realisedevelopment.net

Just another WordPress site

Leadership – mass participation or elite sport?

by

Leadership in Leeds

How does a community get the leadership that it needs to thrive?

Is it a question of finding an elite cadre of movers and shakers, networking them, hot-housing them and amplifying their power?

Or is it about offering the opportunity for anyone to ‘lead’ on whatever matters most to them, their loved ones and their neighbours?

Can we design leadership development processes that:

  • support and reward mass participation?
  • are inclusive rather than exclusive?
  • respect local starting conditions (values, cultures and issues)?

Certainly this kind of leadership development is possible.

By giving people space to talk about what matters to them and encouraging them to think through what they can do about it and whether they want to move from words to actions we can find ‘leaders’.  But they rarely see themselves as such.  They don’t see their agenda as being ‘leadership’.  They may see it as developing a ‘local community website’, or ‘starting an urban gardening project’ or ‘finding opportunities for young people to learn and earn in our community’.  There are plenty of people looking to do plenty of good things and the truth is that what we usually describe as ‘Leadership Development’  is unlikely to help them in their work…

The Purpose of a City: economic development or something more?

by

Why do we choose to live cities?  What are they for?

Well, for many of us they are ‘Where the jobs are’.  We don’t choose to live in or near them.  We do so because that is how our economy is configured.  We are drawn into they city and ‘enslaved’ by it and the economy is exists to serve.  But many of us are, on the whole, happy slaves as the city fathers and their investor friends ensure we are regularly supplied with both  ‘bread and circuses’, superficial means of appeasement, from which they too can often make a handsome profit.

And, on one level, this is a purpose of the city.

To organise a modern population effectively and efficiently for the benefit of employers and those who bankroll and tax them.  They are above all else economic entities, where ‘culture’ and ‘community’ play secondary roles as part of the mechanisms for appeasement while the primary narrative is about the economy, productivity, profitability and gross domestic product.

As Margaret Thatcher put it “Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.”

But, we can look at a city differently.

We could choose to believe that “Head, heart and soul are the method; the object is to change the economy”

We can choose to see the city as a collection of people who have converged on a specific location because it offers them opportunities to do the things that they want to do, to be the person that they want to be and fulfil their potential.  In such a city the primary relationship would not be one of ‘enslavement’ to an economy but as a collaboration of powerful citizens in a participative democracy.  A city where citizens primary responsibility is to each other and to the future.  Where an economy is produced that serves people, both now and into the future.

Such a city would almost certainly not depend primarily on the development of its physical infrastructure, (Supercasino anyone? Or perhaps a high-speed train or station entrance to inspire the business folk?) but on psychological infrastructure.  A network of relationships, support and encouragement that valued people, regardless of wealth or education, ethnicity, gender, sexuality or age.  A psychological infrastructure in which help could be asked for and offered. A city in which collaboration, association and innovation in the pursuit of progress was everyone’s business.

Now THAT would be a city I would want to live in.

Improving the NHS – the role of social media

by

Nearly everyone I speak too recently has a horror story to share about their experiences with the NHS.  And nearly everyone has a fairy tale to tell as well.

For several decades now I have been contracted by various parts of the NHS at different times to provide management development and leadership training, to run assessment and development centres, to develop standards for the board of NHS trusts, to turn HR teams into organisational development teams and so on.  And for just about all of that time the training has been done against a permanent backdrop of policy and structural changes that makes real learning almost impossible.

So it was with some interest that I read about some work that the National Health Service Social Media Group had been doing to explore the potential of social media to transform healthcare. Recently this group have been talking about how the use of video cameras by patients could provide feedback to drive service development.

I love the idea of social media being used to report on both the good practice and the bad.  To shine a spotlight on all that we love and hate about how healthcare is delivered.

But, until we we build a culture where such data can be collected, analysed, reviewed and acted upon by experienced clinicians and managers with the time and resources to provide excellent management and leadership we run the risk of finding ourselves with ever more tearful and frustrated health professionals.

And I suspect that it would be the failures and lapses that would get the attention and the resources.  A culture of name and shame is unlikely to work in the long run.  And what would it do to the relationship between patient and staff?  Do we really want patients to be policing their own healthcare experience?  They can recognise and film obvious lapses of protocol and procedures, but the more subtle stuff?  And, do we really want service providers to change what they do just because someone is pointing a camera at them?

At its best great healthcare is delivered as a partnership between clinicians and patients.  I find it hard to see how this partnership can really thrive when when one party is busy filming the other.

It may have a role in driving out bad practice – but I am not convinced that it can ever drive excellence.

As Deming has shown us the road to excellence is reached by driving out fear, not by increasing it.