Months of preparation results in management-speak and gibberish – can you make sense of it?
The Keir Starmer-commissioned ‘Organise to Win’ plan has been months in the making and it was presented to Labour staff – many of whose jobs it will mean shedding – today. And it is brain-meltingly opaque, full of mind-boggling management-speak and gobbledegook.
The section ‘Ways of Working’ presumably tells staff how they’re going to manage without around one in four of their current number – and it introduces them to the wonder-solution of ‘Agile ceremonies’:
One slide was not enough for this pithy new way of working, so a second gives more – well, not sure ‘information’ is the right word, but let’s go with it for now – on the nitty gritty of the new modus operandi:
The ‘voter-centric’ one apparently means telling voters who the party is and what it stands for; but the massive, unaddressed problem with that little gem is that Labour doesn’t perceptibly stand for anything under Keir Starmer – except maybe some flag-fondling and an occasional, blurted bit of Islamophobia – and the blurb makes it clear that it’s not going to actually stand for anything at all, without asking voters what they think it should be.
There will, of course, be as many opinions as there are voters, so no clarity there then. Cover for more money spent on focus groups run by mates of the management, probably.
‘Agile’ ways of working seems more to do with agile ways of packing as many fuzzy buzzwords and phrases into a single paragraph as humanly possible – although it does say it includes ‘honesty and transparency’.
Of course, honesty and transparency will not include the release of the Forde report, at least not until those who can remember what it’s about have all died off.
And of course, the future will be ‘multidisciplinary’ and emphatically not in silos – and it will be ‘flat’ and ‘dynamic’, with ‘clear goals’ that nobody can be told about (according to Labour’s front bench, at least). So much for transparency.
So the Labour party’s future will be flat, dynamic and agile. In other words, a frisbee.
Skwawkbox was not the only one to find the new document, well, less than compelling. Author and former Corbyn scriptwriter Alex Nunns took a similar view, as did many others:
And not a few pointed out that for Starmer’s predecessor, growth and other good things came without a huge spend on management-speak:
Of course, this is just what happens when a party is devoid of ideas and has no one stepping up with any. What a fall from the days of vision and excitement that were killed off by the people now running the ‘show’, if it has enough substance even to be that.
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