Big Society: foretelling the end of confrontational governing?

I’m modestly pleased at the recent succession of posts which do not refer to Big Society. But I guess my thinking just went underground for a bit. This is the first of two or three posts in which, belatedly, I’ll start to offer a critique from the community development perspective.

I find it helps seeing Big Society in the context of traditional attitudes towards governance, which are characterised by dichotomous ‘I/You’ confrontational thinking. This kind of thought does not overlap readily with collective or co-operative (or ‘We’) thinking, but in Big Society they seem to have been teamed up together. What will happen?

‘I/You’ thinking is associated with explicit command relationships, given to careful control of information (secrecy) and minimising empowerment. It is associated with a masculine style of management (widely practised by women as well as men, of course) – largely humourless, limiting negotiation, ever-ready to celebrate what it calls ‘strong leadership’. It says, ‘I am in charge and telling you what to do. By all means do your little bit of collective thinking amongst yourselves, but that won’t change the circumstances of who is in charge’. It is characterised by the stifling of growth, certainty of decision-making, and a refusal to admit mistakes or weaknesses.

The public and community sectors are saddled with a lot of people like this, many of them currently relishing the chance to show how ‘strong’ they are at a time when cutbacks are necessary. Hierarchical organisation was invented for these people, they have evolved to exploit it and dominate. Confrontational thinkers are often very clever people given to doing stupid things in very assured ways. They remind me of a remark attributed I believe to Lord Melbourne, who said of somebody, a historian I think it was, ‘I wish I was as sure of anything as he is of everything’. That’s not a very nice thing to say about someone, which is why it’s so appropriate to apply to these people.

‘We’ thinking, by contrast, tries to acknowledge rather than deny the mess and asks, ‘how can we sort this together?’ It doesn’t always do this very well, is easily side-tracked or hijacked and subject to interference, depends on mutual support, openness, inclusion, uncertainty, discovery, shared learning, making mistakes, and growth in a sympathetic ecology. No wonder it’s never successfully run much for very long.

I think what happened when the Big Society idea was concocted was that Conservative thinkers realised that overt ‘I/You’ thinking is running out of steam, historically. Something called the network society is coming over the hill which is gradually bringing an end to hierarchical systems. The emphasis is going to be on governance not government; on co-operation and openness not command and control. What should we do? Let’s occupy some ‘We’ thinkers’ terrain, and control that. Just bring some of this collective mentality into the foreground a little, not too much. The rhetoric of empowerment, that’ll do nicely.

So here we are at an intermediate stage. Our leaders are still people with confrontational mindsets and they continue to encourage similar attitudes and behaviour in management situations. But they look increasingly anachronistic. They have opened the door on collaboration because they had little choice; but they will continue to try to control things through organisations, without (as Mike Chitty writes) encouraging any real self-determination.

Now we need urgently to look beyond organisations for solutions, to informal networks. There’s plenty of evidence to show the effect of network power – Avaaz, for example, co-founded by Res Publica, offers as much inspiration as we need. Perhaps I’m over-optimistic, but I can see a way in which Big Society foretells its instigators’ demise. Let’s get on with it then.

Comments

[Julian Dobson]

Excellent post, Kevin. I came at it from a slightly different angle here: http://livingwithrats.blogspot.com/2010/08/air-can-hurt-you-too.html but I think we're heading in the same direction on this.

It's also what we're trying to explore, bit by bit, with the Big Society in the North forum - http://grou.ps/bigsocietynorth/home

But it's going to be a long haul. 'We' thinking means holding ourselves responsible for our own failings as well as successes, and I'm not sure we have sufficient maturity of leadership for that in many places.

[Mike Chitty]

I love this post but cannot quite bring myself to share in the optimism...
http://wp.me/pFWuX-3K

[Perry Walker]

Hi Kevin

I enjoyed this. Do you have any ideas on how one might construct measures of how much 'I/you' thinking on the one hand and how much 'We' thinking on the other is to be found in any given situation/community/institution etc.?

all the best

Perry

[kevin harris]

Thanks for slotting those links in Julian. The fact that BS of the North looks, sounds and feels different to the London version is significant in itself.

Mike - maybe there's not really much optimism in what I wrote, just a lack of pessimism?

Perry - sure, piece of cake... ah well no, actually, I was hoping nef might come up with that. 'Course, you'd have to involve the psychologists, who pride themselves on being a profession: and I'm not convinced that the notion of professions - like hierachical organisations, a product of industrial society - isn't part of the problem. Or maybe, the problem isn't professions, but our extraordinary readiness to depend on them. How explain that? Dang, we need those psychologists again...

[Grimbold]

Kevin - concise, measured and absolutely spot on. [Lovely when I can quote someone instead of struggling to write something that still wouldn't make the point nearly so well.] Optimism? I think we need to cultivate our own, and then give people cuttings.

[Jeff Mowatt]

Trying again, the you, me and we ethics of people-centered economics and its influence over more than a decade.

http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=132188

[Mark Foden]

Just brilliant. And the optimism is right. We can't carry on like we are and I sense that some of the 'very clever' are beginning to realise. But, that doesn't mean that there isn't a whole lot of thrashing around to be gone through first. Thanks.

[UKdrugworker]

Yes - there's nothing quite like powerful bodies (e.g. Gov) spotting something organic and 'interpreting' it to death. There are moments when it feels as if there is a genuinely possible tipping point of comprehension - then it slips away again. For Example: I understand there is something congruent in and amongst the Big Soc 'North' stuff but it immediately gets lost. Does the North [to South] really have an identity that makes sense into the future as we face it? Most orgs I know have much different networks than North / South. Many span the two. The 'North' BigSoc implies a trade contract BETWEEN the north and south. Things have changed.

Just as an example then, if the above has any meaning, we would not need to think in terms of regional politics in that way. We would be connecting as modern people, not breeds. North South is an unnecessarily confrontational division for this age. Confrontation is implied through all the historical reference points - to deny that would be disingenuous.

To be truly forward looking, we would be able to see how little we need retrospective boundaries. If we can begin to open ourselves up to that kind of challenge, we really could begin to speak to each other. The old powers would like nothing better than for things to stay the same, and all they need for that is for us to think in the same old ways.

[Jeff Mowatt]

On the link above there's a recent history of the development of We thinking which begins with a critique of laissez faire capitalism and a proposal for a social purpose economic paradigm

The most relevant content I know of in the field of inter-connected networking is the work of Michel Bauwens:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Bauwens

[Jeff Mowatt]

exactly Ukdrugworker as I said today bigsociety is to grassroots innovation as is the tail failing to wag the dog. But please have a look at some of the impact that's been created in a decade of "We" thinking from people-centered economics. You may be astonished at how far the concept has spread, even to the Vatican of all places.