| 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-fa
ctory 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
decided to go.
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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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| | 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 | |
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| | wary of “The Cloud” but
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
before we commit to a | |
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