We came across the phrase "Unconscious Incompetence" in the book “Grow Your Own Heroes” by John J Oliver and Clive Memmot.



The phrase was coined with reference to the behaviour of managers who are genuinely unaware of the damage that they do to their workforces or their organisations.



Examples range from a government who by placing performance targets on our public sector industries have produced teachers who are unable to teach because of the amount of administration they have to do to achieve those targets, to the private sector where we see a similar desire by management to interfere and control having a huge effects on the ability of the workforce to carry on with their work and therefore maintain the competitiveness of the organisation.

A few years ago there was a large hospital on the West Coast of Scotland that with the rest of the Primary Care Trusts at the time found itself in debt to the tune of 9 Million pounds. The local communities were faced with the closure of the accident and emergency department, the closure of several medical wards and a whole raft of redundancies to try to recover from the debt.

Management were at their wits end for measures that they could take to recover the situation and the maintenance of the level of services delivered to the community was of secondary importance to the need to cut the budget. They even hired consultants who, to justify their fee, recommended even more cuts.

The one thing that the administration never did was to ask the care staff how they thought they could improve service delivery and reduce costs.
Why should they? What would they know?

There was a staff nurse working on ward six, one of the few medical wards to remain open, who had been puzzled for a long time about one aspect of her job.
Why was it that when she needed an ambulance to take a recovering patient home she had to order the ambulance 24 hours in advance. The ambulance station was only fifteen minutes from the Hospital.

Ward policy dictated that only the ward sister was allowed to phone the ambulance station so she had no opportunity to ask her question.

It was even more frustrating for her on the weekends because the ambulance station stopped answering their phones at midday on Friday.
The patient who had recovered sufficiently to go home on Friday afternoon had to wait until Monday before an ambulance could be called which then arrived on Tuesday to take the patient home.
This was doubly frustrating for the nurse who not only resented having to feed and care for someone who didn’t need care, she was also frustrated by the bed being occupied by someone who should have gone home, preventing someone else who needed it from receiving her care.

What the nurse did not know but would have been of great interest to the management was that the cost of one bed for one night in an NHS medical ward was reckoned to be £500. One patient who should have gone home on Friday but had to stay four extra nights because there was no ambulance to take them home cost the hospital £2,000. In one year the cumulative effect of this phenomenon, called “Bed Blocking” cost this one hospital an estimated £1,000,000.

One day this staff nurse, when the ward sister was away on a training day, found herself in charge of the ward and her thought turned to her frustrations with the ambulance service. She was now the acting sister and could therefore legitimately call the Ambulance station. Her first question was why did it take 24 hrs to get an ambulance to take someone home. The ambulance man was very helpful and explained that some years ago there had been a target setting exercise in the Primary Care Trust and that a target had been set that any request for an ambulance should be met within 24 hours.

To ensure that this target was always met the hospital were told that they would now have to order their ambulances 24 hrs in advance.

The nurse pressed him further, “So if instead of ordering an ambulance for tomorrow I asked for one today instead, how long would it take to get here?”

The ambulance man replied without drama, “15 minutes”

So what about when you are really busy, how long would it take then?

“One hour tops, but we would have to be very busy”

While what he had told her sunk in she asked another question.
“Why did the ambulance station not receive calls on Friday afternoon?”

Because, she was told, in the same cost cutting exercise the ambulance station were instructed to reduce their non essential personnel. The receptionist who answered the phone was deemed non essential and therefore had her hours cut. Now there was nobody to answer the phone on Friday afternoon so the Ambulance men, who were essential, hung around playing cards until it was their time to go home.

Managers are not incompetent because they want to be.

Managers believe that they are doing a good job and that is why they continue doing the same destructive things, unaware of their effect.

We have become aware recently of a number of stories similar to the above about actions that management have taken that, unconsciously or not, have resulted in great damage and in some cases, even the destruction of the organisation.

We want to gather these stories together to create a new book in which managers and workforces can read and become aware of the specific behaviour that is causing so much damage to our industries both public and private.

By becoming aware of some of the consequences of the things they do managers can take the first and biggest step towards changing their behaviour.

If anybody has a story or a tale of destruction caused by Unconscious Incompetence please let us know by sending us an Email to BadManagement@BreakingtheMould.co.uk .

We realize that some of these stories may be sensitive for both the organisations and the individuals involved and will assure any level of discretion required.