sympathy for the folk devil

in which I disagree with Dominic Cummings

This was something of a reader request (I should probably be only doing those for paying subscribers, so if you are one and have a question, make sure to identify yourself as one).  I was asked for thoughts on Dominic Cummings, and this is an expansion of my offhand reaction, which was that I hope someone gives the new book to him to review.  I am pretty sure he’ll hate it, but I feel like it might be worth eating a one-star in order to get an answer to the question – how much does Cummings Thought owe to cybernetics?  From some of the things he writes, I think he mist have at the very least read people who were influenced by Stafford Beer and Jay Forrester, other times it seems impossible.

Anyway, I don’t know about anyone else, but as I get older I find it harder to write really hostile pieces.  The old Will Rogers line is kind of true:

“I saw that this old boy wasent so strong for me X-raying old Trotzky.  But I bet you that if I had met him and had a chat with him, I would have found him a very interesting and human fellow, for I have never yet met a man that I dident like”.

The strange thing about Classic Dom is that whether or not he’s read the management cyberneticians, he does at least Get It with respect to a lot of the key questions.  When you look past the needless fight-picking and intellectual showboating (which I can hardly refuse to do, as I extend the same courtesy to Nassim Taleb and indeed request it for myself), he’s making the same point as Alfred Chandler.  That is to say, the only important thing in management science, the Laws of Motion of organisations – that complexity is constantly increasing, and that reorganisation is the way in which environmental variety is brought back into balance with the capacity to manage it.

And it’s not at all unreasonable to say that something – some many things – in the British political and governance systems are unequal to the task and unwilling to restructure to meet the 21st century.  That’s the basis of Cummings’ critique of everything, from the SW1 media-political complex to the civil service.  Even the “NASA style control room”, the most obvious point of reference to Cybersyn, is based on a highly valid assessment of the way in which the information technology revolution has passed the centre of British politics by.  The idea that something is broken and needs to change – and that the COVID-19 pandemic revealed deep wells of institutional incompetence going well beyond the known fountains of personal incompetence – seems plausible, and Cummings’ stories of vitally needed pandemic responses getting stuck in process ring true to me.

Where it all goes wrong, in my opinion, is simply that a hand grenade is not a tool of reconstruction.  The highest function of the Viable System Model is that of balancing the need to change with the capacity to change.  It’s necessary to respect the problem, make a realistic assessment of what capacity exists or can be gathered, then think in terms of priorities and trade-offs to meet the most vital and immediate changes that need to be made.  Systems have to be designed and redesigned, so that they obey the basic principles of “variety engineering” (the management science of ensuring that information arrives in the right place, in time and in a form in which it can be the basis of decision making).

That’s what has seemed to be missing from Cummings’ writing; any clearly articulated theory of how things work and how and why they need to change.  I would guess that subjectively he thinks it’s obvious, but it isn’t to me and I don’t think it is to many other people.  There’s a huge list of urgent things, all of the highest possible priority and not much clear unifying theme.  A lot of the issues he talks about are indeed very important, but so are a lot of things he doesn’t seem very worried by. 

And this problem exists in symbiosis with the other thing that people always criticise him for – if you don’t have any framework for thinking about priorities, then you are going to be structurally inclined to ignore constraints like “maintain organisational viability” or “it’s not possible to restructure large and complex systems just by shouting at people”.  If you see the world as just a list of problems to be met by a fully fungible reservoir of capability, then you’re much more likely to interpret failures as resistance by vested interests.  I’d regard it as a real tell when people start talking about “start-up culture”, because it’s always a sign that they think that the problems they’re looking at are all atomic and capable of being dealt with one by one.

I’d like to link back to an early post, that people might not have read because there were lots fewer subscribers then.  In “Ogilvy as Educator”, I argued:

Without wanting to get all “graphic design is my passion”, I always think it’s important to take designers seriously, and there’s one big reason for that.  Graphic designers are more or less the only people left in the modern industrial economy who ask questions like “What’s the purpose of this organisation? What’s the identity of this brand? What’s the meaning of what you’re doing? What are your values?” and expect to get answers.

[…]

Consequently, the questions asked by the graphic designers aren’t just about getting a logo and some adverts that don’t look like shit.  The ability to give truthful answers to the questions they ask is absolutely fundamental to organisational viability.

In many ways, the much-vaunted “three word slogan” is the opposite of this process.