Peter, Dilbert and Institutional Incompetence

You've probably never heard of Dr. Laurence J. Peter, but his work goes a long way to explaining why almost every large organisation, including Governments, are totally useless and operate in spite of their upper management and "leaders".

I've been in and out of various hospitals over the last five or six years because of issues with my wife's health, in different areas and different counties, and they're all useless. Don't get me wrong - the people at the front line, so to speak, are nearly always brilliant. Polite, capable and willing, and really well qualified. The problem is the systems that they work in are not fit for purpose. On several occasions, we have arrived for appointments to discuss the results of the latest scan, only to find that the consultant doesn't have the images. If we're lucky, they'll have a written report of the scan, describing the results - but no actual image. A couple of months ago, we saw an endocrinologist who said he would like my wife to have an ultrasound scan, and then a visit to his clinic to discuss the scan.

A few weeks later, we received the two appointments through the post. The appointment for the specialist had been made before the scan. My wife realised that this was not right, so she rang the office and got the appointments rearranged. She had the scan, and we turned up for the consultant's appointment. The scan results had not been sent to the consultant's office. Nursing staff had to spend precious time phoning around and arranging for the results to be sent. We got there in the end, but not by design. We had a similar experience when my wife had an MRI. We arrived to see the neurologist only to find that no images had been sent. Again, some frantic searching bore fruit and we eventually had the images that we needed.

Virtually every other company has stories or experiences like this. The staff at the lowest levels in the organisation are busting a gut to do a useful day's work in the face of incompetence and ignorance in the levels above them. One explanation for this was provided by Dr Peter in 1969. It became known as "The Peter Principle".

This explanation holds that when someone is good (competent) at the job that they do, they get promoted to the next level up. If they do well there, they get promoted again. Eventually, they get to a position where their performance at that level does not warrant further promotion. Thus they are no longer competent. This is the general thrust of the Peter Principle - that people get promoted to the level of their incompetence. My own experience bears this out. In nearly every company I've worked for (some more than others!) most of the management positions are filled with people who are incompetent at management, leadership or both.

There is a variation on this hypothesis - "The Dilbert Principle". This was created by the author Scott Adams. His version is that people who are incompetent are promoted further up the organisation where they can do less damage. Adams' character Dogbert explained it as "nature's way of removing morons from the productive flow". I am personally aware of one such example, in a previous company, of someone who was so useless at the task at hand, that he was transferred to management where he could do less damage.

If either of these points are even half true - then most of the people in any given management position are there either because they aren't good enough to be promoted further, or they've been promoted to their current position to get them out of the way of the productive people. Not inspiring, is it?

The other reason that most large companies are institutionally useless, is that the people making decisions and policy are so far removed from reality, by which I mean the reality of what's actually happening, that they couldn't possibly do an effective job. If you've ever had the misfortune of being on one of those cringeworthy team building courses where someone has to drive a car blindfolded whilst being verbally directed by a colleague, you'll know exactly what I mean. The senior managers are so distant that by the time their latest policy is implemented, the circumstances that lead to it in the first place have shifted, and it's no longer relevant.

This is why politics is almost always a totally futile exercise from the public's point of view. It genuinely doesn't make any difference who you vote for. For a start, most politicians know next to nothing about the business of their area of responsibility. Some of them (I'm tempted to say most of them) have never done a real day's work in their lives and so can't relate to us to begin with. If, as happens rarely, you get a politician who for some inexplicable reason, does know something about their area of responsibility, all of the above applies; they're so far from the shop floor that they can't effectively manage any situation.

As I said earlier, some organisations work despite their political leads and senior management. The NHS and the Police are perfect examples. A lot of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) have not been on patrol for so long that I'd be surprised if they could even remember the caution. The nature of policing has changed so much in that time, they wouldn't have a clue if they were forced to go on active duty again. It used to be the same in the military - the reasons that so many lives were lost in the First World War was that the generals were implementing strategies from their previous war experience, which were no longer effective and were actually counter productive.

The unfortunate thing for a lot of the public services is that all of these things overlap disastrously - managed by people with decades of experience, and little of it relevant, and led by politicians who know nothing about that service anyway. The current debacle over the cuts to the NHS and Police services illustrates this perfectly. The Government of the day thinks it knows all about these services, being given information and assurances by upper structures which are twenty years out of date. The result is the complete and utter shambles that we find ourselves in.

As I write this, it's Sunday evening. That means tomorrow is Monday morning. Enjoy your week at work everyone.