I was at a trade show a few days ago. It was concerned with health service commissioning. There was the usual clamour of offers being made and conversations being entered into. I develop a trance-like stance, where I am open to browsing, but not sure what is going on in such settings. It reminds me of a souk without the smell and colour.
There were some presentations on offer – each for half an hour – quite ‘clipped’, full of content, based around ‘key messages’ and ‘critical challenges’. One of these concerned an investigation into the actual nature of commissioning, as opposed to the ideal of complying with a ‘commissioning cycle’. The findings were interesting, and touching – portraying a very human face to the real-life experience of working together in a context where there should be a ‘divide’ between the ‘puchaser’ and the ‘provider’. One of the observations concerned money – and how little discussion there was of it in the processes of commissioning – even though part of the context was to re-design services in order to save money.
The way in which the people worked together was characterised as ‘relational’, and the tendency to leave out money was characterised as not-being-transactional (enough). There were conjectures about the future, in which we would be less relational and more transactional. ‘The NHS could not afford to be so relational’, seemed to be the hypothesis. ‘It needs to be more transactional’.
I wondered whether or not there could be a working world in which the relational and the transactional were in intimate relation to one another, different partners in the same endeavour. Reminded me about horizontal and vertical forms of governance – with the horizontal governance attending to transactions (by and large) and the horizontal being pre-occupied with the relational (by and large). Where these two attitudes to purpose intersect, a set of conditions are created under which we act as if we did did not need both – as if there were no transactions within relationships, and that transactions could be meaningful in the absence of relating. So, in anticipating a world in which we transact more and relate less, we are acting out a fantasy that things can be other than they are. Simpler, say; with enough money to go round, say……
Maybe it is vision that helps to bring into being a context in which transactions and relationships can inter-penetrate and mingle – muscular and diaphanous in their inter-dependence on one another.
Slingshot