Reflections 16th January

On my mind.

The great unravelling.

This has been a week that has seen the culture at the heart of the U.K Government made excruciatingly, embarrassingly clear; the Monarchy conducting damage limitation through the sacrifice of its own, another stand-off between a nation and the sports economy as the Djokovic visa affair follows on from scandals in Football, Cricket and Formula One. Elsewhere, Nation States are working to bring trying to bring companies and cross border capital flows under control as they undermine local economies. What used to be tidy is becoming increasingly untidy, and effective leadership scarce.

Our bureaucracies, organisational and business, were built on a presumption of a need to deal with complications more than complexity, and as complexity gets the upper hand, they no longer work.

When things are complicated, processes, protocols, and consultancy all work to an extent. They are rather like diets – episodic responses to a more fundamental problem behaviour. When …