The management consultants had helped with the caucus – could they heal the Lange-Douglas rift?
Quantum Leap, the fourth episode of Juggernaut: The Story of the Fourth Labour Government, is now available wherever you get your podcasts.
In July 1982, Bill Rowling, Richard Prebble, Roger Douglas, David Lange and the rest of the Labour opposition caucus found themselves lost in the desert near Levin – their plane crashed, its pilot dead. They were at a retreat at Tatum Park, north of Wellington, taking part in a team-building exercise run by Michael Gourley, franchise holder of the US company Human Synergistics, specialists in organisational development.
It was Richard Prebble’s idea. Gourley had managed his successful campaign in Auckland Central a year before. He’d been recommended by Jim Anderton, who knew Gourley from the Catholic Youth Movement. “I went to Michael after the election and said, what is it you’re doing that has made our campaign so much better?” Prebble told The Spinoff in an interview for the new podcast series Juggernaut: The Story of the Fourth Labour Government. “He explained that he had been in business and learned about this company called Human Synergistics.”
Prebble resolved that the techniques might help Labour’s “dysfunctional caucus” of the time. “The basis of the desert survival game is your group of eight, you’re all passengers on an aeroplane,” he explained. “It’s crashed in the desert. The pilot’s dead. You’ve got a map. You’re so many miles from the nearest base, and you’ve got certain equipment. The first thing you’ve got to do is decide whether to walk or to stay. And you do it as an individual first. And then you sit down and do it with the whole group. And then you get the answers. If you walk, you die – half the caucus walked and died. The other half didn’t. But the real essence is that in every case, the group came up with a better answer than the individuals.”
The other lesson: “the groups that died would have survived if they had listened.” Those that had worked out the right answer “were talked over, disregarded”, said Prebble. “Some people who weren’t regarded very warmly by other MPs – they suddenly realised she or he had more brains.”
Those ideas were then applied to the way caucus was run, embracing a more open and consultative approach, said Prebble. After he became a minister he continued to use the tools, such as in a railways summit. “We used Human Synergistics techniques to get the management and the unions and other people who normally hate each other to sit down and listen to one another and to make decisions together. The purpose of the game is actually to persuade you that you should listen more carefully. And that a group of people can make better synergistic decisions than you do on your own.”
By 1988, there was another deepening dysfunction that needed attention: the Lange cabinet, and an increasingly toxic relationship between the prime minister and his finance minister, Roger Douglas. At the end of 1987, a bold new economic package had been announced, including the most radical measure yet: a flat tax. Early in 1988, with Douglas out of the country, Lange unilaterally killed it.
“Things were falling hopelessly apart,” recalled Prebble. “We’d been a cabinet that had worked together extremely well. And we thought: can we patch things up? I said to the cabinet, look, remember, we had the Tatum Park [exercise], and how well that worked for the caucus? Let’s try with the cabinet.”
Gourley was again enlisted. “It went extremely well. Cabinet did the exercise and then was applying it to some of the problems we got.” Except someone was missing. “We looked around and realised that David Lange had walked out. And he didn’t come back.”
Another minister in the cabinet room was Michael Bassett, who recalled the sessions in his book Working with David: Inside the Lange Cabinet. “The exercise involved ministers filling out a series of forms about themselves and then analysing the results,” he wrote. “At the first meeting Lange wouldn’t fill out his form, and then under pressure had a colleague do it for him. Then he left cabinet and made disparaging comments about it all to the media … On 11 April, after the Easter recess, the session with Gourley resumed following a lengthy cabinet meeting. I thought Gourley’s lecture rather tedious. So did Lange. He departed once more, leaving ministers worried that the whole exercise, initiated with his obvious problems in mind, had become a waste of time.”
The Human Synergistics work with the cabinet did make headlines. “Think what governments around the world are going to say when they read this,” said opposition leader Jim Bolger. “That the New Zealand government has had a groupie session for five hours to get a clearer vision of the future.” High-flying opposition MP Winston Peters at first confused Gourley with a sexologist, but subsequently lambasted the costly use of “a facilitator to pump cabinet egos”.
The use of Human Synergistics has prompted other controversies since, such as the 2015 revelation that the Ministry for Social Development spent more than half a million dollars with the company across two years on a culture change programme called “Building Blue”.
According to a Stuff report, the goal was to “change the thinking and behaviour styles of staff”, with the use of “colours to illustrate current operating culture and the preferred culture it wants to achieve”. Other New Zealand state organisations to have contracted Human Synergistics for functions ranging from executive training and culture change to psychometric analysis include Customs, NZTA, IRD, Auckland Transport and Parliamentary Service.