Could Bernard Jenkin and Iain Duncan Smith be 2nd Tier thinkers?

 Afghanistan, charity, community, government, international conflict, Psychology, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics  3 Responses »
Oct 192010
 

Maybe there is some hope of 2nd Tier thinking emerging amongst UK politicians….?

 I was greatly heartened yesterday to hear Bernard Jenkin, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme call for strategic thinking to create a “deep and sustained analysis of what kind of country we want to be in 10 or  20 years time.”

Jenkin, Chair of the Public Administration Select Committee (PASC), was being interviewed about the Committee’s report, ‘Who does UK National Strategy?’, published mere hours before the first part of the Government’s Strategic & Security Defence Review.

The Committee’s report suggested there was a tendency for Whitehall to “muddle through”. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were cited as examples where there had been a lack of over-arching strategy.

The report also warned that the UK’s capacity to think strategically had been undermined by assumptions that its national interests are best served by its relationship with the US and economic links within the European Union – “Uncritical acceptance of these assumptions has led to a waning of our interests in, and ability to make, national strategy,”

Unfortunately Foreign Secretary William Hague attempted to make political capital from the report, saying it showed a “chronic lack of strategic thinking in Britain’s foreign and security policy” in recent years. In other words, it’s all Labour’s fault! Perhaps Hague’s response was inevitable, given the fractious relations between the Coalition Government and Ed Milliband’s increasingly left-leaning Opposition; but I could have hoped for better from a politician who has often displayed a high complexity of thinking alongside rough and ready practicality.

In spite of Hague’s rhetoric that: “Under this government there is a proper mechanism for the bringing together of strategic decisions about our security, defence, diplomacy and development, after years of ad-hoc thinking and poor decision- making.” – he was given only guarded approval by Jenkin in his Today interview. Jenkin acknowledged Hague’s vision in foreign policy but lamented that very little was being done in Whitehall to make it effective.

The need for strategic thinking
Bernard Jenkin is a rather controversial character. A seemingly-tireless self-promoter who got hurt in last year’s parliamentary expenses scandal, he wears his convictions on his sleeve (limited integration with the EU, anti-proportional representation) and appears to expect everyone else to treat them as the only sane option. Nonetheless, he is absolutely right about the need for strategic thinking and the tactical way in which he has exposed the lack of it without overtly undermining the Coalition Government smacks of a certain brilliance.

While the remit of its report is defence, the PASC yesterday caught the whole of Whitehall in its sights: “We welcome the new Government’s aspiration to think more strategically, but when we tried to find out who actually does UK National Strategy, virtually all the evidence we took suggests the answer is ‘no one’. Ministers are in danger of announcing a Strategic & Security Defence Review that is anything but ‘strategic’. Whitehall has fallen out of the habit of strategic thinking.  Different departments think about strategy in different ways, often at cross-purposes.”

In his Today interview, Jenkin expanded on this: “…we’ve lost the art of strategic thinking…. There needs to be much better cross-departmental working. For example, the Treasury, their strategy is clearly deficit reduction but it’s not the only strategic imperative facing us….”

A key element in Jenkin’s brilliance has been to say all the traditional assumptions should go under the microscope and to call for truly radical thinking which takes into account the resources available. For example, he told Today: “If we’re going to have to live in a much smaller envelope, how do we completely reorganise the way we do defence? Instead it’s been about Okay what do we have to cut?”

This very much reflects my ‘Cameron & Clegg: where’s the Vision?’ Blog when I wrote: “…what kind of Britain do Cameron and Clegg want us to become? Do they know? And, if they do, when are they going to tell us?”

The Big Society sounds like it might actually result in effective taking up of some of the slack as the public sector is shredded in the coming years…but what will the Big Society look like? What kind of people are expected to inhabit it?

When Jenkin asks, “…what kind of country we want to be in 10 or  20 years time?” – he’s going along very similar lines.

Having the capacity for strategic thinking
That David Cameron and Nick Clegg, together or separately, have yet to articulate a vision of transformed Britain beyond the most woolly philosophy, may not just represent the difficulty in bringing together 2 very different political traditions. It may also reflect a lowered capacity within government to develop strategic thinking.

As Jenkin told Today: “You need the research and assessment staff who are going to do the analysis and assessments…. There used to be… a six-month course at the Civil Service College for strategic thinking. Now there is a one-week module. It’s that kind of reduction in the importance of  strategic thinking that’s being denied.”

It’s perhaps telling that the minister who most completely has a vision for his area of responsibility and who had the arguments so well prepared he managed to get the key points through the Treasury’s slashing was Iain Duncan Smith. His Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) think tank, outside of the Whitehall malaise, has been researching and proposing options on social policy reform for years. Duncan Smith has had the benefit of substantial strategic thinking resources.

While the CSJ undoubtedly has a PURPLE/BLUE ‘family values’ bias in its fundamental assumptions about how society should work, there are clearly GREEN empathies both in the unrelenting distaste for poverty that underpins everything it does and in the way it connects up with so many charities. That it could guide Duncan Smith into preparing for a totally different way of thinking about welfare demonstrates the radical, daring thinking Jenkin calls for right across Whitehall. Again, one might well attribute 2nd Tier thinking to Duncan Smith and his team who have included the likes of psychologists Rod Morgan and Lawrence Sherman and maverick Labour MP Frank Field.

The Cuts…from the BLUE vMEME or 2nd Tier thinking?
As the country braces itself for the most savage spending cuts since the early days of the Great Depression, there is no doubting the need to cut the defecit. Labour will say they’re much too soon, much too broad and much too deep – but Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling were starting to head in a similar direction before their election defeat (if not at the same frantic pace!).

The question, to me, is: are we just cutting, cutting and cutting – driven by the BLUE vMEME’s drive to do ‘what’s right’, regardless of the human cost – or is there a vision for the shaping and reshaping – social construction – of a different kind of, hopefully better society. If it’s the latter, then it needs to come from 2nd Tier thinking – the kind of dazzling, daring thinking that’s comng from the CSJ.

Unfortunately, as Jenkin, indicates, it seems highly unlikely that kind of thinking is widespread in Whitehall. It needs to be.

In his interview, Jenkin at one point was savaged by Today regular James McNaughtie for seeming to suggest that he was advocating the training and development of strategic thinkers at a time when Whitehall was meant to be cut back. Jenkin denied that he wanted to create a new department as such  but, as with the report, advocated an investment in the development of training and resources in strategic thinking.

Jenkin, again, is right. If we cannot develop – re-develop? – longer-term strategic thinking, then we risk being limited and trapped by myopic short-termism.

Cameron & Clegg: where’s the vision?

 Afghanistan, business, charity, community, crime, education, government, human rights, mental health, racism, religion, society, Sociology, Spiral Dynamics, substance abuse  48 Responses »
Jul 152010
 

2 months ago, in ‘”Liberal Conservatives”: new politics?’, I wrote about my hopes that the Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition might indeed be the start of the ‘new politics’ Nick Clegg says he’s always believed in. I talked about the need for 2nd Tier thinking in Government to take us beyond repeating the same old mistakes, ideological conflicts and embezzlement of the public purse.

A month on I’ve yet to see real signs of 2nd Tier thinking in anything the new Government does.

Yes, as Henry Porter wrote in last Sunday’s Observer (11 July), they’ve made a good start. “…the coalition has moved with degrees of fair mindedness and deliberation that are refreshing. To be sure, there have been blunders, like Michael Gove’s botched announcement on scrapping new schools, but it surely is right to suggest that doctors be put in charge of spending GPs’ £80bn budget, to remove the target culture from the health service and provide 24-hour cover. The withdrawal from Sangin and setting a deadline for ending combat in Afghanistan is welcome, as is the review of defence needs and spending. For once, our relations with the world appear to be conducted by grown-ups without displays of fawning or self-importance…..In two months, the coalition has announced the ending of the wasteful and, as it turns out, dangerously insecure children’s database, ContactPoint, as well as the ID card scheme. Immigration minister Damian Green put an end to the inhumane detention of thousands of children belonging to asylum seekers. Theresa May has agreed to examine the way the police are collecting and storing photographs and data about legitimate protesters, like 85-year-old peace campaigner John Catt who was classified as a “domestic extremist. She has also said that the automatic number plate recognition system that tracks and records 10 million vehicle journey per day will be placed under statutory regulation and scrutinised for the first time. CCTV cameras used to watch Muslims in Birmingham have been disabled. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act terror laws, used by councils to spy on members of the public, are to be reserved for counterterror operations. And in the last week the home secretary suspended section 44 of the Terrorism Act which allowed police to stop and search 250,000 innocent people last year alone, and [David] Cameron announced details of a full judicial inquiry into allegations that British intelligence officers were involved in the torture of terror suspects.”

 As Porter says, the “Coalition is popular” - and that may, in part at least, why there has been so little reaction against the massive cuts the Government is going to make – and is already making – in the public sector. (RMT leader Bob Crow’s call for a general strike is, at this stage at least, a very lone voice.) The Treasury’s demand, ‘leaked’ from the Cabinet meeting of 1 July, for most Cabinet ministers to prepare plans for cutting their budgets by 40% is, as some commentators have suggested, almost certainly scaremongering. That way, the real depth of the coming cuts – predicted to average out at 25% – will seem nothing like so bad.

While, as Henry Porter points out, the new government are already implementing a number of new policies, their ‘big idea’ undoubtedly is cutting the deficit; and it will certainly be the defining policy of the Coalition’s first few years in power.

Though I think the developing policy on Afghanistan is muddled and short-sighted – see ‘Why we must win in Afghanistan’ - much else the Coalition is doing seems headed in the right direction. Even the cuts.

We all knew there would be cuts. We’ve been told since before Christmas that there would have to be cuts; and Labour aren’t denying that they were edging towards the 20% figure for cuts in their own proposals. (Though Labour almost definitely weren’t planning to impose the cuts as hurriedly as Chancellor George Osborne intends.)

So why am I casting doubts on the quality of thinking in the new government?

Essentially, it’s because I’ve yet to see a vision being articulated.

Cameron & Clegg, in their co-written article for the Daily Telegraph (12 July) say they “…want to change our country for the better. We want to see the best schools open to the poorest children, a first-class NHS there for everyone, streets that are safe, families that are stable and communities that are strong.” That’s hardly a vision since it’s pretty much everything every politician tells the voters. Nor is a key strategy - that of slimming down and decentralising government – a vision.

When I say ‘vision’, I mean a view of how society should be.

The need for a vision
Margaret Thatcher, for example, had a clear vision based on the philosophy of meritocracy. It’s all too easy to see Thatcher as being about depriving unprofitable heavy industries of state subsidies or busting the unions or deregulating the money markets. Rather they were key strategies to free up individuals to create and enjoy wealth. ‘Thatcherism’ was such a success that Tony Blair carried many aspects of it over into the early years of his government, with the British being the second richest people on the planet (based on gross national income per head) by 2006 (World Bank, 2007).

However, it was far from being a 2nf Tier philosophy since it left substantial communities in Wales, the Midlands, the North of England and Scotland devastated, with a consequent raft of social problems – including large scale unemployment amongst the indigenous working classes, many house repossessions, spiraling divorce rates, substantial alcohol and drug abuse and an explosion in small-scale crime (drug dealing, prostitution, burglary, car theft and mugging, etc).

In the early days Blair talked from time to time of creating a ‘decent society’ but there was never any real elaboration of what he meant. So Britain drifted on, the majority reaping the rewards of Blair’s neo-Thatcherism while a substantial minority got lost in the sprawling urban sink estates typified so well in the Shameless TV programme.

Now a great many more of us are faced with ‘sinking’. The newly-created Office of Budget Responsibility anticipates 600,000 jobs will be lost in the public sector over the next 6 years. Meanwhile leaked Treasury figures anticipate more than 700,000 private sector jobs will go in the same time period. When confronted by Labour’s acting leader, Harriet Harman, about these figures at Prime Minister’s Questions on 30 June, Cameron stated that employment would rise during the life of the Coalition…but he didn’t say how.

The remarkable Coalition is enjoying a remarkable ‘honeymoon period’ with the voters (in spite of some venomous attempts in certain parts of the media to hurry them towards divorce). Partly that’s because people are ready for something different from the party-centric conflicts of the past. Partly it’s because Dave ‘n’ Nick actually do seem to enjoy a genuine rapport. Indeed much of the Government seems infused with bonhomie – even George Osborne and his Lib Dem Chief Secretary Danny Alexander seem capable of  singing from the proverbial ‘same hymn sheet’!

But bonhomie isn’t going to go very far when people are losing their jobs and their homes and seeing their standard of living plummet - and there seems little or no hope of things getting significantly better. The truly scary thing about Osborne’s ‘cuts budget’ is that there’s almost nothing in it to stimulate economic growth.

On 30 June Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development’s chief economist John Philpott told BBC News: “The government thinks that just by …tackling the deficit, there will be a vent for growth because the prospects for investments and exports will be greater. If you look at both demand in the UK economy and more globally, there is a question mark over that and if that doesn’t pay off then we’re going to have a much weaker employment outlook.”

If the economy fails to grow sufficiently in the short-to-medium term to offset the social sinking caused by the cuts in the immediate-to-short-term, we risk becoming a different kind of Britain.

Thatcher – love her or loathe her! – had a pretty clear vision of the kind of Britain she wanted us to become. So what kind of Britain do Cameron and Clegg want us to become? Do they know? And, if they do, when are they going to tell us?

25%…25%!!!!
You simply cannot take 25% out of the public economy in anything but the very shortest term and not create massive change.

So where do we start? (After all, Clegg has promised widespread consultation over how and where to apply the cuts….)

Maybe you’re OK with having to take your own recycling to the council tip; and having your domestic rubbish collected only every other week would be acceptable…?

Getting the potholes in your road filled in only every other Spring…?

Class sizes of 35-plus and out-of-date textbooks instead of broadband-connected PCs in schools…?

How many police officers are we prepared to lose…? (Former chief constable Tim Brain estimates, for Police Review, that between 11,500 and 60,000 police officer, civilian staff and community support officer posts will be lost by 2015.)

According to Justice Secretary Ken Clarke, speaking on Tuesday evening (13 July) to judges at their annual Mansion House Dinner, the fall in recorded crime during the 1990s may have been precipitated by economic growth, high employment levels and rising living standards rather than imprisoning criminals.

If Clarke is right, then will the reverse prove true when we add another 1.5 million to the unemployed tally, some of whom will be police officers?

Having still not cleaned up fully the ‘human waste’ from Thatcher’s era, are we now going to add massively to the ‘human rubbish tip’?

Just what do you do with 3 million people with no jobs and few prospects, slashed to the bare bones benefits, a still dwindling jobs market and many losing their homes…? Faced with similar crises, Margaret Thatcher, the most unpopular prime minister since the end of World War II, took us into another war – the Falklands – from which she emerged victorious and untouchable for another 8 years, the public behind her so much she was able to batter the miners almost with impunity.

What will Cameron and Clegg do to reverse their fortunes when, as is all but inevitable once people really start to suffer, their popularity dwindles? (Only yesterday a supermarket till assistant told me she wanted “that new prime minister shot because he took away my second baby’s child benefit!”)

What kind of Britain will we become?
The challenges Britain faces as the cuts bite are more than simply coping with lower standards of living, mass unemployment, schools troubled more than ever and a likely substantial rise in small-scale crime – as if they weren’t daunting enough! We actually face a major change at vMEMETIC level in societal values.

Since the late 1960s much of the political agenda in Britain (and in the rest of the Western world) has been driven by the GREEN vMEME. Anti-racism, feminism, health & safety, rights for disabled people, employment rights, anti-ageism, human rights…to some degree or other, they’re all the creation of the GREEN vMEME. In its drive for egalitarianism, GREEN will even use positive discrimination to equal the playing field for those who are disadvantaged.

The problem is that GREEN is expensive. Where now will come the money for ramps for wheelchair access in buildings that weren’t built with the disabled in mind? Community Care is more costly than institutional care – so how long before the old mental asylums are reopened and people with mental health problems requiring supervision are herded back into them? How will the Government be able to justify the Equality & Human Rights Commission when the jobless are marching through central London?

One of the things Tony Blair probably was grasping for in his inarticulation of the ‘decent society’ was that we treat each other as equals and with respect and that we care for the less fortunate.

Treating someone with respect might be hard when they got the only job available and you didn’t - especially if your PURPLE clocks that they’re not of your ethnicity and, therefore, not of your tribe. (Just watch the popularity of the BNP grow among the white working class jobless needing someone to blame! Just watch as more Muslims become more devout in the desire for God to right the wrongs white society does to them!)

Charities can be expected to take on some of the support for the disadvantaged but charities depend on donations and it’s hard to donate when your company can’t pay its suppliers (corporate donations) or you’ve not worked in a year (individual donations).

With little nurturing of ORANGE’s wealth creating tendencies, much of the culture of this country will go down the Spiral, settling in PURPLE and RED. Expect increases in racial tension, crime and religious observance (of all kinds).

To some extent, it’s unavoidable. Whether from Osborne’s head-on dive into austerity measures or Alistair Darling’s slightly more measured approach, the cuts have to happen. However, the transition to a different kind of Britain they will bring can be managed and some of the more severe effects ameliorated – especially if there is understanding and management of shifts in values from 2nd Tier perspectives.

But, for that to happen, Cameron and Clegg have got to develop and then share the vision.

It is, of course, a little unrealistic to expect 2 men who were political opponents 12 weeks ago to get into each other’s heads so much in such a short space of time that they can develop a vision they can sell both to the public at large and their 2 respective parties. But, if we are not to slide unthinkingly into the kind of Britain many of us won’t want, then Cameron and Clegg have to get to work pretty damn fast.

I wrote in ‘Liberal Conservatives’ about dissonance arising from the challenges in holding the Coalition together possibly being the factor to drive them into 2nd Tier thinking. Now, as we face the reality of the cuts, it’s clear that there’s going to be far greater dissonance from far more sources than most people realised. It’s also patently clear that the need for 2nd Tier thinking in our leadership is far more urgent than I realised 2 months ago.

I’m still intrigued and excited by the Cameron-Clegg Coalition and still think it presents potent opportunities for real change in the way we do politics…but, guys, we need real vision very quickly.

Yesterday I met Zulfi Hussain MBE

 business, charity, community, heroes and inspirational figures, Psychology, Spiral Dynamics  2 Responses »
Apr 082009
 

Well, no, I didn’t actually get to meet Zulfi Hussain to say ‘Hello’ – but we were in the same room and we made eye contact and he will know who I am because I was the guy going on about the importance of values in understanding diversity. (“Hey, Zulfi, that was me…Keith Rice!”)

 

If I sound unusually humble and maybe even a little subservient – fawning, even! – not at all my usual pompous and arrogant self…well, I spent some time yesterday with one of those rare people who just make a difference in the world. Almost just by who they are. You just know, being with them, that you are in the presence of someone special – very special indeed!

 

I can probably number on one hand the people who have made me feel that way previously: Spiral Dynamics co-developers Don Beck & Chris Cowan, Meta-States developer L Michael Hall, ‘Inner Child’ specialist Penny Parks, maybe former Hidden  Resources head honcho John Lavan….

 

The occasion was a get-together yesterday morning of some of the speakers and committed participants in the ruins of the 6th annual Yorkshire Leadership Conference. The Conference, so successful in previous years, had already been rescheduled once. On the day a vibrant, forward-looking conference of 100-plus  participants and a over a dozen speakers and facilitators should have been plotting the evolutionary development of the Yorkshire & Humber region and beyond; instead a rump of less than 25 of us met to discuss the viability and progress of  the key issues. Yorkshire Leadership Programme leader David Taylor – whom I have known since the heyday of the 21st Century Group – seemed both genuinely upset and perplexed by the collapse – hopefully, just temporarily – of the conference.

 

But, as was acknowledged by several participants, once I put values and needs into the discussion using Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (1943, 1971), the concepts of corporate social responsibility, the environment and sustainability are too far up the Hierarchy to be relevant to many small businesses focussed on survival in what is increasingly being talked up as the worst recession since the 1930s.

 

Although the meeting was so far from what had been intended, it did produce some useful discussions. Though they were largely inconclusive, you never know what little seeds of ideas might germinate from them in time.

 

Zulfi was the highlight

At least for me, he was. His story, as he told it, was truly inspirational and a fascinating example of vMEMES at work.

 

A self-made multi-millionaire who came to this country as a young boy with no experience of formal education, he suffered severe racial abuse at a Bradford secondary school on an estate which was a National Front stronghold. Yet Zulfi appears to harbour no grudges – no bitternesses – from what were clearly traumatic experiences. (At one point he and other Pakistani students were forced to take cover in a part of the school which “we could defend” because it had only two access points.) You might have expected Zulfi’s PURPLE vMEME to polarise him into a position of tribal isolation and opposition to the white tribe whose own PURPLE demonised him and his fellow Asians while his RED would want revenge, taking the law into its own hands in a clear vacuum of dependable BLUE order….

 

How Zulfi mutated from the harassed, beaten and abused teenager into the suave and confident businessman before us was not part of his story on this occasion. However, he did credit his father’s guidance during these years. There may, however, be an interesting mix of vicarious learning and genes in Zulfi’s development as his father obviously was also a remarkable man, being one of the few Indian soldiers to escape and survive from the Japanese prisoner of war camps during World War II.

 

The Zulfi of today seems slightly extraverted, a persuasive speaker who was not shy either of reading us a poem composed, he said, for the occasion or of showing us his impressive list of credentials, concluding with his MBE award. However, none of this came across as the kind of bragging RED  – or even ORANGE – might engage in. Rather it was part of a strategy to show us what could be done if there was sufficient will.

 

I have no doubt that this man is capable of 2nd Tier thinking.

 

Connections and bullying

It was Zulfi’s story of how he set up his Global Promise Foundation which most illustrated what can be done and which demonstrated his 2nd Tier mastery of 1stTier thinking.

 

His GREEN horrified by the devastation wrought by the ‘Asian Tsunami’ of 26 December 2004, his TURQUOISE realised some of what needed to be done to prevent more of the survivors dying. His ORANGE entrained by 2nd Tier thinking made the best use of his huge network of business contacts, to acquire both much-needed supplies and the means of getting those supplies out to the survivors. With people dying first from injuries and then from disease, speed was literally of the essence and Zulfi’s 2nd Tier-entrained RED was put to use in what sounded at best like brutal badgering and at worst like outright bullying.

 

Zulfi told us gleefully how he telephoned one senior BT executive early in the morning of 26 December and said: “The sooner you say Yes, the sooner I’ll let you go back to bed.” Another company, who offered some clothes over the phone, soon found themselves with Zulfi in their offices; 4 hours later their offer had expanded to 3 full containers. Zulfi then told them he wanted one more thing: transport. Thus, the company was bullied into bullying their haulage contractor into transporting the clothes for free.

 

Zulfi’s TURQUOISE could see that cash was needed as well as supplies and he set up a number of fund-raising events, even exploiting members of his own family! Money was taken from younger members of his family if Zulfi could get an aged uncle onto the dancefloor; when the ruse was explained to the uncle, he was badgered into promising £5,000 a head if Zulfi could perform a similar trick on the youngsters. Which he did. RED using PURPLE for 2nd Tier purposes!

 

Through his fund-raising, Zulfi raised over £2M – a relative drop in the ocean in terms of what was needed in the aftermath of the tsunami – but undoubtedly it saved lives. And, if lots more £2Ms were raised….

 

It also was the start of Global Promise, with its vision of making “a real difference to the quality of life of local communities around the world, helping them achieve their potential.” Interesting that Zulfi uses ‘Promise’ – such an optimistic term – rather than the usual ‘Concern’ or ‘Relief’ or ‘Aid’.

 

It was an inspiring privilege to hear his stories and realise some of just what can be done if there’s the will.