Change the world

"No, no, no, no, nooooOOOO!"

"Did Thib come out this way?"

It is a repeated conversation in my household.  I leave doors open where the dogs can get out and join me on the porch, in the yard, wherever.  They like to hang out with me, and love the freedom that being outside with me gives them.  I usually watch them pretty closely, so that they aren't eating stuff they aren't supposed to.  And they occasionally give chase to a squirrel or a chipmunk and stop listening for my commands.

Kathe is more of a preventive maintenance kind of gal.  She makes sure the gas level doesn't get dangerously low.  She gets her 50k mile car maintenance done at 45,000 miles.  Thanks to her, we have tp in every bathroom, clothes are clean and dry and in the closet, and there is always food in the pantry.

And the dogs do not spend any time running free in the yard.

They are two approaches, plain and simple. Neither one is better than the other.  My way leads to unnecessary excitement from time to time, when that 25-gallon truck tank gets down to 0.056 gallons left.

Seriously.

The dogs are not as well protected from harm under my care.  They might find something to munch on that would give them a bellyache or worse.  And Thib is notorious for eating stuff he isn't supposed to.... and has the enterotomy scars to show for it. (Not my fault, for what it's worth)

But without letting them run 'free', I have no chance to teach them what is allowed and what is not.  Which means if they do get out, I have no control.

The occasional loss of control allows me to teach, correct, and get them to accept the commands I give.  We can practice what we expect.

Trade off.

I work at an agency that works on the assumption that if you follow the process. the same way, every time, you end up with a consistent product.  We are engineers, and we are military, and we follow orders and we follow procedure, and we love templates and predictability.

There is truth to the old joke - you ask an engineer what the volume of the blue rubber ball is, he looks it up in his blue rubber ball table.  Same result, every time.

I was recently in a class.  It was a really good class on the procedure that our agency uses, with the compelling and immediately understandable acronym PMBP.  The class was good.  The speaker was engaging, and kept my attention for the full 8 hours of the class: no easy feat.  For some reason, however, my ears perked up at one of his assertions.  I had heard variations on this theme over and over through the years:

"Faster, Better, Cheaper.  Pick two.  You cannot do all three."   It is one of the basic tenets of project management.  If you require something fast, you have to cede efficiency on one level or another.

But there was something in that simple statement that bothered me, and it related to my aforementioned loss of control with the dogs.  After the class was over, I stopped him and challenged him on the statement.

"Sir, Eli Whitney, with his cotton gin.  Henry Ford with the assembly line. Edison with the light bulb.  Al Gore and his internet."

"OK," he said, "I'll grant you that. But those were not ordinary efforts.  What you are talking about are all things that changed the world - they are actions that changed the course of history."

"I understand," I told him.  "And during a lecture of process is not the right time to discuss it.  But what you describe here is the rule of efficiency, using the way that we are currently doing business.  If we look at things differently, there is a possibility of making changes that can do all three.

"If we are not allowing ourselves the possibility of thinking differently, we have no chance to change the world."

I know that the inside of a large Federal burrocrazy is not the likeliest place to look to make that kind of change.  But the principle is more pervasive than that.  Instead of working to train people in good planning, we are creating templates that even an idiot cannot screw up, with checklists to make sure that we did everything in the template.  We work at preventative maintenance, rather than at creative problem solving.  We look for our answers in look-up tables, and we make sure that the details are right. We use the everlasting go-by because it was approved before, rather than re-framing our documents to fit the organization of the problem and solution.

And sometimes, in our attempt to avoid loss of control, we miss the fact that our question is wrong, because we have never left our dogs running free in the yard.  There is no chance for learning, because we have prescribed the process so completely that there is no room for error.

Innovation should not be exclusively in the domain of the private sector.  It needs to be part of our Federal process as well.  We need to take a chance that something small will go wrong, so that we have the possibility of learning, growing, and creating for ourselves, making it so we can come up with the better solution when the big questions arise.  Without an investment in innovation, and without that commitment, we will have empty process, and no inculcated ability to think beyond the template, the checklist, the go-by.  In the process, we are safe.

In the process, we lose the chance to change the world.

Bandits

A friend who is an artist agreed to sell me a piece of her art.  I collect art from friends, and the wall in my office has been slowly been overtaken with fun pieces of quirky, beautiful art.

I set aside a few dollars a week over the course of several months, and walked down to the Trustmark bank downtown and paid for a money order.  I sent it to the address the artist had provided me.  Her response when I sent her a note to look for the money was classic, and made me happy:

"Thank you for supporting my art!  It helps me want to make more!"

A few days go by, and I haven't heard that she received it.  I ping her once; she says she had not received the check.  A couple more days go by, and I get the following:

"You check got stolen out of our mail!  We havr had our mail stolen in the past so we get this USPS service that sends a picture of what should have been delivered every day.  The check was delivered Friday and we never got it."

It is labor day weekend, so I can't do anything.  But on Tuesday, I walk over to the Trustmark Bank near where I work, and ask for them to cancel the check.

Back a year and a half ago, when I first arrived in Vicksburg, I needed a local bank.  For convenience sake, I chose the bank immediately adjacent to my work. Regions Bank promptly closed down that branch and several others in town.  So the convenience I had counted on is not there.  As a result, I am in the market for a new bank.  Trustmark carries my mortgage, and I was impressed with the folks in that department.  This interaction - cancelling the money order - is working a little bit like a trial run.  Will the service be worth changing banks for?

I felt like it was a little bit like taking your car to a dealership to be serviced.  Are they going to gouge you?  Can you trust them when stuff goes wrong?  Or are they only interested in new car sales?

From the outset, I was treated with great suspicion, as though I was somehow gaming the system. The Head Cashier explained that my only recourse was to pay a fee to have the check canceled.  Then I was going to have to pay to have the new check issued (I had already paid for the money order once; now it was going to be twice).  And I could pay for it in cash, or they could deduct it from my 'account' (you know, that account that I am trying to decide whether to open with them?).

"What would you like to do?"

Well, you just told me that I have no choice.  Or rather, you have explained that my choice is a Hobson's Choice. (As much as I love game theory, this one sucks).  I can lose the money, or I can pay the fine.  To add insult, the ATM charges $3.  And it is out of order.

When I came back, I am directed to someone else, who processes the entire transaction without looking up, except when I tell her that she has misspelled my name on the affadavit.  And her own.
In exchange for the fee, she tapped a few keys, canceled the money order, printed out a new one, and held out her hand.  I walked out, just under 50 bucks poorer, with a new money order.

Less than an hour later, my cell phone rings.

"Mr. Lawton, I just wanted to apologize.  I don't know where my head was this morning."

I nodded my agreement.  I had wondered the same thing.  

"I gave you the all the copies of the money order.  I was only supposed to give you the top two copies.  Can you come back and give the others to me?"

So in summary, I was robbed, treated like a criminal by the bank I was interviewing, charged an exorbitant fee for a few seconds of computer work, and then was asked to take additional time out of my day to do them a favor, to correct a mistake that was not my fault.

Sure.  I'll get right on that.  And you can expect my business just seconds before before the Pope sends me a piece of his own art work.

I just hope he doesn't want a money order.