Do you see the problem?
We’ve all seen playing cards. They have done experiments showing people a group of cards and have them repeat back what they have seen. Most people get all the cards right. They just don’t recognize that the cards are the wrong color. It’s not a condition that is supposed to exist so most people don’t see it.
We always seem amazed when a high school student makes a medical breakthrough, or someone completely outside of an industry comes up with an idea that changes everything. People within an industry are actually less likely to see solutions that are beyond the boundaries of where they work. They get very good at working within the rules and will generally completely ignore things that fall outside of the rules.
Institutional Acceptance
When I was first in the Military the word processor was still a new concept. Letters and messages were done in triplicate and usually went through a formal signature process. I used to tell my boss that as long as a package was perfect, no one actually questioned the content. To prove my point I orchestrated a little April fools joke.
A few weeks before April, my boss got a speeding ticket on base. Largely a formality, unless you make a habit of it. So began my diabolical plan. I got some help from a few other people in the office and we created a perfect package for signature. It was a fake letter from the head of security police to my boss telling him that his driving privileges on base had been revoked for a year. We sent it through the system, and it actually got signed off on by a two star General. No one ever read it until it made it all the way to my boss. He was more than a little puzzled reading it, but the tear running down the face of one of my coworkers trying to keep from laughing gave things away.
Everybody got a good laugh. My boss figured he would play the same trick on his wife when he got home. Apparently it wasn’t as funny the second time around. But that’s another story. Fast forward a couple decades and I still find real world examples that just aren’t that funny either.
But we’ve used it for years
Recently a woman made the front page of CNN because she refused to fill out a form for a drivers license because the category for her race was an outdated reference than most people would find offensive. Or at a minimum in need of a rewrite. It’s amazing to see the deer in the headlights reaction when someone points out an obvious problem. There is often no vehicle for fixing the problem, and it would be easier if it were just ignored. Why do some people have to make trouble?
Not too long ago, I was sent a budget form to fill out. It had been created several years ago, and it came from headquarters, so it had the proper pedigree and institutional blessings. Unfortunately, the categories were wrong, there were numerous spelling mistakes, and the base formulas didn’t work correctly. I didn’t know if it was just for our organizations or if all the other organizations got it as well. So I asked the questions.
Here are the problems, would you like me to fix my copy, or if everyone got this, do you want to fix it and resend it? Other emails followed in a ping pong match of “use the form provided” and “but it’s wrong”. Eventually someone higher in the food chain said to adjust as needed, but this message didn’t go out to everyone. Others received the same form. Some found the same problems I did, others did not.
What transpired over the next 24 hours was a lot of people jumping through hoops realizing the mess that was created. Then someone decided that this wasn’t the form that was needed at all, and two new forms were introduced into the mix giving people only a couple hours to redo their work. Still, no acknowledgement of the original problem. Maybe next time they send it out.
New Paths
People often have trouble discovering new paths, especially when there are well established paths already there. There are examples of colleges setting up new campuses and waiting to see where people go before they put in the sidewalks. It makes for a more natural flow. When we already have sidewalks, people tend to stick to them, even if they don’t make sense.
It’s not always a matter of something being wrong, sometimes it’s a matter of the original rules no longer applying. This can occur for a variety of reasons. The challenge is creating the conditions so those can changes can be accepted and put into practice. Make a habit of questioning the status quo – whether it be in business practices, or in your daily life. It’s really easy to get locked into a set of processes, procedures and habits that don’t let us see change around us. Look around – is something wrong? Maybe it’s time for a change.
