Another big day at the RSA
It’s the AGM of the RSA today. In some ways I like to think the content is a demonstration of some of the progress we have made. My first AGM was a sparsely attended formal meeting in the Great Room followed by a lecture and dinner. Apart from the required business of approving the accounts and annual report, there was almost no discussion about the content of the Society’s work.
As I write the House is buzzing with activity. There is a series of seminars at which RSA staff are showcasing our work to groups of Fellows, with a particular focus on how Fellows might get more involved. As Fellows arrive they are being directed to the exhibition the team here have developed. At the centre of this is a specially commissioned mural illustrating the ideas behind the new Fellowship Charter. We hope the Charter itself will be endorsed by the inaugural meeting of the Fellowship Council which takes place this afternoon.
The AGM will still have to do the formal stuff and there is still the dinner but in-between we Luke Johnson’s first lecture as Chairman of the RSA Trustees. The Great Room will be full to bursting.
So the feel is very different and running though it all is our new ambition for Fellowship. I am speaking to the Council in a couple of hours and the question I will pose to them is ‘how can we embed a culture of collaboration, creativity and social ambition in the Fellowship? In terms of Fellows getting together to make a difference in the world we are seeing more good initiatives. The social activities and networking in the Fellowship are an important part of what it is to be a Fellow and they provide the foundation from which ideas can emerge. But substantive Fellowship initiatives still feel like isolated examples rather than the new goals and ways of working I hope the Council will champion.
When I talk about a culture change I mean that the expectations, norms and practices of the Fellowship mean that it is a creative and powerful space, one in which ideas naturally emerge and develop rather than one where – too often – innovators feel they are having to fight against, rather than with, the prevailing way of doing things.
If we don’t achieve this cultural shift the RSA will be a perfectly pleasant but largely irrelevant organisation that occasionally succeeds with specific projects (and for some people, I know, this is enough). If we do succeed I believe the RSA can come to be seen internationally as a leading example of the kind of organisation with the kind of ethic the world needs in the 21st century; to be a Fellow will not only be an important individual badge of status but will connote that an FRSA is part of a amazing organisation making a positive difference in a hundred different ways.
This is the challenge I am throwing down to the Council and while I want them to buy into the vision and to accept how far we have to travel, I also know that the Council will have its own strong views about how we undertake that journey and the way the organisation as a whole can best help reach the destination.
Time to take up knitting
Soon, I hope, the RSA will be guaranteed at least one mention in the national press every week. Currently, Luke Johnson’s entertaining and informative FT column lists him as Chairman of Channel Four. By the end of next year it should say Chairman of the RSA.
Mind you we will need to improve our coordination. Writing today about ambition Luke mentions the downfall of Jonathan Aitken. Sadly, he doesn’t take the opportunity to advertise Mr Aitken speaking at the RSA tomorrow. The former Tory cabinet minister will be responding to a talk by Susan Wise Bauer author of a new book ‘the Art of the Public Grovel’ which traces the history and theology of public confessions in modern America from Ted Kennedy to Bill Clinton.
The lesson Luke draws from the downfall of political and business figures, and there are plenty of the latter crashing back to earth, is that ‘we must each know our limit, and resist the urge to overreach’. Those involved in the tangled Corfu holiday saga, featured on most front pages, may wish they had such wisdom.
The whole sorry episode is best captured by the standfirst of Julian Glover’s column in today’s Guardian.
‘What part of: ‘Oligarch. Big boat. Peter Mandelson. Spells trouble’ did George Osborne fail to understand’.
An aspect of the hubristic culture of the last fifteen years has been fawning over the super rich. To become rich in business (as distinct from simply by inheritance) you must have worked hard, taken risks and if you are over forty you’ve probably had some bad times to go with the good. But none of this means you necessarily have great insight into world affairs or policy making.
But the super rich have come to believe that having the ear of politicians is an expectation that goes with the yacht and the private jet. And for a variety of reasons (few of which are good) most senior politicians are only too happy to look as though they are fascinated by the lives and opinions of multi-millionaires. Just as the super rich often expect to get away with sexual philandering, so they enjoy showing that not only can they carouse with politicians of all stripes but that they can get them to forget their boring Party allegiances in favour of their much more important shared membership of the global party of the rich and powerful.
Who knows who said what to whom on the Greek island? What is in no doubt from the cast list of this drama was that it was an accident waiting to happen. The overlapping of the worlds of celebrity, high finance and politics is another example of the detachment of status and rewards from merit which has been such a characteristic of our hubristic elite culture. Well, we face a different world now. With business leaders and politicians facing major challenges – not least of which is to retain any respect and authority amongst an increasingly disenchanted and volatile public – it’s time to stay off the yachts and stick to the knitting.
Navigating the financial crisis, and the moral maze
An even-briefer –than–usual update today as I am rather distracted (not to say terrified) about being a Moral Maze panellist tonight. The programme is live, the other panellists have done it loads of times before and the subject is really difficult – whether NHS patients who top up their cancer treatments with drugs not available on the NHS should be denied NHS care. If you want to listen in it’s on at 8.00, or you could ‘listen again’ on the podcast tomorrow.
Really good seminar yesterday on Tomorrow’s Investor. Rowland Manthorpe and David Pitt Watson made a good case to a very knowledgeable group that there is a gap in the market for a simple, low fee, high accountability, ethically robust pension fund. The next stage is to look more thoroughly at the viability for such a fund and explore what possible regulatory barriers there might be. The first stage was funded by INVESCO and PWC – whose representatives also made invaluable contributions to yesterday’s seminar – so thanks to them.
I have a piece about behaviour change policies in today’s Guardian. It’s the lead article for a magazine called Ethos which I guest edited on the subject of behaviour change for the company Serco. The magazine includes an interesting article by neuroscientist Susan Greenfield and an interview (by me) with Oliver Letwin.
A pleasurable new task for me
A pleasurable new task for me is to read the always stimulating weekly FT column penned by RSA Chair designate Luke Johnson. This week Luke was writing about the value of strong leadership in companies and contrasting this with tendency towards timidity and vacillation in the public sector.
Luke knows much more than me about business so it’s not just because he’s soon to be my boss that I defer to his judgement in this area. But two thoughts occur to me about the public sector and leadership more generally. First, decision making in the public sector is bound to be more problematic due both to the content of the decision and the public expectation of a higher level of accountability. We might regret it when the local pub closes down but we don’t feel we have the right to protest as we do when the post office is threatened. Similarly, we shrug at the shoddy content of most commercial TV channels but get agitated if we think public service broadcasters are being irresponsible or unresponsive. This is a matter of degree. The private sector is having to adjust to a world of greater transparency, scrutiny and expectations of accountability but I suspect public authorities will always face more a complex and compromising decision making context.
My other thought relates to an explanatory framework I have quoted before in this blog. Developed by a group of political and social scientists and largely based on the insight of the anthropologist Mary Douglas, this theory argues for the existence of four elemental ways of viewing social relations. These are the hierarchical (change from leaders and experts at the top), the individualist (change driven by the pursuit of individual self interest), the egalitarian (change driven bottom up by shared values) and the fatalistic (scepticism about the very idea of change). The key point of this analysis is that strategies must take into account the existence of all these ways of viewing, and acting in, the world. This means – in the researchers’ words – that we need ‘clumsy solutions for a complex world’.
Strong leadership is vital in the face of major challenges. But achieving buy-in also means aligning individual interests to those of the group or organisation. For new ways of doing things to endure and evolve requires deepening the commitment of those implicated in the change, which in turn means they must feel they are the authors and not just the victims of the process. And, finally, in any organisation there will be many who view change with world weary indifference. Strategies need to work with the strong seam of fatalism in every organisation (arguably, in every person).
Leaders need to be bold and clear but they also need to recognise the inherent limitations of top down change.
A couple of announcements
I’m really delighted to announce Luke Johnson as the new Deputy Chair and Chair designate of our board of Trustees.
Also, as any of you who’ve been involved in a major IT project will know, things are never as smooth as you’d initially hoped.
We’ve been having issues with the comments section on our new (and lovely) website, resulting in my not receiving some of the comments to my blog that you have been so kind as to send in
This problem has now been rectified and I invite everyone to comment on my most recent posts, safe in the knowledge that I will read and respond and the dialogue will get going again. Apologies to those of you who posted comments before that did not get to me!
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