"Dear Emily"

I'm sitting in my office in London, writing my report this morning. It's very sunny and I can see the London eye and the Shard out of my window.  I go back to work in a month's time, to the Home Office, so I finally have a sort of 'essay crisis'. I'm meant to be at a Home Office conference today but this feels more important. I might try and get to the end of it.

On Tuesday I caught up with Sophi and Jennie and Paul, who all teach systems thinking, to reflect on what we've been doing and adapting from our core material. (Paul of course is my husband and ironically, that 90 mins was about the longest I've spent with him all week!) In the course of our conversation I started talking about my report.

"Who's it for?" asked one of them. "Well, it's for people who do policy and strategy in the centre of government. It's basically for me!", I answered. "I sort of want to write, 'Dear Emily. Please don't forget all the fantastic things you learnt in your Winston Churchill Fellowship year to listen to the citizen. Remember to get a witness in who's got a neutral perspective. Take courage. Create political cover. And so on."

"That sounds much more interesting than an executive summary" said Jennie. "Why don't you do that?"

So now I'm wondering if I should write some of the report as a letter to myself. Is it naff? Or a bit different?  Comments puh-lease!!!

Indebted. To Winston Churchill.

Winston Churchill owes 13 Rupees to the Bangalore Club. Churchill's entry is the 6th one from the bottom

I’ve spent the last 5 days in Bangalore staying at the Hotel Laika and the room that has become my home is now in the process of being ‘packed up’. I bought myself a new suitcase today (I bargained it down from 2500 to 2000 rupees to the pleasure of me and the guy selling it) so that I could fit in the clothing and wooden elephants I’ve bought for the kids and Paul.

Today is my last day in India, and the last day of my travels on this quest to understand more about collaboration. In two separate trips, I’ve visited Washington DC, Alexandria, Richmond Virginia, New Haven Connecticut, New York, Ottawa, Toronto, Santa Fe New Mexico and Albuquerque New Mexico, Arizona, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bangalore. I’ve been snowed on, rained on, and sweated, on two continents. I’ve stayed on friend’s floors, in 5* hotels, in a village hut, in a wood cabin, in lovely people’s spare rooms, in friendly guesthouses. I've eaten refritos, dahl, pancakes (& syrup), vegan pot pie, and I've drunk decaf lattes everywhere.

It was a very fitting day in so many ways. The sun shone brightly, and it poured with rain too. The variety of my interviews was large: government, non profit, social enterprise. I experienced fantastic hospitality from the owners of Hotel Laika. (Hospitality, generosity and connectedness have been constant themes of my 2 trips). And I got a brush with Winston Churchill too. (The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust have funded my trips to the USA, Canada and India.)

I saw a social enterprise this morning, Unnati, that gives vocational training to young adults. My interviewee was unfortunately ill, so I was given a tour instead. I unexpectedly found myself addressing classes of 20 people. “My name is Emily”, I’d say. “I work for the Home Office in the UK Government. We work on policing, immigration and counterterrorism. I have two children, my son is 7 and my daughter is 4.” 

They asked me questions.  “How does British culture compare to Indian culture?” (I said that our attitudes to women differed, and the 5 girls in the front row perked up.) 

“What do you think of Indian education?” (I said the universal education act was great, the next job was to get quality teachers in primary schools.)

Downpour in Bangalore. 

“Can you say anything in an Indian language” (Namaskar. And we all put our hands together and bowed and they giggled at me.). 

“Do you have terrorism in England?” (Yes. But we’ve also prevented lots too.)

“What do you like about India?” (The scale. The friendly people. The food. The entrepreneurship.)

“What are you giving to Unnati?” (I’m not giving anything. I’m learning about how you do things to take back to the UK. You’re giving things to me.)

The college teaches 70-day courses in cleaning, industrial paintwork, driving, ‘business process outsourcing’, and other things, and a core curriculum of spoken English and life skills - which included ‘managing strong emotions’ ‘goal setting’ and ‘managing conflict’. They generated money by renting out their assembly hall for weddings and parties, they got some government money for students of certain disadvantaged castes, and they also took donations. 

Bangalore Club

I asked the students, “What do you learn here” and almost everyone said “Punctuality” and “Life skills”

And then I asked them “What is hard about being here?” “Nothing!”, they said. One added, “Have you been to any Indian temples while you’ve been here? UNNATI is like a temple to me.” Such optimism and positive attitude. 

Then the owners of Hotel Laika took me to lunch in the Bangalore Club. I’d especially wanted to go there because two or three people in Bangalore, hearing that I was being funded by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, had mentioned that Winston Churchill still owed 13 rupees to the Club, a debt he had left in 1896. (To give you a sense of how much that would be in today’s money, the exchange rate is currently around 70 rupees to the pound, 45 to the US dollar.) With inflation and interest, that amounts to quite a lot of money... But for only 40 rupees today, I had a delicious South Indian meal there and enjoyed the hospitality and friendship of my hosts. I managed to sneak a photo of Churchill’s entry in the ledger as well, even though cameras weren’t allowed inside the main club house.

This afternoon I interviewed a serious and helpful government official, and then I finished off with a trip to Akshaya Patra, the social enterprise that works in partnership with Government and the private sector to deliver 1.2 million school meals a day (hot!) to kids in Bangalore state schools and in 7 other states in India. They were ferocious in their attitude to efficiency and had invented all sorts of machines to cook rice faster, speed up chappati making, ensure that the 250 vans in Bangalore were swift and took efficient routes. Hearing this NGO talk about ‘Six Sigma’ interested me. I wasn’t sure how they were going to eke out more process efficiency. “Oh but we still need to do our accounts, we can improve the distribution network for the vans, and our marketing work.” Their meals have improved attendance at school, and reduced the number of undernourished children, and still they are hungry for improvement.

Sunset from Hare Krishna temple, the home of the school meals enterprise

Leaving India is not the same as finishing my project on collaboration. So I want to take all of those qualities of today with me. The sun, the rain. The optimism of the students. The hunger for improvement. The friendship. The quality of inquiry and insight. And making a difference. I’m feeling grateful to Winston Churchill. While he may owe a debt to Bangalore, I am indebted to him. The strapline of his Memorial Trust is ‘Travel to Make a Difference’. I hope I’m going to do just that.

What if... Government was organised like Wikipedia?

When I was in Mumbai, I spent an afternoon meeting Bishakha Datta.  She is, in my humble opinion, a very very cool lady. Not only has she made various documentary films on the role and place if women in India, she has set up an ‘intermediary NGO’ which provides communications and campaign support to service provider NGOs, especially on things like domestic violence,  AND she’s now the first ever Indian board member of the Wikimedia Foundation.  

We had lots to talk about. But it was her description of Wikipedia and Wikimedia that got me very excited. Is it possible to fall in love with an organisational structure? At the very least, I’ve got a serious teenage crush.

Wikimedia and Wikipedia: How they organise themselves.

So, first of all, Wikimedia is BIG.  According to an estimate, the projects run by Wikimedia receive more than 364 million unique visitors per month, making it the 5th most popular web property worldwide (January 2010). Wikipedia alone comes in at number 7 on the May 2011 list of most popular websites, behind giants like YouTube, Google.com and Facebook. Compare that to the BBC who are currently at number 40. (http://mostpopularwebsites.net/). In size terms, the combined Wikipedias currently has over 1.74 billion words in 9.25 million articles in approximately 250 languages. About 3.6million of these articles are in English.

What I hadn’t realised before is quite how self-organising and disciplined this community is. Bishakha described them as ‘making collaboration an art form’. This is anarchy (or at least huge freedom), held together by some self-policed rules and principles. There around 100,000 editors around the world, and these editors do not see the Wikimedia Foundation (on which Bishakha serves) as the ultimate authority. They are in charge of their own editorial policies, and their own rules for working together. These principles are things like ‘verifiability’, ‘assume good faith’, ‘no original research’ and ‘neutral point of view’. 

The Wikimedia Foundation technically owns Wikipedia.  Apart from keeping the servers which host Wikipedia running, its constitutional role is really to provide organisational strategy, for example giving support to the smaller Wikipedia communities that aren’t in English, or agonising about whether the number of editors can grow sufficiently to match the volume of content. They are ‘serving’ and ‘facilitating’ the community, not ‘leading’ it. 

It reminds me of the way a Quaker clerks a Quaker business meeting rather than chairs it.  The clerk does not have the power of a casting vote or of shaping the recommendations to their own taste. Instead, they are there to facilitate the worshipful space of the meeting, ensure silence is held when needed for reflection, ensure everyone gets a chance to give their spoken ministry, and to notice when the meeting has come to a ‘sense’ of a decision. They then draft a minute, in the meeting, reflecting what the group has agreed, and then written minute is agreed on the spot.  They are facilitating, not leading the business. (More on Quakers and how they organise things, here.) 

So, Wikimedia is NOT a hierarchy with the Wikimedia foundation at the top, and the community divided in to country chapters. Oh no. This is a balance of power. Wikipedia’s structure is bottom heavy, the editorial community having most of the power.

The Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia foundation has 10 trustees, but only 4 are co-opted by the Board (Bishakha is one of these). Three board members are elected by the community of editors. The thirty chapters in different countries select two candidates by consensus, and one post is reserved for the founder.  There are about 70 paid staff for the whole enterprise, and over 100,000 volunteers.

When there are controversies about Wikipedia itself, huge discussions are initiated amongst the community. The emails fly. There was one last year on offensive material. Fox News made a fuss about porn in the image repository of Wikipedia. In reaction, one Board member took it upon himself to delete porn from the site. The community hit back against this violation of the principle of non-censorship, taking away his deletion rights.  For the past 12 months there has been an extended, diverse and adult discussion about how to handle offensive material through Wikipedia. There was no expectation that even the board must hold a single ‘line to take’. In the spirit of transparency, they are more than happy to show there is diversity of opinion and disagreements amongst colleagues. But in the end, solutions are found by consensus. Slowly built, hard-won, consultative, consensus.

Government in the Wikimedia model.

My brain was itching to imagine what it would be like to have a Government department in the model of Wikimedia and Wikipedia.

Of course (being a good civil servant) I can immediately think of all the reasons why this would NOT work. 

• Paid staff or volunteers? Can you rely on volunteers to distribute and manage billions of pounds of Government money, rather than distributing and managing knowledge and information? 
• What about democratic accountability through the minister?  Is it really fair to give so much power to the workers/producers rather than the end-user, the citizen, who is (in constitutional theory at least) represented in Government by the Cabinet Minister? 
• What about law enforcement? How could you do THAT by consensus?
• And what about accuracy? Wikipedia doesn’t have to live or die on the accuracy of its pages. It’s a gradual process towards accuracy.

Ach, maybe I’m already too locked in to my own silo-based view of the world.  Why would you have departments and their corresponding ministers at all? Surely if you were going to have a ‘community’ you would base it around those who were engaged in an issue, not in a pre-determined slice of government functionality?

So here are some Wikipedia-inspired ideas for government.

1. Put the community on to the departmental Board. The Permanent Secretary could sit on it and select 4 people to join her. But 5 of the Board members would need to be elected by the community doing the work: from both those inside the government department, and those outside.  
2. Set up more systems for participation. You could borrow from the Hubli-Dharwad or Mysore models for citizen participation (I heard about these from Indian officials this week) and set up representative bodies with 9 people for every 1000 people in the community of workers and citizens.  You could purposefully go beyond the boundaries of the department when considering each 1000 people.
3. Put operational guidance in to the hands of the producers AND the consumers.  At the UK Border Agency, we had stacks of operational guidance on casework. It was all drafted by little process teams who knew the caselaw inside out and could write clearly. But often after a key court judgement or when a key error was discovered in the way the guidance was interpreted - or when there was a dispute between two parts of the Agency over how a particular piece should be redrafted - the process updates would be delayed.  And the process guidance might work really well for the Liverpool teams but might not be quite right for the Croydon or Glasgow or New York teams, where, for instance, the address for the unit that ‘dispatched’ the case was different, or a particular local NGO or private partner was involved with a certain part of the process.  If I think of welfare, tax, pensions, any part of government that has to make a decision, there is this kind of operational guidance. You could have a ‘Wiki’ approach to casework guidance with contributions from all round the community (NGOs, legal advisors AND caseworkers) and self-appointed editors to make sure it stays accurate.
4. When a controversy arises, let the community discuss it on a website for several weeks, and then engage the 6 most diverse opinion holders in a listening exercise, before acting. Local authorities don’t like what the UK Border Agency is doing with housing asylum seekers?  Local officers, politicians, asylum seekers, UKBA officials, could thrash it out on a website. (Hmmm, I can feel the ‘don’t expose conflicts to the media’ culture kicking in as I write that!)
5. Put key strategic questions out to the community for discussion.  E.g. How should we measure our impact? What should be on the Board’s agenda next month? What should we bear in mind while we go about making significant cuts?  
6. Abolish all Strategy Units in government departments and merge them together. Then let them form self-organising communities on strategy projects. That might break down the silo’s around environment, transport, energy, health, education, crime, justice, culture....

As I propose each of these, they cause a frisson of anxiety in me. I see that in the existing hierarchical set up of a government department, these kind of conversations feel clunky and the power sharing is terrifying. Why would junior staff trust senior staff to listen to them? How would they get past their sense of being consulted as a paper exercise? How would you handle the inevitable exposed conflict publicly? Would there be room for mistakes? How do us senior staff keep CONTROL?!! 

(On that note: I love this Glen Gilchrist cartoon...)

It strikes me that the culture would need to be one of listening,  trust and no blame for mistakes, for these initiatives to be successful.  And that also these initiatives might promote a culture of listening, trust and no blame. A virtuous... or a vicious circle.

India: Only Connect

Last week I was on a Leaders Quest in India. In 6 days I met business CEOs, private equity investors, social enterprises, teachers and NGOs. We stayed the night in a tribal village, sleeping on the floor and joining this group of excluded and incredibly poor ‘untouchables’ for dancing and singing. We spent an evening on the roof of the Four Seasons Hotel in Mumbai, gazing down at the sea and the metropolis and hanging out with the rich elite. (We had more fun in the village, I hasten to add.)  Some of us ‘ragpicked’, sifting garbage with the homeless in Mumbai. Others met victims of domestic violence in a shelter in Hyderabad. I held a one-week old baby in a social enterprise maternity hospital, and I talked to a 27 year old manager in one of the most successful Business Process Outsourcing companies in the world. I saw the racks of a data storage company, padding around with my shoes covered to prevent dust, and discussed with an outgoing chief executive of an 8000 strong engineering firm, how you build talent and plan for succession. It felt like we saw all sorts of shades of India, and all shades of life.

A Leaders’ Quest is designed to inspire you to see the world from new perspectives.  “Joining 15 -20 of your global peers, you will spend time with inspiring leaders from civil society, business, the arts, academia and government.”  

The Four Seasons Hotel in Mumbai

I joined the owner of well-known restaurant chain, a senior banker, a leading academic, a vice president of a huge charitable foundation, a very successful brand manager and others, from the UK, USA, China and Canada. We could have focused on what divided India from ourselves - the poverty, the scale (1.2bn people, 60% in the countryside, 45% illiterate), the gender relationships (1 in 2 women suffer domestic violence), the slums. But actually we discovered what connected us to this country and all the people, rich and poor, in it.

My bedroom in the village. In the hammock is the baby.

When I was in the village, because there was a language barrier, we communicated through the international languages: sport, dance, song, smiles, and photographs.  I got caught out in cricket. Twice. We sang ‘Stand by Me’ and ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’ to 300 villagers. We danced with the women in the village square. I took picture after picture of the family that owned the house I stayed in, their sons donning their best shirts for the occasion, and then everyone crowding round to admire the digital camera’s results. That night I shared a bed with 7 people: all of us sleeping on the mats on the floor of their brick hut. One of the elders in the village declared in Mahrati, 'These are not foreigners! They are human beings!' And I agreed with him. In the end, for all the difference and division, we were all connected. 

What does this mean for collaboration? It confirmed for me that these direct experiences, of human spirit-to human spirit connections, these are what prompt us to serve each other. The more those 'in power' and those 'with wealth' can walk in someone else's shoes, the more successful our governments and businesses will be.

"Culture eats Strategy for Breakfast"

The municipal laundry in Mumbai

Last night I had dinner with Ramesh and Swati Ramanathan, the founders of Janaagraha. They are systems thinkers and they have been working in and outside government to improve Indian cities. There’s something about talking about policy, politics, government and implementation, with passionate and smart people, that causes me a lot of pleasure, and I had a fantastic evening.

Ramesh, for instance, is the technical advisor to a huge $25bn urban renewal programme  (and while there are around 8 programmes like this, only one of them is focused on cities rather than rural areas, and only one has a technical advisor. I think the PM likes him!). 

Swati, meanwhile, has been working really closely with the Chief Minister of Rajasthan  on a strategy to conserve its heritage and culture (Rajasthan is like the Italy of India, with loads of heritage and cultural sites).  She persuaded the Chief Minister to get personally involved with reviewing the work of departments every month, and to invest in short term projects AND long-term reforms, even though the long-term might not give a political payback in the tenure of the Chief Minister. 

If that’s not enough, Janaagraha has set up IpaidABribe.com, to name and shame parts of local and national government that demand bribes.

In the course of the evening, we swapped ideas about how you get civil servants or agents working in a complex system, to think holistically. 

Ramesh and Swati are convinced that citizen participation is essential. 

Their early efforts at citizen involvement in administration (like budget setting) were enthusiastically received by citizens, but less enthusiastically received by councillors and politicians. They pondered why 2/3 of councillors in Bangalore were unwilling to listen to the views of their local participatory platforms, and came to realise that the problem was, the councillors didn’t have to. So they needed to change the law. They campaigned successfully for a completely comprehensive system of local participation, and persuaded the Indian government that States should only get urban renewal money ($25bn remember!) if they reformed their legislation on citizen participation. In effect, they brought the Indian village-based system of very local self-government, to the cities. “You can’t treat participation like scaffolding”, said Ramesh, “Just putting it up for a bit and then taking it down later.” 

What struck me about this is that they were determined to work on structure.  I heard all their wonderful examples of how they were forcing the system to respond more actively to citizens, and wondered, ‘but what if the civil servants deflect and resist the changes? You have to change mindsets to change the culture!’

Changing mindsets has been part and parcel of what I and others have been doing at the National School of Government for the last few years. Along with others, I’ve taught senior civil servants system thinking tools so that they understand A. That there is more than one point of view, ESPECIALLY the point of view of the service recipient; and B. One’s own understanding of the problem is limited by the frames one imposes on it. I.e. A. Pluralism, and B. Holism. 

I described this to Ramesh and Swati, but also pointed out that while the civil servants went away from these learning experiences enthused, I doubted that their commitment to thinking holistically and pluralistically remained steadfast. I know of a couple who got so enthused they went on to learn more and more about systems thinking (some will even be reading this post!) but I fear that is the exception. When the minister is demanding ‘answers’ and ‘announcements’, offering a ‘process’ to build consensus and listen to plural views, isn’t exactly the most attractive proposition. Ramesh described my teaching experience like a steroid injection:  a good effect, but it wears off quite fast.

So there’s culture. And there’s structure. And sitting here in my hotel room near the Mahatma Ghandi Road in Bangalore, I realise that I knew that already. In fact I teach it. (“You teach best what you most need to learn” said Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.) I adapted the 2x2 table below from Ken Wilbur’s ‘Theory of Everything’ and applied it to a government context, and I’ve used it in several ‘Achieving More With Less’ seminars recently. In effect, Ramesh and Swati were talking about interventions in the ‘external’ column, and I was talking about interventions in the ‘internal’ column.

The point, of course, is that if you want an organisation or a system to think more holistically, you need to intervene in all the domains: internal, external, individual and collective - even with the Ford insight that 'culture eats strategy for breakfast'. The citizen participation law that Ramesh and Swati have promoted is in the external/collective box. My teaching is in the individual/internal box, with the hope that that will effect the internal/collective box.

So what would be the interventions that would be structural (external/collective) to promote collaboration and a whole system view? “How do you create mechanisms to undermine the dominant culture”, asked Ramesh. Ones that we covered last night...

• A credible ‘independent voice’ or NGO that sits in the governance structure and provokes the system. Their role is to be ‘an irritant’ with power, but if possible with little vested interest save for that of the citizen. As I described here in my post ‘In Praise of Third Parties’...

• A senior political champion and a senior bureaucrat champion (Swati reflected that without one or the other, you stood the risk of things going awry in a hierarchical system)

• Strategies and plans with accountability and ownership, - as long as they are well followed up at senior levels and not just seen as bits of paper. One way of doing this is Swati’s twin track approach. In Rajasthan, every month, the Chief Minister reviews the short-term projects (the flyovers, the museums, etc... and there can be no more than 10 on the go at anyone time), and the long-term reforms. This reminded me of the Prime Minister’s stocktakes that I used to administrate, where he chose 10 priorities for delivery and relentlessly pursued these. 

• An ‘Office of Administrative Innovation’ whose job it was to harvest all the good ideas and share them. This office would champion innovation and celebrate shared systems thinking. A bit like what IDEA are doing in the UK, but working at the federal or national level rather than just for local government.

• Following up the training on systems thinking with the participants committing to an intervention in their own work that would create a tangible outcome for that experience.

And that’s just the beginning...

India. First impressions.

I’ve been in India for 6 days now. I went straight from Mumbai airport to a village near Karjat, about 2 hours’ drive from Mumbai. Dusty, poor, buffalo pulling carts, women slapping their washing against rocks by the river in the 35 degree heat, mango trees, arid rice paddies awaiting the monsoon. I sweated in a simple house with no air conditioning, joined my hosts for meditation at 5am each morning, and enjoyed dahl and rice and sampling new fruits whose names I can’t now remember. I went for a soak in the river, in my clothes, as a way of cooling off. 

Then on Tuesday I came to Mumbai. I’m staying in (apparently) “India’s first art hotel”, in a room (ironically for a Quaker) which is decorated in honour of the fine tradition of gambling. The leaflet on the hotel explains: “The 7 rooms of the ‘Rajas’ floor depict vibrancy, action, passion, vivaciousness and style. ‘Life is a gamble’ and the room is representative of Life, a game of pitch and toss’.  While hearts and spades are embroidered into the cushions, chess seems to play a hefty role in the decor too, with two carved knights at the end of the bedstead and a headboard resembling the lattice of a chessboard. Perhaps strategy and control are part of this narrative alongside chance and fate.  

In this leafy suburb, Mumbai is charming. European bistros and coffee shops abound. I’m a short walk from the sea and when the tide is in, the rubbish is covered up and the mangrove trees look elegant rather than as if they are handy pegs for plastic bags. I even have a place to get my favourite drink, a decaffeinated latte, and the Indian barista serves up the milk to form a beautiful leaf shape in the froth, of the kind I first saw in a coffee shop in Washington DC.  I have failed to find any Indian restaurants and have eaten mediocre Italian food. I did manage a ‘curry fondue’ yesterday though.

I know that I’ve tucked myself into a corner of safety and security. My last trip to this part of the world was in 1998, to Bangladesh, and the one time I travelled alone there, I had a grim experience of sexual harrassment. It made me very cautious about my plans this time around. (Of course, I discovered within 10 minutes of arriving here that Mumbai is nothing like Dhaka. For a start there were no taxi touts at the airport, just an orderly row of pre-ordered cabs.) Next week, I’m joining a leadership programme in Mumbai and Hyderabad, organised by Leaders Quest, and they will do their best to broaden my perspective, and help me see the world from a much less privileged point of view.

That last statement implies I have spent the week in an ivory tower, or ‘in an AC room’ which apparently is the Indian way of saying you are not in the ‘real world’. Actually I have been busy criss-crossing Mumbai (occasionally very very slowly in the very very heavy traffic, but often quite nimbly in autorickshaws) to meet fascinating people  - for interviews about working collaboratively. Unlike the gambling concept of ‘leaving things up to chance’ I’m interested in people who are trying to influence, change, and have power over the way life works, rather than those subjected to its ‘pitch and toss’. 

Here are a few of the themes that are striking me this evening. 

The first is hierarchy. I’ve listened to a number of my interviewees reflect on the ingrained hierarchy in Indian culture, first in the caste system, and then the way this is replicated heavily in the hieararchy of government. The impression I have is that people inside government are trained to look ‘upwards’ rather than ‘outwards’. No one seems to talk about ‘citizen centric’ here. You do things because the Minister, or the ‘Additional Chief Secretary’ told you to, and you certainly don’t do it unless there’s a ‘government circular’ telling you to. You are ‘posted’ from one job to another. You are trained (according to those I have met, who are all, it must be said, on the outside of government) to believe that you are in charge, or you are subordinate. There is a Hindi phrase, ‘A Karo!’ which means ‘Do that!’. It’s an order. Command and control is how it happens. You are not ‘sensitive’ to the local issues or local needs. 

In this setting, people are reluctant to tell the truth to those in power because the truth isn’t pretty. “No, there hasn’t been huge take up of the literacy programme."  "You are rigid and hierarchical.” These are not nice messages to deliver. Those working with the ‘echelons of power’ (at least 3 people have used that phrase to me this week) pick their battles carefully.

At its worst, this results in corruption, where the bureaucracy is unaccountable and self-serving. Your electricity bill has a very odd over-charge in it, or your case needs to be moved from one desk to another in the local police office, and it is clear that unless you pay the bribe, these things will not be sorted out. In recent months, India has had several waves of national scandals revealing corruption at incredibly senior levels. (See www.corruptioninindia.com)

I wonder if somehow as an outsider I shouldn’t say these things. One interviewee this week was anxious that her view of government wasn’t repeated to government. But the question of Indian culture around hierarchy and power has come up in every interview I have done, so here I am.

Of course, the counterfactual has come up too,  that of flexibility.  “We are so many ways, so many cultures, so many languages”, said one of my interviewees. There is an inherent adaptability here: you can take a law, or a principle, and make it work in your own setting.

The second theme is scale. I’ve heard about ambition and idealism, on a major scale. India, of course, is huge. (“It’s easy for you,” said one of my interviewees. “I mean, the UK is so little!”) Even if we asked 100 extra people to stand next to every single person in Britain, we still would come nowhere close to being as populous as India. In fact, you and all your friends and relations and all other UK residents would each have to be joined by 200 extra people to get anywhere close to the Indian population of 1.2 billion.

In this context, legislating for universal primary education (as the Indian government has recently done), giving every child a meal, a school uniform, a school bag, free textbooks, this is a big deal. Making sure that the teachers are of a decent quality, and there are enough for all the kids? This is way beyond the current capacity of the system. Legislating that every domestic violence case must dealt with by a multiagency team including social workers, not just police officers? This is a big deal too and again, way beyond the current capacity of the system. I struggle to imagine what it must be like to be a civil servant in this scale. I used to notice the difference between cohesion between my team in Liverpool (300 staff) and my team in Croydon (500 staff). It was much easier to get joint working across teams happening in the team of 300 than 500. What must it be like to get joint working happening between millions of civil servants?

The third theme is about what citizens are up to.  When I was in Canada last year, I talked to lots of people about ‘citizen-centric’ services, with the government trying to take a citizen’s world view. Here I find I have met lots of people who talk about ‘collective action’ and advocacy, where the citizen is trying to force the government into seeing the world from their point of view. I’ve heard many stories this week about how clever advocacy has changed the way government is operating. For example:

• A group of villagers had had their grazing land taken from them in a series of illegal actions by local land owners. After one of them had some advocacy training, the villagers decided to take all their livestock (buffalos, chickens, cows) to the nearest government office and demand a re-survey of the land. The officials took notice, resurveyed their land, and they got 37 acres of grazing land back.

• A group of women were frustrated that the local school didn’t have a teacher. They rocked up to the office of ‘The collector’ (the local senior official) with all their children with them and asked the officials to teach their children. Their school got a teacher pretty quickly.

• In April, Anna Hazare, a septuagenarian, and well-known and respected social activist, went on hunger strike to demand that civil society have a role in drafting a new anti-corruption law in India. He described the current Citizen’s Ombudsmans Bill as ‘complete eyewash’. Four days later, the government capitulated, and set up a committee of ministers and civil society to draft new legislation. Anna Hazare’s campaign was aided by assiduous use of modern technology. In two days, the number of members of the India Against Corruption Facebook page grew from 500,000 to 1.2million.

There have been times, this week, when I have felt disheartened about the prospects for what I could learn about collaboration in this setting. A couple of my interviewees seemed staggered that I had come to India to look at this theme of governmental collaboration. How can you collaborate when government departments are locked in to power battles? How can you get multiagency collaboration on this scale? How can you get collaboration when collaboration requires a form of ‘letting go’ of power, of allowing local discretion, and autonomy, and apparently this is not a certainty in India? And yet... I have also found inspiration. 

Inspiration in the ways of the community advocates. They are taking a genuinely bottom up, grassroots view. This, in fact, is what David Cameron is asking the UK to do in his Big Society agenda. What might UK government look like if it was genuinely trying to promote this sort of pressure and interaction? In many ways the themes of 'choice' and 'competition' are all about people power.

Inspiration in the ways that partners with different cultures haven’t succeeded in changing each other but have found ways of working together, coexisting. Through persistent presence and non-positional power, have held the space for their partners to adapt, very slowly and very surely.  This seemed true of social workers and police officers working on domestic violence; and it was also true of two gay rights campaigning organisations I heard about, one that was run as a non-hierarchical collective, the other as a more traditional hierarchy. In both cases, their joint working was very successful, though with significant tensions and some internal conflict.

Inspiration, too, in what can happen when those at the top do endorse something. India’s Prime Minister gave the thumbs up in the early 1980s to a massive programme to eradicate preventable disability, and Impact India has been working since then, entirely funded by the private sector and charity, and making huge inroads in to polio vaccination, cataract operations, cleft palate ops, and so on. In the early 2000’s, the model of having a social worker in a police station to help women who complained of domestic violence, got picked up by the State of Maharashtra and rolled out to 20 districts. For almost18 years this model had only existed in a small area. In the next five years, it started going statewide and then nationwide - all because government had picked it up and run with it.

And there are, it turns out, heavy resonances here with themes I had already run in to in the USA and Canada last year. Once again, trust, and long-term relationships, are important. A neutral or third-party ‘holistic’ view makes a difference. A clear and shared vision is a game changer.

I also have found much of the comment about the Indian state government surprisingly familiar.  In the UK Border Agency, we liked our command and control. We were grade conscious, and we didn’t give enough autonomy to the frontline. We certainly didn’t pay enough attention to the experience of our applicants, and I know many in my caseload thought we were corrupt, useless, oblivious, unfair, even though I always knew we were doing our best. Building collaboration in this sort of hierarchy is the challenge I am seeking to crack and so perhaps India is the best place for me to learn how to do it.

What can those working on "the Big Society" learn from successful collaboration leaders?

Last week I went to a conference on the ‘big society’, organised by the centre right think tank, Reform. I wanted to find out where the mood music on ‘big society’ had got to now that the idea has been in the public consciousness for a year. (The concept ‘got legs’ in the UK political scene after Cameron talked about it in a leadership debate in April 2010, though many Conservatives would say they had been working up the policy intent for 3 or 4 years before that.) The idea of devolving power to local communities, getting government out of the way, increasing networks and connections at a local level.... this all sounds rather like promoting collaboration to me!

Naturally, it being a conference, there were plenty of people with strong opinions, eager to have their say. Bernard Jenkin, MP for Harwich and North Essex, was on one of the panels. He chairs the Public Accounts Select Committee, which has just launched an inquiry into the Big Society. He said something I’ve been thinking for a while. 

“The Big Society requires civil servants to have new skills, the skill of getting things going in communities.This is potentially a huge culture change for government and how it goes about the business of government.” 

He has written to all Permanent Secretaries of government departments (the big bosses) to ask them how they are taking forward Cameron’s promise last year that this would turn ‘Whitehall on its head’. 

Patrick Butler, Guardian journalist, also criticised the issue of implementation, although blamed this on the politicians. He said that the Big Society had been Cameron’s Hurricane Katrina moment. The cuts to local authorities were affecting the NGO sector the most, including excellent charities that were actually critical to the success of the big society. In Patrick’s view, the failure to ensure the role of the State in creating the big society infrastructure (for example by rewarding and supporting organisations that could be at the vanguard) was an error, and a result of the non-intervention dogma.

All this brought me back to the polarity I saw at play in my visits in the USA and Canada. In order to get collaboration happening on the ground, you needed strong, possibly even formidable leadership. At the same time, the group of leaders had to lead the constellation of organisations towards devolved power, where local ‘agents’ (as Service Canada called them) could take decisions on the ground to make things work for the citizen. In this way, silos were broken down, and collaboration enhanced. 

Beth Follini, a Quaker and executive coach I had lunch with last week, has written an article with the Dutch academic Ursula Glunk on how polarities are often badly dealt with by leaders.

People find it extremely difficult to deal with paradoxical tensions. Often, we do not see that in order to gain and maintain the benefits of one pole, we must also pursue the benefits of the other. Instead we tend to fall into one of the following polarity traps (Cameron et al., 2006; Johnson, 1991; Lewis, 2000; The Polarity Pathway Group, 2009):

(1) Clinging to one pole and overemphasizing it while projecting and repressing the other. Using the metaphor of breathing, this trap is comparable to either merely inhaling or merely exhaling.

(2) Obsessively swinging from one pole to the other, from overemphasis on one side to overemphasis on the other side. In terms of the breathing metaphor, this trap could be compared to hyperventilation.

(3) Creating a lukewarm compromise between the poles that lacks all vitality. Again translating it to the breathing metaphor, this trap is analogous to shallow breathing.

The dynamics of such reactions are often vicious, leading to either/or thinking, lowered creativity and effectiveness, difficulties to collaborate, and decreased alignment between words and deeds. A typical illustration that many executive coaches will recognize from their practice is the manager who speaks the language of empowerment while being at the same time heavily attached to keeping control, having the deep belief that without this control chaos will take over.

(From ‘Polarities in Executive Coaching’, Ursula Glunk and Beth Follini, Journal of Management Development Vol. 30 No.2, 2011)

It’s the both/and that is the way forward. Applying Beth and Ursula’s prescription for handling polarities, in the same article, to the Big Society, would be interesting. They recommend

1. Discovering polarized thinking. Perhaps Eric Pickles’ (the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government) clear commitment to decentralisation is a good example. He is very very against the idea that Government can be the answer. My experience working in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit in 2005-6 is at the opposite end of the pole.  We never answered the question, ‘What role can the Government play in promoting or pushing this policy’ with the answer, “none”.
2. Exploring and embracing each pole. Beth and Ursula comment, “The client learns to look at the up- and downside of each pole. What serves the client here? What does not serve the client?”. Patrick Butler’s challenge to Government is that Government has  become over zealous in rejection of its role of Government. There are upsides to getting Government out of the way though, well articulated by Oliver Letwin MP at the Reform conference last week. I paraphrase: 

“What is the best way of ensuring a lot of innovation? Have a wide range of providers and ensure contestability. By empowering at a local level, and liberalising, we open up the space to a huge number of bodies and individuals to act and participate. When we do this, the ‘them’ becomes ‘us’, decreasing frustration and increasing empowerment.”

1. Softening the boundaries – At this stage, the client starts to understand what has been holding the two poles apart. The concept of the boundary keeper is introduced, an imagined figure whose job it is to hold the two poles apart. I start wondering who this boundary keeper is. The media, forcing political parties in to ‘dividing lines’ between ‘The State can solve this’ and ‘let the power go’? Parties themselves, with inherently different philosophies and the desire for differentiation?
2. Stepping into transformation – “This final step naturally flows from the work with the boundary keeper. The client is invited to return to the poles and to look at both at the same time – noticing what it feels like to hold both and what has shifted for instance if one pole was favoured?” What is it like to hold leading from the front, and devolving power, at the same time?

It made me hope that, as Permanent  Secretaries take forward their departmental culture change and reply to Bernard Jenkin MP on what they are up to, (if they choose to give such a letter a fulsome reply!) that they do not throw babies out with bathwaters, and are alive to the benefits of each pole - strong leadership AND devolving power at the same time.