Cogito, Ergo Sum

July 8, 2024?

Dear Leaders,?

A penny for your thoughts.? In the age of artificial intelligence, it is too easy to defer to the machines or your subordinates to do the thinking, and then simply render a decision.? In the extreme, some leaders have gone so far as to defer and demur on deciding, costing their organization and their credibility.? Leaders who engage their brains, see the big picture, weigh the variables and factors, and make decisions easily stand out from the rest.??

My former federal agency was a model of what happens when you don’t think.? In processing applications and petitions for immigration benefits, they went beyond not thinking in training people to not think about what they were doing.? In their zeal for speedy service, but more to meet the dreaded production metrics, officers were taught to simply follow the checklist.? Regardless of anomalies and irrespective of the individual situations and claims, they simply ensured the form was correctly filled out, supporting documents were included, and that the applicant or beneficiary appeared to be eligible.? Follow the checklist and come to an approval.??

As you would expect, it didn’t take long for the perpetrators of fraud to catch on, and when revenues increased because applications and petitions soared, management was happy, as they were when production numbers were likewise high.? As we in the nascent fraud section started to apply thought and rationale to the individual files and collective process, it wasn’t long before we discovered schemes that were so pervasive, everyone seemed to know but the people doing the actual processing, and the few that were aware were often discouraged from taking further action, lest their numbers go down.?

This was part of the larger leadership failure in the inability to see the big picture.? We were but part of the immigration process, but the various functions were often set apart, with internal leaders working to keep them apart.?? Our people did not comprehend that giving someone an approval conveyed credibility, even if the applicant was obviously not qualified.? Beyond that, even if denied, there was no sense of need to post a lookout or refer threats to public safety to enforcement and inspections for arrest or entry denial.? ??

One of our biggest challenges came from the inability to see and understand the larger picture in that decisions were often rendered in the vacuum.? With a compartmentalized mentality, individual leaders and groups would levy requirements and make decrees without considering how it would impact others, notably the operational units.? Even allowing for unforeseen issues, the constant whipsawing took a heavy toll, and field management normally responded by robbing one side to pay another in shifting resources to answer an immediate problem, only to create other problems in the process.??

Having come from the Army and the Defense Department, I was used to bureaucracy, but nothing compared to the scale I saw in the Departments of Justice and later Homeland Security.? Even though I started in what was officially a non-leadership position, I didn’t wait for the solutions to happen, or permission to start applying them, for if I had, I would still be waiting 24 years later.? As my colleagues and I saw the need, we started calling to light the issues in question, investigating to sustain our findings, and devising solutions therefore.? Working internally at first, we made recommendations for procedural changes that were so successful, filing rates dropped over 90 percent in some categories.??

We looked upon this as validating our work, but management took a different view when they saw a drop in revenues and in production time.? Again, not thinking of the larger issues involved, they saw only that for which they considered themselves to be accountable, raising a bigger issue on accountability measures, but we’ll save that one for another letter.? It took a massive communication effort at all levels, and the tragedy of September 11, 2001, to get them to understand why there was more to the process than just following a checklist.??

Our endeavors culminated in the establishment a formal directorate to deal with potential miscreants in fraud, criminality, and national security, and even then, getting beyond the tunnel vision was a constant process, one in which we were not always successful.? One agency became three, and doing so magnified the provincialism and intransigence on the part of some.? We solved this as best we could by maintaining local-level contacts and simply working around the impediments.? ?????

“I think, therefore I am.” ?Descartes set the philosophical bar high that so few can get over it.? Leadership is not simply reacting to what is happening, it requires seeing the big picture, understanding the facts, even if you don’t have all of them, weighing the options and the ramifications of your actions, and then deciding and directing action.? Leaders cannot always control every factor, so they manage the possible, and apply ingenuity in getting to that which others thought not possible or even impossible.? ??????

Sincerely,

Tim