‘The progressive consensus’ – and me, me, me ….

March 17, 2009 by matthewtaylor
Filed under: Credit crunch, Politics, Social brain, The RSA 

Back to Number Ten this morning to discuss ‘the progressive consensus’. With only an hour for discussion, four presentations and 30 very clever people (plus me) round the table it was hardly surprising that the conversation comprised little more than the identification of a list of issues. But looking at what I found the most interesting points there is a line of connection.

• We are at an important moment in history. The goal must not simply be to mange the crisis and get back to business as usual. It is important to talk about what we might call the national ethos. In the face of uncertainty will people opt for greater individualism or greater social solidarity?

• Policy matters but so does culture – in institutions, in communities and in nations. Fascinatingly, research on values indicates that, despite globalisation and immigration, values are converging within nations but diverging between them (despite the event being under Chatham House rules I can attribute this point to David Halpern who is soon publishing a book about it). To take one small example, what Brits and Germans mean by equality and social justice is very different.

• One characteristic of contemporary British values is that we are hostile not just to the state but also to the market, or at least to big business. The over-riding national mood now is one of powerlessness in the face of events and big power of various forms. Adding to this, the credit crunch and the Government response may cement oligopoly in key markets – banking, supermarkets, mobile phones, energy companies.

• Government likes to talk about empowerment both as a good in itself and as a means towards more efficient and more responsive public services. But it is not clear the public want to be empowered (if this means transferring more responsibility to them) or that central Government has any clear account of who, realistically, is to do the empowering

• In all of this, conventional politics and the jargon-laden language of economic management and public service reform leaves people cold. Politicians need to find a way of speaking to people’s worries but also to their resilience, to their aspirations – and to their altruism. This is a time for leadership, people are open to new understandings and possibilities but leaders are not using a vocabulary people can understand, let alone be inspired by.  
 
Interesting stuff.

Not that this is what I will remember from the morning. Before we went into the seminar one of the directors of my old haunt, the IPPR, said to me: ‘we all have a good laugh about your blog  – it’s all me, me, me’.

Can this be true? I am shocked. I have decided to spend a lot more time thinking about whether it is true that I am obsessed with myself. Maybe it’s something I should blog about? I have also resolved to stop talking so much about myself, for how else can I create the space for other people to say what they think of me?

Despite this terrible blow to my frail self esteem, I was given some comfort when David Aaronovitch (whose column today is particularly brilliant) told me that my pals over at the Times Comment pages enjoy my blog.

It’s the stuff on the brain they like best so they can rest assured that with Elizabeth Gould here tonight and Norman Doidge (whose new book is stunning) here tomorrow, it will be the brain and not progressivism, nor even me, me, me, that will be my focus over the next couple of days.

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Comments

23 Comments on ‘The progressive consensus’ – and me, me, me ….

  1. Matthew Cain on Tue, 17th Mar 2009 12:59 pm

    2. I’ve done a quick, objective and completely unbiased analysis and can reveal your blog is not all about you. Government, people, leaders all figure prominently of late.

    http://bacatu.blogspot.com/2009/03/matthew-taylors-blog-whats-it-all-about.html

  2. Susmita on Tue, 17th Mar 2009 2:26 pm

    3. Didn’t someone say “there are two kinds of egotists – those of who admit, it and the others”?

  3. Duncan Lawie FRSA on Tue, 17th Mar 2009 5:20 pm

    4. I suspect that if it was all “you, you, you”, we’d be hearing more about West Bromwich Albion.

    It does feel very much that this is your blog rather than a representation of the RSA, though. Of course, the sub-heading at the top of the page makes that clear, but my interest in reading is more about where we – as the RSA – are going than for what you have to say about the issues of the day.

  4. David Wilcox on Tue, 17th Mar 2009 8:10 pm

    5. Nonsense! IPPR haven’t read David Bubb’s blog

  5. Rob Greenland on Tue, 17th Mar 2009 8:27 pm

    6. I think all good blogs have a lot of the writer’s day to day experience and thoughts in them – it’s the links between your own experience and what’s going on in the world that make a blog interesting and engaging.

    Even better than Bubb’s blog is Bogg’s Blub –

    http://boggsblub.blogspot.com/

  6. Joe Nutt on Tue, 17th Mar 2009 10:10 pm

    7. One of the reasons I list your blog on my own Matthew is because, in a medium plagued by poor writing, it is so well written. And one of the reasons I frequently put down any number of newspapers, is because within a few sentences of getting into an article on contemporary culture, education, or whatever, I routinely discover that the article is actually about…the author!

  7. The right climate for progressive thinking? « LGiU - the local democracy blog on Tue, 17th Mar 2009 11:48 pm

    8. [...] good this morning to discuss, “where now for the progressive consensus?”. I agree with Matthew Taylor’s analysis of the broad themes. We are in a moment of history which requires a recalibration of how we behave [...]

  8. Frances Zammit on Wed, 18th Mar 2009 9:42 am

    9. Elizabeth Gould’s work, comments about your blog being all about you, and England and Germany having different value systems are, according to the works of
    Clare Graves (industrial psychologist),
    Ken Wilber (American philosopher – see Integral Theory, and ‘Ken Wilber Stops his Brain Waves’ on Youtube)
    and Rudolph Steiner (Steiner Waldorf Education),
    interrelated, healthy, aspects of Human Development.
    Clare Graves work, referred to as ‘Spiral Dynamics’, shows a double helix spiral development of human value sytems and was successfuly used to minimise the potential conflict in South Africa in the change over from aparteid. I understand that his students, and Ken’s Integral Institute, have done some work on the structure of the brain. They find that the brain needs to ‘develop’ in order to move between value systems.
    All three show that, for any development, and in order to interract in a healthy ’social’ way, we need a strong sense of ’self’. I’d be very wary of those who want you to tone this down – becoming more ‘anonymous’ seems to me like a convient excuse for abdicating personal responsibility.

  9. Mike Amos-Simpson on Wed, 18th Mar 2009 10:31 am

    10. I’ve only been following in recent weeks but during that time the balance has been good. There have been posts on the RSA itself (which is what got me reading in the first place), but giving your personal thoughts & experiences seems valid, particularly given that comments are invited for other people to provide their own ‘me, me’ thoughts, and particularly that you’re willing to engage with those comments.

    This blog is a fine example that many others should follow instead of hiding away behind P.A.’s and big desks (unless of course they have nothing of interest to say).

  10. matthewtaylor on Wed, 18th Mar 2009 10:41 am

    11. Thanks Mike. You are very kind. I agree that the the great thing about blogs is their egalitarian quality. They make people feel that they are invited into a conversation with the blogger. I find it interesting that – when i do them – I usually get less feedback from a column in a national newspaper (notionally read by hundreds of thousands of people) than from a blog read by fewer than a thousand.

  11. matthewtaylor on Wed, 18th Mar 2009 10:46 am

    12. Hi Francis. What a brilliant comment managing to link my fragile ego to world values, Elizabeth Gould and spiral dynamics. Did you hear Thought for the Day on Today this morning http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/programmes/thought//? It was from the Buddhist teacher Vishvapani and was all about how we have to love ourselves (which is of course different from shallow self satisfaction or arrogance) before we can love and empathise with others.

  12. matthewtaylor on Wed, 18th Mar 2009 10:50 am

    13. Thanks Joe. My ego isn’t really as fragile as I imply. I find this issue of author distance really interesting. The commentators I like best are the ones who are honest about their own predispositions and inconsistencies without making themselves the subject matter. I think, for example, that David Aaronovitch and Alice Miles often do this well. As a technique it makes the reader feel talked to rather than at and it is also ethical for a writer to be honest about the angle they are coming from.

  13. matthewtaylor on Wed, 18th Mar 2009 10:58 am

    14. Rob you’ve destroyed my productivity. I started reading Bogg’s Blub and twenty minutes later I was told I had missed two meetings. It is inspired. That coming on top of the genius Stuart Lee (see his Comedy Vehicle on BBC iplayer) means I haven’t laughed so much in a week since Wolves last got relegated

  14. matthewtaylor on Wed, 18th Mar 2009 11:02 am

    15. Thanks Duncan. It is a difficult balance. Someone e-mailed me earlier this week and said ‘I like the blog although I don’t bother with the RSA stuff’. The trick, of course, is to write about the RSA in a way that interests people outside the Society. I managed this, I think, when I wrote about a membership organisation a couple of weeks ago. I can also do it when I write about RSA events. as I have today

  15. joe on Wed, 18th Mar 2009 3:36 pm

    16. Matthew, do you know about the “Stronger Communities, stronger Economy” conversation started by the Council on Social Action – which is something to do with the Cabinet Office? Maybe the RSA can encourage fellows to get involved in the discussion which Chain Reaction are arranging around the country – see here.

  16. SOCIAL ENTERPRISE IN THE RECESSION pt2 « Urban Regeneration on Wed, 18th Mar 2009 3:55 pm

    17. [...] ENTERPRISE IN THE RECESSION pt2 Matthew Taylor’s blog today makes some interesting points about who trusts who and the importance of [...]

  17. Dipper on Wed, 18th Mar 2009 8:12 pm

    18. what’s the RSA?

  18. David Wilcox on Thu, 19th Mar 2009 8:22 am

    19. Ooops, my link should have been to Stephen Bubb’s blog http://bloggerbubb.blogspot.com/. Thanks Rob for the link to the authentic voice of umbrellas.

  19. Matthew Kalman on Thu, 19th Mar 2009 3:58 pm

    20. Hi Matthew,

    Re ‘creating a space for other people to say what they think of me’….

    Having got a bit further into that great new book ‘Immunity to Change’, I’ve learnt that it’s leaders with ‘Self-transforming minds’ who actually will open an authentic space for others to comment. (They’re pretty rare, sadly!)

    Not just in the token/limited way that ‘Self-authoring’ leaders will invite input. (And those less mature leaders, with a ‘Socialised mind’, are probably too tied up with group-think to even bother with diverse input).

    These ’self-transforming’ leaders make very sure they don’t leave people guessing about whether it’s OK to send potentially “off-mission” communication that they judge to be important.

    “People with self-transforming minds have found ways to let them know such information will be welcomed”. (They still have their own ‘filter’ of information, but can stand back and look *at* their filter, not just *through* it. They are not a prisoner of their filter. They are aware that any once stance, or agenda, inevitably leaves something out.)

    “They are not only advancing their agenda or design… they are also making space for the modification or expansion of their agenda or design”.

    They know that their own filter “can also screen out ‘the golden chaff’, the unasked-for, the anomaly, the apparently inconsequential that may be just what is needed to turn the design on its head and bring it to the next level of quality.’

    I recommend having a go at uncovering your own ‘Immunity map’ using the book, better still do it together with the management team at the RSA – learn about your ‘hidden competing commitments’ and ‘big assumptions’ etc (or else just persuade your Spiral Dynamics-admiring coach to run through it all with you. They will find it a great new tool in their own coaching armoury, I suspect).

    Professor of Social Enterprise Rob Paton was going to use these immunity maps at the OU, but I’m not sure how far he got. (He tried it out first with members of an integral salon I run!)

    Kegan really seems to think that this work really can help leaders mature into the self-authoring mind, and then on to self-transforming mind.

    Funnily enough, I once chatted with David Halpern about whether anyone had done any work to investigate any correlations between ‘bonding’ social capital, ‘bridging’ social capital and stages of adult maturation.

    I suspect that bonding social capital is typical of the socialised mind (and the more conventional stages/values) and bridging of the more post-conventional stages.

    We need bridging social capital if we aren’t to be at eachother’s throats – and maybe Kegan’s trick of making our ‘immunity to change’ visible is a way to get more people there…?

    A tenuous link I’m suggesting, but I think it could be quite important… ;-)

    By the way, Don Beck’s day-long event last Saturday went very well. So many people turned up – 100 – that he took the opportunity to modestly dub it a ’summit’! ;-)

    ie ‘”From Rule Britannia… To Cool Britannia… to Integral Britannia -
    Summit on the Future of Great Britain”.

    One key point seemed to be that if us progressives can’t generate some kind of contemporary version of national pride, then a toxic variety will take its place (BNP, Islamic extremists et al).

    He’s been doing a lot of interesting work in Holland and in Israel-Palestine around these kinds of values development issues… (years ago he did the same in South Africa, visiting the country 63 times).

    Cheers,

    Matthew

  20. matthewtaylor on Fri, 20th Mar 2009 2:29 pm

    21. Er..check out the web-site?

  21. Matthew Kalman on Fri, 20th Mar 2009 5:33 pm

    22. Hi Matthew,

    This is the website connected to this ‘Immunity to change’ work:

    http://slab500.com/mindsatwork/index.php?page=about&family=us&display=30

    There’s a basic ‘immunity map’ self-inventory you can try there too.

    (Though it looks like it has the first 3 columns but misses off the 4th column of the immunity map: the ‘Big Assumptions’ one – which I would have thought is pretty central. As it’s by uncovering these ‘Big Assumptions’ that keep your internal status quo in place, and then beginning to test the big assumptions, that you enable transformations to occur).

    I doubt the website gets into very much, if any, of the material about working to develop immunity maps across leadership teams and generally looking at organisation-wide immunities.

    But still well worth a look…

    Plus there are nice comments about their book, from Daniel Goleman, Peter Senge and Howard Gardner.

    I just wrote a short-ish piece about ‘Immunity to Change’ for the membership organisation I work for. I even included two immunity maps from leaders in that sector. I’m intrigued as to whether any members will find that this approach resonates for them…

    By the way, it was David Halpern who pointed out to me that the Robert Putnam findings – which you’ve mentioned – on how multicultural communities seem to erode social capital are possibly not confirmed by some later research that has been done.

    I mean to look into it some time – I have a couple of references to later papers, which are probably the ones he’d seen…

    Cheers,

    Matthew

  22. matthewtaylor on Mon, 23rd Mar 2009 9:06 am

    23. Thanks for this Matthew. I must get into this literature. And I would be interested to see the research that challenge the Putnam thesis. I always suspected the findings were more a function of population mobility rather than diversity per se.

  23. Matthew Kalman on Mon, 23rd Mar 2009 2:07 pm

    24. MULTICULTURALISM + SOCIAL CAPITAL – CONTRA PUTNAM?

    Hi Matthew,

    Here are two references a US academic called Clarence Gravlee sent me. I don’t know whether these are exactly the ones that David Halpern was referring to. But it seems likely…

    * When Does Diversity Erode Trust? Neighborhood Diversity, Interpersonal Trust and the Mediating Effect of Social Interactions
    http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119395639/abstract

    * Ethnic Diversity and Social Capital in Europe: Tests of Putnam’s Thesis in European Countries
    http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/121392375/abstract

    The latter piece of research covers 28 countries, so sounds fairly substantial…

    I think it was the first one that I managed to track down an open access copy of.

    I wonder if Putnam responded to either of these papers…

    A point re the Prof Robert Kegan/adult development literature and brain science: when he started reporting his findings about qualitative advances in mental complexity throughout adulthood, the brain researchers sitting next to him on distinguished panels would “smile with polite disdain” – their ‘hard science’ didn’t agree with Kegan’s longitudinal interviews (to assess complexity).

    The brain doesn’t undergo any significant changes in capacity after adolescence, was the receive view – back then.

    “Thirty years later? Whoops!”, as Kegan puts it. Turns out the brain scientists were making their own inferences, despite claiming they were “looking at the thing itself”.

    Today the instruments are better, and the talk is of neural plasticity and suchlike – and “the phenomenal capacity of the brain to keep adapting throughout life”.

    I suspect that your ‘Social Brain’ project will be far more powerful if it is aware that it is calling for a shift to the ’self-authoring mind’, at least, or – even better – the ’self-transforming mind’.

    This isn’t asbstruse nonsense – the OECD put Kegan’s findings about the gap between the minds we currently have, and the key competencies that professions say they need, at the heart of their major 5-year project on ‘Definition and Selection of Competencies (DeSeCo)’:
    http://www.oecd.org/document/17/0,3343,en_2649_39263238_2669073_1_1_1_1,00.html

    Cheers,

    Matthew

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