Humility, pandemics and place management
At the start of the pandemic I promised myself I’d do more reflective journaling to get me through the Crisis. It’s a practice I learned while I was studying coaching and leadership at Northumbria University, ten years ago now.
The beauty of reflection as a practice is the opportunity it gives us to put our fears on paper, as well as our speculations. Leadership is, after all, a practice of decision supported by a narrative we construct. Even the idea of being a natural leader is a construction, a process of both leader and the audience who agree with them select in the components of the natural leader, and deciding to what extent there is congruence.
When i found myself first thinking about leadership, it was before the lockdown had been announced, but when I felt it was inevitable. Deciding to act on that conclusion, to start business continuity activity, to start thinking about how we might tackle the coming challenges, was a leadership task. Along with the decision though came the thoughts about the practice of leadership, about how to lead from amongst the team I manage, and in close contact with the council I serve.
My first task, in effect, was to check that my conclusions matched those of my team, and my employers. I remember clearly the vision that came into my head, of the man who used to stand on the south side of Oxford Circus, back when I was a young man in London, with a placard declaring that peanuts, along with other protein heavy foods caused lust and sin. He was called Stanley Green, and was utterly convinced he was right, but I thought he was also the loneliest man in the world as the crowds flowed around him. In later life I realised that he had some degree of minor celebrity thanks to writers like Peter Ackroyd, but that didn’t change my impression of him as disengaged, and ineffectual. Buying one of his pamphlets as some people did, seemed to me like collecting an artefact for display, a demonstration of how odd some people were, not a genuine engagement in a debate.
That insight, that there was a task of not being the man with the placard and some conclusions about peanuts that no-one else shared, changed how I did my job. I It had to. It still does. Like any conversation that starts with the possibility that others might not share your conclusions, it had to start with humility. I had to start by being humble, without becoming Uriah Heep in the process.
Humility in leadership isn’t some kind of virtue that we practice because of our innate qualities; it’s a vital tool in making conversations work. One of the things the young me noticed about the peanut preacher on Oxford Street was that not only did he not have conversations, he did not seem to want them. He wanted to tell you, not to engage or explain.
I decided, thinking about Stanley Green, that I had to have conversations. I had to listen, and to test my conclusions against the evidence, and the conclusions that were coming back to me, based on both the same evidence, and on other evidence bases.
Why is it important to reflect on this now?
As the pandemic progressed, and the R number was suppressed by lockdown, it became clear to me that lockdown must end eventually. Planning for the end of lockdown seemed to me to be an opportunity as well as a challenge. Talking to colleagues in the place management community it seemed inevitable that there would be choices to be made, including choices about what our towns and cities would look like in the future. It was driven by a conclusion, unspoken but felt deeply, that we must have failed as a community, and as places, to have come to this point. Judging by the statistics, the death rates and the impacts, we have not done as well as other countries; could we ameliorate the worst effects in the places we influence, and could we take steps towards being healthier in future?
I work in an unusual town. Berwick upon Tweed is a perfect example of a medieval walled town, with hundreds of listed buildings crammed into the post medieval street plan within the walls. I don’t know, from where I stand, whether some of those buildings were listed because of their genuine merit, or because listings were seen as an adornment for the town, a kind of civic achievement, like badges on a Boy Scout’s arm.
The town is choked by cars, funnelling across a 1930s bridge over the Tweed estuary, with drivers preferring to use the town centre as a through route rather than the bypass around the town. Valuable land within the walls is taken up with car parks, squeezed into every available nook and cranny, leading to a perception that a substantial proportion of the town’s daytime traffic is made up of drivers seeking an available space, with demand only managed by enforcement and restrictions. Add in the pressure on on street parking from residents who perceive parking as a right, not a service that has a cost and, potentially, a price, and you have a town that is in desperate need of a new direction.
Why does that matter when I’m reflecting on leadership? The answer is that one of the reasons why I know these things is because there has been a plethora of plans to address the needs of the town centre, its traffic, its residents, its businesses and the visitors who form a part of the economic activity that makes the town work.
Those reports have been written by regeneration experts, by traffic experts like Colin Buchanan, right up to the latest, the branding package developed by Wayne Hemingway’s team. (In a coincidence worthy of Arthur Koestler, Hemingway’s fashion label, Red or Dead, used to make tee shirts bearing Stanley Green’s messages as slogans.) I’ve added my own small effort to the pile, in the shape of an emerging plan for the town centre to recover from the pandemic, using the work of the IPM and the High Streets Task Force.
Why have those plans failed to be delivered? One conclusion is they were never very good in the first place, or were impractical, or simply politically unpopular. Another conclusion might be that without the social cohesion and sense of community needed to deliver it, a plan is speculative fiction. Buchanan’s plan for a signal controlled junction at Golden Square is no more real than a colony on the moon, because no-one wished or willed it to happen with sufficient conviction.
The reflection that’s been dogging me for two or three weeks now is that humility is what Stanley Green lacked, in his monomaniacal certainty. We built a re-opening plan for the town based on a clear narrative, around reassurance and safety, and actions that demonstrated that message. Our partners at the principal authority have taken the opposite route, of doing as little as necessary, preferring to rely on a lack of demand for town centres, and on an approach that assumes that the new normal will be much like the old normal but with an extra prejudice against coughing in public.
I cannot have a dialogue with them, and the town cannot have a dialogue, without starting from the premise that the officers at the principal authority, or the councillors who direct them, might be right. Even when I see other places, like Corbridge, working hard on reassurance and visual messaging in shop windows, and flourishing in the process, I have to still be willing to hear an explanation of why, somehow, they might be different. Otherwise, I’ll be Stanley Green, lonely amongst the crowds at Oxford Circus, and all the accumulated evidence, the work the IPM has done, the work my predecessor and all those expensive consultants have done, will be wasted.
So far, the partnership message has only been partly taken up. Perhaps, speaking with humility I may not have explained it well enough, and may not have explained the need to build a community plan around shared goals and desired outcomes. The nagging fear I have is that maybe this desire to reflect, to explore alternatives, is not shared by all our partners, and is not part of their top down toolkit. Since I don’t control those partners, I’ll keep on trying to lead and respond to those I serve in my way.
