Shut it All Down

At least until we figure out what the hell is going on here...

You have probably seen the meme that goes something like this:

"We have to shut it all down until we figure out what the hell is going on here!

Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing for America to shut down, to stop for a bit.

I mean, what do we do the minute we realize we are going the wrong way - we stop, right? If it is clear that our heading won't get us where we want to go, we need to stop, reassess, and chart a new course.

I've been in businesses that have been so screwed up that everything is broken. It is hard to see a path forward because everywhere you turn, nothing works the way it was intended. Rather than addressing the problems head on, people built workarounds - because that is all they could do - that were band-aids, while under the surface, things were still festering, just waiting for the chance to pop out and ooze at the worst possible time.

The way those businesses are fixed is by first ferreting out what their current objectives are and if those align with its survival - many times they don't because people who had no idea what was wrong put the businesses on paths to nowhere.

It's like trying to repair a car by putting new parts on it until you stumble across the problem.

You must stop what is being done and refocus the business on the real goal - and then start with solving two or three of the major problems preventing achievement of that goal because you can't attack them all at once. Nobody has that many resources - plus at this stage you don't know if they are problems or symptoms of other problems.

America is like that - she is screwed up every place you look.

Our governance has drifted so far away from its true, enumerated goals because the least qualified people tried to fix it by adding and replacing parts, hoping one of the replacements or additions would solve the issues - and true to form, the additions and replacements just created new issues.

They made it worse AND cost us a lot of money in the process.

Often what I have found is that the answers are not more controls, but less. We get so hung up in following directives and we don't even know what those directives were meant to accomplish.

I actually make a practice of stopping the transmission of reports to the higher ups to find out who is reading what. In many cases, I find that people at the facility level spend significant man-hours putting analyses and reports together that nobody reads. Some VP from three VPs ago wanted to see some data but now, nobody even knows the reports exist.

It's like that in any organization - including government - non-productive inertia drives a lot of activity for no real gain. We just do it because we do it and if someone important started it, obviously it is important.

No. Just no.

Stop. See who complains - if anybody does. If they do, make them justify the value, if they don't, stop doing it.

I'm going to bet our federal bureaucracy operates that way. I'll bet that 80% of the activity creates no real value for anyone.

It has to stop.

And maybe that is not such a bad thing - at least until we know what the hell is going on here.