Your Rio Olympics, our power grid and this American obsession with perfection

OK. I'm going to admit something here that may, in fact, get me culturally stoned: It's Day 11 (or 111 or something) of the Rio Olympics, and I haven't watched any of it. Not a lick. Not a second. Not a Phelps gold-medal-winning stroke. Nada. Nothing.

I don't actually understand the Olympics. First, it seems like a huge explosion of cost that can collapse a fragile economy for the silly sake of branding a country (see: Greece). Second, it reminds me of phys ed class (at least the summer Olympics), and I really, really don't need those flashbacks.

But, it's the third reason I don't get the Olympics that I want to talk about here: It reflects our American obsession with perfection---even though, yes, I realize it's an international event.

When you turn on the TV and they are reviewing the Olympics each morning, do you get heartwarming people stories of the masses that went and never medaled, of all those that tried and sacrificed and worked dead-end gigs and spent the money from those dead-end gigs on ridiculously expensive sporting goods all for a quest that is just about akin to windmill-tilting? Do we celebrate their hard work and keep a running count of all the people giving it their all, giving it heart and soul but not taking home a darn thing? Nope. We see a list of which countries have the most medals, and we talk about it especially long if America is (or remains) at the top of that list.

Would we care about the Olympics if we weren't always, always at the top of the medal counts? Would we care if our athletes just went for the camaraderie? Would we care if we only sent one Olympic athlete with no hope of winning a darn thing, like Tuvalu, a tiny Pacific Island country lost between Hawaii and Australia, with their single lone runner? 

I'd postulate the answer to all those questions is "no" because we Americans have a long history of wanting to be the best, be #1 and win everything from baking contests to world wars. In fact, if you just randomly google "American perfection," you'll get everything from a basement waterproofing company to poultry standards to pictures of the WWE.  

While this obsession with perfection may bind all of us during the Olympics---or all of you, as it were, I'm still not watching that---it can also be a huge problem when it gets regularly applied to areas where perfection is a bit impossible: politics, for example, or military interventions. Or even the power industry. Yes, us to. 

I would throw out there for your consideration that our American obsession with perfection has impacted the power industry more than any other domestic group for two reasons: (1.) We're everywhere, every day powering everything (so we're visible), and (2.) we cannot control all the factors that must be controlled for our infrastructure to work perfectly. There's too much. It's too spread out.

And, yes, customers are the worst on us for our lack of true industry perfection. The power's on in their houses 8,755 hours of the 8,760 hours in a year at a price, on average, less than half of what they are willing to pay for their collective obsession with the last season of "Penny Dreadful," yet customers, on average, remember only those few hours without power---not the thousands of hours with power. And they don't understand why they ever, ever have to be without power at all. Why can't we fix it where that never happens? Here's the short list of answers for that:

• Because power has a lot of moving parts, all of which can break
• Because power infrastructure is often open to the elements from derechos to wandering, seemingly militant squirrels
• Because power still cannot be properly stored like other commodities
• Because a lot of our infrastructure is old and replacing it all right now would send your bill skyrocketing 

So, on the one hand, knowing all that we know from the inside, we're well aware that we can't, as an industry, have customer-facing perfection. We know the wind will blow (and knock down poles). We know the rivers will rise (and flood out circuit transformers). We know that a rumba of rattlesnakes will see that partially buried substation as slithery heaven and move on in. But, still customers expect that perfection. (And even if you go an amazing few years without an outage, the moment you have one, it will all be Janet Jackson whispering "what have you done for me lately?")

It's that need for perfection. We're well aware of that attitude in our customers, but I think we've missed that it exists within ourselves as well. In some ways, it can be a good thing: We make things more efficient. We run the data to know the details on making the package a better whole. But, as with all obsessions, it can blind us as well. In this industry, what comes to mind is cybersecurity. We want a perfection solution to cyber issues, and there isn't one.

We still seem super obsessed with preventing attacks, with staving off hackers, with building digital walls and keeping things out. But, your digital systems are very similar to the physical ones you lament that customers don't understand: They're layered and complicated. They're "exposed" to a lot of things. The threats change daily but your expensive systems and protections don't, and if you tried to keep up with that, the bills would skyrocket.

Rather than looking at cybersecurity as something to prevent, ward off and keep at bay, we should be thinking of attacks as inevitable and impossible to prevent. We can't make a perfect cyber defense, but we can assume attacks will happen and create systems that are flexible and adaptable. Rather than a perfect system, we need an agile one.

The same could be said for other parts of this industry as well, from cultural thinking to system analysis. We have to all stop having "customer mind" when we approach our internal processes---or even "Olympic mind," if you will. Despite being an American cultural obsession, perfection doesn't have a place in modern infrastructure. We have to stop planning for winning the gold and moving on to another event. There is no other event. We have to start realizing that this is all a cycle without an end with no final sprints or mad dashes or dramatic dives. It's no longer about winning. It's about staying afloat. These are not 100-meter butterfly days. These are doggie paddle in an endless ocean days.

I wonder if the doggie paddle could make a future Olympics? I might could survive that event.

This piece was originally written for Energy Central's new interactive communities designed exclusively for the power industry. Take a look by clicking here. 

How's your utility tossing out the old ideas of perfection and planning, instead, for long-term agility? I'd love to hear all about it. Tell me in the discussion below or in the discussion forum on the original article here.