There are no Good Excuses:The unreal employment situations which are created (as in the above example) are due to deluded, duplicitous, or dishonest, use of very dubious, intellectual rationales (Head Games). These are used to justify pushing people to the physical, psychological, emotional & moral limits. These practices are based upon very unsound, superficial interpretations of 'Political & Economic Science'. And these are barely sciences to begin with.
It is a pretence that there are some people who can handle this efficiency burden indefinitely and that those that can not handle the challenge are incompetent, or inadequate in some fundamental way. Actually, those who survive (and sometimes thrive) in this pretended rationally ordered, accountancy defined, legally prescribed, risk averse operations, usually cheat. They are often the first and loudest to complain when those systems then fail them.
Once more, the media is beginning to see through this quasi-intellectual hype. As in the recent cases of Service Failures in the Child Protection Industry; The Service Provisions are often inadequate to consistently & safely do the job. Everyone avoids acknowledging this, for fear of being seen to be covering up for their own incompetence. The fact is, those who eventually realise that the task is impossible (for any length of time) have a stark choice:
Dedicatedly persevere till you burn out; Skilfully pass the burden onto colleagues; Keep your head down, look busy (then move on before they are found out); Lie, cover up and falsify the figures; Prioritise and take the flack for the bits not prioritised; or; move up the management ladder, join the insider club and pass the burden down to those who didn't shift up, or ship out quick enough. Like the elusive 'political science', there is no science involved here.
We are all expendable (so it is said); there is always a more desperate replacement. This is said so often and now seems so obvious that we miss the key flaws in this assertion: If that were the case, why do we bother providing these services. If that's the case, why are there not enough people with the essential skills. If this is the case, why are services deteriorating. If this was the case, why do managers allegedly seem to keep picking so many losers?
This is all part of the Bigger Picture:
If you see, in the above description, some similarity with circumstances of the current financial crisis that we are in, don't be too surprised. It is the same psychological processes and consequences, which created the world wide financial crisis. Social Psychology (and dare I say it 'Social Psychiatry') has more credibility in identifying institutional and cultural 'madness' than it has in identifying 'classifiable', individual mental ill health.
It is corrupted and deluded social systems (and collusive individuals who generate them) that cause most of the social and personal distresses we all eventually experience in some way. The consistent, progressive and historically evident endeavour to establish Laws, Human Rights, Bills of Rights, Transparency, Open Government, Treaties and Ethics is as fundamental to success in all human activities as any 'genetic' propensity. It is built into most of us.
Where any institutions, organisations, nations (or and other kind of 'systems') operate in fair, empowering, unprejudiced, intelligent and transparent ways; going a little beyond duty and legal minimums; they are usually successful, enduring; generally appreciated, trusted and mostly respected by people (even when they sometimes get some things wrong). They are 'self correcting, responsible and reflective'.
When any kind of organisation operates secretively, dishonestly, from self interest, in denial, unreflective, closed to alternatives, inflexible to changes, unresponsive to needs, with increasingly complex processes, reliance upon volumes of policy, dogmatic edicts, achieving statistical targets, meeting legal minimalisms; those institutions become incompetent, expensive, ineffectual, disliked and distrusted (even when they are seen to get things right).
People are not stupid. They may not always understand 'why' something isn't working but the usually recognise that it is not. The don't always know why something is unfair, prejudiced, or incompetent but they can usually recognise that its effects are just that. Few people are convinced by the excuses, they have just been successfully duped into believing that those who defend the system they run have a sound understanding of it. They usually run on excuses.
Collective Delusional Thinking:
Efficiency assumptions are at best described as 'delusional' on the part of the Managers. At their worst they are intentional, incompetent and dangerous practices. Of course; a younger, less experienced, less 'stressed out' and less disillusioned person may manage things better - for a while! Most of us can work at an exhausting pace, during periods of emergency. If we are dedicated to the job, we may comfortably do this during accidental emergencies.
In the usual, quasi-entrepreneurial ways of today; 'Human resources' and 'Public Relations' practitioners compromise many principles and fundamental, practical realities, under the same pressures as Service Managers. The fact is, they cater to naivety & self interest; the least beneficial qualities for maintaining consistent, long term & effective public services. Ask the most successful business managers their opinions. These 'sciences' have the character of mysticism. No competent, successful business has ever, or would ever work in this 'quick fix' way for any time.
Everyone is caught in this collective delusion, which has become institutionalised, even in our educations systems, up and through university levels; The delusion is that hyper-efficient tasks are possible to maintain indefinitely, because we have the technology to do it. It is nonsense, of course. Even if we believed in this expendable, mechanistic notion of 'People Systems', it would be poor maintenance practice and would be highly wasteful of expensive resources.
More important, it does not work. They are highly inefficient, wasteful and ineffectual practices. It is a 'virtual reality' that looks good in the computer model but catastrophically fails at the user end. Rather than reduce the real risks and failures it actually dramatically increases them . Most of the modern service shortfalls, complaints and litigation costs, are due to these false economies and deluded rationales. We end up chasing our tails & wasting resources.
Lets Compare this with other Bad Ass Attitudes:
The attitudes that these kinds of Service Systems incorporate are the same negligent, quick fix attitudes that progressively causes some of us to fail to top up the oil in car engines; fail to check tyre pressures; run the fuel down to the lowest limits; drive through changing traffic lights (to save a few minutes); cut up other road users and never leave a gap to let others into 'our' lane (to get there quicker). We know this only benefits us short terms and has costs.
Eventually, a significant minority take the same attitude and the original selfish benefits are lost, as each road user learns to cheat the more fundamental rules of the system and collectively end up getting nowhere fast. People are often so busy rubbernecking the misfortunes of other, they crash themselves, or get stuck in the traffic jams that this kind of behaviour invariably causes. Alternatively, we get off the main road, when we see it is going nowhere.
The next psychological trick is to 'reorganise' things again. Golden handshake the previous Senior Culprit, or move them to a more senior role; Bring in some aggressive new blood, who has been trained up in the same dodgy system, developing another set of convincing, quasi-intellectual rationales, taking no nonsense and squeezing the last drop of blood out of the surviving human remnants of the original failed system.
The process continues until the majority of skilled practitioners are convinced they are incompetent by comparison with the invented 'ideal' model. This invariably involves 'borrowing' someone's else's well tested, researched concept and corrupting it to the point where it is unrecognisable. All is doomed to fail again, often discrediting what was originally a sound idea, badly implemented. It is then lost in favour of another less sound but convincing dogma.
Perhaps we are modelling too much on the entertaining antics of celebrities and characters, like Alan Sugar (The Apprentice), Gordon Ramsey (Hells Kitchen), David Brent (The Office) and Sir Humphrey (Yes Minister), Could it be that some managers are modelling themselves on these 'experts' in management styles? Or is it more that some 'naturally inclined' managers fail to see the irony in the derogatory images that such programmes actually portray?
Media Caricatures both Illustrate and Reinforce 'Tolerable' Stereotypes:
The fact is; these caricatures do not represent the best management practices in commerce, or even the average management practices in typically competent, reasonably successful business. Motivational and reward based, customer orientated practices always win over stale, complacent, fear based institutionalized practices. These are not different 'styles' of management; one is 'managing' the other is 'abusive and dishonest, or deluded incompetence'.
Open, creative, 'risk managing' services always succeed (long term) over stale, replicated, 'risk averse' styles of operation. Off the peg rarely works well and only attracts a Mr & Mrs Average service. Micro-management, prescriptive processes work well with repetitive, duplicative, production line systems, but do not fit the tailored requirements of 'People Systems'; trying to get the best out of people and promoting independence and functional competence.
We now end up with two types of Managerial Incompetence. The 'Misfit'; who never had the fundamental skills, but gave a good intellectual impression of managing; 'by dictate' (they have and will always be with us - we have to politely remove them, with apologies for mistakenly choosing them). The other is the Manager who would have made the grade and been good enough, if they did not fear to be seen as 'different' (by bucking the general incompetent trend).
The current trend really is one that fits the analogy of "The Emperor's New Clothes". Incompetent Managers can make any competent concept, system, or group of people, look pathetic, inefficient and expensive to operate. The financial, material, social and personal cost are very high. Institutions (Like UK.CO) have a habit of grabbing onto ideas that other organisations had been operating to, just as they realise these have been superseded by better, more effective practices.
On listening to the Radio 4 program you will hear the typical 'Public Relations', 'quasi-scientific', politically expedient rhetoric (Political Science) in full flow. It is, like old fashioned politics itself, the Art of Deception; used to discredit anything, or anyone, who does not follow the dogma, or fit the intellectual template that is laid down as the 'model' of practice. I am sure that many of these people actually believe what they are saying. That is the most frightening fact. At least lying sometimes makes sense.
Why is is reasonable to describe these practices as 'delusional'? The fact is, like in all politics, the vast majority of thinking people know that politicians deceive. Some people even prefer that they do so. It is part of the game of politics. There is no science involved. It is when they begin to believe their deceits, that it become dangerous. In the new world order of 'privatised practice' and 'business units', services became politicised and took on the same deceits and delusions.
Get the full picture from BBC Radio 4 iPlayer - Goto: Jobcentre Plus - Not Working
