For the past few days I have been pondering about the difficulty which leaders have in changing their minds. The basic tension seems to be that on the one hand one often gets things wrong and ought to change position but on the other a change of position is apt to be seen as a sign of weakness, in the various senses of not being in charge, of not being the man, of being pushed around by others and of being indecisive. There is also the consideration that one may need a decision, right or wrong, in which case the time for changing minds has run out and the flawed masterpiece, as it were, has gone to press. The trick is, as the process guys (see, for example, http://www.pcubed.com/) would say, is to have the right process for taking the decision.
Sometimes people want a lead to be given. FIL used to say that one could pretty much always get one's way on a committee if one knew what one wanted. And I remember a time of modest IT catastrophe when just coming up with an articulate way forward carried the day, more or less without discussion.
I associate to the bit (I think) in Rambaud's 'La Bataille' where he talks about Napoleon officiating at a battle and just soaking everything up without much reaction. Everything is happening as he predicted and everything is under control. Just the odd touch on the rudder needed here and there. And this stance is important to his officers and other ranks; they will fight and die for this fiction of control but not for the actuality of muddle and confusion.
And then there was the occasion when, while still in the world at work, I was responsible for making a recommendation about something, a recommendation which had to be cast in the form of a paper and submitted to a committee. But by the time the committee met I had almost changed my mind, and was indeed invited to confirm that I still stood by what I had written, but I felt unable to exhibit a change of mind, feeling that such a change would reflect badly on me. In the event the recommendation was adopted and things did not turn out particularly well, but it may, nevertheless, have been the right recommendation. Perhaps the difficulty, or the failing, was my failure to properly rehearse my doubts in my paper, preferring to submit something which was much more cut and dried and which would not invite the committee to chew over the whole business ad-nauseam. Or perhaps it really was my duty was to take and document a decision which the committee could reasonably rubber stamp and not to expect them to take an intelligent interest in the matter.
But politicians live in a much rougher world. They are always food for the media vultures. Furthermore, whatever view they come to, there will nearly always be others who take a different view. There may well be lots of different views. Generally speaking, a more thoughtful and detached person, the sort of person apt to be useless at being a politician, will find it hard to take a definite view on, for example, the right way to organise educational services. There are always points for and against. There are always likely to be points that one has not thought of. But the politician's job is to take a clear & simple view and to take if forward: as my father used to say, when annoyed by an interminable discussion in the council chamber, the important thing was to get on and do something. The penalty for inaction was much greater than the penalty for the slightly wrong action. However, the politician, unlike my father and certainly at national level, has to be prepared to put up with all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. With being rubbished by one or other segment of the media, with this rubbishing being what passes for public debate.
And if he changes his mind, even those segments of the media which agree with the new line might go on about how weak he was to have done a U-turn.
The party system provides one way of escape. The Prime Minister has his little coterie within which private discussion and dissent is possible. Then once the coterie has come to a view, that view might be taken out to some bigger group, perhaps the cabinet or perhaps the party at large. But by this time the line to take is pretty much settled and packaged up: the Prime Minister is no longer in receive mode; he has circled his wagons and is ready for a fight, proof against more or less anything. And by the time he gets to Parliament he is just going through the motions. All of which protects him from, helps him get through the rough and tumble of public discussion, but which makes it hard to change his mind. He, and those around him, will have sold themselves the clear and simple line and they may well have forgotten that it was not an easy decision, which might easily have gone the other way. Perhaps more important, there is the question of face with which I started: how could I possibly be so weak as to admit to a mistake? The media pack will know I have weakened and will go for the jugular - in which, given the way we do things now, they may well be right. So if, perchance, he does change his mind in public, one of the coterie will have to be offered up for sacrifice, or at the very least one of the cabinet.
Maybe one day the standard of public debate will improve, will move beyond chucking rocks about and give public speakers room to air a bit of decent doubt and uncertainty. And maybe we the public will learn to put up with a bit more doubt and uncertainty and not expect things which are difficult to somehow be made easy.
And now it is time to head off to see if I can make it in time for the end of the car booter.
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