Brexit? Seen It All Before

In my working life I have been involved in implementing system changes in organisations, while at the same time observing those that went wrong in other organisations, and pondering why they failed.

I would say that for a major system change to be a success, three fundamentals are essential:.

1. A clear vision of what you are trying to achieve. And the achievements need to be precise. Saying we are going to have a new system that will put us way ahead of the field is too vague. ‘We are leaving the EU for a great new future’ is equally far too vague as a vision, it doesn’t say what you are trying to achieve. ‘We are going to regain our sovereignty’, much too vague, for how will you know when you have achieved it? ‘The very best for Britain’, how on earth are you going to know when you’ve achieved that? You cannot leave something without going on to something else, and there is no shared vision of what that something should be. Individuals have their views, of course, they always do, but the vision needs to be from the top, and sold from the top.

2. Implement incrementally. A big-bang change on a complex system never works very well, simply because the complexities are too enormous for a person, or a group of people, to get their head round.

3. If a prototype appears to be not working, be prepared to change it. We need a system that works, not one that we’re going to stand on our high horse over.

What happens when those fundamentals are ignored follows a common pattern, essentially a great deal of time and money gets spent to end up with something not that different from what you started with in the first place.

Tony Blair’s major computerisation project for the NHS was a typical case in point, we should not blame him, for he is not a technology expert, we can blame the dinosaurs in suits that he engaged to manage the project; at a time when the world was moving towards distributed processing, the Cloud, and machine learning, his supposed experts were trying to make everything work on a 1980’s mainframe. Many of us knew that was never going to have a future.

Any many people know that Brexit isn’t going to work, too, because similarly it is under the control and guidance of the dinosaurs in suits.

As well as the technological inevitability of failure, there is the human inevitability of managing that failure. It is absolutely typical and normal that as the woolly-brained system change gets underway, those who are in favour of it pronounce that all gainsayers are gratuitous wreckers, with no optimism and delight in the great future ahead. That always happens. And then as things do not seem to be progressing entirely smoothly, the management does exactly what Theresa May did in November 2017: they set a date at which this thing is Going To Happen. Oh that is soooo typical!

For people like me, who voted Remain – Brexit could affect me negatively personally, in fact it already is, so I would vote Remain wouldn’t I? – this is all actually not too bad. Money will be spent, there will be arguments, there will be battles, and at the end of it all, if the pattern is as it is, we shall end up with not much change. Since the new system won’t really work, and because it may be difficult to abandon it completely, repercussions will continue long after the ‘implementation date’; repercussions and great cost, until either the thing fades away or someone puts their finger in the hole in the money dyke and says ‘Stop’.

If I were a passionate Leave proponent, I would be much more worried, I would be concerned that Vote Leave was rapidly becoming Vote Lose. I would be saying let’s stop this madness now, and devise a plan that is actually going to work. But I suspect no one would listen. That’s typical too.

Of course I may be wrong, but if I am wrong, then this major system change that is Brexit will be a first, bucking all past trends and throwing all theories of how to implement change in an organisation out of the window. I don’t think so!

I’ve seen it all before.