Media

When buying anything, using something or requesting services as a citizen it is impossible to escape the game of performance management, the metrics deployed to ‘measure’ what is generally referred to as my customer experience. ‘We want to hear from you! Give us your feedback!’

I had been working with a group of managers and we had been discussing how a lot of managerial work is about dealing with uncertainty. Things don’t work out quite how you planned, surprises come out of left field, or your boss, or the organisation with which you are working closely, has just decided that something else is now a priority. What you came in to do in the morning has somehow gone off course by the afternoon, but you’re still responsible for your first priority. This was the link I had been making in the seminar I had given them earlier in the day on the complexity sciences: I had been arguing that social life arises in the interplay of differing intentions of which no one is in control. But how do you know how to respond and what to pay attention to?

Everyone knows what good leadership is in the abstract and the ideal. But there is no leadership in the abstract and the ideal. There is only what you do when you show up at work which will never be ideal. So if you are a leader you are always a work in progress making it up as you go along with your colleagues and hoping that previous experience will count for something.

There is nothing inevitable and linear about human progress, as we might infer from listening to the evening news. Sometimes, as the sociologist Norbert Elias observed, we go through a decivilizing process, periods where human behaviour regresses and explicit conflict becomes more visible and destructive. He made sense of the regression to barbarism in Germany in his work The Germans, a subject of particular interest to a German Jewish citizen forced to flee as a refugee to the UK.