Messy by Tim Harford

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This is an insightful book, at one level liberating but at another uncomfortable.

There is a significant chunk of the book that deals with the functioning of organisations, there is a dominant trend for order and predictability within organisations. The message is that this can get you to “good” but rarely gets you to “great”.

Within education practices like the literacy hour raised the baseline, giving a solid structure that allowed less able teachers to perform well but for stronger teachers it is seen by many to have limited their potential. The same is true of chain restaurants, walk into any Pizza Express and you know what you are getting, walk into an independent Italian and you might get the best meal of your life, or the worst.

Tim Harford also points out the ways that targets that are set as a measurable proxy for performance quickly become the be all and end all and fail to work – how many organisations have set a performance indicator that all emails will be responded to within 24 hours, and then create an automated response that merely thanks you for your email to hit that target, with the meaningful response coming days or even weeks later if at all. The KPI is met, but whether a service is delivered remains in doubt.

The part of the book that sat less easily was about those who were successful through the deliberate creation of chaos. Once you know that most of the world operates on pre-scripted rule based protocols, and you have the guts to back yourself to deal better with off-script scenarios than your rivals, it is natural for you to set up those scenarios and trust your wits to get you through. That Harford's examples of this in action are Field-marshal Rommel, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Donald Trump proves it is effective but maybe leaves you wondering if winning is the same as virtue? Being a good person and being a “successful” person are not necessarily co-determinate.

The Greasy Poll by Mike Parker

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Most political memoirs are written by “successful” politicians, maybe after a fall from power, nevertheless there has been some period at the top. Therefore the memoir of a loser is in itself an interesting take.

As a follower, from afar, of Welsh life and politics I am clearly particularly drawn to this account of a Welsh aspect of the 2015 General Election, but I don't think that you need to have any particular interest in Wales to find the dynamics of a constituency campaign being played out – how the big picture of the election does, and in many ways does not, influence the local. It is also an intensely human story, and so I don't think you need to be a political nerd to engage with it either.

Mike Parker is honest, at times brutally honest, about Plaid, the party he was standing for. It gives clues about why Plaid is not riding on the crest of a wave in the same way as the SNP, but also perhaps why all parties are undergoing some level of existential crisis. How the SNP has seen a surge in support in the wave of a defeat in a referendum on its primary raison d'etre, UKIP possibly the reverse, and Labour's membership is seen by many to be growing in direct inverse to its electability are political puzzles equal to Plaid catch-22 to being too “small c” conservative to capture the anti-establishment vote, and yet too radical for many others.

Given the turning point of the tale is the dredging up of Mike Parker's past published writing makes me even more cautious that usual about putting writing what I am really thinking... His conclusion is a sad one, that writers are unwise, unable, to become politicians because there will always be something in their past that can be quoted out of context and torpedo them. But in the age of Twitter, we are not all writers now? What we once said in the pub we now publish online...

I would be deeply worried by the prospective politician who has never made an ill judge quip on Twitter, whose every move from the first utterance online, has been considered and calculated with a view to future electability. As Billy Joel once sang “And the only people I fear are those who never have doubts”. We complain that our politicians are out of touch with reality, and yet pounce on them when they betray that they are human... In so doing we get what we deserve?

Mike Parker's relationship to his party feels very real, he is loyal to his party but not blinkered to its failing. Enough of an outsider not to be consumed by its internal and self-validating bubble, a bubble that is likely to be true of all parties not just Plaid. His accounts of the hustings, where many are attended almost exclusively by the committed supporters of the various candidates, no one comes to listen, learn, and decide, but merely to cheer their guy (in most instances in this campaign all the candidates at the hustings were male). Rather than a debate they are in effect 4/5 simultaneous rallies occurring in the same physical space but without meaningful overlap.

It would seem that one of the challenges Mike articulates is the erosion of nuance, it is not just that he gets “better” at keeping to the script in his doorstep encounters, it asks if there a question about chicken and egg between message and medium?, the sound-bite existed before the 140 character limit of Twitter, but for whatever reason it seems clear that if you need a paragraph to explain your position you are unlikely to get traction with the current electorate. But while the message needs to be simple the world isn't.