By Dr Leandro Herrero
‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’ is a famous line by L.P Hartley in ‘The go-between’ (1953). I like to refer to it again and again when I find myself too close to a piece of history and try to interpret it. How did we get to today’s managerialism? Asks Dr Leandro Herrero, as he reflects on 25 years since he pioneered Viral Change, bringing behavioural science to culture change and transformation.
Looking back at 25 years of The Chalfont Project makes me feel like I do when receiving one of those long, never ending Christmas letters that friends from the USA send me every year, full of pictures of kids, graduations and Theme Parks. I will try to avoid that trap. Rear mirrors don’t sit well with me, but reflection needs one.
If I were to explain that rear mirror reflection with a single, overarching (and therefore destined to be pure reductionism) quick diagnosis, I would say it’s the Triumph of Managerialism and its offspring. Management comes from Old French, ‘horsemanship’, ’to control a horse’, and contains the roots of ‘manus’ (hands) in Latin. I never dismiss etymologies. They always contain a significant load of meaning and truth.
When managerialism reaches a point of maturity, it has no choice but to reinvent from within. What it has done is to fall in love with nominalism. That is, name functions, activities, programmes, initiatives and give them a dedicated room in the house. Naming is putting up borders, declaring some uniqueness, a first pass to control.
That rear mirror tells me that the recent years could be described as the permanent reinvention, rise and fall, of management by acronyms and labels coming on and off the stage: CSR, DEI, and not to forget SDG; plus newcomers such as Wellbeing and veterans such as Employee Engagement (now injecting Experience) and the ubiquitous Agile, now less agile due to age.
Nominalism provides an illusion of control by creating a category that will surely need a Head Of and a budget, a truly dangerous combination. Since the initiatives seem to breed in triple-letter form, the fate of the individual letters is associated to the other siblings. Interestingly, at least in DEI as an example, they seem to highlight deficit, never strength. We name it DEI because we are supposed to ‘defend’ and promote or create diversity, equality and inclusion. There are lots of things that we need to promote in the organization that don’t have a dedicated letter collection. Presumably, Collaborative, Aligned and Transnational, would be a very legitimate CAT, although not totally sure what exactly a Head of CATs would do.
We have all seen the backlash. Despite the common belief that all the current ills lead to Trump, this was not the case this time. Mother Corporate got disappointed with the child’s lack of ‘productivity’ and ‘delivery’. A recent news article said that people are working around the fallen acronyms by continuing to do as before under another name. In his wisdom, the interviewed person asserted that ‘we are now going to call it culture, people, or anything different’, a truly disingenuous path.
The carving out of the pieces-of-culture-cum-Head hasn’t done much good to culture per se. Any reductionism has a price. Managerialism needs reductionism (to manage it) and in DEI terms, it doesn’t get better than quotas and ratios.
We’ve got the map and the territory mixed up. The custodian of Diversity is no longer the company ethos, the inexcusable and unquestionable role of respect, or the conscious seeking of novel ideas, viewpoints and lived experiences, all translated into what used to be called a healthy culture. Today, it’s what the Function does: training, awareness and a mixture of tokenism and self-deluded fixes.
In this ‘manageable reduction’, Diversity is not the celebration of the unique human but ‘The Nutella Man’ which is spread on multiple identities and categories (minority, majority, colour, race, age, geographical origin, gender, ancestry, you name it) that can be identified, labelled, quantified and allocated, like items on a supermarket shelf. Far from celebrating what is unique, diversity becomes a solvent.
This permanent flow of ‘functions’ runs the risk of a corporate version of the god Cronus, devouring his children to prevent his own death. If DEI dies (reincarnation TBD) it will be of suicide, not murder.
The trouble with people sitting critically in this discourse is that they will be automatically (and totally consistent with the principle) labelled. Are we not good at that, after all? Reactionary would be the kindest.
Managerialism injects confidence, predictability and, above all, control. It also provides a quasi-scientific face. It has its rituals and these are contagious.
I’ve learnt recently about the use of ‘Managed Democracy’. If democracy does not go in the ‘right direction’, it has to be managed for the good of all. I am afraid this is happening today, and in places close to home and in plain sight.
Years ago, I used to tell this to groups of Internal Communications: your function is not needed, your functionality is. Nobody ‘needs’ a communications department, but good communications are vital. An equivalent logic could be applied to the Acronyms Wars, particularly DEI. We need to free the functionality from its ideological capture so we can all shape futures unchained.
I am bound to revert to my area of expertise: behavioural and cultural change. From my perspective – apologies if inadvertently offending – most acronyms, labels, ‘functions’ and boxes are not the solution but the problem themselves. In culture terms, what matters is what people do, or not do, described with as much clarity as possible. Then imagine ‘that’ at scale. That is culture. Resist the label. If at the end people say, ‘Ah, you are describing a culture of diversity’, for example, so be it. But don’t dwell on the label for too long. It’s cosy, attractive and comfortable. If you stay too long, you will end up managing it.
Diversity is too important to be left in the hands of a department. That child needs to grow up.
Dr Leandro Herrero
