ORACLE

By Doug Samuelson

The four OR/MS analysts had just completed their weekly five-mile Sunday morning run and were cooling down with energy drinks and sandwiches at their favorite coffee shop.

“Nice day for a run,” one of them commented, “although the pollens sure were out today. That’s the price we pay for a mild winter, I suppose.”

“Yeah, Pete,” acknowledged Alan, another of the group. And he proceeded to recite: “Spring has sprung, the grass has riz, my nose knows where the pollen is. Forget about the birdies on the wing, my allergies will tell me when it’s spring.”

They all laughed. “With poetry, no less,” Dan, the youngest of the group, added. “I just wish the allergies were the only thing making me irritable.”

Naturally, his friends wanted to know what the problem was. “I feel stuck,” he explained, “even though the client I’m working for claims to support innovation and cooperation among people in the organization. Management says, ‘Don’t ever tell me something is not your job.’ But that doesn’t mean your boss, or your boss’ boss, never says, ‘That’s not our job.’ We can propose any initiative we want, but if we can’t justify it as closely related to our branch’s current mission, it isn’t gonna happen.

“And the other thing,” Dan continued, “is that we’re a policy shop, so it’s one short-term response after another. Brief this guy, brief that guy, revise the first brief to go to a higher level – great access to decision-makers, but never with anything all that different from what they’re used to hearing.”

“Well, I can see one part of the problem pretty easily,” Pete observed. “As far as I know, nobody ever won a 10-k race by treating it as a hundred 100-meter sprints in a row.”

“True,” Carl agreed, sharing the group’s laugh. “And the other part is clear enough, too. When people are under pressure, they tend to fall back on what they know. Even if you have time and resources and encouragement to innovate, you still have to have management that is willing to accept ambitious, interesting failure. Generating new ideas and avoiding mistakes are two totally different management styles, and you can’t do both at the same time.”

“More than that,” Alan added, “what strikes people as a good idea depends on what they already think. I’ve heard that General Petraeus, when he was in command in Afghanistan, claimed that the military could make decisions more effectively if they abolished PowerPoint, worldwide. Presenting things in the way senior people are used to can become a substitute for thinking by all parties involved. And, as with any other way of presenting, some concepts are easier to convey than others, and the ones that are hard to convey tend to get neglected. Before projected slides, the powerful sound bite tended to prevail. Now the powerful picture or graph does. But either way, it’s too easy to fall into a rut – just tell ‘em what they already believe, in a slightly different and more compelling way. That’s how you win a speech contest, but it isn’t how you promote the best decisions.”

“There’s still another aspect to it,” Pete pointed out. “Suppose you give somebody a piece of crap and tell him his job is to keep it gilded and polished. He may not think much of that task or that object, but anyone worth his pay takes pride in his work, whatever it is. So after a while he has an ownership interest in how good that thing looks. And when someone wanders by and says, ‘Hey, what’s that piece of crap?’ the person who’s been polishing it is likely to get defensive rather than acknowledging the obvious. Ever seen that happen with a poor data set that was critical to some process that management needed to track?”

Again the group shared a laugh. Sure enough, they had all seen occurrences like that.

Carl added, “Did you ever read ‘The Best and the Brightest,’ David Halberstam’s classic book about American policy in Vietnam? There’s a story in there about how Daniel Ellsberg, in late 1965 or early 1966, working for RAND fresh out of the Marines, went to Walt Whitman Rostow, who was national security adviser, and said, ‘I’ve arranged to spend some time in Vietnam. I don’t trust these numbers we’re getting and using as the basis for our analyses. I want to see for myself how things are going over there.’ And Rostow told him, “Great timing! Get over there and see it while you can. Look at these figures! Look at these charts! We’ll win this thing within six months.’

“So something like a year later,” Carl continued, “Ellsberg came back to see Rostow again. ‘Listen, Walt,’ he said, ‘all the numbers we’re getting are nonsense. People just put down whatever they think higher-ups want to hear, or whatever won’t get questioned. We’re losing, dammit, and we don’t realize it!’ And Rostow replied, ‘No, no, you’re wrong! Look at these figures! Look at these charts! We’ll have this thing won within six months!’ And of course we know how that turned out.”

“So what do I do?” Dan inquired, his frustration showing plainly.

“As always, you have two choices,” Carl responded gently. “Stay and do your best to improve things or find a better fit for yourself somewhere else. And if you do stay, remember what a psychologist friend of mine had posted in her office: ‘Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig.’ ”

Doug Samuelson (samuelsondoug@yahoo.com) is president and chief scientist of InfoLogix, Inc., in Annandale, Va.