In most countries Management is not Meritocratic - people whose job is Organizing, Tactical Planning and even Strategical Planning are in practice selected on Networking (the social kind, not the tech kind), Social and Image Management skills as well as Knowing The Right People (which often is Coming From Well Off Families And Attending The Right Posh Schools) instead of concrete metrics on the skills they’re supposed to have and apply on the job.
Since performance measuring in that domain is often pretty nebulous (especially in IT), it’s a lot easier to get away with being mediocre at the job than it is in more strictly measurable domains where results are clearly PASS/FAIL.
So you get tons of Shoot From The Hip, Make It Up As You Go and generally insufficient problem space analysis, none of which conducing to reliable, sustained and robust outcomes. Since generally the management pyramid is people like that all the way up, the higher ups just see the inevitable problems that emerge later as “just the way things are” because they themselves did the exact same thing, and often even promote such people because they’re like them:
The
Some manager does insufficient upfront analysis and preparation, and then, when things needlessly blow up because of that, in a “superhuman effort” “saves the day” by avoiding catastrophe, hence is seen as a hero and gets promoted.
is very common exactly because upper level management themselves work in the same way and are thus unable to spot the causal relationship between not doing something they themselves don’t do and the later crisis when a “unknown unknown” that should’ve been a “know unknown” for which there was already some defensive planning turns into a near catastrophe for which in their eyes “nobody could have seen coming” is a valid justification.
Mind you, this actually varies quiet a bit from country to country as the overall management culture is not the same - in my own professional experience it’s not at all the same thing in Northern Europe and Scandinavia as it is in Western Europe and Anglo-Saxon countries and in turn between those and Southern Europe and Latin America.
In most countries Management is not Meritocratic - people whose job is Organizing, Tactical Planning and even Strategical Planning are in practice selected on Networking (the social kind, not the tech kind), Social and Image Management skills as well as Knowing The Right People (which often is Coming From Well Off Families And Attending The Right Posh Schools) instead of concrete metrics on the skills they’re supposed to have and apply on the job.
Since performance measuring in that domain is often pretty nebulous (especially in IT), it’s a lot easier to get away with being mediocre at the job than it is in more strictly measurable domains where results are clearly PASS/FAIL.
So you get tons of Shoot From The Hip, Make It Up As You Go and generally insufficient problem space analysis, none of which conducing to reliable, sustained and robust outcomes. Since generally the management pyramid is people like that all the way up, the higher ups just see the inevitable problems that emerge later as “just the way things are” because they themselves did the exact same thing, and often even promote such people because they’re like them:
The
is very common exactly because upper level management themselves work in the same way and are thus unable to spot the causal relationship between not doing something they themselves don’t do and the later crisis when a “unknown unknown” that should’ve been a “know unknown” for which there was already some defensive planning turns into a near catastrophe for which in their eyes “nobody could have seen coming” is a valid justification.
Mind you, this actually varies quiet a bit from country to country as the overall management culture is not the same - in my own professional experience it’s not at all the same thing in Northern Europe and Scandinavia as it is in Western Europe and Anglo-Saxon countries and in turn between those and Southern Europe and Latin America.