14 February 2022. Organisations. Geographies.

Dealing with culture failure. How technologies have fractured our sense of place.

Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story. Recent editions are archived and searchable on Wordpress.

1: Dealing with culture failure

I try to stay away from local politics on Just Two Things, unless there is a bigger picture to be seen. The resignation of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Cressida Dick, fits this bill.

At the blog Political Betting, the pseudonymous blogger ‘CycleFree’—a regular contributor—wrote a longer piece about the fact the the Met was in urgent need of cultural change—and suggested where to start. Some of his advice applies to other organisations as well.

If you’re not from the UK, you might have missed some of the detail here. In short, over the past two years a series of scandals has revealed the Metropolitan Police to be misogynous and racist. Cressida Dick’s response has been to do the minimum in response that she was able to get away with, “tapping lightly on the windows with a wet sponge”, as a former boss of mine used to say.

In general, she seemed to be defending the culture even while the offending officers were disciplined—or in the most notorious case, sent to jail. The outcome has been plummeting confidence in the force, especially among women in London.

(New Scotland Yard. Photo via Wikipedia. CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication)

CycleFree’s article opens like this:

When an organisation in trouble loses its leadership, there is a tendency for the new management to embark on a reorganisation. This is usually a mistake. It’s not that reorganisation isn’t needed. It’s rather that it should not be the priority. It destabilises and distracts from the work which is needed. So it is with the Met.

They suggest two priorities for the next Commissioner:

- Disciplining and sacking all misbehaving and incompetent officers.

- Culture change. This is hard, extremely hard. It takes time.

On the first, there’s a template from the Met’s history in the 1970s, when the force was notoriously corrupt. The then Commissioner, Sir Robert Mark, put in place an investigative team to root out offenders, and gave them his full support so that they didn’t get obstructed in their work.

On the second, it takes a senior leadership team who know that change is needed (“a near death experience” helps); external stakeholders who keep the pressure on; and an awareness that it takes time to make the needed change, and that the task is never finished.

This also requires that people know what a good culture looks like—hard to believe of the Met at the moment—and CycleFree has a useful checklist on the essential elements:

- “Leaders at all levels who take responsibility, who do not seek to excuse, who know how to say sorry and mean it, who understand how the force is viewed by the public and why and can communicate effectively to the ranks why change is needed.”

- “Proper due diligence and thorough vetting both before recruitment and throughout employment.” Including on existing police officers.

- “A culture of “Speak Up” and an understanding that turning a blind eye, having misplaced loyalty to wrongdoers is unprofessional, wrong and dangerous – and will be punished.”

- “An effective training system and continuing professional education. That training... must be about professional competence”.

- “An effective disciplinary system”, coupled with no tolerance of minor misdemeanours.

- “A way of really learning from mistakes... What it means is accepting that mistakes will happen, catching them early and treating them as learning opportunities not as something to be PR’d away.”

There are clearly other organisations than the Metropolitan Police who could do with a programme like this.

The element that he adds, borrowing a phrase that Churchill used to use on wartime documents, in “Action This Day”. All of this needs to be treated as immediate and urgent.

They will need a team of senior leaders below the top whose sole focus, at least initially, is on this. They should start even before the new Commissioner is in place. Listing the weaknesses in procedures and procedures and the suggested recommendations from the numerous reports over the last few years will provide a detailed and worthwhile To Do List and a plan for action. They can start on this right now.

2: How technologies have fractured our sense of place

I was doing some tidying at the weekend, and came across a short piece in the New Left Review from 2017 by Marco d’Eramo called “Geographies of Ignorance”. It seems to be outside the NLR paywall. In it he talks about how our mental maps of the world have been changed by, basically, aviation and mass media.

”Once ‘faraway lands’ were swathed in the fascination of the exotic… We knew all about what lay around us and what we had contact with… But the communications revolution both material (low-cost airlines) and immaterial (radio, TV, cellphones, the internet) has meant that ‘faraway lands’ no longer exist.”

And the result of this is that the faraway is now close at hand. As Marshall McLuhan reminded us, all new technologies both enhance some capabilities and obsolesce others.

“As the faraway has been brought closer, what was nearby has become distant….The more we chat by network with remote interlocutors, the less time we have to talk to our neighbours. The more we splash about in the waters off Sharm El Sheik or Puerto Rico or the Maldives, the less we find out about Calabria’s Ionian coast.”

One of the reasons for this is that cost and time is now a more important determinant than distance.

“In this perspective, New York is nearer to Milan than a Sicilian city like Trapani. The effect of this geographical abridgement is also one of social estrangement; it is easier to communicate with an interlocutor who, though far away, is compatible with is in culture, income, and status.”

—

(It’s a long, long way to Trapani. Photo by Leandro Neumann Ciuffo, via Wikipedia. CC BY 2.0)

As a result, our mental models of the world, which were once concentric circles, are now patchworks.

“The same city in which we were born and grew up now reveals entire neighourhoods that are stranger, more exotic, than a faraway metropolis.”

d’Eramo links this to an idea from Wolfgang Schivelbusch in his book on the effect of the railway in the nineteenth century on our ideas of time and space. Schivelbusch makes a distinction between “landscape” and “panorama”. The train creates the panorama because its speed obliterates the foreground.

“Today, for us, the whole world is viewed in panorama. We are now blind to what moves in the foreground, right in front of us, and we cannot reconstruct the landscape.”

The piece doesn’t really draw any conclusions, at least not directly. But if you put this all together, it seems to connect very directly with two of the significant political effects of our time. The first is the political split in many countries between cities and the rest—smaller towns, rural areas, and so on—which has tended to play out in surges of populism.

The second is the way in which the world wide web has acted as a large political sorting hat, making political differences more extreme and shared ground harder to find. Shared landscape is a common ground, even for people who have differences.

——————————-

j2t#262

If you are enjoying Just Two Things, please do send it on to a friend or colleague.