Systemic breakdown in organisations has a cascade effect, but often hides in plain sight for a considerable time, Dr David Cliff explores what happens when things are broken.
“When the Bough breaks…down will come cradle, baby and all”, is a children’s lullaby. Unfortunately, it accurately serves as a metaphor, for the failure of our personal social services to protect children adequately these days. I can remember reading the Maria Caldwell enquiry in 1973. The same rhetoric of improvement was there in the multiple recommendations with the laudable, but unrealistic mantram of, “this must never happen again”. Unrealistic because it did, Victoria Climbié, baby P, Rochdale, the list goes on…
Our NHS system shows increasing systemic failure, with different parts of a leviathan system, incapable of interacting with each other. Ambulances queue outside of hospitals, A&E can’t move people into beds, blocked by people who need social care. Social care itself is an overlapping system, not quite healthcare, not quite something else. The Covid enquiry has ably highlighted in order to protect the NHS, ministers summarily discharged our elderly to, in many cases, fatally, cross infect their peers back in their care homes.
Systemic failure occurs when public expectations and that of customers have to be maintained in defiance of the operational and resource realities that exist for an organisation. An organisation such as the NHS that is politicised, has to become all things to all people and virtue signals where the gaps lie. It must deal with cancer, age, mental health and even change the physical gender of people in a world of increasing rights and individual preferences are championed more by globalised market forces, than any notion of community. We see in reality, getting to an NHS dentist, whatever your gender and racial identity, is for many, a bridge too far.
Law enforcement has seen the same thing. In times of increasing focus on human rights, international tensions, hate crimes and other socially constructed criminal activities, the baseline issues around burglary, shop lifting, domestic violence et cetera, rarely now see either great preventative or detective work in the physical spaces people dwell.
Of course, that would never happen in the private sector! Yet the high street has given way to online shopping, banks reduced to “hubs”, mid contract price hikes and offshore or centralised customer services abound whilst shareholders and CEOs receive bonuses at odds with the unhappy, depersonalised lived experience of so many customers. Complaints are increasingly met with formulaic responses, often with an upsell/upgrade as the solution on offer. Small wonder there is a groundswell for Martin Lewis to be PM!
Scores of well-paid service executives stand in front of the cameras saying they are committed to what they are paid to do anyway, as if it is a statement of virtue and a vindication for any failure in the system they oversee.
Many people no longer want to live in the truth, preferring instead the simulacrum of how things ‘should’ be rather than how they really are. All of us are constantly finding our realities reframed by our political classes who, rather than being honest, offer rhetorical sound bites and the ritual blaming of a “Global Pandemic”.
With an impending election, the Tories abysmal handling of the economy is deflected onto Covid and Ukraine and oh yes, the ‘bogeyman’ of the Labour Party when in power. Whilst fiscal management is a constant issue that transcends any individual government, accounting for your results on the stewardship of another organisation, 13 years ago, simply doesn’t wash anywhere else.
When systems collapse, they affect real people in communities. They realise how powerless they are to influence events; direct action is inhibited by increasing legislation to limit public protest. Organisations often use the digital world to move into nameless, faceless leviathan structures with an email address rather than a human name to contact when there are difficulties.
Those with vested interest continue to plough a furrow of their own self-promotion, whilst increasingly creating distance from those they serve, only for the disasters to be discovered later, at even greater human and financial cost. We only need to look at the situation with the Post Office as a case in point to validate that position.
I am all for being positive about the future, but for some it serves as denial in the here and now. We must call things out as they are. Sadly, realists these days are increasingly seen as spectres at a feast where the starving are told by the caterers that smaller, more costly portions are good for you!
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