I’ve worried about the Virgin Mary before, but this book review in The Economist gave me new causes for concern:

They knew that the Holy Spirit had made the Virgin Mary pregnant but that she was still a virgin. What they were not quite sure about was how those two things could both be true. How, in short, had God got in?

Theologians set about solving this riddle with great debate—and a healthy disregard for biology. Almost no orifice was off limits. God had entered Mary through her eyes, suggested one text. Another scholar thought He had come in through her ear. A third suggested that He had impregnated Mary through her nose—which was inventive, if hard to imagine being incorporated into the annual school nativity play.

This is one of those brilliant book reviews: it’s filled with humour and extracts the juice from the book without me having to bother with the whole volume. This seems just as well given the cutting verdict on the tone:

Mr MacCulloch’s great strength is that he knows a vast amount. His great weakness is that he has written it all down, over 497 pages, in a tiny font.

Oof. This is good stuff.

Marion Fourcade and Henry Farrell have a short but fascinating thought in The Economist concerning how large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT might influence work rituals.

Organisations couldn’t work without rituals. When you write a reference letter for a former colleague or give or get a tchotchke on Employee Appreciation Day, you are enacting a ceremony, reinforcing the foundations of a world in which everyone knows the rules and expects them to be observed—even if you sometimes secretly roll your eyes. Rituals also lay the paper and electronic trails through which organisations keep track of things.

Organisational ceremonies, such as the annual performance evaluations that can lead to employees being promoted or fired, can be carried out far more quickly and easily with LLMs. All the manager has to do is fire up ChatGPT, enter a brief prompt with some cut-and-pasted data, and voilà! Tweak it a little, and an hour’s work is done in seconds. The efficiency gains could be remarkable.

Exactly because LLMs are mindless, they might enact organisational rituals more efficiently, and sometimes more compellingly, than curious and probing humans ever could. For just the same reason, they can divorce ceremony from thoughtfulness, and judgment from knowledge.

I don’t think any of this is exactly surprising, but the way of thinking about it—through the lens of rituals—was new to me.

Rituals form a critical part of organisational life, even if we don’t always notice them. In health and higher education, rituals around topics like sustainability, inclusion, or diversity set the tone for how organisations present themselves. Yet these rituals can easily become hollow.

In my own experience, many organisations have rituals which are already divorced from their original intention. For instance, consider performance reviews. We all know the drill: managers gather feedback, write it up, and then sit through slightly awkward meetings where everyone knows what’s coming. This ritual started with the idea of providing useful feedback, promoting development, and assessing progress. But it has, in many places, become a tick-box exercise. Managers rush through the task, focus on compliance rather than insight, and employees nod along, knowing that what’s written is often more about playing politics than providing meaningful development.

Now, throw an LLM into the mix. For managers juggling a hundred other tasks, it’s tempting to get ChatGPT to churn out those reviews in seconds—especially if the task has already become perfunctory. But the consequence is that the process, already watered down, becomes even more superficial. The words become smoother, and probably more aligned with corporate standards, but they’re ultimately just noise—an efficient effluent, a downgrading of a ritual that’s already lost most of its meaning.

The same goes for things like corporate values. Having pronouns or a phonetic spelling in one’s email signature started off from a genuine desire to foster inclusivity. These days, their presence—or absence—often ends up being used as a proxy signal for other things, without deeper thought. It’s like the phrase ‘consider the environment before printing this email,’ tacked onto the end of countless emails. It almost certainly does nothing for the environment, but it signals that the person sending the email aligns with certain values.

What’s fascinating here is how easily LLMs could amplify these rituals. They can craft the perfect corporate spiel on inclusion, diversity, or sustainability, and they’ll do it without any sense of irony or understanding. A well-prompted LLM could pump out a flawless internal memo about the company’s dedication to [insert value here] without anyone needing to reflect on whether the company is actually doing anything meaningful about it.

It hadn’t previously occurred to me that LLMs have the potential to reinforce this effect by parroting the corporate lines to perfection, with absolutely no understanding or judgment behind them. Prompt an LLM to write an annual review for an employee in a way that aligns with corporate values, and it will do so—with absolutely no ability to thoughtfully probe whether or not the work actually demonstrates those things.

Of course, LLMs have a place in business, and can be transformative when thoughtfully applied. But the drive towards efficiency is not always thoughtful—even without LLMs involved, we can all think of times when processes have been made more efficient without proper regard to whether they remain effective.

It’s definitely something to think about. And perhaps that’s where the real work lies: recognising where rituals, human or automated, stop being useful and start being obstacles to real progress. If we’re not careful, we might find LLMs influencing deeper organisational habits and values in ways we don’t anticipate.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

It feels strange to live through an election period where a change of Government is forecast with—by the sober analysis of The Economist—99% certainty. While it’s democratically essential, even going through the motions of the campaign feels a little disconnected from reality, even before one considers the specific promises made by candidates.

Tonight, Julie Etchingham will host the first televised debate of this election, ostensibly between the two candidates who could plausibly be Prime Minister on 5 July—though it’s hard not to wonder whether more people ought to be involved if a 1 in 100 chance is considered ‘plausible’. It feels like false equivalence—not that I have a better suggestion. It also feels narrowly composed: the recent experience of Prime Ministers leaving office between elections shows us that the candidates are asking us to place our confidence in the leader selection process for each of their parties as much as in them personally.

On Saturday, the always-excellent Stephen Bush had a brilliant article in the FT Weekend exploring how British politics has lost touch with reality. He points out that both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are guilty of promising things that they cannot plausibly deliver. It is this three-paragraph excoriation of Rishi Sunak’s failure to make even the simplest of changes that particularly stands out:

Remember, too, that Sunak has been unable to achieve some seemingly achievable policy challenges. Although it is early days, it is hard to see how any political party in the general election will manage a better argument as to why Sunak should not be re-elected than the one that came from the man himself. He described his failed attempt to ban future generations from buying cigarettes as evidence of “the type of prime minister I am”, and he was right. Rishi Sunak is the type of prime minister who, when he wants to do something, when it is backed by large majorities in both his own party and the Labour opposition . . . still can’t reliably deliver.

In this case, his attempt to bring about a “smoke-free generation” — the flagship not only of his attempt to rebrand himself as a “change candidate” last autumn but also one of his signature achievements in his speech calling the election — came unstuck because he couldn’t manage the simple trick of not expediting the legal change ahead of an election he didn’t need to hold.

Whether you agree with Sunak’s phased smoking ban or not, the difficult truth for the prime minister is that passing his ban into law was a public policy challenge with the difficulty turned all the way down to “casual”. Yet he could not manage it. Nor is it an isolated example. One of Sunak’s earliest initiatives was a push to teach all children in England a form of maths until 18. If, as looks likely, he leaves office in five weeks’ time, the country will be less equipped to teach maths to 18 than when he took office — because there are fewer maths teachers. There is no prospect that Sunak, a limited prime minister with few achievements to his name, is going to be able to keep the promises he is now making, any more than he could make the snow fall on Christmas Day and the sun shine in June and July.

In 2024, comparisons are inevitably drawn with the 1997 election. In the exit poll for that election, 57% of the respondents felt that John Major could be trusted, versus 56% for Tony Blair. At the start of the 2024 election campaign, 21% of respondents considered Rishi Sunak to be trustworthy, and 28% considered Keir Starmer to be trustworthy. Those figures portend poorly for Sunak, but perhaps worse for the population, representing as they do a complete collapse of trust in politicians.

We can debate how much of that collapse is attributable to a failure to keep simple promises, and how much to the criminal behaviour of some politicians. But it seems unlikely that the continued disconnect between political rhetoric and reality will repair trust—or that a fantastical television debate will do anything but further damage trust in our politicians.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

This book seems to have had a digital release in September, but isn’t coming out in physical form in the UK until 2024. It’s therefore the first book I’ve read in ages which I’ve read purely digitally. I bought it after the book was referenced in this Johnson column in The Economist.

It’s a short book largely based on behavioural science about how to write clearly and concisely. At work, one of my pet peeves is poorly written corporate communications. I get quite riled when people send mass emails which I can’t understand, frequently with calls to action that are bafflingly unclear. You wouldn’t know it from my rambling on here, but in professional life, I spend a lot of time refining things I write to make them as precise, concise and clear as possible.

As a result, I spent most of this book nodding along. I don’t think I picked up anything new from it, but I appreciated how to authors compiled sage advice into this short, actionable format. It should be required reading for anyone drafting any sort of corporate communication… and many of the principles are applicable in personal life as well.

A couple of weeks ago, when I was reflecting on the terrible news of the felling of the tree at Sycamore Gap, I mentioned that

Sycamore Gap also features on endless bits of North East merchandise: often the option left over once the Tyne Bridge, Millennium Bridge and Angel of the North tat has been sold. It always felt like the North East’s symbol for the North East, not necessarily known or appreciated to the same degree by outsiders.

To prove the point, here are six examples I’ve recently seen while wandering the city.

The Economist had a lovely obituary. I particularly liked their line about the tree ‘bearing a pastoral load’, which feels like a neat way of communicating a feeling which is quite difficult to put into words.

I know nothing about sport, but even I’m aware that England faces Spain in the World Cup Final this morning.

I enjoyed reading the Economist’s Simply Science newsletter on the subject, written by Abby Bertics. I had no idea, for example, that “women still overwhelmingly wear football boots designed for small men, not women.”

But the most interesting part of the article concerned some research by Arve Vorland Pedersen, who proposed several modifications to the game to scale it to the physiological attributes of women, rather than those of men. Women are shorter, for example, so the pitch and goals ought to be smaller. Women should not have to live in a world designed for men.

And yet the kicker, so to speak, came at the end. The average physiological attributes of men at the time the sport’s rules were codified have more in common with the average physiological attributes of today’s women than today’s men. So really, the challenge ought not to be to scale things down for women, but up for men.

In today’s world, football is a women’s game.

There’s an article in the latest edition of The Economist which laments the death of the hatchet job in book reviewing. At first, I enjoyed it mostly for the bitchy quotations from bad reviews:

It is delicious to know that one reviewer called John Keats’s poetry “drivelling idiocy”. It is more pleasing yet that Virginia Woolf considered James Joyce’s writing to be “tosh”. And surely no one can be uncheered to hear that when the critic Dorothy Parker read “Winnie the Pooh” she found it so full of innocent, childish whimsy that she—in her own moment of whimsical spelling—“fwowed up”.

And:

In the Victorian era, “reviews were seen as a kind of cultural hygiene, so there were high standards,” says Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, a professor of English at Oxford University. Reviewers were not merely taking a swipe at an enemy but cleansing the sacred halls of literature. Not that this stopped them from mild grubbiness themselves. For example, one reviewer called a fellow writer’s work “feculent garbage”; the reliably robust Alfred Tennyson called yet another “a louse upon the locks of literature”; while John Milton (apparently having momentarily lost paradise again) described another as an “unswill’d hogshead”.

And:

One of the most famous poems of the Roman writer Catullus is a riposte to critics who accused him of being effeminate. “Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo,” he wrote, which means (broadly speaking): “I will sodomise and face-fuck you.” Not the sort of thing you see in the Times Literary Supplement these days.

But the comments later in the article about the effect of the internet on book reviews came to linger longer in my mind. The article argues that the risk of a social media pile-on has led to fewer scathing reviews.

I then came to read an article by Megan Nolan in the New Stateman and one by Helen Lewis in The Atlantic, both criticising the negativity of the online book-themed social media site Goodreads. They both cite the same examples in some cases, and make the point that many people on the site review books even without reading them.

At first, I was slightly taken aback at how this implies people use Goodreads: I mostly use it to see what people I know in real life thought of books, not to look at the aggregate scores and (seemingly aggressive) reviews of random strangers. I’m not certain why people would attach much weight to this.

And secondly, I thought about how this is a good example of the complexity of the influence of the internet on systems. According to these three articles taken together, the internet has vastly decreased the likelihood of a book being panned by a critic, making professional reviews less valuable as a result of them essentially becoming less discriminating. At the same time, it has drastically increased the likelihood of an amateur reviewer having a disproportionate effect through sharing opinions uninformed by the most basic facts.

It feels like that that might read across to other areas of life, too.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

I cannot stand workplace jargon and have developed quite a reputation for challenging or ridiculing it depending on my mood.

But as much as I abhor corporate nonsense words—inane and insane in equal measure—I enjoy being challenged on my deeply-held views. It is one of the key ways I learn and grow. I was therefore delighted to see that the Bartleby column in The Economist this week addresses the upsides of workplace jargon.

Firstly, though, I need to address an error in the column:

Doctors have a private vocabulary for patients when they are out of earshot. “Status dramaticus” is how some medics diagnose people who have not much wrong with them but behave as though death is nigh; “ash cash” is the fee that British doctors pocket for signing cremation forms.

The idea that this sort of unsympathetic, uncaring use of language is ‘the norm’ in my profession is a myth. It’s the sort of language that routinely gets called out, and which gives people an unsavoury reputation.

Regardless, the column cites two main benefits of jargon.

The first is ‘creating a sense of tribe and of belonging’. This may be true, but I do not see this as a virtue. This is essentially suggesting that an exclusive culture is preferable to an inclusive one. The column suggests that knowledge of the language confers ‘membership’, which might be fine in social groups, but is really quite abhorrent in the workplace. People ought to be included by dint of their employment in the organisation, and it is up to the organisation to welcome new recruits; they ought not to be excluded until they acquire ‘membership’ of the cult.

The second is ‘practical reasons’ such as ‘increasing efficiency’. It’s hard to understand how jargon increases efficiency if it excludes some staff members and—as the article cites elsewhere—frequently leads to errors and misunderstandings.

One of the organisations I currently work for is in the process of rolling out a programme to improve wellbeing, morale and a sense of inclusion in the organisation. Let’s imagine that they called it ‘Inclusion for Excellence’, which is not a million miles away from reality. I’m now deluged with corporate communications for the ‘I4E programme’ and seemingly no-one recognises the irony.

The most dangerous jargon of all is the language we don’t even recognise to be jargon. Some years ago, I led the response to an outbreak in a prison. The health services, me included, talked about ’vulnerable prisoners’, meaning those at higher risk of serious illness if they contracted the infection. The prison services heard us talking about ‘vulnerable prisoners’ and thought we meant those in special protection due to the risk of attack from other prisoners. We used identical shorthand for different groups of people.

I concede that I’m not totally opposed to jargon: it can indeed be a useful shorthand in situations where one can be certain that everyone understands what is meant. Everyone uses it, to some degree, every day.

But it is my fervent and unshakeable view that jargon is, for the most part, best avoided. Where unclear language is used and not understood (or misunderstood) it is a failure of the speaker.

And your chosen deity help you if you ever send me an email saying, without further explanation, that you’d like my input into

an innovative outsourced supply chain solution that will drive strategic alignment as we recalibrate towards business as usual

You’re unlikely to receive the reply you’d hoped for.

The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.

There’s nothing I could write today that’s even half as spot-on as yesterday’s Economist leader.

The recipe for saving the NHS requires radicalism, but of a simpler sort: turning the NHS from what it has become—a sickness service—into what its name promises—a health service. That will mean spending more money. But to spend it productively requires a shift in focus: away from hospitals to the community, from treatment to prevention, from incentivising inputs to encouraging better outcomes.

A system focused on hospitals is one designed to treat people only after they have become really sick. That is the equivalent of buying more fire extinguishers while dismantling the smoke alarms.

The whole thing is well worth five minutes of your time.

I’ve read two recent articles which were basically about rubbish meetings: ’How to be a superstar on Zoom’, a Bartleby column in The Economist , and ’How to escape the hell of bad meetings’, by Adrian Wooldridge on Bloomberg.

There is certainly a trend within my employing organisation in recent times for holding impractically large meetings via Microsoft Teams. These often seem to a mechanism for effectively broadcasting information which would be better communicated asynchronously, preferably in writing. In my personal notes, I’ve somewhat petulantly developed a habit of recording the number of participants in a meeting along with its length. None of these meetings would have been held pre-pandemic, when we were reliant on audio-only teleconferencing. In these cases, it seems to me that the technology is being used because it is there, not because there is a strong underlying need for it.

There was a notable occasion recently when I sat in a meeting where twenty participants spent half an hour ‘discussing’ whether some minor changes should be made to a document, or whether this was a poor use of time. This was ten person-hours spent discussing whether a task that would take roughly two person-hours was worthwhile. The irony struck no-one.

The close of the Economist article:

The right way for companies to respond is to make meetings shorter and more relevant. Whether you are on camera or in the room, it is always easier to listen when there is something worth hearing.

Well, quite.

The picture at the top of this post is an AI-generated image created by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2.