A Tribute to my Dad - Follow the Money
My Dad’s Legacy
The church of Hambledon Village where my dad was Church Warden & Chair of Parish Council
This is an article in memory of my dad who died in January.
In this article I use my personal life experience to explore the governance practice of ‘follow the money’. As it is also true that some of our fundamental values-in-action are shaped by our personal life, very often in our family tribe.
As a Non-Executive Director as well as consulting to governance development, I have found that following the money is one of the most useful tools for getting into systemic insights.
My hope is that, you, the reader, with your own family systems experiences will be able to look at the organisations and businesses you have been part of, especially ones you are involved in as a member or governor, and think through what you think is going on at the macro pattern level.
I think ‘the search for patterns’ is the type of scrutiny skill that cuts through to forms of truth which can be very insightful.
In this article I’m looking at how the skill of searching for patterns is useful for looking into what can be understood of the Unconscious at Work. In Governance, where your role is to provide oversight and scrutiny, I believe it is your duty to be observing patterns and developing testable working hypotheses about what is going on in the culture of an organisation or a partnership. Well honed skills in this area can also be useful for guarding the purpose of an organisation and leading the organisation to be its best self.
In my experience it is very often those people who are on the edges of systems, the non-exec or the critical friend consultants, or close partners, who can see macro patterns more than those inside the organisation.
I’ve chosen the very accountancy practice of ‘following the money’ to illustrate how you can follow through a quantitative measure such as finance, through and around a system, tracking the behaviours, in order to notice the way the system works and the cultural norms that are operating consciously and unconsciously.
This is one of a series of articles and case studies I have written around Governance as a verb, the skills and diversity of perspectives needed in Boards for organisations to perform well and serve the community (society) well.
Understanding unconscious patterns at work to do with the practice of Follow the Money…
Often the deepest lessons in life are also embedded in the personal sphere, and sometimes they remain unconscious to ourselves. Yet at crucial times we can gain a heightened sense of these deeper lessons. In my case, grieving the loss of my Dad who died in January, I have chosen to use an aspect of what I’m thinking and feeling about in order to illustrate how the unconscious can become conscious.
So here is my story about ‘follow the money’.
I think that my dad wasted his money and he put himself under financial strain while he and my mum were divorcing because he was still paying out the ridiculous school fees for me to be privately educated in boarding schools. In my analysis, of my experience, I think these fee paying private schools are a con. Especially the boarding schools. The education services are often not rounded, not real to the actual context of the world, and on top of their hefty fees, they also charge for many extras, like piano lessons.
Yet this form of schooling don’t actually support kids and childhoods very well. (for example: I don’t actually remember getting much encouragement for regularly practising the piano, and the main building with all the pianos in them was across the grounds which didn’t always feel safe, partly because of all the bullying from other children, sanctioned by the wilful blindness of adults [teachers]).
You might like to read the parallel article about ‘Logical Families and Systems Thinking
Therefore it is my experience that there are multiple layers to neglect and bullying, which are often sanctioned and authorised by the pattern of the systems. The authorising environment was made up of 2 main elements: Firstly the authorising of the school system by the neglectful parents and are often sending a message that their privilege and place in society must be bought into. Secondly by the disciplinary regime of the school staffing (often operated by the senior prefects) that push you towards a very narrow idea of what success looks like. (In my day, and in my family of origin’s culture there was very clearly prioritising conformity to ‘little England/Empire standards’ rather than valuing diversity). Anyway, boarding schools, for many, are where you learn the lessons that actually your parents don't seem to love you enough to live with you. (although many just push that into their unconscious as they also have the happy experience of massive privilege in society that brings them careers and all sorts of benefits).
“Many might still decide in spite of the damage and bullying that they would still invest in such an education because it is itself a path to power and more money and we can see that in the stats, and our widening inequality. That kind of decision feels like the equivalent of a society that thinks only about GDP and has no regard for emotional wellbeing or the wellbeing of the rest of the living world. I wonder if that’s partly what you’re saying - that money follows money, but there are other more important things that are disregarded when that happens. You learned that at a young age through your experience at boarding school.”
I join the many critics who believe that this is a real dis-ease in British society.
From a systemic perspective, the private school system is one of the systemic blind causes of wrongdoing in our world and society. There are so many articles in The Guardian and Observer and books written by authors that show that actually the private education system is one of the roots of immense difficulty in our world and help cause so much trouble. For example see Nick Duffell’s article about Boarding Schools creating bad political leaders.
It saddens me that my dad was collared to put his own money into this system thinking that he was doing a ‘good thing’. He regularly asked me, “did I like my school, was it a good decision?” I regularly told him “no, it wasn't a good decision”.
Yet, '“I liked some of the classes at school and the food was excellent”, but “no, you're not going to listen to the extent of the bullying and harassment that I encountered as a young person or take note of the bullying and harassment which I witnessed and protected other people from”. These forces and factors were some of the reasons why I became a Karate teacher and the head of The Christian Union at such an early age before I even trained as a monk at Taize.
I think my dad understood me at times, but I don't think he was trained in systemic thinking and systems thinking. I don't think it was part of whatever qualifications my dad did in management and leadership. Maybe the Army or Marketing schools didn’t teach that kind of skill.
I'm grateful for my dad’s life, but I'm not grateful for the lies and manipulation of the media and the political systems combined that puts pressure on families like my dad, to continue to perpetuate systems of abuse.
It needs to end
It should end now.
Please, please don't be so ignorant as to invest in these systems.
What you can do, is keep learning to follow the money. Use this very simple tool for helping you scrutinise and avoid such pitfalls.
Following the money is also one of the key skills of governance. It is important to look at the context within which the flow of funding exists for any organisation. For example with political parties we can see where the flow of funding comes from to prepare people with privilege to take the risk of public life, and then the routes by which the same funding sources can twist and trick the systems into doing the bidding of the largest financial stakeholders.
Even in volunteer organisations and large staffed charities, you can follow the money to consider how independent really is it?
In my career I’ve lived that life with the Simon community in London, where we didn't accept any government funding so that we could challenge what the other voluntary sector organisations that were receiving funding under the Rough Sleeping Initiative were doing in their practice of output counting.
A second area is to look at how the money is invested. Even in green organisations there can be pension investments that harm the planet caught up in the terms and conditions of the salaried campaigners. (this is an area I’ve led workshops and written about since the 2008 financial crisis and the findings of the Senate committee looking into the finances of the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spills.)
My dad didn't really follow my investment advice. I'm a member of the Slow Finance movement. I joined that movement after the Gulf oil spill and the financial crisis revealed the ridiculousness of fast money. I've written about that in Quakers in Business and worked on the banking project at a worldwide level. I’ve also tried to help the Church of England clean up its money with Archbishop Justin Welby when he got caught out on his ‘War on Wonga’.
So, there are a phenomenal amount of connections here about following the money. Proper scrutiny enables you to spot these connections and bring them into consciousness. Then the Board can make proper purpose driven decisions about what the organisation needs to do.
I don't see that happening that much amongst non-executive directors - I see them leaving it to the money men to follow the money. The most frequent dynamic I hear about is that the money aspects are a matter for the finance sub-group and the Treasurer, or the pension investment experts.
Well, Adam Smith has something to say about that in book two: “don't ever put the money man in charge of the markets”. He called it the merchant class - don't put them in charge of the markets, but what have we done? We've put them in charge of the markets. We seem phenomenally useless at actual due diligence around following the money.
Adrian Cadbury in his 1992 Cadbury review of the ethics and stewardship of all companies published by the Finance regulator for Britain sets this all out - it's only a couple of 100 pages of reading. It's not difficult to set up decent governance - it's about integrity, systems, checks, balances - it's the opposite of what Boris Johnson and Tony Blair do. It's simple, it's about humans being careful.
Enjoy following the Money, its a good way of learning systemic thinking.
Money is a big factor in how power is a significant force in how business and politics happens in the world consciously and unconsciously.
Footnotes
1. The Unconscious at Work Edited by Vega Zagier Roberts and Anton Obholzer first published in 1994 is a brilliant, core text book for all my work. In its case study short chapters it illustrates all sorts of unconscious patterns that help organisations and partnerships function, yet also can be source of dis-function. Across my career its been great to work with Vega in various ways and I continue to know clients who are supervised by Vega.