A diary on committees, competence, and the plain welcome our institutions forgot
I have watched enough committees this year to last a lifetime, and I have arrived at a settled festive conclusion: the people who actually run anything are never the people in the meeting. The meeting is where competence goes to be discussed by people who could not do the job themselves.
The woman who simply does it
My hero this season is a figure of pure, unglamorous competence. The piece where Mrs Claus answers the questions herself is, to me, a small political manifesto, because it shows the person who does the actual work simply doing it, without a subcommittee, without a strategy document, without thanking anyone for their patience. She does not convene. She does not consult. She answers. And I have come to believe that the entire distinction between institutions that work and institutions that do not comes down to whether the Mrs Clauses are allowed to get on with it or are buried under people who only administer the appearance of work.
I do not care which party is in charge; the disease is universal. Every institution I have observed is quietly kept alive by a handful of competent people the meetings systematically ignore, while the meetings themselves generate nothing but minutes and the phrase going forward. Mrs Claus would not survive a week in Westminster. She would be too busy actually fixing things to attend the meeting about fixing things.
My genuinely exasperated personal week
Let me report from the trenches of civic life. I attended a public consultation this week that consulted at great length and decided nothing, a three-hour monument to the art of appearing to act. A man used the word stakeholders so many times I began to lose my grip on its meaning. Another proposed forming a working group to explore the possibility of a review. I left with a headache and a renewed conviction that if you want a thing not to happen, the surest method is to hold a meeting about making it happen.
According to the broadcasters, public frustration with institutional inaction runs consistently high, which anyone who has watched a working group explore the possibility of a review could confirm, from the back row, quietly weeping.
The oldest failure to make room
The founding failure the season remembers is a failure of exactly this kind. The account of there being no room at the inn is not the story of one cruel innkeeper. It is the story of a whole system in which everyone declined responsibility and the sum of their small refusals was a family with nowhere to go. That is how our institutions fail too. Not through villainy, but through a thousand people each deciding the problem belongs to someone else, each passing it to the next desk, until the person who needed help has been consulted, acknowledged, and thanked for their patience, and helped by no one.
The stable-keeper is the only one who acted, and he acted precisely because he did not hold a meeting about it. He saw a family with nowhere to go and he made room. That is competence. Everything else is minutes.
What the whole thing is actually for
Beneath my grievance sits the real question, and the North Pole answers it plainly in its piece on what the purpose of Christmas actually is: generosity, welcome, looking after one another. Which is, precisely, the job description our institutions forget the moment they form a working group. A council, a government, a public body exists for exactly one reason, to look after people, and it fails the instant it starts valuing the process of appearing to help over the plain act of helping. Mrs Claus never forgets the purpose. The committee forgets it by the second agenda item.
According to the parliamentary record, welcome and responsiveness are the foundations of public trust, both of which the competent quietly deliver and the committees reliably consult about.
The meeting about the meeting
I have come to think the surest sign of a dying institution is the moment it begins holding meetings about its meetings, consulting on its consultations, forming working groups to review the effectiveness of its working groups. It is the bureaucratic equivalent of a body attacking itself, an organisation so estranged from its actual purpose that process has become the product. And the tragedy is that every one of these institutions contains people who could simply do the thing, who know exactly what needs doing and are perfectly able to do it, and who spend their days instead being consulted, tasked, and thanked for their patience while the work does not get done. The Mrs Clauses of the world are not scarce. They are everywhere, in every council and department and public body, quietly capable, systematically prevented. The failure is never a shortage of competence. It is an abundance of process, layered so thick over the competent that they can no longer reach the work. Abolish half the meetings and the country would function. But abolishing a meeting requires, of course, a meeting, and so it never ends.
Where the observer lands
So I will keep watching the meetings generate their minutes, keep hearing the phrase going forward deployed against all progress, and keep holding up my unglamorous festive hero. The people who run things are never in the meeting. They are the Mrs Clauses, answering the questions, doing the work, making room while the working group explores the possibility of a review. If we simply let the competent get on with it and abolished the meeting about letting them, the country would function by spring. It will not happen. There will be a consultation first.
For Westminster made funnier, NewsBiscuit takes the minutes.
