Some years ago, two British supermarket chains needed to place a large order for replacement trollies. They had to decide what ratio of full-depth and shallow trollies to order, and how best to allocate them between stores.
One of them amassed mounds of demographic data and tried to construct an elaborate optimisation model. The second took a different approach: ‘We already employ people to collect trollies in the car parks — so why don’t we ring them and ask what they need?’ The second approach worked much better.
How often are problems best solved not centrally but by devolving decisions to people on the ground?
How often are problems best solved not centrally but by devolving decisions to people on the ground? Anyone working in the car park of a superstore is alert to factors no head-office model can know. And this approach is safer overall: if a number of trolley-pushers get their ratio wrong, their errors are likely to cancel each other out. If the centralised model is wrong, you end up with a large surfeit of one kind of trolley.
Solve for the specific and you may also solve for the general. The reverse does not apply. Or as Luca Dellanna recently wrote on his blog in what is perhaps the best sentence of the year: ‘Centralisation is only efficient when viewed from the centre.’ Luca is an expert in complexity theory and someone Dominic Cummings should hire. In fact every government department should have a complexity expert on hand to prevent the group-think which arises when you have a homogeneous group trying to impress each other with single solutions.
This problem occurs, I think, because humanities graduates think that policy is like high-school physics: a space where the same laws apply regardless of scale.
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