David Pilgrim posts….
The new independent chair of the faux Board of Trustees, Mr. David Crundwell, and his three colleagues from outside the BPS face a task which is, to use the preferred management euphemism, ‘challenging’. He and the other newcomers have been parachuted into a dysfunctional and corrupt organization. We do not know who sent them or how they were chosen for their ‘challenging’ jump. Was it the Charity Commission directly or did the cabal itself choose them for their particular crisis management skills to placate the demands of the former? As with most of the decision making about, and within, the BPS this matter has been kept hidden from the scrutiny of members and the public.
Despite this opaqueness, which immediately becomes pure cant given that the Society has a purported core value of ‘transparency’, something might still happen for the better. Small changes in systems, even in relatively isolated ones like the BPS, can potentially at least trigger larger improvements. Family therapists know this about their chronically ‘stuck’ clients. However, the objective character of that closed culture, embedded for over fifty years, is still worth recalling because any measure of success must use it as a yardstick. Whatever ‘perspective’ (that great postmodern fudge) we take on the legitimation crisis of the BPS, it remains a legitimation crisis. The facts we keep restating about corruption and dysfunction remain the facts.
What is the ‘challenge’?
This is the score. The BPS has never had a proper Board of Trustees. The group calling itself by that name was initially a self-perpetuating oligarchy. Those on it at any moment in time not only tended to hang around for years on end but when it became a ‘slow open’ group, newcomers were let in by grace and favour. Sometimes chairs of other Boards and Divisions waited their turn, like status obsessed MPs in the queue to enter the House of Lords. This quasi-Masonic tendency was neither democratic nor transparent.
Newly appointed ‘trustees’, in exchange for a taste of power or influence, were expected to toe the line. If they did not, then they risked punishment. The latter claim has been evident in relation to the one sub-group of ‘trustees’ with any sort of democratic mandate: the Presidential triumvirate. However, although this three person steer at the top was elected by the membership, even they were still not proper Trustees, according to the expectations of charity law. They were not members of the public, who could at any time walk away from the role without career, financial or status implications. Moreover, the elected Presidential role has now been neutered, with those elected by the members only having an ‘ambassadorial’ role, instead of becoming the Board Chair. Let us be honest, who would now want be an ambassador for a banana republic?
Outsiders create proper oversight. Insiders, even at their benign best, act out their conflicts of interest. We have witnessed this over and over again, especially in relation to two matters: the struggle to sustain sub-group interests and the opportunities for policy capture. An example of the first was when the third Divisional departure emerged in 2017, with the formation of the Association of Clinical Psychologists; prior splinters away were the Association of Business Psychology and Association of Educational Psychologists. These schisms reflected the struggle of groups of applied psychologists to escape both the shackles of oligarchical control and the iron cage of bureaucracy.
Examples of the second, which we have explored at length on this blog, have been the capture of policies on gender by transgender activists and the alignment of the BPS policy on memory and the law with that of the British False Memory Society. Governance failure has meant that these biases have accrued, and other legitimate voices from within the Society have been systematically excluded. This culminates in an organization that is not learned but captured. It has become a legitimizing policy platform for activists with particular vested interests. The latter displaces full and proper academic reflection with propaganda. That process has been aided and abetted by the ‘Comms Team’ and The Psychologist, as well as a recent cultural proclivity in the BPS for censorship.
Facing this ‘challenging’ scenario
Given the above, how will the new small broom start to discharge its onerous responsibilities? This is an unenviable but interesting scenario for anyone. Remember that Mr. Crundwell and his colleagues are the very first genuine Trustees of the BPS, so this is a recordable historical moment. Will they take stock and then opt to distance themselves from the past chicanery and bullshit, which we have documented extensively on this blog? Will they demand full transparency for the membership about the fraud, the arson and the kangaroo court expulsion?
However, before jumping in with those blunt questions, there are the information gathering advantages for them to consider about very cautiously engaging with the extant ‘leadership’. The newcomers need to gauge the scale of damage of the organizational wreckage and its realistic prospects of repair. A watchful period might also allow the new broom to hold the old guard to account for their sins of omission and commission, before telling the story of that experiment publicly and without resorting to redacted minutes (O to be fly on the wall of the current ‘Board of Trustees’ meetings!) For the newbies there are clear grounds then for a ‘wait and see’ engagement stance. However, the very real risk is that it becomes quickly routinized and the new broom is then rendered completely ineffective. At the time of writing, Mr. Crundwell and his colleagues are on the cusp between wise caution and mistaken collusion. This is a tricky time for them.
Their cultural absorption would be a replay of the pattern of incorporation we have seen so often in the past. The more it changed the more it stayed the same. What impact did some well-meaning new Presidents have? The answer is very little. Did the New Public Management model lead to a rectification of organizational inefficiency? The answer is that it led to at least one major fraud and a profligate £6 million ‘Change Programme’; ‘changing from what to what?’ we might all well ask. This shambles culminated in a fiscal crisis, summarised well in the resignation letter of Vice President David Murphy, we previously re-printed in full.
Since then, the highly redacted minutes of the ‘Board of Trustees’ are beginning to hint at an impending meltdown; what more is there to hide from an already hoodwinked member audience? The answer may well be ‘quite a lot’. Neither the old oligarchs nor the new managers, since 2000, with their poor understanding of academic values, prevented the fraud. Who in either group has taken responsibility for that scandal? The answer is ‘no one’. Who has apologized for the kangaroo court expulsion of Nigel MacLennan? The answer is ‘no one’. Given this lack of evidence about personal integrity or a culture of learning from experience, the old guard has no legitimacy or ‘rational authority’, to use an old notion from Erich Fromm.
In light of these points, we have approached the new Chair to open up a channel of communication with him. This offer of free highly researched, albeit highly critical, feedback to date has not been taken up fully by him. The relevant context of our offer is that we have had no fancy fees like the management consultants and lawyers paid out from members’ money by the SMT, to save their skins. We have zero ambition for power within the BPS but as career-long members we can see it for what it is, warts and all.
Faced with our guerilla campaign, the SMT have ignored us hoping we might give up or die (both of course might have happened, so from their tactical position it was worth a try). But our presence or departure is not relevant to what we have been drawing attention to about corruption and dysfunction, which is either true or not true. We were just the messengers to be shot or ignored. Accordingly, the newcomers with their fresh eyes and lack of loyalty to the old regime might be wise to take what we are saying seriously. That is their choice.
Our elaborated case is set out in the just published British Psychology In Crisis: A Case Study of a Dysfunctional Organisation from Phoenix Books. I have arranged for a free copy to be sent to Mr. Crundwell, at his request. He will use his own judgement about its contents, in comparison to the obfuscations, rationalisations and silences likely to be heard from his advisors from the SMT, depicting us as a small disaffected and unrepresentative minority. As Robert Thouless noted in his classic 1930 text, Straight and Crooked Thinking, the strength of an argument, which mixes logic and evidence, is not how many people say it but whether or not it is more plausible than competing arguments. The path less taken is sometimes the wisest one.
Mr. Crundwell has written back very politely to us recently. Knowingly brief (he is a communications expert according to a click on Google), he is keeping his cards close to his chest about his appraisal of the organizational madness so far. But at least he replied, which is more than was the case so often in the past, when a host of members sent letters of concern and complaint to the ‘leaders’ of the BPS and were blanked. This culture of contempt, when letters and complaints were systematically ignored by the CEO and other senior managers, is a norm that the newcomers may be wise to disrupt and eschew.
So Mr. Crundwell has replied quickly and politely, albeit guardedly. He has invited us to meet with him and the CEO. Maybe he wants to nail the CEO to his side to make him face the music. However, our interest was in talking directly to the new and authentic Trustees about their oversight role, not having meetings with employees. This lack of administrative separation, even today, of the CEO and the Chair is highly problematic. All communications to the Chair still go through the office of the CEO. In a well-run Charity a Chair should be interested in feedback from any source (minority or not). Given that the CEO and the SMT have been the focus of substantial disappointment for BPS members, there ought to be an opportunity for Mr. Crundwell to listen to voices of concern about them from anywhere. How can that happen with the remaining norm of administrative enmeshment between the CEO and the Trustees, including the Chair? This does not augur well for a new regime of oversight.
Moreover, why would any BPS member trust a CEO, who was suspended for a year on full pay and who then returned with no explanation for the world about how his fraudster PA, with past convictions, ended up stealing members’ money with impunity and is now, once again, in prison? However he was using his time when not replying to members concerns, it was clearly not on hiring and managing his own subordinates to ensure financial probity. Teflon tactics of leaders may lead to personal survival, even if temporarily, but they rarely provide the survivors with genuine and historically vindicated credibility or the respect of others. This leaves just a few stalwart loyalists to defend the indefensible. Our Boris Johnson zeitgeist is permeating more than the culture of Westminster. Applying this point to the BPS, why would any member any longer want to talk to the CEO – what is the point given his track record?
Conclusion
The BPS is under immediate existential threat. Poor governance, financial corruption, policy capture, censorship and academic incoherence point to an organization that may now be fatally wounded. The current CEO has no legitimacy as its most senior manager. The ‘Board of Trustees’, now reformed for the better, is still a sham. It needs to be scrapped fully and a new one installed, where every single member is truly independent of the operational aspects of its staff and its competing membership interests. The resolution of tensions between the latter now require careful and separate reflection, given that the discipline of psychology remains so contested in terms of its theories and methods. That matter of academic hygiene, underpinned at all times by academic freedom, has been lost in an organization in which secrecy and censorship have become management norms. A truly independent Board of Trustees could oversee the rectification of these signs of both organizational and academic malaise. For their part, psychologists must take collective responsibility for dealing with the latter.
If the Society is now on the brink of extinction then the current reforms at the top are a start but they are not enough. Finishing where I began with the unique historical installation of proper and so credible Trustees, and to use another managerial cliché, ‘our door is always open’ for them. However, whether they listen to us or not, maybe the BPS is going to collapse from its own contradictions about poor financial control and grossly inadequate governance. New leaders, even if well-meaning, honest and open to feedback from all-comers, may be doomed to fail because maybe the Society is now doomed to fail. Hero innovators may only now be offering palliative care rather than a cure.
psychology UNREDACTED 