Make room for the valedictory dispatch
Victoria Ward, Monday, November 23, 2009

The culture of change has reached Cultural Revolution proportions with no opportunity for new working methods to put down roots. Can it be that in wading through the plethora of business plans, capability reviews, skills audits, zero-based reviews and other excrescences of the management age, we have indeed forgotten what diplomacy is all about?

Labour killed the British diplomatic tradition of the valedictory dispatch in 2006 after this, the parting shot of Sir Ivor Roberts on leaving his post in Rome in 2006. Parting shots is a series of 15 minute programmes on Radio Four about this tradition and some of the things that were said.

Sir Ivor Roberts joined the Foreign Office in 1968 and retired nearly 40 years later. That’s a lot of accumulated insight to offer. Someone who has extraordinary experience and access to some of the most sensitive moments in history, a great ability to render this incisively and without fear. What a cowardly loss to put an end to it. ‘Pusillanimous’ one interviewee called it, and I think that’s just the word. In his valedictory dispatch, Sir Ivor had a pop at ‘bullshit bingo’, including terms like synergies, value for money, benchmarking, best practice, silo working, stakeholder, empower, push-back, deliver the agenda, fit for purpose, roll-out, which he called a

substitute for clarity and succinctness

Now we have a ruder term for the same thing and in fact we’re playing that very game today in an organisational development session we’re running, although we’re calling it ‘words we love to hate’ and then inviting everyone to ban those words from the stories the organisation tells about itself.

One of the interviewees said that the system was not abused. Dispatches were read with great interest and real amusement and it was the one time when career civil servants could say what they really thought. Matthew Parris, hosting the programme pointed out that indiscretion is a precious thing, in danger of becoming extinct. Another interview told of how they were sent all round the office, causing sniggers of delight, reading things people had all thought but nobody wanted to say. A safety valve.

I’ve always found that. People really aren’t stupid and, given the room and a thoughtful listening ear, the things they say will nearly always be because they care about what’s happening and about the place they work in. Plus, valedictory is a word with a Latin root, as the programme pointed out, and means farewell. I think that rituals of farewell and departure are almost completely overlooked as meaningful rites of passage in the workplace and valediction generally needs a place in these chaotic, fluid working structures and passages we all now pass through.

The need for adventure, wit, fun, untidiness is a need that all institutions have. As well as w**k word bingo, we often run ‘worst case scenario’ or ‘how not to do it’ or other dark story telling invitations (if you look in the Spark publications you’ll find ‘Listen or thy tongue will make thee deaf’ which tells a bit about one of these assignments).

It’s always a sign that an institution is not on a firm cultural footing if bowdlerisation, and a constant watering down of the permitted versions of things are the order of the day. Vivid language, says Karl Weick, are essential to organisational health. I think he’s right. I do always look for the clues of the smoothing that goes on between spoken and written, and between what people will say on organisational turf or when they step off it. But, to coin a tired and well worn management metaphor, we do all become boiling frogs and fail simply to notice how the absurdity of the strangling language of management and direction setting has seeped into every day assumption, behaviour and conversation.

Vivid language, plural not singular stories, and room for the vitality and personal truth of the valedictory dispatch. I feel a manifesto of sorts coming on and so will end here for now with a piece of Rumi I found in the front of a Sri Husvedt book:

Don’t turn away. Keep looking at the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you.
Rumi, a 13th C Persian poet and mystic