Organisational Governance
I experienced the value of a human-centric organisation at an early age...
When I was 8 years old, my junior school in Coventry (UK) adopted recommendations from the Plowden Report (1967) which "espoused a child-centred, 'informal' humanist approach, stressing the uniqueness of each child and the paramount need for individualisation of the learning process".
The aim was for children to flourish, and it seemed to work for me.
Three months before I left at age 11, I'd apparently sucked the school dry of things to teach me, so the Headmaster kept me busy helping out in the library.
I'd passed my '11-plus' selection examination, and in September 1970 started at King Henry VIII boys grammar school.
The school had been founded in 1545 by John Hales as part of a deal with King Henry VIII to purchase former monastery lands around the city during the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
My immediate impression was that not much had changed at the school in the intervening 425 years.
It had a rigidly top down, authoritarian, even brutal system of 'governance' by schoolmasters, most of whom wouldn't be allowed anywhere near children today.
It would be a massive understatement to say that life at "Henry's" was in stark contrast to my earlier child-centred school experience.
Another major contrast I became aware of at the same time concerned the political view of my ardent trade unionist factory worker father that: "the only good Tory is a dead Tory"1.
This contrasted with my own lived experience that many of the kids I got on with well at school came from the kind of Conservative background that my father seemed to detest.
It's probably the main reason I never developed a political identity or allegiance – neither sucked into 'being a socialist like my dad' nor feeling any pull to identify as 'a Tory'.
It was from this apolitical perspective that I experienced life in the UK when the 1973 oil crisis combined with a national strike by mineworkers led to a three day working week, power cuts, and studying by candlelight – a powerful memory to this day.
The above all came back to me recently whilst watching a 1980 NBC video: "If Japan Can, Why Can't We?".
It was like opening a time capsule and being transported back to when corporate America struggled to respond to The Japanese Miracle2 and took seriously the need to bridge the chasms between 'bosses' vs 'workers' that had also blighted my dad's working life on this side of the pond.
The NBC video reminded me of the powerful effects of the experiences above and their deep influence on my professional work over the past 35 years:
The profoundly positive effects of conditions that encourage an individual's strengths to flourish.
The profoundly negative effects when conditions create authoritarians and underlings, pitch them each against the other, distort both 'sides' views of each other, and perpetuate adversarial relationships that impoverish people’s lives and an organisation’s performance.
The first inklings that there must be a better way - one that brings alive the self-evident truth that none of us is as smart as all of us.
The NBC video is 40 years old and definitely of its time: the clothes, haircuts, and presentation style; the appeals for reduced government regulation (which subsequently happened under Ronald Reagan); the singular focus on 'productivity' as the holy grail of organisations; the underlying assumption that organisations are machines for producing dollars.
But the most striking thing is the adversarial relationships whose legacy continues to this day, echoed in debates about whether everyone should return to a fixed workplace when the current pandemic 3 is behind us.
The NBC video is definitely worth a watch. 4
It’s also worth reflecting on what formative experiences have had the most influence on your outlook and whether they still serve you well…
As of writing in June 2021