How to know when you're losing

Robin McAlpine

Let's take a break from the depressing world of Scottish politics, swerve the depressing world of UK politics, avoid at all costs the depressing world of EU politics, pretend the depressing world of US politics isn't happening and let's just not go anywhere near the Middle East at all. Instead, let me do one of my little guides to 'how things I've learned through work might be useful for you'.

I already looked at how to read bureaucratic gibberish without going mad and I swear I wrote something on how to work with the media but I can't find it right now. So this time, a trick I can't recommend enough if you're working with any kind of bureaucracy – how to know if you're winning or losing.

Bureaucracy can be anything from the labyrinthine depths of government to the planning department of a local authority or it could even be winding your way through a complaints procedure at work. If you're trying to get something done and someone who can help you is constantly taking notes and checking their own rules, you need a way to work out how it's going.

On the whole a bureaucracy seldom tells you to simply bugger off. I mean, if you try to get planning permission on top of a historical site you won't get far, but assuming you're engaged with a bureaucracy, they're generally don't want to send you out of the room actually pissed off. It just makes their lives harder.

The problem is, experienced bureaucrats are usually better at telling you to go away and leave them alone in a way that sounds helpful and enthusiastic than you are at working out that that is what they're telling you.

I know that sounds unlikely and that you probably think you have a great sense of these things, but I promise you that has not been my experience, from either side of the desk. I used to brief people on how to get rid of someone troublesome without them realising that it was happening. I've seen it work over and over. Equally, I know really senior, clever, intellectual people with experience and knowledge who simply don't notice they're getting the run-around. 

Why does that happen? Because humans are all lovely, empathetic beings (when we're not being horrible, selfish, angry beings), and when people show us empathy we tend to take an empathetic position in response. Simply put, we think nice things about someone we think is trying to help us and we still think it even if they don't manage. 'Well thanks for trying.'

This is greatly exacerbated by another factor; most people get intimidated by bureaucracies, which makes sense because bureaucracies make themselves intimidating for the purpose of better managing the discontented public. Kafka wrote a whole book about it...

I once went into a meeting with some very senior people on both sides – on my side a group of well-kent names who were asking for something, on the other a very senior politician and the full bureaucratic entourage. To my great surprise the people on my side were very nervous going in (they were acting in unusual roles for them).

We were asking for three things. We got knocked back on all three of them, almost completely. Yet outside afterwards, everyone thought the meeting had gone swimmingly. I was bemused – we wanted three things and we got zero. There was no good outcome.

Why was this meeting misread? Because people were so nervous going into it that it took surprisingly little belly-rubbing from the politician to release the tension and make them relax. And from there they were, well, too relaxed.

Let me give you a very simple secret – in the history of history there is no politician who wasn't 'delighted you have taken time out your busy day to meet me because I value you and your input very much indeed and I really want your experience of this issue to help in making my decision because you're one of my most important stakeholders'. That literally just means hello. Bureaucracies use similar approaches.

You'll then be asked to set out your case. Throughout this your gatekeeper (bureaucrat, politician, manager – whomever you're trying to persuade) will be extremely attentive and will give you lots of positive reinforcement. It'll put you at ease and you'll start to relax more.

Except the second you start to relax too much you will begin to miss the signs of what is actually happening in the meeting. My first piece of advice is this; from the first minute you're in the door to the last minute you leave, you are always working so you need to stay alert at all times. I've seen people utterly blow a meeting while literally on the way out the door.

It doesn't mean don't be friendly – you'll almost certainly open with some general chat about the weather or where your going on your holidays or whatever, and you'll very likely close with more chat or niceties. These have a use to the gatekeeper but that doesn't mean they're not sincere. Be sincere in return, but never start behaving like they're your friends. They're not.

Stay alert and don't let your ego get in the way. I was once taken aside by a senior politician, shown a piece of controversial text I was campaigning to alter and was told that I was 'one of only three people in the world who has seen this'. This 'just for you' stuff was information I immediately discarded – it could only serve one purpose, to flatter my ego and get me thinking 'oh how important I am' when I needed to concentrate on close-reading the text.

From 'this is the best submission we've had' to 'before we get to the planning details, can I say that I adore the design of your proposed house', the words might be sincere, they might be cynical, they might just be time-fillers. What they are not is useful information for you. Don't get swept up in it. It doesn't mean your submission will have any impact or that you'll get to build your house.

In fact, there are really only three things to look for. Thing one is whether you are getting what you wanted. Before you go in, be clear on specifically what you want (and that should never be a pat on the head or a warm, fuzzy feeling...) and then at all times be equally clear about whether you're getting it or not. Make your goal binary; either you achieve it or you don't. Don't get distracted from this.

Thing two is to be acutely focussed on barriers in your way. Simply put, are they decreasing or increasing in number? I helped a community group by going through about 30 pages of correspondence from a local government committee. It took me two or three minutes max to say 'you're getting totally screwed here'. It was simply because every time the group addressed a previous problem raised by the bureaucrats, another one appeared.

People who are trying to help you are always working with you to take down barriers to what you want. If new ones start appearing, they're not trying to help. This might sound obvious but often it isn't when you're going through it. 'Right, having cleared those problems, here are some more...' should always be met with 'hold on, you didn't specify these at the outset – are you making this up as you go along?'.

And finally and crucially, try really hard to work out in what direction you're pointing. I mean this very specifically – at any given point in a meeting you will metaphorically either be pointing inwards towards the centre of the bureaucracy or outwards away from its centre. 

That latter can mean that you are offered another follow-up meeting, but it is with someone with less seniority than the person you're talking to (one pretty big network of community groups I helped out was getting meeting after meeting but they were all with decreasingly senior officers, and so I just told them to stop, that they were getting the runaround).

But it can often mean that you get very specific advice to help you with your problem, but it is advice you could have got from a web search. This happened to a charity I'm involved with recently – the bureaucrats kept telling us places to get help and absolutely none of them were in the same organisation as them. We were being politely shown out the door, and yet it wasn't obvious. Others involved thought the meeting went well. It didn't.

Forget the chat, forget the noise, forget your ego, don't get all sweet on the bureaucrats no matter how nice they are, focus on those three things and you'll save yourself enormous amounts of time and energy. Thing one, are you specifically getting what you're specifically looking for? If you're not or you're getting something else you didn't ask for, you're losing.

Thing two, is the path towards where you want to get to becoming clearer or less clear and are the barriers coming down or going up? Unless the path is becoming clearer, you're losing. And thing three; in which direction do you find yourself (metaphorically) pointing by the end of it all, inward towards greater access to the bureaucracy or outwards towards either more junior people or to other external organisations or grant funds or whatever? If you're not pointing inwards, you're losing.

What should you do if you're losing? Oh, that's a whole other article. But it begins with one simple step. Stop. Stop banging your head against a brick wall if you're trying to get something done and it isn't working. You will burn yourself out, get angry, slow everything down and waste giant chunks of your life.