The politics of uncertainty.

...and how novelty requires redundancy, not efficiency

I have been working with a group of professionals, mostly in the health service, who shared some of their work dilemmas with me. In each of their situations the service they contribute to is barely coping. Following years of underfunding and political changes in the UK which resulted in many European colleagues going back to their home countries leaving the service with many unfilled vacancies, there aren’t enough resources or staff to run things well. The services limp from crisis to crisis and there are harsh decisions to be made about who receives what kind of health care, along with long waiting lists for patients.

In this environment it is hard to go off sick, to take leave, or to go on strike in favour of better terms and conditions. A number of colleagues expressed the wish for a break, for permission to stay at home when feeling ill, or told me that they were conflicted about protesting the erosion of their standard of living when the consequences were that the service they contributed to would get worse and the waiting lists longer. Nor did they want to feel that they were letting their colleagues down.

In each of their situations neither their peers nor their managers put particular pressure on them not to take leave, to go off sick, or to strike, but they each had an internalised sense of responsibility for the group, a group which was already under pressure. The closer you are to the front line, the more you are aware about the impact of a threadbare service on patients and your colleagues who may have to bear the additional burden of your absence. And it is the frontline staff, nurses, doctors, receptionists, who endure the frustration and anger of members of the public, disappointed with the poverty of service on offer. But for the colleagues I worked with carried a lot of the anxiety for the maintenance of service levels for which they were only minimally responsible.

A teacherly point about ‘efficient’ organisations: from a complexity perspective organisations which are ‘efficient’ in strict economic terms are vulnerable and probably incapable of innovation. As far as vulnerability is concerned, to run an organisation efficiently, stripping out all but the absolute minimum to keep things going, means that it is incapable of dealing with shocks and contingencies, as the pandemic proved with the NHS in the UK. An organisation can lurch from just about coping to not coping at all with a black swan event. As for innovation, one of the central insights of agent-based complexity models demonstrates that novelty arises because of the experimental behaviour of agents, some of which will lead to no new patterns emerging in the population as a whole, but some of which will not. In other words, there is no guarantee that experiments lead to ‘improvement’, but without a degree of experimentation then all that is likely to emerge is a stuck pattern. This is not an argument to excuse poor management and profligate use of resources, but to contend that resilient and innovative organisations demand a certain degree of over-capacity when defined in strictly economic terms.

My colleagues’ dilemmas also made me think about the anxiety associated with uncertainty and how it is unevenly distributed. In times of crisis and hardship there is often a myth that ‘we are all in this together’, whereas in reality some are more in it than others. In his book The Politics of Uncertainty Peter Marris (1996) explains how group life, particularly in highly individualised and competitive societies, also comprises competition over who gets to sit with the most uncertainty. Your position in the hierarchy will determine how much you can pass on uncertainty to others. And Marris argues that the most marginalised are likely to bear the brunt. As an example, Marris’ reasoning explains how, during the pandemic and in the UK, you were more likely to die of COVID if you were already poor and living in a deprived neighbourhood. The poor, the sick and people from ethnic minorities were particularly exposed to the crisis. Those of us with good housing and well-paying jobs could work from home, while we had our Amazon packages and take-out meals delivered to us by couriers, and had our bins emptied by municipal employees. Equally, in times of financial austerity there have been successive waves of ‘reform’ of benefits so that those receiving them have to pass through increasingly stringent investigation as to whether they really need them. The UK government is currently removing the ability of GPs to renew the ability to renew workers’ sick notes. It is much more likely that the privileged decide who is deserving of state aid, aren’t working hard enough, or are too often sick.

Looking at government policy as a whole and where they pay attention in policy terms, you could be forgiven for concluding that Britain is in a mess because the poor and marginalised live too comfortable a life, and too many asylum seekers are crossing the Channel in small boats.

Equally in organisations facing the continuous crisis of competition it is often the more marginalised who carry the can. In my own sector, higher education in the UK, the trend is to make those towards the bottom of the hierarchy more precarious on ‘flexible’ contracts, or to make people’s jobs dependent on constant successful research applications. In other sectors of the economy there has been an expansion of flexible and zero hours working, or as in the gig economy, to deem the workers to be self-employed, entitled to neither sick pay nor holiday pay.

So yes, life is uncertain and unpredictable, but whether the uncertainty is shared evenly, falling more squarely on those better prepared to endure it or those least able, gives an unfolding demonstration of the existing power figuration. Dominant groups dominate because they work hard at it and develop narratives about why their courses of action are inevitable and necessary. And those enduring the most uncertainty are also likely to feel more responsible for the circumstances over which they have less control given the direct impact on their working relationship will colleagues and their proximal relationship with their patients/clients/customers.