"...institutional inability to constructively handle criticism..."

More on the question of diversity. It seems that BECTA's passing isn't being universally mourned:

"Much dissatisfaction has been muted over the years because of Becta's major importance as a conduit of resources and funding. Companies, organisations and individuals were reluctant to 'rock the boat' because of Becta's institutional inability to constructively handle criticism. As a result, much negative feedback, extremely valuable for reputation management, didn't appear to make it back to the higher level – and this meant that few, apart from those who felt they were excluded by overly bureaucratic framework agreements, were prepared to speak out."

At the risk of really overdoing this commitment to say what I think regardless of tribal loyalties, there are a very large number - larger than the ones named in the first cull of the quangos - that are long overdue the chop. Many of these organisations were set up to maintain the unsustainable fiction that awkward decisions can be taken without politicians taking responsibility for them.

These little empires soon grew into self-perpetuating managerialist entities. I hope the coalition government doesn't collapse before I gets rid of a few more of them.....

If you want to hear God laugh...

... you tell him your plans.

The nearest thing to a deity that we have in our house is Brian Clough. You can learn a lot about things that have nothing to do with football by reading this comprehensive post over at More than Mind Games.

John Cameron, in 1905, might have been speaking for Clough in 1973:

Every manager is aware that if a professional team is to show successful results there must exist a genuine spirit of good fellowship among the players. The little jealousies that sometimes occur between different members of a team are unfortunate in the extreme, and should on all occasions be firmly repressed by those in authority.

Cameron never discusses tactics, and we know from other Edwardian writers that the basic 2-3-5 was considered to be the optimum formation, arrived at organically through experience and experimentation. Don Shaw describes just such an attitude in Clough:

Clough disregarded ‘tactics’ which, he said, were ‘the best thing to talk about if you want to ruin a team’s rhythm.’ Blackboard analysts were condemned as counter-productive. ‘Tactics aren’t for me,’ he declared. ‘They’re things teams dream up because they’re scared they might lose.’

Here Clough is channelling R.S. McColl, the Edwardian footballer and founder of the newsagent chain, who wrote:

Too rigid a system of play, in which all the moves are known, will not do. There must be flexibility; endless variety and versatility; constant surprises for the other side. System must be inspired by art and innate genius for and love of the game.

“We pissed all over Benfica,” said Clough after putting McColl’s advice into practice in the European Cup. “You don’t teach genius,” he said on another occasion. “You watch it.”

NuBureaucracy and Capitalist Realism

12th February at Goldsmiths:

"Far from decreasing, bureaucracy has changed form, spreading all the more insidiously in its newly decentralised mode. This 'nu-bureaucracy' is often carried out by workers themselves, now induced into being their own auditors."

Spontaneous organisation

From the every-good Counago and Spaves:

"No modern factory could function for twenty-four hours without [the] spontaneous organization of work that groups of workers, independent of the official business management, carry out by filling in the gaps of official production directives, by preparing for the unforeseen and for regular breakdowns of equipment, by compensating for management's mistakes, etc."

From "The Proletarian Revolution Against the Bureaucracy," by Cornelius Castoriadis, in the December 1956 issue of Socialisme ou Barbarie.

(The whole post is worth a look)

Led by donkeys

Here's Pete on the posties.

"Most of the people who work on the front line are not obstacles, they are experts. Their knowledge is far more valuable than the snake oil of management theory. The denigration of the workforce and the elevation of the great talents who brought us the credit crunch into superheroes is one of the more unlikely episodes in a class war, one being waged, increasingly successfully, against workers, rather than by them."

Leaving aside one's ritual allegiances, if anyone is in any doubt about which side to take in this dispute, just go to your local town-centre post office and make a judgment on the quality of management behind it. The Post Office has been willfully mismanaged for a long time, and I can only see it as some kind of softening-up exercise for privatisation.

'Empowerment agenda'

One of many phrases that just drain the very life out of you when you read them.

Sometimes, pulling a great quote from a blog post elsewhere may stop you from bothering to go and read it.

Well, Will Davies said this about Labour's 'empowerment agenda':

"New Labour has the political psychology of an infant that has yet to work out the difference between 'world' and 'self'. It removes its hands from its eyes, and believes it has just produced everything it sees. Thus political truths that will endure long after Labour, capitalism or Britain have disappeared are there to be tweaked by an empowerment agenda. Utopian economic dreams can be achieved through changes in employment law. The cart is not dragging the horse, its dragging the forrests from which all carts are produced."

In this case, really, don't leave it there. Go and read the whole thing.

Web-usability and decentralisation

Anthony has a really excellent post here about the tensions between demands for local accountability and the needs of national government. Don't let anything I say here now distract you from reading the whole thing.

The core question that Anthony goes over is the need for "balancing effectiveness and democratic accountability in delivery of local services centred around individuals."

I read the post just after having looked at an online presentation about usability and the iPhone (ta Kathryn), and it started me thinking about different models of decentralisation. And Anthony's implied use of the term 'user-centred design' (OK, he didn't use those exact words, but still...) made me think about how developments in software will change things. How the medium will shape the message.

Usability and interface design is a fascinating subject. It's a huge growth area in commercial web-development, and the increasing seriousness with which it's taken says a lot about the maturing industry. It has the potential to turn unused services into highly efficient ones if it's done properly.

The practice of usability in design offers a number of lessons that translate well outside the world of XHTML and CSS.

The title of first book that I flicked through on the subject about seven years ago - 'Don't Make Me Think' - is one such lesson that has implications for the whole dialogue around choice. How far does it get in the way of ... well... choice? And, really, since about 2001, books like that, and the work of Jakob Nielsen and others have had a massive impact well beyond the GUI design sphere.

Another is the question of the legitimacy of market choices as a rival to democratic ones. One of the staples of Public Choice Theory has always been that we make only one big decision at the ballot-box every five years and a few smaller ones in between, whereas we indicate dozens of preferences each day at the checkout (and, increasingly, via Worldpay). As Chris Dillow put it when I interviewed him a while ago, "imagine if we bought our food simply by voting for Tesco or Sainsbury every five years."

Now, I don't want to go into it too much here as it's the subject of a book rather than a blog-post, but - as Tom suggests here, this notion of rationality, with markets as their expression, leaves a great deal to be desired.

Indeed, picking up on the discussions around 'behavioural economics', perhaps in some ways, usability and web-design can tell us more about people's preferences. When Anthony talks about user-oriented design of local government services, it is noticeable how little attention is paid by policymakers into the subject of web-usability.

Usability works in a number of ways. Firstly, it re-focuses the design of the interface upon the needs and preferences of the user. In terms of web-accessibility (a separate, but closely-related idea), this means allowing users to customise the interface to meet their particular physical requirements. Poor eyesight? Change the font-size. Dyslexic? Change the fonts and the colours, use a speech-browser, and so on.

One mistake a few commentators make is that accessibility = political correctness. In reality, what this evolving science does is that it removes bureaucratic and diagnostic boundaries around needs and abilities. The 'skip navigation' links that appeared early on when sites had a separate 'text-only' interface. The convention has now been mainstreamed, and many of the better websites offer automatic browser-sensitive options such as single-column views of websites for mobile phones.

So a highly literate, perfectly-sighted athlete can navigate their way around your website on their mobile phone, while riding a bicycle, using only their thumb. And someone who doesn't have the use of their hands and has a visual impairment can using assistive technology interfaces can do so as well.

Things move on. It's a couple of years since I worked around accessible web design, and I know certain approaches to web-accessibility rapidly move from orthodoxy to heresy in this evolving sphere, so I'll leave it there.

But there are other issues. Matching expectations with the use of language, for instance. Have a look at Moo.com as an example. The design is straightforward, the language used is attractive, and subtly honest - you don't get scripts that pretend to be human in some way with the messages that you are given.

And then there is commercial usability. Large retail websites spend a fortune watching user groups use their website. Put most crudely, eye-tracking software will tell a researcher exactly where on the screen a user first glances when they decide to buy something. The 'Buy Now' button gets moved to that spot as soon as the research results are in. But, more broadly, whole businesses can be re-designed following a usability exercise.

One report that a saw a while ago said that eye-tracking software could even be applied to window shoppers. Look at an item in the window, and find some context-sensitive help that tells you what a bargain it is. Privacy issues abound there, of course.

Enough, already. What I'm trying to say, in summary, is this:

Services can be perfected quite rapidly using other evidence than market data, and this is starting to happen in a way that it didn't use to.

Now, back to Anthony's article. Much of the distrust between Westminster governments and local bureaucracies is in the quality of service design and implementation. One thing Anthony didn't really pick up on is the way that this results in a managerial centralisation - where services are boiled down to processes that are designed to remove professionals and expertise and replace them with a more narrow, er.. flexible workforce. We are seeing feedback mechanisms and - ultimately - service design being perfected centrally and applied locally.

It would be interesting to hear views on how effective this approach is destined to be - it's one that has been barely started, but one that could be expected to evolve rapidly over the next decade.

Will we have a need for locally-designed and implemented services in ten years time? Or will we have replicable bureaucracies all over the country - doing things in the same way, responding to feedback in the same way, allowing users to shape services in the same way? And if so, will this clarify the real political questions that preoccupy elected representatives?

Will it reduce their reliance upon local civil servants? I'm inclined to think it will.

Will it increase the power of those elected representatives? I'm inclined to think it will.

In the wider context of e-government infrastructure combined with post-bailout new thinking, this is an exciting time. I'd argue that a centralisation in the way that services are designed by users may ultimately provide local government with the kind of 'dashboard' that it needs to actually make manageable local decisions again without exciting the displeasure of a Whitehall bureaucracy that can snatch powers away at the first hint of incompetence.

Perhaps this is very deterministic - even idealistic - but it is possible, surely, that centralisation in service design will result in political decentralisation. A new sort of 'subsidiarity'?

I know I'd really need to write a book rather than a post to make this point properly, but can you see where I'm going?

Oh - one final point: Have you noticed that the countries that are the best at designing usable process-fitting products that value design as highly as technical innovation (mobile phones, flat-pack furniture) are the Scandinavian social-democratic societies that have spent the last thirty years being the least distracted by the irrelevant arguments around the need for a universal market determinism in everything?

What's the problem? Really?

What is the real problem at Forest? The man behind ‘Through the seasons before us’ is right to sit on the fence about Colin Calderwood’s fate.

For those of you who aren’t Forest fans, here’s the background:We are were (until last night) bottom of the Championship. On paper, it’s been a terrible start to the season, though the consensus is that – apart from a deserved drubbing at Wolves, we’ve not deserved to lose some of the games we have done. The old ‘too good to go down’ curse that has haunted Forest in the past.

Our manager has been with us for two seasons and this is the start of his third. He failed to get us promoted once, the critics say that he fluked it the second time and has had a terrible start this term. So, the predictable chorus is demanding his sacking, and the armchair tacticians are moaning about his choice of formations. I’m generally almost always against sacking football managers for a number of reasons.

Firstly, the tosser (taking an example at random) that hired Juande Ramos (sacking Martin Jol!) is the same one that has now hired Harry Redknapp. Rather unusually, the people who made the last mistake have a monopoly on the next decision.

Secondly, some of the great managers have had bad starts. Brian Clough had an unimpressive start at Forest – half a very poor season followed by a middling one before ... well, you know the rest don’t you?

Continuing the City Ground theme, it was widely understood that Alex Ferguson would have been fired back in 1989 if United had lost at Forest in the FA Cup 3rd Round as everyone expected them to. A 1-0 shock win at ours (those were the days!) kept Alex in the job, and again, the rest is history.

It can take a good few years for a manager to get a handle on a club, and there is a reasonable chance that you are cutting them off on the verge of something worthwhile if you sack them at all in the first three years. Of course, you are also postponing any stability for a further couple of years as well, because it can take managers a couple of years to get the club to a point at which it can provide judgement on their management.

And this will nearly always happen a few months after the stands have echoed to the chorus of demands for their sacking.

There is, I’m sure, much more analytically-framed evidence to support these first two contentions. I'm pretty sure I've read some of it, but you'll have to find it yourself, because I’m really writing this post to make a third point. It’s this:

You know how astrologers know that planets exist even when they haven’t ever seen them? They know they are there because calculations show that they are. The orbits of other planets are altered by ... something .... so we call it a planet or a moon or something.

There are a few of these in politics: Why are successive British governments uniformly Atlanticist? Why is the UK a fairly slavish supporter of US foreign policy? Is it because politicians all become Yankee bastards the moment they get a whiff of the Cabinet Room? Is it because the Illuminati, P2 and the Bilderberg Group have done their evil worst?

Or is it because there is a gap between what politicians feel that they can explain to the public, and what they have to do in order to avoid the kind of disasters that end political careers? Harold Wilson's need to quietly do as he was told by the US in 1964 is the nearest concrete example I've read, but I'm sure that a year or so doing an MA in Anglo-American Studies would yield up a half-decent answer.

Ditto The Big Brother State. (There is a concluding point about football here, I promise.) I know a couple of Senior Labour Politicians – and I knew them before they were SLPs. There wasn’t much by way of authoritarianism beating in any of their breasts at the time, and Labour isn’t really – at bottom – an authoritarian party. Now I doubt if anyone believes that – whatever the Hon. Member for Magnercarter and Howden* would tell you – that the Tories would be planning anything less intrusive than Labour’s current plans to kit us all out with compulsory transponder-suppositories.

So what is this gap between what they think they need to do in government to avoid being blamed for all sorts of shit, and what they feel able to explain to the public on individual policy areas?

Similarly, at Forest, there is something we don’t know about. We’ve sacked Gary Megson and Joe Kinnear because they weren’t up to getting us out of the Third Division. They are both managing Premiership Clubs now. If we sack Colin Calderwood (and I’d expect very long odds now on him lasting until Xmas, whatever reprieve he got tonight at Crystal Palace), I doubt if there is a manager in the country who will look at the job as anything other than a couple of years at a higher rate than you would expect when there is an absolute certainty of failure.

Because there is something wrong at Forest. The simplistic explanations point to the weight of expectation, the oppressive ghost of Brian, the snarky fans, and so on. But it’s something more complicated than that. When it happens in politics, a reasonably astute spectator can usually – at least – work out what the questions are. But I’ve no idea what the questions that need to be asked at The City Ground are - and I’ve not read anyone who has hinted that they know either.

One thing is for certain: If Colin Calderwood is sacked in the next few weeks, his successor will not be .... er.... a success.


*Nicked from Sadie

Check your blog! Malicious hackers are at large!

I am now very worried about poor John Redwood. It appears that his blog has been hi-jacked by someone with malicious intent.

I posted this comment (below) a while ago, and I notice that other comments have since appeared under this post on his site while mine is still 'awaiting moderation'.

'Deleted by hackers' more like? While I don't see eye-to-eye with John on lots of things, I think he should be told about this.

John,

I hope that you monitor the comments on your blog because this one is very important. YOUR BLOG HAS BEEN HACKED AND A SOCIALIST IS POSTING STUFF ABOUT THE NEED CORPORATISM AND FOR PUBLIC SPENDING ON REFLATIONARY PROJECTS.

Thankfully, it doesn't go as far as taking your arguments to their logical conclusion and calling for higher taxation to fund public projects and a safety net for the poorest that can half-way match the one that ZaNuLieBore have given to your former colleagues in the city over the past couple of weeks.

Your blog is usually a sensible haven from this Keynesian nonsense, and it's probably the only place in the world that we STILL can go to read about how the current crisis is down to excessive banking regulation.

The post here is also calls for everyone to be PUBLICLY POSITIVE ABOUT THE CURRENT SITUATION - a call that is thankfully being ignored by your former leader, Mr Hague who made some very reasonable rational points yesterday about how all of this is Labour's fault and nothing to do with any irrelevant global problems that Broon has dreamed up to deflect attention from how crap he is.

There are two posibilities. You've either been hacked by a RED or you've given your passwords to a trusted friend who has - annoyingly - STARTED READING NEWSPAPERS.

Either way, I'd change your passwords if I were you?

The Trotskyist fanatics that have snaffled John's passwords are undoubtely not letting him see comments either. Is there another way he can be informed about this perhaps?

In other news, I know that I'm probably overplaying the funny side to what is a massive bad-news story, but this is actually quite good news isn't it? The Godfathers of box-ticking, pen-pushing, clipboard waving managerialism have been stung right where it hurts.

I am now officially opposed to public bodies being bailed out because they invested in Icelandic banks. Let the fuckers go to the wall, I say....

Workplace democracy

Here's Fatman with two very good posts about management. The conclusion of the second one calls Labour's commitment to social democracy into question.

Tomorrow, he will question the Pope's commitment to promoting rubber johnnies.

Brian and Mark E

Autodidactic management. A really good post over at K-Punk comparing Mark E Smith to The Almighty Brian.

K-Punk:
There's no better example of the way in which success in football depends on management than Clough and Taylor. Clough and Taylor - who, remember, took a backwater Second Division club, and made them into League champions, not once but twice, with players, for the most part, that no-one else wanted or could do anything with. No accidents, no luck, this was real sorcery, not hocus pocus.

No player was a greater testament to their approach than John McGovern - who makes a brief, sad appearance in The Damned United, the time and the place not right for him. McGovern seemed destined to be a middling journeyman professional, but with Clough and Taylor's help he cheated that destiny and ended up winning two league championships (one with Derby, one with Forest), and two European cups. No accidents, no luck.

Being a good manager is about being an engineer of collectivity; not about assembling the best players but about getting the best out of the ones you've got. There's nothing supernatural about esprit de corps, although any team that it has it will seem to have (at least one) extra player. Compare Smith's remarks on the England team again:

"The way the England team is now is ridiculous. A team of superstars is like a supergroup. It's like picking the best guitarist in Britain, the best drummer and the best singer, and expecting them to produce something that isn't prog-rock mush. It doesn't work: this England team will never work at the highest level. I know that. See, Sir Alf Ramsey - people never liked him for it, but he'd always have the full backs from the second division. He took players and moulded them, like I do with musicians. Gordon Banks, the goalkeeper, was from Stoke City, who were bottom of the first division."

*Almost pathetic gratitude to Will for pointing me to this.*

Public sector ethos redux

If you're here because of a link from Stumbling and Mumbling, I think you are meant to be looking at this post about TV detectives - a sequel to this one about the need for a public service ethos. (I think Chris has accidentally mis-linked).

And, for the record, this...

"This doesn't just mean that the neoliberal idea that everyone is motivated by narrow self-interest is wrong. It also means that there are dangers in "reforming" the public services. Reforms that introduce profit motives, or alienate workers by introducing heavier-handed management, might add to costs by reducing donated labour."

... is a very good point indeed. My only caveat is that Chris focusses on the ideology of managerialism - a newish phenomenon if I read him correctly. The more I understand his position here, the more I agree with it by the way. It may well be the epitaph of the 1997-2010 Labour government (if it does die in 2010):

Here lies the government that managed to enact the Crosslandite Democratic Socialist dream of redistribution through effective economic management, but entirely fucked it up because it allowed itself to be captured by useless management consultants.

But these TV tecs show that there is nothing that new about arse-covering useless British management.

The need for a public service movement

Peter Ryley has a really good post up over here. I think everyone has their own version of this bit of evidence...

"...a mere one week before the 1997 landslide, Labour strategists felt they could still lose if the Tories announced another cut in income tax. The election victory had been a foregone conclusion since Britain was forced out of the ERM in September 1992."

... that we were sold a dodgy bill of goods. That 'no compromise with the electorate' had to be replaced with a recognition that the Tories and their allies in the media were running a narrative that we couldn't ignore.

And our suspicion was that this had provided an odd assortment of Atlanticist (worst kind) Christian Democrat entrists with the pretext to mount a mini-coup on the next Natural Party of Government.

One of his main themes here, though, is worth looking at:

"The public sector, Labour's natural support base, has been alienated by 'reform' - a permanent revolution of part-privatisations, pseudo-marketisation, micro-management through targets and bloody performance indicators, resulting in rising bureaucratic workloads. Labour initiated none of this; it was all Thatcherite in origin. In 1997 I expected that the damage would stop, instead it has intensified."

There is a problem with this. I think it would be fairly hard to make the case that Labour hasn't delivered the kind of funding that many on the left (and on the left of Labour) would have hoped for. Labour has chucked money at a public sector that hasn't shown a capacity to spend it particularly well - not least because of the dose of clap that it has caught in the management department. They've mostly done it in a fairly Crosslandite way (public spending drawn from good fiscal management, stability and surpluses rather than from a radical reworking of redistributive taxation).

The problem is the one that Peter rightly points identifies: an inability to understand that the public sector is managed in a different way, incentivised differently, and has strategic needs that are just incompatible with the (massively over-rated) management methods of the private sector.

But this refusal to identify with the public service ethos is something that few Unions have really targeted. Unions still only really get animated about bread-and-butter salary issues. They don't see the point in taking on the ideology of modern management because they don't have a ready response to it. It doesn't have a ready-made narrative that they can explain in the split-second of face-time that they get with their members.

The current fiscal uncertainty will result in public sector cuts and a round of fairly feeble strikes over the coming months that are unlikely to achieve anything apart from - bizarrely - driving some of their pro-strike members to vote Tory next time. Labour will be damaged for its short-term failings in the one field that it has succeeded rather well in overall, and that damage will be inflicted partly by the people that we would expect to campaign on behalf of the public service ethos.

New Labour has a handful of founding myths. Things like...

• You can't take on the press and win - and there's no point in complaining about it
• That you can't suggest a raise in taxes and win an election afterwards
• That you can't win an election with a divided party.

I'm sure you can come up with a few of these yourself. And it would be unfair not to acknowledge that they are all, to some extent, positions that have been arrived at through the bitter experience of the 1980s and 1990s.

But probably the most potent one is the myth that Labour can only present itself as a party that represents the public interest if it can distance itself from producer lobbies. It's a tough one to explain, given the party's umbilical link to the unions, but the the Labour Party politicians that I know say that the whole thing can be explained in three short words:

"Enn. You. Tee."

You can argue all you like about how fair this is, but until the people that work in the public sector can articulate just how bloody awful the quality of public sector management is - how destructive the centralisation, the managerialism, and the pseudo-market simulations are, the Labour movement is going to struggle to win elections and do what it thinks needs to be done. And - given the NUT history, those who work in the public sector have to make the case that professionalism involves a greater level of dialogue between the providers and the users of these services - and that dialogue shouldn't be dominated by politicans, newspapers or employers.

If the myth of the pernicious producer lobby is to be overcome, the public sector is going to need to co-ordinate its voice more effectively on things other than short term pay and job losses. There is no articulate institution that has the respect of the general public, or - failing that - the means to project itself over other competing forces. Such a force is needed. It needs to establish what most people who work in the public sector know: That the public service ethos is alive and well.

At the moment, after yesterday's débâcle, getting the kind of government we'd like is almost the least of our worries. But it is never too late for the establishment of a public service movement. It isn't too late because the benefits will take years to feed through - whatever happens between now and May 2010.

Élan

"... management is not a technical function aimed at making things work, but an ideological process used to justify bosses' status and salaries."