Lack of agility: The UK Government's Covid-19 response and the curious case of weak signals

An interesting article in the Telegraph on 30th August 2020 reviews the UK government;s perfomance in response to Covid-19. The article titled Revealed: How, on every measure, Britain's response to the Covid pandemic has been woeful is a sober analysis of data on a range of metrics.

3 things play a part:

1. Response to weak signals
2. Blind faith in evidence based strategic planning
3. Acting out the philosophy of managerialism

I suggest that the UK Government has had at least 45 years to prepare for the Covid-19 pandemic. That's why I've been trying to put my finger on why I am troubled by the UK Government's response to the early phase of the Covid-19 crisis and I've reached the conclusion that they completely ignored or were ignorant of the notion of 'Weak Signals'.

Weak signals are defined as:

'the first symptoms of strategic discontinuities, i.e. symptoms of possible change in the future, acting as warning signs or signs of new possibilities ' Mari Holopainen and Marja Toivonen (2012) Weak signals: Ansoff today. Futures. 

Weak signals are phenomena that business researcher and writer Igor Ansoff (most famous for his Matrix) first wrote about in 1975 in an article titled Managing Strategic Surprise by Response to Weak Signals.... yes folks you read the date correctly 1975!

I emphasize the date because one part of the government narrative when defending their actions during the Covid-19 crisis has been 'this situation is unprecedented, it is a completely new situation, we have never faced anything like this before'.However I would claim the government has faced something like this before and it's called a surprise.

?We all know that surprises are a common and regular feature of life. This means that whilst the specific nature of each surprise is surprising the fact that surprises happen should not come as a surprise! That's why I'm suggesting the UK Government has had at least 45 years since the publication Ansoff's article at the very least to prepare for the Covid-19 pandemic.

Basically in his article Igor Ansoff was having a pop at the idea of Strategic Planning and the way it impairs the agility of organisations because it encourages the unhelpful belief that we need to have lots of evidence before we act on anything. Ansoff's article gets quite technical in terms of the management processes needed to pick up on weak signals but there are some very thought provoking observations. Tellingly he said:

'strategic planning has had little success in dealing with surprises.'

So, Strategic Planners have a fixation with gathering 'lots of evidence' on which to base valid decisions. What lovers of strategic planning don't declare is that this approach belongs to a particular 'management mindset' that has its roots in the natural sciences (physics, chemistry etc). This mindset has been appropriated by business school management courses in recent decades to imbue the study of management as 'management science' to avoid criticism that it is not a proper academic subject. This leads to a form of professional management practice that claims to be objective, values free, and logical. If businesses were the Star Ship Enterprise then this is the Spock perspective. Logical scientific management is thus identified as the way of 'best practice' and applicable in all general management situations, hence the proliferation of MBA's, albeit this management paradigm is changing in some cases it still thrives and is performed particularly in the public sector as 'managerialism' *

Key criticisms of Strategic Planning are:

1. strategic planning is overly demanding for input information

2. it assumes that information about change can be provided in a timely way so that people have time to react and plan

To repeat, the problem with surprises are, they are just that, a surprise. Surprises don't give a damn about the time you need for your planning processes to work through. Waiting for lots of evidence to 'prove' that there is something amiss exposes you to unnecessary risks. Absolute proof and causation are things that natural scientists emphasize and in turn objective and logical management science advocates but sometimes in the social and management world often there isn't lots of evidence to prove something and show a direct cause in the very early stage of suspecting something is up. This means leaders need to be good at inference rather than extrapolation, comfortable with ambiguity rather than certitude, acting in advance of the data rather than always following it. In other words competent leaders and managers need to be good at reading situations and making wise judgement in the absence of having the complete picture.

How many times have we heard from UK Gov. 'we base our policy on the facts or we are led by the science ', phrases which reveal the 'management science' mindset and managerial assumptions of the speaker. Phrases that are carefully constructed to produce the impression of sober objectivity and control but which obstruct agility.

We have two choices to cope with facts:

1. After the fact - reaction
2. Before the fact - preparedness

Now, as a little thought game; substitute Covid -19 or any other public health issue for these examples in Ansoff's quote and tell me what you think:

' when a potential surprise originates in an alien technology [another country], with a previously unknown competitor [source], with a new political coalition [globally connected situation], or with a new economic [public health] phenomenon, simple extrapolation will not suffice'

It seems to me that the UK Government was locked into a strategic planning reactive mindset rather than a weak signal preparedness mindset. Government as management rather than government as state craft. Ansoff goes on to say:

'Enhancing strategic decisiveness involves making changes in decision-making technology, systems, information, distribution of power, and above all, in the risk attitudes and values of managers who are key to the strategic response. Thus, strategic decisiveness is an organizational state of mind a culture as well as a distinctive competency'

Recently my colleagues and I, Dr. Simon Kelly and Stacey Danheiser conducted research into high level strategic competency for our forthcoming book Stand Out Marketing that will published in December 2020. Our research revealed the need for senior executives to be exceptionally good a 'connecting the dots' and being able to visualize what might happen in the future and from this we were able to create a set of competency maps to aid candidate selection and executive development. Connecting the dots and visualization are competences that are essential for picking up on and responding to weak signals from the business environment. Failure to do this costs of sales, customers and profit. Incompetency when dealing with weak signals associated with public health costs lives.

* 'To managerialist practitioners, they believe there is little difference in the skills required to run an advertising agency, an oil rig, or a university. Experience and skills pertinent to an organization’s core business are considered secondary...Materialists claim to have a superior form of advanced knowledge and know-how deemed necessary to the efficient running of organizations....Managerialism justifies the application of its one-dimensional managerial techniques to all areas of work, society, and capitalism on the grounds of this superior ideology, expert training, and the exclusiveness of managerial knowledge necessary to run public institutions and society as corporations.'

Klikauer (2015) What is managerialism. Critical Sociology 2015, Vol. 41(7-8) 1103–1119

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