Get that pole up
An almost certainly mythical aptitude officer test set this problem. You are in charge of a sergeant and a group of ten men. You have a ten-foot pole, four 12 foot lengths of rope and there is a hole measuring three feet deep in the ground. How do you get the flagpole erected? The answer was you say, “Sergeant, get that pole up.”
Humour aside, there is an important lesson in knowing how to delegate, and when not to micro-manage everything. There have been several examples in real life, both good and bad. A good one saw the rapid development of a Covid vaccine. Instead of putting it through innumerable NHS committees, Boris Johnson turned to Kate Bingham, brought in as Chair of the Vaccine Task Force. Her appointment was a temporary, unpaid role, and it was made directly by Boris Johnson, bypassing traditional civil service recruitment.
Under her leadership, the UK made early and aggressive investments in multiple vaccine candidates, including the Pfizer-BioNTech, Oxford-AstraZeneca, and Moderna vaccines. The government committed billions of pounds to secure vaccine doses and scale up infrastructure (like manufacturing and distribution). Her leadership is widely credited with helping the UK become one of the first countries to start mass vaccinations in late 2020. She got that pole up.
A bad one has been British Steel. There is little demand for virgin steel made in blast furnaces from iron ore and coke. The demand is for electric arc furnace steel made from scrap. It is cleaner and cheaper. Government started to micro-manage when it realized that the switch from blast furnaces to electric arc ones would cost thousands of jobs. It stepped in, dragging present and future taxpayers with it. And the pole will never be erected.
The replacement of the ferry to Arran from Ardrossan was initiated by the devolved Scottish government. The new vessels cost quadruple their original price tag of £100m with one delivered seven years late, the other still being built. Both are too big to fit the main harbour at Ardrossan for their daily journeys to and from the Isle of Arran. It would require an estimated £80m upgrade to the harbour to accommodate them, and that cost would rise, as they always do. Ardrossan is left in limbo, with little likelihood that the pole will ever go up.
HS2 was conceived when faster travel meant time saved for getting to work. The costs mounted and the difficulties arose, as they do. Meanwhile technology has allowed people to work on their way to the office, reducing the value of time saved. At almost inconceivable costs to the taxpayer, the construction lumbers on, hindered by bats and environmentalists, who many people think are interchangeable. If the pole is ever erected, not many people will notice, but white elephants might.
Think how, in an imaginary world, there would be no councillors, just an elected mayor. He or she would meet on day one with their hand-picked team of advisors from the world of business. They would prepare the specification for contracts to cover the responsibilities for local schools, garbage collection, pothole repairs, social services and the rest, and put them out to tender. Local, not national regulations would facilitate the process.
Three weeks later they would meet to award those contracts, with the advisors recommending the bids to be awarded. None would have dealings themselves in any of those areas. One more contract would appoint a team to monitor the performance of those contractors. That would be it, and many poles would go up. This is an imaginary world, but it might be a more efficient one.
Madsen Pirie
