FALKIRK’S ACTION PLAN AND BP GRANGEMOUTH a ‘second enlightenment’ view 1 FALKIRK’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 Dundee 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 Fife 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 Edinburgh to Glasgow. 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.