37. The credit/blame matrix –what’s going on when people try to make failure a badge of success?

Suella Braverman’s eager championing of the refugees-to-Rwanda policy demonstrates a wider unwelcome trend of promoting division.

This Substack is about creating, leading, running and working in organisations which are both humane (treat people well) AND effective (function and deliver their aims). Most of the time I try to point out ways to do that. Occasionally, though, it may be helpful to point to examples of the opposite; organising inhumanely AND ineffectively. So this time I’ll look briefly at the UK baffling refugees-to-Rwanda scheme before introducing a new framework to see it in a broader context which may help us see more clearly what is going on. Hold tight.

Refugees to Rwanda

The United Kingdom has a long and proud (though not unblemished) record of giving asylum to people fleeing persecution from around the world. In the late 1930s nearly 10,000 children from Germany were taken in, mostly from Jewish families, in what was termed ‘Kindertransport’. (That their parents were excluded is less often remarked.) After World War II international frameworks for refugees were established by the newly-formed United Nations (in particular with the UN Refugee Convention of 1951 and its Protocol of 1967. The European Convention on Human Rights was established in 1950 (led by British lawyers) to prevent atrocities as seen in Nazi Germany.  The UK Parliament gave legal force in domestic law to these in our Human Rights Act 1998.

However, things have taken a different turn since 2010.  The Conservative Home Secretary (interior minister) Theresa May brought in a policy of a ‘hostile environment’ towards those without the legal right to remain in the UK.  This was much-trumpeted at the time, with poster vans going around the streets announcing ‘In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest.” While no-one can complain about taking action against those in the country without permission, this campaign seemed to imply that such people were thick on the ground. Anyone who looked a bit foreign might be an ‘illegal’. This fostered distrust.

A ‘hostile environment’ mobile billboard commissioned by Theresa May as Home Secretary. Anyone would think it was a big problem…

The policy later led to the Windrush Scandal, where people who had arrived from the West Indies as children in the 1950s without passports or documents were detained and even deported for being unable to prove their right to live in the UK. The Government reversed their position after an outcry and promised to right the wrongs; they are still dragging their feet on putting that promise into action.

‘Stop the boats!’

The UK left the European Union in 2020 with promises of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘protecting our borders’. Around the same time significant numbers of asylum seekers started to travel to the UK across the English Channel in small, crowded and often unseaworthy boats from France. These people were mostly from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Eritrea, fleeing war and persecution and wishing for various reasons (family, language) to come to the UK. The numbers increased through 2020, 2021 and 2022, when over 45,000 made the journey. (This is many fewer than came from the middle east but stopped in Turkey, Germany and other countries, but still an outrage to British politicians with fantasies about doing what they liked to foreigners.)

Such crossings are very visible; the heavily loaded boats push off from a beach near Calais and once they are in international waters call the UK Coastguard to be rescued. The Coastguard has no choice but to go to assist under various international conventions; it turns out that simply abandoning people to drown is not an option (even though UK Home Secretaries wish that it was). What made things worse was that by leaving the EU, the UK had also removed itself from various ‘return agreements’ with France whereby migrant could be sent back. Once they are on UK soil, they may claim asylum, and most are accepted (in the end). At the time of writing there are 140,000 people awaiting decisions on their asylum claims. It is commonly agreed that the Home Office have delayed these cases to discourage people from coming to the UK.

A small boat filled with migrants and asylum seekers in the English Channel (photo Gareth Fuller/PA)

In 2022 the UK government announced their ‘Rwanda Asylum Plan’, another measure to discourage small boats. Asylum seekers arriving ‘illegally’ would be sent to the African land-locked state of Rwanda to claim asylum there. Not to have their cases assessed there, but to ‘build a new life there’. This was, it is generally agreed, not a serious plan for actually dealing with the backlog – only some 150 people could actually be sent. But the idea was to treat asylum seekers so badly they would be put off.

There were two snags. Firstly the UK had to pass a law declaring that those arriving by ‘irregular means’ (like small boats) would be illegal migrants and not entitled to claim asylum. It did this in the cunningly titled Illegal Migration Act of 2023. (Some thought that the Act itself would be declared illegal!) Secondly, there were court hearings as to whether the Rwanda policy was itself lawful. This process culminated last week in the UK Supreme Court, where the judges ruled unanimously that while the principle of sending asylum seekers to other safe countries was not itself impossible, Rwanda was not, in fact, a safe country and therefore the plan as it stood was outside the law. 

Suella Braverman’s histrionics

While the Rwanda Plan was put in place originally by Home Secretary Priti Patel, its most vocal proponent has been her successor Suella Braverman. She declared it her dream to see planes taking off for Rwanda, among many other things including speaking of an ‘invasion’ of migrants and pro-Palestine demonstrations as ‘hate marches’. She was sacked days before the Supreme Court ruling for publishing an inflammatory column in the Times newspaper without sign-off from the Prime Minister’s office (as she is required to do). After being sacked, she was back on the attack in excoriating terms, saying the the Prime Minister had let her down and that the UK should leave the European Convention on Human Rights. So what is going on here?

Home Secretary Suella Braverman speaks in the House Of Commons before being sacked by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (right)

In most organisations, championing a policy which is declared illegal is not a sign of success. It might seem, in the words of Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance Of Being Earnest, to look like carelessness. An apology and a period of silence might appear to be appropriate responses. But no; Suella continues to rail at the Prime Minister (who sacked her), the judges (who ruled out her policy, the United Nations and anything else which prevents the UK Home Secretary doing exactly what she likes.

The credit/blame matrix

One way to understand this apparently confusing situation is to look at my Credit/Blame matrix. This is the first time I’ve written about it. If you know of some other source for it, I’d be delighted to hear about it. Anyway, it’s about whether people are keen to give, or take, credit and blame. Let’s look at it one step at a time.

The credit/blame matrix (Mark McKergow and Jenny Clarke, 2023. As far as I know we invented this last Sunday afternoon when thinking about this piece. If anyone has seen it elsewhere please let me know so I can give credit.

Giving credit is something that’s well associated with humane and effective organisations. When there’s a success, it’s good to see the people involved giving credit to others. This stance is connected, in my mind anyway, with the Host Leadership and Solutions Focus approaches, both of which involve a generous and appreciative stance. I have always tried to credit others where they have developed or written about something I am using or building on; that’s a key part of the ethos of scientific writing and publishing. It’s very bad indeed to pretend that you’ve invented something when it was clearly devised somewhere else. At least one should credit the others, before adding new pieces to the picture (and then you can reasonably hope that others will credit you). This is a key topic and I intend to return to it in more detail in a future piece.

Taking credit, on the other hand, is associated with hero leaders, experts and others who are eager to stress their own (apparently decisive) contribution following a success. There was a phase of business autobiographies in the 1990s when I was studying for my MBA, where (usually American) chief executives trumpeted how they had saved Chrysler (Lee Iacocca) or whatever. It was all down to my genius, and the rest of you were at best irrelevancies and at worst serious encumbrances. It has to be said that, Donald Trump aside, we see less of this nowadays than back then, at least in public. Perhaps the idea that success comes from working together is finally permeating the male-dominated locker room of big business? Even the august Harvard Business Review has finally (in 2021) published an article urging business leader to ‘stop trying to be heroes’ (le Gentil, 2021).  

Taking blame is, of course, not a pleasant thing to do. If something’s gone wrong then it’s tough to hold one’s hands up and admit it. One key reason why this is so hard is probably fear of the consequences. If the result is punishment, loss of job, loss of status or whatever, it is understandable why folks might seek to avoid it.

My background was (way back in the 1980s) in the nuclear power industry. There, and in the airline industry, work has gone on over decades to encourage a ‘no-blame culture’. Where there are potentially very serious consequences, it’s important to help people admit to and report failures and near-misses in order that lessons can be learned, shared and steps taken. Indeed, in these industries it is much more serious to attempt to cover up an incident than report it. In recent times the idea of a ‘just culture’ has emerged in places like the UK National Health Service, trying to balance responsibility and accountability with learning and open-ness; the question is more likely to be ‘what went wrong and what can we do?’ than ‘whose fault was this and how can we punish them?’.  

Giving blame – blaming others for our own mistakes – is the final category. And this is what Suella Braverman appears to have been doing with her failed Rwanda policy. On the face of it, this is the behaviour of a four-year-old having a tantrum. So how has it come to pass that the holder of high office in UK politics feels able to do this?

A few possibilities:

• It’s better to be seen to be ‘doing something’ - anything - than looking at the effectiveness of what’s done?

• It’s better to be raging at everyone else than being judged by one’s own competence?

• The lack of progress IS ITSELF a badge of honour. See how hard it is? Aren’t I wonderful for jumping in and grasping the bull by the horns (even if it throws me off and tramples me?

• Rather like the lack of evidence in a conspiracy theory (they’re covering it up!), the failure becomes a compelling part of the story.

In some ways, Suella and her allies are more interested in rubbing her opponents up the wrong way than getting anything actually done. They get points for this from some quarters – but at the cost of dividing our society. This division is by far the most serious long-term element. By pitting one group against another in an apparent zero-sum win/lose game, those involved are putting their own careers above the people they have been elected to lead. Indeed, it has been said that Suella is burnishing her credentials for a future party leadership bid.  

Conclusions

Fortunately, the Supreme Court seem to taking their authoritative role seriously and getting backing from others in the Conservative Party. We can but hope that the pendulum is swinging back from authoritarian and disreputable to inclusive and tolerant. The latter path is hard, slow and frustrating at times – but it’s better in the long run than simply trying to ignore the law. When the leadership (of any organisation) puts itself outside the norms it lays down for everyone else, bad things will follow.

This piece is free to read, like and share. You’re welcome to subscribe for new pieces every week.

---

Dates and mates

The 2024 SOLWorld ‘Unconference’ has been announced for 14-16 April 2024 at the beautiful Land Aan Zee conference centre in the Netherlands. The theme of the event is Exploring how the Solution Focus Approach Creates Sustainable Organisations, and you cat get more information and book here.

Between the land and the sea…