What Makes Me Mad...

 This is going to be a bit convoluted, but bear with me.

A class I had discussed how to build quality healthcare organizations, and the lessons relate to more than just healthcare.

What they noted was that if they focused on punishing people who made mistakes, it led to bad results. Basically things turn into a blame game, there's incentive to try to cover up or hide your mistakes, and it doesn't tend to lead to quality outcomes.

What is better is to focus on identifying mistakes and then looking at how to improve the system in order to prevent them from happening again.

For example, a nurse may give a patient the wrong medicine. A punitive system would fire that nurse, but wouldn't necessarily prevent similar mistakes in the future.

If you look at it systemically, though, you can think of other ways of preventing the mistake. Like making the medicine a different size and/or color, so it's visually distinct.

That is why, in my last job, when a mistake was made and the team started to go down the path of finger pointing and blaming, I interjected and tried shifting the conversation more to a discussion on what we could do to make it harder to make such a mistake in the first place.

Now, here is where things start to get more convoluted.

See, I've talked before about how leaders set the tone and shape the environment. They can help shift discussions (like in my example above) to be more solutions-oriented, and to look at ways of improving the system.

This plays out in more ways than just how we handle mistakes. See, a funny thing happens when people work together. They combine in a way that makes an organization act like a person.

Companies have their own culture, citizens of a particular nation tend to be more open or closed, etc.

It is easier to influence a culture at the start, and hard to shift it once it's already been established a certain way, and they are often influenced significantly by key personalities... though said personalities are not always the head of the organization.

Really, it's kind of like magic.

Anyways, there are certain things that seem to be the key to success and I've mentioned them before.

1) Having a sense of what your desired endstate is

2)  An accurate assessment of where you are

3) Accurate feedback on how your policies and strategies are working

4) Course adjusting as necessary if those policies and strategies aren't leading to the results you want

Seems simple, right?

But... simple isn't easy. And when you dig into these things, they aren't actually all that simple either.

Let's look at 1. Knowing what your desired endstate is. To me, when it comes to a nation, I generally say something like 'be a good shepherd', because generally we want our people to be happy and healthy and able to live a good quality life. But how do you define that? How do you measure it? And I specifically avoided talking about a 'greater good' because people have the ability to justify some pretty horrible things if they think it benefits 'the greater good', so you have to be careful with that.

Then look at 2. How do you get an accurate assessment? How do you make sure people are telling you what's really going on, rather than what you want to hear? In order to get that you have to make sure you reward people for telling you the truth - even, or perhaps especially, when it's a truth you don't want to hear. And you have to mean it. Your people will pick up on your cues, and if you even hint that they'll get in trouble for telling you something you don't like then they just... won't tell you anything they think will get them in trouble.

3 is similar to 2, but it's focused more on checking on what your policies are actually doing. This is hard because people tend to get attached to their ideas and plans and if they're not mature enough they can see a report that something isn't working as intended as an attack on them. It's saying they're wrong, or made a mistake. 

It's like... people have talked before about how we tend to get attached to a specific plan, and fail to recognize when the situation has changed and the plan is no longer going to work as intended. 

Plus, you have to recognize when bad results indicate some sort of flaw in your thinking. Like... people get attached to all these -isms. Capitalism, communism, authoritarianism... most of these are just ways of looking at things. Like a map, they will ignore irrelevant details to help draw attention to key factors. You can have a topology map, a map of political borders, a map of highways or train routes, a hydrology map... they're all useful for the right situation. They help simplify a complex situation.

But the map is not the territory, and if you get too focused on interpreting something through the lens of your particular map you can easily make a mistake. A map focused on political borders may miss important context when you're dealing with hydrology, or vice versa. 

But people get attached to their ideas, get focused more on proving they were right than on getting accurate feedback and assessing the situation, and it turns more into a fight over bruised egos than it is about actually fixing things. (This is why I like evidence-based principles, and think it's important to investigate when the evidence-based principles give you results that don't match your expectations.)

And then we have 4. If what you're doing isn't working, try something different.

Again, simple. Right?

Except doing so may mean admitting you were wrong. Again, egos get involved, people will try to find evidence explaining away why something didn't work without admitting they were wrong, and then it turns into the blame game and finger pointing instead of, again, fixing stuff.

When I evaluate presidents, that's generally what I'm looking for. First - are they a good shepherd? i.e. are they trying to find solutions that are good for all of the nation. All of it. Not just one political party, not just the business leaders, and also not just the average citizen (because a solution that benefits the average citizen in the short run but also makes it difficult to run a business can ultimately hurt those citizens even more. It's a complicated system that you have to handle carefully, while trying to understand the long term consequences of your decisions.)

Then it's all about their decision-making policies. Or rather, it's about how much they encourage a system that emphasizes honest and truthful assessments of a situation, and a willingness to course correct as needed.

Like - if you think privatization will help improve the education system? Go for it. Get the evidence. Show that it works.

And if it doesn't, do a course correction.

The end goal is to ensure a quality education for all our citizens, and we all benefit from having that educated workforce. I don't actually care how you achieve that, so long as it doesn't overly impact some of the other factors that ensure we all have a good quality life.

I'm not too focused on whether it's the federal government, state government, private sector or public. What I care about is the end result - a well-educated population.

You could say the same for other things - a healthy, well-educated population that is able to earn enough money to live a comfortable life where they are free to raise their families, practice their faith (or lack of faith), and speak and think how they will, with a good economy with jobs available and the skills needed for those jobs, and the ability to switch between jobs so that we can adjust as needed for ever-changing needs.

Yeah, okay... those are all complex topics with quite a bit of subjective values thrown in, but you get the idea.

So what bothers me, what makes me mad about the current administration - is not just all the ways they lose sight of our hard-earned lessons and make the quality of life for the average American worse.

It's also just the sheer stupidity. The inefficiency. The waste. 

First, they don't seem to have the goal of being a good shepherd in the first place. Or rather, they only seem focused on taking care of a small segment of our population. And even that isn't the portion they claim they're taking care of. 

They don't care about truth. Don't care about accuracy. Are not evaluating the results of their policies and adjusting if needed. 

More than that, it's the immaturity. All the stuff I described above requires a level of maturity that understands that criticism and negative feedback is not an attack, and does not mean someone is your enemy.

Here's what happens when someone immature is in a role like that -

They hear someone criticize what they have done, and instead of taking it as honest feedback they see it as an attack. Instead of course correcting, they focus on defeating their 'enemies'. Enemies they often created themselves, simply by treating anyone who disagrees with them or says something they don't like as hostile.

They think they'll magically get their desired endstate if they could just...

Get rid of all those pesky obstacles. Get rid of the annoying enemies blocking their way.

And so instead of course correcting, they focus more on gaining power. On getting into a position where they can get rid of those 'obstacles'. Install loyalists that are on board with their plan.

Except that their plan is flawed and they're not willing to accept any feedback that points that out.

They turn it all into a game of control, of who can gain leverage points and put their people in key positions of power, but in the process they lose sight of what they're trying to achieve and how to get there.

The malevolence or incompetence question comes down to two things.

Is their endstate actually a good one? (malevolence implies that their goal is bad. Discouraging vaccine use means more and more people will die when their deaths could have been completely avoided. Is their goal to have a lot of people die? Or are they just so incompetent that they don't realize that's the consequence of what they're doing?)

If their endstate is a good one, if they truly wanted to 'make America great again', then the steps they're taking show a tragic level of incompetence. They're not assessing whether their policies are actually going to achieve their goals, and they aren't course correcting when they're not.

Instead they're wasting time creating unnecessary enemies, trying to consolidate control in a centralized fashion, suppressing dissent as though anyone who disagrees with them are 'enemies', and basically doing a thousand and one little things that will make it impossible to achieve their goals.

Assuming the goal is a good one in the first place.

It's so stupid. Wasteful. Inefficient. Especially since if they bothered to actually learn more about what they're trying to do they could avoid some pretty well-known problems.

Or maybe they just don't care at all about making America great again.