| Mick James says the consulting industry has made far too much money in the past helping clients swing from one extreme to another and this time around it can afford to suggest a little restraint. |
| The centre cannot hold |
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| | By Mick James
Every now and then
one catches a whiff of
what might be called
the zeitgeist. I last
got it a few years ago,
when an urge I couldn’t
explain caused me to put
my name down for an
allotment. Now people
are signing up in the
hope that they might be
able to pass then on to
the kids.
Recently my nostrils
started twitching at the
news that David Cameron
is planning to hand key
areas of health and
education service
delivery over to
workers’
cooperatives—but the
nice, John Lewis kind,
not the
occupying-the-motorbike-f
actory kind.
This chimes in with a
lot of rhetoric that’s
been flying around
recently: “distant
bureaucrats,”
“over-centralisation,”
“control freakery”.
Could we be in for a
decisive swing of the
pendulum towards
decentralisation and
devolution?
The news that we
could all be setting off
on a massive journey to
new organisational forms
is obviously good news
for those of us that
specialise in getting
clients wherever they’ve | |
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| | decided to go.
But haven’t we been
here before? We’ve all
heard a lot about the
demise of
command-and-control but
you don’t have to spend
too much time hanging
around with the C-suite
set to know that rumours
of its death have been
greatly exaggerated. And
empowerment? Who
remembers that?
There’s no greater
fan of John Lewis than
me, and a lot of the joy
of shopping there does
come from the
empowerment of the
staff. But that
empowerment is based on
deep and valuable
knowledge—knowledge is
power in this case.
The John Lewis
experience is somewhat
difficult to replicate.
Will it work in health
and education? It’s hard
to say. Cynically, one
might argue that the
problem with much of the
public sector is that
it’s run by and for the
workers already.
Less cynically, one
might wish to kick back
a bit about the “Sister
knows best” mentality.
It’s very similar to the
“experts—what do they
know?” mentality that so
often turns on
consultants.
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| | before we commit to a
weekend break.
If the recent
economic crisis has
taught us anything, it’s
that “local” covers a
pretty wide area. There
may have been a lot of
fuss about few remaining
local building societies
that escaped the global
meltdown, but few purely
local financial
institutions can survive
the collapse of local
employment, for example.
In all too any cases
being purely local and
totally devolved means
being completely
disempowered.
One doesn’t have to
be an outright fan of
the obsession of the
Blair/Brown centralism
to note some of the
positives of “joined-up”
thinking on the few
occasions when it has
managed to work. The
(admittedly limited)
progress that had been
made in shared services
in local and central
government shows that we
have all at least
achieved
proof-of-concept.
Technology, too,
offers ways of gaining
the knowledge and
communications benefits
once only available to
those that could afford
massive infrastructure
investments. You may be
wary of “The Cloud” but | |
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| | it’s there if you need
it.
Far be it from me to
stand in the way of the
zeitgeist, but the
consultancy industry has
made far too much money
in the past from helping
clients swing from one
end of the pendulum to
the other not to be able
to afford to suggest a
little restraint this
time. Before, so to
speak, we rip out all
our period features and
get the avocado bath
suites in again.
Every time an
organisational
structure—such as
co-operativism—is held
up as the magic wand
that will achieve
desirable outputs we
should hear the warning
bells. What makes you
think this structure
will create those
results? Have you
thought of what you
might lose if you
abandoned the old way
completely? And what is
it you are trying to
achieve anyway? After
all, if you really
believe in a
zeitgeist, you have to
believe that we can
create some kind of a
synthesis and make
progress rather than
merely going from one
extreme to another. | |
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I’m sure Sister knows
a lot of things, but
there’s also much that
doesn’t get taught in
the Hattie Jacques
school of nursing. I
pick on health because
it’s a great example of
where the centralisation
versus localism argument
gets bogged down.
Procurement in the NHS,
for example, illustrates
it well: localism
demands that every
surgeon gets to pick his
favourite drug, and
every GP prescribes her
favourite drugs. Good
procurement practice
suggests rigid category
management and single
vendor tenders based on
combined buying power.
As a country we are
hopelessly confused in
this area. We will
defend a “national”
health service to the
death, yet the politics
of devolution means we
must embrace localism in
Scotland and Wales. They
can’t both be right. We
want, and need, national
standards—otherwise we
end up (and this happens
now) researching the
quality of A&E in every
corner of the country | |
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