By John Hitchin
Following on from my earlier post on the London Policy conference, what was striking in all of the sessions that I described was the odd lack of a thread that ran through the whole conference. Each session was populated by experts: people who have worked in their fields or researched their subject matter over a number of years. The exceptions to this were invariably the politicians, and for that reason they became all the more interesting (not often you hear that).
As Tim Harford has discussed so well in his book Adapt (read it, it’s excellent), there are many problems with our reliance on ‘experts’, and I think that came up again here. They have a tendency to get things wrong in the long term, to encourage us to prioritise theory over practice, and to always be ‘just about to be useful to us’. That’s not to say that the people weren’t interesting and informative, but if the place they were describing was London, then I’m a trapper’s hat. What they were describing, however, was some remnants of London. It’s residue in the mind, rather than the living and messy city. They did their best to squeeze their thoughts into 5 minutes and then handed over the microphone. But having lots of 5 minute chunks of knowledge, does not a city – with all its complexity and contradiction – make. The audience was left to pull it together, and to do so in an environment where the dichotomy had become one of policy focus rather than political (small and big p) choices. The contrast seemed to be between London the global city or London the city of poverty and inequality. Because the speakers treated these issues so separately (as their expertise dictated), we weren’t able to see the debate about how London is both of these things. I’m sure others at the conference are able to imagine with me that they want London to be both globally competitive and more equal. The challenge is how to do it. And in a way, we didn’t get that. We got speakers advocating for what can perhaps be summed up as a prioritisation of focus.
In a way, this was a strong endorsement of Bruce Katz’s implicit point from his presentation. We need a new kind of leadership – policy and perhaps political too – and as much as I enjoyed and learned things from the London Policy Conference, I’m not convinced it is the vehicle for policy leadership in the capital in the future. We need to be more discerning about complexity, more aware that the structures we create can often leave us discussing remnants of issues, rather than the issues themselves, and more dispersed in our understanding of leadership and change.
That problem with the structuring of expert opinion also manifested itself in the way in which the event itself was organised. The almost palpable ‘expertise’ in the room meant that I’ve never felt further from the speakers of a conference. It was very clearly divided between those speaking and those there to listen. The opportunity to discuss anything was reduced to a few minutes of questions at the end, which the chair always apologised for being so short, but in reality even those sessions with a longer period for questions did little to break down the barriers surrounding the speakers. I very rarely go to paid-for conferences any more, and this is a strong reminder of why. The spirit of sessions with more informal structures and a co-produced agenda, which have been inspired by things such as barcamp, was a long way from the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the two days of the London Policy Conference.
And so whilst it was perhaps the most impressive conference I have been to, all that did was to further highlight the flaws of the concept. It seemed further away, not closer to, the reality of London. The ideas, enterprise, poverty, diversity, wealth, change and dynamism of the capital were only ever partly there. If you have the chance to see Stewart Lee’s show at the Leicester Square Theatre, Carpet Remnant World, you should. It will likely make you laugh much more than this post, but he’s essentially making the same point. In my view that desire to simplify, compartmentalise and reduce is both natural, and to be resisted as often as possible.
