Annual Infarction (Part II): What Is Unknown

This post is going to grow much longer, I think.

I started the morning thinking about why institutions tend to hive off their best staff especially at critical points in their history. It comes down to two areas of lack of knowledge: 1) Not knowing how good their staff are, or not knowing just how good they are; and 2) not realising how critical the moment is, historically and strategically speaking.

Back in a while. Need to go and see the madness up close.

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Well, I think I was wrong. It comes down to THREE areas of lack of knowledge: 1) staff, 2) strategy, 3) sanctity. Heh, I look as if I did that just to have a convenient sibilance in the alliteration. But I think an elaboration will make it clearer.

Firstly, staff. Quite often an organisation chooses the wrong rubric or wrong reasons for deciding to eliminate staff. Very often, it comes down to an experienced administrator deciding on the basis of personal experience what should be done. This is a key mistake. Why, you ask, since the administrator is experienced?

As a wise man once told the whole local civil service, experience is the least of at least five factors that make a man fit for his job. The reason is that experience functions best when inductive logic is called for: if you see five black swans in a row, you will think the rule is that the next swan will also be black. It is the same reasoning that uses the weight of past events to predict future results, and it fails in some very common situations.

One of them is this: flip a fair coin, and if it comes up heads the first time, what is the probability that it will have one head and one tail in the first two flips? The answer is still 50%, since the first one was heads and the second one has a 50% chance either way. In fact, it doesn't matter if the you flip two fair coins at once, flip one and it comes up tails first time, whatever. The chance is still 50%.

When an experienced adminstrator decides to retrench (or provoke into resignation) some member of the staff, it is normally because a comparison is being drawn, using past experience, between the staff member and other people. But these other people cannot in any sense be part of a fair comparison unless they are also a fair sample. And my friends, this never ever happens. In fact, most of the time these exercises are conducted with minimal (or no) transparency, with spurious, dubious or otherwise contestable reasons being advanced.

A former boss of mine used to say, "Can't trust the whites because they are not reliable; can't trust Indians because they're Indian." If he sees himself here and is upset, well, there are literally dozens of witnesses who have heard this more than once. Obviously, this is an example of inappropriate use of past experience or (frankly) personal prejudice, carried over into the staff selection (or deselection) process.

Very often, a senior administration team will look at all the wrong factors because they are not doing it as a strategic planning or vision exercise. They are doing it as a) a cost-cutting exercise, b) a deadwood-ablation exercise, c) an enemy-removal exercise, or d) a discomfort-amelioration or comfort-increasing exercise. What they are not doing is putting the institution first; rather they are claiming that they and the institution are one, or that they have special claim to be identified with the needs of the institution. This is what happens when people think of themselves as masters and not as servants of a greater cause... which brings me to the second point.

Secondly, strategy. The obvious thing for any institution claiming to pursue some kind of strategy (whether blue ocean, coloured hat, rainbow, or any other kind of chromatic legerdemain) is to actually publish the benchmarks and targets for things which can be quantified, and post videos or portfolios or other more qualitative evidence for things which are not so easy to quantify. In other words, use quantitative measures for quantitative processes and qualitative examples for qualitative concepts.

Most institutions don't do this. Rather, they will measure work done and value added by whatever means suits them or helps individual senior officers entrench themselves in more secure positions. Examples of this are legion in the institutional annals of the world.

Think, for example, of how a good teacher is determined to be one. The very best systems actually compare a candidate's portfolio of achievement to that of an officer who has been assessed in detail, in every area of practice, and whose acts and achievements have been archived for comparison. In a good system, all stakeholders are asked about their reasoned opinions and conclusions concerning that teacher. The worst systems are those which use restrictive and inappropriate selection as part of the methodology; for example, those that ask if a teacher can get along with other colleagues while failing to ask the students if they have learnt well because of that teacher.

Consider the strategy that emerges if there is a lack of strategy, but lots of tactical behaviour designed to weed out staff that make us uncomfortable and promote staff that make us feel good. It will be a 'green ocean strategy' or 'red sea strategy', one in which the algae bloom all over the place and all the other organisms die for lack of nutrients. Eventually, the whole area suffers ecological limitation or death. This leads to my third point.

Thirdly, sanctity. In every profession, things are professed; in every occupation, one's time is occupied. But in a vocation, one is called to serve, and one's enthusiasm takes on the patina of sanctity. This sanctity need not be a religious one; the Hippocratic injunction to 'do no harm' has taken on the force of of holy writ in most medical circles. This is because every true and worthwhile calling has got underlying ethical principles.

Most people don't know what these principles are, or if they do know them, have managed to conflate them with other rubbish such that even their mothers wouldn't recognize them. An institution is only as strong as its principles when it comes to having the kind of quality that lasts for generations. The worst thing is that the adulterated principles are then applied to staff and strategy, and dire consequences creep up on you like a thief in the night.

Let's say you have a very good officer in your institution, which is a big law firm. He brings in cases, acts as a model ambassador to clients and their relatives, educates them completely and discreetly, wins for the team, serves the firm well as a member of the legal entity that is the firm. He also disagrees with you about 5% of the time, and reserves the right to say so and to reply to what you have to say. He associates with lawyers from the government and from other firms, and has good relationships with them. Should you fire him?

Ethically, there are no grounds for his removal or for provoking him into resignation or any of the other sanctions a senior partner can employ. Then again, some people might say that the profession of law does not amount to a vocation and is not known for that kind of ethics.

I don't know. But it seems to me that in the annual infarctions of our lives, one way to clear the blockages is to make sure that staff are treated as staff, strategy is treated as strategy, and sanctity is treated as sanctity. None of these should be substituted by a Punch & Judy show, a Monty Python Flying Circus, or a wild yak from Tibet.