Diversions Manifold

Labour had a seemingly impossible decision to make regarding the Brexit trade deal vote in the House of Commons on Wednesday 30th December. Labour leader Keir Starmer is quoted as saying: “The choice before the house today is perfectly simple. Do we implement the treaty that has been agreed with the EU, or do we not? If we choose not to, the outcome is clear: we leave the transition period without a deal. Without a deal on security, on trade, on fisheries. Without protection for our manufacturing sector, for farming, for countless businesses. And without a foothold to build a future relationship with the EU.” To me, the words "perfectly simple" are rather disingenuous. Starmer tried to portray the judgement as a binary choice, whereby all other considerations are neglected. That can be seen as clear leadership; it can also be a sign of a leader uncomfortable with conflict.  Fortunately, there was some public debate on the day: [Stella] Creasy said in a statement on her websi

The Brexit pre-mortem: BFMEA Of all the engineering tools that I have encountered, the one that spans the widest spectrum of respect and scorn, hope and despair is the FMEA , the Failure Mode and Effects Analysis. Developed by the US military and NASA and gradually adopted by the automotive industry from the 1970s onwards, it is intended to highlight things that could go wrong before they do; it's also a way of collecting and tracking the evidence (models, test reports, etc) that shows that the nuts and bolts have been proven before putting them on a rocket - or, indeed, jettisoning a country out of the European Union. At its heart, the FMEA is a "what if?" analysis. Other methods are available, like the Potential Problem Analysis from Kepner-Tregoe. But I'm automotive, and the FMEA is a requirement in our field, so I've sketched up how a BFMEA (Brexit Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) might have been constructed and eventually look like. W

ABQP: Advanced Brexit Quality Planning It is surely doing the British Civil Service an injustice to suggest that there was no planning process for Brexit. However, what we see in the media strongly suggests that whatever planning did take place was swiftly overcome by politics: the votes upon votes in Parliament, the pontificating and hardening of views, the dreams shattered and still dearly held. We hear of Papers stating one potential outcome or another, but the feeling remains of a Brexit ship veering ponderously from port to port, turning away from each in disgust without ever reaching one. I'm an automotive engineer, and could imagine Brexit being an automotive project; there would (in my imaginings, anyway) have been a clear baseline for planning, thinking, moulding, approving or even cancelling the project before it's too late. Comparing Brexit with a VW Polo facelift? Ridiculous! Well, yes, but I feel there are some lessons in the processes that w