The Unaccountability Machine

The Jolly Contrarian’s book review service™ Go Premium The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost Its Mind — Dan Davies, 2024. Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Book reviews Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

’Tis neither malice, spite, nor virtue
Whose ledger swells, or plucks, the seedy fruits of progress —
But mainly accident.
Lest thee with surety know aught else —
Withhold thy assignations.

—Otto Büchstein, Die Schweizer Heulsuse

Business administration is broken

The epic judicial processes of 2024 have been Tom Hayes’ appeal against LIBOR rigging, about which we have had much to say elsewhere, and the Post Office Horizon IT scandal. Both are resolving to the question: to what extent can we put this absolute shower down to the nefarious, or just bone-headed, interventions of individual operators.

Yet, much of the engineering of business administration — you hardly need an advanced degree in operations research to know these days, there’s a lot of it — exists specifically to prevent bad apples, or stupid apples, subverting our complex modern organisations and systems.

Much of modern business administration is a catalogue of a singular failure to achieve that basic end. Our roll of honour refers. LIBOR rigging and the sub-postmasters débâcle are but pinnacle examples. With all that infrastructure, superstructure and supervision how were a band of relatively lowly trading staff able to run riot?

Where were all the barking dogs?

With all its infrastructure, internal and external legal advice, consultancy, and, er, second sight, how did no-one stop to think something must be wildly, catastrophically, wrong with the Post Office’s theory of the situation? How did no-one, even once, applying Otto’s razor?

Rogue apples, middle England and the grace of God

Either these are peculiar, localised problems — rogue gangs of bad apples plague the innocent houses of commerce — or the prevailing business administrative paradigm is in crisis and we need another theory of the game.

Because it relieves executives of accountability and leaves only a deniable residue of responsibility for hiring them in the first place, “bad apples” is always the preferred diagnosis. The paradigm being in crisis, by contrast, suggests senior executives take credit for all the good stuff, dodge the rap when things go tits up and live a charmed life never being honestly marked to measure for anything. They are a waste of money, in other words.

LIBOR submitters fit the “rogues gallery” identikit nicely. By making microscopic adjustments that no-one else would notice, they (allegedly) stood to make multimillion-pound bonuses for themselves. It was almost a victimless crime.

The post office middle managers do not. If they had anything to gain personally from vilifying pillars of the community up and down the country, it was indirect and paled in comparison to the city bonuses on offer to the LIBOR submitters. These people do not seem psychopathic. Their motivations are not base. They do not resemble “bad apples”. They seem unremarkable, familiar, mediocre middle managers.

Watching their excruciating evidence, three things occur: first — The weave of life’s tapestry wouldn’t have needed to be that different for these witnesses themselves to have been sub-postmasters on the other end of this outrage. None more so than CEO Paula Vennells, a middle-English lay Methodist, who even looks like a sub-postmaster.

Second — A montage of every utterance by every witness of the manifold variations of “I don’t remember” would go for hours.

Third — There but for the grace of God go I. Post Office in-house legal head Rodric Williams is a fifty-something expat New Zealander, whose career trajectory, in vector if not altitude, is strikingly similar to mine. In the halogen glare of cross-examined hindsight, his ineffectual interventions in an epic miscarriage of justice over an extended period are regrettable, but none of them resonate as odd. Williams was adept at the sort of pencil-pushing, risk-averse buttocracy that is drilled by bitter experience into every single inhouse lawyer in the land. This is what inhouse counsel do. This is how we behave. We should ask ourselves: knowing what he knew then, would we have done any differently? We should not kid ourselves here.

Modern corporation as an unaccountability machine

Which brings us, finally, to Dan Davies’ fascinating new book. There is, he reports, a crisis of accountability in the modern commercial world: the relationship between “we” the general public and “we” the representatives and managers of the corporations which intermediate much of public life — many are on both sides of this equation, of course — his irreconcilably broken down. This is because modern corporations are designed to diffuse individual accountability for the actions a corporate legal entity takes, by means of what Davies calls “accountability sinks”.

Someone — 

an airline gate attendant, for example — tells you some bad news; perhaps 

you've been bumped from the flight in favour of someone with more frequent 

flyer points. You start to complain and point out how much you paid for 

your ticket, but you're brought up short by the undeniable fact that the gate 

attendant can't do anything about it. You ask to speak to someone who can do 

something about it, but you're told that's not company policy. 

The unsettling thing about this conversation is that you progressively 

realise that the human being you are speaking to is only allowed to follow 

a set of processes and rules that pass on decisions made at a higher level of 

the corporate hierarchy. It's often a frustrating experience; you want to get 

angry, but you can't really blame the person you're talking to. Somehow, the 

airline has constructed a state of affairs where it can speak to you with the 

anonymous voice of an amorphous corporation, but you have to talk back to it 

as if it were a person like yourself.