Instead of wanting to know why leaders and workers sometimes get things wrong, we should ask how they ever get things right, writes LUCY KELLAWAY.

OVER THE past few days I’ve come across four explanations for how we’ve got into the mess we’re in. The first says the problem is having too many men in charge. If only women had been running the show they wouldn’t have taken such big risks and banks would now still be lending and the economy would still be growing.

This theory strikes me as soppy, unprovable and bone-headed. We have no idea what the economy would be like if run by women, as such an economy has never existed.

My experience of being at an all-female educational establishment – a women’s college at Oxford University – makes me inclined to think that things would be much the same. As far as I could tell, the main difference between women’s and men’s colleges (apart from the inferior architecture of the former) was more to do with appetite for breakfast than for risk.

At my college, women students generally got up in time for scrambled egg on toast and traipsed into the hall in candlewick dressing gowns, while the men tended to stay in bed.

The second explanation blames the crisis not on too many males at the top, but too many alphas. What went wrong was that the leaders were too autocratic. If, instead, they had been more curious and more grounded, things would have worked out better.

There are two things wrong with this theory. The first is that it is unrealistic about human nature. Grounded, mature people don’t usually want to be leaders. Being grounded means you don’t long for other people to follow you, as it’s a nuisance and a responsibility and you are happy as you are. And being curious means you are more likely to fancy a career as a private detective or journalist than as a banker or executive.

The other flaw with this theory is that it

is plain wrong. It is not true to say authoritarian leadership has brought on the collapse of the banking system. The problem was not too much leading from the front, but too little. What happened was that everyone was blindly copying what everyone else was doing without any firm figure saying: that’s enough.

The third theory diagnoses the root problem as selfishness. In the Financial Timeslast week, the economist Richard Layard argued that too much individualism and too much greed had brought us to this and we need to bring back the good old days of values and trust and altruism.

Layard may have a point, but I suspect the rot may go deeper still.

I’ve just been reading a new book that puts forward a fourth and more disturbing theory, which suggests that there is nothing new or sinister going on. The trouble is simply what you get when you take human beings and put them in an organisation.

According to the authors, Robert Hoyk and Paul Hersey, such is the human propensity to err in the office that there is a Fred Goodwin or Dick Fuld or even Andrew Fastow lurking inside most of us ready to be brought out in the right circumstances.

This theory isn’t terribly appealing, but I fear it may be partly right. I often think of how, when I started work as a journalist, I landed a job at the FT at the same time as an old school friend got a job at a tabloid newspaper. As people, we were morally similar. But as workers we became quite different. Even in those fat old days, the FT took a dim view of such traditional journalistic practices as fiddling expenses or making up stories, whereas at her newspaper both were expected and even encouraged.

When she told me about her working life

I felt priggishly shocked. But thinking about it I’m pretty sure that in her shoes I would have behaved just as she did.

According to the book, The Ethical Executive, it seems she was falling into four traps that office workers commonly fall into. She fiddled her expenses because she was trying to conform. She made up her stories because she was in stiff competition with other journalists who were doing the same.

She justified it to herself by saying that as others were doing it, it must be all right. And she said it wasn’t stealing and lying, it was just the way things were.

However, these four traps – conformity, competition, being lost in a group and renaming bad acts – are just the start.

The authors of The Ethical Executive identify 41 other traps, each one leading workers to behave badly, or making them lie to themselves about how bad they’ve been.

Power is a big trap, and so is money. So too is following orders. Another one is the way we start with small unethical things and slowly build up to bigger ones.

Another is having faceless victims. The list goes on and on: there is time pressure, the desire not to make waves, anger and alcohol. Even being empathetic can lead you astray if you let it cloud your judgment.

One could say this was a rather frightening book. But instead of leaving me in despair, it cheered me up. If there are 45 elephant traps waiting for us the minute we step through the office door each morning, the real thing to explain is not how we got into this mess, but why the mess isn’t even worse.

The true mystery is not why leaders and workers sometimes take the wrong road, but why most workers, most of the time, take the right one. – ( Financial Timesservice)