Stephen Billing’s Blog

Those involved in funding health services such as mental health services do not have it so easy.

The previous post described the perspective of the world of the CEO of an NGO – what it is like to be funded by an entity that does not actually use the services you provide.

But, it’s not all beer and skittles for a contract/relationship manager in a funding organisation such as a District Health Board. Imagine you are the new contract/relationship manager in the procurement area of the DHB. You start your job and you are responsible for a range of NGOs providing services, some with as few as 2 full time equivalent staff and others with over 100 full time equivalents.

You review each contract and find that some don’t specify how many service users will be catered for. The descriptions of the services specified in the contracts don’t match what the providers tell you they provide. The NGOs explain the reasons for this, but how do you tell if they are valid or not?

Informally, you hear both positive and negative things about the service provider. (more…)

Spare a thought for those who are working in the non-government organisation (NGO) sector. Imagine this scenario.

The users of your service do not pay for it. Instead a central funding organisation contracts you to provide certain services to certain numbers of service users for a fee. Imagine that you are providing long term residential services to elderly people who experience mental illness. Over periods of 10 years or more your staff providing the care would develop deep relationships with these users of your services.

Now, imagine you are funded by a contract that is renewed annually. The process of negotiating the contract takes several months so you start negotiations for your June contract in February in order to have everything finalised for the new financial year starting in July. You have some tweaking and improvements you want to make to the contract so you signal them early.

Your contract is one of many for the procurement person you deal with, and because it still has four months to run you are not on their priority list. Weeks go by without response from your contract / relationship manager. Things get urgent, but eventually the contract expiry date passes and a new contract is still not finalised. (more…)

Kenneth Gergen in The Saturated Self points out how the modernist view of humans gave rise to the (questionable) personality questionnaire.

Continuing Gergen’s argument, the modernist view was that an ideal human would possess machine-like reliability and rationality – and would be genuine, principled and stable.

David Riesman’s book Lonely Crowd distinguished other-directed from inner-directed types of character. An inner-directed focus was a source of direction implanted by parents and family, that was aimed implacably at the achievement of goals.This sense of direction would keep the inner-directed person on a course towards those goals while negotiating the buffetings of the external environment. By contrast, an other-directed type would be without an internal guide, and would instead be guided by the immediate social surroundings. This type would tend to be superficial, a conformist with a high need for approval.

The inner-directed personality captured the central ideas of modernist humans. If people have machinelike essences, situated not too far from the surface (by contrast with the romantic self which was hidden deep and only hinted at in the real world) then these should be able to be measured. And if the essence of a person could be measured then this should lead to the ability to make predictions about people’s behaviour in the future.

Personality instruments are based on the assumption that people are basically consistent and stable through time, and that their essences will manifest like a fingerprint or DNA.

Gergen points out that the logic by which such tests demonstrate the internal traits of a person is both interesting and misleading. (more…)

The romantic notion of the self as a deep well of hidden passion and emotion has given way through the application of scientific thinking to an idea of humans as rational beings applying reason to make sense of their world. The n-step approaches to change are based on this view of humans.

The romantic stage began to wane toward the end of the 19th century. As expansionist markets and mass production started to emerge, the sciences, with their imperatives to objective evidence and rational utility gained favour. These concepts went against the romantic ideals of feeling, soul, will, and the driving forces of the deep interior which were so much a part of the romantic view.

Science: objective versus Romantic: deep inner core (subjective). The battle lines were drawn. (more…)

In Kenneth Gergen’s The Saturated Self, he notes that the Western concept of the "self" has developed in three stages and I have been thinking that we can see these three stages in our current views of leadership. These stages he labels as:

• Romantic
• Modern
• Post-Modern

This post considers the Romantic stage and the residue it has left on our current thinking about leadership.

Gergen is not using the term "romantic" in the way we think of romantic love. Rather he is referring to a view of the world that prevailed at its height in the late 1700s and on into the 1800s, which is known as the Romantic period. During that period, the view was that what was important about people was their personal depth – passion, soul, creativity and moral fibre.

An early exemplar of the romantic period was Goethe’s "The Sufferings of Young Werther." This is the story of a young man, Werther, who is hopelessly in love with a young woman who is married to an older man. His love goes unrequited and Werther has months of agonising over the conflict between passion and morality.

This conflict summarises in a nutshell the elements of the concerns of the Romantic period – the conflict deep inside the person, between the passions of the spirit, and what it is right to do. (more…)

In which I consider that even though it is much debated what leadership actually consists of or whether it actually exists at all, the language of leadership has certainly given rise to to many ways to describe deficits of personal characteristics in those who manage and lead organisations. 

I am currently reading The Saturated Self by Kenneth Gergen. In it, he discusses the impacts of burgeoning technology on our identity – i.e. how we experience who we are. He says that through technology we are now bombarded by many disparate voices of humanity – both harmonious and alien.

He demonstrates how the scientisation of human behaviour has led to an explosion of terms to describe mental health deficits in the 20th century. Terms such as low self esteem, repressed, authoritarian, obsessive-compulsive, bulimic, sadomasochistic and post-traumatic stress disorder have only come into being relatively recently, and they all refer to problems, shortcomings or incapacities – mental deficits. (more…)

This article appeared in the November 2009 edition of our monthly newsletter, ChangingOrganisations. Why is it that it is so hard for your people to articulate to you what is actually going on?

In my consulting work I often find that clients who tell me of a problem or issue they want to resolve, often have great difficulty explaining what is going on and what it is that they see as the problem. They know that there is a problem and they know roughly what it is – they definitely know who is involved. It’s just so darned hard to articulate the multitude of factors and the complexity of the problem(s)

The challenge seems to be in explaining the situation to someone who is not intimately involved. At one point I used to think that this meant that the person must be not very competent if they couldn’t describe what’s happening. But then a colleague graciously pointed out that I have the same difficulty in explaining my own practice. I had to admit that there are so many nuances that are difficult to explain, and I started to appreciate that explaining our practice is difficult for everyone. You end up repeating yourself, skirting around the issue and providing a picture that is not very coherent. It becomes like an onion where you are trying to unravel the layers and it makes you cry while you’re doing it, if you’re not careful. (more…)