FALKIRK’S ACTION PLAN AND BP a ‘second enlightenment’ view

1 ’S ACTION PLAN AND BP GRANGEMOUTH a ‘second enlightenment’ view

Introduction

This April’s meeting of the International Futures Forum (IFF) had a decidedly practical bent. How could an evolving set of paradigms, models and languages – gathered under the capacious title of the search for a ‘second enlightenment’ – be put to best use in the real world? A world of habit-driven organisations, constrained budgets, and unpredictable (or all- too-predictable) actors? What are the problems for which the IFF might provide some solutions – or at least illuminations?

Three “case-encounters” were devised in order to test the IFF’s relevance:-

1: The challenge of building a ‘learning society’ in

2: Falkirk’s development agenda, as crystallized by the relative fates of the Falkirk Wheel and BP’s Grangemouth refinery

3: The complexities of health provision for deprived individuals and communities in

The question

This brief paper outlines the story of the IFF’s case encounter in Falkirk and Grangemouth. A subgroup of the IFF took the afternoon of Wednesday, 24th April to visit Falkirk Council, the Falkirk Wheel, the Grangemouth Enterprise Centre and representatives of BP’s community liaison committee at BP Grangemouth. Over Thursday and Friday the group generated a range of models and vocabularies, drawing both on their experiences in Falkirk and Grangemouth and on the existing body of IFF thinking. On Friday evening we held a dinner to share with our guests from Falkirk and Grangemouth the results of this process.

The essence of the challenge we were asked to investigate is that BP needs to make its refinery and chemicals plant at BP Grangemouth more efficient to compete in a global market. This presents the challenge of transforming the local Falkirk economy, managing a downsizing in the plant, an increase in efficiency and long-term viability for the plant from this process, and steering the local economy through the initial impact of this decision and into a cycle where the rest of the economy transforms itself to match the demands of an uncertain and changing global economy.

2 Clearly this is a complex set of circumstances involving many actors, in which BP Grangemouth’s own challenge in bringing new efficiencies to the plant is just part of the picture. Yet there is a commitment from the principal stakeholders in the area (our hosts for this encounter) – ie BP, Scottish Enterprise Forth Valley, and Falkirk Council - to work together for the good of all and in service of a thriving community for the future. The immediate vehicle for expressing that partnership and shared commitment is the ‘Falkirk Action Plan’. Given this context, the IFF was asked the following question:

“Is the need to produce a plan limiting delivery of an aspiration to fully exploit the potential of the area? Does current ownership of economic development limit the delivery of economic expansion? Does a parochial approach to corporate social investment, or the belief that commercial investment is the primary role for the private sector, limit the leverage that can be accessed from the private sector?

Is there a different way of exploiting • the need for a plan • the roles of the economic agencies • the role of a large multinational company as a means of delivering aspirations beyond the plan?”

What follows is a distillation of the presentation the IFF group made to an audience of relevant stakeholders following two days’ reflection on these questions, on Friday April 26th, at the St Andrews Bay Hotel.

The story was told on the evening around six panels. It is retold here in five sections:

• Our perception of the question that we were set • Elements of core IFF thinking that might be relevant • The sense we made of the case encounter applying IFF thinking • The critical insights that arose from this process • The key learning from this process, for ourselves and our partners

1: The Story We Were Told

Our first challenge was to absorb and make sense of the experience we had been treated to on our encounter with Falkirk and Grangemouth. One of the central challenges that the IFF has taken on in its project overall is to make sense of a confusing world of boundless complexity. We have become very alive to the variety of techniques and methods people use in these circumstances to get a grip on reality. So we started our investigation by considering our encounter in Falkirk as an artful, orchestrated experience. We had been witnesses – and participants – in a drama, with a variety of actors and settings. Seen in this light, what was the story we had been told?

3 Our cartoonist came in useful at this point – providing a comic strip version of our encounter. Our hosts had structured the encounter around four visits: a sense of place, a sense of the future, a sense of today and a sense of community.

⇒ Afterthought: News story on “Wheel Opening Delay” (due to sabotage)

A Sense of Place We heard first from representatives of Falkirk Council, both about the history of the area, the immediate response to BP Grangemouth’s decision to reduce the workforce, and the longer term problems of the area: poor health, low educational achievement for many, and poverty of aspiration. The Falkirk Action Plan, drawn up at speed in response to BP’s decision, but in the context of an existing and well worked out community plan, was now the principal vehicle for addressing these issues and realising the area’s potential.

A Sense of the Future Next we saw the Millennium Wheel – a striking piece of engineering, the world’s first rotating boat lift linking the Union and the Forth and Clyde canals, and reopening the water route from to . The Wheel was presented to us as a world first, a ‘global icon’, something that would put Falkirk on the map, brand Falkirk and give it a new spirit – the spirit that would energise the local community, tackle the poverty of aspiration and prompt the cultural change that was needed to realise the aspirations in the Plan.

4 A Sense of Today At Grangemouth Enterprise Centre we heard from people making the best of the opportunities that exist in the area today. These seemed like the first green shoots of what might be possible – a business person who had chosen to set up there rather than in Alloa, a trainee who thought his present training scheme for the unemployed was the best one he had been on so far. Things were happening – but not on a scale or with an energy that matched the level of aspiration we had seen in the Plan and at the Wheel.

A Sense of Community Finally we got to BP Grangemouth. It looked like another country and it spoke to us as another country and certainly another community. We met around the BP Boardroom table. There representatives of the community told an ambiguous story about BP as a blessing and a curse in the community, a company that’s both growing and shrinking. We heard a story about a comforting past and an uncertain future, particularly for the older members of the community. We heard little hope: the money and the influence had moved to Falkirk, it was Falkirk that had the Wheel (“the canal doesn’t even reach Grangemouth”). A pupil from the local High School thought his pals foolish for sitting back and assuming that ‘the BP’ would give them a job. Life wasn’t like that any more. His future, he said, was in America.

2: The IFF’s Lenses

The IFF have over the past 15 months worked to develop metaphors, images and vocabularies that open up new ways of seeing the world, based on our conviction that many people seem to be trapped in a model of reality which is inadequate or which at the least does not give access to very effective action. One of our central suggestions in the project as a whole is that in these circumstances it will always make sense to ‘try on other worldviews for size’. What would it mean to apply this approach to the Falkirk/Grangemouth encounter? What might things look like viewed through IFF lenses?

In advance of the meeting we had prepared a number of ‘prompt cards’ – selected maxims and phrases that would help to recall to mind the habits of thought and feeling that we have developed together in the IFF to date. We thought that using these prompts might help to open up for ourselves other views of the situations we encountered, potentially valuable insights that might have been missed before.

5 The Fear and Love Loops

A central prompt for these perceptions is the ‘fear and love loops’ diagram developed at our second meeting in November 2001. This arose originally out of a reflection led by Brian Goodwin (an IFF member) at Schumacher College the day after the September 11th attacks in the US. It suggests two very different ways of being and operating in the world.

The first is based on seeking to control the world around us – for which purpose we need to treat subjects as objects and similar objects as the same. This is the basis for scientific rationalism. But treating people in that way leads to alienation – which increases the need for control. This cycle is driven by fear.

The second way of being in the world is simply to experience it, to participate. This allows us to see and value the diversity in all things, and that in turn gives a sense of belonging – which enriches the urge to participate. This cycle is driven by love, empathy, relationship.

This is not an either/or model. Both the love and fear loops are present in the world. The challenge is to locate the fear loop in an overall context of the love loop, not vice versa.

This has proved a powerful image in IFF practice. It often reveals the fact that we have privileged the fear loop over the love loop, particularly in our institutional behaviour (this can apply at an individual level too). Considering what things might look like viewed from a perspective of experience, participation, empathy and relationship can often open up new ideas for action and possibly more effective behaviours.

The centrality of these loops to the Falkirk/Grangemouth encounter is evident. We can see the Plan as generated in the fear loop: at speed, in reaction to a potentially threatening event, and in a political context of anxiety, division and internal competition. What might an Action Plan look like if the love loop, relationship and participation were privileged? Might this hold a clue to how to answer the questions posed at the start: how to free the plan as a vehicle to harness and encourage aspiration rather than constrain and suppress it?

Beyond Economics There is a wealth of relevant experience within the IFF for the substance we had been presented with. Wolfgang Michalski, for example, former Director of the OECD International Futures Programme has a long history of involvement with economic development at regional, national and international levels. The same goes for other members of the group.

6 At one level, then, it was tempting to take a detailed look at the Plan and to analyse and critique it from a technical economic viewpoint. That is something that the IFF could do: but we did not feel it would really open up the new territory that the original question implied. We recognised the value in having the Plan to mobilise action and resources, appreciated the potential power of the innovative partnership – BP, Falkirk Council and Scottish Enterprise Forth Valley– who had drawn it up and now stood for it, and welcomed the commitment in the Plan to longer term thinking (although why three years? why not five, or ten?).

We then stood back from the Plan and considered our own IFF prompts: which of them might open up new perspectives on the Plan that might prove useful in realising its aspirations in the future?

DIRECTION RATHER THAN PLAN SEE DIRECTION AS A RESULT OF PROCESS

First, we considered that the notion of a ‘plan’ suggested a known endpoint. The plan showed the route to arrive at a known destination. That looked to us dangerously like ‘picking winners’: deciding in advance what was going to succeed. Another approach would concentrate rather on the direction of travel rather than the destination, and recognise that direction is a result of process.

ECONOMIC ACTIVITY TAKES PLACE WITHIN A MORAL FRAMEWORK RECOGNISE THE DIFFERENT VALUE PATTERNS TOLERATE DIFFERENCES IN ORDER TO DISCOVER RICHER WHOLENESS

We had picked up the strong impression during our visits that we were meeting people with very different perspectives on the present, and on the future. Those differences had their roots in multiple causes and histories, but they were clearly there – most notably in the disjuncture between Falkirk and Grangemouth. Yet we had picked up little of this in the Plan. Hence we thought these prompts might be relevant in that they all encourage a broader view of economic development and the context in which it must take place.

7 TAKE ACTION THAT ENCOURAGES A SYSTEMIC EFFECT

In an age of complexity, the most effective actions are going to be those that take account of the bigger system and aim to have a systemic effect. This too relates to the need for more expanded thinking: our encounter was with a place in , but naturally viewed by some of our number as a region of Europe. That broader context makes a difference, but we had picked up little of it from the encounter itself.

PERCEPTION FIRST, THEN ANALYSIS LEAVE LOTS OF ROOM FOR SECOND OR THIRD THOUGHTS STAY LONGER IN THE PRE-HYPOTHESIS PHASE

A powerful source of new perspectives in today’s rational, data-driven, analytical culture is to pay more attention to perception. We saw this aspect in the substance of the Plan: it is full of visionary elements. Yet the balance still seemed slightly askew. Where there was vision, there was insufficient analysis (eg of the real strengths of the area and its people, or of the nature of the goods that would be distributed through the transportation hub) and where there was analysis it tended to cloud the vision. That implied a certain amount of additional work on the Plan – which may indeed be in progress. But that work might be best conducted if it leaves open room for second and third thoughts, and space for a new hypothesis to emerge from both the perception and the analysis. That might be a way to create something genuinely new and distinctive, and expressed in new and fresh language. As the question we were posed at the start implied: there is a danger that the form (a plan) conditions and shapes the content. The result can look very like all other plans – and that is not going to motivate a specific community.

Deliberately cultivate enabling conditions

This axiom suggests the core of an approach might be to concentrate on cultivating the enabling conditions for economic transformation. This approach embraces many of the prompts we found most helpful. What

8 are the enabling conditions that are conducive to innovation, entrepreneurship, risk-taking, investment and all the other things that the Plan is intended to deliver? And what are the enabling conditions for a planning process that would allow these things to materialise in practice over the coming years?

3: The Ultimate Mixed Metaphor

We now return to the story we were told, having refreshed our own IFF thinking and its relevance in these circumstances, and having polished some of the IFF lenses that might give us a better view of the full picture. This is where we attempted to make meaning out of the experience and data that had been presented to us.

In doing so, we sought to redress the traditional balance. We homed in on the knowledge that comes through participation and experience rather

9 than the ‘objective’ statistics and analysis that was also available. And we did so by concentrating on the images of the encounter and the language we heard, particularly the metaphors and memorable phrases. Metaphor is a tool for coping with confusion and complexity, since it describes and communicates in a rich but non-specific way. The metaphors we heard gave glimpses into the implicit worldviews that lay behind them. They offered access to a different kind of data. So we developed a second version of the encounter viewed through IFF lenses: the ultimate mixed metaphor.

Locks and Keys: If is the ‘gateway to the Highlands’, we were told, then Falkirk is the keyhole. It is a place you pass through to get somewhere else. The canal flows through it again now, thanks to the Wheel. It is the centre for a distribution network. What are the keys to unlocking this new potential? Clearly the will and aspirations of the community are central: both as actors and beneficiaries.

The Bog and The Wall: we heard about ‘the Bog’, a depressed area in the region on reclaimed marshland. The bog sounded, in psychological terms, like the shadow. Grangemouth seemed to talk of itself metaphorically as more in ‘the bog’ than in the light. We heard about the attitudes of dependency, passivity, risk-aversion and a persistent parochialism that kept people in the bog. We heard about the Antonine Wall running through the area: an historic barrier, quite at odds with the image of the keyhole. How can people climb over the wall and glimpse the brighter future that lies through the keyhole as long as these attitudes of dependency etc persist? The key to that transformation seemed to lie in a rediscovery of civic pride and dignity, and a new, brighter image for the future of the area.

The Wheel: at the heart of our encounter, one of the talking points of the visit and of the entire IFF meeting (others who had not seen it were tempted to drive over specially before they left), was the Wheel. As an image, a wheel is a prodigious source of metaphor, and it was presented to us explicitly as an ‘icon’. It offers, in the context of our mixed metaphor, revolution – a move to another level. Perhaps the rotating boat lift can lift the souls out of the bog and into the future?

At the centre of our mixed metaphor is a wheel, or a cycle, that links changes in education, health, culture and – in consequence – in the economy. Those changes will take place within the community, but also at an individual, human level. One key metaphor we heard a lot was the metaphor of driving. But what is driving what? Is education driving the economy, or is culture and tourism going to do so? We heard a lot about the kinds of things that might be attracted into the local area – money, jobs, cultural events, tourists, and boy racers – but not very much about what might lie beyond Falkirk, an “outside” of possibilities that could be reached out to.

This picture gave rise to a variety of more or less practical ideas about how to intervene in any of these four domains of health, culture,

10 education and economy in a systemic way to shift the overall culture. These might be some of the ‘keys to the future’:

• parenting courses to engage parents in their children’s education and development (drawing on Roberto Carneiro’s experience in Portugal) • training for entrepreneurs • a LETS programme for the community • a more broadly-based community building project like the Peckham project • a race track • and a new pitch for Scotland’s airport.

These are ideas for unlocking the future, a future glimpsed in our “mixed metaphor”: An individual in Grangemouth peering through the keyhole and seeing creative ‘lift off’ on the horizon.

4: Critical Insights

Given our work to make meaning out of our encounter, we then considered what critical insights this process had presented us. The three central themes we explored in more depth were the resource available to the area, the Wheel, and BP Grangemouth’s relationship with the community. It is also worth recording the following shafts of meaning:

• BP is only a small part of the story AND a critical part of the partnership • The Plan is a constraint • Whose plan is it anyway? • The Wheel is a symbol looking for a meaning. At present the meaning is ambiguous. • We know Falkirk will attract, but what will come out of Falkirk? • What if Falkirk believed it really is the hub? The heart of the new Scotland – rather than old Glasgow or old Edinburgh. • What can Falkirk offer as a resource for the future? • Grangemouth feels dislocated – the ugly sister • People choose to live in Falkirk (even if they work elsewhere). It is a good place to live • Talk is of preservation. Not adaptation, but how to avoid having to adapt • Look far enough back and you see a story of transition and transformation

11 • Can we see BP’s downsizing as a creative act, releasing high quality resources into the community?

Falkirk/Grangemouth’s Resources One of the IFF’s prompts, derived from previous experience in Dundee, is to ‘expand what we consider as a resource for ourselves’. This is an injunction to escape from a parochial mindset into one that appreciates the bigger picture and sees bigger possibilities. Given the analysis that we heard in Falkirk and the evidence we had seen for ourselves and read into the metaphors and stories we had been told, this seemed like a critical area to explore.

Max Boisot gave it a theoretical underpinning.

This is a model derived from theories about the self. But it might be useful also in considering communities. There are three levels of knowledge. One is ‘embodied’: this is the kind of knowledge that you have when you are riding a bicycle or when you are using a tool. It is knowledge that you cannot codify. You have it, but it is difficult to communicate it to a wider audience. We came up against a lot of this embodied knowledge, inevitably, in our encounters with people in Falkirk and Grangemouth.

Then you can consider a ‘zone of proximal development’. This is the extended area in which, based on your embodied knowledge, you have the confidence to act. You can see, for example, that for the people we met in our case encounter Falkirk and Grangemouth will form part of that zone. Whether you relate to that zone positively or negatively is a function of what we might call your ‘extended self’. This might well be where you get situated knowledge. Embodied knowledge is knowledge that is locked into the self; situated knowledge locates the self in an environment that it is aware of.

Beyond that you have the kind of knowledge of a wider, unknown environment where you can only use representations. Embodiment doesn’t work. This kind of knowledge is difficult to access.

12 One way of looking at the sense of parochialism we experienced on our visit, and that we also found in Dundee, is to see that the zone of proximal development – that zone where people felt able to enact themselves and their desires - is very narrowly construed. At best you are talking about Edinburgh and Glasgow. Part of the challenge here is just how narrow the world in which you define yourself, your problems and your opportunities might be.

So in Falkirk we can say that this community has a hinterland, but is that hinterland narrowly constructed or is it broadly constructed? What is the extent of Falkirk’s ‘psychic hinterland’? – because after all in this zone we are talking about the non-self, the unknown, an area that is mostly symbolically mediated. To relate this back to education, one of the things to bear in mind is that unless there are clear connections between these three levels, then schools may well be giving people the kind of knowledge – representational knowledge – that comes to be seen as a passport to a world outside. That is exactly what happens to the successful ones in this community: if you are able to access this kind of broader knowledge then you go to America or elsewhere.

One of the problems with aspiration levels in schools is that success is defined in terms of representational knowledge. If this kind of knowledge doesn’t have a strong presence or density in a community – and it appears not to in this one - then a huge problem emerges in the education system: it begins to seem irrelevant.

Your community runs on situated knowledge or embodied knowledge: it’s all about what you know and share with your friends. Yet you sit in schools that are talking systematically about the world beyond – that is, using representational knowledge – in a way which feels entirely disconnected from community understanding. These kinds of disconnect run right through the system.

Of course, a lot of the knowledge in the outer circle may well be abstract and irrelevant, and it is almost certainly a mistake to construct our notions of ‘intelligence’ simply around mastery of that particular resource. Yet it is possible that a lot of the disillusion, dependency and pessimism we saw and heard about locally may stem precisely from a lack of mastery of the resources that lie in that outer circle. They penetrate, but only on their own terms.

It’s like a vast cargo cult. You are waiting for outsiders to bring you goodies, you prepare a runway for them, but you don’t actually know where they are coming from. That’s a cramped relationship with the outside world.

13 From Closed Clans to Open Networks

That relationship at present might be characterised in the picture of a ‘closed clan’ in which Falkirk enjoys uneasy relationships with her near neighbours, an uncertain sense of self-identity, and all that within a narrow perception of the wider environment – a strict definition of what is ‘inside’ the wall and what is beyond it (‘outside’).

This itself has elements of an industrial and engineering model: the cogs of the machine fit together, but in order to do so they must maintain their fixed places and characteristics.

An alternative would be to see Falkirk as a genuine hub, a networked city. The sketch map we saw on the Callendar House brochure made this clear in one respect, with Falkirk at the centre of two large and connected suburbs in Glasgow and Edinburgh. But there are other connections in the network: Grangemouth, the twin towns of Creteil and Odenwald, Stirling and Alloa, and farther afield the connections the IFF had seen with, say, Barcelona or Helsinki. This represents a very different view of the Falkirk area and its ‘psychic hinterland’, a much larger potential network of resources.

This firms up the notion of “a sense of place” – the strengths of Falkirk’s actual geography, linked with the idea of networking. Don’t think of the area as having a wall around it; think of it as a node where you are networking with the rest of the world. If that transition can be made then the world is open to you. There is everything to be gained. It requires a change of mental state. David Bohm, the physicist, used to remark that space is what unites us not what divides us. That offers a very different understanding of Falkirk and its relationships.

14 The Wheel

Naturally we spent a lot of time discussing the Wheel. If nothing else it is a very effective conversation piece, and a prompt for imaginative and creative thinking about the area. We homed in on two aspects, in line with the general discussion earlier: the Wheel as geography and the Wheel as icon.

The Wheel as Geography On one level the Wheel is about nothing other than geography. It is there precisely because of the fact that the two canals meet in that place. It could not be anywhere else.

Even so, what a setting! It reminded one of the IFF group of a visit to the Victoria and Albert dock in Cape Town, a recently regenerated area that attracted 13 million visitors in its first year, ten times what was predicted. That was down to the spirit of the place.

The Wheel has a strong spirit of place too. If it were in the US there would certainly be a shopping mall – it would be seen as a place where people would naturally want to congregate. It is a fabulous setting: you can imagine all kinds of events with that backdrop. Most of the discussion we heard about the Wheel as geography was about its linking of the two canals. But it has created a venue, a setting, an atmosphere, almost a fantasy, around which you could build all sorts of activity.

The Wheel is ideally situated, as we heard, with a massive catchment area. The opportunities are fantastic. But remember the spirit of the earlier part of this paper: don’t be too directive about what happens around the Wheel. Create the networks around it, create the opportunities, then you will find that all sorts of people come and see ‘Good heavens! What a place this is!’ Other people will invent the opportunities: Falkirk Council and her partners can create the enabling conditions.

It was observed that although we had spoken for the most part of ‘Falkirk’, in practice most of what we had said applied equally to Scotland. Indeed the two words were interchangeable in much of what we had said. The opportunities are not just for Falkirk but for Scotland, and the growth of Falkirk as networked city would benefit Scotland too. For example, Falkirk could aspire to lead a truly generative conversation between Edinburgh and Glasgow, perhaps around the immediate question of the airport. Who else is going to do it? And, if Falkirk really starts to make the transformations that are possible, the energy could radiate into the rest of the country. As our guest from UZ Events suggested, rather than

15 the ‘transportation hub’ Falkirk might become ‘the extended heart of Scotland’. Imagine that.

The Wheel also sparked consideration of other similar projects that had energised and transformed entire cities. Max Boisot spoke from personal experience of the way the Olympics had reinvented Barcelona and the locals’ perception of their own city. The other example was Bilbao, which had been put on the map almost entirely through attracting the Guggenheim Museum to the city. British Airways now flies to Bilbao, specifically because of that one building.

The difference between these examples and the Wheel is that these cities reached out beyond their known environment to bring something extraordinary into them. It showed a very different spirit. Bilbao went out looking for a big project to put the city on the map, and found the Guggenheim. They did not operate within a budget, they did not seek innovative ways of spending economic development money, they got on a plane and went in search of opportunities – and the opportunities were outside.

There are still opportunities outside. We are not limited by geography. And some of the opportunities for developing the use of the site and the setting around the Wheel will be outside too. They are as likely to be found with some person sitting in Montevideo as in the financial district of Edinburgh. Widen the network of resource.

The Wheel as Icon The Wheel is dramatic and enthralling. It was presented to us as potentially a ‘global icon’, a world first in Falkirk around which the community could unite and discover a new sense of itself. Yet even in our small group there were mixed feelings about the Wheel. One member of the IFF who had not been on the Falkrik/Grangemouth case encounter but had heard others talk about it was convinced the Wheel was an hallucination. There is something magical, intriguing, fantastical about the Wheel. We cannot assume that everyone will have the same sense of what it might signify.

Roberto Carneiro, from Portugal, summed up his experience and the lessons he drew from it:

“Coming from a different culture, Southern Europe, we look at Britain and Scotland as the birthplace of the first industrial revolution. This is the intense paradox about the Wheel. When I first saw it I said, “gosh this is a masterpiece of engineering”. Yet this represents the first generation of the industrial revolution. It’s engineering - and engineering is linearity not networking. So this is a paradox for me: how to transform that icon, which at first sight is an icon of the past, of canals, nuts and bolts, engineering, into an icon of the future, a networking society, new business, e-business, the kind of future we see in the Plan? To tell you the truth I don’t see how the Wheel can be associated with e-business but there must be a clue somewhere.

16 Having said that, I think there is a great mystery in this Wheel. It is intriguing. And because it is intriguing it has an enormous potential to release whatever it is, energy, fantasy, creativity. This is the challenge: it’s semiotics, it’s the manipulation of symbols, it is incorporating the image of the Wheel and the canal into an image of the future.

How do you add economic value to this? I have been involved with many branding exercises and I have never seen (perhaps this could be the first example) that you can develop a brand such as the Wheel that adds value to commercial brands and commercial activity through its very abstraction and richness.

So my business reaction would be to ask where is the business model? Where is the business model around the Wheel and how will the Wheel brand add value to other business models? Rather than thinking in abstract of the Wheel as a brand for Scotland, I would say that from a business perspective you would have a Wheel McDonalds, a Wheel Textiles, a Wheel e-business, a Wheel internet… You have to find declinations of the Wheel that are closely associated with commercial activities or that have commercial bite in business models, in business plans, in marketing plans.”

This was one person’s take. At a more general level it was pointed out that icons can be transformative, but they can also turn into ‘follies’. What would make the difference in the case of the Wheel? Icons do not come with meaning, they have their meaning invested in them. The US flag is just a piece of cloth: but the American people have invested a great deal in it. That is the challenge for the Wheel as icon: what will people be willing to invest in it? And people cannot invest what they do not have. The Wheel alone cannot give people confidence, but once they have it they might invest that confidence in the Wheel as a symbol of their place in the world. Likewise, if they feel disillusion, that disillusion might be invested in the Wheel – and we saw hints of that in the news stories about vandalism.

We concluded that the Wheel is an icon, or a symbol, looking for a meaning. And that there are many interesting participative cultural processes that could begin that search. These processes might use the Wheel as conversation piece, as an ambiguous intriguing object, as a prompt for creative and imaginative thinking, as a means of starting the conversation about Falkirk’s past and Falkirk’s future. Its meaning cannot be imposed. The search for meaning could be an important element in the cultural transformation that our hosts seek.

BP Grangemouth

Our encounter had shown up very clearly the disconnect between the community of Falkirk and the community of Grangemouth. And our discussions with community representatives in Grangemouth had revealed a similar disconnect with BP and the refinery. It was seen as both a blessing and a curse, prompting a relationship of dependence and

17 resentment. The refinery dominates the landscape – and yet we were conscious on our visit of seeing very little of it.

Martin Albrow applied the thinking that he has been developing in the IFF about identity, agency and integrity. It was clear that BP is a very powerful agent in the picture we were shown, a critical partner in Falkirk’s plans for the future. At the same time, the decision to downsize has worried the community, it has damaged BP Grangemouth’s integrity – the extent to which it can be relied upon into the future.

We considered BP’s potential contribution to the future of the area and suggested three possible shifts of emphasis.

Radiant Grangemouth One of our group from the Glasgow School of Art had encouraged us to consider the aesthetic dimension of any transformation process. Art transforms wounds into capacities, ugliness into beauty, boundaries into gradients. In the context of BP Grangemouth, what would it take to see the plant as an association of creative individuals, a creative community?

The kind of relationship a creative community has with its wider environment is fluid and flexible: the difference between a campus town and a company town. The plant would not have a boundary around it but a gradient: when people ‘left’ BP they took some of BP with them, the skills, attitudes, values, the creativity. We might then see BP as a different kind of energy company, radiating energy of all kinds – intellectual, physical, creative - into the community.

We could choose to see the physical plant itself in a new light. At one level it was already a work of art, a thing of beauty caught in the late dusk across the water as we took the bus back to St Andrews.

What would it take to make that reality more powerful, to eclipse the dirty, industrial image? Our guests at dinner were taken with this suggestion. Part of the area’s problem is its association with old, dirty industry. There is a tendency to dance around that in the hope that nobody will notice – but a more positive and active approach to transforming the image and the reality would be more energising. That should be part of the vision – and the language - of the future.

18 BP Falkirk Given BP’s presence throughout the area, and the disconnect between Falkirk and Grangemouth, the linkage BP Grangemouth is striking. The two appear interchangeable. BP’s programme for improving the plant goes under the banner ‘securing a future for Grangemouth’, implying that the plant and the community are one and the same. How about shifting the BP brand and attaching it to BP Falkirk? That looks more consistent with a future in which the disconnect between Falkirk and Grangemouth no longer blights potential. It would leave the problem of what happens to the community in Grangemouth? How about a new Grangemouth? The history of urban development is all about new places which emerge out of older places. So the counterpart would have to be a new Grangemouth which could be some kind of new housing community venture, particularly for the older members of that community.

Given our ear for language and metaphor, we also considered the power of simply introducing this new formulation – BP Falkirk – into the language. It is a very simple thing to do. You don’t have to introduce a grand paradigm. All you have to say in conversation with colleagues is ‘BP Falkirk’ and let them work on what that means for them. They can come back to you then to share the consequences for their thinking, and you can then see how this might fit with the context that led you to introduce ‘BP Falkirk’ into the conversation. This is a potentially radical change of language. It would be interesting to see what it generates.

Graceful Legacy We also contemplated the longer term future for Grangemouth. We had heard that there was no reason why at some point in the future Grangemouth couldn’t revert to a clearing port, a distribution centre. Certainly we were told by BP representatives that it would be irresponsible not to consider a future in which the Grangemouth refinery played a diminishing role in Scotland as North Sea production fell. BP’s stance around the world was to leave the communities they operated in better places than when they arrived. What might that look like for Grangemouth? What would make for a ‘graceful retreat’?

This thinking, and in particular the metaphor of a graceful retreat, opened up a new line of inquiry. In terms of developing an inspiring story about the future, a positive future consciousness, the image of a ‘retreat’ (however graceful) seemed out of place. It suggests abandonment and withdrawal – precisely the fear that is in the community. How about wanting to leave a ‘graceful legacy’?

Perhaps, we speculated in our dinner conversation, BP Grangemouth had been placed in the shadow side of the mixed metaphor, in the bog. There were some things that could not be spoken about openly and positively, yet which are an intrinsic part of the story people tell themselves about the present and the future. One option for BP would be to intervene in that story with a positive picture of the future for the Grangemouth site. Rather than simply withdraw, could we paint a picture of what might be left in its place? Securing a Future for Grangemouth. Securing a Grangemouth for the Future?

19 This sparked enticing visions of a transformed docklands-type development in Grangemouth, a model of modern regeneration. And it conjured up images of what the media would have to say if such talk got out. The papers would be full of myths. The challenge would be to be ready for that: cultural change, such as the Plan requires, is all about the making of new myths, more credible and more powerful than the old. The key insight that had generated the conversation for us had been the realisation of the central power and influence of the myth BP Grangemouth constructs for itself. That seems to require more attention for the future.

V: Summarising our Learning

This was a very rich and stimulating encounter, from the visits themselves, through the conversations they generated in the IFF, to the fascinating discussion with partners from Falkirk and Grangemouth and other stakeholders on the final evening of our meeting. Summarising the learning from the encounter is extraordinarily difficult. This paper is itself only a partial view of the whole. But for completeness we did conclude our presentation on the Friday evening with two brief panels, drawing out some of the main implications from our discussions both for ourselves and our partners.

Throughout we had seen the possibility for Falkirk/Grangemouth to expand current constraints on thinking about the future, about what is possible, and about what resources and connections can be drawn on for support. We homed in on four thoughts that express the attitudes and behaviours needed to realise these possibilities:

1. Stretch – don’t fit

2. Don’t wait – go get

3. Enact, don’t just react

4. Focus on the possible as much as the actual

20 All are invitations to extend beyond the known and predictable. This paper records some of the possibilities that might emerge from that frame of reference. At the same time we were acutely aware of the advantage we had in moving into that frame – no demands for action, no political pressure, a diverse group of international talents, freedom to think and explore, and the time and an ideal setting in which to do so.

One firm conclusion, consistent with all that has gone before, is that these kinds of enabling conditions must somehow be recreated or represented in the working lives of those responsible for the Plan if it is to realise its full potential.

For ourselves, the encounter yielded many insights and helped to develop the IFF’s awareness of itself, its own methodology and emerging habits of thought and feeling. That is especially true of the three case encounters taken together, since much of the most valuable learning for the IFF as a whole has come from comparing and contrasting the experience in these three very different cases. From our work in Falkirk/Grangemouth we might highlight three clusters of insight.

Reinventing the Wheel We had entered the encounter listening for metaphor as a way of making sense of a complex world. We found in Falkirk/Grangemouth a phenomenally rich territory for this mode of inquiry. The Wheel was just one striking element in the ‘ultimate mixed metaphor’. That gave us access to a new way of thinking and talking about the area: the metaphors and language in use were very striking, and equally readily suggested alternative language, new interpretations, opening up new perspectives and different futures. A traditional model will tell you not to waste time ‘reinventing the wheel’. The IFF has learned that this is precisely what we need to do.

Future Consciousness Right from the start of the encounter we were introduced to stories of the past and stories about the future. Both inform the present. One of the learnings from all three of our case encounters is the importance in an age of complexity and rapid change of developing a future consciousness to inform actions in the present. That future consciousness was weak or ambiguous in Falkirk/Grangemouth. Like the Wheel. But the past was strong, shared and understood. Like a series of locks – the traditional way to raise and lower canal barges. It is in the development of future consciousness that the concepts of integrity, identity and agency are critical.

21 Also the power of story. One way of describing the condition of lacking a future consciousness is to describe it as being ‘storyless’. The old story is very strong – and we heard it particularly in our contacts with the Grangemouth community. But the new story is weak and uncertain – the Wheel, jobs in the US, the Plan, the graceful retreat. Future consciousness needs new stories that are as compelling as those from the past. Yet to carry weight in confused times those stories must themselves take on a different form – less rigid, less familiar, more intriguing, mysterious and generative.

Transformations Much of our work in the IFF is informed by the need for critical transformations in the world. From threatened planet to sustainable system. From pessimism to optimism.

These encounters suggested some other transformations that might prove useful in bringing about the global changes that the IFF considers significant at this time, and also worth exploring further in the context of the transformation Falkirk seeks: ugly ⇒ beautiful past ⇒ future resignation ⇒ aspiration micro ⇒ macro boundary ⇒ gradient part ⇒ holon energy (BP as oil company) ⇒ energy (BP as radiating intellectual and creative energy and human potential)

22 Conclusion

Our dinner in April concluded with a commitment from both parties – representatives of the partnership behind the Falkirk Action Plan and the members of the IFF – to remain in relationship: to find ways of sharing the story of this encounter with others, to reflect on its implications for action, and to develop the insights within these pages.

The IFF sensed during the encounter, and particularly in considering the Fife, Dundee and Falkirk/Grangemouth encounters together, that there are valuable insights here particularly around the governance and planning model, how to make the most of the Wheel as opportunity and icon, and the relationship between BP Grangemouth, the community and the future. These deserve to be kept in play and developed in parallel with the Plan. The IFF has an intellectual commitment, and as a result of the encounter an experiential and personal commitment, to develop those insights in service of supporting aspiration in Falkirk/Grangemouth and elsewhere.

Ends

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