Purpose, and endeavour.

Can we sustain the business of care if problems are solved?

Coleman Hughes has written on the end of DEI, observing on how the call to act affirmatively in the 1960s became an statistical tool called “affirmative action”, noting that they are far from the same thing. I couldn’t agree more.

Language gets in our way as much as it illuminates. I grew up in the ‘60s and through experiences that most white middle class kids do not have, saw plenty. It wasn’t only a matter of racial divides. That aspect of life in the United States was unavoidable, yet somehow invisible to those disinclined to look outside the frame of their own world. I wonder what my life, fragmented by numerous divides, might have been if the frame outside viewers had on me was real. That’s something I aim to explore, though I still wrestle with the degree of exposure such exploration demands.

So, in this post, I want to highlight an (as yet undeveloped) aspect of “modern” management. Because DEI, affirmative action, is managed. How it is managed reveals something about how we run all sectors since the 1980s integration of, let’s say greed, into the fabric of organizational systems with their rippling influence on social norms.

I carry some old fashioned notions with me. I’m not sure why, or whether it is simply my tendency toward an aspirational, even romantic, way of viewing the world. Noblesse oblige was instilled in me early, despite a notable lack of noblesse. It led me into, and out of, bureaucracy. As I write these words, I think that living up to a deeply instilled expectation of doing good for others has the ring of purpose. And this, bear with me, grounds my view of how things should—at least could—be done with purpose in mind. That is to say, purpose leads to a focus on outcomes ahead of process. It is not an “end justifies the means” approach in which all bets are off and principles compromised in chasing some goal. Rather, it is an awareness that there are many ways to achieve an outcome and that the path is contextual. One size does not fit all.

This is where action at scale fails in the MBA driven world of corporatized care, and governance. For a host of well accepted reasons born of practice and laudable, even critical, desire for accountability, outcomes are subsumed in process. The operation was a success, but the patient died.

Injustice rules in the pursuit of justice.

Bureaucracy distances individuals, producing automatons satisfied (or not) to perform roles that can be carried out correctly yet, in the aggregate, do not deliver the outcomes they promise. A world of counting produces statistical justifications for the process. When the numbers don’t quite reveal what is wanted, categories codified through te Chart of Accounts are redefined, sums reconfigured, and, voila, they do!

Disciplinary codes are dressed in familiar terms with new meaning. Unfamiliar terms appear. A forceful oppression is disguised by good intent. Industries are born, borrowing purpose to ground their growth. Compliance is required. Underlying problems, the many challenges to achieving purposeful outcomes, remain. It is so much easier to find easy-to-count measures than it is to devise meaningful indicators of progress across myriad contexts. Power is a bonus. Or, has the purpose changed? Surely, the most important thing is to ensure that everyone feels good about “the work.”

And they do.

They will devote energy and resources to defend and expand that work, even at the expense of the cause. Emotive language, and those self-justifying numbers, become means to extend employment and the pride that comes with doing good, even if it never actually gets done.

The cause remains, so useful to us all in so many ways. The work continues.

Koolaid soothes the troubled mind.