In the Tory Leadership debate, one of the candidates, Kemi Badenoch, said that “the machine of government was “not working” and as an engineer, she was the only person who could fix it.” But although it is tempting to think of government as a machine, it leads to a number of problems. It is perhaps more accurate and useful to think of it as a conversation.
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Since before the dawn of history, projects have been a principal human activity. Today, projects add significantly to the world’s GDP. They have become a common form of transforming the built environment and the way many organizations manage themselves in the private, public, and voluntary sectors.
Much modern project management guidance emphasizes the principles, structures, processes and techniques involved in delivering the product, service or transformation that is the project’s intended output. Also, both research and practice acknowledge that project executives should possess ‘people skills’. But despite this, too many projects still fail to live up to expectations, which results in both economic and social waste.
As a ubiquitous example of shared intentionality, projects can be thought of as an expression of our essential nature as human beings – what marks us out from all other species. So, perhaps what is needed is more careful and nuanced attention to the people, the context and the relationships that constitute the project itself.
Netflix’s new satirical science fiction film, Don’t Look Up, set viewing records when it started streaming on Christmas Eve in 2021. It lampoons government, political and media indifference to a catastrophic threat to the survival of homo sapiens, but unsurprisingly offers no diagnosis for how humanity got itself into such a dire state. Coincidentally, Iain McGilchrist’s magisterial new book The Matter with Things was published just six weeks before the movie, and it offers a vision based in well-researched neuroscience of how humanity could return to a better way of living.
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Reflecting on a management career spanning fifty years, Dr Terry Cooke-Davies suggests that for would-be leaders, there is great value in cultivating a growth mindset, developing an attitude of humble inquiry, mastering the art of dialogue and conversation, and combining the tools of an anthropologist with the skillset of a facilitator.
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Two prominent leaders call for cooperation to confront the challenge of both the coronavirus pandemic and the climate emergency. But to work together in harmony, we have to face up to the brute facts of our need to belong, our tendency to create “them” over against “us”, and our habit of allowing disagreement to escalate into conflict.
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