Do Professional Societies care about the Public or only their Members?

Yesterday I was horrified when I made a phone call to CPA Australia asking if a) someone had been a member and b) if they'd ever been the subject to Disciplinary action or complaint, especially around 2004.

The answer given I found shocking:

That information is Private, it's part of the "Member Record". You have to get their permission to release that information. [In response to question on 'serial offenders' and 'irregularities' in Association accounts well over $1M.] This is our Policy. If you want to pursue this, you can write to our Legal Department who probably won't respond to you.

Compare that to Aviation, not just Pilots...

Not only do they have the best Quality and Safety systems of any Industry and Profession, they take it as a given that Open and Transparent Governance, including professional discipline matters, is fully public.

Sunshine is the best antiseptic for corruption, negligence and incompetence.

Today I wrote to a TV current-affairs program with:

If you thought Dr Death of Bundaberg and the Butcher of Bega weren't bad enough, what do other Professional Societies do that's different?
Nothing...
Members First, stuff the public!
Unlike Aviation, they are there to keep the Sins of their Members secret.
2 stories: IT Recruiters and Accountants (CPA)

Links

IT Recruiting (ITCRA).
If you complain about a recruiter, whatever they decide about the compliant is a secret. Probably the same with general recruiting [the GM of ITCRA used to work for that Association. Commented they got many, many more complaints.]

My Story:
http://stevej-on-it.blogspot.com/2012/12/recruiting-fail-non-response-of-itcra.html
http://stevej-on-it.blogspot.com/2012/09/recruiting-fail-part-3-itcra-complaint.html
http://stevej-on-it.blogspot.com/2012/09/recruiting-fail-how-to-foul-up-employee.html

CPA Australia:
What happens when you ask if a CPA has ever been disciplined?
 ITS A SECRET...
Even if you think they're part of a 20yr conspiracy, potentially a swindle, worth $1-2MM...

The Association Investigation: NSW Assoc Y0133609.

NOTE: the Association is NOT the subject of this commentary on Professional bad behaviour and are known for being litigious. I will not name them and ask others to maintain this confidentiality although the registered name appears on the official documents and their Journal referenced. [I do have the technology to black-out the information in PDF's.]

RL was the Public Officer Y0133609 from  21 July 1997 to 10 December 2009 according to the official Association Extract.  He was also Treasurer, though the period is uncertain as the historical Committee Register of Y0133609 is not available on-line.

These Association returns, fully public, were procured from the NSW Associations Register and contain the name and address of the Public Officer, RL, at Heysen Close, Pymble:

Y0133609 1996 Return.pdf

Y0133609 1999 Return.pdf

What's NOT in the forms that four years returns (1996-1999) were submitted on the one day, triggering at least two penalty clauses of the 1984 Act:

• s54(1)(f) - Forced winding up on failure to lodge returns for 3 financial years
• s27 - Lodge statements within 1 month of AGM.

The accounts, in my opinion, violate s26(6) in that they don't give a "True and Fair view" of the financial affairs of Y0133609. If I'd been at the AGM those accounts were presented, I and everybody I've known in a Professional Association, would've rejected those accounts.

RL gave a Business Hours number on the Public 1996-1999 returns, identifying his then employer:  "CCS Partners" in the City. CCS used to be Calligeros, Cassim & Simos.
http://www.ccspartners.com.au/Home

CCS confirmed RL once worked there but would provide no other details, not even if he'd been a member of CPA Australia or the Institute of Charted Accountants.

There is a current White Pages listing for RL at 3 Ellendale Rd, Kenthurst NSW 2156.

The gross irregularities in Y0133609 accounts that I wanted to follow-up with CPA Australia is $1.25MM missing from the 1996-1999 Accounts attested to as correct by this upstanding, presumably registered, Accountant.

A large bequest was left to Y0133609 by Stanley Whaley of Queensland, except that it never appears in the Association accounts. The money was transferred to a Trust which under s26(6)(d) they were obliged to report as well, but never did.

Images of relevant Journal pages publicly declaring the Bequest and its movement to a Trust:

Y0133609 Journal 1995 #2 pg3
Y0133609 Journal 1995 #2 pp 5 & 6
Y0133609 Journal 1996 #4 pp 63-64

Full-text PDF on-line:

Y0133609 Journal 1995 #2

Y0133609 Journal 1996 #4

But the matter doesn't end there...

The Public Officer is seen under the Act as having special responsibilities, they are the official representative and where notices for the Association will be served by the Registrar. Under s23 of the Act the Committee has just 14 days to advise of a change of Public Officer and the new address to serve notices. It appears RL left Y0133609 5 or 6 years before the Registrar was notified.


RL is in the Journal of Y0133609 at the end of 2003, but never heard from again after that. He is still listed as being on the committee at the end of 2004 and there's no mention of him in mid-2005. After being a major "mover and shaker" within the Association, he's suddenly gone without trace.
Y0133609 Committee Nov 2004
Y0133609 Committee, Jun 2005
Y0133609 Journal 2003 #4

Yet he was still listed as Public Officer until 2009 when the Registrar took the highly unusual step of involuntarily cancelling the registration of Y0133609 for failing to lodge mandatory annual returns for 10 years.

After that little lapse of not filing returns for 4 years in 1996-1999, RL had never filed another one!
The official Association Extract shows Y0133609 didn't file a return in 2000-2003 nor any official documents until 07-May-2010.
After a period of almost a year, when accounts and returns for 2003-2009 were filed together, very strangely the Registrar, under s54A(2), reinstated Y0133609's registration as if nothing had ever happened. No penalties were levied, at least not according to the list of official documents available. Y0133609 were allowed to continue trading while formally deregistered, which makes me wonder "Why bother with the Act and registration at all?". I find this strange...

But this is about RL and his behaviour as a Professional Accountant.

Why were no accounts or returns filed by Y0133609 for the 4 years, 2000-2003?

The reason isn't on public record, but can't be related to a "7 year statute of limitations", nor to 5 years.

What we do know is that RL stopped writing in Y0133609's Journal in 2004.

What we see with the non-lodgement of the accounts is consistent with RL doing a massive Dummy Spit in early 2004 and withdrawing completely from Y0133609 and, we can guess, in a fit of temper deleting all records and files relating to them from his personal and work computers. If he'd felt this way, he also would not have felt a responsibility to inform the Registry of the Public Officer vacancy either. [Under the new Act of 2009, this is now an offence, with a penalty, for the Public Officer, but not then.]

As an Accountant acting as their Treasurer and responsible for filing BAS statements [noted in the Journal], he would've been handling the bookkeeping on a computer. Recreating that work from paper records would've been deemed too hard by both the incoming Treasurer and later by the Registrar.

I've been involved with a number of small Professional Associations and sometimes, in spite of the requirements under the Act, volunteers move on and records, especially 'the books' are lost forever.

It gets better yet, still.

In late 1999, the past-president of the "Victorian Branch", after years of confronting the Committee of Y0133609 and RL (still Treasurer), wrote about the events and misbehaviour in detail.

RL's actions were deliberate and intentional hiding this large bequest entirely from the Regulators and the Committee either went along with it or were involved.

The Victorian tried to publish his detailed account of the goings on at Y0133609 in the Journal of another well known and respected Society, but that editor withdrew the piece after threats of a defamation action.

Y0133609 was known for being litigious and for using Mr Whalley's money to back court cases. In its 1996 Report on Activities (the only one produced publicly), ~$180,000 was given to an individual for a failed lawsuit they'd followed closely, even reporting daily on. (The case was rumoured to have cost north of $500,000). This case, heard and appealed in the Federal Court, produced some much cited Case Law for the Trade Practices Act. The academic who took the action, a Professor, sold up and moved to Adelaide to pay his legal debts.

So, when there is strong Public Interest involved, why don't "Professional" Bodies automatically provide full public disclosure of complaints and disciplinary action?

Why are major and "serial offenders" in Law, Medicine and Accounting not publicly named and shamed to protect hapless victims that these people are known to prey upon but whom the Profession is sworn to serve?? How can these "Professional" Bodies, through deliberate action of suppressing information, not be held accountable for subsequent civil or criminal offences? How can they not have Public Interest as their first Duty of Care?

"Full Disclosure" is proven to work in all aspects of Aviation, so why do these other "professions" insist on still putting the interests of themselves and members ahead of the Public whom they supposedly serve?

My only conclusion, a personal opinion based on the evidence I can find, is:

That like RL, they are rorting the public and they know it...

The Professional Mandate Pt2: Continuous Improvement, No Regession

Previously, I've defined the central aspect of the Professional Mandate as:

Its "unprofessional" to repeat, or allow, Known Faults, Failures and Errors.

Which is the Deming/Shewart Quality Improvement Cycle: PDCA (Plan-Do-Review-Improve System, also Plan-Do-Change-Act).

All Quality, Safety and Performance Improvement programs share must contain these 4 elements and have a central element in common:

Conscious, deliberate learning and adaption.

Improvement is not accidental: If you don't design it in, why would you expect it to show up?

There is another, personal, factor underlying Quality and Professional Improvement:

Caring comes first.

Which is not quite a restatement of "Professionals owe a Fiduciary Duty to their Clients". Caring is an unforced, voluntary internal state, Duty is an an imposed external obligation. Good Professionals not only have to perform well, they want to.

More specifically, Professionals must both Care about the Client Outcomes they produce and how well they do job they do. Good Professionals aim, every day for every task, to produce their best performance and provide Perfect Client Outcomes.

Perfect Client Outcomes are NOT "Perfectionism" nor unrealistic and unachievable. It's not about a Perfect Performance, execution without flaw, impossible by definition for Real People ("To Err is Human") but about the Client Outcome:

• Perfect for the Client may be getting any help whatsoever.
• Perfect for the Client may be getting "Good Enough" service in a timely manner.
• Perfect for the Client may be resolving an issue within a time-frame.
• Some some Clients, Perfect is As Cheap as Possible or Really Close and Accessible,
• whilst the PT Barnum rules also applies: You can please some of the People some of the time, but not all of the People, all of the time.
• For some Clients, no outcome will ever be deemed by them to be Perfect.

The execution of a Professional Service may contain Errors, in fact you'd expect (small) Errors every time, but the System and Process creating the Client Outcome need to be tailored to noticing them before they can affect the Outcome and in preventing consequential effects.

It's OK to make an error, so long as its corrected before it has an impact or creates damage. Trying too hard to Be Perfect degrades the Performance and Execution - we are not machines... This is the "secret sauce" known by Elite Sports Coaches:

Perfect is the enemy of Great, Perfectionism doesn't lead to Best.

Expanding notions introduced in Part 1:

• Professionals must refuse directions and work demands that result in unsafe Practice, endangering clients or the public.
• Doing The Right Thing must never penalised.
• There are two sides to improvement: 
• What not to do,
• What to do.

Extending the rubric to include "and practice What Works (ie. proven)".

But there are two sides to this:

• Adopting new Practices when proven superior,
• Extinguishing old Practices when shown inferior.

There are research papers that conclude that for some "high standard" Professions:

• It takes 15 years for proven new Practices to be adopted by even 50% of Practitioners, and
• and 40+ years for old, inferior or disproven Practices to be phased out. Universally? not sure.

This work dovetails with the 1961 book, Science Since Babylon by Derek De Solla Price where he estimates the doubling period of Human Knowledge as shown by Journals and publications at 15 years and ties it in to the working lifetime of Scientists to arrive at his famous observation:

80-90% of all Scientists who have ever lived are alive today

The same 3 doubling periods of the average worklife also explains the time to give up old, inferior practices.

more to follow.

Professions/Professionals: Conflicts of Interest

Consistent Altruism is a rare human commodity, probably impossible over a life-time, yet that's the standard implied by: Learned Professions owe a Fiduciary Trust to their clients.
That's All Clients, All the time.

It's simply stated and tested: Are Client Interests always placed before the Practitioner and Organisations? Yet its impossible without sustained, conscious, deliberate and co-ordinated effort by the whole Profession.

As a client or user of Professions, that's a reasonable standard for them to be held to.
As a Practitioner, Professional Organisation or Profession, it's a profound and never-ending challenge.

The overwhelming human behaviour is self-interest: often expressing as greed or avarice, but also in other "temptations", including sex, power and influence.
People may start with good intents, even living up to their ideals for a long time, but as Hollywood amply demonstrates, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Most people exhibit Altruism some of the time and often only towards related groups. How can that be leveraged to impeccable Professional Standards? It's not just a hard problem, but a diabolical one.

It's impossible for ordinary people to keep others interests before your own for an entire career, in the face of all direct temptations and, more importantly, preventing gradual, imperceptible declines especially in the face of "but everyone is doing it".

This is exactly what got the USA from a well regulated banking system in 1999 following the repeal of the 1933 Glass–Steagall Act, to a record financial collapse in well under 10 years.

All Professions have to address this central issue: How to monitor and deal with Conflicts of Interests.

The Iron-Cald Law of Quality applies: You cannot check your own work.

Which means ever Profession that needs to meet a Fiduciary Duty has to design, implement, staff and fund third party checking, investigation and monitoring systems (i.e. Governance and Audit), create Licensing, Compliance and Regulatory Bodies with real teeth and constantly train and check its Practitioners and Professional Organisations against those standards of Knowledge, Performance and Practice.

I'd argue that this Governance and Compliance function is more important for "Fiduciary Duty" Professions than Competency Testing and Licensing:

Without an absolute trust of Clients for the Profession's Services, it is fatally compromised and incapable of delivering good, let alone Adequate or Best Practice Services. If the Public won't come to you and don't trust you, it undermines your Mission/Purpose, devalues the Profession and pushes the Public to find substitutes.

In "mid standard" Professions two factors operate that limit the excesses increasingly found in Professions such as Banking, Finance, Financial Advice and Financial Audit which led to the record collapses of 2007/2008 requiring Public Bailouts:

• By definition, only "high standard" Professions owe a Fiduciary Duty to their clients, the rest only owe "normal commercial and contractual responsibilities.
• Consumer Protection bodies and legislation (ACCC and TPA/ACC in Australia) offer common law remedies (protections) to consumers against unscrupulous practitioners and organisations.
• The Consumer Protection bodies actively monitor the business world (practitioners and organisations) for illegal or 'sharp' behaviour.
• Cartels and price-fixing is illegal and is aggressively pursued by the ACCC.

• There is seldom, in "mid standard" Professions, a Natural Monopoly of Practitioners, Professional Organisations or Professional groupings/Associations.
• There are commonly large numbers of "best quality" practitioners and organisations for consumers to choose between:
• The operation of a large Free Market prevents prices ratcheting up faster than inflation.
• Market forces (Supply and Demand) act to regulate the number of Practitioners and Organisations offering the Service, including per location.
• Sometimes there can be a "race to the bottom" caused by new entrants (e.g. Chinese Dental Laboratories) that undermine demand even for high-quality local practitioners.
• Consumers often can find adequate Service Substitutes, either direct or within the Profession.
• When the Service is only offered by a sole supplier, often the Public Service or a single Government Licensee, a Natural Monopoly and market competition cannot keep Service, Quality, Safety and Price in check.
• Often in these situations, Audit and Governance ("Industry Watchdogs") organisations are formed in an attempt to restrain outrageous excesses.

So what's needed of Practitioners, Professional Organisations and Profession Groupings/Associations in "high standard" Professions?

The New Oxford Dictionary defines "Fiduciary" as:

involving trust, esp. with regard to the relationship between a trustee.

I use a more colloquial formulation:

Put the clients interests ahead of your own, every time, and in every way.

In Law, Business and Accounting, this problem is known as Agency Theory: How do you get an 'Agent', such as an employee, trustee or representative, to always put your Best Interests first, even to the detriment of theirs, either directly or through "Opportunity Loss" a.k.a. Insider Trading?

"High standard" Professions suffer multiple problems:

• They are Natural Monopolies without good substitutes (think Law, Medicine and Public Service).
• Where can the Public go if they don't like the Professions' Services? Nowhere...
• The rich always have more options like privileged access to other countries and systems, which creates its own special Conflicts of Interest in both countries.

• If they don't internally regulate, who can or will regulate them?
• Nobody else can properly assess their performance, errors, omissions and over-servicing.

• Because they are Natural Monopolies:
• The Monopoly is usually explicitly granted by the State.
• meaning there are Registration Boards and Licensing Examinations.
• They are highly desirable as a choice of Work: well paid, "protected" jobs for life,
• Numbers are tightly controlled,
• There is intense competition for admission, often on criteria irrelevant to good Professional Practice, such as Academic prowess.
• There is usually little effort in identifying desirable High Performer Professional characteristics and less effort or attention in selecting or evaluating against those criteria.
• All emphasis is placed on The Barrier to Entry, gaining a License, close to none is spent on ensuring All Licences are of Equal Value (a 1910 notion of Flexner's), which implies frequent full competency checking, against all current Knowledge and Best Practices, to retain a license.

• The traditional Learned Professions are backed by an extensive heritage of Common Law and Statues that create especial problems:
• They usually embody, explicitly or tacitly, a No Harm or No Fault clause:
• Medical Doctors, even unqualified frauds, are generally regarded as not ever having criminal intent to harm patients.
• This unfolded in Australia with the "Dr Death" of Bundaberg case. Whilst strict Academic-quality Evidence indicted him with causing many deaths and huge numbers of injuries, the legal system requires direct causal Evidence, reducing the criminal charges to "harming" a very few patients and a 5- or 7-year sentence. For any "mid standard" professional acting this way, they would've been found guilty of multiple counts of murder and received a probable life sentence.
• The 2011 sentencing of the "Butcher of Bega" underlines the on-going nature of this problem and jurisdictional inconsistencies.

• If the Profession in a country systemically fails to regulate itself against Conflicts of Interest, particularly Financial, then you end up with the US Healthcare system:
• 18% of GDP is spent on US Healthcare, versus 9% of GDP in Australia.
• In 1960, the US spent 5% of ts GDP on Healthcare, almost a quarter current levels.
• But Australians have universal Medical care access, out-live and have better health outcomes that US citizens, except for "Rescue Care", where the USA beats everyone.
• Arnold Relman and Marcia Angell, editors from 1977-2000 of the New England Journal of Medicine, have run a very long campaign against Medical Profession "Conflicts of Interest", starting in 1980 with Relman's, "The New Medical Industrial Complex".
• Despite unequivocal data and many high-powered, highly influential internal voices/activists, the US steadily increases the proportion of its whole economy spent on Healthcare and the proportion of uninsured people who are uninsured continues to climb.
• Perhaps in-line with the increasing disparity between the Rich (top 1%) and the bottom 30-50%.

My observations on "high standard" Professions achieving near a uniform, on-going delivery of Fiduciary Duty to Clients are:

• It's a war without end, every new generation has to discover their own solutions to the constantly evolving challenges. The Internet Changes Everything, including how Professions now experience Conflicts of Interest and the methods to address them.

• Perfection in managing Conflicts of Interest, like Quality, Security and Safety, is a journey, not a destination.
• If a Profession's Monitoring and Reporting systems are detecting nothing, they have failed.
• Human Nature hasn't changed in the 400 years since Shakespeare, it's not changing soon.
• The US "Medical Industrial Complex" that Relman and Angell have spoken against for 30 years versus the inexorable rise in Healthcare costs is definitive proof that without strong external intervention (from Politicians, pushed by the general public) a whole Profession can be wilfully blind to serious Conflicts of Interest.
• Without specific Agencies with real teeth, nothing changes.
• Simple, unequivocal definitions and tests are needed for the Qualitative Tests.
• Absolute and rarely changed quantitative measures are needed to convert Qualitative goals to measurable, reliable data.

• The NTSB/FAA example of separate, well-funded Investigation and Compliance, Licensing and Testing organisation staffed by selected dual-experts: they have to be both amongst the most Competent and Knowledgeable Practitioners and expert in Governance, Quality and Safety.
• These organisations and their staff also take care to constantly monitor, test and train themselves, with periodic "refreshes", or systemic re-examination and redesign.

• Initial Practitioner Selection and Testing and then through on-going Training, Testing and ReCertification regimes are necessary to even start to achieve high, uniform standards of "Fiduciary Duty" amongst Practitioners and Professional Organisations, along with Competency, Knowledge and Practices.
• Initial Practitioner Selecting and Training needs to be targeted at selecting for High Performance Practitioner Traits and Characteristics.
• Which implies they must be first researched, documented then kept current.
• And explicitly not to default to mere Academic Prowess as the sole entrance test.

• Fully public, Open and Transparent reporting of all Professional issues, Conflict of Interest and Practice of Individuals and Organisations is a minimum requirement.
• Without full data, the Profession internally cannot know "how it is travelling" and be able to take corrective actions as necessary.
• Without full public access, nepotism, cronyism and lax standards are inevitable and unavoidable. "We discipline our own, in private" is the hallmark of a Failed Profession.
• It also invariably leads to a pernicious and pervasive Inversion of Loyalty and Duty: Professionals swap their perceived Duty to Clients to a Duty to Protect the Profession at the expense of the Public they serve.
• This attitude of "We look after our own" is an absolute corruption of a Profession.  
• Professions with strong Duty and Safety Cultures and full disclosure don't need expensive and embarrassing Royal Commissions or Courts of Inquiry: they are doing the job of ensuring Good, Competent Practice and reinforcing the Culture each and every day.

• Structural elements have to be in place to prevent putting people in the way of temptation or compromise:
• Laws and Regulations allocating Blame and Liability to individual Practitioners for Ordinary Accidents and Failures must be replaced with Indemnifying Individuals within Organisations, provided they have acted properly and followed all relevant processes and procedures.
• Practitioners who exhibit unprofessional behaviours, should be stripped of all Professional protections and indemnities and be subject to stiffer Criminal charges and Penalties than the general public.
• Failing in your Professional and Fiduciary Duty is not an extenuating circumstance, it calls for harsher treatment. Those taking more Responsibility must be held to higher standards.
• Any Practitioner who self-reports Errors early on should be indemnified from censure for that event, though not for unprofessional action, such as repeating Known Errors, Faults and Failures.
• Any Practitioner who fails to self-report or report anothers' Error should be metered out harsh penalties. The Professional Mandate requires everyone involved to "own up" to their mistakes - and to make sure everyone else does as well. "No Error goes unreported, ever."
• Professional Organisations, and their managers, must be Criminally and Civilly liable for malpractice and failures in their Fiduciary Duties.
• In order to Indemnify individuals within Organisations who act properly and professionally, legal liability and Onus of Responsibility have to transfer somewhere.
• There also have to be powerful incentives for non-Practitioner Managers and Administrators to uphold the Professions' Fiduciary Duties, Competence, Knowledge and Practice standards and adherence to Quality and Performance Improvement.

The Professional Mandate: Don't repeat Known Mistakes, yours or anyone else's.

My formulation of the Professional mandate:

It's "unprofessional" to repeat or allow, Known Faults, Failures and Errors.

That sounds complete, perhaps obvious, but let me unpack this some more...

What's "unprofessional"?

If you're a cleaner, mower mechanic or dish-washer, i.e. not someone held to the highest Professional standards, then it's probably "skiving off" or doing a dodgy or substandard job. It might get you reprimanded if detected and if its your normal mode of work, in most places it'll get you fired. But only if detected, and that's only going to happen in better run organisations that routinely check work.

If you're someone who holds other people's lives in their hands, especially in a Profession that owes a profound Duty of Care to them, like Aviation and Medicine, then you should be held to a much higher standard.

These are the usual types of "unprofessional" behaviour and generally not considered "criminal":

• malfeasance: deliberate/wilful wrong doing/actions (in the discharge of public obligations)
• misfeasance: wrong action (esp in the discharge of public obligations)
• nonfeasance: didn't do what needed to be done (esp in the discharge of public obligations).
• negligence: didn't pay enough attention or care to the execution of the task, inexpert or incomplete action.
• incompetence: can't do the job, use the tools or know the process properly or incorrect action(s).
• indolence: lazy, idle, a "failure to perform".

But we know there are more types of "unprofessional" behaviour:

• failing to act in a timely manner, i.e. tardiness,
• "wrong inaction" when action was necessary,
• rushing to act without sufficient information, or on an incorrect and unquestioned judgement,
• acting when "inaction" or waiting was necessary,
• deliberate harm through acts committed or withheld,
• systematic harm to cohorts of people through deliberate, "wilful blindness" of not reviewing previous outcomes or not implementing known "Best Practice" or continuing with known "Bad Practices".
• deliberate and systematic "gouging" - resolving "Conflicts of Interest" in favour of monetary outcomes for the Practitioner, against the interests of clients or the public.
• over servicing, over charging and deliberate price gouging (selecting high priced alternatives over technically equivalent or superior lower priced ones).
• ignoring or failing to deliver adequate service to individuals and large cohorts of the public for whom they should be responsible.
• acting whilst intoxicated or drug-affected.
• deliberately under-performing, not giving or doing your best in all circumstances, including "phoning it in" or "just going through the motions".

Which leads to two questions:

• In this, the Internet Age, can a Profession even call itself a "Profession" if it doesn't detect all deliberate or unintended errors of commission or omission and impose Professional Penalties on organisations and managers responsible for allowing preventable harm, injury or death to those for whom they were responsible, as they unequivocally fail the "Professional mandate"?
• Individuals who've are appropriately trained and with current certification, correctly follow organisational guidelines, checklists and processes and attempt to deliver their best Professional performances, or at least self-report Errors, Faults and Failures or omissions, should be protected from legal liability. Professionals need to be explicitly protected from being made "the fall guy" for Organisational or System Errors or managerial malpractice. Doing your job well, to the best of your ability/competence, should never be cause for censure or penalty.
• Organisations have a Duty of Care to the General Public, Community and the State to ensure the Professionals under their direction are properly selected, adequately trained, including on-going testing/training cycles, are properly informed of the latest/current Organisation Standards, Processes and Procedures and all Professional Performance properly and adequately checked and corrected and if necessary, individuals reassigned, stood aside or removed.
• If you are a Private Professional Practitioner, you undertake to competently and adequately provide, and perform to, both the Organisational and Individual Professional Standards, being personally liable at both levels. In most current fields, with Knowledge and Skills/Processes/Tools/Equipment doubling every 3-5 years, not within the Professional working lifetime as it once was, this is now beyond even the most competent and able Professionals.
• I believe Registration and Certification Boards should be acting to prevent Sole Professional Practitioners from getting in over their heads in this way. 
• What should now constitute Criminal Action or Criminal Negligence by Professionals and their managers/organisations when they deliberately, or with "wilful blindness" or disregard, continue with, or allow harmful Professional behaviour?
• In Corporations Law, individuals and boards are deemed liable "if they knew or should have know". Ignorance is not a defence, in fact, failing to be informed is in itself an offence.
• Is there any reason Professionals directly responsible for Human Life should be held to a lesser standard than Corporate managers and boards?
• What should constitute Evidence of such Criminal Action or Negligence when it can be clearly demonstrated statistically there were adverse outcomes for multiple clients, though individual attribution of harm, injury, death or wrongful act may not possible.
• Statistics, and their use in the Analysis and Review of Professional Performance of individuals and groups, are well established and universally accepted, with appropriate "Confidence Intervals", as the highest level of Evidence in Research and Scientific investigations.
• Why should these same tools and results not be acceptable Civil and Criminal Evidence? What counts as indisputable Scientific Evidence should be acceptable in a modern Court of Law.
• Judges and members of the public empanelled on juries can, and should, be knowledgable in, or able to be tutored in, these concepts, tools and their interpretation and subtleties.

And a bigger question:

Are "high standard" Professionals liable for Errors and Injuries directly attributable to poor management decisions or yielding to "management pressure" to perform unsafely or continually at unsustainably high levels of 'commitment', either excessive hours, excessive supervisory load or "above my pay-grade work", i.e. substantially above their Professional level of competence?

I argue that Dr Brent James' notion of "Professionals owe a Fiduciary Trust to their clients" (and in return are given the right to Professional Self-Determination) applies. Managers, especially if current or once practicing Professionals, should not, either knowingly or not, put those they direct in these invidious position, in effect putting them in a "Conflict of Interest" situation: chose between your employment or career and the safety of those clients or the public for whom you are responsible.

It's not Good Practice, let alone acceptable Professional behaviour, to ever work a continuous 40-hour shift or 100+ hours/week when you may endanger others' lives.
Personally, I consider knowingly working whilst impaired in any way (alcohol, drugs or fatigue/exhaustion), isn't just Professional malpractice, but Criminal, especially if a repeated, even normal, action.

The Nuremberg Defence, "I was just following orders", is as unacceptable and specious, especially for high-standard Professionals, now as it was 6 decades ago. Professionals are solely responsible for their actions and must be held to account for them, in the same way that Managers can't transfer their Responsibility and Accountability to the Professionals that they direct.

Which creates another addendum to The Professional Mandate:

It's unprofessional to accept, or allow, tasks and responsibilities beyond your, or others, competence level or act whilst notionally or practically impaired, incapacitated or impacted by external factors. If you can't competently and adequately do the job before you, you should not be doing it. If others put you in the position where you feel you cannot decline a job/task/role outside you ability/competence, you are obliged to report both your own action and the situation, before, during or as soon as practicable after the event.

Specifically, I reject the widespread notion or "meme" for mangers deliberately demanding unprofessional conduct:

"You're a Professional, you have to 'do whatever it takes'" -  especially to fulfil roles, responsibilities or deadlines/commitments that you yourself did not commit to, but were imposed externally on you.

Any Professional who makes an explicit, not tacit, undertaking to deliver a Professional outcome should reasonably expect to be held to that Promise. Attempting to flip Accountability and Responsibility from Management to Professionals is a variation of this "Blame Assignment" technique and should result in personal liability for those attempting to assign blame.

The resulting Corollary is:

Professionals don't just have an implicit Right, but a Professional Duty, to refuse directions, including work rostering, that may, or will, result in unsafe Practice or a failure in their Professional Duty to clients or the public.

Or more simply: Professionals reserve the right to say "NO!", and make it stick, to unreasonable or unsafe management direction and be protected against reprisals, harassment or recriminations for such action.

Doing The Right Thing must be rewarded, never penalised.

---

Elsewhere, I've attempted to layout the context of Professional Behaviour within Professions. It isn't just about not doing the wrong thing, but also doing the right thing.

How a "professional" gets to know "What Works and What Doesn't" is another beyond this, "the Professional Mandate".

A relevant extract:

Barry Boehm neatly summaries the importance of the Historical Perspective as:

Santayana's half-truth: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”

Don’t remember failures?

• Likely to repeat them

Don’t remember successes?

• Not likely to repeat them

The critical insight here is that there are two sides to improvement:

• What not to do,
• What to do.

So my rubric must be extended to include something like "and practice What Works (ie. proven)".

ISM/FoSiM: The irrelevance of more "Science" in Healthcare Reform

[Post moved to other blog.]

ISM (Institute of Science in Medicine) and their Australian "mini-me", FoSiM (Friends of Science in Medicine), are advocating a rather extreme version of Healthcare reform:

Medicalisation of all Healthcare, under the guise of advancing "Science in Medicine".

These extreme views are published in an ISM Policy paper on the Licensing of non-Medical Healthcare practitioners. They advocate changing world-wide statues/regulation to only allow "science-based" Healthcare (code for Only Medical Care) and finish with:

Unscientific practices in health care should further be targets of aggressive prosecution by regulatory authorities. [italics added]

They don't just want to wind the clock back to The Grand Old Days of the Fifties, but a whole Century. The authority they cite is the 1910 Carnegie Foundation report on Medical Education by Flexner.

Flexner tossed around a bunch of concepts, many more than the State Regulation of Medicine and Medical Schools on which ISM/FoSiM base their calls for increased Healthcare Regulation, a.k.a. "Science in Medicine", as the definitive solution to all the ills of all Healthcare Systems in the world.

In the second half of this piece, Flexner's original thesis and concepts are examined - and not wholly surprisingly they support the opposite position of ISM/FoSiM.

Firstly, What do the world's best experts in Healthcare Reform identify as the local and/or common challenges to Healthcare?

And, How do the proposals of ISM/FoSiM address these Medical Millennium Challenges?

Dr James is also quoted in a forum organised by his University, PANEL ON HEALTH CARE REFORM – FALL 2008, Continuum, Utah University.

This is what he has to say on the Challenges facing Healthcare around the world:

JAMES: Another point is that we’re getting exactly what we pay for. We tend to pay for procedures and rescue care, so we get lots of procedures and lots of rescue care. This is a key factor.

Another thing you need to know is that other countries have exactly the same problems. So don’t look for solutions in Europe. Don’t look for solutions in Canada.

I get a ton of those guys coming through visiting to see how care’s delivered in Utah, believe it or not, because they face exactly the same problems.

There’s a standard working list of the top five problems within health care, and nobody’s solved them.

Travel the world and it’s the same list of five things:

1. The first problem is variation in care on a geographic basis.
It’s so high that it’s impossible that all Americans are getting good care, even with full access.

2. The second biggest problem is high rates of care directly judged to be inappropriate.
This is where the medical risk treatment outweighed any potential benefit to the patient and we did it anyway . . . usually in a rescue setting.

3. The third problem is unacceptable rates of care-associated injury and death.
This is where the care delivered actively killed somebody, whose death was judged to be preventable upon review.

4. The fourth problem is that the system does it right only 55 percent of the time.
There are things that we know for a fact should be done every time but the system does right only 55 percent of the time.
Now, that’s better than zero, but it’s not nearly 95 percent or 98 percent, where it ought to be.

5. And the last one is that there’s at least 50 percent waste in the system.
This is non- value-adding from a patient’s perspective, and that’s where the opportunity exists.

Conclusion:

From the hard-data evidence presented by Dr James based on more than 3 decades of successful Healthcare Reform, we know:

• The ISM/FoSiM proposals address the least important, least useful areas of change. 

• Addressing Lifestyle Issues and Environment/Public Health would have six times the impact of attempting to improve "Health Care Delivery" through more "Science".  

• Even then, ISM/FoSiM are either vague or silent on just what benefits their proposals, if adopted, can deliver. If they want to turn Healthcare around the world inside out, with considerable disruption, cost and upheaval, then they need to first inform us of the exact benefits we can expect.

• The ISM/FoSiM proposals are irrelevant to the common "Top 5" Challenges faced by Healthcare Systems around the world: None benefit from more "Science", they are all about Quality of Care and Effectiveness of Delivery and Implementation.

• All successful and effective Healthcare Reform, since and including Flexner, has been Patient-centric. The ISM/FoSiM proposals aren't just wrong, but exactly the opposite of what is documented to have worked. Practitioner- and Profession-centric reforms, such as "More Science in Medicine" do not deliver better outcomes for Patients.

ISM/FoSiM consistently demand high-quality Evidence and rigorous Science from those in its sights, yet fail to apply the Scientific Method and their Rules of Evidence to their own proposals and assertions.

To be consistent and credible, ISM/FoSiM must:

• Meet the same standards of "Evidence", Research and adherence to the Scientific Method as they demand of others.
• Demonstrate and Quantify how more "Science" will improve Quality of Care, Patient Safety, Equity of Access and Systemic Waste and Cost-Effectiveness issues identified as "Top 5" Healthcare Reform Challenges by the leading experts in the field.
• First define their own "Top 5" Healthcare Challenges, and
• provide research backed by verifiable, hard-data on the Efficacy of their own proposals, their own favourite criticism of non-Medical Healthcare.

If ISM/FoSiM criticise the Effectiveness of non-Medical Healthcare, we must in turn ask them to demonstrate the Effectiveness of their own proposals. If they set Rules and Standards for others, they need to follow them themselves, even better, demonstrate by superior example.

---

The Flexner report doesn't just say "Regulation and Licensing is necessary" as ISM/FoSiM seems to think, it also says many things still relevant today:

• it asks for common standards and basic clinical education with laboratory practice,
• suggests the 'Best Practices' as used by the Europeans,
• says that Medicine is a Performance Discipline [my words] - that Theory and Practice/Experience together are needed by competent Professionals ("Head and Hands"),
• that Medicine is not primarily a commercial enterprise, but has a very large "Public Service" component, with a Duty of Care not just to individuals treated, but the larger Community,
• and explicitly recognises "all medical sects", and they be based on good clinical education.

It also contains an implicit commentary that demands:

• As part of good Professional conduct, the systematic elimination of Known Errors, Faults and Failures, ("To Err is Human", but repeating preventable mistakes is malpractice of the highest order) and
• From the Flexner principle of "licenses bear a uniform value":
• Continuing certification retesting of all license holders, not a lifetime grant of license.
• the adoption of practices that have been demonstrated to have value in assuring Professional competence and skills/knowledge currency at every point in time for all license holders. From Aviation, we know these techniques work:
• Frequent (2 monthly) "Check Pilot" assessment of the in-situ performance of every Practitioner,
• Simulator checks of "worst-case" situations. (Quarterly)

Why would we expect Medicine to have lower Quality and Practitioner Certification standards and processes than other fields? Heatlhcare should be the leader in Practice Efficacy, Quality, Safety and Cost-Effectiveness.

In conclusion, Flexner talks of Duties, Ethics and the need of the Medical Profession to guard against the corrupting effects of commerce. Exactly the same "Conflict of Interest" message that Arnold Relman and Marcia Angell started writing about in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1980.

Like the army, the police, or the social worker, the medical profession is supported for a benign, not a selfish, for a protective, not an exploiting, purpose.
The knell of the exploiting doctor has been sounded, just as the day of the freebooter and the soldier of fortune has passed away.

It's fitting to end with a quote from Arnold Relman ("A Drumbeat on Profit Takers"):

“It’s clear that if we go on practicing medicine the way we are now, we’re headed for disaster.”

If the things the best and brightest minds in the world of Medical Science are writing, researching and talking about, and have been doing so for 3 decades, are completely different to what ISM/FoSiM started advocating in 2009, then who should we give credence to?

My vote goes to the existing experts who can provide hard-data to back their stories, not mere puffery, exaggeration and "spin" as offered by ISM/FoSiM.

Failed Professions: Definition, Impact, Consequences

I'd like to assert that (Australian) Medicine, Banking and Finance & Investment Advisors and Information Technology (I.T.) are Failed Professions.

The fields of Management and Politics, whilst notable for their egregious actions and errors and not just failing expectations of good governance, but actively harming or exploiting the general public, are not Professions: they fail the basic tests of "Body of Knowledge" and "Entrance Requirements".

What do I mean by a "Failed Profession"?
How do I support that view?

A Theory of Professions

Here I attempt to lay out a Theory of Professions that can be used to guide and inform practitioners, Professional Bodies, Regulators, Governments and the general Public.

The original contribution here is an attempt to layout a framework to categorise Professions by their Duty to Others and suggest that these duties apply at multiple levels: Practitioners, Organisations, Whole Profession.

Describing Professions in this way makes discourse easier and more focussed, allows reasonable expectations to be set and may inform Policy makers and Regulators when judging if Professions or their parts are succeeding or failing.

Good Democracy needs Strong Media: What impact the Fairfax sackings?

Yesterday, Fairfax Media, the publishers of some of the oldest, most respected newspapers in Australia announced it would radically downsize and move its prime business on-line. More video, Lateline and a detailed timeline.

"The Fourth Estate" is a fundamental to strong Democracy - in Economics terms, it (notionally) provides "full/perfect information" for the Market. It's how the Public become informed of Things That Matter.

I posit that the "Golden Age" of Democracy of the 20th Century co-incided with a strong newspaper, newsreel and later "electronic media" culture:

• there is strong public demand for "information" coupled with a willingness to pay.
• "Fresh" news and stories are a competitive advantage: News 'Scoops' made money.
• Strong competition amongst providers for "fresh news" funded a lot of technology, a lot of research and stimulus to "look under every rock".
• Under this pressure, the News Cycle shrank from weeks, to days, to hours and minutes. Twitter with its 'news cycle of seconds' may be the end-game.

Media companies had a sound Business Model for around 100 years because they filled a fundamental human need: curiosity and concern.
They had worked out a great way to place a tax on that, far better than just paying for 'a' paper: advertising.

But is this Value Proposition of "Fresh News" dissolving in the New Media?

Newspapers used to be "News", i.e. the facts of {Who, What, Where, When, How and if known, Why}, not "Opinion" - the stuff that I'm writing.

After the Vietnam War, TV took over the immediate delivery of "News", as in "What's New(s)?".

Newspaper couldn't 'break' fresh stories because TV would always beat them with the 6PM or 10Pm bulletins, unless stories were non-obvious and required unusual research.

Newspapers found new niches with Opinion, Analysis and Entertainment and Informing (vs 'News' of delivering new facts).

Woodward and Bernstein's "Watergate" investigation happened precisely because:

• Post Vietnam, TV had taken over as "where Fresh Stories break" forcing the paper to "dig deeper" for stories,
• the Washington Post had the resources and editorial judgement and nerve to fund the research and publish the results "without fear or favour",
• "sources" respected the paper and its journalists enough to speak, with an implied contract that they'd be treated fairly and respectfully and their identity would be protected if needed, and
• the public trusted the facts were real, correct and checked, and trusted that any fraud, confabulation or misrepresentation would be outed and all those responsible would "suffer consequences".

The Washington Post had an owner that was interested and engaged, and would back their Editors and Journalists. The people on the coal-face trusted they would be defended if they told the truth and acted in Good Faith.

What evolved with News reporting was a delivery pipeline with well-known "rendezvous points", Trust, Respect, and "Reputation" that took decades to build and a moment to destroy, and diversity with competition.

Who kept the Media Honest? Their competitors!

Who prevented complacency, sloppiness and indolence? Their competitors!

And the Media, "the Fourth Estate", with its insatiable appetite for News and Fact, kept those in positions of power and trust, Politicians and Business leaders, accountable.

For a hundred years, the public could (mostly) trust what the papers said and trust them to hold those in power accountable on their behalf.

Without a vibrant, competitive and highly professional News Reporting disciple, this half of the democratic system dissolves...

In a Democracy, the citizenry has a duty to care, to actively maintain their Rights and hold those in positions of power to account. We're not going to see riots in the streets over this, it seems like an inevitable, and minor, business failure or restructure.

But what can and will replace a strong, free Press?

The Internet does Change Everything, but where's the business model that will fund good News Reporting? None has yet to emerge, and after ~15 years of "The InterWebs", if it was going to appear, it should be apparent.

On Being a Professional: 3 Axions. Right Reasons, Attitude, Aptitude.

I've stated for a time my rubric of Professional Practice as a rhetorical question:

When it is ever acceptable for a Professional to repeat, or allow, a Known Fault, Failure or Error? [A: Never]

Some larger questions arise but won't be dealt with here, but they imply a meta-level, the "Profession":

• Define 'Known' (which needs a means of transmission), and
• What are, or should be, the Consequences of unprofessional conduct or performance?

Healthcare, Medicine and the Learned Professions (eg. Law) have a special (higher) onus of responsibility on them. In the scale of Professional Duty, they are the most stringent and demanding:

• Fiduciary Duty or Trust:
•  "involving trust, esp. with regard to the relationship between a trustee and a beneficiary" [Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus]
• Fair Go, Fair Treatment.
• No Rules, Buyer Beware.

I argue that the Fiduciary Duty implicit in the Practitioner/Patient contract and relationship is demonstrated in the Hippocratic Oath, "First, Do No Harm,..."

This is a very high standard.

I take it to mean that Practitioner always places the Patients' welfare and health above their own concerns and needs, and those of their employer, supervisors and Professional Bodies.

Internal to this, I assert that the more radical or extreme the effects or possible adverse outcomes of the treatment/procedure are on the patient, they higher the duty of care. A variation of "Your Life in Their Hands".

• A surgeon or Intensive Care Physician can trivially cause immediate death or terrible permanent injuries. They have the highest level of Fiduciary Duty towards their Patients.
• Whilst the maker of a prosthetic device needs to avoid transmission of diseases, the use of toxic elements and have the device work safely. There is still a Fiduciary Duty towards the Patient, but it is much closer to the "Fair Go, Fair Treatment" level.

I'm positing three axions of Professional Practitioners, especially those with a Fiduciary Duty to their clients:

• Clean Motivation of Entry into and Practice in the Discipline: not Money, not Status, not Power/Prestige/Influence.
• If a Clinician is practicing because of the money, not primarily for providing good Patient Outcomes, they will routinely fail in their Fiduciary Duty.
• This is counter to the best interests of the Patient.
• A focus on pecuniary rewards will not sustain a Professional for their full working life. Once immediate goals are satisfied, what then? More of the same, or Just Cruising, not Caring?
• Caring for others outcomes is the first requirement for Quality and Continuous Improvement.
• Those who espouse, or act out, "Care Factor Zero", will not and cannot provide good Quality practice. If they have a Fiduciary Duty to others, they should be relived of duty without delay.
• Continuous Active Learning and Improvement.
• This isn't the 20-hours/year of mandated CPD (Continuing Professional Development).
• It's an inherent self-monitoring, self-examination of process, procedures and outcomes leading to Improvement in Quality of Care and Process (efficiency and effectiveness) and Adaptation and Improvement of Practice.
• A trusting and safe environment, "The fundamental Clinical Requirement", for the patient to "open up" into a full, frank and unstinting clinical communication.
• As human beings, we have 90 seconds to make a first impression. Recovering from a poor or antagonistic first impression is possible, but lengthy and time-consuming.
• Within that time, any clinical professional has to establish a basis of communication with the patient where they can be fully open, honest and complete in the clinical dialogue.
• "Why didn't you tell me before/when I asked" is the calling card of failure in this fundamental clinical requirement.
• Patients are both fully informed experts and ignorant. They know absolutely the experience of their own bodies, but can not be Clinical experts, even if they are trained in the field. This contradiction requires the clinician to both respect, not discount or ignore, what the patient is telling them and to fully draw out the patient experience. The patient will not be aware of apparently trivial or obvious details that are critical for swift, correct diagnosis by the clinician.

Lastly, there's the matter of Talent.

Some people are gifted in a field and given the same degree of training and practice, outperform us "mere mortals" by many times. Some might say "orders of magnitude".

The proof is Elite Athletes and Professional Sports. Talent counts, not just perseverance, determination and desire. Professional teams pay massive amounts for their stars, not 'the pack'. In professional tennis and golf, it shows up in earnings, both tournaments and sponsorship. The notional performance differences between #1 and #100 are small (<1% or 0.01%), but earnings are different by powers of ten. Talent counts as much in the clinical setting as on the sports field - and the results are similarly different.

Professions don't do themselves favours by allowing those of limited Talent to practice.

It diminishes the field and fails the patients.

Ironically, through the Dunning-Kruger effect (tone-deaf performers self-assess as virtuosos), this can institutionalise perverse selection and assessment regimes:

   when the professors are tone-deaf, they reward those like themselves and remove all others.

Exemplified by the claim: "I'm the Best XXX in the South-West/North/Area/City/State/..."

It's an error of logic of the kind: "compared to what? by whom?"

Only for the brave? Doom and Gloom analysis of "USA Inc" + solutions.

This report, co-authored in early 2011 by Mary Meeker of KPCB (Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfied, Byers) the legendary Silicon Valley Venture Capital firm, is deeply challenging.
Long PDF and Short PDF available as well.

It's not your average "Doom & Gloom" report or "The Sky if Falling, all is lost, get to the Bunkers" shrill fear-mongering.

This is solid analysis backed by good research and unrelenting numbers.

These folks know their way around a balance sheet, their record speaks for itself. If you can't refute it, you have to believe and act on it.

The headlines for me are dual:

• If nothing changes, within 15 years the USA won't be able to pay its bills [like Greece and Spain], and
• these folks are very positive. They layout the strengths of the US Economy and its people and a game-plan for getting back into the black.

So, look at the video [43mins] and pull down one or more of the PDF's if you like, I'm not only suggesting that this is not something that everyone should read, but that people should carefully consider beforehand if they even want to read this. It's not said, but the GFC was just the beginning...

Be prepared to read some deeply disturbing and challenging data/analysis, I found it quite sobering.
The authors pointedly don't dwell on the negative outcomes or consequences inside the USA and for the rest of the world. There will be many commentators only too glad to bang that drum and instil "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt" into a wider audience.

BUT, the whole reason Mary and her team spent a small fortune constructing this report, is they, the acknowledged experts in analysing the operations of any business, not only think there is hope, but think solutions are possible and achievable. This comes from a fundamentally positive 'frame'.

That they did the research, produced the analysis and published it, is a massive vote of confidence by some of the world's best financial minds in the resilience and capability of "USA Inc" and that solutions are within the grasp of Americans. The solutions may not be easy or palatable, but they are achievable.

This report is about Hope and Inspiration, don't lose sight of that when you read it.

Vote [1] Independent: Gillard vs Abbott - why we hate them both.

The last newspoll in May-2012 had Gillard and Abbott both with  disapproval ratings of ~60%.

Who cares about the approval ratings jiggling up and down a little with one or the other sneaking 'ahead' by a single point? It's all noise.

The BIG message here for these leaders and their parties is: the electorate hates you both, equally and with a passion. Almost the only folk still supporting either leader and party are the rusted-on faithful. The rest of us want "None of the Above".


This is why we have the hung Parliament, with the balance of power being held by Independents.

The Greens may be a safe bet "to keep the Bastards Honest" in the Senate, to borrow Don Chip's line, but intense disapproval of major parties will not translate into lower-house support for the Greens. They have yet to earn that support from the majority of voters.

There are around 500-days until Gillard has to go to the polls.

Is that enough time for strong independent candidates to declare themselves in all the lower house seats? I've no idea.

It would be so wonderful if Abbott or Gillard lost their seat to an Independent, in much the same way that the electorate of Bennelong "sent a message" when they replaced PM John Howard in 2007 with Maxine McKew. But only for a single term: The ALP got sent another message when she wasn't reelected.

We are in this "Tweedledee, Tweedledum" situation exactly because of all the "sophisticated" tools that political parties have used and refined over the years.

When Dr Gallup invented sampling theory for his PhD thesis and showed it comprehensively worked in the 1948 election of Truman, we embarked on this course towards "identical candidates and parties".

Simple survey techniques have been supplemented with frequent, targeted polls, "focus groups" and enhance with technology.

But the Political Party's analysis and use of this data to create "Perfect Candidates" and "Perfect Policies" has a monumental flaw: it can only tell you what to leave out, or not do, it cannot tell you what to do, what is missing.


A perfect example from my Industry, I.T., is Microsoft versus Apple:

Microsoft has products and a persona perfectly constructed from Opinion Polls and Focus Groups. Apple builds stuff it is passionate about, that springs from a clear well-expressed vision and worldview and is intentionally, not for everyone. 

Until 5 years ago, you would've said Microsoft had won hands down. Now Apple is so far ahead on all measures and Microsoft results so poor in absolute and relative terms, that there is simply no contest. The business press has called for the firing of the long-term Microsoft CEO and a set of commentators are now waiting for them to fail.

The lesson from MSFT v AAPL?

Pandering to the whims and desires of the masses and attempting to "never offend anyone" yields short-run benefits, but in the long-run guarantees all but the most faithful hate you with a passion. The majority of people will only buy and use your product if they have no other choice. Look at the share price and revenues since the 2007 launch of the iPhone... It had stopped being a contest before then, now the iPhone and iPad have "nailed shut the coffin" on Microsoft's business model.

Apple and Steve Jobs have, since the 1984 launch of the Macintosh, shown that they put Great Design ahead of everything else. Without Jobs in the company to solidly maintain this stance with upper management and the board, the company floundered, almost to the point of extinction.

When Jobs returned with the same core philosophy but now with the skills to profitably implement it, the turn-around of the company has been nothing short of amazing to those who don't understand the rule, and more than comforting to those who do understand this philosophy.

This is the "secret sauce" of Apple and Steve Jobs: Stay true to your deeply-held Beliefs.
Jobs' 2005 Commencement Address for Stanford says more.

You cannot "cut your way to success" in business, nor elsewise achieve greatness through appeasement, placating and being "politically correct" - newspeak for "never offend anyone". Being a reed that blows in the winds of opinion does not buy you friends, influence or respect.

This is why Australian voters don't just dislike, but actively hate, the major parties, their leaders and their policies:
 they don't have the guts and gumption to strongly state their message and stick with it.
If you have real, strongly-held beliefs, you will have a whole raft of people disagree with you, but they will admire and respect you for it and given the choice, grudgingly allow you to get on with it.

Voters know too well that the party hacks they vote for locally will, when given the choice between the interests of their own electorate and "the party", consistently not put the interests of their constituents first.
So why vote for someone that won't stand up for you and your interests when it counts???

This is exactly why strong, capable Independents are being increasingly elected.

Voters know that Bob "mad hatter" Katter will fight to the death for them. He might hold a bunch of crazy and unimplementable views, but he is passionate about his electorate and volubly so. Love him or hate him, you have to respect his passion, his work ethic and commitment to his constituents: this is real Public Service, putting others interests ahead of your own.

So this is why my recommendation for the 2013 Federal election is:

Vote [1] Independent.

Because if you don't vote the bastards out, nobody else can.

If you don't have a strong, capable Independent standing in your Electorate?

You still have many avenues to make your views known, though there are few I can write about.

Just be sure when you do share your views and attempt to influence others, that you don't fall foul of the Electoral Act.

You cannot advocate that people don't vote nor that they vote 'informal', especially not that they avoid being on the electoral rolls. We are a Democracy and this entails a duty to care, it relies on your active engagement, not passive acceptance of the Status Quo and wishy-washy 'statements' that waste your vote.

Voting is compulsory in Australia (we're such an apathetic lot and seemingly love to obey authority!) and failing to vote for a good reason attracts a $25 fine. The penalties for advocating others not vote are considerably harsher and more onerous (court appearance, not a fine, possibly criminal offence) than an individual failing to vote.
To be clear: I support everyone casting a vote, this is fundamental to maintaining our Democracy.

IIRC, Somewhere around 4-6% of registered voters don't cast ballots on the day. I've no idea, nor any interest in finding out, if or where the reasons for not participating in the cornerstone of our Democratic process are tabulated.

Update 10-Jun-2012: The Financial Review has estimates that 20% [~3MM] eligible voters "choose not to vote". 2.88MM of 14.09MM people:

• 1.20MM not on the roll,
• 0.95MM don't turn up to vote (and face the fine)
• 0.73MM don't cast a formal vote

 To create change, you have to vote.

Think about it and make your vote count in 2013.

Root cause of the GFC: systemic failure in fiduciary trust/duty

Watching a Lateline interview with a British politician last night on the British Leveson Inquiry into the behaviour of the Murdoch media, crystallised my thinking on the root cause of the GFC:

A systemic failure in both fiduciary duty in the global financial community and a concomitant failure in governance and oversight by the regulators, public service and politicians.

---

The New Oxford American Dictionary defines "Fiduciary" as:

involving trust, esp. with regard to the relationship between a trustee and a beneficiary

Princeton's Wordnet defines "Fiduciary Duty" as:

the legal duty of a fiduciary to act in the best interests of the beneficiary.

---

The critical piece for me in the Lateline interview was that the politicians driving one of the most important Inquiries in recent times let their personal fears override their duties as representatives of the Public:

... Rebekah Brooks [chief executive], who rejected our invitation [to give evidence] on three occasions ... but the committee then decided not to invite Rebekah Brooks, [seen as surprising] ... And I think it is very clear now that the individual fears that committee members felt led to them ... basically losing the will to do that.

The GFC did not arrive unheralded nor without the involvement of many actors through the whole investment "food-chain".

• The front-line sellers of retail "sub-prime" loans that lied, deceived and failed to disclose to victims what they were actually buying, especially A.R.M.'s (Automatically Resetting Mortgages: a low-rate "honeymoon" period (2-3%?) before repayments were increased to the underlying rate (12-15%?).
• The churning of these sub-prime loans as if they were prime-quality loans by Banks through the Mortgage Underwriting houses, Freddie Mac and Fannie May and those underwriters accepting high-risk loans as low-risk.
• The "repackaging" of sub-prime loans from the Mortgage Underwriters as CDO's (Collateralised Debt Obligations) without fully disclosing or properly insuring the embedded risk, instead using CDS's (Credit Default Swaps).
• The complete operational failure and dereliction of duty by all Ratings Agencies in declaring these packaged "toxic loans" in CDO's backed by CDS's to be the lowest risk asset possible, AAA-rating.
• The relentless, high-pressure wie-spread sales of these complex instruments to inappropriate and uninformed consumers, with extraordinary levels of deception, misleading statements and since documented, complete fabrication and wilful dissembling (lying).

But it could only have happened if there was not only widespread failure of agents Fiduciary Duty to investors, but also criminal behaviour.
There were a slew of interlocking system failures that were necessary to translate the "zero-cost" money being thrown around by the US Federal Reserve into systemic rorting (fraudulent gaming of the system) - and none of them was ethical, moral or legal.

The GFC was fuelled by an seemingly infinite pool of zero-cost money being used to "stimulate" the US economy after the "Dot Boom" became the "Dot Bust" circa 2000.

There were many schemes to take this money and convert it into "high return, safe vehicles".
The contradiction inherent, returns are the inverse of safety (higher rates of return compensate for higher risk), went unnoticed, unchallenged and generally uncommented, except towards the inevitable collapse.

Yet, despite, the massive consequences of the GFC, the "socialisation" of the crystallised losses, which for decades will haunt the mug punters, or average taxpayers paying for these bailouts through their governments, nothing has substantially changed. More importantly, almost nobody has gone to jail.

Many banks and financial institutions declared record profits (and hence record internal bonuses), the year after they were bailed-out by the very people they were again relentlessly gouging - the average taxpayer.

There is a fundamental inversion at work in the financial and managerial world that the regulators and legislators have been ignoring for the last 30-40 years:

• CEO's and fund-managers/investment advisors want all the upside of ownership, and none of the downside. They want a large fraction of any gains when the market goes up, and suffer nothing when it goes down. They can bankrupt a company an/or destroy all your investment, and still demand a bonus, let alone compensate the owners for their reckless, irresponsible behaviour.
• Institutional Investors, in the form of Banks, Insurance companies, Retirement Funds/Investment houses give their small, anonymous investors all the downside of ownership and little or none of the upside. Risk is transferred from the Institution to the Individual investors, while they retain all or most of the benefits when the markets improve. The small investor, often forced into compulsory investment, takes all the losses of the gambles and speculation by the Institution, whilst being charged a fixed percentage of their assets and a proportion of "excess gains".

This state of affairs is consistent with the causation of the GFC and stems from a very simple thing:

Politicians, and hence Regulators and Government Bureaucrats, confuse CEO's and Institutional Investors with Owners, when they are merely employees or agents.

How I can prove these assertions:

• The GFC was inevitable from the documents released or surfacing afterwards.
• CEO, 'senior management' and Board salaries have spiralled upwards at a compound rate of 30%pa since ~1975, without any comment, constraint or Inquires by Governments worldwide.
•  while real wages of employees have remained static or declined since ~1985, and
• "big business" especially continues it outrageous calls for "more flexible working arrangements" from those employees to "lower costs" and "increase productivity" when decades of decline in real wages show that none of the savings and improved profits are passed onto those long-sufferring employees.
• Institutional Investors and Governments still pass wide-scale losses onto the general public, who were not responsible for the decisions, had no control and no 'internal information'.
• The unemployment rate is most countries is (very) high, but those people out of work, receiving lower "benefits" and paying higher taxes are exactly not the people who created the GFC.

Then there are the many studies into "Mergers and Acquisitions" of large, publicly owned companies.
They all say the same thing, despite the very expensive and detailed "Due Diligence" processes, the vast majority of Mergers not only fail to create value, they destroy substantial amounts of owner value, which is ultimately the small, anonymous investors funding Institutional Investors.

A case in point from my field (I.T.):

Unisys (UIS): Formed from the 1986 merger of Burroughs and Sperry/Univac (numbers 2 and 3 in turnover and CapEx behind IBM), not only never became #1, but has declined four-fold in share value and declined from $10.5B revenue/year and 120,000 employees to $5Bn/year and 30,000 employees in 2010.

It was never going to be a good idea due to the radically different, and incompatible, corporate cultures and that there were no great synergies in their product lines, rather the reverse, they were direct competitors in most of their markets.

Yet the deal was struck and The Great New Giant Company was formed.
Within two years, the extent and scale of value destruction to both brands was obvious, and in a rational world would've been cause for a rapid demerger and unwinding of the still incomplete "integration".

Yet this didn't happen. The Board, the CEO and all the "management team" kept resolutely destroying the company. Now, decades on, it is a mere shell of its former self, and both brands struggle. Both organisations were successful, growing and sound before the merger. The market or "externalities" didn't change significantly at the time, rather the reverse, IBM grew its business very well for the next 5 years.

At the very least, the CEO and senior management team should've been placed "on notice" by the Board at the end of the first year when they comprehensively missed all their targets, and summarily sacked after the second year when the value destruction and failure to grow was incontrovertible.

Why didn't this happen, and why wasn't the Board sacked for a gross dereliction of duty? Institutional Investors are the majority shareholders and have a general policy of "we don't interfere". It's almost like they don't care about protecting their small, anonymous contributors from the downside...

Those who caused all this carnage at Unisys, the active destruction of shareholder value and the massive opportunity losses from both brands failing to keep growing, have never been held to account or suffered dire economic or civil penalties for their actions and inaction.

The resulting questions are:

• Who pursued and benefited from the Merger? Presumably the two Boards, CEO's and combined "senior management team". Those who stayed got bigger salaries and bonuses, those who left got their "golden parachutes" (outrageously generous severance packages unavailable to the rank-and-file workforce).
• Why was this massive market failure not investigated nor pursued by Regulators and Legislators? I guess because nobody that mattered complained. No Institutional Investor would complain ("we're uninvolved"), nor did they act on behalf of their plethora of small investors, rather handing them back a slightly smaller dividend without explanation.

It seems that Politicians, those we have elected to represent us against the more powerful, have become the captives of Big Business (CEO's and Boards) and servants of Media.

Unsolicited advice for the new Queensland Government

Last night in Queensland, the Liberal National Party (it could only happen in QLD), won in a landslide, led by Campbell "Can Do" Newman, son of Federal Politicians and with 13 years distinguished service as an Engineer in the Army.

One of the candidates I graduated with from school, 40 years ago has a very successful legal practice, I'm an underemployed I.T. consultant.

I sent him this unsolicited advice.
Not very original of me I know, but I hope it gives a useful insight to them.

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First, from my profession of I.T.

 A piece of ~1,000wds on the cost to Govt. of essential infrastructure (IT) not fulfilling its promise (slanted more to CBR than QLD):
"The Triple Whammy - the true cost of I.T. Waste"

And a way out of the hole (600wds):
"Controlling Waste in Government I.T. - An Immodest Proposal"

Summary:

Create two bodies like Aviation has, ATSB/CAA. One to investigate, identify root-causes and write detailed recommendations for remediation, and another to implement and enforce those recommendations...

It means making the Audit Office do more than check for fraud/broken regulations and develop real, on-going expertise in essential disciplines, starting with I.T.

And establishing an Independent Authority with real teeth... One of the first actions has to be "start collecting performance and outcome data", like the 15yr old CHAOS report that reports on I.T. project outcomes in the USA.

If people and firms are assessed as incompetent or worse then, like in Aviation, the Govt has the right to de-licence them, only they aren't licenced. But they can be put on a public "not to be employed by Govt." register , which others will know if it is lawful currently or not.

Most importantly the "Authority" has to focus on Change and Improvement, not disciplining and "handing out consequences" (which is part of its remit) or it becomes counter-productive. (900 wds)
"The Accountability Paradox: Personal Consequences and Blame"

It comes down to a basic proposition:

Is it ever acceptable for a Professional to repeat, or allow, a Known Error, Fault or Failure?

I'd argue that a number of professions owe a Fiduciary Duty to their clients/patients and professional failures in this way should result in the most serious penalties.

In Aviation, not repeating mistakes is taken very seriously, but not in I.T. nor seemingly in the medical world.

In any Engineering profession, a professional who fails in this way, causing fatalities or allowing preventable economic failure, not only loses their license to practice, but is open to criminal, not just civil, charges.

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Secondly, on Public Health and Hospitals.

Urgent reform is needed within Queensland Health, at many levels, but what's been tried over the last 20 years hasn't worked. A radical approach is needed, and one that is known to work.

This is not my area of Professional expertise and I wouldn't know where to start...

But I know who does and how to do it:

Adopt the Aviation model of Systemic Quality and Deliberate Change Implementation.

A recent article in the Journal of Patient Safety proposes exactly this:
"An NTSB for Healthcare, Learning from Innovation: Debate and Innovate or Capitulate",

What they don't say is that Systemic Quality (my term) isn't just free, but because it embraces active, intentional learning and improvement, it is better than free:

20% cheaper is well documented.

1. Dr Brent James of Intermountain Healthcare. You can read his 2001 ABC interview "Minimising Harm to Patients in Hospital" and his "its 20% cheaper" data.

2. Dr James' work is reflected in a major report by the US Institute of Medicine:
   "To Err is Human: Building A Safer Health System" (1999).

3. Donald Berwick and the "Institute for Healthcare Improvement".
    Here is a landmark article by Berwick from 1996:

"A primer on leading the improvement of systems"
BMJ VOLUME 312 9 MARCH 1996
Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Boston, MA 02215,USA
Donald M Berwick, president and Chief Executive Officer.

I'm sure you've read the 500 page QPHCI report and possibly Margaret Cunneen SC's "The Patel Case – Implications for the Medical Profession" (which as a layperson I found astounding).

The inherent problem with Commissions of Inquiry is that they cannot oversee or enforce the implementations of their recommendations. The responsibility gets handed back to Govt. which delegates the Change and Improvement process to the organisation that has the problems.

This fails a basic sanity test:

If the organisation could've changed itself, it would've.

Continuing systemic problems are not the result of lack of knowledge or insight.
Berwick formulates this problem exactly with:

every system is perfectly designed to achieve the results it achieves.

The Organisational Rules have to be changed to create more than cosmetic change because the incumbents have both an investment in keeping the status quo (its worked for them) and if they could've changed the system within the existing Rules, they would've.

Changing Organisational Rules, and making them stick, can only come from above.
This is exactly why Dr Demings' "Quality Circles" (and his teachings) worked in Japan and failed in their country of origin, the USA. Deming was hired by the heads of Japanese industry and they were able to mandate the changes.

Some things to kick off reform of QLD Health are:

• assess the degree of compliance with the QPHCI recommendations within 2 weeks.
• Any good bureaucratic will attempt to stall efforts like these for months or years. Think of the HSU Inquiry by Fair Work Australia as an outstanding example.

• look to new laws addressing Patel's deliberate action in harming patients.
• There is also a lesser offence of ' professional incompetence', proven by the statistical outcomes of a doctor. Individual victims cannot be identified, but that there are victims is proven by the stats.

Rudd versus Gillard: Everyone loses.

A copy of a letter I sent today to my local ALP senator.

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Dear Senator,

Not sure if you care what one of your constituents thinks about your internal party matters, but here goes.

Julia Gillard is, IMO:

• a competent legislator,
• a good administrator, and
• outstanding at achieving 'meeting of minds'
• negotiating with many competing parties,
• with conflicting aims and differing agendas, and
• hence achieving legislative aims in a hung parliament.

Her record of accomplishment in the actual business of government is, again, very good, doubly so in that it's a hung parliament. Not 'revolutionary' like Whitlam and his many reforms, not 'breakthrough' like Keating floating the dollar (because we aren't in those times), but solid important stuff that matters now and matters for the future - balancing the budget, creating the next century's infrastructure and improving our intellectual competency and competitiveness.

So what's wrong that she doesn't have the 60-70% voter approval rating that she should have??

There is a serious disconnect between what Gillard does and her perceived performance in the electorate. It's worth at least 30-40% in her approval rating, IMO.

I have no idea why this is so. My best guess is that it is somehow related to the advisers around her in the PMO.
 [PMO = Prime Ministers Office, her personal unit staffed by her vs Dept. of Prime Minister and Cabinet, a normal Public Service Agency]

Howard had Arthur Sinodinos and together they made a formidable team, unbeatable for a decade. Proving the point that Great Leaders have Great Teams around them. But that's speculation on my part.

What Gillard is experiencing (approval vs performance gap) seems to me to be the political equivalent of business' "glass ceiling".

Women work incredibly hard, are exceptionally competent and do very good work but regularly get overlooked for promotion by their managers. I've personally worked with a number of mid-level Managers in the Public Service who've been trapped this way, but never were any of them men.

This can't be blamed solely on bias, nor solely on "Men do this to us".
Part of the effect, at least, has to be something in the way that Women approach work and promotion. A side-effect of this is that Women Entrepreneurs coming from this group are hugely successful in the plethora of small businesses they create.

There's such a weight of evidence about this 'overlooked for promotion' effect that I'm surprised it hasn't been studied extensively and that 'remediation' courses/training aren't available for it.

None of which might help Ms Gillard right now :-(

But this is my attempt at explaining why one of our most competent and apparently most broadly knowledgeable and informed political leaders isn't getting due recognition from her 'employers', the electorate.

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Rudd:
Plays well to the public and sprouts lots of great sounding stuff.
Unfortunately, has proven to have very limited ability to 'execute'.

Or to sell difficult decisions.

After 3-4 attempts to get up Carbon pricing legislation, he quite rightly said, "enough time wasted on this now, we'll  defer it until after the next election when we should have better upper house numbers".

If he'd been up against Nelson or Turnbull (whom I'd call 'reasonable men'), that would've been the end of the matter...

But Abbot creamed Rudd, and easily so, quickly bringing him down.

Abbot has beaten two Labor leaders - Rudd lost office and Gillard didn't win the unloseable election.
But Abbot doesn't understand there's a difference between beating an opponent and winning over them.

A Rudd vs Abbot election will be another debacle for the ALP.
As would currently, a Gillard vs Abbot election.

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I talk to my friends, most of whom like me have been voting since Whitlam or before and cover a spectrum of political persuasions, and we all would like to vote "None of the Above" if the next election is between Abbot and either Rudd or Gillard.

The consensus is: "Not ALP, not Liberal, Not Greens, but WHO?"

And many wish we could vote for Independents as gutsy as Windsor and Oakeshott, or a little less wild-eyed than Wilke. Katter is just plain crazy, but so one-eyed pro-QLD his electorate must love him.

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If I was in your shoes, I wouldn't know which potential Leader could get the ALP over the line at the next election - at least not against Abbot.

Gillard doesn't sell herself well enough to the electorate and has been kicking far too many 'own goals' recently, and Rudd is like week old fish, flashy but well past its Use By.

Crean was leader for a time, but the "Anyone But Crean" sentiment is still strong.

There are many other fine people serving in Parliament who, in time, might make outstanding leaders - but anyone contesting and deposing  an incumbent ALP Prime Minister for the second time, no matter how good or well respected, will be hated by the electorate, just for the act.

If the ALP was in Opposition, this would all be moot. We, the electors, expect there to be jockeying amongst the contenders for 'a shot at the title' (to use a boxing analogy, appropriate for Abbot).

But the electorate, wrongly, presume "we vote for the Prime Minister", as I saw stated in a voxpop last night.
That's a direct outcome of Australian political parties succumbing to the 'Presidential style' of campaigning and government.
We aren't the USA...

While a single, strong 'all-powerful' leader is an easier sell to the electorate, this situation we find ourselves in is its inevitable conclusion.

Why are all these unpleasant stories and opinions about Rudd and his poor performance/personality only coming out only now? Why not when they were happening?

Because the Parliamentary wing of the ALP collectively and consciously created and maintained the fiction of "one good all-powerful leader", possibly telling itself that "Disunity is Death" (the flip-side of "Workers, United, can never be Defeated").

Being caught out in "the Big Lie" is also "political Death".  The electorate are just finding out about being sold "the Big Lie" and are NOT at all happy about it.

As Richo said, "Politicians Lie" (that's what they are forced to do by our Political and Media System).
We, the electorate know that, but don't expect/condone such monumental constructs, hence the massive rebound effect.

You'd think that the way to cut this Gordian Knot is for Gillard, not Rudd, to revert to Radical Honesty.

There'd be an immediate backlash for sure, but it would completely destabilise and confuse Abbot.
And given time, might win over a bunch of the disenchanted electorate.

It also needs Open, Honest, Transparent comment/opinion from inside the rest of the Cabinet and potentially the Caucus.

There's a time for a rigidly controlled, disciplined "single message", and perhaps a time for close-to-genuine Honesty.

For evidence, I offer Bob Hawke. A hard-drinking womanising larakin if ever there was one, that we still applaud because he can scoff down a beer faster than most.
He was forgiven these indiscretions by the public because he announced them, unlike the damaging backroom succession deal with Keating, or the unfulfilled Howard/Costello agreement, reported to the public by others.

If the Liberal party can get behind a good Leader, someone besides Abbot who thinks constant whining is a strategy, before the next election then the ALP, if it doesn't do something very different, could well be in the wilderness for another generation.

But I don't expect changes like that in Politics, just like I don't expect a fuchsia Airborne porcine division to swing by here. [A squadron of Pink Flying Pigs]

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All the best in whatever happens.

regards
steve jenkin

--
Steve Jenkin, Info Tech, Systems and Design Specialist.
0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
PO Box 48, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA

stevej098@gmail.com http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin