When systems fail, people-leadership must prevail
19 Jan 2024
Blog
The long-running Post Office miscarriage-of-justice scandal in the UK, which is now, belatedly, being handled with long overdue urgency and sensitivity, is a stark warning of the dangers of overpromising technology implementation without adequate governance.
For over a decade, a faulty computer system, Horizon, led to hundreds of sub-postmasters being falsely accused of accounting errors and theft. Many were prosecuted and even jailed, resulting in severe suffering as livelihoods and reputations were ruined based on flimsy computer evidence that was not adequately investigated. It was flawed from start to finish.
This scandal reveals the havoc that can ensue when responsibility fractures around promoting new technologies that lack oversight to ensure alignment with human needs.
As pressure mounts globally on organizations to pursue digital transformation, leaders today must heed the lessons of such failures before racing headlong into automation and, more recently, AI projects with necessary planning to avoid harmful and long-lasting impacts.
Vigilance needed
A core factor underlying the aforementioned debacle was an institutional blindness in Post Office leadership and governance to mounting evidence of software flaws. Despite increasing symptoms of unexplained discrepancies in branch accounts, challenges from sub-postmasters were dismissed amid rigid system centrism that suppressed truth and transparency.
With automation and AI spreading rapidly across functions absent commensurate oversight, the risks accumulate of similar governance failures, enabling uncorrected mistakes to cascade through digitized decision chains.
As leadership pushes to substitute additional roles with algorithmic systems, what safety guardrails are tracking these innovations’ alignment with human needs and values on the front line? Already, responsible governance struggles to catch up with the pace of technological innovation reshaping society behind the digital scenes.
Responsible leadership
Learning from such debacles demands leaders’ commitment to transparency, diversity of insight, and embracing scrutiny of the systemic interdependencies that shape outcomes. Responsible leaders must engage emerging technologies not as convenient turnkey toolkits, but as continual challenges requiring collaborative guidance across functions to ensure architectures adapt to enable human thriving.
Today’s overeager rush to adopt technology solutions as convenient fixes mirrors past episodes where dependence on efficient systems suppressed signals of resulting fragility until severe crises erupted. Behind celebrated stories of innovation-driven progress often lie overlooked figures whose critical insights were marginalized, resulting in lost opportunities.
For example, the book and Hollywood film Hidden Figures – which I saw during the festive break – reveals such forgotten ingenuity during the space race in the 1960s. It is based on the true story of NASA physicist Katherine Johnson. Her mathematical expertise proved essential for double-checking the orbital calculations underpinning launch trajectories computed by the organization’s new IBM mainframe, which produced conflicting readings.
Without Johnson’s involvement in bridging the technical specialist realm and the actual situational needs of safe rocket operation, the fruits of computation would have led astronomy astray. But now, we are in another universe in terms of technological advancement.
In our era, defined by the exponential expansion of automation, algorithmic systems stand poised to substitute additional roles and functions with due oversight of that integration. Like nascent space exploration, we stand on the edge of a new world, but this one is dominated by self-improving AI whose arc trajectory remains unpredictable.
Yet the risks remain of fragmented translation across technical specialties and grounded human contexts. Today, responsible leadership requires commitments to bridge systems and diverse community knowledge to ensure continuity of understanding and wisdom.
Rebuilding trust
Absent leadership dedicated to such integration, elevating any single realm of knowledge – whether technical processes or theoretical models – as the ultimate arbiter of truth inhibits adaptability to uncertainty ahead.
Enabling civilizations to endure relies on structures legitimizing a diversity of observation, fostering broadened debate, and anchoring collective sense-making within grounded human contexts. Integrating broad wisdom traditions with specific situational insights proves essential for attuning complex systems to known and unknown future risks and navigating responsible innovation.
Rectifying years of damage from the Post Office scandal has demanded relentless efforts from victims to compel authoritative confrontations of hubris to initiate necessary reforms rebuilding trust in such powerful institutions. The predictions decades ago that reliable restraints would emerge through market discipline now ring hollow beside humanity’s responsibility to right collective wrongs. Trusteeship for our shared future demands an engaged governance prepared to steward transparency, navigate uncertainty, and guide institutions capably through the digital transition ahead.
Leaders must be willing to reverse course when evidence reveals harm, embrace uncertainty as the source of innovation, and equip talent to translate across knowledge realms. No perfect structures exist absent engaged humans completing the last mile. Enabling continual renewal relies on distributing oversight through common platforms, elevating shared wisdom. With people leadership prevailing, the future remains within our grasp.
It took years of tireless effort from victims to force authorities to confront the hubris behind the Post Office scandal. Only now, as the miscarriage of justice is being resolved, can the necessary reforms begin to rebuild trust in the institution.
Restoring faith demands leaders willing to admit mistakes when harm is revealed. It means embracing uncertainty as fueling innovation, while equipping people to bridge knowledge gaps.
No institutions or businesses remain sound without humans guiding oversight and wisdom. Innovation is critical for progress, but leaders must not blindly trust technology. More scandals will occur without necessary checks and balances, and that’s bad news for humanity.
