Father Neil McNicholas: Leaders failing to learn from their mistakes

Once upon a time, you used to learn your lessons at school and proving you had done so is how you got a job.

When a person left school and started work for the first time, they would typically spend a considerable period of time learning the various facets of the job they were going to be doing.

Sometimes that would involve a formal apprenticeship, or it might be a gradual process of on-the-job training.

Only when a person had demonstrated actual ability and competence – and in some jobs that could take quite some time – would they be permitted to work independently, though even then answerable to a foreman or supervisor who, in turn, worked under the oversight of a head of department.

This is largely still the case in industry and commerce. No manager or director worth their salt is going to risk the reputation and operation of his or her company to an untrained or incompetent workforce. It makes no sense either practically or economically.

And yet we seem to do it in government, otherwise why are people in positions of power still having to learn lessons?

There was a programme on television recently looking at the ever-increasing participation in, and influence on, government by politicians educated at a select handful of the same schools and universities.

Contacts are made and networks established very early in the process, with graduates moving on to become special advisers working within the party machinery, “fast-tracking” their way toward selection as candidates by which stage, as the programme pointed out, few will have had regular jobs or work experience of any sort outside of the political system.

Asked whether going to public school was an advantage to a political career, the response of Lord Hurd, the former Foreign Secretary, was: “I don’t think it is a substitute for intelligence or hard work; you have to add those.”

He suggested that these contacts were not guaranteed to be acquired at public school and may have to be so acquired later. But what if they never are? And is that why we find politicians admitting that they still have lessons to learn?

Also interviewed, Lord Mandelson had to admit that MPs are increasingly drawn from the ranks of professional politicians rather than from the professions or the trade unions who, by implication, would have had both professional training and work experience which they then brought with them into the political arena.

Nowadays, it was said, without connections (and without money) you don’t get selected as a candidate in the first place. Westminster is filling up with people who have connections and money but little or no work experience, are well educated but, it would sometimes seem, have a paucity of common sense. One Minister walking along Downing Street with confidential papers exposed to the print media cameras is careless; a second Minister doing it is totally irresponsible. And how many CDs, memory sticks and laptops, packed with personal and confidential data, have been left on buses and trains or were stolen from cars?

When the response to failure and poor judgment continues to be “We have to learn a lesson from this”, you can’t help wondering whatever happened to meritocracy as a system.

How can Ministers be appointed to positions of authority and leadership without a proven track record – and not just their political background, but hands-on training, and not a little actual capability for the task in hand?

Clearly there is a problem with the current process of selection if Ministers later find themselves still learning from the catastrophes and blunders that have occurred on their watch.

And the system is not helped by people being parachuted into ministerial positions purely on the basis of gender or ethnic background rather than on merit and experience.

In the real world, we expect people to be qualified in the areas in which they work and so we would be more than a little alarmed by people being asked to be surgeons or pilots or engineers on the basis that they knew someone who knew someone, but otherwise had no particular training or experience.

And yet we entrust the governance of our country to people who are appointed to positions of leadership and power on the basis of who they went to school with, and despite the fact that, in many cases, they have no previous experience of the work they are being asked to do.

Meanwhile, the noise you can hear may be more clangers being dropped; the excuse you will then hear will be the same one you have heard so many times before: “We have to learn a lesson from this.”

So do we.

Father Neil McNicholas is a parish priest in Whitby.