Originally Posted by
Warren Peace
The RAF should take a lesson from the commercial world.
Which bit? Carillion? Patisserie Valerie? HMV? Lehman Brothers? I could go on, but I imagine you get the point.
The ‘commerce is always right idea’ is wrong. I wish the world were as simple as it is in the minds of those who say ‘if only they just did this...’. Regrettably, much of our world is replete with interactive, not systematic complexity.
This will come as a blow to those who believe they know all of the factors that obtain, and also to those who believe all the factors are knowable. It just ain’t so. There is no simple binary cause-effect relationship in a lot of things, no algorithm that just requires a couple of numbers to be applied to it to get the invariably right answer.
That’s not to excuse waste, which people should be rightly concerned about and which does require people to be incentivised to avoid and sanctioned when they make an egregious mistake (Just Culture anyone?). However, don’t assume that just because something hasn’t worked well that the outcome was predictable at the point the decision was made.