Most people view the COVID-19 pandemic as a rare outlier of normal events. An aberration. It is important to recognize, though, that the process through which it emerged as a pandemic was not extraordinary at all. On the contrary, the direct and indirect transmission of the virus between people was a particularly vivid expression of the complex social process of everyday human interaction. For the most part, of course, this involves small-group and one-to-one conversations, rather than the exchange of potentially deadly, airborne particles! However, if we were to take our own and others' experience seriously, we would recognise that the pandemic brought into sharp focus our inability to predict and control what happens as a result of the widespread interplay of people's interactions, both locally and across the world. It is through this continuous, interactional process that we are all perpetually creating the future together - in all of its richness and beauty; ugliness and poverty; hope and despair.
Sadly, despite this graphic illustration of the unavoidable complexity of everyday human life, the fundamental belief remains that those ‘in charge’ should have been able to predict and control what happened. Whilst critics continue to argue that those orchestrating the UK's official response got it wrong, there is no agreement at all as to what, when and how they should have done things differently. All decisions are political (with a little ‘p’), in that these unavoidably require balances to be struck between competing demands, and trade-offs to be made, in what is always a continuously emerging and unknowable future. To compound the problem, the advice that decision-makers received from their various scientific advisors and other experts was itself contested by others; people whose own views were offered with little if any acknowledgment of the partiality and potential fallibility of their own judgements.
So, regardless of the popular rhetoric, nobody knows what would have happened if different choices had been made along the way. Nobody knows, in the unique context and history of (in this case) the UK, how things might have turned out, if apparently successful elements of the widely diverse approaches taken by governments across the world had somehow been cobbled together into a supposedly ‘best practice’ strategy. From here on in, the focus needs to be on the future. That is, on gaining actionable insights from past experience, which will aid the practical judgement of those called upon to deal with any equivalent threats that might emerge.
If useful lessons are to be learnt from the management and support of the UK-wide response to the pandemic, this requires those involved to be willing, able and allowed to openly discuss their recollections of what happened at the time. And, most importantly, to share the contributions that they made to what emerged — warts and all. Crucially, this requires them to be a willing to admit to their own mistakes, lack of preparedness, well-intentioned failures and the like, alongside what they judge to be more successful interventions. In particular, they need to be encouraged and enabled to participate in ways that reflect and acknowledge the real-world messiness and unknowability of the context within which they and everyone else were participating.
The Public Inquiry
Against this background, what can we say about the UK's formally constituted COVID-19 Inquiry?
It seems to me that the current arrangements have little chance of reaching meaningful conclusions as regards the complex social reality ("wiggliness") of what actually went on. Less still the implications of this for future ways of working, which are not simply reduced to a mechanistic and context-free set of formally imposed procedures, checklists, targets, etc. With this in mind, it is likely that arrangements that would have encouraged and facilitated more reflective practice, along with open dialogue between those in the know and relevant others, would have been much more conducive to this than a pseudo court of law..
Some of the issues that I see are:
- Structuring the review as a Public Inquiry undermines the sense of a mutual-learning environment; both in terms of the inordinate amount of time required to reach a conclusion, and the presupposition that we are dealing with a series of failures for which somebody is to blame.
- Adopting a ‘blame frame’ limits people’s willingness to acknowledge and unpack their own contribution to what happened — both positive and negative — which is an essential condition for learning. Whilst much of the attention in the Decision-making and Political Governance module has so far been on the character and perceived capabilities of the specific people in charge at the time, it's worth recognizing that a wholly different cast would be called upon to orchestrate any country-wide response to future challenges of this kind.
- Examination of ‘witnesses’(!) in search of simplistic yes/no, right/wrong answers, rather than seeking-out nuanced, context-aware, reflective and sometimes open-ended responses.
- Taking for granted the mechanistic and context-free assumptions of management orthodoxy.. These fail to take seriously the complex social dynamics of organization. In particular, believing that order, predictability and control are within the gift of those who are formally in charge, provided that they circumscribe people's ways of working with formal systems, procedures, targets, measurements, and so on.
- Relying on ‘evidence’ that is based on people’s post-event rationalization of the complex social reality of what was actually happening day to day. ‘Evidence’, that is, which fits with the orthodox narrative and, in particular, the myth that if you’re not in control, you’re not leading. Dominic Cummings, for example, used a ‘shopping trolley’ analogy to ridicule Boris Johnson’s apparent indecisiveness; doing so in the midst of a crisis of which nobody in the world was in control. A subsidiary aim here, of course, is for those being questioned to try to absolve themselves from criticism and to make sure that the 'blame' lands elsewhere.
- ‘Weaponizing’ supposedly private informal exchanges. In the current module, most of the questioning seems to have centred on the WhatsApp ‘conversations’. In earlier times, these exchanges would have occurred almost exclusively in person and off the record. Informal, shadow-side conversations are an essential aspect of organizational life — and of life in general. Such interactions are fundamental to how things get done in practice. If the ‘SPADS’ and others had been doing their jobs properly, they would have been using such exchanges to mobilize informal coalitions of support for the shifts in perspective and practice that they, the relevant Ministers, key officials, and other 'technical' experts judged to be necessary. Instead, it seems that many used these solely to boost their own egos; and to criticize the capabilities and character of those that they were supposed to be advising and supporting. By definition, informal, shadow-side conversations are not intended to be shared in official forums. Yet here, they are providing the main focus of attention in a Public Inquiry!. The naivety of those involved in sharing their innermost thoughts via WhatsApp perhaps says most about the quality of their judgement overall.
- Enabling widespread, real-time reporting by the media of what’s being said; with their thirst for sensational headlines setting the ‘tone’ for subsequent interviewees’ responses.
Although commenting on Inquiries in general, rather than this specific example, I think that Johnnie Moore put it perfectly in a comment on his blog from 10 years ago. In it, he challenged the presumption that we are able to model the dynamics of real-world interaction:
"It seems a default setting in this country to demand enquiries, led by authority figures and typically lawyers. These take a long time and produce dense, thick detailed written reports. It all sounds sensible, but I think the whole grammar and style of these things is seriously disconnected from the way people actually function in the real world ... We get seduced by the idea that if we work hard enough, we can produce a sufficiently detailed model of the system and figure out what’s wrong."
He calls this "the tyranny of the explicit".
We were all on the pitch, playing
The big difference between the inevitably flawed efforts of those charged with making the decisions, and what the assembled masses of scorekeepers, commentators and the rest of us were engaged in, is that the former were caught-up in the practical realities of dealing with the challenges of governing moment-to-moment. Those who saw themselves as reporters and commentators need to recognize that their own, post-event words and actions unavoidably contributed to the very factors and situations that they were reporting and commenting upon. They, too, were active participants — and often very influential ones. They were (and still are!) on the pitch, playing’, so to speak, not ‘sitting in the stands’, as objective observers of other people’s actions. What they said, and how they said it, served to clarify, reinforce and — on occasion, no doubt — undermine official efforts to deal with the implications of what was happening at the time.
And in the end...
Johnnie Moore's notion of "the tyranny of the explicit" is spot on. It echoes the theme that underpins the wiggly world image at the head of this post. That is, it counters the mainstream belief that it is possible to 'catch the wiggliness of the world in a net' - in this case, comprising the six modules of the COVID-19 Inquiry. As the philosopher Alan Watts said, "… the real world slips like water through our imaginary nets. However much we divide, count, sort, or classify this wiggling into particular things and events, this is no more than a way of thinking about the world: it is never actually divided.”
And so, in prepararing for, and responding to, any similar catastrophe that might arise in the future, all that those in charge can do is to muddle through the complex social reality within which they — indeed all of us — are continuously immersed. Their ongoing challenge then becomes one of seeking to do so with purpose, courage and skill.
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