You know the check engine light. It comes on, you worry for a day, and then a piece of electrical tape starts to look like a repair. The light is gone. The engine is no better. But you can get to work on Monday, and Monday was the only problem you were trying to solve.
If it is hard or costly, many don’t want their problem solved. They want it to stop hurting, and most of us live in the gap between the two.
That gap frustrates me. I also understand it, which is worse.
How a workaround becomes a way of life
Picture any outfit that has been around a while. Somewhere inside it is a process nobody designed. It just grew. One team does it one way, the team down the hall does it another, and the whole thing holds together because three or four people perform small miracles every week to make the pieces line up.
Those people are heroes, and I mean that. They are doing their very best with what they were handed. But look at what happened along the way: the heroics became the process. Once you are the one who knows how to make the broken thing work, the broken thing is part of who you are. Fix it, and somebody loses their cape.
Then there is the math. The fix costs the people doing the work, right now, in discomfort and relearning. The payoff shows up later, and most of it lands on somebody else’s desk. Offer me that trade and I would hesitate too, especially when everybody is already doing the work of two.
So when people tell me they just want the symptoms handled so they can keep moving, they’re being rational, which is what makes it hard.
Why I can’t let it go
I am a data person. I love good data because it is a mechanism for telling the truth. Lay what was supposed to happen next to what actually happened, and you learn a whole lot in a hurry.
Did we do what we set out to do? Did we do it on budget? On time? To the spec the customer asked for? Those four questions should be easy. With messy information they are close to impossible.
Bad data is where problems hide. Organizations fail slowly in it, because nobody can see clearly enough to fix anything. And the same fog that hides the mistakes swallows the credit owed to the people doing great work.
Here is the part I don’t enjoy admitting. Clarity is threatening even to honest people. Nobody wants a bright light on a process they have been holding together with their bare hands.
When the right thing is the wrong thing
So when is doing the right thing not the right thing? When you demand all of it at once.
The destination does not change. A clear, repeatable process, with a plan going in the front and an honest accounting coming out the back, is still right. But dropped on tired people as a single mandate, it is one more thing that hurts. They will reach for the tape.
The job, then, is to find the next less-wrong step. Get people far enough down the road that the work gets simpler for them, not just cleaner for me. Let the differences that matter stay different. Make the rest uniform.
It’s slower than I want. I don’t have to like it, and I don’t.
I’m frustrated, and I’m fired up. That’s a decent place to start work from tomorrow.
