mana, mojo, management

animal spirits and their preconditions

I thought I might expand a bit on a throwaway line I came up with earlier this year for the conclusion of a book review (the subject being the baleful influence of management consultants in the public sector):

“There is an element in public life, not well understood or analyzed by economists, that might be thought of as “the kind of energy and identity that makes purposive action possible.” [...] A Polynesian society might think of it as mana, the life force, but it might be less pretentious for us to call it “mojo.” A lot of the problem of renewing government in the twenty-first century is as simple as this: The public sector has lost its mojo. We can work out who stole it. The only question is how to get it back.”

When I wrote this, there were two distinct concepts in the back of my mind.  There’s the idea of the role of “philosophy/identity” as “System 5” in Stafford Beer’s model.  The concept here is that the identity and purpose of an organisation is determined by, and determines, the way in which it balances the two priorities of “doing things here and now” and “adapting to a changing environment”.  The causation runs both ways – your philosophy and sense of who you are is your means of deciding how you’re going to adapt to the world, but conversely, if what you do constantly produces a particular kind of result, that’s what your purpose is; there’s no point in claiming that your true identity is something else.

But I was also thinking about something beyond that – as well as internal organisational energy, there’s a property of “being recognised as a legitimate part of the wider system”.  The public sector over the period of outsourcing and privatisation lost a lot of its internal competence and capability, but it also lost a basic level of respect for its ability to do things, from the general public and from its political superiors. 

The example that sticks in my mind is that of the BBC Micro; in 1982 it would have been a default presumption on the part of the British middle class that “mere private enterprise can’t possibly produce a home computer that’s going to be as good as the state broadcaster”.  Twenty years later, even the idea of state provided broadband begins to sound like something out of an alternate history novel.

I think real cybernetics heads will say that I’m describing various global properties of a recursive system here; as well as talking about the viability and identity of one particular system, you always need to consider the wider “metasystem” in which it’s embedded, and it’s only possible for an organisation to be viable if its wider environment will permit it to be. 

On the other hand, I think I might make a case that sometimes you have to consider organisations and their management one-at-a-time, if only to keep problems to a size you can hold in your head.  And that for this reason, it’s useful to have a portmanteau word combining “capability to act” with “general legitimacy and acceptance of your agency”.  I think “mana”, as used in contexts of organisation and leadership (ie, mainly New Zealand politics), matches up pretty well to this concept, and “mojo” might even be a little bit better as it reminds us that we’re not meant to be taking this too seriously.

The coining of names for theoretical entities is a serious matter; if you can get away with it (particularly if you can grab hold of a common English word like “value” or “capital”) then you can close off entire species of potentially awkward questions.