The unintended consequences of security theatre

I learned about the term “security theatre” a few weeks ago from the Economist. The magazine was discussing the Paris attacks, and the familiar dilemma between security and civil liberty. They made an attempt to work out what types of security actually worked, in that they ensnared perpetrators or at least acted as an effective deterrent.

Even though the term was new to me, the concept wasn’t. I first became aware of it when I lived in Belfast in the 1980’s during the Troubles. Quite often, I would fly from Belfast to London, either for business or to connect with family. The only public access road to Belfast International Airport had a massive police checkpoint, which each car was required to pass through slowly and some were pulled in for questioning.

A became annoyed because I was pulled in quite often. As soon as the British soldiers heard my English accent they relaxed, but it was still inconvenient. Over time I realised why I was getting pulled in. My job was visiting Shell petrol stations, and I had one, outside Derry, that was so close to the border that I had to go through the UK customs and security point to get to it. After a while I worked out that I was always pulled in at the airport if I had visited that station the previous day.

This taught me many lessons, apart from the obvious ones to change my visit schedule to avoid delays. Mostly, the checkpoint was for show. If I took the ferry to Scotland there was no security, indeed once I didn’t even have my ticket checked. So security theatre follows the power and the money, while terrorists probably travel in other ways, and even if they did want to blow up a plane, presumably they could also work out not to use a vehicle that had crossed the border recently. The whole thing was a bit of a show to make us feel safe and to show the police were at least active and concerned: the real work of deterrence happened well out of my sight.

Since those days, security and security theatre have become a massive industry, as anyone who uses any airport can testify. Once someone hid explosives in a shoe, so we all have to take off our shoes. Once they tried liquids, so we have the ritual of the plastic bags. Presumably the bombers of the Russian airliner at Sharm el Sheikh knew these tests were coming so used something more subtle, such as infiltrating the staff. Meanwhile, all this routine security costs us hours and hours. Further, an American study showed that sixty seven out of seventy people in a test managed to get guns through security without being stopped, so dull is the work of the agents trying to locate such things hour upon hour.

This week I have seen a different example of security theatre that has awakened me to another positive purpose of such things. A month ago I saw the house directly opposite house burned to the ground. It transpires that this was arson, and that five other houses in close proximity have also been attacked. This week a permanent police van has appeared at the end of the road and the police presence has become very apparent.

My first thought was that this was another example of rather pointless security theatre that would only inconvenience us. Is the arsonist likely to try to burn a house down right outside such a van?

But then I thought further. It transpires that all the burned down houses had Jewish owners, and local gossip suggests that the attacks might have an anti Semitic motive. This is entirely plausible, though it could also be quite wrong, since the arsonist has attacked only building sites and the vast majority of those around here are Jewish owned. But the gossip made me see a good reason for the police presence. What if there was not one? It is very likely that self-appointed vigilantes would be manning our neighbourhood by now, and in some ways I could see how that could be almost justifiable. The police presence makes us feel just a bit safer, and also deters alternative action that could have worse consequences.

Going back to the Economist, the article made a strong case that predictable and extensive checking was pretty ineffective. Those people arguing for fences and border controls and even more security do not have good solutions. Indeed, it can all be a bit self-serving; the whole security industry is huge nowadays, and they seem to get a lot of what they want. Official security institutions seem to come under very little scrutiny as well, getting away with poor articles about ISIS that defy all logic and only really serve themselves.

What does work is intelligence, though even that can hardly hope to eliminate all crimes. Intelligence eschews standard checks but focuses on the possible criminal. The trouble with this approach is that it challenges our ideas of privacy, and Edward Snowden was quite right to highlight its illegal and troubling aspects. Still, for me, as long as agencies are honest about what they do, I’d rather sacrifice some privacy for effective security, especially if in return I would be allowed to go through airports without all the pointless time-wasting measures.

So security theatre has some advantages. It makes us feel a bit safer, and deters hateful alternative measures. It also has some costs, in terms of our privacy but also our time in complying with rather pointless measures.

But I have noticed a rather more serious disadvantage to security theatre. What happens when people believe in it?

In the USA, the two most common reactions to the Paris atrocities were both strange. Firstly, anyone planning on visiting Europe was advised sternly against it, as the place was plainly not safe – even though many more people die violently in any week in the USA than in Europe. But the second reaction was incredulity that this attack could have succeeded so soon after Charlie Hebdo. Americans thought that the crackdown after the former attacks should have rendered the city safe from further assaults.

This shows how security theatre, aided by politicians over-selling their own security measures, can mislead. True, Europe has less of a surveillance culture than the US, but surely it is more realistic to believe that nowhere is safe? Anyone who wants to can find some deadly means of killing, even one so basic as hurling rocks onto a crowded motorway from above.

Yet Americans believe that security can make them safe, despite all the mass killings that go on week after week. This explains the extreme reactions to the subsequent San Bernadino killings, first of anger that the perpetrators could not have been somehow identified beforehand, and then with the outrageous racist proposals afterwards. If security theatre has failed, first blame those responsible for security, then beef up security to new levels.

This thinking is not just naïve and ugly, it is dangerous. Security becomes the solution for all problems, even though it will never work. The thinking means that any solutions tackling root causes never even get discussed. No one ever stops to think of why someone might become radicalised, how a message of ISIS might appeal to some, and what might help to reduce this appeal.

Security theatre has its uses. But the unintended consequences run much more deeply than the inconvenience of extra hours at airports. Security theatre is most dangerous when it leads people to believe that more security is always the best response.

Tips from a long-term expat

Next summer it will be twenty years since I left the UK to live in Sweden. I would never have dreamed that I would be away from my native land for so long. After Sweden, I went on to live in Norway, the Netherlands and now the US.

A few weeks ago, Schumpeter wrote a good column in the Economist about expatriates. His main theme was that companies tended to waste the experience of returning expats. I agree with that claim. Time and again, I have seen the careers of returning expats stall. While the initial move away tends to be well reasoned as an attempt to broaden the experience of a rising executive, rarely does that experience receive much value upon return.

There are a variety of reasons for this wasteful state of affairs. Some relate to the expats themselves. Many enjoy the experience of being a bigger fish in a smaller pond and spin out their posting, or try to acquire a second or third posting somewhere else. When they do return, they can resent it, can feel undervalued, and fail to make enough effort to apply the lessons from their experience to their home business. Quite a few leave the company altogether.

It does not help that reintegration into a home country can be hard socially too. Outlooks have changed, yet old friends have moved on and no one seems to want to hear about how exciting life is in whatever foreign country they have been living. And coming back to live on a more meagre salary is hardly an incentive.

If the expats fail their companies, the companies usually fail the returning expats as well. HR systems and power networks tend to be very parochial. An expat is out of sight and frequently out of mind as well, so when it is time to return they have often been forgotten and are placed somewhere hastily that does not fit their skills. The knowledge that they have acquired is not seen as valuable, and is even resented, while jealousy can also be a problem. While onboarding programmes for new staff and even new expats can be lavish, little effort is placed on reintegrating returning expats. If a foreigner arrives in the office, people make an attempt to listen to them and learn from them, at least after initial suspicion. A returning expat can have just as much to offer, but is seldom asked.

Schumpeter made all these points, and I can support a good many of them from my own experience and that of those I observed. One thing that became clear in my case was that the most transferable skills that I acquired as an expat were those that would help me in other expat assignments rather than back home. And when ready to move, no one back in the UK system could remember me, but when other expat assignments became available, I seemed to be on the radar.

I recall one short conversation on a plane after I had been away from the UK for maybe four years, with the head of Shell UK’s retail business at that time. I had left the UK two levels below that post, but had done quite well in two jobs in Europe, eventually rising to a sort of shareholder advisor role to his position, that could loosely be termed a peer function. On the plane, he sounded me out for a position reporting to him. In his mind, he was being generous in considering someone from outside his regular system for what he saw as a big job. In my mind, I had already progressed past that level, and the only job in that business that would fit me would be his own. Stupidly, that is exactly what I said to him. The conversation ended swiftly and I never received any interest from Shell UK again. He felt threatened, especially since I might have been consulted about his own performance, and he felt unjustly rebuffed. He was half right, and so was I, since I had a reasonable case for a more ambitious career path, but should never have expressed it so bluntly. I condemned myself to the role of jumped up outsider. In this small story lie a hundred lessons for anyone on the expat trail.

The article offers many tips for aspiring expats, and I can add a few more. From the article, one key tip is to be very cautious when it is time to come home. Keep your network as strong as it can be, but expect the need to rebuild it, and build one outside your own company. Be ready to accept a more modest job than you might think you deserve, at least for a time. Don’t show off about your expat experience, just let what it has taught you come through in your work (in that respect, such experience is just like gaining an MBA).

Socially, a returning expat has to recognise that the people at home at not like the ones you got to know abroad, and are unlikely to want to be regaled of stories from foreign lands. Take time to rediscover the self you were before you left rather than rejecting it. Practically, quickly get back into former frugal habits, for the money will be tighter.

I can add some tips to apply during an expat assignment as well. Expect some resentment and jealousy abroad as well, and don’t go on at length about how things are done at home. Instead, try to integrate as much as you can into your new country. You will need to mingle with expats, but make sure you take on local activities as well, these will ultimately be the most memorable. Really try to learn the language, and keep trying, making sure you improve year after year. Ultimately, my biggest regret is that I was far too lazy in learning languages, especially after the initial enthusiasm in Sweden.

Your attitude about the length of your assignment is very important for your wellbeing. In your company, always say – and believe – that you will be there for the long term, and that your wish is to remain as long as possible. Even if it looks like your stay is closing, stay in the present and keep behaving in your social life as though it will continue for some time: keep buying things and arranging things, for otherwise you’ll live in an unpleasant limbo for what could be a long time. But also have half an eye on other possibilities: when I left the UK, I never thought it would be for more than a few years, and I may well have planned differently if I had considered that as a possibility. This is a tough balance to manage, and requires deep and frequent discussion with your family, as it is so easy for assumptions to dominate and preferences to change without acknowledgement.

Depending on your company, you will probably do well financially out of expatriation, perhaps even very well, but you’ll only really know afterwards and it will take at least six months for there to be any stability in your finances. Managing dual careers through expatriation is an exception and needs great care, but otherwise make the early stages less stressful by being ready to spend much more than you otherwise would.

I developed a rather negative view of my homeland while away from it, something that may be a risk for others too. I tended to see where I was living through a half full glass, but matters at home with a half empty one. I forgot the best things about home, and also remembered it as it was rather than accepting that things could have improved. It was only recently that trips to London have rekindled positive thoughts about the UK and even some desire to live there again one day.

Expatriation has been a massive blessing for me. When it started, the circumstances were perfect, in that there were no significant dual career issues yet I had a child young enough to grow and learn from the experience without major educational disruption. I think dual careers and teenage kids might be the only factors that would make me advise against taking a posting.

Then, as things developed, I was able to follow the tips I lay down here, more perhaps by good fortune than any wisdom, and notwithstanding stupidity on planes and laziness with languages. I feel the overall result to be a more fulfilled life than could have been possible within one country, blessed by a wider world view, blessings that I’ve also been able to pass onto my family. For people thinking about taking a spell abroad, on balance I’d advise almost anyone to go for it, so long as dual career discussions can be reconciled. And a lovely trend is that more and more people will have such opportunities, though maybe without quite the unwarranted financial benefits that were showered on me.

So here is a four step guide to considering expatriation. Step one is to deal with possible blockers, notably dual careers, via deep family discussion, with outside help if required. If you can get past step one, step two is to find a good enough opportunity, without being over-fussy about location or apparent finances. Step three is to read this blog. And step four is to go for it with full gusto. Good luck!

Global Free Movement - let's make it possible

Amid the misery about the failings of the EU, we would do well to turn the argument on its head and celebrate its triumphs. True, the Euro is a flawed project, with inadequate institutional and legal support. But it happened anyway, it is still alive and growing, and it has made living and doing business a lot easier for many citizens. The free market is an unqualified success, as have been many of the social reforms, despite repeated complaints from politicians looking to deflect blame for their own inadequacies. The expansion to the east was a project of historic proportions and significance, offering over 100 million people the reality of a more prosperous and fair life.

But perhaps the greatest achievement is the one that has come under pressure during 2015. The EU has a principle of free movement of its citizens. For a part of the union covered by the Schengen agreement, this goes further by making border controls perfunctory.

It is the freedom of movement, backed up by other freedoms such as removal of exchange controls, which is so marvelous and historically special. We are taught from an early age to love our countries, to respect our passports and to be suspicious of foreigners, yet here are twenty-eight nations taking concrete steps to pool their sovereignty, nations that have spent much of their existence at war with each other.

My wife and I have a wonderful luxury problem ahead of us during the next decade, when we finally leave the US. Holding British and Dutch passports, we can choose to live wherever we like within the EU. We occasionally talk of pros and cons of the various options, but what we must remember is how privileged we are to have these options at all.

But then I’d like to turn that argument on its head once again. While the opening of rights within the EU is a historical anomaly, is not the true anomaly that the movement of most global citizens is so restricted? The planet belongs to all of us, and national borders are man-made constructions, so why should the accidents of where we happen to be born and the citizenship of our parents have such a profound limiting factor to our lives?

Think about the great injustices of history, slavery, race laws, limitations to voting rights and so on. How did these happen, and why did they persist for so long?  We should recall that for most of the time that these practices were prevalent, people thought they were justified, even normal. It was the way things had been, and somehow right. Even when movements started out to abolish the practices, it took a long time for majorities to back what we now see as basic human rights.

Imagine the arguments that defenders of the status quo put forward in each of these cases, arguments strong enough to persuade more than just racists and bigots. I think I can make a good guess at what the arguments might have been.

Some arguments would be based on religion or history or some natural superiority. Examples would be that we have always had slaves and Jesus lived in a time of slaves. Then, the slaves don’t have any education and would not be able to live decent lives even if they were nominally free. This can extend to the thought that actually slavery benefits the slaves, because they have some sort of security and a roof over their head.

Over time, people would be able to see through these arguments as fundamentally unjust. It might take a generation or two, and there would be many conservatives who continued to hold such beliefs, but the power of such ideas would diminish as more and more came to see them for what they were.

At this point, the killer argument kicks in. We have to keep slavery, or whichever other injustice, because things would collapse if we didn’t. If women could vote, for example, somehow the order of society would be fundamentally changed and pillars would collapse and the economy would be ruined and there would be intolerable social upheaval. If slaves were freed, where could they live, how could we afford the transition, and what about the prospect of riots or even wars if former slaves rose up? Further, losing slaves would impact economic competitiveness and our way of life, at least locally if not globally. In summary, rectifying these situations would be a nice idea in theory, but it is just not practical, it is naïve.

Now fast forward to our current debate about Syrian refugees, and, by extension, the limits to migration around the world. Many people have not given a thought to the human injustice involved, just as many people would have never thought slavery was unjust until general society pointed it out. But for those who get beyond that, the practical argument holds great sway.

Jeffrey Sachs is quite a good liberal commentator, but in last week’s Guardian, the practical arguments were exactly those he used to restrict immigration. He saw a flow as essentially unlimited, and therefore unmanageable or at the very least unacceptable to public opinion.

Just as with slavery and the other blots on human history, isn’t it time to move beyond such thoughts? And actually, even the practical arguments are rather thin.

The most open societies have tended to be the most successful and peaceful ones. When we see that in the last forty years the US has grown faster than the EU and the EU faster than Japan, the Economist would like us to believe it is all about small government and flexible labour markets, but the dominant contributor has been the sheer size of the working age population. Japan is ageing and shrinking faster than anywhere else, the EU is ageing as well, but the US is growing – mainly thanks to those pesky Hispanics that some politicians would see sent home.

It has been the same through history. This morning, I looked up the history of passports on Wikipedia. Among other things, I learned that the first passport is recorded in the Hebrew bible, that the name came from the fact that ports were traditionally free zones while to “pass” the port required some authorization, and that passports first came into common use in sixteenth century, in England. I also found out that passports were largely ignored in the age of trains from 1860-1910, for practical reasons, but then came back into vogue after World War 1, for security reasons and to control emigration (people wanting to get out, not come in). Is it a coincidence that 1860-1910 was an age of global development, and the inter-war years saw depression?

The US is quite a good case study for free movement, since states have very different laws and people are free to move between states. There have been periods of massive flows, but systems find ways to cope with such changes and in the end there are counter-flows. Detroit grew while there was work, then shrunk, and now starts to grow again. The southwest is growing, but will be limited once water becomes so scarce that people will be asked to pay properly for it. New York continues to grow, but some find the place too noisy and the rents too high.

In the event of global free movement, initial flows might put strains on services, but in the end new equilibria would come about, and finally most people would rather stay close to where they were born and where they understand the culture. There would need to be some transitional rules, for sure. Countries would need to qualify for the global free movement zone, which would nudge their policies in a good direction: what better advertisement could there be for the west over somewhere like Russia, for example?

The EU shows it is feasible. The US shows that it is beneficial. Comparing prevailing arguments with historical ones like slavery and women’s rights shows that it is just. So why can’t we fight the reactionaries around the world with the wonderful prospect of free global movement, and design how it can be made a reality? Perhaps in fifty years time we will all be able to look back and see this as just one more removal of a natural injustice.     

Get out of the way!

Sometimes at workshops I have been asked what is my single piece of advice for aspiring leaders. I’ve usually responded by quoting Martien van den Wittenboer, one of my better Shell bosses, with “Be Yourself”. I do love that as generic advice; we all spend far too much time trying to work on improving our weaknesses, and not enough building on our strengths and contributing with our unique assets. But now I have had a bit longer to reflect on my whole career, such as it was, and I have changed my mind. Now I would say: “Get out of the way!”

I believe this advice can apply to almost any manager. Like dysfunctional families, all of us are bad bosses in our own unique ways, but I don’t think very many of us err by being insufficiently intrusive. A bit like the famous epitaph for no one “I wish I’d devoted more of my time to work”, “I wish my boss had intervened more” would be a rare plea indeed.

I also believe this advice is especially useful because it is rarely offered. We all receive lots of advice about what we should do more of, but not enough about where we should be doing less. Finally, I think back to all my own bosses, and how they could have helped garner better performance from themselves and from me. Staying out of the way is a recurring theme.

Many of us are given a manager job because we have proven ourselves performing the jobs of subordinates. So we become a boss, and we can do what our subordinates do very effectively, probably better than them since we have more experience to bring. So we end up trying to do their jobs for them, since that is our comfort zone, and it has disastrous consequences.

First, no matter how dedicated we are, we can’t do ten jobs well at the same time. We become a bottleneck, as we are late doing one job while we are doing all the others. Worst of all, we get tired but there is no time left at all to do the one job that we actually have to do, the one of manager. The team leader job involves prioritizing resources, coaching, a lot of politics and interface management, and some skills requiring more distance such as future planning and creativity. These things are totally sacrificed while we are busy doing the jobs of our subordinates, so the team fails to go forwards. We are busy and tired, but we are not doing what we need to do at all.

Then we should consider the impact our behaviour has on the team members. How are they supposed to develop and grow if they are not allowed to face all the challenges of their job? What does it do for their confidence if they see their boss stepping in all the time? And how much initiative are they likely to show, if they know that everything they try is likely to require rework and may even duplicate someone else’s effort? In the end, such subordinates tend to shut down and do the minimum. What a waste of talent that is, and what a loss of upside for the business.

This is all very obvious stuff – we could never fall into this trap ourselves, could we? Well, that is one of those examples of asymmetry in boss relationships. It is extraordinary, and I have tested it many times. If I ask people to rate their bosses, they tend to score them rather poorly. But if I ask people to rate themselves as a boss, they are rather positive. There must be one or two really bad bosses out there who are skewing the numbers! Either that, or many of us are far less effective than we think. And a good place to start would be to look out for warning signs that we are in the way.

I think the most telling examples are often in progress meetings for projects. These can range from formal stage-gate type meetings with steering committees, to informal progress meetings between a boss and one or more team members trying to achieve a project task.

What are the most common outcomes of such meetings? Sadly, my experience tells me that the most common single outcome is to have another meeting in the future. Usually, the team is asked to check up some extra data or work stream, to correct a few errors, and to come back and re-present later on.

This outcome is a classic symptom of not getting out of the way. The extra data might help, but is it really necessary, or is it just that the person asking for it is demonstrating what they would have done if they had been doing the work themself? Do those errors really justify re-work, or is the one pointing them out just trying to justify their seat at the table by being clever? If the presentation is lacking, might it be that the original instructions were not clear enough, or that the team has really only done a partial job because they suspect that however complete a job they did, there would be some complaints and re-work demands?

Of course, such outcomes only serve to delay and extend projects and to demotivate project teams. Whole organisations become mired in meetings when this is the prevailing culture. How often are you in such meetings? Might you be the problem here? Don’t just consider the formal type of meetings, but extend your thoughts to informal progress meetings with team members. If instead, you can force yourself to let something move forward as good enough, even if not perfect, you will help everyone.

The second major symptom of being in the way covers excessive secrecy and protection of hierarchy. “Need to know” has its place, but in my opinion confidentiality and restriction are overused in business, sometimes just as an unconscious way of making something or someone feel important. Ask yourself if you could delete the word “confidential” from some documents, or if you could share things more with your staff. Are you uncomfortable when your staff talks directly with your own peers or your boss? If you encourage this, you avoid becoming a bottleneck and you open the door for more creative and agile solutions: in most cases you’ll find it reflects well on you too, as your staff will want your team to look good in front of others. Your team will also benefit from greater exposure and thank you for it.

Another area you can get out of the way is in team discipline and administration. Rotate chairmanship and agenda setting for team meetings. Set down the standards, but then watch the team enforce them for you via peer pressure. You can even involve them in recruiting. Don’t worry, you won’t lose control, you’ll just create a more productive and motivated unit, one which will often surprise you with ideas that you would not have thought of yourself.

I am not advocating the absent manager, and indeed there are important responsibilities to perform. If you have to sign something off, take your own signature seriously and don’t just be a rubber stamp – but then be very clear what you expect and be ready to accept something as good enough. A key role is to represent and defend the team and its members when required: that is one area where they will not want you out of the way at all. Also, it is important to be available if team members ask for help, and to put as much time as you possibly can into coaching and developing them.

As with so many good practices in business, there are useful parallels elsewhere in life. As parents, perhaps our toughest and most valuable responsibility is to let our children learn to fly solo, which means getting out of their way whenever we can. Then there are governments: most attempts to meddle in markets do more harm than good, as Brazil is finding out now. One great feature of capitalism is to leave the market to its own devices whenever possible. Mind you I laughed when the Economist recently ridiculed the latest Chinese five-year plan – which business would try to operate without one of those?

Lastly, getting out of the way can help in foreign policy too. I can argue that Obama has learned that, even though patience can be hard and have consequences. His Syria policy is slowly forcing others to face up to their own responsibilities – I could argue that Russia intervening is actually a triumph for the US, rather than the disaster portrayed by the macho commentators.

One of my proudest Shell legacies is a programme called Applied Leadership, in which leaders attempt peer couching in teams without much of an imposed agenda. What I forget at times is that the real architect was not I but Greg Lewin, a rare master at getting out of the way. I had proposed some heavy leadership programme, but he had the courage and foresight to see that Applied Leadership would be more effective. Well done Greg – a lesson for us all.