Dominic Cummings: evaluation

Transcript context

…There’s a lot I want to ask about there. It’s interesting because the way you’re describing it, it sounds like it’s a company with the Prime Minister as a CEO who’s dealing with all these operational things that come up, but there is no CEO who has a long term plan. I’m curious about the media stuff. I want to understand why it’s the case that they’re so obsessed with the media. Does the media actually matter that much to how people perceive the politicians? How is the media interacting with the things that are happening in the building so that people are constantly thinking of the media? Why is the media so ever present in people’s minds? Just go back to your first point about the kind of CEO analogy. Imagine if Steve Jobs or Tim Cook or Patrick Collison or someone actually spent a large part of their day just doing photo ops as well. That’s actually the reality about how a lot of these jobs have evolved. So you have a person whose time is the single most precious asset, who, because of the dysfunctional bureaucracy, his decisions or her decisions, is the only thing that can actually break down the bureaucratic resistance and make sure something happens. Yet they’re actually standing with the ambassador from Tongazonga, whatever country, just doing photo ops for a large part of the day or going to stupid ceremonies or whatever it might be. So again, I think that analogy also shows some of the central problems. These people have all grown up in a system where they just don’t know any better than dealing with the media all day. Now, if you actually understand communication, you know that communication is not the same as answering questions to the media, but that’s not what they think, and it’s not the environment in which they operate, and also it’s not the incentives in which they work. Again, one of the funny conversations I had with Boris was, you know, we should say to the ministers that here’s your actual priorities as defined by us. Whether or not you get promoted and whether or not your career goes well is going to be defined by how well your department actually fulfills these goals. We don’t care about all of your interviews. We don’t care if you are on TV or never on TV. That’s not how we’re going to judge. Because they’ve all grown up in a culture where they think whether or not they’re going to be promoted really depends on: Are they seen as a good media performer? Or do they botch things on the media? Well, that’s just a fundamentally bad criteria, not least because their definitions of what’s good on the media are themselves terrible. By approaching government like that, you’re incentivizing them to think that their goal is making friends with the media. So then they get good interviews. That also incentivizes them to leak everything. So again, the culture and the incentives are self reinforcing in a very negative way. Let’s say the Prime Minister was somebody who agreed with you and said no more interviews. Ministers, you’re going to do your thing. Media is out. How would the media react? Would that matter?…

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