A bad Hair day, heterarchy and responsible autonomy

Team heterarchy, management hierarchy:

Football and cricket teams exemplify a heterarchy. This is because, in a team, the players agree to organize and work together to achieve a win, structured through the sharing of power. If things go wrong during a game and a player is sent off the field, his teammates re-organize. Players change position, regroup and fill in the gap. If it is the captain, another player immediately takes on his mantel. In football, even goalkeepers have been known to leave the sacred space of their goal, attack and score a goal when the chips are down.

Of course, there is a huge additional structure organized around the support and promotion of any professional team. The key people in that external structure are arguably the club chairman, manager and trainers who form additional units that are distinctly more hierarchical in nature. Responsible for finding the best individual players their job is to maximise the players’ ability to work within given roles and so forge a successful team. In other words, they exist to facilitate learning and to provide the necessary infrastructure.

Self-regulation and responsible autonomy:

An outside eye deals with arbitration. The FA and ICC were developed to establish the common rules and regulations for a level playing field and to select refs and umpires to make them work. Self-regulation gives everyone confidence that cheating and bad practice won’t go unpunished. It sets out an ethics of good, trustworthy sportsmanship. Potential rows during the game are averted through an assurance that a punishment of misdemeanours by the players or referees will be dealt with fairly. The trouble is that retrospective punishment rarely seems to fit the crime. Management and the regulators are also supposed to be scrutinised. Players, management and referees often seem to get away with murder and self-regulation is deemed less than satisfactory because of possible self-interest and sports’ politics.

A bad Hair day?

So what about the latest test match at the Oval? During the match, umpire Darrell Hair condemned Pakistan for ball tampering. In the early part of the day, a couple of bad umpire decisions against Pakistan exacerbated the team’s already long-standing sense of injustice and prejudice against them on the part of umpire Hair. Then the ultimate accusation of cheating was made. When they attempted a small protest by being slow to return to play, Hair applied the rulebook to their absence on the field to the letter and, for the first time in the history of test matches, declared that Pakistan had forfeited the game and that England were the winners.

This is an interesting case study for organizations that consist of a mix of hierarchy, heterarchy and responsible autonomy - all the more so because it was played out, in part under the public gaze, in part behind closed doors.

In my view, there are 4 interconnected issues:

1. The ICC had ignored Pakistan’s previous complaints and anxieties about their perception of Hair as prejudiced against their team during the winter test and in this one: in their insistence that he continue as umpire for the whole series, they had already allowed an atmosphere of discontent to build up.
   
2. The rulebook: in Hair’s accusation of ball tampering, he acted as judge and jury; the team had no right to demand evidence or to defend themselves (this seems to accord with most players’ view that there is an inbuilt unfairness that is different to that of umpire judgments about lbw, for example. In the only other such judgment, the ball was locked away and never seen again…)
3. Hair applied the rulebook so rigorously that the willingness of both teams to continue play was overruled, as was good sense.
   
4. Cultural and historical. There is a general misunderstanding of the nature of honour and shame in patriarchal societies, where public humiliation is taken really seriously, and a consequent history of upsets between teams from the sub-continent, some umpires, the ICC and some teams from here.

The incident on Sunday has resulted in general sense of perplexity, embarrassment and dissatisfaction from players, spectators and commentators which the ICC officials have compounded by extended periods of radio silence followed by statements about adhering to the rule book and the umpire’s right to rule.

The ICC office was closed on Monday. There will be an enquiry on Friday. But I doubt if their response will do anything but increase tension and dissatisfaction. The trouble is that their lack of action re Pakistan’s complaints about umpire Hair after the winter test series and during this one, their mishandling of events at the last match, and the likely delays/fudges in resolving the whole issue of what ball tampering is and how to deal with it won’t increase anyone’s confidence in the reality of impartiality.

How could things have worked better?

Common sense, diplomacy and serving the game might have made a difference – even if this might have meant bending the rules. Retired umpire Dickie Bird has said as much. I suspect that if Hair had had a quiet word about the funny shape of the ball before making any accusation, Pakistan would have been extra careful about its condition. Furthermore, if the teams had been asked, both England and Pakistan would have probably backed away from making accusations of cheating (after all, the Pakistanis didn’t complain about Cook’s remaining at the crease on Sunday morning when he surely knew he should have walked). (The teams have a better relationship at the moment than for a long time and that now risks being compromised by the very arbitrators whose job it is to avoid team conflicts.) If common sense and a bit of diplomacy had been used instead of applying the letter, not the spirit, of the rule book, Pakistan would have made their small protest (it’s happened before, ie there is precedent) before going on to complete the day’s play. The inquiry could then have taken place in a much ameliorated atmosphere.

Instead of this, a sense of unfairness and bias will now potentially fuel supporter fury, general spectator frustration, and player paranoia (where the balance against bowlers is already commonly deemed to be spoiling play and competition).

What if this had been another kind of organization?

Let’s apply the concept of regulation to another type of organization altogether. Let’s take an engineering company from China and one from the US. They are competing for a big contract. The arbitrators of the proposals, who are made up largely of Western professional bodies, give the contract to the Americans. It would surprise none of us if many people might quickly begin to accuse the arbitrators of bias and prejudice, especially if complaints and anxieties expressed at an early stage had been ignored.

What effect does poor regulation have on heterarchy?

In sporting cases, there is often no effect. As with Zizi’s chest-butting of the Italian player in the World Cup, players and spectators alike will tend to rally round the ‘offender’. The sense of team and supporter spirit consolidates and grows – even to the point of politicians exploiting it for national benefit. And, of course, that spirit is seen as a role model for other heterarchical groups because there is a rough justice at play that people tap into.

What effect does this have on the concept of responsible autonomy?

Self-regulation only works if the processes are transparent and if all parties are, and believe themselves to be, fairly dealt with. Bias in one case leads to perceptions of prejudice in another.

If self-regulators are perceived as being unfair, because they fail to self-critique in as rigorous a way as their chosen referees/umpires have judged the team’s play (in this case, the Pakistanis), then it is likely to encourage a desire to cheat (well, why wouldn’t you…). And a complete disillusion builds up around the very bodies that were set up to settle disputes on the playing field. (In the business world, in the case of Enron, the auditors Arthur Anderson went to the wall over the sense of lost integrity.) In the cricketing world, there is already some talk of a split between ex-colonial countries and the rest of the world. Maybe the ICC needs to watch its back and think about improving its own practice and transparency. Maybe they should also think about getting a group of cricketers and spectators together to discuss how to overcome the present problems and how best to reform the self-regulators. After all, it is the players and the spectators who provide jobs for these boys, just as it is the shareholders and customers who fund the executives in large organizations.