18 Conversations — 5/18: A Defensible Position?
Survival — the first order of business…
Some months ago I (Mark) supported a group facilitating a discussion between members of a community and various statutory partner agencies about an issue that concerned them all but affected them differently: knife crime. I was new to this collective and so was very much there to listen and learn, whilst those whom had been there a while did the talking.
The council was essentially the coordinating body and were the anchor for a multi-agency strategy that was set around this particular geographically bound community. Money and the time of key workers had been set aside, meetings had been had and so the session was to take a view on how it was going and whether the strategy needed to change. My job was to observe the facilitators and help build their practice.
I could see a group of residents of the area pretty much sitting on their hands as the progress made in implementing the strategy was being reported. Partner organisations were nodding and the tone grew in confidence. Residents understood less as they heard more. The dam was sure to break, and eventually it did.
“What strategy?” someone asked. Residents hadn’t seen it, or understood it. “Where’s the money you said we could use?” someone else asked. “Why are we still talking about this?” asked a third, who clearly was not attending their first rodeo…
The public sector staff were struggling soon enough. They worked hard, they cared and they wanted the same things everyone else wanted. Yet, they felt quickly cowed and beaten down, simply by hearing that their work hadn’t reached the people it was intended for.
It would be easy here to drift into a discourse about community development, doing-to/with/for/by etc but that’s not I want to draw attention to here. Instead, I wanted to focus on what was actually said when the context of the work was discussed and shared from the various perspectives in the room.
One of the residents talked about the tragic loss of someone in their extended family to knife crime. Her hope was the money would be passed to the community to work on specific things in the area, and how undertakings to do this had been made. Her anger and frustration were palpable and her show of vulnerability was admirable.
The response was essentially a doubling down of the intent and endeavor described in the outside-in strategy. There was a hollowness to it that even the person speaking felt. None of it felt good enough, and yet there seemed to be an invisble impasse between people that, to all intents and purposes, agreed with each other. The community development-esque critique of this situation would have to wait, because something even more fundamental and human was happening here and I wanted to explore what it was. What I learned was achingly familiar.
During the break I found a quiet corner and asked the council officer what the real answer was to the question about the money. She said it was to do with financial regs and auditors, and her fear of them. They couldn’t “just hand out money” and hope good things happened. I asked why she didn’t just say that and she responded by saying that she would have felt silly citing fear of an auditor when the people asking had lost loved ones. There was empathy in her anxiety and fear in her actions — it wasn’t great for anyone.
We talked more about whether showing some vulnerability might build trust with the group. After all, they were showing their pain and grief. It might not compare in degree but it’s no less true. Once this was out in the open, they might be able and willing to help? It’s tough call to make when you’re in the headlights. She said she’d think about it, and the session passed off with the invisible impasse preventing any progress. I was left wondering what would happen if the community met the auditors, and whether they could have worked something out together.
At the end of the session we spoke again, and this time she elaborated on her predictament. She knew that the ask of the group was not unreasonable, and no-one wanted to waste resources, and so the issue was not that it wouldn't have worked. Instead it was that if it didn’t show anything positive or learned, she wouldn’t be able to defend the decision. She ventured that she didn’t get to decide what passes for good or what’s defensible, so has to play safe, even if it angers already hurt people. It emerged that her defacto purpose, and that of the systems that governed it, was to create and maintain a defensible position, with defensibility being defined by a system looking for activity and industry rather than relationships, the enriching of context and of how people feel.
This felt immediately familiar. Our second of these 18 conversations discussed how the system of public services would rather cycle through consumption via multiple cycles of standardised provision that is knowable than enter into something relational that reflects the complexity of its context whose outcomes aren’t specifically knowable. Ron Charlton and I used ‘Brian’s’ story to trace and dig up his interactions with 14 different organisations, we were able to look at the policies and rules that sat behind them and consider the logics they represent, and how these logics nest among each other.
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We saw scale logics, standardisation logics, compliance logics and performance logics. Everything was done on the basis of something that was defensible: a threshold, a performance indiator, a budget. Nothing was based around the logic that understanding and connecting was a way towards flourishing. Everything was codifiable and thus defensible. It goes hand in hand with another observation — that the system defaults to ‘no’. Justifying inaction was, on the whole, easier than defending an action that didn’t ‘work’, especially as we can kick the can down the road ask people to come back when they are worse and maybe hope that they don’t or that action is obviously justified (and more urgently needed)….
When the decisions we were able to discern were viewed as a sequence of actions in Brian’s life, we could see how these logics were playing out and how they related to each other. We were then able to see what drove what, and the overidding logic of creating and maintain a defensible position revealed itself as that hidden impasse that I saw in that conversation in with those citizens whose community was affected by knife crime and in the deeply ingrained learned helplessness that sits behind every computer that says no…
One of the trickier conversations…
This isn’t an easy thing for anyone in public services to hear, i.e. they have been conditioned into serving a purpose more concerned with survival in a system than flourishing in a community. No-one wants to be accused of learned helplessness. So digging things up like this is helpful — a cultural and system burning platform and perhaps a series of aide memoirs for us to stop ourselves falling into traps when we try another way. Hannah phrases this more constructively, observing this defensiveness as a series of truces that people make with the system in order to keep the peace.
Fortunately this isn’t quite what is happening all of the time, because (maddeningly and simultaneously) when most people go home to live their lives, enjoy their friendships, love their families and fuss their pets even, they do what humans do best — exist within and act upon relationships between themselves and the world around them. So, we CAN do this differently.
Things that are innate are harder to describe, which makes them of lesser appeal to system that demands everything be buttoned up tight and defended to the hilt. But they are crucial if we are ever think beyond what those auditors might think…
So what are we to do?
This blog is the last of the ‘Problem Statements’ section of this series. I wonder if there is a conversation worth having about your experience of this notion — either as the person in the system or the citizen needing something from it. Do you have perspectives of both? Or, does this irk you? Are you an exception to this (many are, and they will the subject of future conversations) or do you think the system has to be this way and we need to act differently within it? A conversation about the ecosystem of public services’ defacto purpose moving away from creating and maintaining a defensible position, however it is had, is surely a key part of a movement towards a relationally inspired future.
We hope this induces some useful conversations and that you find it interesting.
Next up, Hannah will lead the way in discussing ‘contextual acuity’ as a key part of working relationally with people and as a system, and she will basically cheer us all up a bit as she is generally wont to do.
Thanks for reading
Mark and Hannah
