Thread by @garius

One of the things I do for a living is design governance models. I'm very good at it. People pay me lots of money to do it.

What truly annoys me about this government is how many utterly basic errors they've made on lockdown rules, as they're terrified of responsibility. /1

https://twitter.com/JoshHalliday/status/1289109060797726721

For governance to work, it has to be:

1) Simple
2) Unambiguous
3) Have obvious consequences for failure to comply
4) clear on who has authority to make decisions/exceptions, and MAKE SURE THAT HAPPENS.

This isn't rocket science. It's pretty damn obvious to anyone who does this stuff, or has had to deal with... well... human beings in any way.

It is because we are a constantly swirling mass of individual emotions, demands, obligations and desires, all competing for priority.

This is why complex governance models - such as the utter bullshit this government has been throwing out for months now don't work.

Because they end up failing at points 1) and 2). They are neither simple, nor unambiguous.

And that introduces the worst thing ever: Common Sense

Common sense does not exist. It is not a thing. INDIVIDUAL sense is and, in homogeneous groups, it often pulls everyone vaguely in the same direction, making it LOOK like common sense exists.

But the UK, like your average workplace or digital community, is NOT homogeneous.

Repeat after me:

GOVERNANCE CANNOT RELY ON COMMON SENSE

The bucket of under-informed nerves and chemicals we are leads even good people to justify stupid shit to ourselves, often subconsciously. This results leads to bad decisions.

This is how 90% of data breaches happen.

This is why you have simple, clear rules. To protect otherwise good people from making shit decisions in good conscience.

Because it is UNFAIR ON THEM. If you are in charge. It is YOUR FUCKING JOB, not theirs to make the hard decisions. That is what you are paid (or elected) for

On top of that, you have the small percentage of the population who are just Generic Arsehole. That is, for whatever reason, they simple refuse to accept that the rules apply to them.

There is no reasoning with those people. If you have vague rules, they will exploit them.

And when they exploit them, I don't know let's say by fucking off to the nearest castle for an eye test, you not only insult the good people who did try (and we're often inevitably failing) to follow the rules, but also show the other Generic Arseholes that they can do the same.

Which is why 3) is important. You need clear consequences for failure to comply. Which you can't have if your governance system is overly complex. Because it'll be full of holes which they'll then happily bog you down in arbitrating for bloody ages.

Complexity is the enemy. It is ALWAYS the enemy. If your governance system has complexity it is a paper tiger.

IT 👏 WILL 👏 NOT 👏 WORK.

But simplicity inevitably leads to issues. This is fine. This is why you have 4) - clear authority and fast decision making.

Your governance model has to:

1) Clearly identify who has the authority to make decisions
2) Empower and support them in doing so
3) Make fucking sure the people in those roles are prepared to do it (or allow you to remove them from that position).

This is critical. People need to know who they can ask if they need clarity or - yes - to break the rules.

And they need to get a clear and prompt response.

People will HAPPILY follow strict rules, as long as they feel they are equally enforced and have a path to an exemption.

90% of times, they will also happily accept not getting an exemption (which in most cases they didn't need) as long as they've had an actual, sensible and friendly conversation with a human being about why that exemption isn't valid.

Logic works, when people trust the source.

But they have to trust the source of the decision, and believe that they are actually making decisions. Not just punting shit down the road, or back on the user, or onto someone else.

Which means the decision-maker has to actually decide stuff. Visibly.

They'll even accept that sometimes those decisions will be wrong.

There's an old military adage that the only thing worse than a bad decision in a crisis is no decision at all. This is 100% correct.

This is fine, as long as your governance model ACKNOWLEDGES PEOPLE CAN MAKE BAD DECISIONS, and empowers people to change them once this becomes clear.

And finally you damn well need people at the top who are actually prepared to both decide things, own those decisions, and change them promptly and quickly if it becomes clear they are wrong.

It's the price you pay at the top, for asking people lower down to obey strict rules.

All of that is how you design governance that works. It's not rocket science, but it doesn't happen as much as it should because of that last step.

It requires senior people to fucking OWN decision-making.

Almost every bad governance model I've seen has failed because of this. It tries to swap complexity for decisionmaking. It tries to replace leadership and senior ownership with reems of paper and advice

It abdicates responsibility and replaces that with hope and eventually blame

Now go back and read this thread again, and think about everything the UK government, or the US, have done. From STAY ALERT to HERD IMMUNITY, to Cummings apologies and Matt "You can meet for a pint but not in a house" fucking Hancock's awful TV interviews, near daily.

Now compare it with New Zealand or a whole bunch of other countries. And think about how they've approached this challenge and applied the principles I've set out above.

And that's what's TRULY annoying about this whole thing. This isn't about partisan politics.

It's about BASIC 👏 PRINCIPLES 👏 OF 👏 LEADERSHIP 👏

It's about expecting AT LEAST the same level of basic managerial competence we'd expect from ordinary managers a large business.

REGARDLESS of their politics, Johnson, Hancock, this whole mob - and their US equivalents - have failed at basic business management.

You can get away with that, for a bit, when you're running a paper supplier in Slough.

Not when you're running a government. /END

SIDENOTE: If governance models are something you want to know more about, here's a talk I gave a few years back on designing devolved governance models for higher education:

SECOND SIDENOTE: And here's one on techniques for identifying Invisible Labour and how to manage teams plagued by it, as this came up in comments.