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FALKIRK’S ACTION PLAN ANDBP GRANGEMOUTHa ‘second enlightenment’ view

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FALKIRK’S ACTION PLANAND BP GRANGEMOUTHa ‘second enlightenment’viewIntroduction

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

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

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

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

3: The complexities of health provision for deprived individuals andcommunities in Fife

The question

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

The essence of the challenge we were asked to investigate is that BPneeds to make its refinery and chemicals plant at BP Grangemouth moreefficient to compete in a global market. This presents the challenge oftransforming the local Falkirk economy, managing a downsizing in theplant, an increase in efficiency and long-term viability for the plant fromthis process, and steering the local economy through the initial impact ofthis decision and into a cycle where the rest of the economy transformsitself to match the demands of an uncertain and changing globaleconomy.

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

“Is the need to produce a plan limiting delivery of an aspiration to fullyexploit the potential of the area? Does current ownership of economicdevelopment limit the delivery of economic expansion? Does a parochialapproach to corporate social investment, or the belief that commercialinvestment is the primary role for the private sector, limit the leveragethat 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 anaudience of relevant stakeholders following two days’ reflection on thesequestions, on Friday April 26th, at the St Andrews Bay Hotel.

The story was told on the evening around six panels. It is retold here infive 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 wehad been treated to on our encounter with Falkirk and Grangemouth. Oneof the central challenges that the IFF has taken on in its project overall isto make sense of a confusing world of boundless complexity. We havebecome very alive to the variety of techniques and methods people use inthese circumstances to get a grip on reality. So we started ourinvestigation by considering our encounter in Falkirk as an artful,orchestrated experience. We had been witnesses – and participants – in adrama, with a variety of actors and settings. Seen in this light, what wasthe story we had been told?

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Our cartoonist came in useful at this point – providing a comic stripversion of our encounter. Our hosts had structured the encounter aroundfour visits: a sense of place, a sense of the future, a sense of today and asense of community.

⇒ Afterthought: Newsstory on “WheelOpening Delay” (dueto sabotage)

A Sense of PlaceWe heard first from representatives of Falkirk Council, both about thehistory of the area, the immediate response to BP Grangemouth’s decisionto reduce the workforce, and the longer term problems of the area: poorhealth, 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, wasnow the principal vehicle for addressing these issues and realising thearea’s potential.

A Sense of the FutureNext we saw the Millennium Wheel – a striking piece of engineering, theworld’s first rotating boat lift linking the Union and the Forth and Clydecanals, and reopening the water route from Edinburgh to Glasgow. TheWheel was presented to us as a world first, a ‘global icon’, something thatwould put Falkirk on the map, brand Falkirk and give it a new spirit – thespirit that would energise the local community, tackle the poverty ofaspiration and prompt the cultural change that was needed to realise theaspirations in the Plan.

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A Sense of TodayAt Grangemouth Enterprise Centre we heard from people making the bestof the opportunities that exist in the area today. These seemed like thefirst green shoots of what might be possible – a business person who hadchosen to set up there rather than in Alloa, a trainee who thought hispresent training scheme for the unemployed was the best one he hadbeen on so far. Things were happening – but not on a scale or with anenergy that matched the level of aspiration we had seen in the Plan and atthe Wheel.

A Sense of CommunityFinally we got to BP Grangemouth. It looked like another country and itspoke to us as another country and certainly another community. We metaround the BP Boardroom table. There representatives of the communitytold an ambiguous story about BP as a blessing and a curse in thecommunity, a company that’s both growing and shrinking. We heard astory about a comforting past and an uncertain future, particularly for theolder members of the community. We heard little hope: the money andthe influence had moved to Falkirk, it was Falkirk that had the Wheel (“thecanal doesn’t even reach Grangemouth”). A pupil from the local HighSchool 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, hesaid, 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 modelof reality which is inadequate or which at the least does not give access tovery effective action. One of our central suggestions in the project as awhole is that in these circumstances it will always make sense to ‘try onother worldviews for size’. What would it mean to apply this approach tothe Falkirk/Grangemouth encounter? What might things look like viewedthrough 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 habitsof 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 ourselvesother views of the situations we encountered, potentially valuable insightsthat might have been missed before.

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The Fear and Love Loops

A central prompt for these perceptions isthe ‘fear and love loops’ diagram developedat our second meeting in November 2001.This arose originally out of a reflection ledby Brian Goodwin (an IFF member) atSchumacher College the day after theSeptember 11th attacks in the US. Itsuggests two very different ways of beingand operating in the world.

The first is based on seeking to control theworld around us – for which purpose weneed to treat subjects as objects andsimilar objects as the same. This is thebasis for scientific rationalism. Buttreating people in that way leads toalienation – which increases the need forcontrol. This cycle is driven by fear.

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

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

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

The centrality of these loops to the Falkirk/Grangemouth encounter isevident. We can see the Plan as generated in the fear loop: at speed, inreaction to a potentially threatening event, and in a political context ofanxiety, division and internal competition. What might an Action Plan looklike if the love loop, relationship and participation were privileged? Mightthis hold a clue to how to answer the questions posed at the start: how tofree the plan as a vehicle to harness and encourage aspiration rather thanconstrain and suppress it?

Beyond EconomicsThere is a wealth of relevant experience within the IFF for the substancewe had been presented with. Wolfgang Michalski, for example, formerDirector of the OECD International Futures Programme has a long historyof involvement with economic development at regional, national andinternational levels. The same goes for other members of the group.

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At one level, then, it was tempting to take a detailed look at the Plan andto analyse and critique it from a technical economic viewpoint. That issomething that the IFF could do: but we did not feel it would really openup the new territory that the original question implied. We recognised thevalue in having the Plan to mobilise action and resources, appreciated thepotential power of the innovative partnership – BP, Falkirk Council andScottish Enterprise Forth Valley– who had drawn it up and now stood forit, 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 mightprove useful in realising its aspirations in the future?

DIRECTION RATHER THAN PLANSEE DIRECTION AS A RESULT OF PROCESS

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

ECONOMIC ACTIVITY TAKES PLACE WITHIN A MORALFRAMEWORKRECOGNISE THE DIFFERENT VALUE PATTERNSTOLERATE DIFFERENCES IN ORDER TO DISCOVER RICHERWHOLENESS

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

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TAKE ACTION THAT ENCOURAGES A SYSTEMICEFFECT

In an age of complexity, the most effective actions aregoing to be those that take account of the bigger systemand aim to have a systemic effect. This too relates to theneed for more expanded thinking: our encounter was

with a place in Scotland, but naturally viewed by some of our number as aregion of Europe. That broader context makes a difference, but we hadpicked up little of it from the encounter itself.

PERCEPTION FIRST, THEN ANALYSISLEAVE LOTS OF ROOM FOR SECOND OR THIRD THOUGHTSSTAY 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 thisaspect in the substance of the Plan: it is full of visionary elements. Yetthe balance still seemed slightly askew. Where there was vision, therewas insufficient analysis (eg of the real strengths of the area and itspeople, or of the nature of the goods that would be distributed throughthe transportation hub) and where there was analysis it tended to cloudthe vision. That implied a certain amount of additional work on the Plan –which may indeed be in progress. But that work might be best conductedif it leaves open room for second and third thoughts, and space for a newhypothesis to emerge from both the perception and the analysis. Thatmight be a way to create something genuinely new and distinctive, andexpressed in new and fresh language. As the question we were posed atthe start implied: there is a danger that the form (a plan) conditions andshapes the content. The result can look very like all other plans – andthat is not going to motivate a specific community.

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

Deliberately cultivate enabling conditions

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are the enabling conditions that are conducive to innovation,entrepreneurship, risk-taking, investment and all the other things that thePlan is intended to deliver? And what are the enabling conditions for aplanning process that would allow these things to materialise in practiceover the coming years?

3: The Ultimate Mixed Metaphor

We now return to the story we were told, having refreshed our own IFFthinking and its relevance in these circumstances, and having polishedsome 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 anddata that had been presented to us.

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

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than the ‘objective’ statistics and analysis that was also available. And wedid so by concentrating on the images of the encounter and the languagewe heard, particularly the metaphors and memorable phrases. Metaphoris a tool for coping with confusion and complexity, since it describes andcommunicates in a rich but non-specific way. The metaphors we heardgave glimpses into the implicit worldviews that lay behind them. Theyoffered access to a different kind of data. So we developed a secondversion of the encounter viewed through IFF lenses: the ultimate mixedmetaphor.

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

The Bog and The Wall: we heard about ‘the Bog’, a depressed area inthe region on reclaimed marshland. The bog sounded, in psychologicalterms, like the shadow. Grangemouth seemed to talk of itselfmetaphorically as more in ‘the bog’ than in the light. We heard about theattitudes of dependency, passivity, risk-aversion and a persistentparochialism that kept people in the bog. We heard about the AntonineWall running through the area: an historic barrier, quite at odds with theimage of the keyhole. How can people climb over the wall and glimpsethe brighter future that lies through the keyhole as long as these attitudesof dependency etc persist? The key to that transformation seemed to liein a rediscovery of civic pride and dignity, and a new, brighter image forthe future of the area.

The Wheel: at the heart of our encounter, one of the talking points ofthe visit and of the entire IFF meeting (others who had not seen it weretempted to drive over specially before they left), was the Wheel. As animage, a wheel is a prodigious source of metaphor, and it was presentedto us explicitly as an ‘icon’. It offers, in the context of our mixedmetaphor, revolution – a move to another level. Perhaps the rotatingboat 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 linkschanges in education, health, culture and – in consequence – in theeconomy. Those changes will take place within the community, but alsoat an individual, human level. One key metaphor we heard a lot was themetaphor of driving. But what is driving what? Is education driving theeconomy, or is culture and tourism going to do so? We heard a lot aboutthe kinds of things that might be attracted into the local area – money,jobs, cultural events, tourists, and boy racers – but not very much aboutwhat might lie beyond Falkirk, an “outside” of possibilities that could bereached out to.

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

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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 educationand development (drawing on Roberto Carneiro’s experience inPortugal)

• 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 “mixedmetaphor”: An individual in Grangemouth peering through the keyholeand seeing creative ‘lift off’ on the horizon.

4: Critical Insights

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

• BP is only a small part of the story AND a critical part of thepartnership

• 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

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

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

Max Boisot gave it a theoretical underpinning.

This is a model derived fromtheories about the self. But itmight be useful also inconsidering communities.There are three levels ofknowledge. One is ‘embodied’:this is the kind of knowledgethat you have when you areriding a bicycle or when youare using a tool. It isknowledge that you cannotcodify. You have it, but it isdifficult to communicate it to awider audience. We came upagainst a lot of this embodiedknowledge, inevitably, in ourencounters with people inFalkirk and Grangemouth.

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

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

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One way of looking at the sense of parochialism we experienced on ourvisit, and that we also found in Dundee, is to see that the zone ofproximal development – that zone where people felt able to enactthemselves and their desires - is very narrowly construed. At best youare talking about Edinburgh and Glasgow. Part of the challenge here isjust how narrow the world in which you define yourself, your problemsand your opportunities might be.

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

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

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

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

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

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From Closed Clans to Open Networks

That relationshipat present mightbe characterised inthe picture of a‘closed clan’ inwhich Falkirkenjoys uneasyrelationships withher nearneighbours, anuncertain sense ofself-identity, andall that within anarrow perceptionof the widerenvironment – astrict definition ofwhat is ‘inside’ thewall and what isbeyond it(‘outside’).

This itself has elements of an industrial and engineering model: the cogsof the machine fit together, but in order to do so they must maintain theirfixed 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 clearin one respect, with Falkirk at the centre of two large and connectedsuburbs in Glasgow and Edinburgh. But there are other connections in thenetwork: Grangemouth, the twin towns of Creteil and Odenwald, Stirlingand Alloa, and farther afield the connections the IFF had seen with, say,Barcelona or Helsinki. This represents a very different view of the Falkirkarea and its ‘psychic hinterland’, a much larger potential network ofresources.

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

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The Wheel

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

The Wheel as GeographyOn one level the Wheel is about nothing other than geography. It is thereprecisely because of the fact that the two canals meet in that place. Itcould not be anywhere else.

Even so, what a setting! It reminded one of the IFF group of a visit to theVictoria and Albert dock in Cape Town, a recently regenerated area thatattracted 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 therewould certainly be a shopping mall – it would be seen as a place wherepeople would naturally want to congregate. It is a fabulous setting: youcan imagine all kinds of events with that backdrop. Most of the discussionwe heard about the Wheel as geography was about its linking of the twocanals. But it has created a venue, a setting, an atmosphere, almost afantasy, around which you could build all sorts of activity.

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

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 growthof Falkirk as networked city would benefit Scotland too. For example,Falkirk could aspire to lead a truly generative conversation betweenEdinburgh and Glasgow, perhaps around the immediate question of theairport. Who else is going to do it? And, if Falkirk really starts to makethe transformations that are possible, the energy could radiate into therest of the country. As our guest from UZ Events suggested, rather than

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the ‘transportation hub’ Falkirk might become ‘the extended heart ofScotland’. Imagine that.

The Wheel also sparked consideration of other similar projects that hadenergised and transformed entire cities. Max Boisot spoke from personalexperience of the way the Olympics had reinvented Barcelona and thelocals’ perception of their own city. The other example was Bilbao, whichhad been put on the map almost entirely through attracting theGuggenheim 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 citiesreached out beyond their known environment to bring somethingextraordinary into them. It showed a very different spirit. Bilbao wentout looking for a big project to put the city on the map, and found theGuggenheim. They did not operate within a budget, they did not seekinnovative ways of spending economic development money, they got on aplane and went in search of opportunities – and the opportunities wereoutside.

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

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

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

“Coming from a different culture, Southern Europe, we look at Britainand Scotland as the birthplace of the first industrial revolution. This isthe intense paradox about the Wheel. When I first saw it I said, “goshthis is a masterpiece of engineering”. Yet this represents the firstgeneration of the industrial revolution. It’s engineering - andengineering 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, ofcanals, nuts and bolts, engineering, into an icon of the future, anetworking society, new business, e-business, the kind of future we seein the Plan? To tell you the truth I don’t see how the Wheel can beassociated with e-business but there must be a clue somewhere.

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

How do you add economic value to this? I have been involved withmany branding exercises and I have never seen (perhaps this could bethe first example) that you can develop a brand such as the Wheel thatadds value to commercial brands and commercial activity through itsvery 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 Wheelbrand add value to other business models? Rather than thinking inabstract of the Wheel as a brand for Scotland, I would say that from abusiness perspective you would have a Wheel McDonalds, a WheelTextiles, a Wheel e-business, a Wheel internet… You have to finddeclinations of the Wheel that are closely associated with commercialactivities or that have commercial bite in business models, in businessplans, in marketing plans.”

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

We concluded that the Wheel is an icon, or a symbol, looking for ameaning. And that there are many interesting participative culturalprocesses that could begin that search. These processes might use theWheel as conversation piece, as an ambiguous intriguing object, as aprompt for creative and imaginative thinking, as a means of starting theconversation about Falkirk’s past and Falkirk’s future. Its meaning cannotbe imposed. The search for meaning could be an important element inthe cultural transformation that our hosts seek.

BP Grangemouth

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

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

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

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

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

The kind of relationship a creative community has with its widerenvironment is fluid and flexible: the difference between a campus townand a company town. The plant would not have a boundary around it buta gradient: when people ‘left’ BP they took some of BP with them, theskills, attitudes, values, the creativity. We might then see BP as adifferent 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 onelevel it was already a work of art, a thing of beauty caught in the latedusk across the water as we took the bus back to St Andrews.

What would it take to make that reality more powerful, to eclipse thedirty, industrial image? Our guests at dinner were taken with thissuggestion. Part of the area’s problem is its association with old, dirtyindustry. There is a tendency to dance around that in the hope thatnobody will notice – but a more positive and active approach totransforming the image and the reality would be more energising. Thatshould be part of the vision – and the language - of the future.

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BP FalkirkGiven BP’s presence throughout the area, and the disconnect betweenFalkirk and Grangemouth, the linkage BP Grangemouth is striking. Thetwo appear interchangeable. BP’s programme for improving the plantgoes under the banner ‘securing a future for Grangemouth’, implying thatthe plant and the community are one and the same. How about shiftingthe BP brand and attaching it to BP Falkirk? That looks more consistentwith a future in which the disconnect between Falkirk and Grangemouthno longer blights potential. It would leave the problem of what happensto the community in Grangemouth? How about a new Grangemouth? Thehistory of urban development is all about new places which emerge out ofolder places. So the counterpart would have to be a new Grangemouthwhich could be some kind of new housing community venture, particularlyfor the older members of that community.

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

Graceful LegacyWe also contemplated the longer term future for Grangemouth. We hadheard that there was no reason why at some point in the futureGrangemouth couldn’t revert to a clearing port, a distribution centre.Certainly we were told by BP representatives that it would be irresponsiblenot to consider a future in which the Grangemouth refinery played adiminishing role in Scotland as North Sea production fell. BP’s stancearound the world was to leave the communities they operated in betterplaces than when they arrived. What might that look like forGrangemouth? What would make for a ‘graceful retreat’?

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

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

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This sparked enticing visions of a transformed docklands-typedevelopment in Grangemouth, a model of modern regeneration. And itconjured up images of what the media would have to say if such talk gotout. The papers would be full of myths. The challenge would be to beready for that: cultural change, such as the Plan requires, is all about themaking of new myths, more credible and more powerful than the old. Thekey insight that had generated the conversation for us had been therealisation of the central power and influence of the myth BPGrangemouth constructs for itself. That seems to require more attentionfor the future.

V: Summarising our Learning

This was a very rich and stimulating encounter, from the visitsthemselves, through the conversations they generated in the IFF, to thefascinating discussion with partners from Falkirk and Grangemouth andother stakeholders on the final evening of our meeting. Summarising thelearning from the encounter is extraordinarily difficult. This paper is itselfonly a partial view of the whole. But for completeness we did concludeour presentation on the Friday evening with two brief panels, drawing outsome of the main implications from our discussions both for ourselves andour partners.

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

1. Stretch –don’t fit

2. Don’t wait –go get

3. Enact, don’tjust react

4. Focus on thepossible as muchas the actual

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

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

For ourselves, the encounter yielded many insights and helped to developthe IFF’s awareness of itself, its own methodology and emerging habits ofthought and feeling. That is especially true of the three case encounterstaken together, since much of the most valuable learning for the IFF as awhole has come from comparing and contrasting the experience in thesethree very different cases. From our work in Falkirk/Grangemouth wemight highlight three clusters of insight.

Reinventing the WheelWe had entered the encounter listening for metaphor as a way of makingsense of a complex world. We found in Falkirk/Grangemouth aphenomenally rich territory for this mode of inquiry. The Wheel was justone striking element in the ‘ultimate mixed metaphor’. That gave usaccess to a new way of thinking and talking about the area: themetaphors and language in use were very striking, and equally readilysuggested alternative language, new interpretations, opening up newperspectives and different futures. A traditional model will tell you not towaste time ‘reinventing the wheel’. The IFF has learned that this isprecisely what we need to do.

Future ConsciousnessRight from the start of theencounter we were introducedto stories of the past andstories about the future. Bothinform the present. One of thelearnings from all three of ourcase encounters is theimportance in an age ofcomplexity and rapid change ofdeveloping a futureconsciousness to inform actionsin the present. That futureconsciousness was weak or ambiguous in Falkirk/Grangemouth. Like theWheel. But the past was strong, shared and understood. Like a series oflocks – the traditional way to raise and lower canal barges. It is in thedevelopment of future consciousness that the concepts of integrity,identity and agency are critical.

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

TransformationsMuch of our work in the IFF is informed by the need for criticaltransformations in the world. From threatened planet to sustainablesystem. From pessimism to optimism.

These encounters suggested some other transformations that might proveuseful in bringing about the global changes that the IFF considerssignificant at this time, and also worth exploring further in the context ofthe transformation Falkirk seeks:

ugly ⇒ beautifulpast ⇒ futureresignation ⇒ aspirationmicro ⇒ macroboundary ⇒ gradientpart ⇒ holonenergy (BP as oil company) ⇒ energy (BP as radiating intellectual andcreative energy and human potential)

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Conclusion

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

The IFF sensed during the encounter, and particularly in considering theFife, Dundee and Falkirk/Grangemouth encounters together, that thereare valuable insights here particularly around the governance andplanning model, how to make the most of the Wheel as opportunity andicon, and the relationship between BP Grangemouth, the community andthe future. These deserve to be kept in play and developed in parallel withthe Plan. The IFF has an intellectual commitment, and as a result of theencounter an experiential and personal commitment, to develop thoseinsights in service of supporting aspiration in Falkirk/Grangemouth andelsewhere.

Ends

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