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Make a decision today…
… what happens tomorrow?
When managers at the Chernobyl reactor-plant decided a new level of safety was required... it was installed. A sensible precaution, but…
… it added another layer of complexity, to an otherwise highly complex system, and…
… it was tests of a new safety system that helped produce the meltdown and subsequent fire.
When complex things get more complex, unexpected outcomes are not rare accidents.
They become the normal.
Understanding complexity, unravelling it, can turn us into bystanders. Decisions taken in complex systems often produce consequences far beyond the intentions of the people making them.
The first effect is usually visible and immediate. The important impact arrives later and...
... from directions no one anticipated.
Military conflict in the Middle East is a good example. The US beef with Iran, might appear to be a contained strategic decision.
In reality, it is reverberating through one of the most sensitive choke points in the global economy, the Strait of Hormuz.
Any instability, or even the perception of instability, ripples instantly through energy markets, insurance costs, shipping routes and currency movements.
Oil prices jump, inflation follows, and the consequences ricochet through economies thousands of miles from the original decision.
People will be changing their holiday plans. Decisions which will reverberate through to the bloke selling the souvenir-tat in the market and in consequence…
... what's on his wife and three kid’s diner plate, or...
... a life saving drug for one of his family.
Closer to home... job losses, when already we have more unemployed than Italy.
This phenomenon is described as the law of unintended consequences. I like to think of it as the diner-plate theory.
Often, the more confident and decisive the intervention, the less leaders have considered the wider system they are disturbing.
Maybe, understanding systems, how they work, their impact might just not be possible… we can’t think wide enough and deep enough and fast enough.
Peter Senge, in his work on systems thinking, tried to warn us. He described the pattern as ‘fixes that fail.’
Senge is not just another management guru. His work is actually promoted, used and taught by the Cabinet Office. There is a whole blog on it, here.
To translate all this into English;
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Decisions we make today will end up being tomorrow’s problems.
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If the solution looks easy… you don’t understand the problem.
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Cause and effect are not closely related in time and space.
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You might be able to have your cake and eat it… but not at the same time.
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Dividing the elephant in the room in half does not produce two small elephants… it gives you a room with a big mess, and…
… most important, if you look for blame, you’ll miss the point.
The interactions between parts of the system are probably too complicated for anyone to predict fully.
The NHS is one of the most complex organisations in Europe. Its workforce, finance, social care links, general practice, hospital capacity and emergency services are all interconnected.
Change one element suddenly and the disturbance rarely stays contained.
The current rush to remove large numbers of staff from ICBs and NHSE carries exactly this risk.
On paper the logic looks straightforward… reduce management numbers and save money. The visible consequence is immediate…
… a lower management payroll.
But, the less visible consequences may take longer to appear.
Cutting the targeted number of 18,000 posts from a workforce of 1.4m, may sound like trimming bureaucracy.
In reality it removes roughly thirty-one million working hours of organisational capacity a year, from one of the most complex, safety-critical systems in the world.
The question policymakers have not yet answered is simple… which thirty-one million hours of work will the NHS stop doing?
In well-run organisations there are normally three steps before cuts of this scale;
- Process redesign
- Role redesign
- Workload modelling…
… then remove posts.
The NHS Board have reversed this sequence. Posts removed before the new operating model exists.
Managers do not simply administer bureaucracy. They;
- coordinate services,
- maintain institutional memory,
- manage contracts,
- organise programmes and
- keep complicated networks functioning.
In complex systems bold action often creates the illusion of control, but…
… systems thinking teaches a different lesson.
From the Oval Office to the Strait of Hormuz, from the Victoria St., HQ, to the workaday front-line of the NHS...
... messing with complex systems has a habit of ending up on someone's diner plate.
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