Council, communications and control freakery

Or is it paranoia? Either way it is diseased and utterly self-defeating. Here’s an indicative story.

Elaine Vassie from Lochgilphead suggested joining our reporting team. We were delighted. This is what we want to see – people with a commitment to their areas coming forward to get involved in telling the rest of Argyll about them – the history, the local culture, the issues, the initiatives, the achievements.

Each community can tell its own storiand For Argyll exists to offer a wide – and responsive – audience for them.

Being pro-active, positive, with Community Council experience and interested in her area, Elaine Vassie felt that there was a worthwhile story in the refurbished library in Lochgilphead and the new Head of Libraries at Argyll and Bute Council. So she made contact and arranged to do an interview on Friday (12th February).

This wasn’t our idea. It was hers – it was her own initiative, the dream situation.

But come the day, she was told that the Head of Libraries had spoken with the Council’s Press Office and that there would be no interview.

Why?

A Press Release was already planned for issue on 22nd February and would be carrying relevant information.

This little chain of events is emblematic of a culture within the Council that simply has to change. It is born of a fundamentally defensive world view that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and breeds a diseased and disabling culture.

That is exactly where we now are in Argyll.

The self-fulfilling prophecy

If you expect attack, you invite it. If you are seen to develop structures to defend against possible attack, the first question is – ‘What have you got to hide?’

Then you start to behave manipulatively, as part of the felt need for defence. Then you do hide your manipulations. Then you get found out. Then people ‘know’ they were right all along and they stop believing anything you say, always looking for a hidden agenda. And by then, there often are hidden agendas.

This is a sick and disabling cycle of despair.

The siege mentality

We have regularly come across a communications culture in the council that is battened down for siege.

We often want to interview Councillors and Council staff on initiatives they are driving – like Jolyon Gritten on the hugely important initiative to develop Argyll’s ‘core paths’ – or long distance walking trails.

This has been one of the Council’s big success stories. It is absolutely attuned to the development of Argyll’s unique resource – its physical self.

The heart of such a story is found in the people who believe in what they do and who commit to getting it done. It is not found in a press release.

But no. The communications policy is that staff are not allowed to speak for themselves. There will be a press release.

Communications

In every possible sense this is madness. It has nothing to do with the meaning and purpose of ‘commuications’ – which is a two way process – transmit and receive.

The Council – as with much of the public sector – only has a transmit button. Until it develops an interest in receiving, it will stutter along in a defensive vacuum.

Of course this non-communications policy is born of the related twin urges of fearfulness and a wish to control.

A Councillor or a senior Council officer might say something that would be seized upon and used against the Council.

The answer is to gag them. This leaves the Councils’ greatest resource – its elected representatives and its staff, as a wasted resource which, through disuse, becomes a fast depreciating asset.

Councillors are used only to public speaking – single track communications traffic, with passing places for the occasional heckler.

Staff are unused to talking to ‘outsiders’. That breeds incompetence – through inexperience – in personal communication; and a potent sense that outside the safe and known confines of the Council, ‘there be bears’.

This situation simply has to change.

An opportunity for change

There is a new Communications Manager arriving shortly.

This is a moment when Council Leader Dick Walsh – the ultimate authority in the Council – and its CEO, Sally Loudon, whose line manager he is, should work together to frame a new communications culture and give the incoming Manager a latitude the previous incumbent did not have.

When you have able and creative people you need to give them room to deploy those abilities. You should not ram them into a straight-jacket sewn by those who have taken a vow of silence and are most comfortable with immobility.

And that applies to liberating Councillors and senior Council officers to do interviews. No wonder most of them can talk only in a series of acronyms.

Back to the beginning

In the instance we began with, the Council had a local citizen who was interested in some positive new developments, wanted to learn more about them and to share that information – and had the initiative to set about getting it. What happened. She was shut down.

Let’s hear no more about ‘voter apathy’ and ‘lack of initiative’ in Argyll.

Let’s see what the Council does to open up.