Rome Wasn't Built in a Day...

And certainly not by a committee.

I have been listening to the radio and in quick succession I heard two articles about a failure of leadership, or at least that is what I took from the articles.

The first one was about the Australian Navy having made some bad decisions about what ships to buy or what design to use or from whom. The upshot of this is that because ships take a long time to build they are now short of the needed equipment as the old ships are now end of life and the new ones are yet to be built due to some or all of the reasons above. The Australian Navy’s issues with its ships isn’t that interesting it is what the Minister said in response to this, he said “we must ensure we have a more rigorous process when it comes to these decisions” and he will be “insisting that officials review all of their process” In other words he was going to have a stern word to the committee that stuffed things up. I mean give me a break in times past if the Navy ran out of ships the minister would have resigned and several admirals would have been keel hauled or shot. There would not have been a discussion about any process or committee, the leaders would have been held accountable.

So the next one was closer to home where there have been complaints from Principals about the quality of recently graduated teachers, specifically they do not have adequate literacy or numeracy skills to teach at a primary school level. (begs the question if they can’t read write or do arithmetic what can they do but we shall ignore that for today) When the head of the teachers college in Christchurch was asked about this, she responded that if this was the case then these individuals would have their practicing certificates tagged accordingly and this would reduce their employment chances. (note for any parents out there she didn't say eliminate) The interviewer asked the obvious question, why were these people graduating at all and why wasn’t the college teaching them this stuff to bring them up to standard. Response “we don’t teach literacy and numeracy because all our students have University Entrance which shows that they have reached the required standard in these subjects.”

So here we go again, the answer to a problem is more process, i.e. we will tag the practice certificates rather than actually fix the problem. And when challenged on the fundamental issue we get more process, i.e. "well they have UE so how is this my issue", was essentially what she said. In other words I followed the process. It is at this point where I have the urge to track this person down and say to them (very slowly no doubt so that they get it) “never mind the process you failed to achieve the outcome”

These are just two examples of how the world seems to work these days, we no longer care about outcomes we just care about following the process. I believe that this is because we no longer allow strong leaders to lead, everyone wants to have a say and nothing of any consequence was every achieved by a committee.
We need to retreat from attempting to systematise everything and begin to place a bit more trust in leaders.

The big objection to a leadership / outcome focused model is that sometimes leaders get it wrong and you get failure. (which seems unacceptable these days as well)  Well to me a few more failed student teachers wouldn’t seem to hurt (rather than the stupid PC rubbish of no one failing) and as the Australian Navy will tell you lots of process doesn’t guarantee success either.