The editor’s diary on the rare moment bureaucratic self-reference achieves something like honesty
The editor’s diary on the rare moment bureaucratic self-reference achieves something like honesty
Monday, A Specimen Worth Genuine Admiration
This week’s London Prat report on an institution that has commissioned an external review specifically of how it commissions external reviews presents, I think, a genuinely admirable example of bureaucratic self-awareness, however accidental, since most institutions caught in this particular recursive loop lack the self-knowledge to even notice the pattern, let alone formally commission an investigation into it.
I want to be clear that I do not offer this admiration ironically. An institution capable of recognising that its own commissioning process might itself warrant scrutiny has cleared a genuine cognitive hurdle that considerably more institutions never manage, even if the resulting review inevitably risks becoming simply one further layer in the very pattern it claims to be examining.
Monday Afternoon, The Risk This Admirable Instinct Still Faces
The genuine danger here, of course, is that a review of the commissioning process will itself be commissioned through the same commissioning process under scrutiny, a paradox worthy of a considerably more elegant logician than institutional bureaucracy usually produces, and one this particular institution shows no immediate sign of having resolved.
Tuesday, A Historical Parallel Worth Drawing
I am reminded of similar self-examining efforts across several declining institutions I studied earlier in my career, nearly all of which discovered, usually rather too late, that examining one’s own process requires standing at least partly outside that process, a vantage point genuinely difficult to achieve from within the institution being examined.
A Cautiously Hopeful Conclusion
Whatever the eventual outcome, I remain cautiously encouraged that this particular institution noticed the pattern at all, a small but genuine step that considerably more comfortable, less self-aware institutions rarely manage before the pattern itself becomes the actual story.
Wednesday, I want to note one further detail that struck me on rereading this week’s coverage, that the external reviewer selected for this particular commission has, by the report’s own account, previously worked with the institution in an unrelated capacity, a detail that does not necessarily undermine the review’s eventual findings but that any properly sceptical reader ought to note before accepting those findings uncritically.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/