For those of us who think that OJ Simpson killed his ex-wife, his death last week was a reminder of one of the most useless bits of detective work in history: a double homicide investigation in which the LAPD failed to fit up a guilty man. In short, the essence of incompetence.
One of the things about incompetence is it turns up in almost every field. Take Boeing, whose travails are the most high profile ongoing example in the private sector. This is a company that can’t deliver the basic ask of an aeroplane manufacturer that its planes get from A to B in one piece.
In general, our understanding of what drives incompetence is low and understudied. As a new paper in the British Journal of Sociology demonstrates , there is essentially no formal study of the problem in sociology. There isn’t even a widely agreed upon definition, though the paper suggests what seems to me a pretty good one, of unsatisfactory performance relative to standards.
Of course, as the OJ example illustrates, certain forms of incompetence are well-studied. Racism and sexism in institutions, for example, are both the subject of a considerably higher number of substantive studies in the BJS than the mere six that relate to incompetence in general.
But there are benefits to considering and studying the problem itself. The first is that bias is not just a form of incompetence: incompetence is itself a form of bias. I have recently had to spend a vast amount of time rectifying a matter of administrative incompetence: a task that would have been borderline impossible if I had children or elderly relatives to look after, or if I worked in an occupation that made it impossible to balance fixing the problem with doing my job. What this means in practice is that, over time, outcomes will be consistently biased against people who can’t devote the time and resources I did to rectifying mistakes.
The second benefit is that, because incompetence is largely studied in a management context, we have a better idea of how to tackle it when it harms the perpetrator. In the case of Boeing, customers may vote with their feet, and the company be compelled to improve by a combination of stakeholder pressure and market forces. When the state fails in a way that hurts a government, there is democratic pressure to change. When incompetence is a competitive disadvantage — and makes, for example, a company less profitable — we usually put in place a strategy to combat and reduce it.
But we have a less firm grasp on how to tackle incompetence when it benefits an institution or the state, but has a malign effect on the common good. The UK government’s compensation schemes for victims of the Windrush scandal and the Post Office injustices are good cases in point: both have been criticised for being too ponderous and Byzantine for those affected to navigate.
The history of government compensation schemes, or consultations, that use incompetence as a shield to either delay payments or frustrate scrutiny is long. It is precisely this form of weaponised incompetence that Douglas Adams satirises in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy , when plans for the destruction of the protagonist’s home are on display in a darkened room “in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying, ‘Beware of the Leopard’.”
Although the Conservative government disputes that there is any strategic incompetence baked into their compensation schemes, I am willing to bet large sums of money that approximately five minutes after they leave office, two things will become true.
The first is that the Tories will happily malign Labour’s management of compensation schemes (some of which the new government will have inherited from Rishi Sunak’s tenure) as incompetent. The second is that they will be right.
In cases like this, incompetence is a competitive advantage: it benefits governments to delay compensation schemes, which generally involve giving money to voters who are already rightly angry with them, when they could instead spend it on other things, which have the secondary benefit of wooing voters who are better disposed to them.
It benefits businesses, too, to make it hard to cancel direct debits or fix the consequences of poor delivery services, or have in place other forms of incompetence that act as a backdoor mechanism for cost control.
It is this type of incompetence that needs further scrutiny. We need to understand better how to reduce and prevent its weaponisation — not least because those most affected by it often don’t have the time or resources to delve into the subject themselves.
stephen.bush@ft.com