Standards in Public Life, Management and the Post-Truth Era. Genesis

Over on Orphans of Liberty I posted the following comment in response to a post about the post truth era and when it started. I apologise, as this is going to be long as it attempts to define the decade that brought us to where we are today. In fact it will be a series of blog posts in order to avoid this being a cure for insomnia.

"I think it really started in John Major’s time (although the Hillsborough disaster with its official truth conflicting with the actual truth may have been a very early indication of the control of truth and media mentality). When managament-speak changed to include words and phrases like “stakeholder” and “going forward” is really an indication of the corporate and media changes. John Major’s government commissioned the Nolan report into standards in corporate life, which strangely seems to have been a catalyst when the standards really started to slip. The control of risk morphed into the control of everything including the truth.
By the time Tony Blair got into No.10 the mentality has perfused into the Civil Service although it was probably a willing victim. It was the start of the time of arse-covereing, risk-averse, truth manipulation. Tony Blair’s government just pushed the boundaries of what they could get away with. Successive governments have pushed further from then on. The rise of 24Hr news feeds has also promoted news as drama: to hold onto viewers, everyone is a victim, the left wear white hats and the right wear black hats, the truth is what the media say it is and what makes good drama. The news is tabloid in nature: Trump is Satan, Brexit is wrong, UKIP are far right, Corbyn is a cuddly old duffer, Theresa May is incompetent, Boris Johnson is a Clown… so it goes on.
Not so coincidentally, the organisation Common Purpose started in 1989 with the stated aim of targetting leaders and emerging leaders and training them. Also not so coincidentally during this time the weaponisation of diversity emerged and the homogenisation of management across public services and the private sector"

It was a bit long for a response and it brought up some interesting ideas on how governance has changed since the Eighties and the reasons for it.

I'm not sure how I should go about this, so do excuse me if I ramble.

Anyway, let me explain. Back in the Nineties I was on the cusp of management (in fact I did become a manager in 2000, but being just on the oputside looking in, I could see some pretty dramatic changes going on in management culture all the way through the Nineties and it's only now I can sort of rationalise the changes, explain how they came about and explain where we are with the post-truth era we find ourselves in.

So, let's go back to 1989. A seminal year where a number things happened that would shape the coming decade.

So, in no particular order, here's what happened in 1989:

Sky News launches.
The Common Purpose Organisation is formed.
The Hillsborough Disaster happens.

Taking the Hillsborough disaster first. It's the first instance I can find where an official narrative directly conflicts with both anecdotal news and also the video footage that was captured inside the football ground. The official line was that the disaster was caused by hooligans. But the video footage showed no riots, no violence. Only fans climbing the fence at the front of the stands in order to avoid the crush that the Police had caused.
The offical narrative was fixed that evening by the Police and officials that the people dying on the pitch were the very people to blame. It was not the truth and as we know now, it took decades for the truth to come out that the Police were to blame.

You have to bear in mind that the "official" narrative was not questioned by reporters despite having the evidence in front of their eyes. The truth was not the official "truth".

Now to Common Purpose. Most readers will already know I have am sceptical about this organisation, it's aims, it's training and the people it targets. But it's aim is "Leading Beyond Authority", which seems innocuous enough. From impirical evidence their aims are not to teach leaders how to lead, but instead lumber them with baggage that incumbers them from doing the actual job they are employed to do.

The rise of Common Purpose and a certain management ethos has gone hand-in-glove with the failure of senior managers to to their jobs. In my mind it is no coincidence that over the decade senior management has been encumbered with things like diversity and equality to the exclusion of their original job spec. Now, decades later you can spot a Common Purpose type by the vaccuous meaningless phrases they use, the sheer inability to do their job without serious help and the slavish adherence to an agenda set by others. They are not true leaders.

Finally, the thing that happened in 1989 is Sky news is launched. A 24-hour news feed initially with no competition. However the number of Sky subscribers in the UK caused Sky to have significant influence over UK news. Other news providers started to copy it's style over the Nineties and in 1997 the BBC launched their own 24-hour news service. The problem with 24-hour news is the very nature of news: it's sporadic and you have busy days and lean days. The problem the 24-hour news providers have is how do you keep viewers watching while you are repeating the same news over and over again until the next new story pops up.

The answer is to not supply the news as a dry, truthful thing, but to make news into drama in order to hook viwers and keep them. "Truth" is not necessarily the primary response. Drama, escalation, suspense, etc. are the new News narratives.

So for instance everybody in a new story becomes a victim, to add drama to a story. Reporting Politics is pretty dull. The same names come up again and again unless governments change or ministers change. So very early the 240-hour news services took a leaf out of the book of satire: Politicians became good guys and bad guys: heroes and villains. Sky News has tended to modify it's political hero/villain narrative in line with it's owner's views, whereas the BBC have a basic Left: good/Right:bad narrative in play.

Aside to all of this, Margaret Thatcher had been in power for a decade and there was seemingly no way to remove the Tories from power. Labour, the official opposition had had a series of extremely far left leaders in the early Eighties after the Callagahan government was ousted by the Tories. First Michael Foot and then Neil Kinnock. Both innefective leaders during the Eighties and hamstrung by the far left in the Labour party.

The supremacy of money, the "greed is good" mentality and the rise of the Stockmarkets and the City of London as the prime engine of GDP in the UK (and therefore political influence), the demise of manufacturing were all well in place by the end of the Eighties.

So, that's setting out the stall for the genesis of the post-truth era, back in 1989.

In my next post I'll try and explain how during the early Nineties this all started to affect management, public services, politics, society and life in general.