Archive for June 2nd, 2008
Common Purpose: real power
Audacious powerplay
Common Purpose is a registered charity, founded by people involved in the creation of Demos, which exists to identify and train current and future leaders in business, politics, national and local government and wider civil society to form opinion and influence policy making. It has advocates in institutions all over the place, from teachers in schools to politicians in central government. The charity’s head, Julia Middleton, wrote a book on its aims called Beyond Authority, which is the basis of CP’s slogan: “People who lead beyond their authority can produce change beyond their direct circle of control.” Middleton’s book’s title hints at a move away from oligarchic authority, but the CP slogan suggests an audacious powerplay rather than a rejection of authority.
Note that Middleton’s book is not called Beyond Power. The CP site says that the leaders it is fostering should learn to “understand how power works in different worlds: find out where real power is and spot relationships between players”. Surely, if you’re spotting where the ‘real power’ is, you’ve already assumed a privileged vantage point. Does that privileged position not relocate the source of the ‘real power’ and place it in the hands of the trained observer/leader who understands the wider context?
Ideas futures
Also, have a look at The Tomorrow Project (tagline: “Using the future to understand the present”), a companion website to CP, which provides information on, for example, globalisation and climate change. Demos regard “futures thinking” as vital and cite a quote on scenario planning, the technical basis of “futures thinking” in its favour: “Scenario planning ensures that you are not always right about the future, but - better - that you are almost never wrong.” If you thought we’d seen the last of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s policy analysis market (see here for another internet view), think again.
This marketplace for ideas futures immediately brings to mind the more visionary work of Philip K. Dick.
Pro and anti
I’ve been reading about Common Purpose on the internet and can find only extreme opinions, mostly against it. For instance, heavily in the ‘anti’ camp there’s ex-Royal Navy anti-submarine warfare officer, Brian Gerrish, who runs UK Column and who says, among other things, that the EU is evil and that Common Purpose brainwashes its participants and proposes a treasonable agenda in this video on Common Purpose.
On the ‘pro’ side, there’s Stef Lewandowksi, who uses the negative criticisms of Common Purpose by the BNP, UKIP and David Icke, among others, to taint any further criticism of the organisation by association, consigning “the loons”, or ‘obviously’ idiotic critics, to the internet nuthouse. [N.B. This person’s site was not working properly when I looked at it, so I’ve linked to the cached text.]
I suspect Lewandowksi’s not unbiased. He dismisses any possible criticism of CP’s leadership ideology thus: “when you start using the word ‘leadership’ in anything you do, you’re bound to start getting a few weirdos interested in what you have to say - I find it funny that a few years ago, when it was called ‘management’ nobody would have given a damn.” Its news to me that only certain “weirdos” are interested in leadership: given the market for news product, that puts quite a few of us in the frame. However, I’m more interested in his parenthetical assertion, which is that when ‘leadership’ training of the kind CP offers was called ‘management’, “nobody would have given a damn”. Of course, that’s just silly. I think that given a couple of moments most people could call to mind many criticisms of management speak and associated management bollocks, whether from personal experience or in the media, and if they can’t, there’s commentary galore all over the place for them to read at their leisure. I think that people actually do give a damn that they were, and are now, subjected to the divisive and often contradictory edicts of ‘management’. And I doubt whether it’ll take them more than a couple of blinks to see that self-appointed ‘leaders’ are new-fashioned managers. Have a look at The Tomorrow Project on “futures thinking” if you doubt there’s a correlation between new-style ‘leadership’ training and old-style ‘management’. The point is precisely what such people call themselves; but it’s also about who appointed them our leaders and what we think about it. I don’t wish to be divisive, but by ‘we’ I mean those who are not identified as leaders.
Visionary leadership or new-fangled management?
CP’s offer of visionary leadership training to enable the new managers to understand and negotiate the layers of organisational complexity in the new modern world significantly pre-figures the debate pending on the future of democracy and pre-empts any discussion that might be had about who we want leading us (if, indeed, we want that at all). The imagined community, with communal power at its centre, vanishes with the introduction of specially trained leaders appointed by nobody, who will sniff out where the “real power” in communities lies and act accordingly, having co-opted, relegated or sidelined opponents who are not specially identified and trained leaders.
Now here’s the thing. I can’t easily locate balanced debate on this subject, which puzzles me. The ‘pro’ people seem to assume that there’s nothing more than training involved. The ‘antis’ are sure that it’s all about indoctrination and control. I want to find out more about who’s involved with Common Purpose and what they think they’re getting out of it.
So let’s have a debate and keep it nice, without any name-calling or whatever else it is that people do on the internet instead of having conversations with each other.
Some questions
On whose terms should the expansion of leadership beyond authority be debated?
If Common Purpose is, as it seems, about the ‘right’ people gaining power, what do we think about that? Are you the right person? Are those identified by unknown others as potential leaders the ‘right’ people?
Can governance be improved by a network coalition of the ‘right’ people? Will their friends and contacts whom they encourage to participate be the ‘right’ people, too?
If the things that need to be done get done ‘right’, does it matter who does the work?
Given the positions of some of the participants, is Common Purpose just the old establishment in a new outfit, working semi-transparently where it once worked opaquely?
Alternatively, is CP the regrouped and rebranded British Left?
What do those involved in CP get from the experience of observing ‘real power’ at work? Do they earn higher salaries? Do they bring those with the ‘real power’ with them on their journey of self-discovery?
How will the development of ideas futures benefit me and my community?
Does CP’s leadership training alter where the power lies?
Edit:
Here’s a fabulously bland site with CP participant endorsements.
Further edit:
In the face of criticism and vitriolic attacks, Common Purpose has started another site, Commonpurpose.net, devoted to explaining “The facts about Common Purpose” and, reasonably, countering various outlandish claims against it.
Through this new outlet CP reiterates that it offers leadership training and has no agenda. Commonpurpose.net emphasises that CP has “no alignment with any political party, religion or other organisation whatsoever”. Apparently, it exists “to give leaders the inspiration, the skills, the knowledge and the connections they need to produce real change in their work and potentially, in their communities or wider society.” Its charter “expresses its aim to identify opportunities and encourage leaders to become actively involved in civil society, but makes it clear that Common Purpose has no role in prompting or deciding what people choose to do”.#
Courage at work
So in Common Purpose, we’re seeing the birth of a novel social-cultural formation: a network organisation comprising individuals aspiring to leadership that claims only to facilitate, never to influence ideologically. CP rightly places responsibility on individuals. But are we to believe that there are no ideological choices, biases and prejudices in leadership training, whether in trainer or trainee? Is training someone to be a leader - to identify where the power lies and act accordingly - not a realpolitik assumption? And does the usage of realpolitik methodologies place users beyond ideology? Surely, this is new-fangled management speak: old ideas in new clothes. CP says as much in a section on its site, titled “Managers scared to manage”.
This, from a downloadable research document called, “Courage at work: Causes and cures for timid management” (2005): “Common Purpose is a campaigning organisation that believes the UK needs more – and more diverse – leaders.” The solution to society’s ills? More managers! Perhaps their thinking’s changed since 2005.
Through its new site, Common Purpose gives you “the facts”. Aside from the fact that these “facts” are factoid gobbets variously restating CP’s own (non-)agenda and addressing remarks it regards as defamatory and therefore actionable under law, are there really just things called facts that describe reality and which exist outside context?
I ask again: what does Common Purpose actually do? I should say at this point that I have read CP’s blurbs and understand the verbiage. (Please do not redirect me to the CP website for re-education.) I am inviting you to question CP’s cover-all mission statement and think about the effect of the training it offers. If every other organisation ever invented, whether network or institutional, perpetuates ideology, how is it that CP does not and, in fact, according to its own (non-)ideology, cannot? And what ideology is it, or isn’t it, perpetuating? Since its training facilitates individuals to make audacious interventions in situations where power relations are in question, what are the grounds for CP’s positioning itself as an disinterested mentor?
Is this just another back-slapping opportunity for managers and various policy makers/implementers?
Should we tolerate the existence and modus operandi of an organisation that effectively celebrates the appropriation of power by an unelected elite or at the very least seeks unproblematically to encourage individuals to manipulate power relations? We should be asking whether, given all that’s been discussed about power relations down the years, such a purpose can be regarded as politically neutral. Does it matter than we’re talking about a charity comprising supposedly disinterested individuals, whether professionals in the social sphere?
Update 7 August 2008
In the absence of any debate on this matter in the public sphere, here’s a video of Brian Gerrish speaking recently, deconstructing the present language of social control, which he identifies as cultural Marxist. Linguistic analysis of structures was/is the basis of Marxian deconstruction, but provides a great starting point for anyone wanting to understand social structuration.
Note that Gerrish is not wielding this analytical tool ironically: like the individuals involved in maintaining the structures he talks about, he understands that language is structure, is control. He states: “If your language is controlled, you are controlled.” It’s not passed me by that, beyond this analysis, he assumes there is a right way and wrong to use language — including in respect of how to run a state, how to promote religion, etc. — but my point here is not to show up the linguistic gaps in Gerrish’s appropriation of non-conservative discourse. Gerrish understands language is control. But what do those individuals involved in promoting efficient leadership in pursuit of social justice understand? If you asked them — if you could find one — about their part in creating more intrusive structures of control through their interventions, what would they say? (And please don’t refer me, as some have done, to the Common Purpose website, where participants speak blandly.) Do they visualize themselves as the positive element in a duality of good and bad control?*
*This South African CP course attendee narrates his view of the complexity of power relations in a Machiavellian, or amoral utilitarian, take on leading beyond authority: “The part that brings about real change and effectiveness, whether we like it or not, is simply academic method and manipulation, end-justifies-the-means kind of stuff. Having a pure original intent is not necessarily more useful than having an evil one, provided you are able to relate to all of the required players required for your vision in a manner which gains you influence”.
Posted by Neil
on June 2, 2008 at 11:01 pm
Tags: Consciousnesses, Counterculture, Regionalism, Spatiality, ventriloquism
7 comments | Permalink
Bo Diddley
Here he come and there he goes:
RIP Ellas Otha Bates
Posted by Neil
on June 2, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Tags: Uncategorized
1 comment | Permalink