Moving forward, but where to ?

Last week, the CEO of LIST held a short speech at the end of the year event. I think it was a very good example of how Big Ideas can fundamentally disagree with the reality of the common folk.

The Big Ideas (or Big Plans) were about two new initiatives. The first Big Plan called “program” will supposedly help transversal exchanges between the three departments and the industry, and the second was the creation of a “composite center” (no clearer definition of its role and its relationship to the research center was given during the speech). The daily reality for the center's employees is, I think, quite remote from that magnificence. While our CEO, staying in the Ideal above the fray, was telling us that next year would be different, that the process of the merger was over, and that now we could go ahead with things, I was thinking that there were very concrete problems that ought to be addressed right now and were not. There is first the general atmosphere pervading the center, a noxious mixture made out of fear, subservience, demotivation and frustration which may miraculously come to pass on its own

(but has not been in any way addressed, let alone recognised by the middle and upper management), but also quite of number of unsolved issues that seem to take a chronic character.

First example: asking for holiday. For an unknown period of time to come, former Tudor people will still fill in their holiday demands on paper. This powerful innovation was introduced with the merger on January 1^st 2015 and replaced an outdated online system that also happened to display the history of days off taken and the number of days left, without having to ask one's manager as is the case now.

Second example: the salaries. Rumor has it that there are wide discrepancies for equivalent positions. There is now an official career scheme, a performance evaluation scheme, but no salary scale (and employees are forbidden by contract to divulge their pay to colleagues).

Third example: Rumors. They are one of the modern modes of communication at the center, fostered by a unspoken policy of discouraging employees to assemble, discuss, ask questions or come forward with suggestions. Just like the online holiday booking system, the different intranets in place both at CRP Gabriel Lippmann and Henri Tudor have been replaced by ...nothing.

One should think that there is nothing complicated to solve. But maybe these small technical issues, and the way in which they are either ignored purposefully, considered irrelevant, their solution botched, or a mixture of the three, reveal quite a serious flaw in the fledgling center : concern for the well-being of individuals is nowhere to be seen.

When during his speech our CEO stressed the importance of people for the center, and right after announced additional recruitment to prove his commitment to “people”, he made his point clearly (although unwittingly). “People” are important indeed, but as necessary productive units rather than as unique individuals. Judging from the one year experience at the center, individualism (in the sense of autonomous thinking and action) is rather to be stifled as much as possible so as to protect the hierarchy from unwanted questions (the rationale being that intimidated employees refrain from asking anything that might be dangerous to answer, because rationally untenable).

Our CEO used quite a number of times the expression “moving forward” interspersed in the middle of sentences, as if it were a holy phrase from a ritual (which it probably is). I think this is particularly interesting, and highly significant. In that particular instance, “forward” very much depends upon the frame of reference. This also reminded me of the love of the head of the environmental department for “bigness” metaphors, as well as the predilection of the former CEO of one of the merged CRPs for the image of the “blank piece of paper”. While the former may confuse “movement with activity” as Hemingway once wrote, the second takes physical size for an adequate indicator of worth, and the latter seems to ignore that you cannot erase habits, customs, relationships and memories by simply ordering it (one might also have expected this person to resign as a gesture that blankness was meant seriously, including in the top management. One example of the numerous inconsistencies that plagued the merger). All approaches fit very well with an idealist orientation combined with the naïve view of reality as a mere assemblage of objects that need to be acted upon by mankind.

Here's what I mean by idealist orientation, and why I think this is such an obstacle for a fruitful development of the center. Idealist thinking, developed by Plato and his disciples from Aristotle to Hegel, places pure thought above common sense as THE faculty with which to understand reality and recognise which action should be taken to produce a desired effect. In opposition to this school of thought, realist thinking looks for answers to problems in the material world, and for this, trusts critical thinking, common sense, and dialogue between human beings. For the idealist, true objectivity lies in the stars, while the realist looks around him. Although Big Ideas can, and do have effects in reality, their root are in the abstract, in the ideal. 

For the manager, the objects to be manipulated are mainly the workers, so that efficient management consists in finding techniques that allows optimal job distribution. Now I am all for finding out what tasks are better suited to whom because I do believe that (i) talents and interests are not interchangeable and (ii) a person's unfolding requires him or her to develop a deep interest for the activity he or she is engaged in. But what the managers at the center do is not really that. In the prevailing idealist reference system, decisions are taken following irrational ideological “logic” blended with personal fancies and in some cases cronyism as well, and thus are largely imposed from above without much concertation. The consequence is twofold: it tends to alienate the employees from the management with the risk that over time, employees become cynical and lose interest in their work too, and most often than not it misses useful practical solutions by excluding experienced staff members from the design of a solution.

To conclude, the quasi-absence of a human perspective at the research center is weakening durably its dynamism by betting on big projects while neglecting to create a sound human basis.

I shall finish on a cheerful note. The announcement of the creation of a “program” that does seem related to the former “programs” put in place at Tudor will at least have relieved some former employees from that center. For the best part of the bygone year they have been told over and again that they had been working in the epitome of scientific, technical and managerial failure (i.e. this had not at all been the case for the other partner of the merger). Now it looks like as though at least one feature of the bad pupil of the class was deemed worthy of (unacknowledged) adoption.

Pablo N