Thread by @garius

It's important to understand HOW you reach a point where animals are evacuated ahead of people.

It's not due to malice, but of addressable issues all organisations need to watch for in their productive narcissist leadership:

I call it the "Skeletor's Minions Problem"

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https://twitter.com/theousherwood/status/1468165943310356481

The Skeletor's Minions Problem (SMP) happens when you have an insecure populist narcissist in politics, or a productive narcissist in business, in charge of an organisation. But the org lacks:

1) Top level understanding of what happens on the ground
2) ANY senior staff pushback

If, as is alleged (with growing evidence), Boris Johnson specifically ordered the evacuation of animals from Afghanistan then there likely wasn't a moment where he thought people would miss out.

He thought that he could shout "do something about this!!" with no consequences.

That's a career-long problem with BJ and leaders like him. They've huffed at the tap of Steve Jobs biographies (or the Eton education variant) and drawn the lesson that productive narcissism gets things done:

You give people a tricky problem. Smile/Shout a lot. They solve it.

Now the truth is, that CAN work. For a while. At the beginning. But it relies heavily on two things:

1) Surrounding yourself with actual talent (Steve Wozniak)
2) Surrounding yourself with people who understand reality, who'll tell you to eff off, when it really, really matters.

And this is where most poundshop Steve Jobs, or populist narcissists like Johnson fail. They like doing the shouty/smiley bit. But they're paranoid about being found out as a bit useless.

So they surround themselves with nodding dogs and stupid/lazy people.

I guarantee you that Boris Johnson was (if the alleged sequence of events is true) not sitting there going:

"Do I save dogs or people?"

He sat there, remembered his hero Churchill writing 'fix this' on memos, and breezily did the modern equivalent of the same.

But the issue is that Churchill DIDN'T have the Skeletor's Minions problems. Most of Churchills 'fix it' scrawlings were fucking stupid. Same as the stuff he'd bring up in War Cabinet.

But Churchill had smart Ministers and Senior Staff who understood stuff and would tell him no.

FUN FACT! The last person off the beach during the evacuation of the Gallipoli beaches in WW1 (Churchill's big disaster) was Major Clem Attlee.

Future leader of the Labour party, deputy PM in WW2.

Clem raising an eyebrow tended to make Winston stop and think a bit.

Johnson hasn't got that. He's specifically built a government that doesn't have that. He's Skeletor, shouting at Raabman, Man Hattcock and a bunch of other cheap interchangeable plastic action figures in the hope they'll make actual decisions or fill in the complexity gap.

And they can't. Because, frankly, if they could then they wouldn't be in the government in the first place. Rishi is the only cabinet member close to being competent and that was an accident. Johnson would fire him in a second now if he got the chance.

And that's how you end up here an an awful situation that costs lives on the ground.

Johnson had no thought about the logisitics bottlenecks in the evacuation. Raab didn't either and probably didn't want to. He wanted to shout "something must be done" too.

And nobody said "no."

Governments and organisations can't run on narcissism alone. They can tolerate it. It can actually be productive if channelled correctly.

But effective leadership is quiet leadership. You need more Pikes than Kirks. More Arderns than Johnsons.

Otherwise in a crisis, things fail

I've given plenty of talks on this btw. Building cultures like this in IT precisely so they are crisis-tolerant is literally something people pay me to do.

Here's a UCISA CPD module I delivered on building Quiet Leadership cultures, if you want more.

And here are six things you can start doing as a manager or senior leader, right now, to make your organisation, department or team both a better place to work AND better prepared to deal with ANY crisis.

The right workplace culture matters. It's not just for show.

Here's the slide on diversity as a key pillar of effective leadership as well, before someone with numbers in their handle calls me 'woke'.

Problems are solved by ideas. More life experiences/perspectives/talent maximises the chances of good ideas. Who robs themselves of that?!