Sadly for Houdini the Fei Fei, Taiwan’s famous escape artist and fugitive, his days on the run came to an abrupt end last week in a maelstrom of official misunderstanding and incompetence.
Alec Issigonis, designer of the Mini car in 1959, famously said, “A camel is a horse designed by committee.” The Mini became one of the most successful cars of all time.
So he knew a thing or two about design and outcomes.
Sadly, the simple task of a capture of an escaped Baboon was organised by a committee of local officials.
The miserable demise of Houdini who was shot to death in a rural homestead by an overzealous hunter acting on behalf of the local council, has been mourned across the country. It is a timely reminder that we are effectively governed on many levels by incompetents.
There will, of course, be an inquiry, but it is obvious that the myriad people involved in the hunt were not communicating properly with each other. There was no clear chain of command, instructions as to the required outcome were not passed down and confusion reigned for days before the tragic outcome.
Compounding all this was the unseemly rush to claim credit for Houdini’s capture to the extent of congratulatory selfies being taken over his dead body as he lay sadly curled up in a net, presumably bleeding out.
These were soon replaced by pictures of officials bowing in apology over Houdini’s flower-draped ‘coffin’. What an unedifying display of official self-aggrandisement one minute, quickly replaced with an admission of utter uselessness on the other.
Poor Houdini never really stood a chance against these buffoons who were apparently more interested in their own image than they were in a positive outcome in terms of both public safety and the interests of a member of a non-native animal far from its natural home.
Unfortunately there is a deficiency of analytical thinking skills across all levels of officialdom which never ceases to depress us all. It does, of course, also exist in the commercial world but at least there incompetent people tend to be weeded out more quickly as the level of accountability tends to be much higher. Companies just can’t survive if staff are ineffective.
I was a director of a small company which was an offshoot of the multinational company I worked for and believe me, the Director’s Responsibility Manual is huge. It contains legal requirements on behaviour and you can end up in court if you are negligent or slipshod in the role.
Sadly for us taxpayers, a lot of officials, particularly at lower levels of the administration are more able to more easily hide in the herd of those around them, much like Wildebeest and shoal fish seek safety in numbers to confuse and baffle predators.
Ministers and Heads of Departments resign and take ultimate responsibility when something goes wrong on their particular patch. Take the Puyuma train crash in 2018 when Minister of Communications Wu Hongmou resigned two months after the incident. From what I have read about the disaster many of Wu’s underlings were held accountable for the incident but he rightly resigned because he was in charge when it happened, although he was not directly involved in it’s cause.
That said, the trend of stepping up, taking responsibility, being accountable and acting ethically is ebbing away and I hope this does not happen in Taiwan, although I fear it will given the more unscrupulous actions of some politicians in the recent past. As I have written before some are taking their lead from the likes of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson who brazenly dish out blame for failure to anyone but themselves.
A phrase far more prevalent in the UK media recently has been “Mr A pushes Mr B under a bus”. Which is generally applied to a politician who has dumped blame on an underling for a mistake they were ultimately accountable for.
After Prime Minister Liz Truss made a huge mistake in pushing for massive tax cuts the country could not afford crashed financial markets and was forced into an embarrassing U-turn, she simply blamed Finance Minister Kwasi Kwarteng, and refused to take responsibility.
“Truss throws Kwasi Kwarteng under a bus” shouted the Evening Standard newspaper front page the same day. Truss resigned soon after, but nevertheless she tried to shift the blame to Kwerteng in an attempt to survive.
Does former president Trump throw people under a bus to avoid being accountable? Just ask his former lawyer, Rudy Giuliani who is facing a $2.7 billion lawsuit for defending Trump’s conspiracy theories over vote rigging during the 2020 election. Or his former fixer and lawyer, Michael Cohen who is currently giving evidence to the grand jury investigating the former president after doing three years in prison for Trump related crimes.
It’s all part of the post-truth and lack of accountability era we live in and I would hate to see that infection gaining a larger foothold on these shores.
Errors of judgement have always happened and will continue to happen. There are names for it. In Britain and America it is commonly known as Murphy’s Law which holds that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. (It is really an aphorism but is attributed to many different people).
In military slang S.N.A.F.U (Situation Normal - All F**ked Up, or more politely Situation Normal - All Fouled Up) is defined in the dictionary as meaning a situation marked by errors or confusion.
In the commercial world I inhabited for most of my career, goals were clearly set and thought given to how to achieve that goal and various ‘owners’ assigned for the various stages involved who were accountable for their part and also the end result. The overall project would have a single ‘owner’ who would be accountable for the outcome, be it positive or negative.
You have to wonder, when you look at the apparent chaotic way some politicians and officials approach problems, whether they are lazy, do not care, or more interested in covering their tracks in case there is a S.N.A.F.U.
No comments:
Post a Comment