Decapitation as therapy

England's soccer team recently lost a game to Northern Ireland. All of a sudden, its manager is looking at imminent likelihood of the sack.

Two weeks ago cyclone Katrina exposed a top to bottom systemic failure to cope which should give all us pause, wherever we are in hierarchy or geography. And FEMA's head has fallen on his sword.

I have no particular views, either way, on the competence or otherwise of Ericsson or Brown, but I do wonder at our enthusiasm for immediate decapitations in mid crisis.

If there's a problem, let's deal with it. But let's deal with it when the immediate needs have been met, not when we desperately need continuity. And let's deal with it fully, not by ritual sacrifice of a figurehead. Both of these men seem to have performed competently enough up until they were overwhelmed. If they are competent, let them do their jobs; if they are not competent, why was nothing done about iut earlier?

In the short term, competence in place is preferable to vacuum in an emergency - an in the absence of competence, continuity is better than nothing. In the long run, we deserve better than a cosmetic face job on bodies which have failed us. If I were an England soccer supporter or an inhabitant of New Orleans, I would be profoundly dissatisfied at being deprived of a key figure when times were bad, and then asked to accept that deprivation as sufficient answer to what had gone wrong.

Truth is, such knee jerk organisational decapitations are a scapegoating exercise - and a sort of cathartic therapy through theatre, to pacify the mob. They usually signal that nothing meaningful is being done where it really matters. When one head rolls in mid crisis, look very carefully at those which haven't.