The NHS and the civil service should recruit some TV News people to get things done

Recent news items have confirmed my belief that paperwork, jargon, job titles and project management tools are killing common sense - and people.

The NHS – the envy of the world, according to socialist mythology – kills about 12,000 patients a year, needlessly. One of them was 22-year old Kane Gorny who died of dehydration at St George’s Hospital, Tooting in 2010 after medical staff failed to give him either the water he needed to stay alive or the medication which would have allowed his body to absorb it. The poor young man grew so desperate he phoned the police on his mobile, but, when they turned up, the hospital told them there was nothing to see here, move along please – and Mr. Gorny died of thirst. (In case anyone imagines that what happened to Kane Gorny was a mere aberration, read this Mail Online article by Melissa Kite.)

Yesterday, the Home Secretary, poor old Teresa May, got a battery-farm’s worth of yolk on her face after admitting that 3,500 troops have been called in to handle security for the Olympics because G4S has failed to recruit sufficient staff to do the job, despite being paid £284million to sort it. Today, DMossEsq wonders what exactly the zillions of Home Office officials tasked with overseeing this sort of thing actually do all day (you can read the item here).

I’ve found the BBC mockumentary series, Twenty Twelve, almost unwatchable, not because it isn’t funny – on the contrary, it’s hilarious – but because it's obviously so close to the truth. This is the way stuff tends to get done – or more frequently, not done - these days: many people actually think and speak like this. I’ve experienced it at first hand in the higher echelons of the BBC and in some government departments. It’s terrifying.

Many people – especially administrators – spend their life pretending they know what they’re doing, making promises they have no idea if they can keep, and somehow getting away with it until the very moment the ordure hits the air-circulating device because the system they’re working within punishes realism while rewarding baseless optimism; because their job titles often offer no clue as to what their role is; much of the language in which their business is conducted is so meaningless it merely acts as a smokescreen for unfolding disaster; and because the visual aids available to project managers tend to make people feel relaxed about progress when they should be running around, shrieking “We’re all doomed!”

I was reminded of one project I worked on as a contractor where I and another ex-journalist were putting together a daily programme for a new TV channel. Every week  we'd meet with a member of the technical task force charged with delivering the whole shooting match. We would tell him what we needed in terms of hardware and software (it was complex – we were planning on doing things that hadn’t been done before), and he’d write it all down and then email everyone an updated spreadsheet detailing all the items needed, delivery dates, which companies were supplying what etc. Glancing at this document always made me feel warm inside.

But after about six weeks of this I woke up in the middle of the night in a bit of a panic and thought – hang on, does this chap know we expect him to deliver this stuff, or is he just updating a spreadsheet which is giving everyone a false sense of security?

I brought this up at a management meeting the next day. Turned out, as I’d begun to suspect, that the technical task force didn’t see it as their job to arrange the supply of technology for our programme – their role (in their eyes, if, as it turned out, in no one else’s) was simply to “capture” what we were up to, technology-wise, a sort of reality-check heads-up going forwards.

I seem to remember my response – in a rather a loud voice – was along the lines of: “You have got to be fucking joking! You’re the technical experts, and you’re being paid a fucking fortune to dick around with spreadsheets while actually delivering all this cutting-edge technology is down to a couple of clapped–out old journos?” 

Turned out that, because our programme was a late addition to the plans for the channel, their company didn’t see it as it's job to help, and the gung-ho, go-to language and all the rigmarole of modern project management – which helps suggest that miracles are being quietly achieved by teams of super-efficient professionals when in fact sod-all is happening - had managed to keep this fact hidden from everyone else involved in the project.

I bet the Home Office meetings where G4S’s progress on finding and training security staff was discussed were conducted in pure management-speak by people with confusingly ornate job titles and accompanied by endless spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations designed to make everyone feel better about life, but which bore no relation to events on Planet Earth. I bet the medical staff at St George’s, Tooting were armed with a stack of papers that proved they were doing the right thing while killing Kane Gorny, and that he – as we all do - naturally thought that the people with the title “nurse” would do their very best to help relieve his suffering and to keep him alive, when nurses are now apparently all university graduate administrators who don’t go in for all that compassionate, caring nonsense – their degrees tell them they’re better than that.

(I'm not saying this applies to all civil servants and medical staff and technical contractors - of course not: it must be incredibly frustrating for the competent ones to be effective when surrounded by all this silly nonsense.)

So, what’s to be done?

By the time I left the BBC, an extraordinary number of senior positions throughout the organisation were occupied by ex-TV News people (including the Director-General, his deputy, the head of Radio 4, the head of Radio 5, the head of TV, the controller of BBC One and the director of the World Service). I pondered the reasons for this for a while and decided that News folk care about the meaning of words, they develop a sixth sense about whether people are telling the truth, they’re used to prioritising under pressure in order to get something delivered on time, and they’re used to working with teams where, if each member doesn’t know exactly what their role is, disaster invariably ensues.

I don’t want to sound smug about this – News people can be low on emotional intelligence, thuggish, and short on imagination. But at least they know how to deliver. And that seems to be something many highly-paid Britons seem to have forgotten how to do.