While I worked for IBM I was an avid follower of Dilbert, the cartoon character who seemed to understand how IBM works better than the executives who pretend to run it. One of my favourites was pinned to my office wall. In it, Dilbert spent his entire week accomplishing nothing other than fulfilling the demands of the institutional processes surrounding the task – the actual task was never completed. At the end of the week, he concluded that, if he was to take pride in anything, he had to take pride in the processes. The strip was entitled, “We take pride in our processes.”

Such is life at IBM: few executives care what gets done as long as the attempt adheres to the process. To accomplish anything worthwhile demands an intricate knowledge of an underground network of people willing to conspire together to circumvent the elaborate obstacles erected by entire divisions of bureaucrats, the object of which is to prevent anything happening any faster than the pace of continental drift.

I sometimes think that Rowan Williams, with his indabas and listening process, should work at IBM after he retires: he would fit right in.

Here is an article by the ever perceptive Charles Raven:

The strategy behind Williams’ address was not to promote his views on homosexuality directly, but to reflect on the process by which moral decisions in general should be made – not so much to play the game, so to speak, as the more ambitious task of actually trying to define what the playing field should look like. And this is the enduring significance of his address thirteen years later as he continues to promote ‘indaba’ and ‘listening process’ strategies which focus on the process of decision making, while all the time kicking the can down the road in the hope that the institutionally messy consequences of closure can be avoided.