Santa, the Saboteur and the Shape of the Problem

This morning, with more to muse on than usual, I made the mistake of asking my daughter for editorial direction. There was a heatwave forcing half the country into a national debate about whether shorts are acceptable office wear, and a churn of Prime Ministers that will eventually work its way into the NHS, into immigration policy, into almost everything that matters this year. Surely, I thought, she would hand me something timely. She paused with the gravity of someone weighing a great philosophical question, and then she said: “Santa. Write about Santa.” It is the end of June. Father Christmas has not been mentioned in this house since approximately the second of January.

I laughed, mostly at my own expense, because I had gone looking for relevance and been handed a reindeer instead.

It reminded me of something that happened during a session I was facilitating on neighbourhood health partnership working. I asked the room to count backwards from twenty to ten, with one condition: no two colleagues could speak consecutive numbers back to back. If someone said eighteen, the next person had to say anything except seventeen, and nothing already said. It is a deceptively fiddly little exercise in self-organisation without instruction. We had barely begun when one colleague, with the confidence of someone who had simply had enough of the rules, yelled “One!” That was the end of the game. Not because the system had failed, but because the system had done exactly what systems do when you are not watching closely enough: something other than what you asked of it.

Neither moment derailed me, and that is rather the point. My daughter’s Santa was not a wrong answer to a right question. It became the muse for today’s piece, which is this one. Systems, whether they are six year olds, conference rooms, or the British state, rarely respond the way we want them to. The system does what the system wants to do, and our job is not to be offended by that.

The instinct, when a system answers oddly, is to correct it: repeat the question more slowly, insist on the original brief, restart the counting game with another rule bolted on. I think this is usually the wrong instinct. A better one is curiosity, which means sitting with the ambiguity for a moment longer than feels comfortable, and treating the odd answer as information rather than noise. The shouted “one” told me more about that room’s appetite for instruction than a tidy count to ten ever could have. The point at which a system breaks its own rules is rarely an accident. It is usually the system telling you, quite precisely, where the real problem is hiding. Clarity about the problem is what gives a solution its shape. Skip the clarity, and you simply end up with a more elaborate version of the wrong solution.

It helps to look at the same odd answer from more than one angle, because a single lens always flatters itself into believing it has seen the whole picture.

There is a functional way of looking at the heatwave and the political churn I had originally planned to write about: as engineering problems, solvable with better forecasting, sturdier contingency planning, and clearer accountability when one Prime Minister hands the baton to the next. This is the paradigm of dashboards and key performance indicators, necessary and useful, if a little blind to anything that resists measurement.

There is an interpretive way of looking at the same mess, which treats it as a set of competing stories rather than a single truth waiting to be found. A heatwave means something quite different to a hospital trying to keep its wards cool than it does to a Cabinet trying to keep its temper, and neither party is wrong, only differently positioned within the same weather.

There is an emancipatory way of looking at it too, which asks who is left without air conditioning, without secure immigration status, without continuity of care, while the people with the authority to decide remain comfortably insulated from the consequences of their own churn.

And then there is what I have come to think of as the deviant paradigm, which pays attention not to a system’s design but to the moments it breaks its own script. The colleague who yelled “one” was deviant data. So, in her own small way, was my daughter. Both told me something the orderly version of events never would have, because well behaved systems rarely confess where their weaknesses lie. It is usually the rule breaker, the outlier, the unscripted answer, that does the confessing.

I still have not written about Santa. But thanks to him, I have written about something rather more useful: that the next time a system answers a question you did not ask, the wiser move is not to repeat yourself more firmly. It is to wonder, with something close to delight, what exactly it is trying to tell you.