Last week I found a box of my old books. (Yes, I did feel like Indiana Jones.)
Lewis from university had been helpful, highlighting things, dog-eared pages. He’d left me a map of what a younger man thought mattered. And what’s odd, going through it, is how little, despite my experience and knowledge, my focus has moved in twenty years.
I studied Politics and Journalism at Salford and it seems that one belief came out of that and it has never really shifted: the people affected by a problem should be involved in solving it. Not by force, or by laziness from the management, but because they have the best ideas.
Aristotle got there first, which is annoying
He wasn’t writing about business or charity consultancy, or a swish new app I developed. He was arguing about who should hold power, which was a live question in Ancient Greece, and stubbornly remains one today.
His line, from Book III of the Politics: “the many, of whom each individual is but an ordinary person, when they meet together may very likely be better than the few good, if regarded not individually but collectively, just as a feast to which many contribute is better than a dinner provided out of a single purse.”
Then, a sentence later, “Hence the many are better judges than a single man of music and poetry; for some understand one part, and some another, and among them they understand the whole.”
Every part of everything has a view on the problem, so we should listen to them. It’s not some cutesy thing about inclusion. It’s a claim about accuracy, and usefulness, and making people feel seen, and heard.
Dewey did it next, and said it better than I could.
John Dewey, arguing with Walter Lippmann in the 1920s about whether ordinary people could be trusted with democracy, wrote the sentence I’ve been quoting ever since I found it:
“The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied.”
Read the second half again, because most people who quote the first bit don’t like the second, because it admits that although people should be listened to, they don’t always have the answer, or the agency, or the power.
Dewey isn’t saying the expert is useless. They, the expert that is, are answering a different question. Someone can be useful but only answering part of the problem, or merely identifying it. The expert, or the fixer, or the researcher – they have different roles.
So the service user shouldn’t be tasked with the building of the thing alone – that’s absurd. They’re the only one who knows where it rubs, and they could have ideas about how to fix them, bring them inside the conversation because the shoemaker is still the shoemaker.
Arendt, who understood what speaking delivers
Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition: “In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world.”
She’s making a distinction I try to keep in my mind always – the difference between what somebody is and who they are. What you are is your qualities, your job title, your category on a form. Who you are only shows up when you speak, act among other people and are listened to. People aren’t “what”, they are “who”.
Why all this rightly reduces my efficiency
Participation is slow, messy and uncontrollable. It regularly produces an answer nobody in the room wanted, at a point in the project where changing course is expensive.
And it gets used as a shield. “We consulted” is one of the most reliable ways to put a decision beyond challenge, and the decision was usually made in March.
That’s not an argument against it. It’s an argument against the theatrical. This is worse than not asking – it spends people’s time and their goodwill and returns nothing.
The test I use is simple enough to be uncomfortable. Can you name one thing that changed because somebody told you something you didn’t already believe? If you can’t, you ran a survey, not a consultation.
Back to the box
The books are going back on a shelf rather than into the loft. It’s what my younger self would have wanted.
He’d have been pleased that the arguments won, at least inside my own head. He’d have been less pleased at how long it takes to win that argument in my current job.
So, when did you last change a decision because of something a resident, a service user or a member of your own staff said? I’d like to hear it.
