Creative Tension in Downing Street

Earlier posts on this blog have explored Creative Tension in the White House - from FDR to the Donald - and analysed them in terms of my OrgIntelligence framework. In this post, I want to look at the UK experience, drawing on a recent report in the Guardian.

Those who worked closely with him say Johnson encourages rows and tensions over policies as he considers all sides of the argument and figures out what he will do next. Some argue that it generates a creative energy in which he thrives and is the process by which he arrives at a final decision. Ask others, and they say he cannot make up his mind until options have been whittled down by time and after those he relies on to walk out in exasperation. Syal

The article quotes several people talking about the Prime Minister's leadership style, based on various ideas about decision-making, risk and diversity. There are also some remarks about the ethical implications.

Previous articles about Mr Johnson's leadership discuss his management style with cabinet colleagues and advisers (Simpson), and his style when addressing the nation (Moss). Whatever he may think in private about the challenges of Brexit or COVID-19, and whatever difficulties he gets into when discussing solutions with his colleagues and advisers, the Prime Minister's instinct apparently leads him to present them to the public in extremely simple and confident terms.

Post-heroic leadership seems to be the order of the day. Stokes and Stern talk about the need to adopt a less gung-ho style when presenting the government's approach to wicked problems. They quote from a paper by Keith Grint advocating several supposedly anti-heroic behaviours: curiosity and sense-making ("asking questions"), bricolage ("clumsy solutions"), and ranking collective intelligence above individual genius.

The UK government's approach to the COVID-19 pandemic has sometimes seemed erratic and inconsistent. But given the complexity of the problem, and the volatile and ambiguous data on which decisions and policies were supposedly based, a more consistent and single-minded approach might not have turned out any better. 

In Greek myth, the Gordian knot stands for wicked problems, and Alexander's simple yet imaginative solution quickly resolves the problem. To the supporters of Brexit, this represents the only possible escape from European satrapy. Nothing post-heroic about Alexander. 

So what does that tell us about Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson?

---

 

Keith Grint, Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions: The Role of Leadership (Clinical Leader 1/2, December 2008)

Gloria Moss, Is Boris Johnson's leadership style inclusive? (HR Magazine, 23 August 2019)

Per Morten Schiefloe, The Corona crisis: a wicked problem (Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, 2021; 49: 5–8)

Paul Simpson, What is Boris Johnson's leadership style? (Management Today, 11 October 2019)

Jon Stokes and Stefan Stern, Boris Johnson needs to show a ‘post-heroic’ style of leadership now (The Conversation, 27 April 2020)

Rajeev Syal, Does Boris Johnson stir up team conflict to help make up his mind? (The Guardian, 1 March 2021)

Related posts: Creative Tension in the White House (April 2017)

Leadership versus Governance

@j2bryson has commented on her blog about the fate of Google's Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (ATEAC), to which she had been appointed.

She argues that the people who were appointed to the ATEAC were selected because they were "prominent" in the field. She notes that "although being prominent doesn't mean you're the best, it probably does mean you're at least pretty good, at least at something".

Ignoring the complexities of university politics, academics generally achieve prominence because they are pretty good at having interesting and original ideas, publishing papers and books, coordinating research, and supervising postgraduate work, as well as representing the field in wider social and intellectual forums (e.g. TED talks). Clearly that can be regarded as an important type of leadership.

Bryson argues that leading is about problem-solving. And clearly there are some aspects of problem-solving in what has brought her to prominence, although that's certainly not the whole story.

But that argument completely misses the point. The purpose of the ATEAC was not problem-solving. Google does not need help with problem-solving, it employs thousands of extremely clever people who spend all day solving problems (although it may sometimes need a bit of help in the diversity stakes).

The stated purpose of the ATEAC was to help Google implement its AI principles. In other words, governance.

When Google published its AI principles last year, the question everyone was asking was about governance:

• @mer__edith (Twitter 8 June 2018, tweet no longer available) called for "strong governance, independent external oversight and clarity"

• @katecrawford (Twitter 8 June 2018) asked "How are they implemented? Who decides? There's no mention of process, or people, or how they'll evaluate if a tool is 'beneficial'. Are they... autonomous ethics?" 

• and @EricNewcomer (Bloomberg 8 June 2018) asked "who decides if Google has fulfilled its commitments".

Google's appointment of an "advisory" council was clearly a half-hearted attempt to answer this question.

Bryson points out that Kay Coles James (the most controversial appointee) had some experience writing technology policy. But what a truly independent governance body needs is experience monitoring and enforcing policy, which is not the same thing at all.

People talk a lot about transparency in relation to technology ethics. Typically this refers to being able to "look inside" an advanced technological product, such as an algorithm or robot. But transparency is also about process and organization - ability to scrutinize the risk assessment and the design and the potential conflicts of interest. There are many people performing this kind of scrutiny on a full-time basis within large organizations or ecosystems, with far more experience of extremely large and complex development programmes than your average professor.

Had Google really wanted a genuinely independent governance body to scrutinize them properly, could they have appointed a different set of experts? Can people appointed and paid by Google ever be regarded as genuinely independent? And doesn't the word "advisory" give the game away? As Brustein and Bergen point out, the actual decisions are made by an internal body, the Advanced Technology Review Council, and external critics doubt that this body will ever seriously challenge Google's commercial or strategic interests.

Veena Dubal suggests that the most effective governance over Google is currently coming from Google's own workforce. It seems that their protests were significant in getting Google to disband the ATEAC, while earlier protests (re Project Maven) had led to the production of the AI principles in the first place. Clearly the kind of courageous leadership demonstrated by people like Meredith Whittaker isn't just about problem-solving.

---

Joshua Brustein and Mark Bergen, The Google AI Ethics Board With Actual Power Is Still Around (Bloomberg, 6 April 2019)

Joanna Bryson, What we lost when we lost Google ATEAC (7 April 2019), What leaders are actually for (13 May 2019)

Veena Dubal, Who stands between you and AI dystopia? These Google activists (The Guardian, 3 May 2019)

Bobbie Johnson and Gideon Lichfield, Hey Google, sorry you lost your ethics council, so we made one for you (MIT Technology Review 6 April 2019

Abner Li, Google details formal review process for enforcing AI Principles, plans external advisory group (9to5 Google, 18 December 2018

Eric Newcomer, What Google's AI Principles Left Out (Bloomberg 8 June 2018)

Kent Walker, An external advisory council to help advance the responsible development of AI (Google, 26 March 2019, updated 4 April 2019)


Related post: Data and Intelligence Principles From Major Players (June 2018)

Updated 15 May 2019

Political parties and organizational intelligence 3

According to Wikipedia, a party leader is the most powerful official within a political party. I think this statement is debatable. Party leaders in recent history have had varying degrees of power and influence over their own party members, let alone the wider political system.

Writing in The Atlantic during the election campaign, @jon_rauch expressed strong opposition to the conventional view of party leadership.

The very term party leaders has become an anachronism. ... There no longer is any such thing as a party leader. There are only individual actors, pursuing their own political interests and ideological missions willy-nilly, like excited gas molecules in an overheated balloon. ...

This is not only a problem of leadership and individual agency, but also a question of the nature of the political party as a viable system with collective agency and intelligence. Rauch continues

The political parties no longer have either intelligible boundaries or enforceable norms.

The relationship between the politician and the party has always been problematic - consider Winston Churchill who changed party allegiance twice before becoming party leader. But the root cause of this problem is unclear.

Political parties are what things look like when you put politicians in charge.

— David Allen Green (@DavidAllenGreen) August 3, 2016

@DavidAllenGreen or they are machines for turning people into politicians

— Sean Owen-Moylan (@SeanOwenMoylan) August 3, 2016

---

Jonathan Rauch, How American Politics Went Insane (The Atlantic, July 2016)

Wikipedia: Party Leader (retrieved 4 Feb 2017)


Related posts

Political parties and organizational intelligence 1 (May 2012)
Political parties and organizational intelligence 2 (June 2015)

Developing cultures of high-quality care

#kfleadership Excellent lecture at @TheKingsFund this evening by Professor Michael West. Here are some of my notes.

---

When he left college West was short of money, so he took a job in the coal mines. Productivity was important to everyone, and the pay at the end of the week depended on the quantity of coal extracted. But there was one thing more important than productivity, namely safety.

In many organizations this would just be lip service. But in the coal mines, safety was taken very seriously, and management actions were completely congruent with this.

West argued that the same should apply in the Health Service. Of course productivity is fundamentally important, but the number one priority should not be productivity but high-quality and safe patient care.

Valuing patients and staff turns out to be good management. West's argument is not merely based on rhetoric, but is supported by data. Patient outcomes and patient satisfaction are highly correlated with staff satisfaction and morale, and these in turn are correlated with staff engagement, which West defined in terms of three things: pride, intrinsic engagement and involvement in decisions. Ultimately this links back to improved productivity.

Someone in the audience objected that productivity must always be the top priority, otherwise you risk running out of money to pay for patient care. West replied that productivity follows from good people management. He agreed that the NHS has a great deal to learn from the private sector, and expressed a hope that private sector expertise (including non-executive board members) would not be limited to the Marketing and Finance perspectives.


West affirmed that the NHS is full of intelligent and highly motivated people, and said that the traditional command and control mode of leadership was such a waste of resource. The key role of leaders is to learn from staff, and to realize the potential of the people.

People at all levels require courage to accept challenging targets - in other words, to strive for things that they won't always achieve. The organization must accept and learn from failure to reach these targets. Blaming people for failure to excel is not only stupid and unfair, it is also counter-productive, because it makes people risk-averse and inhibits them from striving for anything that isn't guaranteed in advance.

Leadership includes the courage to seek unwelcome information - for example feedback that indicates things not going well.

After the lecture, I was chatting to a group from a London teaching hospital about accountability. As I see it, accountability doesn't only mean taking responsibility for the consequences of one's decisions (such as short-sighted cost-cutting) but also taking responsibility for what one chooses to pay attention to. One of the classic examples in Moral Philosophy concerns a ship owner who sends a ship to sea without bothering to check whether the ship was sea-worthy. Some argue that the ship owner cannot be held responsible for the deaths of the sailors, because he didn't actually know that the ship would sink. I think most people would see the ship owner having a moral duty of diligence, and would regard him as accountable for neglecting this duty.

In the current climate, the NHS leadership has a duty to achieve high quality patient care and productivity, and the evidence from Professor West is that this can best be achieved by engaging staff at all levels. Executive boards must surely be held accountable if they neglect to do this.

---

See also Culture of Fear (Storify, 27 Feb 2013)

The ship-owner example can be found in an essay called "The Ethics of Belief" (1877) by W.K. Clifford, in which he states that "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence".


Related post: Ethics and Intelligence (April 2010), Agility and Fear (February 2013)

Updated 28 Feb 2013

Leadership and Renunciation

Web searching for Leadership and Renunciation, I got lots of spiritual stuff. Plus commentary on Sonia Gandhi renouncing leadership.

Web searching for Burning Ones Bridges, I find lots of material advising against it. Web consensus (thanks to Google) is to leave your options open But then Google merely leads us into thinking with the majority.

The emphasis here is on what the leader renounces for himself or herself - including leadership itself. But my interest is on what the leader renounces on behalf of the group - deliberately closing down options in order to increase the focus and commitment of the group.
 

Buddhist Leadership

Ven. Thanissaro Bhikkhu (Phra Nicholas Thanissaro), Keynote Speech: Roles & Challenges of Buddhist Organizations in the Next Decade (WFBY Buddhist Youth Leadership Seminar, Dhammakaya Foundation, Thailand)

Lecture One: Three challenges face Buddhist leaders which cannot be overcome by usual leadership considerations of time, money and human resources

Lecture Two: Buddhist leaders must: have the same vision and standards as the Buddha, take responsibility and practise Buddhism for themselves, keep up communication with the rest of society, lead others to do good and train leaders to lead others to do good

 

Vaisnava-Christian Dialogue

Chaitanya Charan Das, Isn’t Renunciation a Sign of Frustration? (thespiritualscientist.com, 17 October 2013

 

Indian Politics

S Leelavathi, Price of Leadership: Emulation and Envy (India Times, undated)

 

See also Choice and Action (January 2004)

Choice and action

In his post on Imagination and Discipline (January 2004), Aidan rightly indicates that leadership often involves generating new choices for the people and organizations under this leadership.

However, we can sometimes be paralysed by too many choices. And in the consumer society we may have the illusion of choice.

Leadership also involves the renunciation of certain choices. Making commitments, burning your bridges. Perhaps this is what Aidan means by discipline, but I think that word sounds too static. 

See also Leadership and Renunciation (June 2004)

Leadership and Simplicity

Leaders (both in business and politics) often insist on a simple view of the world. They adopt patterns of thought (such as either/or thinking) that more complex thinkers regard with suspicion or even contempt. Strong foreground issues are sketched against the vaguest possible background. For their part, leaders often impatiently dismiss more complex or precise reasoning, perhaps seeing it as a symptom of resistance to action and change.

There are two possible explanations for this phenomenon. The first is that leaders actually do have a strong and simple picture of the world. This may even be one of the characteristics that qualifies a person for leadership.

The second explanation is that part of the leadership task is the construction and propagation of a sufficiently strong and simple picture of the world to carry people and organizations forward. Perhaps some leaders privately cherish more complex and nuanced pictures of the world, but they believe it to be tactically unwise to share these complexities with the public, and discourage their immediate followers from discussing them. They may even practise the kind of mental self-discipline that suppresses their own doubts – thus edging us back into Explanation One.

In his post on Leadership Levels, Aidan talks about leaders speaking only of measures and numbers. This may be part of the same phenomenon – the leaders only talk about what they are confident their followers and public can both understand and enact. Meanwhile, leadership is often only granted to those who are trusted to operate in predictable (low-level?) ways.

Fortunate indeed are the leaders whose followers and public can understand and enact more challenging material, such as purposes and values. Of course some wise and brave leaders may have a private intention to raise the level at which their followers and public can understand and act.

However, there are obvious difficulties to communicating such intentions in advance, except in the vaguest terms. A trusted leader may be given some licence to take an organization into unknown territory, but what if the trust is used up before the objectives are reached?

If we want to appreciate leadership, then, we need to pay attention not just to what leaders say, but also to what they do – inferring as much as possible from the behaviour of the systems these leaders inhabit.

Leadership levels

originally posted by Aidan

---

There is another dimension to leadership: the level at which action is considered, whether this is about change or whether it is about maintenance. At the lowest level leaders speak only of measures and numbers and only what can be measured is considered to be material in the organisational processes. At the highest level there is open discussion of the purposes of the organisation and the values by which it operates.


This concept of the level of leadership determines the scope for action by others in the organisation. Indeed it determines the scope for humanity in the organisation as it implies a level of respect and engagement.


Do we want self-aware organisations or would we rather they stayed in a more predictable place?