With the bruhaha around the status of the government's WhatsApp messages to the Covid Inquiry, we thought it would be good to write another piece about the way organisations manage their information and come to decisions. Whilst the Government is in the spotlight here, in our experience the blight of the little green icon has reached epidemic proportions everywhere: it is shocking how many organisations are run off a series of breathless messaging threads.
Why so shocking, I hear you shout? Well, for a start the Government's own defence of its unwillingness to release the full trove highlights one of the big shortcomings: the messages mix the personal with the professional. There would be a danger of divulging something deeply personal alongside something of national importance. WhatsApp's pervasion is indicative of a "casualisation" of so much of our modern lives, where (perceived) tedious process has given way to (supposed) greater efficiency of an informal network of a coalition of the willing (or a cabal of the favourites). It is a symptom of a drive to blur the distinction between the office (the formal job title) with the officer (the person filling that role). Thus Tony Blair saw nothing wrong with "sofa rule" and Donald Trump can apparently declassify highly sensitive government papers "by thinking about it". This is not an exclusive Political disease: there are plenty of this in other sectors.
Why is this dangerous? I'm sure there will be plenty of people who say that they cannot do without WhatsApp - but that is the point: as we have said before, a series of messages does not constitute an information network. In this, we find ourselves in awkward agreement with Dominic Cummins, who wanted more "data-driven decisions", instead of the gossipy nonsense that passed for a process in government. And we haven't even got to the security bit: when someone leaves office, who is deprovisioning their access to a channel? Of course, building a proper set of information and managing the enterprise according to it is not easy, and requires two principle mountains to climb.
The first is to build a reliable set of information in the first place. The biggest cop out in the world is for businesses to settle on a series of "KPIs", in itself seemingly sensible, but really a way to narrow the information set so far that the hard yards of normalising data sets so as to combine them programmatically is magically avoided and dear old Maureen from Accounts can continue to work her alchemy on the handful of numbers that the management group "needs".
As hard as that first mountain is, it is nothing compared to the second: an acceptance that the enterprise and its information is bigger than anybody in it, especially the boss. Data-driven decisions will, of course, open up the possibility of data-driven shortcomings: we all love to berate the Bank of England for its "failure" to predict the rise in inflation, whilst labouring mightily to avoid any such independent scrutiny of our own work. In this WhatsApp is really only the symptom and not the cause: we are struck when moving new organisations onto systems like Teams, which offer public channels for each business subject, how many new users scurry for the safety of the little bit of the app that allows personal chats. Plenty of our senior clients will complain that "it would be inappropriate for me to write x in a subject channel" - of course HR is a legitimate concern, but most of the angst comes from the fact that public channels do not allow for the selective patronage of private sub groups in an organisation, where advancement comes at the price of uncritical support and acclaim, regardless of what the data said. Leadership is a responsibility, not a privilege.