Rafe Fletcher is the founder of CWG.
My grandfather was confused when I told him I was going to be a consultant. “But what are you consulting on?” He struggled to understand what wealth of wisdom a 22-year-old graduate had to impart on the world.
Fortunately, my then-employer offered reassurance. At our induction week, combatting impostor syndrome was a key theme. Don’t doubt yourself in the face of external validation, was the message. Your authority is merited by virtue of it being imbued.
Which is all very well when authority is contingent upon objective criteria. A surgeon, for instance, has to know and do certain things. Even if I perfected the lingo and appearance, I couldn’t fool people into thinking I was one for long. Inner conviction would be insufficient in the face of dead patients.
But consulting keeps one at arm’s length from actual results. The consultant cannot be held accountable if broad strategic advice does not turn around a company’s fortunes. Blame can be assigned to failures of implementation or understanding, for which the consultant assumes no responsibility. Unlike the surgeon, he or she does not have to worry about what happens on the operating table as long as the plan of action sounds suitably impressive.
I don’t mean to dismiss a whole industry just because I could only endure a year on said graduate scheme. I worked with genuinely impressive individuals and saw plenty of capable colleagues suffer from self-doubt. Expertise often brings greater awareness of what you don’t know and impostor syndrome has merit in such cases. But correlation is not causation. Sometimes people feel incompetent because they are. Allaying those feelings with confected authority perpetuates institutional inadequacy.
I think about this in the context of a recent social media spat about Britain’s ‘lanyard class’. The journalist David Arronovitch raised it dismissively, saying it perhaps referred to “people who don’t hate migrants enough”. Opponents responded that it constituted everything from jobsworths to managerial elites. But where such a class exists, the inherent problem isn’t bureaucracy or pedantry, but this same issue of conferred authority.
It consists in the premise, “believe me because an institution has designated me an authority”. It is different from anything demonstrative – “believe me because I can show you” – or earned – “believe because my record makes it reasonable to defer to me”. Both examine content and evidence. In those cases, credentials attest to expertise. But for the lanyard class, credentials constitute it.
Credentialism proliferates in the private and public sectors alike because it outsources responsibility. Engaging consultants shows a CEO is doing something. Quangos or commissions show a Prime Minister is taking an issue seriously. But the demand for outside advisers has bred a whole industry in itself, where the qualifying criterion is having advised on something before. It doesn’t mean these bodies are devoid of talent or insight, but their institutional authority is derived from within.
This problem is often conflated with the concept of the ‘Westminster bubble’. If only we had more politicians with real life experience, we could break through bureaucratic impasse. But Britain’s last truly consequential Conservative Prime Minister was effectively a political careerist. Margaret Thatcher spent just a few post-university years in the pharmaceutical industry before running as an MP. More recently, David Cameron emerged straight from CCHQ to prove a capable Prime Minister, while Rishi Sunak’s illustrious financial career was little help in Downing Street.
Singapore rejects the idea that public servants need outside experience to execute their briefs. The Public Service Commission (PSC) is its leadership development programme which selects applicants based on merit and prepares them for a political career. Exceptional educational achievements are a prerequisite to admittance but scholars have to demonstrate ongoing competence. The programme’s secretary said in 2012, “scholarship holders know that potential alone, without performance, will not get them far.”
Expertise is still outsourced by the government but accountability isn’t. Various bodies sit directly within the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), giving them operational autonomy while remaining in central control. They exist to figure out how the government can implement its strategy, rather than providing independent advice.
Singapore is technocratic. It has a managerial elite. Dealing with it is often administratively burdensome. But its focus on results over process throws up pleasantly surprising interactions. For instance, the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) recently required me to complete an onerous employment dataset for my business. I had to double check it wasn’t a scam when an MOM employee called and did it for me under its new automated service. The government decides it needs something and takes responsibility for delivering it quickly.
By contrast, Britain clings to appearances over results. It’s nothing new. I recently read Ben Macintyre’s book, A Spy Among Friends. It’s an account of the Cold War’s most famous double agent, Kim Philby. Macintyre describes Philby as consistently evading detection because his public schoolboy chums at MI6 couldn’t believe that “one of us” could do such a thing. Philby’s Westminster scarf remains a reassuring sign that he couldn’t possibly be an impostor.
It shows the dangers of any institutional certainty about what a credible person looks and sounds like. We have not escaped that error merely by changing the signals. Jettisoning an old boys’ club is no good if we replace it with new uncontestable expertise. Be it the 22-year-old consultant or the commission chair.
Authority cannot be tautological – “I am this because I am this.” But that attitude is increasingly prevalent in Britain. It’s why the ‘lanyard class’ is pernicious. Not because we reject expertise, but because we resent the idea of a priesthood, whose authority rests on recognition by other members of the priesthood. And the outsourcing of responsibility this cabal enables.
My grandfather was right to ask what I was consulting on. And the answer does not lie in impostor syndrome. A healthy culture needs people capable of asking themselves, “what if I’m an impostor?” And institutions who can offer re-assurances beyond the merit of its own conferred qualifications.