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
June 4th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
Hi Neil,
Thanks for the link. My hosting provider had a fire, so my blog was offline for a few days. All fixed now.
I think you’re right to call for a balanced online discussion about this - so I’m happy not to mention the more tongue in cheek stuff here.
A few things in response:
“Its news to me that only certain “weirdos” are interested in leadership:” - I wasn’t saying that only weirdos are interested in leadership, but just making the point that the language used nowadays could spark interest in potential conspiracy theorists. But I’m with you on the fact that ‘nobody would give a damn’ is a little throwaway.
In terms of expansion of leadership beyond authority, I’d use the positive impact that ‘thought leaders’ including prominent bloggers and writers have on our society (like Philip K. Dick). Their exciting ideas lead many people to make changes in the world, and making changes outside of ones authority is a valid thing to undertake in a democratic society.
Demonstrating by marching, writing to your MP, blogging about an idea you’ve just had, mentioning a problem-solving idea to someone with the ability to make it happen - these are where we can take those ideas and make changes in the world. Is ‘leadership’ becoming more network-based? Is that perhaps a core issue here?
Out of interest, Common Purpose recently reacted to the criticisms they’ve been having and have posted more information on their website in response:
http://www.commonpurpose.org.uk/home/aboutus/trusteestatement.aspx
June 10th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Thanks for taking the time to reply, Stef.
I take your point about “thought leaders”. The words and deeds of people with something to say and something to offer will always strike a chord with people.
We shouldn’t necessarily assume that “thought”, this almost-tangible thing that is harvested to produce the ‘right’ results, progresses in more or less parallel lines. For example, how can principled dissent be incorporated successfully into a progressive-type model of society without being sidelined as unhelpful or otherwise obstructive? Can principled dissent not be allowed in respect of social policy?
Perhaps P K Dick would have appreciated his ideas, which form a coherent critical commentary on the politics of postmodern society, being acted on. Perhaps we have acted on them. I think he’d be rather miffed to be misrepresented as a “thought leader”. If anything, he was a visionary dissenter with little affection for organisational structures and managerial culture.
Demonstrating, writing and blogging are great examples of showing publicly where the power lies. Change happens when people make it happen in the public sphere.
Using contacts and influence is a different order of political action. Can ‘change’ that happens within, or even between, organisations really be called change?
We should differentiate between political change called for by most people and organisational change (let’s call it “management”) when it occurs in a semi-public space beyond the gaze of the people.
June 13th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
I’ve recently commenced a Leadership Program at work. They spend a lot of time differentiating between leaders and managers. It looks to me like old-fashioned status anxiety.
In a service economy, or a marketised public sector, there are a lot more people falling into the category of manager than there used to be, and lots of jobs done by people whose parents were working class now require management skills. If you run a cafe, like my brother, you used to just be someone’s boss. Shout at them, sack them, buy them drinks. That relationship is now much more formal, and requires specialist skills and knowledge effectively to navigate through it. That knowledge and skills framework is broadly managerial. But every relief bar manager in Brighton has it. Saying you’re a manager is like saying you’re a graduate - it might have impressed your girlfriend’s Dad in 1990, but now it means next to nothing.
For someone in my position, 40, senior NHS manager, unless I become an executive (which is next to impossible) I need to differentiate myself from the Asda-clad middle mass. So they tell me I’m a leader. They talk a lot about emotional intelligence, self-awareness, etc. It’s all rather vague self-improving officer class stuff - 40% Paddy Ashdown, 40% Sgt Wilson, 15% Branson, 5% Braveheart. Very New Labour.
“Managerial” is a term of abuse in government, implying attention to the detail at the expense of the context, mechanistic as opposed to visionary. Old as opposed to new. We pass, like masons, through degrees, from the lower being, extraction industry, through manufacture, to service, to ideas. And ultimately to light. Leadership as gnosis. Vision. The Olympics, the Millenium Dome.
I suspect that CP is a fistula between academic management theory and some socialist think-tank business. Really just a mind game. If you want to effect change in the public sector it’s pretty much a case of: be really good at your job, network, accumulate cultural capital, pick your fights carefully, etc etc. It’s not brain surgery. If you want to effect change in the private sector, be rich. If you’re interested in collectivity, go home. You’re thirty years too late. We’re all managers now, and by 2012 we’ll all be leaders. Then what? Wizards? Demiurges? The future, Palmer, is bright.
June 14th, 2008 at 8:39 am
Thanks for that, Alan. I think “fistula” describes CP admirably.
The language of futurity is necessarily bright, as you suggest. Dismal, though, to encounter language (communication, theory) pitted against language (heteroglossia, life) in an attempt to own discourse.
Will the wisdom-fringed literature of leadership be any good? Organisational networks would like to be epic: vainglory, epithets and hard death; something to really live by. But there’d have to be a separate degree of ideas futures leaders. Bards, probably, in the Medieval Welsh political sense, rather than in the lingering Romantic Druidic sense of dreaming the organisation. Listing the targets achieved. Mycanaean cultures survive mysteriously, in epic poetry, despite their material textual history comprising lists. So literary separations of the ideas and the things of culture can be done.
In 2,000 years will some poor wight narrator demiurge be so intrigued with leadership and ideas futures that he isolates himself mad feeling their sense in Cantos collating ideas pasts?
August 10th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
An as yet unnamed elite, lawless organisation is actually running the country by stealth, in effect a silent insurrection from within. The control must be total, absolute, and lead top-down from the centre. What and who cannot be controlled must be destroyed by nulabor. An unelected cadre already runs the country, bypassing Parliament, the Judiciary, and all the institutional safeguards that were designed to ensure our freedoms.
Meanwhile, it is daily reported how our leaders lie, cheat, steal, bully and abuse, yet there is a reticence - for fear of retribution - to using the appropriate description - institutionalised corruption - that has repeatedly, relentlessly, ruthlessly, systematically and cynically destroyed the lives of anyone arbitrarily deemed to be a potential threat.
It is an expensive business to run an insurrectionist alternative power cult in parallel with what the ordinary decent citizen perceives as democracy. However, any perception of local democracy, people empowerment, or meaningful enagement in consultation to inform and contribute to the decision-making processes is a carefully engineered illusion.
It is necessary to create control structures, finance them, then train people to head these on behalf of the nulabor cult, to pay for fixers, and to employ the miriad of minions in the non-jobs. The money from this comes from both the current central government, and from the billions of Eurofunds. These created structures are used to facilitate the falsification of evidence of prior consultation and concensus needed for eligibility for the funds. To staff these structures, and to ensure placement of the chosen people in the right places, there needs to be a nulabor centrally controlled leadership training establishment, working as a charity. The truth is, the training establishment is not training leaders at all, it is doing the opposite, training automatons to do the bidding of their masters, regardless of morality, ethics or the law.
Why a charity? Because charities do not attract the same level of cycnicism and scrutiny as public authorities, they are not subject to freedom of information laws, they are easy and naive prey for the nulabor elite, and charities are easy organisations for strategic positioning to exert influence, interest and control far beyond their legal remit. In addition, where the chosen leaders are placed in a charity positioned for strategic control, they form the perfect base for money-laundering. Where existing charities can’t be taken over, they are destroyed, and new charities created. Where charities prove themselves to be providing a needed service, they are targeted for privatisation, and the tax-liable jobs falsely claimed to be employment creation. There is no job creation, just transfer.
The secretly chosen recipients of ‘training’ are to be found in highly lucrative positions of many of the decision-making quangos with financial controls. They also ensure that the nulabor social-re-engineering projects are funded in preference to any other, whilst refusing any applications not in keeping with the nulabor agenda.
Once the right steps are in place, the nulabor project can continue unfettered, having control of people, publicity, processes, and pecuniary pursuits. Threats are destroyed. All this being done covertly, with the cadre elite of the cult even deciding who can have what information.
This nulabor government is corrupt. The nulabor corruption is absolute, lead from the top down, imposed through all tiers of social and government control, down to street level. Being rotten to the core and from the core, everything it touches it taints. Having neither the ability nor inclination to correct itself, outside intervention is indicated.
This statement can be extended to democracy itself. Perhaps it is not only the government that must be replaced, but the style of government, as the current flavour leaves such a bad taste. Our leading politicians, to whom we are entitled to look for behavioural guidance, have failed to make the distinction between what is legal and what it right. Finding a loophole to do something does not make what is wrong, right. The very act of looking for a loophole is evidence of intent to act amorally. It is no use saying that no rules have been broken, and therefore the behaviour is OK. Those not acting in the spirit of the law, or not capable of making the distinction between right and wrong, have no place in our society, and certainly not as our leaders or representatives in any government.
In the UK, democracy is dead. Despite the claims to devolve democracy, empower people, or derogate decision-making, what we have seen is the creation and maintenance of an illusion of consultation, followed by false claims of concensus. In truth, central control is tightened, as so-called community leaders are politically placed and imposed, and so on upwards through every control tier to nulabor HQ.
SO now we have described what we have today, and how we arrived at this sorry state.
The next question must be, WHY ? and Where is all this leading us?
August 10th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
Thanks for commenting, Stygian.
Common Purpose is certainly elitist: it’s offering leadership training, after all, and we can’t all be leaders, at least according to those in charge. Whether it’s New Labour’s creature is another matter. I can see that Julia Middleton’s past link with Demos might lead you to make that link. But many of the individuals in the public sector who’ve been on CP training courses will still be working in it after the current government have been voted out, and not all of them will be New Labour members or even sympathisers. I suppose what you’re saying is that CP’s methodology links into New Labour’s policy direction. Perhaps it does, broadly. They’d say they’re just facilitating networking opportunities and giving people the confidence to make things happen on their terms.
Describing CP as a “NuLabor cult” involved in “silent insurrection” shows the strength of your feeling, but your language is a bit strong. You’re making a link between CP’s verbiage, in the context of the direction of travel of current government policy — I doubt it would be much different under the current opposition — and the piecemeal creation of a unified European state. There are many who’d agree with you. Whether it’s to be regarded as insurrection or not, the move towards a pan-European state is anything but silent. We’re being informed about it virtually all the time, every step of the way. The question is, how can we oppose it if we disagree with the principle? I guess you’d say that because we’ve no way of voting against a unified European state — no viable political party under our current voting system is offering such a policy choice — we’re being sidelined as an electorate.
I regard CP as part of a network that’s almost on a par with the Establishment of the past. Except those involved in setting up CP training would probably not regard themselves as establishment figures, being either impartial public sector officials, media types who flow through and float on the tide of events, aloof, and/or remnants of the political left who regard such status as reserved for the old-style political right wing. The criticism of the old establishment was that it prevented the progress of ideas and CP stresses that it’s doing the opposite. How could progressiveness ever be equated with establishment values? The answer is that the old establishment was, above all, an effective social and political network of like-minded individuals keen to make the system they believed in work as well as possible. CP’s a bastion of present establishment values.
Are the leadership trainees “secretly chosen”? The CP site says anyone can benefit from its training. But given the prices you’d need to be a wealthy individual to afford it. It would be good to know the criteria on which individuals are put forward for training by the organisations or companies they work for and the criteria used to pluck from obscurity those private individuals identified as potential leaders. How many private individuals have been identified and trained in that way? Does it happen? It would also be interesting to find out how many individuals pay for CP training. Could training bought from a charity be offset against tax?
I’d like to know how many people in the public sector have been/are being trained to network the CP way and how many have taken advantage of other opportunities. It would be good to see how diverse the market for the provision of such training is. I’m sure a charity like CP would be the first to point out the irony in one organisation’s having a virtual monopoly on diversity training.
“In the UK, democracy is dead”. Well, it’s not in great shape, but the idea is alive in people’s minds, despite years of publicity about the shortcomings of our political system (sleaze/cronyism/whatever flavour of underhandedness is currently in popular usage). What’s not helping the idea of democracy is the introduction of further layers of bureaucracy separating the people from the power. In this regard, I accuse regional governance and central government edicts administered by local authorities: these things are not examples of local empowerment.
I regard CP training, and any other form of managerial theory/practice — whether espousing networking, creative thinking, diversity awareness — as just another form of bureaucracy. It’s new establishment activism, adding value to the governance experience.
I agree that any claims made on behalf of the devolution of democracy at present ring hollow, given the drive towards increasing centralisation in this country and in Europe. For example, subsidiarity — the EU principle of devolving decision making to the lowest level possible — means, in Britain at the moment, moving towards the government giving local councils more responsibilities for making central government policy work and, at the same time, creating from scratch an additional tier of government above the supposedly newly empowered local councils, currently in the form of unelected regional assemblies and regional development agencies.