nourishing obscurity

Please answer me this – why can’t we get anything right?

My excuse is that I’m aging but all those bright young things out there, pushing envelopes and thinking outside the box, rolling this and that out – surely they are at the peak of their mental powers and should be able to get it right.

The answer, it seems to me, has something to do with the removal of discretionary power from people.  In a life and death situation, such as that plane ride, it is critical to follow procedures blindly until it’s perfectly obvious that something is mightily wrong.

In day to day life though, people get their knickers so far into a twist that they start making errors, sometimes critical ones.   I once worked in a job where the staff were only there because they were professionals in what they did.  There were broad targets but how you got there was up to you.  There was a business ethos to be adhered to and a spokesperson made all the public statements but other than that, no one was too fussed.

Enter a new leader and she couldn’t abide anyone else doing it his or her way.  It was “my way or the highway”. When she was clearly wrong and it was mentioned, this made it worse and we got into the old “criticize the boss only on pain of dismissal” syndrome – the first step to an organization going down because it suppresses healthy incentive to contribute from one’s own experience.  She was so defensive and intense that it cast a pall over operations.

I saw a conference organized once where everyone was so frightened to make any kind of error that they … made errors.  Ridiculous errors too, such as taking away the seat of the key speaker, just as he was about to sit down – this has been mentioned before on this blog.

It’s a combination of not daring to use any discretion or common sense whatever, slavishly following the regulations and procedures to the letter and no one really informing anyone else of how this or that is done which causes the problem.  Whenever you insist that everyone operates as cogs in the machine, then the machine itself must have its operating system debugged and working perfectly.

Frightened people don’t work perfectly – they forget to mention things, fail to put this or that in the right box and then the recriminations and witch-hunting starts.  Combine that with people of a lower intellect or ability level being given preference over mavericks, on the grounds that they’ll comply better and are a fashionable societal group and there is the recipe for disaster – non-professionals desperately pretending to be professional, according to the handbook instructions on being professional.

Add to this the employment situation and ho easy it is to be on the scrapheap these days.  That’s what we have in this country – not exclusively in this country, to be fair, yet quite widespread, nonetheless.

Filed under: Society & human issues