Kicking Command and Control Blog December Archive blog.topic  

• Hundreds of millions of voters, otherwise known as the bewildered herd, are usually given the same messge by their political leaders that generations of employees have been given by their bosses. The message is: “We don’t need you to think! We need you to do what we tell you. If there’s any thinking to be done around here, we’ll do it.”    Dean Anderson and Linda Ackerman Anderson have written: “Command-and-control is by far the most common leadership style. Most of today’s leaders were mentored themselves by command-and-control managers, and the culture of most organizations is still based on command-and-control norms. It is hard to escape this leadership style’s historic influence and dominance.ⁱ

Command-and-control leadership assumed that most people are  thoughtless, lazy and unmotivated.   They need constant supervision either by specialists or by people who are smarter and/or more experienced: i.e. the people who have all the answers. Over time, the assumptions of command-and-control leadership become self-fulfilling prophecies. People become what command-and-control leaders expect them to be. The reservoirs of intelligence, creativity, good will and energy that some leaders liberate from the people they lead are unrecognised, untapped and waste

This Forum aims to:

1. help leaders to ‘kick’ the Command and Control habits of mind and learn how to use systems thinking to co-create viable, just and sustainable human systems.
   
2. provide a place where activist systems thinkers can combine to launch and orchestrate attacks on - ‘kick’- the Command and Control model wherever and whenever they identify its anti-human and anti-Gaian consequences.
   
3. build a global anti-Command and Control wiki-library.
   
4. act as a hub for a global anti-Command and Control, pro Gaia, pro humanity, pro systems thinking community

   Read more: Introduction to Kicking Command and Control [click]

That question nagged at me as I read the explanations by John Seddon and Simon Caulkin of how the British Governments' imposition of a hugely-expensive, computerised, performance-reducing activity control-system had prevented Haringey's social workers from saving Baby P from his piteous fate.

Think about it. Even the most successful and respected of systems thinkers are little more than frustrated spectators as politicians, economists, corporate executives, civil servants pile one major system failure on another. Nobody takes much notice of us when we offer a our perspectives on the case of Baby P, the global financial melt-down, the futility of carbon-reduction targets in the face of global warming, and the multitude of other fundamental errors that have led, or will lead, to actual and potential disasters. So much of what we see around us cries out for the systems approaches that we understand so well. Yet, after decades of effort, as systems thinkers, we still have little or no influence on the obsolete, dysfunctional, and potentially lethal policy-forming processes that will be as disastrous for the future of our children and grandchildren as they were for poor little Baby P.

Read more: Why are systems thinkers so politically ineffective compared to the charlatans and snake-oil salesmen? [click]