Bletchley Park – rightly – has a semi-mythical status amongst UK geeks as the birthplace of modern hacking. As the wartime employer of Alan Turing and his peers, many of the underpinnings of the information age – from super-computers to advanced cryptography – were developed here. Certainly in my imagination it was a small, close-knit, community of the finest minds in the UK – a place where sustained concentration and flashes of genius changed the course of the war.
Except of course, it wasn’t. It was a huge organisation – employing over 9,000 people by 1945, something you would never know from the official history. I was genuinely taken aback to hear this on an edition of BBC Radio 4’s “Thinking Allowed” (from about 15mins) which was discussing a recent book on Bletchley Park by Professor Christopher Grey of Warwick University. The book, “Decoding Organisation“*, takes an organisational analysis approach the to work of the station, and draws some surprising conclusions.
The fundamental shock being that – in any modern sense of the term – it was in no way organised. There were no clear lines of reporting, often different parts of the organisation had no idea of the existence of other parts, much less what they were doing and why. A very small initial elite group, drawn primarily from interpersonal contacts, barely held together what Grey describes an “anarchistic” system. It had no (or nearly no) job delineation, no strategic or policy function, and (surprising for a quasi-military wartime function) very little hierarchy. The small, close-knit social circle at the top was nominally “in charge” of the establishment – but they didn’t have a remit or regular committee meetings, or -really- any idea what was going on.
And this isn’t a story of “despite this, Alan Turing won the war and invented modern computers”. As Grey makes clear in the interview, it was because of this chaos that such things were possible.
This is by no means a single example. To me the Bletchley management parallels the classic British University structure of a similar vintage. In both cases you see a commitment to a single overarching cultural goal – the “defence of Civilisation”, with surprisingly little codification of such a goal. And universities – loosely organised, loosely managed – have produced many of the advances that have advanced and defended Civilisation: from DNA at Cambridge to the Web at CERN (a multi-university collaboration in Switzerland).
When we hear stories of these efforts, we hear about individual genius, we hear about sudden flashes of brilliance, things falling in to place. We hear – in essence – a revisionist history informed by the myth of the entrepreneur. We seldom here anything of the conditions that make such breakthroughs possible, and we never hear anyone arguing for the establishment of quasi-anarchistic organisations that provide support and resources without obsessing over outputs and accountability.
Which is a very dangerous state of affairs when coupled with our current cultural enthralment with the quantification and demonstration of value. There are few infographics with question marks. Little performance data with error bars. And the irony comes with the realisation of the sheer expense of doing all of this measurement – both in terms of human and financial cost – is the most effective way of ensuring that no innovation ever happens.
(* I’ve not managed to get my hands on a copy of this book, either in a library or through spending £55 plus p&p. If anyone would like to buy me a copy, I’d be happy to review it here)
