What would she do?

One of the great mysteries of the modern world is how to get appointed to the board of a quango.

I have also wondered whether the concerns about the effectiveness or not of quangos may lie in the criteria used to identify the types of people to run or govern quangos. To that end, would the public and political perceptions be different if there were greater confidence that quangos were both purposeful AND engaged the right people to sit on their boards and lead their management teams.

When I was doing work on revalidation of doctors (in the UK), following the tragic baby deaths scandal at an NHS hospital, I observed to medical colleagues that if they didn’t get their medical house in order they would be seen as unable to govern their profession and would lose their autonomy and control of the GMC: in which case, the chair of the General Medical Council would be lay chair, and they would be outnumbered by lay members. I observed that I might be the chair of the GMC since I knew a fair bit about what doctors do, which put the issue quite starkly.

The real issue is whether the criteria used to select candidates for quangos by appointing bodies fully engages the widest possible talent pool, or does it favour certain types of people, who in the end want to work with people like themselves, presumably in some respect professional quango-ites. Part of the challenge is that in many cases quangos should actually be putting themselves out of business. Other quangos should be driving reform and change. But the characteristics of people who get to sit on quango boards have to a great degree established their legitimacy, not as reformers, but as a ‘safe pair of hands’.  Radical, reforming, challenging individuals will never fit as quangos exude stability and bureaucratic purpose, not the instability that comes from reform and general disruption of the status quo.

Quangos could even be seen as evidence that the status quo is alive and well!  A quango focused on innovation should itself be innovative, it might instead suffer from the usual pressures to deliver performance metrics on attendees at workshops on innovation rather than evidence of innovative outcomes.  A quango on research would be disinclined to consider speculative more risky research proposals, as they must prove the value of taxpayers’ money. Quangos that invest in early stage high technology research spin-offs from research labs would need to demonstrate in some budgetary cycle that their investments were creating jobs, for instance, despite evidence that such start-ups might take 5 years before they would have any impact.  And so it goes.

In the meantime, taxpayers’ money is spent on people whose careers are simply to sit on quangos. And when do we have a discussion about whether the very criteria for public appointments to quangos are themselves part of the problem? Perhaps there’s a quango for that?

I attended the European Foundation for Management Development conference at Advancia 22-23 February 2010, to meet new colleagues as well as participate in a panel discussion on the challenges facing entrepreneurs. I organised my presentation around the question: “what sort of the future will the entrepreneur invent?”  I used two pictures to start my talk, one a 1530 Utopian painting and the other a poster of Fritz Lang’s dystopian film Metropolis.

Everything around us is invented, discovered, or created by the mind of people making sense of the world, so while it may be too much to see the entrepreneur as a super-human force of nature (as some discussed at the conference), the point is that human ingenuity is behind the world we live in, and our ability to be ingenious drives the

entrepreneurial spirit. I raised these issues in my presentation:

• crises are really opportunities, especially for entrepreneurs;
• the growing networking and interconnectedness of the world offers amazing opportunities for entrepreneurs to look at ways to bring people, information and services together; concerns about digital divides, social exclusion etc., in my view are transitional features of the current world, and not defining features, and that in time, these will be replaced with other forms of exclusion; the point being that technologies themselves are not exclusionary, but what people do with them is;
• rising educational attainment is upon us, and there will be a substantial decline in the percentageof the population globally with only primary education, and doubling in the next decade or so of numbers of people with tertiary education; again, this offers amazing opportunities for learning in new ways, also considering the networking of the planet;
• agricultural innovation is seriously important as over the next 20 or so growing seasons (years), the planet’s population will rise by about 30%, per capita food consumption will rise by 50%, dietary preferences will change, water and energy demand will also rise; this points to the need to ensure that fresh water is where the people are (right now, the fresh water is located mostly where people are fewer), and that each agriculturally productive hectare can add 50% of productive capacity — in very few growing seasons; with climate change, too, factors such as what grows where comes under stress, as different areas will need to learn to grow non-traditional crops, and other areas will become unproductive;
• I also showed pictures of intelligent machines such as an autonomous GPS-guided farm tractor, and a similarly autonomous mining truck; the autonomous military robot with its gun on top is a telling reminder of the progress in military science, while the Utopian picture of the smart city of the future offers a different sort of hope;
• finally, I showed a map of the world 4 degrees warmer, and wondered how we were going to deal with social displacement indicated by the growing numbers of people who will come to live in unihabitable or hostile environments (at risk of flooding, heat stress, and so on).

Having said all that, I am left to wondering though how we bridge the entrepreneurial challenges facing the public sector.  In many cases the challenges entrepreneurs face are caused by governments, and by regulation, as well as by restrictive banking practices which make access to capital so very hard. While we look to the entrepreneurial spirit in the private sector, and feed and encourage creativity, we find the opposite is true in the public sector. Indeed, Martin Lukes, from Prague, presented an excellent paper, with a telling conclusion that public sector people have less organisational support for innovation and entrepreneurial activity than their private sector counterparts. In some respects the elephant in the room is the public sector, consuming huge amounts of taxpayers’ money, yet often failing in two ways, failing to ensure entrepreneurial growth through poorly thought out rules and regulations (red-tape, regulatory burden and so on), and failing to get their own house in order.  Given the current state of affairs in some the world’s major economies, I don’t think the public sector can excuse itself from the need for entrepreneurial reform and effort.

The invention of the future requires all hands on deck, and no one can be spectator any more.