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What if Leeds carried on as it is..?

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Leeds Architecture

This is an interesting question asked on the What If Leeds.…website (registration required before you can contribute)

The underlying sense is that perhaps Leeds is fine.  We can just keep on keeping on.  Now I am sure that the sustainability crew would have a thing or two to say about that.  Interestingly they haven’t, yet.  As might those who don’t get to share in the benefits of living in the city, the poor and marginalised.

But, change is inevitable, progress is not.  Leeds’ own Max McKeown taught me that.  The art of strategy is about increasing the chances of progress being achieved, because change takes care of itself….
The real problem here is in the methodology that we use to try to think about change and ensure that it is progressive.
The current vision and plan methodology is, how can I put this, a little clunky.  A touch slow.  Impractical.
However if we write it off and do nothing then the usual suspects will maintain power so that they and their friends can order the city as they would like – some would say as  a big investment opportunity to suck disposable income from a city region while providing the promise of good work and jobs for all.
We need a process for influencing strategy in the city that is a)continuous and b) gives everyone a voice and power in the process.
We need a market place of visions where we can choose to work towards as many or as few as each of us personally prefer.  We need to use visions to enable self-organisation, conversation and action.  Not to produce statutory documents.  We need personal visions of what progress means – not just a ‘city’ vision.
We should be thinking about how we continually facilitate a process of ’emergent change’ rather than a vision session every 5 years followed by decades of bureaucratic management in its pursuit.  No-one does strategy like this anymore, do they?
But what is this process really about?
  • Are we giving a steer to the city fathers so that they can benevolently chart our progress to a better place?
  • Or are the city fathers really trying to engage us in creating our own future?
  • Or is this just a necessary/statutory piece of ‘consultation’?
Time will tell.
But Leeds has to change.  The only questions are how, and who will benefit?
I think it is time for Leeds to have a complete rethink about how it organises itself to be a truly innovative city.  And innovation (the prodigal child of strategy) is not an elite sport.
It is very much for all of us.

When the bureaucrats show up in Leeds….

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‘Bureaucrat’ to me is not a dirty word.  I happen to think we need people to organise policies and procedures to bring some sense of organisation and pattern.  To enforce the rules when they need enforcing.  Government and governance can be good.  As long as they remember certain things.

Bureaucrats have been turning up at meetings organised by people who do not work in the official bureaucracies of the city.  They are not employed by the Council, or Business Link, or the Regional Development Agency, or the Arts Council.  But they recognise gaps that these agencies leave and they fill them.  There are enormous gaps left in the online world (anyone tell me of a bureaucracy that does a good job of engagement online?) and the world of the independent and the creative.

These ‘worlds of ones’ are difficult to service for bureaucracies who prefer to batch process large groups of similar types as this offers a much more cost efficient way to ‘achieve’ the outputs that they are contracted to achieve.   At least on the surface.

For me the presence of the bureaucrats is a very welcome one.  The more diverse the group the more potential for something interesting to happen!  They bring skills, resources, political insights and a certain knowledge about how things actually get done in the city that few of us can match.

It is interesting to watch the way in which some of the bureaucrats engage.  For some there is much  note-taking and reporting back, but very little interaction or contribution.  For others the contributions are mainly defensive and explanatory, providing the background to a particular campaign or decision that the ‘world of ones’  has been less than impressed by.  And some perhaps offer personal opinions, thoughts and beliefs, fearlessly, recognising that they attend these conversations as people and not primarily as bureaucrats.  And some, perhaps most yo an feel are torn between keeping their heads down and ‘managing’ risk or just diving in and facing the consequences, whatever they may be, later on.

Leeds Council and its agencies are beginning to wake up to the ‘online community’ (I hate that label as most of my life is not lived online).   What is interesting for me know is to see what happens now.

Are we (The Twitterati, the Web 2.0 Evangelists, the ‘people that slag us off’ as we were recently described) simply a new addition to the list of ‘stakeholders’ to be ‘managed’? Or is there an understanding that perhaps things have changed.  That hyperlinks subvert hierarchy and bureacracy.  That we may be impossible to manage but might respond well to engagement and facilitation. That we are not interested in justification and defence but in relevance, identity and soul.  That co-creation might offer a way forward?

We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.  I wonder if we will be able to develop a way of working in the city that blends the best of chaos and order.

Who is up for Chaordic Leeds?

Elvis said it best: “We can’t go on together with suspicious minds.”

We’re both inside corporations and outside them. The boundaries that separate our conversations look like the Berlin Wall today, but they’re really just an annoyance. We know they’re coming down. We’re going to work from both sides to take them down. – Cluetrain Manifesto

Green Grows the Economy – O

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Is ‘sustainable green infrastructure that supports our economic development’ an achievable goal?

Sustainable economic growth on a finite planet?

Sustainable economic growth in a finite city?

Some say ‘Yes’ – Carbon capture and storage creating thousands of jobs, hydrogen powered buses and carbon emissions reductions

Other say ‘No’ – It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism

How will this play out in the Vision for Leeds?

It’s NOT all about the economy, STUPID!

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So the coalition has major plans to re-balance the economy.

It seems that as far as the UK is concerned this re-balancing means shifting from being paid to move money around (financial services) to the production of wealth through the creation of value by manufacturing and value adding services.  It also seems to imply shifting the economic engine away from the South East…getting the rest of us to pull our weight.

Local Economic Partnerships and a £500bn regional growth fund (a fraction of the budgets available to the Regional Development Agencies when they led this work) are being set up to make it happen.

This sort of re-structuring of the quangos in pursuit of the holy grail of economic growth has been going on for decades.  And I am sceptical about what it achieves.

It configures largely the same people, sitting around largely the same tables having largely the same conversations (skill needs, infrastructure development, investment readiness etc), pulling on the same ‘economic’ levers (vocational training schemes, growth investment funds, business support, enterprise zones, ever diluted ‘apprenticeships’ in pursuit over more skilled jobs) and getting pretty much the same, generally disappointing, results – just under a different brand.

The majority of people are not engaged, leadership is weak and one dimensional (economic growth is king) and the whole shooting match leaves most of us as passive recipients of whatever the private sector led quangos decide to do.  Perhaps invest in the waterfront, build an Arena, a new relief road, or a large mixed use development, you know, flats and shops and workspaces and all….

Why?

Well I believe at the root of the problem is the misguided believe that it is all about the economy.  That the economy is a puzzle to be solved that is disconnected from other aspects of how we choose to live.  If we can just get the economy right – then the rest will surely fall into place.  I think that even if we did ‘just get the economy right’ we would be in no danger of approaching utopia any time soon.    A growing economy seems at least as much progress trap as progress.   Even if we could run ‘the economy’ in a way that delivered ‘no more boom and bust’ I really don’t believe that it alone help us to achieve the ‘better’ communities that we crave.  We have been throwing cash at our most deprived communities for decades and progress remains slow.

When we treat the economy as a closed system, as some kind of sacred cow two inter-related problems occur.

Firstly we start to treat human beings as ‘factors of production’ that we can manipulate and influence for the good of the economy.  The anointed can encourage us onto our bikes, into big society, or to look at ‘opportunities’ in construction, retail, call centres etc, all in the name of ‘the economy’.  Volition, aspiration and enterprise are dulled at the service of the economy.  Just keep your heads down, do as your told, and we will deliver stable economic growth is the message.  Hardly the recipe for an enterprise culture.

The second thing that happens by treating ‘the economy’ as a sacred cow is that the creative tension that lies at the heart of truly inspiring innovation is lost.  The one-dimensional focus on GVA stops us from pondering the really big questions such as:

  • How do we create sustainable economic growth and build communities in which we are proud to live?
  • How do we design work so that it is productive and promotes well-being and happiness?
  • How do we create wealth and manage the transition to a sustainable steady state economy?
  • How do we build an economy that includes all of those who want to find meaningful work?

Instead by making the economy the holy grail we get a society that on the one hand pursues economic growth (anyone for Going Up a League) while on the other hand provides crumbs from the table to ameliorate the negative social impacts that presumably are seen as just the price that we have to pay for a great economy (How about we Narrow the Gap too).  Cultural and creative activities are judged merely by their impact on the economy rather than the soul.

One of the real pleasures, and lessons I learned, from working with Danone at their social innovation lab was the way that they knew that it was these creative tensions that held the key to breakthrough innovation.  By choosing to split out the economy from wider questions of community, sustainability and well-being I believe we trap ourselves in the same old sterile debates amongst the same old business voices.

It is not just Local Enterprise Partnerships and their various fore-runners that do this.  Councils do it too (Leeds Council is based on four directorates, Adult Social Services, Children’s Services, City Development and Neighbourhoods and Environment).

The Leeds MPs, who I am delighted to see have pledged to overcome party differences to advocate for the benefit of the City in their Team Leeds endeavours, have agreed that each MP will have an individual policy portfolio.  This is sure once again to separate ‘the economy’ from other aspects of community development.  In the competition for resources that is bound to ensue I am sure it will be the ‘all about the economy’ mantra that will carry the day.  No surprise too that  Leeds Chamber of Commerce played a key part in the Team Leeds initiative.

Now of course we have to organise somehow.

Specialisation and the division of labour make sense.  But let’s make sure that the way to choose to slice things up does not ignore vital interconnections and does not allow us to consistently put the cart before the horse.  To allow one part of the whole system to dominate the conversation and allow the benefits of development to accrue to the few.  For the business interests to accrue too much power.

  • Anyone for a whole systems perspective?
  • Understanding the city as a complex adaptive system rather than as a reducible puzzle to be solved?
  • Time for innovation?

The Challenge of Leadership in Leeds

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One of the big challenges of leadership is that, once you assume it, you are there to be shot at.

It is not necessarily that people want to bring you down.  But they do want to know that ‘the leaders’ know their stuff, that they are credible.  That they are worth following on a journey.  That they deserve the commitment of discretionary time and effort too.  That it will all make a positive difference in the end.

In leadership, you have to earn your followers…

The problem is further compounded if:

  • leaders choose to more or less replicate a leadership process that the last time around didn’t pull up any trees
  • there is even a whiff of a suspicion that this is not a genuine attempt at leadership but a bit of a box-ticking exercise undertaken at the behest of ‘head office’
  • there is no clarity about how a vision, once developed will be used to really engage and mobilise the talent, skills and resources of all stakeholders
  • different opinions, instead of being heard, are simply denied and refuted

When some of these conditions are met, then vision based leadership becomes very, very difficult.  Attempts are likely to be met with, at best, ‘passive aggression’.  And I think that this is the situation facing us in Leeds at the moment with the Leeds Vision 2030 process.  It is a situation that faces many leadership teams.

People are giving up time and money to engage in a leadership process that should be a very high stakes game for the city.  Shaping our international profile, providing a platform for a socially just society, rising to an array of carbon and environmental sustainability challenges and delivering an economy that works, are just a few of the opportunities and challenges that the process needs to address.

This is why I think some people, myself included, were disappointed when we first saw the new ‘Leeds Owl‘  and strapline that have been developed to brand the Vision 2030 exercise.  Personally I think that Phil Kirby’s criticisms are justified. So too Lee Hickens.  And I have made some observations about the symbolic meaning of the owl. In what is a multi-cultural and international city we should show some sensitivity and awareness of what our city symbol means in parts of Japanese, Hindu and African history.

There are all sorts of things that the council is now doing that I think show signs of progress.  Setting up facebook pages and twitter feeds for example.  Far more council staff seem to be really engaging, online and off, in some of the stuff that is happening in the city.   But these tools are double edged swords.  Reputations take a long time to build online and can be very quickly lost.  They will certainly surface more and more critical responses (let’s face it few of us find the time to write a response that says ‘Great work, keep it up!’) than more traditional and ‘managed’ consultations

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhmjnYKlVnM]

But it seems there is still astro-turfing going on.  It can be tricky to sort out the authentic voices.  And web2.0 savvy folks will forgive many things – but bad design and perceptions of inauthenticity are not amongst them!

I believe the ‘What If Leeds…’ logo debate is only partly about the aesthetics and meaning of the brand.

It is, for me at least, much more importantly a signifier of a very important question.  Can we work with Leeds City Council and its mechanisms for exercising leadership in the city, or should this be a DIY job?  We just keep on organising and doing what we can to shape life in the city by doing our own stuff.

Is the council a credible and trustworthy partner for local people already running themselves into the ground doing what they can.  Or will it just sap our time, energy and morale?

Will the engagement continue once the Vision is developed, bound and on the shelf?

Personally I am very optimistic that the appointment of Tom Riordan shows a real willingness to engage and partner more effectively.  But there is a lot to learn on both sides if we are to make this work.

At the moment I think Leeds is a more exciting City than it has been for a long time.  Interesting things are happening at the grass-roots in business, culture, community development, marketing and technology.   And, if we can get the engagement with the council right, we might be able to pull off something of real importance for the city.   But we must have confidence in those we engage with and their ability to manage effectively the complex process for strategic change that they have chosen to use.  And we must earn their trust too.  This is a two-way process.

It is not just about ‘us’ going on a journey with ‘them’.  It is about all of us journeying together.  Learning has to be done on all sides.

Or should we just go it alone?