No. 113 - Fancy a Career Change James? Super-Talented Wierdos and Misfits Required at No.10.

Dear James,

For months I have been searching for any biography of your party’s Senior Adviser, Dominic Cummings. I’ve scoured Waterstones, searched the web, pestered friends but all I’ve found so far is a vapid cameo of the man in Wikipaedia. It is clearly too soon for a biography and much much too soon for an autobiography.  But yesterday, amazingly, we were given, free of charge,  a glimpse of Dominic, the man. A rambling 3,000 word recruitment ad for his vision of a massive shake-down of the Civil Service has been aired in his personal blog. It’s not exactly a revelation of his inner consciousness – if he has one -  but it’ll do for starters. Oh boy, I bet those scribblers – sorry, the ‘pundit world’ - are sharpening their pencils for the prefaces to the avalanche of bios to come!   

So what do we learn from our first glimpse into this er… ‘busy’ mind? Well first of all that he is looking for what he terms ‘super-talented wierdos’, ‘misfits’, ‘wild cards’ and ‘artists’ all of whom must also be expert mathematicians. Dominic is clearly determined to be the Great Disruptor. The concept of disruption, first identified back in 1995 by Clayton Christensen, has finally reached its apogee, namely Government. If Dominic has his way, we are soon all going to be disrupted whether we like it or not.  

Today ‘disruption’ is part of every self-respecting MBA programme around the planet. To be a disrupter is to find a way of doing things which displaces existing ‘dominant players’ in an industry and eventually replaces them at the head of their sector. Wikipaedia is an example. It disrupted the market for encyclopaedias. Digital photography did the same to Kodak. Dominic’s ad begins with a brief description of the Nash Equilibrium. This is an element of Game Theory in which no player has an incentive to change his or her strategy which immediately results in stasis. The state is trapped in its own Nash Equilibrium, moribund and locked in a stasis that needs to be broken. Disruptors are generally outsiders, and idealists rather than industry insiders or specialists. Ergo, Dominic needs wild ones to break the system.  

But it all goes back long before that. The Beaker revolution of the second millennium BC was a massive technological disruption that brought metal production into mankind’s orbit. Today things happen much faster. Today Artificial Intelligence may be our own ‘Beaker Revolution’. Already it is performing better than two experts in predicting breast cancer in women.  Mr Cummings however, wants to ‘control’ or ‘manage’ disruption in our Civil Service (and later probably in the NHS, the BBC etc, etc). He wants specialists rather than generalists. He dismisses government’s traditional ‘lobby journalism’ as ‘narrative from noise’ and wants people who have worked in film or advertising. He wants unusual economists and great project managers. Nothing wrong with that per se. It would seem however, that Dominic wants to rewrite the world in his own image and according to his own ideas. If the people that he wants to recruit are clones of himself and ‘cognitively diverse’ rather than ‘gender, identity’ diverse, what about those other aspects of humanity where he is less well endowed? For example, unlike the majority of us, Dominic professes to be unconcerned with what other people think about him. He is also suffering from a degree of hubris following his 2016 and 2019 campaign successes. Those two things alone, may I suggest, make him dangerously abnormal.

The really scary bit however, is that Dominic feels ‘safe’ for the next five years and has no need ‘to worry about short term popularity’. As he launches us all on his great experiment, he intends  to address first, the ‘profound problems at the core of how the British state makes decisions’. Surely, his first stop should be the voting system where the majority of the population is disenfranchised by living in a ‘safe’ constituency of one of the two main parties? Our Civil Service may need reform but surely, if we want real change, then the voting system is where you should begin Dominic, not with Sir Humphrey’s lot?

However James, if you are interested in a change of career, then all you have to do is brush up your maths and send Dominic an e-mail with your cv to his private account. Frankly though, I think you should stick to your day job.  Even you are not weird enough to stand a chance in Dominic’s brave new world. 

Kind regards, 

BH - Your Concerned Constituent