Chains versus pipelines

Early thoughts on framing and metaphors

Second post in one day, but I wrote this one at the weekend…

Previously I highlighted what I see as a shift in policy-making thinking about institutional investment away from an accountability oriented model towards an allocation oriented one. The accountability model is focused on how investment institutions exercise power and discharge responsibilities whereas under the allocation model attention is turned to how capital can be aggregated and directed towards desired destinations.

This is necessarily simplified not least because one doesn’t completely replace the other, elements of both exist contemporaneously, rather it is the emphasis which shifts. Nonetheless it feels like there has been an important reorientation and the feedback I’ve had on the particular slide used in the populism presentation setting out the two distinct models suggests that it is something that others recognise.

One of the challenges I see for those of us used to working with an accountability model is that the frames that people use for thinking about investment may have shifted in quite a deep way. This may make some of the language and ideas we are used to deploying, which once felt obvious and intuitive, feel out of place or even jarring within the new frame.

I think some of this is rooted in the conceptual metaphors we use to understand the world. These are commonplace, so much so that we’re barely aware that we’re using them much of the time, which can be a problem. Though they can illuminate, they can also be deeply misleading. And they can inform frames that we use for interpreting the world. This is what I think may have shifted.

To take a real-life example, if you go back to the Kay Review - which did a great deal to cement the concept of stewardship as part of the practice of investment - the term ‘chain’ was used repeatedly. Kay spoke about an ‘investment chain’ linking investors (including end beneficiaries) to companies. Relationships between different actors were conceived as ‘links’ in the chain. Chains can obviously restrain as well as connect. The language was all about linkages, and their relative effectiveness.

If we think about more recent consultations relating to pension fund investment the language is much more about capital, and how to transport it. There seems to be a background idea of ‘capital is a liquid’. At the moment it is spread out, puddle-like, across the pension systems. Hence it needs to be ‘pooled’ so that it can be ‘channelled’ to where it is needed. In turn, the infrastructure projects in which capital might be deployed need to be delivered through a ‘pipeline’.

The language in these two eras is very different because it gives metaphorical expression to a different underlying conception, or frame, of the reality that policy is trying to influence. And I think this means these can clash. To make a trivial point, liquid can’t pass through a chain, as we’d normally conceive it. The structural ideas sitting dimly in the background don’t match.

That may not matter so much, though my gut feeling is that it does cause a bit of cognitive friction. More important is the overall frame that is informed by metaphors - this is the cluster of tacit beliefs and assumptions through which the policy problem is understood. Some ideas that once seemed obvious in one frame don’t land or even feel out of place in another. This is what might be going on in policy orientation towards investment.

The use of these words does not prove the existence of a single, consistent frame. But repeated metaphorical patterns can provide clues to the assumptions through which a policy problem is being organised.

To be clear, this is not an argument about communications strategy and want to distinguish this from another use of ‘framing’ in policy. Although I am a fan of George Lakoff’s work in cognitive linguistics, I was thoroughly unconvinced by its extension into politics in Don’t Think of an Elephant! which talks extensively about framing. Aside from the fact that the distilled version of it seems little more than basic comms advice, I am not focusing on whether or how to shift frames to those that are more helpful for the achievement of particular policy goals (for now at least). What I am interested in is how proposals become easier or harder to accept as a result of frames. Also I do not see frames as synonymous with metaphors, although the latter do inform the former.

Since I started poking around in this area again recently, I stumbled across a much better formulation of the problem in Frame Reflection by Donald Schön and Martin Rein which came out in 1994. This is surprisingly close to the way I’ve been starting to think, so I’m glad someone already did the hard work. Below are a few quick introductory excerpts.

Things are selected for attention and named in such a way as to fit the frame constructed for the situation. Together, the two processes construct a problem out of the vague and indeterminate reality that John Dewey calls a “problematic situation.” They carry out the essential problem-setting functions. They select for attention a few salient features and relations from what would otherwise be an overwhelmingly complex reality. They give these elements a coherent organization, and they describe what is wrong with the present situation in such a way as to set the direction for its future transformation. Through the processes of naming and framing, the stories make the “normative leap” from data to recommendations, from fact to values, from “is” to “ought.” It is typical of diagnostic-prescriptive stories such as these that they execute the normative leap in such a way as to make it seem graceful, compelling, even obvious… This sense of the obviousness of what is wrong and what needs fixing is the hallmark of policy frames and of the generative metaphors that underlie them...

…..

Evidence that one party regards as devastating to a second party’s argument, the second may dismiss as irrelevant or innocuous. Or the second may easily patch his or her argument so as to incorporate the new evidence within it… [T]here is no possibility of falsifying a frame; no data can be produced that would conclusively disconfirm it in the eyes of all qualified, objective observers. The reason for this is that if objective means frame-neutral, there are no objective observers. There is no way of perceiving and making sense of social reality except through a frame, for the very task of making sense of complex, information-rich situations requires an operation of selectivity and organization, which is what “framing” means? As we have illustrated above, those who construct the social reality of a situation through one frame can always ignore or reinterpret the “facts” that holders of a second frame present as decisive counter evidence to the first.

This feels very relevant to current policy discussions about investment. What I take from it is that there are different frames at work when thinking about investment in terms of either accountability or allocation. There are obviously facts on the ground that are not in dispute, say regarding the scale of allocations to particular asset classes, or the typical governance structure of UK pension funds. But the same facts do not carry the same weight within different frames.

And with that… I’m on holiday.

Arguments grounded in the accountability frame may fail to register as compelling or relevant when they are addressed to a policy debate increasingly viewed through the allocation frame. Where investment is conceived as a series of relationships, related concepts such as rights and responsibilities make intuitive sense. Stewardship fits easily alongside. But where the model sees investment as the deployment of (liquid) capital the same rights and responsibilities can come to be seen as blockages to delivery. Stewardship does not disappear in this model, but its role does become more conditional, accepted where it facilitates deployment of capital and management of risk, but treated with suspicion where it appears to impede the allocation function. This is something we might already see happening.