One of the things I was really looking forward to about entering the workplace was the opportunity to study it from the inside. We have a terrible habit, as human beings, of being awful at estimating scale, realistic speeds of completion and the real complexities at work in achieving a task. I suspect that this is a function of cognitive perception: seeing one person and equating their action to any other action we might do as people. We might easily see, for instance, the Prime Minister deciding whether or not to cancel HS2 as little different to any of us deciding what to have for lunch, even though when we consider this in detail few of us would say this was remotely comparable. This is because, to our brains, the quantity of actions (one) and type of action (decision) are the same. To enable us to appreciate that there are more complexities at play, we need to first encourage our brains to see beyond this initial level of depth; we also need to give our brains the experience upon which they can meaningfully estimate that complexity in future. As the Growth Mindset neuroscientific hypothesis suggests, our brains are heavily dependent upon and reactive to the experiential data they encounter.
All this is to say that, in studying governments and societies of the past and present, I was fully aware of my own personal inexperience with the rhythms of office life. I could make a rough guess, based upon depictions in the media, of what this was like, but I had no way of replicating the innumerable minutiae of everyday working life. When accounting for the true effect of a Prime Ministerial or otherwise central decision, I was not in a position to reliably estimate the number of management meetings, policy specialisms, coordination and clearance steps, sick days, office parties, annual leave days, variable working relationships and communication strategies this was away from actual completion. All of these steps are necessary to account for in order to accurately anticipate how a central decision might play out in practice. Essentially, what do we need to account for when assessing the function of government?
The usual, intuitive approach we tend to take as humans is to idealise or catastrophise the functionality of the workplace. Either everyone does their job 100% perfectly, 100% of the time, or everyone’s deliberately undermining the system. Dominic Cummings in particular swings between these two. Having first studied history, giving him both a hyperspeed version of administration and an opportunity to develop his own ideas on how it could best function, he then entered the Department for Education and was hit unexpectedly by the weight of office life, leading him to catastrophise the functionality of administration. In practice, both idealisation and catastrophism are plainly so unrealistic as to be useless as tools of analysis. What DC persistently fails to take account of is what I am talking about here: the people factor.
The fact is that a proper estimation of timescales and functionality relies on a practical, pragmatic and realistic assessment of the situation and of those involved. When making or assessing a decision, we are best-placed to do so if we begin with recognising the situation as it is, along with the limiting factors on any changes we might make. This avoids treating a situation which doesn’t exist (an entirey perfect or imperfect administration) whilst simultaneously enabling us to develop much more targeted, specific and realistic approaches to resolve actual issues. With this approach, recognising and tackling the reality of the situation, we are less likely to either be disappointed ourselves or to disappoint and frustrate others.
The other aspect of the people factor is the appreciation and respect of staff wellbeing. From an analytical perspective, it means recognising that offices aren’t and cannot be entirely about the work they do. One part is that life goes on around work: schools, health appointments, and periods of illness or caring can all impact both the quality and quantity of work. Equally important here is what kind of steps are taken, both on an institutional and day-to-day level, to aid and mitigate that. Bad wellbeing policies worsen both the quality and quantity effects of life on work, whereas good policies can actually increase it relative to what the effects would have been (for example, with working from home or reallocation of tasks to match current capabilities).
An understanding of these kinds of policies is key to an accurate estimation of what weight of machinery is behind any one leadership decision. By meeting them on a pragmatic level, we’re much better placed to give our brains the best chance of an accurate assessment of the situation at hand.
Global Retrospective 