Efficiency isn't the be-all and end-all

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It may be true, as this report at the weekend suggested, that the breakdown of air traffic control last week was due to a military aircraft entering ‘spurious’ data into the system. Further investigation might tell us that, and it’s reasonable to expect that the military will be looking into how and why one of their planes did whatever it did. That doesn’t exactly let air traffic control off the hook though: how did their systems, on which so many aircraft and people are so dependent, allow ‘spurious’ data to be entered in the first place, and how did such data then destroy the system? Computer systems only do what they’ve been programmed to do, and if unexpected data gets in, that’s a failure in programming and testing as much as of the user who inputs the data.

That aside, one of the other interesting questions which emerged was about the extent to which backup systems are in place. They offered two reasons, neither of which really stands up. Why NATS being in the midst of a “complete overhaul of its systems” is a reason for a lack of backup is something of a mystery: being in the middle of a change is precisely the time when having a backup in case something goes wrong is most immediately relevant. But perhaps the second reason – that it would cost “vast amounts” of money – is really the operative factor.

From my own background in IT, I’d say that they’re right about the cost. Building in redundancy and duplication can, indeed, prove costly, and there’s a danger that all that extra equipment and cost will never be used. There’s a judgement call involved though, and it’s one that the drive for ‘efficiency’ doesn’t always seem to recognise. It’s a feature of late capitalism in a globalised world that organisations have attempted to drive out cost by reducing the amount of capital employed. After all, the return on capital will always be improved if the same output can be achieved using half the capital. It’s an approach which has given us globalised supply chains and just-in-time deliveries, all built on the implicit assumptions that the world will become ever more integrated and that systems can be completely relied on. Most of the time, those assumptions have proved correct, and things have worked. Until they haven’t.

Whether due to war, pandemic, the capriciousness of nature, man-made climate change, or simple human error, the systems and structures on which we depend have been made increasingly vulnerable. And all in the name of ‘efficiency’ (or, rather, one particular aspect of efficiency, the use of capital), and the vulnerability is hidden from sight until something goes wrong. For sure, organisations routinely carry out risk assessments, but it’s often a tick-box exercise. Whether risks have been properly identified and their probability and impact correctly calculated is a much more open question, as is the issue of whether impact is measured in human terms, or merely financial ones.

It might look like a big extrapolation from a systems error caused by incorrect data entry, but the point is an important one. Humans need resilience; capital doesn’t. Yet much of our economic system has been hijacked to serve the interests of the latter rather than the former. It isn’t the only way of doing things.