Square Pegs and Round Holes

Throughout human history, it has been – or should have been – evident that attempting to complete a task with tools that are inappropriate for the job is a good way to fail.

We wouldn’t think of trying to drive a railroad spike with a ballet slipper or hit a 90-mile-per-hour fastball with a pencil.

But, of course, these are obvious illustrations of the point.

How about eliminating the use of alcohol by banning its sale and distribution?

How did that work out?

What about attempting to reduce poverty by raising the Minimum Wage?

Humans appear to have a tendency to assume that doing something that feels good – or that relieves a long-lived irritation – is equivalent to being effective. It felt good to make the sale and distribution of alcohol illegal back in the early 20th century. It just didn’t work. In fact, it created major unintended – and negative – consequences. Likewise, raising the Minimum Wage to $15 or even $20 would feel good to many people but it would have a similar unintended effect of eliminating jobs and bringing on the next wave of automation simultaneously. It would be smart to manage immigration with more care, but a physical wall is unlikely to be the answer, no matter how good it feels to a certain constituency.

Being effective requires – among other things – matching the right tool with the task in question.

When World War II ended, the U.S. Government wanted to enhance the employability of the returning soldiers, sailors, and airmen who’d contributed to the victory. The GI Bill was truly well suited to that task. Two late friends of mine were beneficiaries of that legislation: one graduated from Rutgers, his brother from Yale. Both went on to be successful senior business executives who enjoyed the prosperity of the post-war years while contributing to it.

When JFK promised that we’d successfully land on the moon in 1961, the establishment of NASA turned out to be a great tool for that purpose. And we beat his deadline to the lunar surface and back.

Other public sector programs come to mind: The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Marshall Plan, the Social Security Act, Medicare.

There is a subject that I almost never hear mentioned when it comes to the operations of politics.

It is the subject of method: the techniques that are used to effect political change and progress.

In the United States, this process is dominated by what I would describe as the “legislative model.” This model operates based upon variations of majority rule and a very detailed set of procedures for the drafting and revision of individual pieces of legislation.

Were the system to operate purely as designed, it would remain cumbersome and – in an 18th-century way – sophisticated. But it is beset by the conflicts arising from political and local interests and that factor makes it all the more opaque and contentious by nature. There is also the deeply pernicious effect of private money on the whole process.

But an even bigger flaw in the system as designed is this: it does not reflect the way more sophisticated modern organizations solve problems.

If you are seeking to, say, improve the health care system in the United States in a meaningful (not superficial or cosmetic) way, there are a number of ways you might proceed.

If you were a private business organization, let’s say, charged with coming up with a plan to effectively reform the U.S. healthcare system, think about how you might proceed.

Here is one way:

First, you spend a meaningful amount of time being as specific as possible about what “success” would look like if your efforts are productive.

What is your end game? What – specifically – are you expecting to create as outcomes? Do you want to reduce the cost of health care for Americans? If so, by how much? Do you want to improve outcomes? In what way? (Stop me if you’ve already heard the answers from our political leaders.)

Once the goals of the effort have been satisfactorily specified, you can begin to work backward and identify the categories of activities essential to delivering your objectives.

You may have come up with some ground-breaking ideas. How might you benchmark those ideas with other organizations??How will you test them before full implementation? No business would just roll out an exciting idea without testing it. Ideas might appeal to us, but the world is a challenging place. Most good ideas die in their implementation.

You get the idea.

Sometimes we need to step back a few yards and think about the way we think.

It is all too common to fall into a well-worn mental rut that keeps us moving in circles instead of forward.