From hospitals and universities to IT systems, the machinery of compliance meant to reduce risk is increasingly swallowing the work it was designed to support.

Somewhere in the near future, our civilisation will collapse not from war, famine, or asteroid impact, but from a Change Management Framework Checklist. Future archaeologists will not find our ruins buried beneath ash. They will find them secreted away under Attachment B, Schedule 4, Version 12 (Track Changes Enabled), and conclude, correctly, that we all died waiting for sign-off.

We once built cathedrals in a single generation. Now it takes a generation just to approve the risk assessment. Somewhere between “let’s do something” and “the thing gets done”, an entire shadow society has emerged whose sole purpose is to ensure nobody ever quite does the thing. And to produce, in v.82, a record to demonstrate that due diligence was exercised in the not-doing.

The hospital cured of common sense

Take the modern hospital, an institution so committed to patient safety that it has become saturated with documentation about it. Somewhere in every hospital sits a swathe of clinical guidelines each running to roughly 200 pages, most of which exist to protect the hospital from the two-hundred-and-first page, which is the one where someone got sued. Alongside those is an eye-watering range of policies and procedures. To administer a paracetamol tablet now requires everyone to have done the training module, a competency framework, a checklist, a double-sign-off, a barcode scan, and should the patient so much as sneeze afterwards, an incident report describing the sneeze in a structured taxonomy of harm severity (Category 3:........

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