Every person who is successful in whatever walk of life now claims that the secret of their success is their capacity to ‘stay focussed’. ‘Staying focussed’ has become a sort of magical mental state, recommended by advisors to the great majority of us who only lead lives of middling achievement. Like all clichés, ‘staying focussed’ is popular because it conveys certainty without any precise meaning. At its most mundane, it could mean that a person should concentrate on the task in hand or on some immediate ambition. In a broader sense it could it could mean that a person is advised to pursue self-advancement irrespective of effects on their health, their personal morality, their responsibility for others, the happiness of their family life, or the mental health of their children.
Of course, it is essential that for any great task to be completed a person or team of people must concentrate on understanding the problems they must overcome and work together to achieve success. But there are two problems with advising people to ‘stay focussed’. The first is that their greatest ambition in life can or should not be achieved. It is amusing to watch programmes like The X-Factor and see contestants who utterly lack both talent and insight. Their rejection by the panel evokes bewilderment, anger and a renewed determination to succeed at becoming stars - even though ‘success’ will probably in their case mean little more than a wasted lifetime of singing out-of-tune to diminishing audiences. All of us, but especially the most focussed, need to learn what we are not good at. That is not to say that we should avoid activities in which we do not excel. We may of course gain great pleasure from singing, dancing, stamp-collecting or whatever: we should persist in such activities even if we recognise that we will never be world-class. If something is worth doing, it is worth doing even if we do it badly.
The second problem with being ‘focussed’ is that people who concentrate on the task in hand lose sight of the broader picture: they do not see the system. We have all met junior members of staff who rigidly apply the rules of their job even where this undermines the purpose of their employer. But this becomes truly damaging in senior management and politics. Alistair Darling’s memoirs of his time as Chancellor of the Exchequer (Back from the Brink) looks at the events leading up to the collapse of the banking system. He notes that the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority (FSA) were used to assessing the financial stability of individual banks: they did not take into account the massive extent to which banks borrowed from each other, such that the collapse of one bank would topple all the others. The staff at the Bank of England and the FSA were so focussed that they could not see the whole system. Nor indeed were there any senior civil servants in the Treasury with an understanding of the whole system.
A similar failure has occurred recently with the crisis in accident and emergency (A&E) departments in hospitals. The Government has made substantial cuts in funding to local authorities. These have responded by reducing the support the provide for the elderly, the disabled and the mentally-ill. As a result, vulnerable people are discharged from hospital, are unable to care for themselves and are rapidly re-admitted. Governments have persistently failed to see that health and social care services are essentially a single system: cutting expenditure on social services results in expensive hospital beds becoming blocked by people who could remain in their own home (or in a care home) at a better quality of life and less public expense.
Why is system-thinking so rare? The main reason is that it is difficult and becoming more so. System-thinking requires a breadth of knowledge of how many different sorts of institutions operate and the ability to analyse their inter-connectedness. But as society becomes more complicated, people must work ever harder to understand their own small part of it. It is often said that academics advance by knowing more and more about less and less. But the same is true of many other occupations. As a result, people specialise and become experts in their own narrow field or organisation and see the rest of the world as their ‘environment’, either predictable or the origin of unexpected and incomprehensible demands.
Perhaps we need a new set of clichés. Instead of encouraging people to ‘stay focussed’, we should advise them to ‘always see the broader picture’ or ‘look at how it all works together’, or even ‘try not to be too focussed on one small piece of the jigsaw’.
Of course, it is essential that for any great task to be completed a person or team of people must concentrate on understanding the problems they must overcome and work together to achieve success. But there are two problems with advising people to ‘stay focussed’. The first is that their greatest ambition in life can or should not be achieved. It is amusing to watch programmes like The X-Factor and see contestants who utterly lack both talent and insight. Their rejection by the panel evokes bewilderment, anger and a renewed determination to succeed at becoming stars - even though ‘success’ will probably in their case mean little more than a wasted lifetime of singing out-of-tune to diminishing audiences. All of us, but especially the most focussed, need to learn what we are not good at. That is not to say that we should avoid activities in which we do not excel. We may of course gain great pleasure from singing, dancing, stamp-collecting or whatever: we should persist in such activities even if we recognise that we will never be world-class. If something is worth doing, it is worth doing even if we do it badly.
The second problem with being ‘focussed’ is that people who concentrate on the task in hand lose sight of the broader picture: they do not see the system. We have all met junior members of staff who rigidly apply the rules of their job even where this undermines the purpose of their employer. But this becomes truly damaging in senior management and politics. Alistair Darling’s memoirs of his time as Chancellor of the Exchequer (Back from the Brink) looks at the events leading up to the collapse of the banking system. He notes that the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority (FSA) were used to assessing the financial stability of individual banks: they did not take into account the massive extent to which banks borrowed from each other, such that the collapse of one bank would topple all the others. The staff at the Bank of England and the FSA were so focussed that they could not see the whole system. Nor indeed were there any senior civil servants in the Treasury with an understanding of the whole system.
A similar failure has occurred recently with the crisis in accident and emergency (A&E) departments in hospitals. The Government has made substantial cuts in funding to local authorities. These have responded by reducing the support the provide for the elderly, the disabled and the mentally-ill. As a result, vulnerable people are discharged from hospital, are unable to care for themselves and are rapidly re-admitted. Governments have persistently failed to see that health and social care services are essentially a single system: cutting expenditure on social services results in expensive hospital beds becoming blocked by people who could remain in their own home (or in a care home) at a better quality of life and less public expense.
Why is system-thinking so rare? The main reason is that it is difficult and becoming more so. System-thinking requires a breadth of knowledge of how many different sorts of institutions operate and the ability to analyse their inter-connectedness. But as society becomes more complicated, people must work ever harder to understand their own small part of it. It is often said that academics advance by knowing more and more about less and less. But the same is true of many other occupations. As a result, people specialise and become experts in their own narrow field or organisation and see the rest of the world as their ‘environment’, either predictable or the origin of unexpected and incomprehensible demands.
Perhaps we need a new set of clichés. Instead of encouraging people to ‘stay focussed’, we should advise them to ‘always see the broader picture’ or ‘look at how it all works together’, or even ‘try not to be too focussed on one small piece of the jigsaw’.
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