Rumbling on performativity_Frits Simon

The members of the board confirmed our conclusions and recommendations. They
especially acknowledged the importance of the core values as the cornerstone of all
the policy, including an intended new management development programme for team
leaders. The members of the board intended to fulfil a role in the planned programme
especially in regard with the core values. Remarkable in every discussion regarding the
internal branding-programme was that the members also reflected on their own
acting and realized they were not always alert in connecting their policy with the core
values. An insight I don’t forget to remind them off if this happens. As a result of the
discussions we got our funding.
Before the next formal meeting of the coordination team Cees Corte and I discussed
the outcomes of the meeting with the board separately with Henk Rademakers and
Marc Claassen. Because it was Henk Rademakers’ job to develop the programme for
management development we talked this over with him. Until then he had been
hesitating – and to his own saying formally unable – to take the core values explicitly
as the point of departure of human resources-policy. According to him our collective
labour agreement excluded a human resources-policy based on core values, for instance
regarding performance evaluations. Given the conclusions of the board Henk
Rademakers agreed to do this from now on. We talked with Marc Claassen because it
is important that our way of marketing and communication becomes more a reflection
of the core values. Cees Corte and I emphasized that an inspiring story about who
we are and what we want should be expressed in our communication.
The formal meeting of the coordination team was more or less a formality. We agreed
upon the final draft of the conclusions and recommendations. On the 21st December
the President of the Board sent the report with the conclusions and recommendations
to all the deans, directors and associate professors of the UAS. In his cover e-mail (for
the greater part written by me) he stipulated the importance of the programme, his
pleasure in working in an organization which is value driven and he reminded everybody
that the discussion around core values already had a long history, started in
management development programmes many years before and now coming of age. In
between the formal meeting of the coordination team and the 21st of December Cees
Corte and I had done the final editing on the text of the conclusions and recommendations.
As we did before we removed potentially evocative terms.
4.2 Evolved shifts in conclusions and recommendations
regarding the evaluation report
The foregoing narrative is my description what happened in the four months from the
first up till third draft of the evaluation report about the results of an internal-branding
programme. It is a description about what happens in preparing conclusions and
recommendations for the board. As such it is a description of a micro-political process
in which a document is produces which is meant for organization-wide use. Instead of
4. Sense making in and of the internal branding project | 93