WELCOME TO EDINBURGH. It is the 7th June 2020

"the transformation of Edinburgh from a cosmopolitan urban community to a commodified real estate market with tourism feeding the insatiable day-to-day need for revenue"

Welcome to Edinburgh.

It is the 7th June 2020 and the tourism season has started. Special tourism trains and cheap packaged air flights feed the dense cluster of budget hotels, student accommodation and serviced apartments that have taken over the Old Town and extended deep into the New Town. Hoteliers are starting to see a shift from a predominantly weekend influx of tourists that feast on the night culture to an influx more evenly spread across the week. The Grassmarket is closed to traffic and, during the summer months, has nightly open air concerts. The first of the 34 festivals that occur over the 3 months June, July and August has just finished. It was the third year that the Gin Festival had been held and the week long event was well attended.

There have been many developments since planning permission was given to convert the Royal High School into a hotel. It opened as a quality hotel in 2018, but failed to achieve break-even occupancy and has since become a budget hotel, with its rooms split into two to increase its capacity. Other developments have seen Register House, the India Buildings and Kings Stables converted in six budget hotels with 2,850 rooms. The City Chambers has been converted into serviced apartments. The Palace has built a serviced accommodation wing to tap into Edinburgh's need for visitor overnight accommodation. The Scottish Parliament has moved to a new building in Glasgow, to escape tourism, with ongoing discussions about what to do with the existing, now vacant, building. Proposals include converting it into a tartan theme park. Other spaces in the Old and New Towns have been  created with the demolition of a number of fine listed buildings, into which more hotels, student accommodation and serviced apartments have been placed. The 28 storey hotel block in Ocean Terminal has been matched by the 29 storey, so called, 'Turd' Hotel, which was given permission to extend its height. It forms the centre-piece for the redeveloped St James Centre, which opened in 2019. However, many of its retail units have not been taken up. This pattern can be seen in other developments, e.g. Caltongate and Haymarket. Indeed, retailing has been transformed.

Many of the retailers in the High Street have folded, due to dwindling trade and Princes Street has become the main place to buy cheap tartan kilts and other souvenirs, catering for the thriving hen-stag night market.  A number of cheap large super pubs have opened, leading to closure of some of the more traditional pubs. The upper end of retailers have moved to Glasgow. To add, the disappearance of the community in the Old and New Towns has led to the closure of amenities to support them, in particular newsagents and corner shops. Several centrally located schools have also closed due to the absence of local community, with planning permission for them to be converted into student accommodation. Museums and Art Galleries  only open three days a week due to the poor footfall. Visitors seem more interested in the more pleasurable pursuits of drink and food, with the young coming for the festivals. Edinburgh is the Capital of Night Culture.

A spokesperson for the marketing organisation "Come to Party Edinburgh" states: "since Councillors decided to abandon planning restrictions in 2016, Edinburgh has become a 24/7 party destination, perhaps the first of its kind in the world. This has done wonders for local investment, attracting lots of international developers to provide accommodation and food-drink offerings. The return on the real estate investment in Edinburgh is one of the best in Europe and offsets any losses due to seasonal downturns. Irrespective, the festivals have really blossomed. Edinburgh has reached its zenith". However, Mriad Clumbra, a local business man comments about another side to this growth, that, since the demise of many local businesses, the local Chambers of Business has closed its doors, unable to enrol enough members.

Strategy as a form of Problem Structuring

Chandler's (1964) strategy-structure debate has never been conceptually reconciled for the simple reason that research has failed to produce an adequate conceptualisation of the interplay between strategy and structure. An intrinsic feature of this distinction is the complementary distinction between strategy as content and as process. These issues are important as strategy is a concept which is much abused in the everyday use of the concept.  Moreover, as a practice, it is not effectual - despite intent, commitment and resources, strategies are not realised. The more recent shift from a 'resource based view' of strategy to a 'strategy as practice' might have drawn attention to the detail of specific mechanisms, but, nevertheless, still fails to reveal why strategy is still one of the most enigmatic topics of research into business practice. Indeed, despite over 50 years of academic research, strategy is still an enigma.

Recent research into the development of strategy is conceptually grounded in the work of Stafford Beer (Viable System Model), which permits the modelling of a distributed governance structure, allowing the interplay of policy and practice to be explained. It is processually conceptualised as problem structuring methodology, thereby providing a prescriptive approach to the development and implementation of the strategy. It draws empirically upon the Scottish tourism industry and the national tourism strategies.

This work has been published in a preliminary form in Harwood, 2011: Can a Cybernetics Lens Contribute to the Business Strategy Domain? Kybernetes, (special issue: Progress in Organisational Cybernetics) 40(3/4), 507-527. LINK

Distributed Governance through lens of VSM

The VSM (Viable System Model) was developed by Stafford Beer in the 1960s to 1980s and offers a powerful framework to make sense of organisational complexity, in particular, governance structures.

It focuses attention upon how discretion to make decisions is distributed throughout the organisational entity, irrespective of whether this is a firm, region, sector or nation state. Each named unit has its own sense of identity and a degree of autonomy, whilst accepting membership to a bigger whole. Thus, it supports collective activity in a co-ordinated manner, yet also is adaptive to changing circumstances, whether small or great. An effective adaptive mechanism leads to greater resilience to deal with the unexpected. Nevertheless, it adaptation is not passive and responsive, but proactive, innovative and creative. Innovation emerges in  its broadest sense from all elements of the system. Innovation, viability and sustainability is everyone's business. The VSM supports the design of more effective democratic and distributed governance structures and conditions more conducive to achieving aims.

Organisational Dysfunctionality

There are many reasons why organisations, whether public or private sector, do not function smoothly. It can be due to structural dysfunctionality, whereby mechanisms are not adequate to deal with the complexity of the everyday. Alternatively it may be due to individuals who, for whatever reason, are pursuing their own agenda. There are other reasons, for example, inappropriate technologies or policies. Invariably, dysfunctionality can be diagnosed, given sufficient transparency of what is happening - transparency is revealed in the detail of discrete events, which collectively can reveal the problematic areas, and thus allow a negotiated resolution. The analogy is the diagnosis of an ailment, which, by evaluating its symptoms, leads to an iterative process involving deeper examination of the problematic area(s), until the cause of the ailment is found. Bad customer service is an ailment, but its cause requires a systematic approach. One approach that facilitates such an analysis - diagnosis uses Stafford Beer's Viable System Model (VSM). However, this raises an interesting question. If dysfunctionality can be diagnosed, why is dysfunctionlity endemic to all organisations and not eliminated? One reason is that resolution requires negotiation. But this draws attention to another problem...

MESSING  UP  CHANGE

The effort to introduce something new into a complex organisational context can be undermined for a variety of reasons, of which two are prominent:

• there are those that will find an excuse for not being able to introduce it (e.g. not following procedure). Henry Ford described experts as people who find a reason why something cannot be done.
• there is lack of top management commitment to support the new venture (e.g. providing leadership). So when the status quo collapses in on itself, who is there to prevent desertion?

Change is an intrinsic feature of organisational success. Complacency the route to extinction.

read my working paper "ORGANISATIONAL CHANGE REVISITED" written in 2003.

Communities of collaboration

'Communities of collaboration' offers a useful metaphor to explain the manner in which people with, perhaps not obvious commonality, can organise themselves to achieve, not only a goal, but by sustaining their ongoing viability, achieve a succession of goals. A good example is a destination marketing organisation, of which, a good exemplar is HolidayMull.

Edinburgh Street Art

Edinburgh: Capital of Scotland, Home of the Scottish Enlightenment, Host to one of the world’s biggest festival jamborees and a World Heritage site. For a city that has only around 600,000 residents, it offers one of the richest cultural feasts that one can subscribe to, with every form of Art to be found…. Well nearly every form.

I would like to raise the issue of Street Art, viewed by some as Graffiti and others as Vandalism - see Evening News, 4th Oct 2013, is this not one of the more acceptable forms of expression rather than the crude tagging that might have been visible? How is this LEGAL expression to be viewed – such as to be found in Carlton Road or Old Tolbooth Wynd?

(Examples of Edinburgh Old Town Street Art are to be found on another page)

The skills of those that produce works such as this, have the potential to improve the dead spaces that can be found, especially in the Old Town. To answer critics - is this 'Vandalism’ not a more contemporary expression of earlier modern art forms (e.g. cubism, surrealism). Moreover, could Fleshmarket Close become a visitor attraction as a result of quality Street Art?

Could there be a visitor trail? 

Having visited and photographed all 76 Royal Mile closes over the last month, I have found a number of hidden treasures. I have also seen the eyesores. Could controlled Street Art transform?

I do not propose a free-for-all. Instead, that there is an opportunity to provide local artists with space to express themselves in the unconventional manner of their specialised art form. ‘Legal’ spaces in controversial spaces. Street Art has artistic existence in other cities.

A version of this was published in the Evening News, 9th Oct 2013 link