Rumbling on performativity_Frits Simon

start for me in the midst of February when Fiona Cornips clarified me about the
expectations of the board regarding my involvement?
Previously different persons in different places in our organization had the performance
agreements on their mind. Because of feeling a different urgency about the
same concerns one can speak of a Babylonian situation. The thereupon more or less
focussed attention by the members of the board from January on revealed other Babylonian
dimensions. The difference in definitions, interpretation of used data, difference
in opinions even among the members of the board and an unclear status quo of standing
policy, spelled out that only after an investment of months of discussing, a shared
perspective among the most involved people would become possible ... at least for the
time being regarding this document. Already some months later it became clear that
measures on paper are hard to realize.
Even from January up till May the planning was loose, due to the different opinions in
the board about the content and extent of the performance agreements, and the
on-going vagueness in the political context. At the end the document depended on
the mobilized expertise and feedback of a selected amount of members of staff and a
tight planning from the second half of April.
April appeared to contain the turning point. For all of us the project elucidated that
the supposed rationality of our organization is fragile and intangible. If I would ideally
define rationality as a controlled, realistic, exact, grounded and a coherent interpretation
of a situation, then we worked hard to bring closer an at least temporarily controlled
situation concerning the performance agreements.
As I mentioned before ‘coming into control’ was a first reaction from the board on the
experienced tangibility. To forestall unrealistic expectations regarding realizing the
performance agreements, in June and September on several occasions, ideas were
discussed about relying on a self-organizing process. This reliance was more or less
displayed in the speech of Paul Broersen. Nonetheless, I notice that the tension
between a responsibility to organize progressions on fulfilling the agreements and to
rely upon what organizes itself keeps coming up.
Shifting content
For some time the difference in opinions among the members of the board was covered
up. Up till the beginnings of April the emphasis was on a condensed document, in
which broad perspectives and ambitions were leading. With the sick leave of Paul
Broersen and due to a meeting of presidents of UAS’s which was visited by Frans
Custers, the emphasis shifted to a specified document with an extended overview of
our ambitions, our performances up till then and the way we wanted to realize our
future performance. At the end of April the different approaches were united into the
final document, in which - as I wrote - audacity and matter-of-factness were balanced.
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