The mushy quality of the Big Ideas that came out of the summit - the cliches, vague motherhood statements and the bleeding obvious - was not the fault of the summiteers but these management consultants.
Of the 10 facilitators, seven were professional management consultants, at least three formerly with McKinsey & Company. It is their business to turn concrete ideas into gobbledygook, and they did not disappoint.
Amid a flurry of paper, whiteboards, marker pens and Blu-Tack, clear ideas were churned up in the management jargon-generator and spewed out as empty slogans, "priority themes" and concepts worthy of little more than a PowerPoint presentation. It took until mid-afternoon on Saturday for a woman in our group, the media "substream" of the governance "stream", to cry: "I'm sorry but I don't get the difference between a concept and a theme."
This prompted a storm of pent-up fury from exasperated summiteers.
As The Economist journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge wrote in their book on the lucrative management guru industry, The Witch Doctors, such facilitators have infiltrated corporate life, and are the "new, unacknowledged legislators of mankind".
Their language is "remarkably flatulent … If you buy the argument that the lingo of management theory is the language by which … people run companies and governments run countries, then it's no small thing when that language doesn't make sense."
In Canberra, it was the journalists, creatives and doctors who were most peeved their good ideas had been "lost in
translation". The business streams didn't seem to notice.
Exasperated with his recalcitrant mob on Sunday, the governance group facilitator, Tim Orton, a Rhodes Scholar, former McKinseyite and founder of The Nous Group management consulting firm, told them their Big Ideas needed to be reduced to a "slogan on a T-shirt by 4pm". It was close to the truth.
The facilitators were useful for keeping groups to schedule and producing a little green book Rudd could wave at the cameras on Sunday night. But their process is the antithesis of original thinking, forcing ideas into prefabricated cliches. It is the triumph of mush over clarity, psychology and process over human ingenuity and creativity, Myers-Briggs over natural human interaction.
Brainstorming is supposed to be chaotic and competitive. But facilitators nip it in the bud, in favour of "capturing" slogans and pinning them to a whiteboard. Once that is done, participants are expected to vote, or in the unfortunate case of the productivity group, walk around with a piece of paper held up to their head.
But in a blinding flash the weekend did provide the key to the enigma that is Kevin Rudd. He is the quintessential management boffin, a career bureaucrat who talks "performance benchmarks" and promises to sack ministers who fall short. His speeches are full of the feel-good platitudes, pop psychology and symbolism of modern management gurus, who brought us such glowing corporate entities as Enron, "the smartest guys in the room".
The whole idea of a futures summit is one of the more recent fads in management theory. It works beautifully, confusing and anaesthetising people, carrying them along a predetermined path while assuring them their input is valued and important. The path, however, leads to a dead end, because it is the process that matters, not the destination.
devinemiranda@hotmail.com
Miranda Devine was a participant in the 2020 Summit in Canberra last weekend.
