provocation #3 ‘Why oh why did this happen, can you see what it is yet?’ (file under: contentious and and half-baked) | LinkedIn

An occasional series of provocations for management thinkers.

May contain elements of offense.

(File under: contentious and and half-baked)

provocation #3

 

 

WHY OH WHY DID THIS HAPPEN, CAN YOU SEE WHAT IT IS YET?

NB: My target here is managerialism, not committed, ethical, hard-working public sector employees and elected representatives.

Rearrange these into the correct order:

1. Give police targets determined by politicians, and managers subservient to them

2. Import managerialism into the public sector

3. Destroy the multi use approach to city and town street life – thanks planners, abandoning the streets after 8pm to ne’er-do-wells, clubbers, drunks, and the poor and desperate.

4. Think it clever to save social services budgets a few quid by buying cheap places in care homes for vulnerable kids in depressed towns like Rochdale.

5. Close your children’s homes and allow the market to create cheap children’s homes in low cost areas.

6. Send vulnerable kids half-way across the country

7. Don’t see children and youth as valid members of society with needs, rights, and AGENCY, so don’t cater for their leisure and affiliation needs

8. Rack up business rates so that only poverty-level wages for fast-food work are viable in town centres.

9. Prioritise car theft, based on public complaint, over missing children who don’t complain because they don’t matter (“scrubbers” anonymous policeman, BBC Radio 4 Friday, September 12, 2014 13:37).

 

That was a trick question: there isn’t an order only a pattern.

Then wonder why the Rochdale Child Abuse Scandal.

Discuss. Use both sides of the argument and the brain.

 

_____________Footnote

if you find this offensive is it less or more offensive than the Rochdale Child Abuse Scandal?

via provocation #3 ‘Why oh why did this happen, can you see what it is yet?’ (file under: contentious and and half-baked) | LinkedIn.

Give them all ASBOs! This is what advocacy for play looks like

What follows is the (obviously) unofficial view of a senior police officer on the subject of ASBOs, ABCs and other legal attempts to control the nuisance of children.

The officer is commenting on a report, which you can read by following the link below.

———————————————-

The officer said:

“I am writing in a non official capacity – my role is that of *** in ***
(Force).

If I can take the opportunity to comment on your ABC report. I thought it
was spot on and I will ensure it will be sent to my officers responsible for
delivering and working with those who deliver ABCs.

I do see a use for ABCs but as you point out, when the system is vague
and threatening it does nothing to inspire me that this is a tool that will
be of any merit or worth.

Surely children who may be experiencing problems in their lives require
support and should not be growing up in an authoritarian environment?

Thank you for a thought provoking report.”

The report he or she is commenting on is this one:

Report re: The Compatibility of Acceptable Behaviour Contracts with
Article 6.1 of the European Convention on Human Rights

By Jan Cosgrove and Matthew Cosgrove

Have any of our noble play-related university lecturers done any work in this area? I would love to see it.

 

You can find out more about FPFC here:

 

http://www.fairplayforchildren.net/what.htm

Evidence you say? What is that? Away with you and your ‘evidence’! (NAMED AND SHAMED: GPs who miss cancer diagnoses)

Read this blog, please. If you value any of my bloggage, read this other bloke’s blog. We need to bring as much as we can of this level of surgical precision to management.

If psychology can be a science, (a claim I find dubious having obtained a degree in it from an excellent college ranked number 3 or 4 in the UK, Hindustani).

(Hindustani? How could this idiotphone think I meant that when I wrote incidentally? This is why the robots well not take over just yurt)

As I was saying, if psychology can be a science then so can management.

There was a brief kerfuffle in the business schools about why they didn’t see the crash coming and why they failed to teach ethics to MBAs. Six months later all forgotten. Gary Wossname would have put on a conference or earned a big fee for meaculpaing, or both. Business school profs make admen look shamefaced and moral.

I’m not advocating Taylor’s Scientific Management. We have some better science now. And proper true facts are harder to come by in management consultancy. But we could work a lot harder than we do to seek truth amid opinion and cant.

Please read the wise words of the junior doctor.

juniordoctorblog.com

If you saw the Mail on Sunday today you would have seen the above headline.

According to Wikiquotes, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 4-time US senator and academic, once said “You are entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts”. Rather than writing an extensive counter-diatribe of rhetoric on the ridiculousness of the article, the irresponsible attitude to health reporting and Jeremy Hunt in general, I have decided to try a new form of discussion. I call it ‘The Facts’.

Fact #1
Here are the National Institute for Clinical Excellence guidelines for referring patients to a specialist with the suspicion of cancer. http://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/CG27*

Fact #2
This is how common bowel cancer is: there are 47.2 new cases per 100,000 people per year (crude). This equals around 40,000 new cases nationally, which means nearly 1 case per UK GP per year.

This is how common breast cancer is: there are 155…

View original post 978 more words

SNOWBALLS. SOME SCHOOLS CLOSED. SOME CHILDREN SLEDGING.

Ooh, there is snow.

Snow picture borrowed from my chum: A snow day means a play day!

Some schools announced this morning, that they will be closed tomorrow – how do they know? Other schools are open. Apparently Five thousand schools were closed today. Ooh… Interesting…

The weather is different in different parts of the country. Some schools within a mile of each other are differently open: one is closed, while another is open. Some heads insist on opening, making a special effort. Others close if they think significant numbers of children won’t be there, perhaps because it affects their absence records, which in turn affects their league table position. It’s complicated. Questions are being asked.

http://derekblalock.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/snow1.jpg

An ambulance man said, on the telly, that there had been a number of sledge-related incidents, and advised people to wrap up warm, despite not being a weatherman or weather woman. Seems that stating the sodding obvious in a serious way is within the purview of all who appear on the gogglebox.

Snow threat receding, we are told – how on earth do the Scandinavians cope?

Given that lots of schools are shut, and a lot of children are sledging, we might expect a few incidents.

No broken bones, because, if there had been, we would have been told about the ‘snow shock near-death horror’ by a meejah desperate for something more than:

“School shut, kids have fun in snow.”

COBRA discusses growing AlbertKyder threat

 

Some schools are open, some schools are closed. Maybe some questions should be asked.

School shut, kids have fun in snow.

Snow?

Balls.

Ffs: just go chuck some.

Penny Wilson’s thoughts on Social Behaviour and its Anti

Has there been a rise in ASB, or has there been a rise in people complaining about children playing, which is then dealt with under the label ‘ASB’?

As Penny Wilson says:

“Do we see a group of children chalking on the pavement as a traditional and harmless play activity?
– or-
Do we see it as ‘Encouraging older children to feel that graffiti is permissible?’

”Sitting in a housing office I hear an officer describing a young man in shockingly negative ways. Looking out of the window during this monologue, I see the same young man helping an elder along the street with her heavy shopping.“

Some wisdom from the Wilson: go read it.

click here – Catch ‘em doing Something Right!

A school, modified play, and the danger of leaves

A school, modified play, and the danger of leaves

Nothing to add to this superb blog. Go read it.

 

 

 

 

Talking 'bout a revolution – changing the word… (nope, not world, just some words that must die)

Some bloke on the Interweb writes:

“Here’s my check list of degraded words and terms that should be loaded into the tumbrils and carted off to the guillotine.

First up: sustainable. It’s been at least a decade since this earnest word was drained of all energy, having become the prime unit of exchange in the argot of purposeful uplift. As the final indication of its degraded status, I found it in President Obama’s “signing statement” which accompanied the whisper of his pen when on New Year’s Eve – a very quiet day when news editors were all asleep – he signed into law the National Defence Authorisation Act (NDAA) for 2012 which handed $662bn to the Pentagon and for good measure ratified by legal statute the exposure of US citizens to arbitrary arrest without subsequent benefit of counsel, and to possible torture and imprisonment sine die, abolishing habeas corpus.

As he set his name to this repugnant legislation, the president issued a “signing statement” in which I came upon the following passage: “Over the last several years, my Administration has developed an effective, sustainable framework for the detention, interrogation and trial of suspected terrorists…”

So much for sustainable. Into the tumbrils with it.“

Read more: http://www.theweek.co.uk/society/45208/blood-spattered-trip-through-todays-lamentable-lingo#ixzz1lzXGRwNz

 
 

I slung in ‘concerning’ and offensive’ and respec.

Good game – all join in.

 

On the so called news just now Hospitals…

On the so-called news just now:

Hospitals don’t treat patients with Alzheimer’s well, so the government is going to pay them a reward for being nice to them.

Which part of ‘we will do away with ineffective, costly, nannying top-down interference in the NHS’ have they misunderstood?

Why don’t they pay racists to be nice to black people, and sexist men to be nice to ladies? Hey, why not pay Ricky Gervais to be nice to ‘the disableds’? Oh, hold on, we already do.

BAN FECKLESS PARENTS AND FECKFUL KIDS!

This, dear reader, yes all 8 of you, may be worth a listen, especially as both  Adrian Voce and Bob Hughes are on  it:

 “Feral Kids and Feckless Parents”

the first in a series on Broken Childhood featuring an expert-led discussion on the contemporary issues, such as knife-crime and gun-crime and crime-crime and other feckless issues facing parents in our contemporary society

RADIO 4 today, Wednesday, at 8pm.

Do have a listen then we can discuss it online. Such fun!

I speak like this because the increasingly London-centric posh media types at the Beeb, seem to think everyone lives like this, cue vicious parody:

just after you have had a simple family supper of jugged hare in an aubergine and Marsala jus, and just before the ‘man of the house’ has to ‘pop’ upstairs to read Jemima and Jasper their organically-grown, fairly-traded recycled children’s story by Kate Winslet, entitled “ The day that Satsuma forgot about global warming”, you can huddle round the Pure DAB set and listen to (or record for later – such fun) this lovely programme:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0184s39

————–

From the actual BBC:

“Programme 1: Feral Kids and Feckless Parents

”The August riots in parts of England showed youngsters out of control on the streets, and put huge focus onto parenting skills.

“MPs and council leaders warned parents that they should know where their children were at night and keep them indoors and out of trouble.

”But parents themselves were saying they were unable to discipline their kids, either because they feared repercussions by the authorities, or because their children were simply physically too strong.

“In the first of the new series of “Bringing Up Britain”, Mariella Frostrup is joined by a panel of experts to discuss parental discipline right across British society.”

{uncontrollable interjection: RIGHT across? As in all classes? Somehow I doubt it}

”How easy is it for us to control our children, especially after they stop being biddable toddlers and begin to assert their own personalities?

“Have we given children too many rights and ignored those of parents?

”Can you really stop a large teenage child going out, and what restraining measures can you legally use?

“And, if your child is going off the rails, how do you break the cycle and get them back into good habits?”

—————-

Back to the totally made-up vicious parody:

Joining a woman in early middle-age who has a sexy voice because she is foreign, are 4 people who are already known to BBC researchers (who these days are all unpaid interns called Rebecca or Piers), because their names are already in the producer’s filofax (remember them). Joining poshtotty to explore these issues will be:

• Adrian Voce, OBE, freelance policy consultant and ex-Director of PlayEngland,

• Bob Hughes of PlayEducation, the UK’s leading thinker on children’s play and playwork

• some bloke who used to be a teacher who went to school with George Osborne

• the wife of George Osborne (is he married? I thought he was gay, must check) who has set up a charity for badgers distressed by quad bikes

•an ethnic minority person who was booked by mistake but the BBC has an equalities policy so they aren’t being told because it might upset them and they might call us racist

• Professor Martina Rousseau-Clarkson, the  founding director of the Luton University Centre  for the Study of the Causes of Research into the Parenting Strategies deployed in early adolescence by Developmentally Challenged Agricultural Workers in South America and Children

• Peter Rabid, the foreign policy editor of the Economist and best-selling author of ‘Shoot The Bloody Lotl!’

Only joking all of those people are made-up. The two that are real people are the ones least likely to be actually, and disappointingly, on the programme. Follow the link to find out who the real panel is. Gosh, with luminaries like that, we’re assured of a jolly debate. I’m going to be glued to my set: if you miss it, and if I hear anything sensible or interesting or hopeful, and if I write it down, you might see it on here, later.

A NICE CUP OF TEA AND A SATDOWN (was Mary Portas thinks we need high street management)

Mary Portas thinks we need high-street management teams to reverse the decline of the high street.

Yes folks, Mary Portas thinks we need more managers.

That’s right, folks, Mary Portas thinks managers make things better.

Aaaw, bless.

…tbc…

oh…hold on…

She’s not saying that. the headline is crass. blame the media, for, she’s not saying that. the headline is crass. oversimplifying. its what they do. bears say mass in the woods, popes use improvised woodland latrines, and the media sensationalise, simplify and distort. duh.

now

you really shouldn’t let me listen to the ‘Today’ programme

(its on Radio 4 in the morning, pre-9 am, folks, if you are instead listening to banging chewns on Radio Noise FM)

why not? why shouldn’t arthur be allowed to listen to ‘Today’?

because he rants off like this.
so

Mary Portas is on the radio. I am shouting at the radio, because she is right, and WRONG!

2 points:

1. not that kind of manager!

memo to self – write a piece on kids of managers, good non-managerialist managers versus bad managerialist managers. need to do this soon, before I get attacked by managers.\\

2. she thinks the goal should be footfall.

It’s not about bring back shops or less supermarkets its about do anything to get more feet on the street. and its not about organic markets its about barnsley market

I agree.

3. ANDNOTBUT

AND

she then goes on to say ‘so we have to relax planning laws’.

AARGH. ‘FREE UP SOME OF RED TAPE.’

why aargh?

because its the old mistake, good understanding, rubbish solution.

Mary Portas, has, I reckon, got a good understanding of what went wrong, and has been convinced to support a certain solution (relax planning law).

Who thinks letting developers do what they like is a good idea? no one, apart from developers, their partners and the politicians who are their paid-for friend (who thinks spending more on youth clubs? no one except, youth, unemployed youth workers, and the national yoof bureau). That won’t happen , because youth clubs HAVE NO INFLUENCE. Who thinks we should spend more on under 5s? on adventure playgrounds? you get the drift)

so

Oldest game in the book: analyse a complex problem, do a good job, then allow vested interests to pick one solution.

newsflash: if a problem is complex, rather than complicated or simple or wicked, THERE IS NO ONE SOLUTION.

(I wrote a book about this – ‘Navigating Complexity: the essential guide to complexity theory in business and management’.that book sort of scratched the surface. since then, 15 years ago, some smarter management consultant than me have deveoped some useful tools. ASK ME )

so

if you only implement one solution to a complex problem, then it won’t work and you are wrong.

simples,

that’s what we got from Labour with Surestart and family tax credit. That’s what Alan Milburn MP ex-Labour minister of something, thinks (also on radio just now). Alan thinks we need to spend more on under-5s services. Great analysis, Alan, wrong answer because it’s a single solution to a complex problem. These won’t go away. the world is ever more complex.

So are we all doomed? nope, probably. What is to be done?

Well, how about ‘SOCIAL ARGUMENT TECHNOLOGY’.

What is that? it is a way of working together to work on complex problems. it is a methodology by which 70 people could meet for 4 hours (Watford BGOP workshop 1999) and everybody could be heard and the complex problem better understood. When they next meet they could come up with some small actions to take. and so on. No big single wrong answer, many small answers, some of which will work, some of which won’t.

The process has a simple acronym, MLTQ: ‘many little things quickly’ (technically MLTQfb, fb = fed back, abbreviated to be reminiscent of TQM).

Who needs ‘SOCIAL ARGUMENT TECHNOLOGY’?

Everybody, but specifically small movements with no money who want to make a difference, like the UK Play lobby.

I will write more about SAT (Social Argument Technology), but for now I will merely point out, that some wise person, probably your mum, said there are few problems that can’t be made better with a nice cup of tea and a sit down (and biscuits). Heck, there’s even a website for that, because there is now a WEBSITE FOR EVERYTHING:

http://www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com/

I’m saying that complex problems can only be made better with a nice cup of tea and a SAT down. and biscuits.

what is a ‘SATdown’?

it is a special meeting, in which we sit down together and use Social Argument Technology to have an arguement, nicely, listening to each other, not focussing on anyone problem or anyone solution, and stuff like that.

more on SAT later.

ASK ME.

———————————————————————————–

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/dec/11/mary-portas-high-street-management-teams

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Maybe 10 years after 9 11 we are…

Maybe,
10 years after 9/11,
we are starting to reject the lie of the security and safety lobbies that

‘only we can make you safe’.

You can’t make me safe, only I can make me safe.

Having said that, please can we have more bobbies on the beat and our bus conductors back?

That by way of introducing this article:

HAVE WE GONE OVERBOARD ABOUT BULLYING?

Eliminating recess will only make the problem worse
By Lawrence J. Cohen & Anthony T. Debenedet, M.D.

some quotes from them for you- go read it.

“The recent decision by the Chicago Public Schools system to reinstate recess, effectively reversing years of optional recess policy (an option that was exercised less and less), is a step in the right direction. It’s also a stark reminder not to lose sight of the basics.

2 CHEERS FOR THAT REINSTATEMENT OF WHAT WE LIKE TO CALL ‘PLAYTIME’

/…/”If you spend a few minutes at a playground watching recess, you’ll see the full range of human behavior — from friendship and sharing to conflict and cruelty.

/…/“There are the obvious health benefits of physical fitness, but there are more subtle benefits to be gained, like social intelligence, morality and ethical behavior. There’s also good evidence that learning inside the classroom actually comes more easily when children have a chance to let loose outside the classroom.

/…/”Lately, however, another antirecess argument has hit the scene. It stems from a nationwide consciousness and fear of bullying. Essentially the idea (albeit mistaken) is that without recess, bullies will have less opportunity to victimize their peers.

/…/“The real solution to bullying on the playground is to train recess supervisors to know the difference between playing and aggression, and to recognize and respond appropriately to escalating situations.”

Read more: http://ideas.time.com/2011/11/29/have-we-gone-overboard-about-bullying/#ixzz1gJItVsAo

———————————-

Thanks to Tim Gill on Facebook for finding this for us, Tim wrote:
”
‎”It may be difficult for adults to judge whether or not a particular incident is bullying… However, simply redefining all deliberately unpleasant behaviour as bullying does not solve this problem, it merely brushes it under the carpet. The unintended side-effect of such redefinition is that adults are likely to feel under growing pressure to step in whenever children fall out or argue with each other.”

“A quote from this Time article? No. A quote from No Fear. But I’m not jealous, I’m just pleased to see that others are thinking seriously about this thorny issue. (Time article via Marc Armitage.)”

——————————-

I admire your equanimity, Tim. I seriously wish I was more equanimitous myself when I am quoted/misquoted with or without attribution.

Whoever and whatever is to blame/praise for the turning of the tide we might be seeing, it is worthy of celebration.

xkcd: Alternative Energy Revolution

 

xkcd: Alternative Energy Revolution.

 

This is exactly how I feel.

 

And they don’t work. Massive waste of energy in their construction and they don’t work. Ugh.

“To refuse students the chance to study A-levels after they passed 13 GCSEs is outrageous.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/girl-is-told-13-gcses-are-not-good-enough-for-her-schools-sixth-form-710440.html

“To refuse students the chance to study A-levels after they passed 13 GCSEs at the sort of grades Amy achieved is outrageous.”

Really? More outrageous than systematically dumbing down grades so that universities refuse A levels as an indicator?

“The college’s head, Nigel McQuoid, admitted that Amy’s rejection was a consequence of the common currency of GCSE A grades, which in some subjects no longer demonstrated A-level potential.

”In Amy’s case, he said, it would be “a cruel thing to raise confidence when the ability is not there”. Her technology A grade was not what it seemed as the leap to A-level was “enormous”. “Sixty per cent [of the GCSE mark] is on a piece of coursework. If you produce a good piece of work for that you are really flying. The A-level course demands high competence in electronics.”

“Mr McQuoid said the school had been “a victim of its own success” but denied school league table performance dictated his admissions policy.“

 

Yeah, right. Grade inflation: gotta love it.*

 

NOTE

*Irony, of course. just saying.

 

One set of rules for the rich, and another for the rest of us

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/amol-rajan-after-the-capitalist-banquets-its-time-for-humble-pie-6258945.html

”If corruption means anything, it means buying immunity from the law. The protesters occupying temples of capitalism around the world might be an incoherent bunch – more obviously against the present than in favour of a different future – but there is great solidarity with them in Western democracies, because it increasingly feels like it’s one set of rules for the rich, and another for the rest of us.“

I like Amol Rajan, more and more. This is the guy who started being an unofficial bus conductor (shouting ‘Room at the back!) because he was sick of bus drivers not letting people on because the sheep hadn’t ‘moved down the bus’.

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2010/07/20/the-moral-abdications-that-lead-to-empty-rush-hour-buses-and-my-big-society-solution

Observe this, unintended systemic consequence fans: one-man* buses not only increased unemployment by sacking conductors, but also made bus travel a nightmare of overloud iPods and misbehaving yoof with no one to police basic human niceness and give and take, but also – PAY ATTENTION BUS COMPANIES – reduced profit!

Capitalism might be the least worst system, as Amol says, but boy** is it dumb sometimes…

NOTE:

• One -person operated, so sue me.

*** Yes I know, or person

We all should be concerned about this ugly blame game over the M5 pile-up

The ugly blame game over the M5 pile-up | Tim Black | spiked.

Some extracts below. I hold no brief for the Spiked mob, their post-Marxist nihilism disguised as gung-ho responsibilism has more than a whiff of apolitical decadence to it; having said that, sometimes they locate a nail and hammer it all the way in. This is one such piece of stout carpentry:

“/… instead, it has been marked with a peculiarly contemporary impulse: a desire to blame, to find someone or something responsible. In the eyes of those willing to see something more than tragic misfortune at work, this was not an accident; it was caused by the contemporary equivalent of a bad spirit.Not that there was particularly compelling evidence for assuming that smoke from a fireworks display was the cause. As one Transport minister Mike Penning explained, the smoke that witnesses claimed to have seen at the time of the crash could just as likely have come from one of the several burning vehicles. Pyrotechnics experts have also been sceptical about the possibility of fireworks-related smoke travelling and then forming a ‘bank of smoke’ thick enough drastically to affect visibility. But then it doesn’t seem to have been evidence that informed speculation about the role played by a relatively small fireworks display 500 metres away. Rather, such blame-casting draws its force from the increasingly widespread antagonism towards fireworks, whether it’s kids getting their hands on them, or the supposed health‘n’safety implications that make Bonfire Night, in the words of one crash-related commentary, ‘the worst day of the year for air pollution’.”

Can I just interject here? Would any vaguely recycling conscious thrifty person actually want to ban bonfires because of air pollution? Why not ban people?  Well, some deep greens are happy to see us humans made extinct. Pah. Sorry, Captain Black, go on…

“/… In fact, there are all too many people willing to exploit a terrible accident in pursuit of those to blame. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a bonfire-less fireworks display being held responsible or lorries travelling at four miles under their 60 miles-per-hour speed limit: the search for the will-o’-the-wisp culprit, the reason for what steadfastly remains an accident, has paid no attention to what happened on Friday evening. Instead, that reality has been effaced in favour of what various campaigners and commentators want to believe happened.”

YES: AN ACCIDENT! Sorry, go on, Timbo…

“/… This unswerving conviction is marked by something almost medieval in sentiment. That is, there is a refusal to accept that no one or no thing is to blame for what happened. In other words, there is a refusal to face up to the fact that accidents, no matter how tragic, do happen. In place of the modern acknowledgement of sheer contingency, they revive a pre-modern belief in some animating spirit at work in the world. So just as a fourteenth-century village beset by bad harvests might hold the presence of a particular person responsible, so today’s willing blamers foist responsibility for a terrible accident on to a set of unwilling scapegoats, be they speed-happy motorists or a group of pyrotechnicians.

”One thing is for sure: while this cacophony of blaming may well result in the even tighter regulation of fireworks displays or a climate yet more inhospitable to motorists, it will do nothing to stop accidents from happening.”

LET’S REPEAT THAT: 

IT WILL DO NOTHING TO STOP ACCIDENTS FROM HAPPENING!

Grr.