Pause, look back, reflect

Julian Dobson uses a handy live metaphor, a 404 on the community empowerment action plan, to illustrate the fickleness of priorities in government policy.

He points to the amount of energy that gets put into whatever is the current Big Idea until it moves into the 'file and forget' phase. I was told at the time of the empowerment white paper that more than 100 officials were working on it, suggesting a CLG equivalent of Parkinson's law, that work consumes the time of as many people as can be made available for it. Julian notes that:

'This form of leadership, sadly, appears ingrained in our political system,'

and goes on to link the syndrome to international political failure in Copenhagen.

To be fair, the CLG website is a large and very fluid organism and I hope we can forgive the occasional 404. I hope we can also recognise that not all politicians have been slow to respond to climate change and not all can be blamed for the failure of the summit.

But the connection between transitory, even capricious, attitudes to policy and critical failures of leadership is wholly valid. I'd like to add that it's part of a wider culture which may or may not be fuelled by government attitudes. This culture includes over-emphasis on novelty and innovation; reluctance to refer to the past of more than a few months, in case it tells us things we don't want to know; and systematic dismissal of the experience of older people.

It also encompasses the cultural devaluation of loyalty. Sports celebrities aren't expected to show loyalty to their teams; nor employers to their employees or vice versa; nor teachers to their schools, nor consumers to their brands. Nor families to each other. Nor, as Julian's post reminds us, do governments seem concerned to remain loyal to their policies. Only people of faith seem to be exceptions to this rule. If young people are supposed to inherit values from the adult world, this does not bode well.

This phenomenon plays out in a curious way in our hurried public language, nowadays saturated with Important Verbs. Take this for example from Steph Gray's Helpful technology blog, coralling verbs from various government departments:

At the FCO, it’s Listen, Publish, Engage, Evaluate. In the DIUS of Justin Kerr-Stevens, it was Educate, Enable, Engage, Promote.

For Steph, it's listening, explaining, engaging, convening. Others commenting think 'connect' and 'collaborate' should be in there. I've played this game meself in suggesting a model for participative evaluation (Listen, Interpret, Play back, Listen, Interpret, Report). And so it goes on. A few weeks ago DCMS published a widely-condemned document called Empower, Inform, Enrich - of which Rachel Cooke wrote 'sounds like a scented candle'.

Why are we all doing this? I suspect the media and politics engine driving this culture can't stop itself accelerating and we're at risk of losing the habit of reflection. I'm not sure I want to be on board. (Just a quick observation, feel free to tweet).

Comments

[Julian Dobson]

Thanks for the link, and I think you've hit the nail on the head here. Perhaps we should gauge the value of any initiative or policy by the amount of time that's built in for reflection and learning.

If I were to play the Important Verbs game, I might choose Think, Question, Decide, Do. Not that all the connection and engagement and listening and enabling and all the rest aren't important. But we need to employ critical skills, weigh things up, and then act. Basic, I know, but we seem to see a lot of critique without action, and action without critique.

[Leo Romero]

Kevin, Are you Twitter? I'd like to add you to a list that's focused on building community in neighborhoods: http://twitter.com/LeoRomero/communitistas

It includes several of the people/groups in your blogroll, many of whom are also on our page of recommended resources: http://ourblocks.net/resources/

Thanks; Leo

[kevin]

Thanks Leo - regret I don't as yet use Twitter. There is a gentle intended irony to the last sentence of my post, which I'm sure you will have registered.
Julian - thanks, good points as always, I should have said that the JFDI principle ('Just * Do It') is always valid in its place. I think what we're both concerned about is the unconsidered abandonment of things/ideas that at one time were assumed to have value. In social policy, this can lead to what used to be called 'community-hopes-raised-and-dashed syndrome'. The unreflective readiness to abandon stuff is made visible in our landfill sites (perhaps not visibly enough), but it also applies to values and principles. In that respect, among my short list of eroded loyalties I might have mentioned political parties.