In the world of business we are very familiar with the concept of performance. So too in the world of sport – performance matters. In fact whether we are aware of it or not, all of us are consciously or sub-consciously assessing other people’s performance all the time: has the post arrived on time? Is the service in the shop good enough? Does my partner treat me well? And so on. What we want is performance, and in our most intense relationships – our life partner for example – if we don’t get performance, we quit. Usually we don’t say, ‘I don’t think you are performing’, but we feel undervalued, wasted, and fed up to the point where we take action.
My friend Jeremy Old has recently posted a PDF file – available on his website: http://www.teambusinessdevelopment.co.uk/is_organisational_stress_wrecking_the_nhs.html – which reveals research showing that 91,030 people are probably dying a year as a result of what he calls ‘organisational stress’, but which we might refer to as the poor performance of the NHS. This is simply a staggering statistic, and means that more people die in the UK from hospital error than any other cause! What is being done about it (Jeremy’s article does have some great ideas) and by which political party?
The truth is, like bankers, it would appear that politicians have absolved themselves from the need to perform. One hardly knows whether to weep or – or what? – to cry, so bad is the lamentable nature of their inadequacies: to hear, on the one hand Douglas Alexander, grilled by John Humphries, pretending that leadership isn’t an issue in the forthcoming election – presumably because Gordon Brown has something more important than leadership in mind if he retains office; or, on the other, to find Sir Nicholas Winterton complaining about ‘a totally different type of’ person who uses standard rail fares, which are not for him. And this, in the wake of the expenses scandal, is to remind one of that immortal line from Macbeth: ‘Fit to govern! No not to live. O nation miserable’.
Perhaps it would help if we reminded politicians of what performance is about: three core elements in the mix. The first might be termed Direction. A simple word, which is we wanted to complicate would incorporate elements of vision, strategy, planning, goals and objective. People want to know where they are going; and tinkerings, and endless Heath Robinson increments and incrustations on existing structures, do not constitute a Direction. Where is the UK going?
The second ingredient of performance is what might be termed Skills and Knowledge. This is where at a national level Education comes in. And here again, we have utterly screwed up. All the statistics say – the targets ‘met’ – that educational levels are improving; all the evidence on the ground is the opposite. And that it cannot be improving is evident from the premises on which it starts.
These require a separate blog, but just to start with one: the Crowther Report of 1959 established the central two purposes of the educational process: one, human rights, and two, national investment. Both were equally important, it argued, but then made an interesting admission, given its recent memories of World War 2 and Naziism: primacy had to be given to human rights and the development of the individual. It is precisely the reverse of that that has now occurred. And the result is clear: a process producing increasingly a ‘skills-based’ group think kind of education. It is not only nowadays that young people are often illiterate and innumerate; it’s that many can’t think at all – they actually believe advertising and – worse – Authority.
Finally, the third and vital ingredient in the performance mix is: motivation. Without motivation there is no energy, no progress, no movement. One of the most important motivators is what we call the Searcher – the need to make a difference, for meaning and purpose. And that precisely leads back to the absence of a Direction – of a vision for this country.
So my challenge is: which political party is going to start performing? Who is going to provide the Direction? Re-shape an education system, still with some good pockets within it, but desperately in need of a re-think? And finally motivate the people by feeding their deeper aspirations?
James Sale
The Mapping Motivation Series 