How the fire department lost its mojo
In the Globe and Mail, Frédérik-Xavier Duhamel has a sobering piece on organizational disarray in the city’s fire department that led to general abandonment of proper building inspections and culminated in the fatal fire last March.
It would be good to know whether these problems are being attended to.
Ephraim 13:39 on 2024-01-02 Permalink
You mean a publicly available list of buildings inspected and date inspected? That would be too hard to set up on a website. Like a list of when a restaurant was last inspected and it’s score
dwgs 13:50 on 2024-01-02 Permalink
Honestly, other places manage to have functional services and support, why can’t we? Most of those places have lower tax rates as well, where the hell does our money go?
Kate 14:29 on 2024-01-02 Permalink
I know. Doing the blog, I get a sense of so much cash disappearing into the inextricable bureaucracies of borough halls, healthcare facilities, educational “service centres”, the OQLF and similar ideological warrens – and now the fire department. Every little tinpot manager is squatting on their own bit of power, keeping their own secrets, hanging onto their own bit of the budget, giving gigs to relatives and friends, and meantime the public fails to get the kind of services we all know we’re paying for.
Is this how Rome fell?
jeather 15:08 on 2024-01-02 Permalink
The only solution anyone uses here is an extra level of bureaucracy. We just added a new one for the health system. I am not against government jobs, we need people who run these things as opposed to just hiring consultants all the time, but the level is unsustainable.
Kevin 17:10 on 2024-01-02 Permalink
A side effect of cutting budgets and jobs is a loss of institutional memory. Combine that with people dismantling Chesterton’s fence and we collectively end up worse off.
Before changing stuff people need to know why it was done that way… but that kind of high-level thinking is exceedingly rare.
Kate 17:32 on 2024-01-02 Permalink
Chesterton’s fence
Ian 17:45 on 2024-01-02 Permalink
A bit more of an explanation here.
…or the tl;dr:
Second-order thinking will get you extraordinary results, and so will learning to recognize when other people are using second-order thinking. To understand exactly why this is the case, let’s consider Chesterton’s Fence, described by G. K. Chesterton himself as follows:
There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
DeWolf 22:38 on 2024-01-02 Permalink
When I was writing my book about informal uses of space in Hong Kong the most important thing I learned was how the civil service worked. It’s very complicated. There are many layers of processes that go unquestioned and you have to understand why they exist and why they’re possibly destructive before you can start to dismantle them.
All of this to say that organizational behaviour is overlooked and maybe we need a left-wing, non-profit-driven MBA type course in our universities so everything begins to work better 😛
Kevin 23:44 on 2024-01-02 Permalink
I was just going to let people search on their own because I was being lazy 😉
One of my favourite classes during my undergrad was in organizational communications. Fewer than 10 people in the class because most people just didn’t see the point, but it was incredibly enlightening.
That said, I think more people need to take humanities courses, and make them pass-fail instead of graded, so the people who truly need them get exposed to these ideas.