One of the problems with social policy is the reliance on reductionist processes to implement plausible (but often deluded) visions.
Now, any vision worthy of the name springs from deep and complex places, where the cognitive, the emotional and the spiritual merge into the intuitive to create something inspirational and potentially transformative.
Such visions are often shared and become zeitgeist, which is not to say they are universally welcomed or understood.
The implementation of the vision must pay attention to the complexity and keep the big idea as the guiding star. Then we can see whether the vision was realistic in the time and place it landed, or merely plausible, but ultimately deluded.
When visions are implemented through reductionist processes, they generally fail, but it is not always clear whether the vision was deluded or the process mangled it.
To illustrate the point: back in the days when New Labour had lots of New Ideas and some Very Clever People, making policy and influencing the lives of public servants all over the land…………………………………
……..the core ideas were that too much public money was being spent on treating the symptoms of societal problems and that programmes were working in silos, whilst Society was creaking at the seams, despite growing economic wealth.
Note the capital S in Society, because in 1997 we had more or less realised that there was such a thing as Society, after two decades of social policy built on the notion that there was not and that it was all about individuals and their families.
So, out of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit and the Social Exclusion Unit, flooded a plethora of great ideas about Partnerships and joined up thinking.
So far, so plausible.
Now, the implications of all this visionary activity, for those charged with its implementation, were a menacing mixture of opportunity and threat. Whilst such a cocktail is attractive to entrepreneurs, both private and social, the public sector is not the natural habitat of risk takers.
Meanwhile, at community level, where the realities of societal failure are most keenly felt, social activists were coming up with radical and commonsense projects to address the problems in a joined up way. These found funding from the Lottery or various Trusts, but rarely from reconfigured mainstream budgets, which might be expected from the rhetoric…….
As the various big ideas get translated into strategies and passed down the chain to government offices, Regional Development Agencies, Local Authorities, Primary Care Trusts and so on, each level gets to work to create some meaning from its point of view, some extra work for its agency, along with as many of the extra resources it can capture and plays the game of Partnership that is one of the requirements of Government. I once heard public sector partnerships described as “ Different agencies, getting together in a spirit of mutual loathing in pursuit of external funding” and lots of people will recognise some truth in that cruel observation.
Meanwhile, the aforementioned community activists may be rash enough to turn up to a Partnership meeting, having heard warm words about 3rd Sector involvement. Now, since there is implied power shifting in all this stuff, the management of the Partnership is key. The norm was/is for major partners to take control and make sure nothing much happens by controlling agendas and minutes, talking interminably, albeit plausibly and producing “Action Plans”, which produce little action but do manage to leave the power and the money in the usual places. After a while the activists get on with the action on the ground, with whatever resources they can muster, hitting many of the outcomes the Partnership claim to want to achieve, yet still without commensurate reconfigured mainstream budgets.
How can this be?
Well, the fatal flaw is the reliance on reductionist processes and the deluded belief that a thing is nothing more than the sum of its parts – which may hold for a machine but certainly does not for human beings. The power nexus is such that the vision is subsumed by the process and as long as change is driven by process, then nothing much changes……………..not least because process folks hold a lot of power without much accountability and, as Machiavelli said a while back : “When a new system of government is introduced, those who make their living from the old system, will oppose it.” We all know some great exceptions to this rule, but that does not change the rule………….
What can we do?
The problem for folks who think they can hold back change is that change happens anyway, so standing still means going backwards. Eventually all that becomes so clear that the change and realignment just becomes the new commonsense and on we go. ……. Though not always smoothly and incrementally…………………………
New Tories anyone?
