Swann's Way

The wood and the trees

2008-03-03T11:13:00.001Z

Sometimes a series of stimulating reviews prompts me to buy a book I would not normally think of reading.

One recent example is Beechcombings: The Narratives of Trees, by Richard Mabey (Chatto and Windus 2007). The book is what it says on the cover, an exploration of trees and woodlands with a particular focus on the beech tree.

Its resonance with the work and thinking of the Institute is remarkable.

Mabey notes that when faced with an ancient tree people generally ask “when was it planted?”; the notion that trees can “plant” themselves seemingly inconceivable.

He explores the importance of boundaries, quoting a Victorian writer G E Briscoe Eyre who wrote: “The slopes that connect the moorland with the timbered lowland partake of the vegetation of both, and form a debatable land (Mabey’s emphasis) between them, where descending tongues of heath interpenetrate the advancing wedges of rough woodland.”

That immediately prompted me to think about D W Winnicott’s concept of potential space.

Mabey also explores notions of beauty and complexity. He writes:”I’m fascinated by this apparent congruence between the judgement of aesthetic philosophers and the way scientists describe and categorise natural landscapes. Are there deeper roots to our emotional responses to the visual….? What resonances, for example, do ‘picturesque’ trees call up? …. Where did the notion that they were picturesquely beautiful emerge from? What deep-rooted associations do trees conjure up? Are they some kind of portal to understanding the deep relationship between wildness and time?”

One thing the reviews did not alert me to were a number of links links between beechcombing and psychodynamics.

Mabey notes that one famous botanist Sir Arthur Tansley devoted four years of his life to psychoanalysis. While another, George Peterken, was also interested in the work of Freud and discovered the following quote from his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis:
“The creation of the mental domain of phantasy has a complete counterpart in the establishment of ‘reservations’ and ‘nature parks’ in places where the inroads of agriculture, traffic or industry threaten to change the original face of the earth into something unrecognisable. The reservation is to maintain the old condition of things which has been regretfully sacrificed to necessity everywhere else…The mental realm of phantasy is also such a reservation from the encroaches of reality.”

A fertile read.

Phil Swann

Mayoral mauling

2008-02-01T07:51:00.001Z

Criticism of London Mayor Ken Livingston has once again raised questions about the case for directly elected mayors in UK local government.

The London Evening Standard has been running a long-standing campaign against Livingston. But the recent coverage has had an added piquancy because it was prompted by a television programme, for the Channel 4 Dispatches series, fronted by the political editor of the leftwing New Statesman Martin Bright.

The essence of the criticism was summed up by Livingston himself when he acknowledged in a BBC interview that the London mayoralty had in effect become a personal fiefdom.

In local government circles this contretemps has focussed attention on the mechanisms through which directly elected mayors are held to account. The Local Government Chronicle pointed to the way in which the New York City Council holds that city’s mayor to account as a potential model, compared with the supposedly toothless London Assembly.

Yet at the same time as the English media was indulging in a Ken-fest, The New York Times was running an expose of Rudi Giuliani’s record as mayor. Under the headline “In matters big and small, crossing Giuliani had price” the opening paragraph read: “Rudolph W Giuliani likens himself to a boxer who never takes a punch without swinging back. As mayor, he made the vengeful roundhouse an instrument of government, clipping anyone who crossed him.”

Does that sound familiar?

It may well be that these similarities say something about the personalities of the two mayors and about what it takes to successfully stand for election to high profile big city posts such as these.

But maybe the similarities should also prompt us to think more systemically about the culture of city government, the pressures that city leaders face, and the dynamics between them, the organisations they lead, the communities they serve and the political parties they are members of and oppose.

One thing is for sure: this is more than coincidence.

Phil Swann

Telling stories

2008-01-23T08:18:00.001Z

The Guardian’s recent series of booklets on the Greek myths was delightful. Definitely a set to keep.

The booklets prompted me to think about the role that stories can play in helping us to understand society, particularly stories with the depth of the Greek myths and many of Shakespeare’s plays.

The centrality of the tragedy of Oedipus in psychoanalytic thinking stands out. But I am also reminded of the way Mark Stein, an academic at Imperial College, uses the story of Cain and Abel in his work on envy and defences against anxiety.

Stories can also be useful in consultancy interventions, as a way of getting groups of people to talk about the issues they face. They can be used to elicit valuable insights.

The power of stories struck me while listening to the recent performance at the Barbican of Judith Weir’s The Vanishing Bridegroom. The first act, The Inheritance, is about the death of a man whose legacy is found to be missing. One of his sons must have stolen it, and the question is, which one?

A doctor pursues the question by telling a story of a woman, prevented from marrying her lover and made to marry a richer man. From the reactions to the story of the three sons it is clear who stole the inheritance.

Stories, the telling of them, interpretations of them and reactions to them can be very revealing.

Phil Swann

Enduring awards

2007-12-03T11:53:00.000Z

The sense of déjà vu struck as soon as I crossed the threshold. Grosvenor House: the women in posh frocks and the men in DJs.

In a previous, local government, life I was a regular attender of awards ceremonies, sometimes even in the exalted status as a judge. Mercifully such things feature less in my life as director of the Institute. It can only have been withdrawal symptoms which led me to accept an invitation to the Time Higher Education Supplement’s awards ceremony.

For the first half hour it could have been a local government awards event; or, I suspect, a gathering of cutting edge kitchen designers or accountants. As a massive group hug these things probably do serve a useful purpose. They are certainly financially remunerative for the organisers. But as a way of disseminating good practice they are, I suspect, a faux diamond encrusted sledge hammer.

But this ceremony was different. Given the nature of its readership, local government always had to buy in a humorous host. Higher education has its own home grown jester in the inimitable Laurie Taylor. There was also a charity collection, suggesting that academics have more of a conscience than council officers.

But what struck me most was the work that was celebrated. Science and medicine dominated: the Birmingham University School of Medicine; a prediction of labour onset device (not political science I assure you); the measurement of gamma ray bursts; the development of new bone graft material.

There was an award for an intriguing piece of political history – Lloyd George and Churchil: rivals for greatness. And the establishment of a new Centre for Reasoning (at Kent University) was recognised.

But overall social science had a very low profile. I cannot decide whether that is because of a mature aversion to Grosvenor House, a lack of pride, a bias among the judges, or because it didn’t deserve any prizes.

Phil Swann

The cost of neglecting the dynamics

2007-11-26T10:05:00.000Z

Whatever further emerges about the chain of events that led to the loss of the financial records of 25 million citizens, one thing is clear. An important feature of the context in which this monumental failure occurred is the recent merger of the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise to form HM Revenue and Customs.

Red top tabloid sensationalism and Daily Mail hectoring aside, it is evident that there is still unfinished business relating to the merger of these two land-standing and in their own ways august institutions. Unresolved inter-organisational dynamics will have played their part in creating the conditions in which the actions which led to loss of such sensitive material could have occured.

Organisational dynamics have also been identified as a critical factor behind the failure of Metronet, the organisation responsible for the maintenance and renewal of a large part of the London Underground.

Metronet is in effect a consortium. Its shareholders consist of Atkins, Balfour Beatty, Bombardier, EDF Energy, and Thames Water. One senior player involved in this saga attributes the company’s collapse to the fact that it was never clear who was in charge – the consortium was a leaderless group.

Relations between organisations lie at the heart of the other continuing financial drama – Northern Rock. The clunkiness of the response to the bank’s financial meltdown highlighted serious weaknesses in the relationships between the Treasury, the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority.

A consortium is almost certainly necessary to tackle a job as big as the renewal of the tube. The decision to merge the revenue and customs may well have been a sound one. And the creation of the FSA may well prove to have been a good thing. But in all three cases insufficient attention has been paid to intra and inter-organisational dynamics.

The impetus to drive change rapidly is a powerful one. But the millions of people whose bank details have been lost, who fear for their savings or who rely on the tube to get to work may wish that more time had been taken to deal with underlying cultural and organisational issues.

Playing with engagement?

2007-10-26T14:42:00.000+01:00

A seminar with a group of neighbourhood managers on the same day that Prime Minister Gordon Brown returned to the subject of constitutional reform prompts some reflections on how we learn – or not - from policy initiatives in this country.

Neighbourhood Management Pathfinders are a government initiative, the first round of which are nearing the end of their Whitehall-funded pathfinder status. A major national evaluation of them is underway.

They aim to build social capital and work with service providers to ensure that they meet the particular needs of some of most deprived communities of the country. At their best they have secured effective community engagement and begun to shape public services around the needs of specific communities and neighbourhoods.

The themes this group of neighbourhood managers were keen to explore include the part that local politicians could play in establishing a less dependent relationship between consumers and service providers. They were also keen to exchange experiences on ways in which action at a neighbourhood level can feed into more strategic policy making.

These are the things that occupy politicians and policy makers today. Yet the policy and political tide seems to have left Neighbourhood Management (with capital letters) stranded. Because new initiatives have succeeded it, there is far less interest in the programme in Whitehall and Westminster and we are in danger of ignoring learn some important and timely lessons.

One of the successes of some of the NM pathfinders has been to to create spaces in which new approaches to providing public services in deprived communities can be explored and tested. This type of innovation must become more widespread if the challenges that lie behind the Public Service Agreements announced by the Government in the spending review are to be addressed.

One of the thinkers who inspired the thinking of the Tavistock Institute, D W Winnicott identified the importance of play to the development of a child’s creativity and development. From that he developed the notion of “transitional space” in which creativity and innovation can take place, in which anxiety provoking circumstances can be worked with constructively.

As the neighbourhood managers I met this week are only too aware, their work challenges established power relations and therefore generates resistance and anxiety. If some of the pathfinders have indeed created spaces in which innovation and creativity can be nurtured – and the resistance and anxiety worked with - we must learn from them.

We also need a space nationally in which lessons such as those emerging from these pathfinders can be explored – played with? – to inform policy and political debate, rather than being neglected in the rush to the next good idea.

Phil Swann
Director, Tavistock Institute

2007-09-18T15:50:00.000+01:00

60

We invited you to:
Reflect, explore, innovate and celebrate with us…….
You came along, so now we would like to hear from you….
Would you like to share your views on….

Citizens juries
The politics of emotion
The Third Sector
Reforming the NHS or
Anything you have heard today?

2007-09-12T17:07:00.000+01:00

Looking forward is a key theme of the events on 20 September to mark the 60^th anniversary of the establishment of the Tavistock Institute.

The anniversary event itself will conclude with a lecture on the changing challenges facing society by Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the RSA and former strategy adviser to Tony Blair.

The lecture will provide the context for a debate about how the Institute and the wider Tavistock Community of Practice can help groups and organisations to respond to those challenges.

In the run up to the anniversary a programme of thinking and writing has been underway to refresh the Institute’s intellectual traditions to ensure that they are relevant to the needs of client in today and in the future. The results of that work will be presented in an interactive event on the afternoon of the 60^th anniversary event.

The Institute itself is also preparing for the future. Its new website and brand are being launched on 20 September.

A key characteristic of our style our commitment to working with clients, rather than “taking a problem away” and “solving it for them”. This approach is embedded in the design for the anniversary event which includes:

A mini Group Relations event which draws on the thinking on which our annual “Leicester Conference” is based;
A futures workshop which will explore the challenges facing society over the next ten years;
A research and evaluation workshop.

The programme for the day also includes two plenary sessions on:

Organisational consultancy: from Theory to Practice and from Practice to Theory;
Challenges for Research and Evaluation in the 21^st century.

To book last minute places at the event please contact Nikki Benoit on 0207 417 0407.