Are patterns controlling you?
Aidan Ward and Philip Hellyer
What does it feel like to be in a pattern that is actually controlling your behaviour? Does it feel constraining and limiting, or do you really not notice?[1] Is the whole point that it is simply “normal” from the inside? How do we feel when someone claims that our actions are not our own? Or that we must own our actions even when they are part of a pattern?
When you tune in these patterns are everywhere. There are the long range inter-generational ones, like the things I recognise after the event as having been the same moves my father made when he was my age. My granddaughter just learned to walk at precisely the same age her mother did. Weird. There are families where each generation has teenage pregnancies whether they approve or disapprove of such things. And there are more immediate patterns like a flaring temper or a coldness in the face of emotional challenge.
Sometimes the patterns apply most obviously to an individual, and some are inherently group patterns. What happens in families when one member suffers an addiction (already a somewhat loaded description!) or when a partner is violent? The classic power dynamics in organisations such as Oshry’s tops, middles, and bottoms. And the subject we looked at before, the symmetrical or complementary schismogenesis of groups.
I mentioned before a heuristic that I use: if the answer to a problem is that you need to hire the person describing the problem, then that person is not in good faith. (This is somewhat different when arguing for an approach rather than for a supplier.) A related heuristic is the ‘if only’ fallacy of magical thinking. Enterprise architects can tend toward thinking that if only their (often mechanical) models were sufficiently detailed, all the messy problems would disappear. Policy makers can tend toward thinking that they know the answers, if only people could be persuaded to adopt them. The trouble with being bright-eyed and bushy-tailed like that is it blinds you to the patterns you are part of.[2]
If you want to explore this I recommend Ginette Paris: Wisdom of the Psyche: Depth Psychology after Neuroscience. The book recounts her near fatal “accident” falling into an empty swimming pool and the entire re-examination and rebuilding of the meanings she made of her life. In the new edition, “Ginette Paris re-focuses her attention on the modern lack of desire to become adult” which I find a fascinating take on what I observe in myself and others.
It doesn’t have to be like this
Last week I was at the first conference of the Public Service Transformation Academy, entitled “It doesn’t have to be like this”. Which sort of begs the question of this blog. Have we identified the controlling patterns? Do people accept that their behaviour has social patterning? When they do see the pattern, is that enough to change it?[3]
Before we climb into that I want to note the overlap we have explored from various angles between bullshit jobs, falsely positive thinking, the appalling treatment of whistleblowers, and the general falseness we associate with HR practice. Richard Wilson of OSCA who chaired the session I presented in, framed this subject as “we have been doing customer engagement and collaboration for 20 years and nothing much has changed. Why?”.
I tried this out at another session on commercialisation. Everyone was getting excited about setting up companies to do aspects of council business. And there were some great examples, but of course what commercial companies do as a way of being is to export costs: social, environmental, generational, etc. In the back of my mind was the Babylon fiasco where a company set up an online GP service. It failed[4] (and is still failing we guess) on two fronts: firstly, it was cherry picking who it would accept as patients to avoid the ones who were going to be costly to service and secondly, there were not enough checks in place to prevent people getting prescriptions they were not entitled to. Clasic commercialisation. So, I asked whether the companies set up to do part of a council’s business had this same effect and how was it handled? The chair of the session moved rapidly on![5]
In a way the whole conference was set up to address the question “why when we keep doing transformational things are we still the same untransformed councils”. You can take that question as a technical one about content or method, or you can take it, as I do, as a question about what pattern are we in that holds behaviour in place whether we try to change it or not.
Valency
We don’t tend to use chemistry metaphors: I remember chemists at Oxford wearing shiny shoes and tweed jackets. But it strikes me in revisiting schismogenesis that valency is the concept to use. Given an underlying pattern, what behaviours are attracted to participate in that pattern?
In an arms race the people who have a valency for the situation are the thrusting, ambitious, amoral types who will sacrifice anything and everybody just to win. There is a mindset, and because of the structural logic of the schismogenesis process, those people come to the fore. I suppose there are not really grounds for arguing against their excesses, for arguing for a proportional response. What we observe in all ‘do or die’ competitive situations, of which war is the paradigm, is that niceties and people who know how to be civilised get pushed aside.
What the PSTA conference was really about, and what this blog is exploring is the other pattern, the complementary schismogenesis. When we get one party being dominant and the other party being submissive for instance. Now the valency that plays here is the dreadful tendency to tell other people what to do. This is the source of the heuristic above: this messy and difficult situation will only get sorted out if you do what I say! Whereas, of course the situation is probably messy in the first place because in that Seeing Like a State way, the necessary order and complexity has been destroyed by just that imposition of a way of seeing.
As well as having a valency for telling people what to do, these dominant types also have a love of scale. Something is only acceptable as a “solution” if it will scale up to include enough population, geography, and political power. You can only get money to do something if it will scale. Bring back the Empire, colonial attitudes, and the white man’s burden — still alive and kicking in Social Care and in Health. Just as the symmetrical schismogenesis pattern pulls in cold warriors whether we want it to or not, complementary schismogenesis pulls in autocrats and command and control types who are sure everyone needs the benefit of their experience. And, being complementary, it also pulls in the people who will acquiesce to being commanded and controlled. ‘Again, whether we think we want those types or not: it is part of the pattern, and it reinforces and amplifies the pattern, bringing more of the same.
When I used to haunt those complementary circles, I was keenly aware of two ultra-bully programme managers. One was managing the Jubilee Line extension and his mantra was “never a day late”. The other, even more dragon-fire and career-limiting, was managing the national IT project for the NHS. Ill-conceived and ineffective in different ways, but why were they there in the first place? I don’t think anything has been learnt or anything has changed, except the money isn’t there for grand schemes.
The grand scheme I talked about at the PSTA meeting was QOF, which pays doctors to prescribe drugs that are (supposedly) going to limit the development of long term conditions as so save the NHS money. 15 years and £30bn later, no value. These are complementary schismogenesis schemes and they pull in people who like telling everyone in the country how to live their lives. Which ends up having nothing to do with science, medicine or common sense.[6]
Aesthetics
A very good way to understand Gregory Bateson’s thinking about change is to read Bradford Keeney’s book, The Aesthetics of Change. And of course the way not to get caught up in the two types of schismogenesis is to insist that change is introduced in terms of its aesthetics. We can choose, not in terms of outcomes as if we had control over them, but in terms of the nature of the change process: whether beauty and joy are to be found on the way, as well as in the destination. And if that sounds impossible and Pollyanna-ish, then think about the colonial legacy of the way we make decisions now. Not pretty, however rational we convince ourselves it is.
What we know is that the reasons why we approach a change are a limited and overly linear set of the dynamics we need to understand. Gregory Bateson would talk about the larger cycles that control things in the medium term and Nora Bateson’s book is called Small Arcs of Larger Circles for that reason.
Maybe a model for an aesthetic approach is the re-unification of Germany which was a vast investment with no guarantees whatsoever that it was economically rational. It was just the right thing to do. Marianna Mazzucato’s mission-based economic strategies would fall into this category too. First find something that people care deeply about, then invest in what it takes to harness that energy. Business cases, phooey. The business case for business cases has been lacking since they first became a thing: why do they persist?
Responsibility?
The PSTA conference was a good laboratory, though I don’t think anyone was paying attention in that anthropological way. Given that it doesn’t have to be this way, how is it going to change and who is going to play a role in that change, positive or negative? What makes it a good laboratory is that a fairly full range of players of various sorts was in the room.
Jan Morgan played the pivotal role, by arrangement. As a professional in the field of change and a client of social services following a brain haemorrhage, she was uniquely able to critique “services”. Not so much critique as roundly condemn, perhaps.[7] I didn’t notice anyone actually deal with what she said from the stage, except to bleat about culture. My view is that people bleat about culture and leadership when they haven’t a clue what to do next. A bit like saying that laudanum contains a dormitive principle.
So there were plenty of council chief execs, “taking responsibility” the way they are paid to do. They have to set the tone, and come up with bold ideas, typically structural change ideas such as the commercialisation mentioned above.[8] And there were plenty of consultancy service providers who of course will help the chief execs and their directors to affect change practically (and perpetually). My feeling is, given the arguments above, that these must be the forces that keep the pattern in place. Strangely, taking responsibility means not taking responsibility. Nothing actually pivoted around Jan Morgan.[9]
Beyond the conference, or possibly invisibly present, there are people and companies that demonstrate, in their being and their work, that it doesn’t have to be like that. If you like, they are part of a different pattern.[10]
[1] To (ab)use the famous analogy of a fish in water, does the fish really not notice the water? Does it really seem completely normal? How does the fish feel when told that its success is on account of the current, not the swimming? Conversely, how might it feel for having to ‘own’ its actions in the face of a strong current?
[2] Indeed, as we’ve noted before, any belief necessarily creates the conditions for it to become untrue. Our usual shorthand: nurses are kind, so inevitably there will be cruelty.
[3] The answer seems to be ‘yes’ for some things and ‘no’ for others. Awareness at some level necessarily precedes making a distinction and making a change (conscious or otherwise). Conversely, the famous example is that knowledge of cognitive biases doesn’t help one become immune to their influence…
[4] Perhaps it failed society, failed socially, failed morally, vs financially bankrupt business failure
[5] To be fair, it takes a special confluence of people, environment, and context in order to be able to meaningfully discuss the undiscussable. The conference’s short sessions were unlikely to foster genuine challenge, so, actually, it does “have to be like this”. More next week on when so-called radical thinkers become part of the status quo.
[6] In Voltaire’s Zadig is a little story of a celebrated doctor who says that he could have saved the eye if only the arrow had struck on the left side, but that it’s impossible since it was the right eye; pronouncing this wise fact, the expert abandons him without treatment. Of course, our hero makes a full recovery.
[7] Jan received a phone call during one of her sessions, which she reported as being from an occupational therapist who had arrived at her home (unheralded, unwanted, and unneeded) and was miffed not to find her there.
[8] Structural changes being the easiest sort of change to enact, of course. Something must be done. This is something. Prepare three envelopes. That sort of thing.
[9] In several senses.
[10] An example at random would be Spice Time Credits that build links across sectors by getting people involved in volunteering.
