Across the pond

Got back from City University at 5 PM yesterday, feeling extremely irritated. My meeting had taken much longer than I had expected and on the way home it had started drizzling with rain. As I was taking off my crash helmet the doorbell went. There was a young man on the doorstep wearing a white t-shirt. He wanted to ask me a few questions on behalf of Transport for London. It would only take a few minutes.

I was reluctant but since I was already too late to make the telephone calls I had planned to arrange services in our new house in Dorset I agreed. I like to think I am public spirited and if university lecturers refuse to help people doing surveys then how they expect their students to do their research, which in my area depends on a willingness of the general public to answer questions.

So I invited him in. He could not come in because that would be invading my privacy. I realised he was thoughtlessly regurgitating his training programme, which clearly did not include the obvious fact that if anyone invites you into their home you could not be invading their privacy. Then he said he did not mind if I got a chair and sat down. Clearly his training programme did not tell him that if you ask a 73-year-old man if he needs to sit down, the implicit message is that he is a doddery old man incapable of standing on his own doorstep for a few minutes.

To explain all this to him would have taken up more time. So I snorted that what I wanted was a cigarette. I went in and fetched my cigarettes, trying to contain my rising irritation and get in the right frame of mind to answer his questions. The questions began with things like did I own a car, a motor bike or a cycle, did I use the buses and the tube. I pointed to my scooter by his side. He then asked if I realised that I could buy an electric scooter. I said yes but I was not going to buy one until there was a model which would do more than twenty-five miles an hour and had a range much greater than forty miles between charges.

Gradually I realised that what he was doing was not a proper survey at all. The next set of questions started with would I like a map of the London buses. I explained I already had one. Oh, but his maps were much better, and he produced a set of them. One for the tube, one for central London buses, one for north-west London buses, one for the North London railway line, even one for the London underground. By this time I was having difficulty containing my rising anger so I told him that I had lived around here for thirty-nine years and could get about quite happily without using any maps at all.

I realised that this was in fact a public relations campaign for Transport for London. And it reminded me of an incident in the morning. My wife had rung the teacher’s pension fund to inform them of our new address which took about two minutes. She was then asked to answer a series of questions about what she thought about the service provided in response to this very simple request, which took at least ten minutes. My wife answered patiently and courteously. But when she put down the phone she snorted with anger. What a waste of time? What fatuous questions?

I was also reminded of my dealings with British Telecomms over the last few days. Left hanging on the telephone, for a total time of well over two hours, with the automated message ringing in my ears, ‘Your call is important to us.’ All I want from BT is my telephone number in Dorset so I can send out my change of address cards. They promised to send it to me in the post but it still has not arrived. I shall have another go today, but I am limiting myself to half an hour of waiting. Otherwise I shall not have time to do all the other things I have to do before we move in just over a week’s time.

The issues underlying this series of anecdotes are deeply serious. Thousands of such ‘surveys’ are being done every day. If they are collated they are of no value because they are deeply non-scientific. If they are not then the whole thing is a sham. Either way the number of man-hours wasted in such activities must run into thousands and the amount of money wasted must run into millions. They are an aspect of what I call the new managerialism which is almost universally accepted. Someone at BT (and most other large companies in the land) has worked out that the amount of time employees spend on the telephone costs the company a lot of money. So the number of staff answering telephone calls has been reduced dramatically and the customer who is left gnashing his teeth.

Theoretically this problem should be solved by the free market. The business should go to the company, which perceives the customer’s real needs, and which is prepared to train people to answer queries properly and employ enough of them to cope with demand. In fact, it is difficult to find any company which is prepared to challenge the current conventional wisdom. My current telephone company, Virgin, is not quite as bad as BT in waiting time, but it is pretty bad. And, unlike BT, which at least leaves me in silence during the waiting period, Virgin plays the most awful music which shatters my ear drums.

It should be possible to prove the folly of the over-use of the automated telephone voice by a proper scientific survey, but would be almost impossible to design such a survey. Because of the complexity of the issues involved. The increasing complexity of the lives we live is one of the things that makes decision-making in both the public sector and the private sector so difficult for today’s managers.

I can illustrate this by reporting yet another thing that irritated me yesterday. My meeting was at the Cass Business School, which is near Moorgate tube station. So I decided to park my motor scooter in Finsbury Circus, where I knew there were spaces for around two hundred motor cycles. Obviously the best place to head for, because by the law of averages, someone was likely to move if I kept my cool and rode around the circus. After three circuits I decided that the law of averages was not working to my advantage, but I spotted just one space, where I could squeeze in by moving a 1950s Vespa a few inches to one side.

The plain fact is that the number of motor cycle spaces in central London is way below the number of people who want to use them because of the many advantages of the motor bike in today’s conditions. But the boss of London, Mayor Ken Livingstone, does not like motor bikes, although he is very keen on bicycles. He is able to justify this attitude by data which show that in terms of carbon emissions some motor bikes are worse than cars. Quite true. But it is equally true that motor bikes are almost as good for reducing congestion as bicycles and that the amount of energy consumed in manufacturing the average car is far higher than the average motor cycle.

When faced with issues of complexity decision making needs to be based on a qualitative analysis rather than a quantitive survey. The number of variables is so huge, that however you approach it requires a qualititive decision; otherwise, how do you decide to weight the various factors involved.

By co-incidence my meeting yesterday was chaired by a professor of organisational behaviour, the best discipline for articulating the disadvantages with the prevailing fashion for justifying decisions by reference to quantitive surveys. By yet another co-incidence his Ph D supervisor, was Professor John Morris of the Manchester Business School, a doughty advocate of the qualitative, whom I also knew well.

Morris spent a lot of his time in the last twenty years of his career pushing the advantages of action research, which was fashionable in the 1980s but is now too often dismissed as old hat. The starting point is not pulling the manager out of the work place to spend a month at a business school following a prescribed curriculum. Instead the university professor goes to the work place to experience the reality of manager’s job and to get the manager to articulate the way he sees his job and the problems it involves. Then the two of them sit down to work out a programme, which will involve the manager taking some courses at the business school while at the same time working on his problems back on the shop floor.

This approach requires a lot of man hours of work by the professor and the Ph D students who help the manager in the workplace. Which is one reason it has become unfashionable, because like employing human beings to answer the telephone, it costs a lot of money and it also uses up a lot of professorial time.

In the new managerialism, which is dominating the lives of today’s university teachers, it is not easy to find time for such activities. Because university teachers have to fill in their own questionnaires, justifying the amount of time they spend on different aspects of their work and specifying what their aims and objectives are. They have to get their research papers published in the journals. They have to encourage their Ph D students to do original work, rather than rehash the stuff written in the 1980s.

But surely it is still possible to challenge the conventional wisdom? What I would like to see is a Ph D thesis which investigated how similar the new managerialism is to the management theories which were fashionable in the 1960s, which included ‘management by objectives’.

And, come to think of it, perhaps the finance specialists could get someone to go through the books of Transport for London and find out how many of the millions of taxpayers’ money they spent went into wasteful activities like employing armies of young men in t-shirts to knock on doors in Kentish Town.