Heroes Not Zombies

There’s something which really bothers me about modern management theory and practice – “efficiency”.

“Why should that bother you?” you ask.

Well, because it seems to me that it usually means getting the greatest return from the least input or effort. And I’m not sure that’s always a good idea. I’m coming from the perspective of health care. I despaired of the annual cuts after cuts after cuts in the NHS. Every year I saw colleagues who retired or moved away, not replaced. Every single time someone left the remaining staff were asked to “absorb” the missing colleague’s workload. Every year there were more budget restrictions, more closures of beds and services, all in the name of “efficiency”.

So what has happened now that a pandemic has hit? Not enough beds, not enough equipment, not enough staff. Even now, weeks into the crisis, frontline staff lack adequate amounts of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment). All the pressure to “protect the NHS” was due to the fact it had been pared down to the bone over at least a decade. There was, and there is, no, or little, resiliency in the system. Yes, they redirected staff and reallocated beds to deal with the COVID-19 patients, but did so at the expense of the care and services which those staff and beds were normally employed for.

Is it really a good idea to have “just in time” ordering and delivery systems for something like the NHS? It doesn’t look like it. Is it really a good idea to have as few beds as possible, as few hospitals as possible and as few staff as possible? It doesn’t look like it.

Nature doesn’t do it this way.

Nature goes for abundance. Look at the seedhead in the photo at the start of this post. How many seeds are there from that single plant? Way more than you’d “need” for reproduction and spread you might think. Would it not be more “efficient” for the plant to produce, say, half that number of seeds? Or maybe only ten percent? It doesn’t look like it.

Complex adaptive systems are Nature’s way of enabling adaptability and resilience. All such systems have what scientists call “redundancy” – by which they mean there are “belt and braces” approaches, there are several pathways to achieve the same thing. It’s by drawing on those “extra” resources and methods that Natural living organisms survive and thrive.

I think we need to learn that from Nature. There’s been way too much paring back, stripping down, and minimising going on. If we want resilient services, and resilient societies we aren’t going to get there by “efficiently” going for the least, the cheapest, the quickest and the meanest.

Here’s what Nature does –

It goes for more……