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Leading the Torchwood way
Posted on: Tuesday, July 14, 2009
The latest Torchwood mini series had a lot of things to teach leaders. From the Prime Minister relying on the trust of people whilst violating it to the issue of what information to share and what to hold. For those of you not familiar with Torchwood or the latest offering showed on the BBC last week.
The premise is that an Alien race is going to kill the earth population unless humans deliver 10% of their children to them. The children as it turns out will be used as drugs for the alien. The secret agency of alien hunters Torchwood battles the earth politicians and the aliens at the same time to save the human race and its children (honestly it does make much more compelling viewing that my description suggests!).
In a decision worthy (or inspired by) the GE jack Welsh playbook, governments of the world decide that they should give up the bottom 10% of their children on the basis of school test results (after all, they argue, these are the ones most likely to become the less productive members of society). There is an entirely different post to be written about that decision and maybe someday I’ll get around to it but it’s not what I want to focus on today.
Whilst discussing how they should meet the demands of the Alien the British Prime Minister suddenly starts referring to the children as units. How many units should we send? How can we decide on which units to chose? How will we ensure we can get to the units to the same point? How many units should each country supply etc...
What is interesting to note is how by substituting the word unit for children, everyone was now able to concentrate on logistics decisions removing any moral issue. In many ways we know that it is easy to remove moral dilemmas by changing units of measurement (many people will have no problem taking a pen from work or, as I once heard it referred to, freeing a ream of paper from the shackles of corporate life! Yet few, if any of them, would help themselves to an equivalent amount of cash left on a desk).
My question, when watching Torchwood, was, what does our focus, as leaders, on analytics do to our moral responsibility to the people we serve? When we look at calls waiting in call centres, referred to people as assets, look at complaints numbers and strive to make the whole CSR agenda one of metrics, are we running the risk of forgetting what we are really talking about?
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