I was in equal parts bemused and upset with the announcements by the Prime Minister yesterday shifting back the timing of a number of commitments to decarbonising the UK economy.
The politics at play here are of the most cynical electioneering. Sunak is making grand policy pledges about things that won’t happen for another seven or more years in order to hit a goal in nearly three decades’ time. This is all well after the time that he will be anywhere near the control panel of government, and seems little more than miserably calculated attempts to stave off a complete demolition of the Tory part in the election that will take place in the next 18 months.
Putting politics aside for one moment, though, and it makes me wonder if there are general assumptions at play about more and faster data being available for decision making inevitably being a beneficial thing. UK policy making at the moment may well provide a powerful counter argument – that the rapid collection and processing of feedback in the short-term is extremely detrimental to the long-term health of an organisation.
The political system in the UK, as in many other countries, has shifted in approach in the last four decades for many reasons, but notably because of the increased use first of focus groups (moderated discussions with people selected to be representative of a population where policy ideas can be tested) and more recently increasingly granular polling into views on specific issues.
The data wonks will claim that this allows politicians to carefully hone their policies and messaging so that they derive the greatest success ultimately at the ballot box.
However what it appears to do is to both make policy making appear to be as stable as a pinball bouncing around a table, and for decision making to be framed exclusively in the timeframe of the next major ballot.
This in turn means that hard, painful decisions that are needed to be made about long-term challenges that the country faces are perpetually kicked down the road to be some future administration’s problem. Look at social care policy, health policy, public buildings, the environment, pension provision, core transport infrastructure and housing to name but seven.
This isn’t a challenge unique, however, to government. Businesses too struggle to make long-term decisions for similar dynamics. Ambitious middle management focus on 2-3 year goals or the next 12 months budget so that they are best placed for delivering successfully and gain the next promotion. The problem is even more acute at the top where the C-Suite are, in public companies, too often overly incentivised to hit short term stock prices over any other objective.
And short-term, real-time data feeds into all of this. When one has short term objectives one will only focus on short term data, and the more of it that is presented the more the future will become somebody else’s problem.
mmitII 