There aren’t many decade-old Guardian articles that still resonate with me, but I can recall (and often revisit) a 2014 column by Oliver Burkeman. He was writing in response to the latest example of institutional failure that week (something to do with the bungled sacking of the New York Times editor) and he was able to list a slew of other gaffes, cock-ups and embarrassments from the recent news cycle (featuring Ed Miliband and Barack Obama) noting that we’re always “shocked whenever authority figures who are supposed to know what they’re doing make it plain that they don’t.” He wrote that stories of incompetence “illustrate one of the most fundamental yet still under-appreciated truths of human existence, which is this: everyone is totally just winging it, all the time.”
We like to think that “somewhere, in the highest echelons of society, there are some near-infallible adults in charge,” but look around – in politics, across Whitehall, in public institutions, maybe even at your company – and ask yourself, is this really the case?
I’ll never forget being told by a Downing Street official, years after I read the Burkeman column, that “the room with all the really clever people in it doesn’t actually exist.” Do you doubt me? Read any of the lurid accounts of the Brexit negotiations, read the emoji-laden war-planning group chat between Trump’s top officials, consider the rat-infested streets bankrupt Birmingham or dip into the Covid inquiry (or the Post Office inquiry, or the infected blood inquiry, or any of our seemingly continuous inquiries into failures) and then tell me that the people in charge really know what they’re doing. High status does not necessarily infer high calibre.
This column isn’t supposed to be nihilistic; on the contrary – it can be liberating to realise that leaders, experts and systems are fallible and, once we appreciate that, we can work with a clear head to make improvements. Nor is this line of argument designed to excuse serious failures or to shield anyone from ultimate responsibility. Instead, it’s about recognising why we so often have to endure what might be termed ‘low level incompetence’ – often masked by a title, a uniform or even institutional secrecy.
All of this has served as a rather long winded introduction to the point I set out to make, which is that we shouldn’t be surprised to discover that the Office for National Statistics is making a hash of vital data collection and analysis, and has been for years. The important thing is that now their fallibility is well understood by all concerned, we should demand vigorous efforts to review, learn, test and improve in a spirit of candour and transparency. That might seem radical, but it shouldn’t be too much to ask.