Incompetence

The internet is full of conspiracy theories. When something goes wrong, I tend to reach the opposite conclusion – there has been a cock up.

The conclusion comes from years of experience. I have witnessed stunning incompetence and its consequences, time and again. I have also witnessed a few conspiracies, but these are few and far between. Unless certain conditions are in place, cock-ups are much more likely.

We are woefully qualified for many of the things we need to achieve in life. Most of us have little clue how to manage our personal finances. Even more basically, we try to achieve dating, sex, marriage and parenthood despite overwhelming incompetence for all these key skills. I look back at my lifetime performance in all of these areas and cringe in shame, and I have no reason to believe that I am much worse than the average in most of them.

It is worth trying to understand why we are so bad at these life skills, our primary purpose really if we want to perpetuate our species. We start we a big advantage, namely that evolution has honed our abilities over time. Wow, we would be even worse if it wasn’t for that large tailwind.

I am not sure if they form a good hierarchy, or are complete or not independent, but I have come up with five basic explanations for incompetence. The first is exclusion: the pool of people who get a chance to try stuff is too small and poorly selected. This one applies much less to all the relationship and procreation stuff, but looms large in business and politics. Until very recently, the only people deemed worthy to manage a country were the eldest sons of the ones who already did it. That is not a great selection process.

The second great impediment to competence is the absence of information and training. It is amazing that we receive a hundred pages about operating a dishwasher, yet we are made a boss or a husband and just have to do our best. Much of our education is largely irrelevant to real life. I studied for three years for a degree from which I don’t believe I have ever subsequently used anything learned.

The third impediment is dogma. Life is too complex not to make simplifying assumptions, but many of these become outdated and dangerous. A lot of dogma comes from religion. Now just how valuable was your religious upbringing when it came to dating, sex or marriage? There are some good principles in there somewhere, but shrouded in a lot of stuff that only harms us.

The fourth impediment is more technical; it is the whole morass of roles and motivations. In any endeavor involving multiple humans, there are likely to be unclear goals and roles, and a whole series of individual motivations. Even in a partnership between two, such as a marriage, this is a minefield. In a corporation of 100,000 employees, with shareholders, suppliers, regulators, customers and other stakeholders, what is achieved is a complex web that usually resembles incompetence.

The fifth impediment is what Harold MacMillan termed events. Beautifully aligned teams with clear roles usually collapse under the pressure of time or some crisis. Pressure can bring out the best in us, but usually it just demonstrates our crass incompetence. This can be comical – I have recently enjoyed binge watching the various series of Armando Iannucci, notably The Thick of It. I love this sort of British humour. The characters generally also support another of my experiences, that most of us are well meaning and doing our best, but that pressure leads us into unedifying places, and, once we have been there once, it is hard to escape. Most people who we are tempted to think of as evil are usually just normal people who have been caught out by incompetence and then get stuck.

This supports the wonderful Peter Principle, that people tend to rise to their level of incompetence. In many ways we should really celebrate this, because back in the days of impediment one, most people did not rise at all. But nowadays promotions are available (sometimes even to women, foreigners, Catholics and commoners), and we can climb until we fail, and then stop and make everybody else miserable. In business, I certainly did, across multiple dimensions, though a breakdown then offered me a route down the other side of the mountain that is closed to most.

Looking through the five impediments helps us understand how humanity has made so much progress in recent times. Exclusion is still strong (how many Papua New Guinea people run Fortune 500 companies?), but diminishing every year. Education and information have improved markedly, even if we have a long way to go. One of the strongest features of young people today is their willingness to ask and explore and to display their own vulnerability; Youtube is a wonderful thing. Dogma is still a major problem, in business, families, politics and everywhere, but much less so than fifty years ago.

We still struggle mightily with the fourth and fifth impediments. In many ways they have become worse. The penchant for flat organisations and the emphasis on agility, together with the decline of career loyalty, all beneficial in some ways, have made the daily life of many business managers almost unmanageable, with no downtime, endless e-mails and meetings, and a constant web of stakeholders and politics.

We reach our Peter Principle point more reliably now as a result. For me, my Achilles heels included lack of stamina and a tongue lacking control. I became tired and undisciplined. Unlike many, I loved the complexity and the line management, but they defeated me all the same.

I witnessed extreme examples of this modern type of incompetence in Shell. The worst was a mid career external hire, a lovely man but utterly unequipped to handle his role. All five curses were evident. He was selected quickly and narrowly, with a dogma that he had to come from a consumer company and to utter the word customer in every sentence, quite a feat I can tell you. This guy reminded me of Peter Sellers in Being There, another wonderful example of British comedy of the absurd. Once on seat, he lacked information he needed while being surrounded by information he could not process, was immediately a hostage to the motivations of others, whether benign or malicious, and destroyed by the mildest of crises. Still, he lasted six months because the senior manager who recruited him could not face the public ignominy of admitting his own failure.

Imagine being in the senior leadership team of a company like JC Penney, one of many on a doomed road marked by potholes. You were probably a good store manager, or more likely a buyer or designer. Because of that you were promoted to lead a huge dispersed team of such experts, something you hate and for which nobody trained you. You have to deal with an agenda of constant meetings with people in financial and other disciplines you do not understand, many recruited in panic or actively subverting whatever strategy exists, one that changes each time a new leader or banker appears with their hopeless dogma. This situation is not as uncommon as you might think, and slightly less exaggerated versions inhibit almost everybody once they progress beyond managing a simple business unit.

We should recall all this whenever we are tempted to assign conspiracies. Another example is the movie Vice, about Dick Cheney and the George W Bush administration. True, the piece has some villains, though mainly they are misled by dogma and some political greed. However, the overwhelming sense is of incompetence, with all five pitfalls in evidence. My guess is that when the dust settles on the Trump presidency and the intelligent histories are penned, it will likewise be the breath-taking incompetence that shines through.

What can we do? Well, in most situations we now have some sort of merit-based selection and plenty of information, when we care to find it. Over time society will become better at sorting the information to be more useful. Dogma is always dangerous, so individually we must challenge our assumptions and collectively listen to outliers such as whistle-blowers.

The challenges of roles, motivations and time pressure will not reduce any time soon. Individually, we are smart if we work out our limits and try to stick to them. Most of my most fulfilling experiences and ones where I was able to best use my strengths have been in challenges where these dimensions were rather controlled. I think I can administer a choir rather well. I can manage a team so long as the day to day pressure is limited and the role includes idea generation. I managed a post-merger integration rather well, because the politics and roles and goals were clear and shared.

Collectively, let us challenge these fads towards complexity in business and excessive control spans, and champion good line managers. Scale is good when there are machines, but usually a hindrance with people. Bet on companies that understand this.

But probably I have missed the point hopelessly. If I have, don’t suspect any conspiracy because you won’t find one. It will be just another of my many cock ups.