They're Here

Send in the clowns
Don't bothеr, they're herе

(Lyrics from Send In The Clowns by Stephen Sondheim for the 1973 musical A Little Night Music)

From time to time I talk about what it is like to sweep up the mess left by someone who is a walking disaster. I usually mention a computer programmer I call Mad Max who preceded me at one of my largest clients in my IT contracting years.

Maxwell had a gift for persuading managers that he could do something wondrous with their software. It would take two months, and it would be magnificent.

After two months, they would ask how it was going and he would say it needed another two months. That cycle would repeat until it became so obvious he was failing, he was about to be fired. He would jump ship, leaving the software in an unusable condition while he found a new job with an equally gullible manager.

At my client, he replaced much of their core software with recursive self-modifying code. If you are an IT professional yourself, that probably just made involuntary shudders run up and down your spine. Nobody in the group he left behind could makes heads or tails of it. I sorted it out.

That’s when I realized if you sweep up behind someone like Mad Max, you only have to be reasonably competent to look like Einstein in comparison. It’s great. You look like a genius without needing to be one.

This week I’ve realized I should put a caveat on that story.

The Mad Max ahead of you has to leave a mess that is not too deep and fundamental to be cleaned up by a mere mortal.

Max at a National Level

Have I mentioned that although I’m originally American, I live in the UK?

We aren’t Ukraine. Nobody is raining explosives down on us or sending in an invading army. I am immensely grateful not to have to cope with war here at home. But after a dozen years of government that has become more and more like Mad Max the programmer, we have a mess that will require a genius to fix.

Who looks set to become our next Prime Minister? You won’t believe me if I tell you. Are you sure you want to know whose name is all over the airwaves more than anyone else? You guessed it. Boris Johnson. Again. Did we forget everything that came to light this year?

This isn’t quite like programmer Mad Max. He spread his destruction around, going from company to company. He didn’t wreck a place, go away while someone like me cleaned it up, then return to wreck it again, over and over. When I step back and look at the pattern over at least the past 50 years, the latter is what is happening to the UK. For that matter, it’s also what is happening to the USA. When I look to the side, I realize I’ve seen it happen on a much smaller scale too.

It is not an aberration. It happens to all manner of organizations, from companies to charities to community groups to countries.

Destructive Spiral

Sometimes a person or group of people takes control and sucks the organization’s resources for their own benefit. When the resulting damage becomes almost too much, they step out. Somebody else steps in to fix as much as they can of what has been broken. Then the destroyers take control again… It’s a spiral.

Not a circle. A spiral.

In each round, the destroyers go a little farther, trying to get a little more for themselves before relinquishing control. That makes the repair portion of the cycle harder each time, so the harm can’t be fully fixed. The spiral gets worse in each round until eventually the destroyers go too far and the organization collapses.

I realize I’ve seen several businesses and other organizations die this way in my lifetime.

What’s happening in the UK looks and feels like the same spiral. If we could force a general election (which we can’t) and put a cleanup crew in charge, they would have a daunting job to do. There’s no guarantee the job is still possible.

But this is a country, not just an organization. Something eventually rises from the rubble when a country falls apart. It isn’t a ride anyone wants to take. I hope we haven’t gone that far.