a Fordian fantasy, wasting heaps of time

Strategic planning suggests that if you get the correct executives in an expensive enough room for an extended period of time, you will be able to predict the future.

Important people (according to the hierarchy) spend a great deal of time together in organisations, writing documents which declare, in spite of everything outside their walls: ‘A will lead to B will lead to C’.

Additionally, they write further documents to detail how others will ensure that A will lead to B will lead to C.

And then something unexpected happens – as it invariably does – and all their hard work is at best swept aside, and at worse, followed to a T, in spite of a radically changed reality.

When reality strikes, it should make crystal clear that those in the institution who are receiving the largest proportionate amount of its resources, do not have a crystal ball than can plan for any eventuality. By nature of having been elevated to a certain plateau, these individuals have not achieved a superhuman ability to understand all the parts of a complex system.

It denies the centrality of context, assuming that the best decisions can be made from outside the contexts they will be applied in

If we think the best decisions can be made by the people furthest away from their application, we’ve got another thing coming…

The theory that enough information will ‘trickle-up’, from-street-to-suite, to give those who have never experienced the situations they are making decisions for, enough understanding to do a good job, is basically nuts and is not remotely grounded in the experiences of the real world, from sector-to-sector.

Given what we know about how information moves through hierarchical systems (see the first two points), we can’t really believe such systems provide the stuff of good decision making, can we?

Good decisions must be grounded in the realities they will apply to. This is also why ‘scaling up’ of good local ideas almost never works; context is everything, and replacing particular situations and relationships with others and expecting the results to be the same, only makes sense if you are far enough from the ground, for the critical details to have become invisible.

…What have I missed? What is unfair generalisation? What am I misattributing blame for?

‘My day in the civil service’, or ‘How good people can (unknowingly) do bad things’

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010

On September 14th, I had the opportunity to spend a day at the Home Office, as part of NCVO Forum for Change’s voluntary/public sector work shadowing exchange. As someone who spends a lot of time critiquing bureaucracy, but without any personal experience of the civil service, it seemed like a great chance to learn how much of the urban mythology about the public sector was an accurate reflection, and how much was the stuff of a previous era, not yet cleansed from the collective memory.

Those who know me wouldn’t expect to find me wandering around a government department, yet, on September 14th, I was given the chance to meet seven Home Office staff members (and one local authority ‘secondee’), from a range of teams, and at least a few different salary grades.  Much credit goes to my hostess, for her excellent work arranging a busy schedule to give me a sense of what the Home Office looked like from several internal perspectives.

What I’ve been trying to determine ever since, is how the good people I met, are able to be part of an institution which creates so much ugliness.  Whether in the form of policing of activism, criminalising young people, or indirectly promoting racism via immigration policies, the people I met did not seem like the kinds of people that would make these sorts of things happen.

What I did notice, however, (with the notable exceptions of a colleague from the Neighbourhood Policing Team/ Policing Reform Unit, and a seconded Oldham council staff person) was a distinct disconnect between action and reaction, or the work that was being done, and the impacts that were happening, as a result, in the real world.  Which is what I want to start picking apart…

Disconnected?

This revelation is probably unsurprising to most. It is one of the hallmarks of the urban mythology surrounding the civil service, but may, I realise, be deeply offensive (for which I apologise) to many of the people I met, who felt confident that their work was good, honest, fair, but still, whose outcomes were often still anything but…

What follows are a few observations and my interpretations of them. They may or may not have value, but thought they would be worth putting out, for the sake of discussion…

‘Collective ego’

Though there was little sense of individual egos at play in my conversations, there seemed to be an overarching collective one present.  This seems a contradiction of terms, but what I mean is, though those I met did nothing to unduly elevate themselves as people, there was an unwavering sense of the Department’s collective ‘correctness’ in effectively addressing complex national issues, even when responses to those issues clearly shifted with political currents (and recently, parties).  Was there a sense that ID cards were ‘correct’ under Labour, but then ‘incorrect’ under the Coalition? What might be framed as ‘learning’ within the departmental context, appeared to be nothing more than a collective rationalisation (always backed by a detailed evidence base) of a different political perspective.

Who asks the questions?

So it did not seem to come across as a drastic shift when a previous Minister asked the Department’s researchers and policy analysts “What are the economic benefits migrant workers bring to the UK?”, and then their successor asked “What is the appropriate level for an immigration cap?” Each of these questions encompasses a political attitude (built on certain assumptions), meaning the results will invariably reinforce that attitude, no matter how ‘objective’ the research and policy defining them are able to be. The answers produced can only be as varied as the constraints posed by the facilitating questions. So if you’re asked the question about the migration cap, your research will focus on the pros-and-cons of different migration caps, rather than the inherent value of a migration cap, more generally.

Finding value in our work…

This gives those in the Office the fair sense that their work is not about simply justifying a political perspective, as within the question posed, they have honestly tested each of the possible answers, without bias.  This provides a sense of meaning, which is something all of us seek in our work.  Working in restaurants for several years as a means of funding my community work and music in Canada (which gave my time behind the bar a sense of purpose), I met career bartenders who had been able to ‘give meaning’ to the order in which drink mixes were arranged in a bar fridge.  This made no sense to those of us passing through the jobs, but provided a sense of meaning to those who had made a career of serving drinks and needed to give their efforts a sense of importance to be able to justify the time they spent there.  Which ties into the next idea…

‘Horizons’

The Home Office, from Wiki Visuals

My colleague Paul Barasi described this concept (as he does so many things) like a game of chess: If you look at your next two moves, you can give yourself the impression of a likely victory, even if you are in fact setting yourself up for a checkmate on the third move.  Most of the legwork at the Home Office (like most larger institutions) is carried out by people a reasonable distance from those asking the types of framing questions listed above, therefore individual’s ‘horizons’ are generally set not with the endpoint of a policy or law in mind, but with the point to which their manager takes responsibility for the actions (finalising a data set, writing interview questions, getting a report approved, etc).  The ‘horizons’ of the job then, allow individuals to work towards what they feel is a positive ‘endpoint’ (ensuring a good report is produced), without questioning either the justification for that ‘endpoint’, or where it might go next (i.e. – the impact of the report, on a law, on peoples’ lives).

These limited ‘horizons’ disconnect the personal actions from the collective result – distancing the she or he doing the deed, from some element of responsibility for the real world impact. This applies to both positive and negative responsibility; the former in relation to the lost sense of ‘credit’ described by Marx’s ‘Alienation of Labour’, the latter as described in Mark Akbar’s ‘The Corporation’ as how corporate board members avoid personal guilt for their company’s crimes.

…So when the (party-political) Prime Minister says: “We want British jobs for British people.”

…Then the (party-political) Minister says: “We need an immigration cap to ensure British jobs go to British people.”

…And the (‘party-neutral’) Chief Economist says: “What is an appropriate immigration cap to ensure there are enough job vacancies for all unemployed British citizens?”

…And the (‘party-neutral’) Senior Economic Researcher says: “How many less immigrants do we need next year to ensure unemployed British citizens will be able to fill upcoming job vacancies?”

…And horizons’ of the person attached to each descending salary grade are reduced accordingly, along with a personal sense of either credit or accountability for their actions.

An offer?

On an issue where I’ve had some experience (youth gang violence), I offered my opinions and the potential to continue the conversation in more detail another time, or to put the department in touch directly with people I know with more firsthand experience of such concerns. In this situation I was dismissed (I have since sent a follow-up email and will add a comment to this piece if I get a reply), seemingly without thought on what, say, local activists dealing with youth violence might think about the Home Office’s attempts to curb knife crime.

This felt (very aware of the subjectivity here) that they had all the knowledge they needed, in-house, and weren’t interested in involving people from the outside in these discussions, even though I saw minimal evidence of in-depth engagement with community perspectives on this crucial concern.

When I brought up a meeting I facilitated three years ago, in which sixteen London community leaders (early-twenties-to-early-fifties, and all black) involved in youth violence issues agreed unanimously that government wanted to impede effective youth programmes, to keep their communities oppressed, they seemed to have never come across this level of cynicism before. When I challenged them on how significant that mistrust was, to getting honest information and building partnerships, it was not seen as something that needed to be actively addressed.

Expertise?

The emphasis in expertise (perhaps this was more a reflection of the people I met?) was very disproportionately economic. As Dougald Hine picks apart, when seen in isolation (from the social, the cultural, the political, the spiritual, etc) economics can provide a very damaging understanding of the world, which is able to justify a range of activities as ‘positive’ (due to their economic benefits), when any more holistic lens would see the inherently negative consequences of, say, (as Dougald highlights) the industrial revolution on British workers.

Further, as Henry Mintzberg describes in ‘The Soft Underbelly of Hard Data’, the ‘hard science’ of economic measurement can often be based on limited information and a series of assumptions:

“Something is always lost in the process of quantification… As Eli Devons (1950:Ch. 7) described in his fascinating account of planning for British aircraft production during World War II, ‘despite the arbitrary assumptions made’ in the collection of some data, ‘once a figure was put forward… it soon become accepted as the “agreed figure”, since no one was able by rational argument to demonstrate that it was wrong… And once the figures were called “statistics”, they acquired the authority and sanctity of Holy Writ’ (155).” [Mintzberg, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, The Free Press, 1994]

While there remain innumerable ‘experts’ on a range of Home Office related issues in neighbourhoods across the country, there seemed to be little interest in hearing from these people and having them play a part in shaping the policies that are likely to affect them. I made several offers to help bridge these worlds, but felt largely ignored. If that comes across as bitter, it’s probably because it is – not for my own dismissal, but for the rejection of people I know who have experienced youth violence and racist policing first hand, but who have remained marginalised from the discussions that will invariably affect their lives.

Maybe this is all unfair

This may all be unfair on my part. I spent one day there with no previous experiences of the civil service. I have attempted to understand my experience there, in the context of my own thinking around organisations and human behaviour, though claim that in no way these represent truths – just the explanations I (at this point) feel make the most sense of these things. I’d been keen to hear the thoughts (by name, or anonymously) of those who have spent more time in Whitehall, past or present, and if any of these ideas resonate, or if I’ve simply drawn far too much from a very limited experience…