I don’t know when it started or where it came from but the relentless onward march of Managementarianism is slowly and subtly strangling the life from almost all of our creative endeavours.  We have been aware, for some time now, of the deadening effect of this culture on health and education, where educators and clinicians are replaced with managers and where the end result is not health or education but efficiency and exam results. But we have been almost taken by surprise in the way that it has wormed its way into almost every aspect of our lives.  The pursuit of targets, quotas, waiting times, performance, results, outcomes, good and best practice, all with the laudable aim of improving and reforming so that they become better organised and more efficient, is increasing. The imposition of targets themselves often back fire.  Whenever I make an application for Planning Approval I know that the authority are duty bound to  give a decision within a fixed period of time and their performance, in this regard, is monitored. What happens is that the administrators appear to make it their priority to delay the registration process (before the clock starts ticking) as long as possible by scratching around for anything that might need clarification, no matter how miniscule or irrelevant, so that the process, in the end, takes longer. It has all been said before, of course, many times and better.

What has taken me quite by surprise is the way that this culture has wormed its way into surprising places.  My own profession, which at its best is concerned with one of the highest forms of art, is governed by a body that is only interested in a measured standard of practice. It takes annual fees from architects which are then used to pursue the same architects on the basis of complaints from “consumers” however spurious. Inevitably results and convictions are what is important, so the body focuses on the small and sole practioners rather than the big boys who are better able to defend themselves. The results of successful prosecutions are then gleefully posted in press releases in order to put the wind up the lone architect. All of this has a deadening and negative effect on the real work of designing buildings. When you are called up to face a tribunal only one is an architect. The chief executive is not an architect and we wonder how this has all happened.  So from the top down we are not concerned or motivated to produce architecture that inspires thrills and delights but to devote ourselves to ticking boxes and covering our backs and if there is time or energy left over, then and only then can we think about design.  It is all very very depressing.

The obsession with quantifiable results is fearsome and not only does it stifle creativity but it ditches ideals and principles. So we no longer speak of good but better, fairer rather than fair, more just rather than simply just. Crime and justice are managed so it is question of keeping the lid on things, reducing figures is what matters and seldom is there time to consider what actually might be the cause of it all.  Drugs policy is about reducing harm not about what the problem really is. A health and safety policy is successful if it can bring down accident figures. I heard a health and safety officer declare that his aim was to reduce fatalities on building sites by a significant degree. “There are still too many needless deaths” he said.  The aim to avoid any death wasn’t itself seen as an aim. Economic policy is about management, so that David Cameron advice, to us all, some time back,  “to pay off your credit card loans” – the good common sense advice that my granny would have taught me, was stifled before it was actually said. It was important that people pursued debt to keep the high streets turning over and the so the economy is managed.  The same influence is found in politics where party managers and spin doctors ditch idealism and visions in the drive towards a safe harmonious superficial unity, so that, in the end, the parties resemble each other.   It was something that saddened Tony Benn.

What is really astonishing is the way that this culture has wormed its way into the one institution, the one body which should not be following the rest but be a shining light in the darkness and confusion, which should be a haven for the oppressed, the lonely the hurt, which should be speaking courageously with a prophetic voice to the nations, the one body which should not be managed – the Church of Jesus Christ.  And yet that seems to be what is happening.  Congregations become consumers of religion and pastors service providers with job descriptions.  Stipends that historic term that beautifully defines the way a minister is to be supported becomes salaries and the church simply becomes just another modernist machine with stated aims and objectives, standards and values with just as much box ticking and watching the back as in any other field. How did this happen?

A medic friend suggested to me that it was like this: The benefits that were brought to society by Christianity who pioneered them, such as in health, education and welfare, in institutions which were subsequently handed over to the civil authority, lost their Christian base, their grounding reason for being and the only thing to fill that vacuum was a pursuit of a humanist atheistic mechanistic agenda with measureable goals. It is a scary analysis. It is scarier still if the church itself is in danger of being consumed by the same Managementarianism.

Crawford Mackenzie