Monday, October 6, 2014

Systems In Place

Back in the day, I used to rent a lot of videos (the actual DVD’s) from Blockbuster. One time they claimed that I hadn't returned a DVD and they tried to charge me for it as though I’d purchased it. I knew exactly when I had dropped the DVD off, but it wasn’t showing in their inventory. I asked if it could have wound up back on the shelf, and the manager insisted that this was impossible -they had rules and SYSTEMS IN PLACE to prevent this. Until the customer at the next register tried to rent the movie I had returned.
Human beings are predictably unpredictable. No matter what rules you set up, there are going to be failures. Let’s play an adventure game:
You are exposed to a disease that’s 90% fatal. But that’s in the country where you live, where it’s an epidemic, and where the medical infrastructure isn’t up to dealing with it. You have family living in a different country, with the best medical infrastructure IN THE WORLD, and where no one who has been there with the disease has died. You have a week or so before you’re condition is obvious, and you can fly to the other country if you just lie to your country about your exposure,  and you know the other country will let you in no matter what, and once you’re in you will just be part of twelve million so undocumented people who are staying there because no one will make them leave. What would you do?
1.     Be honest, banned from flying out of a hot zone, and probably die either from the exposure you’ve already had or a new one.
2.    Lie so you can fly out of the hot zone, hoping that either your exposure was insufficient, or the medical care in the other country could save you.
Why are we surprised that someone would do this? It’s because so many EXPERTS forget something very basic: in the end, they’re not dealing with automatonic widgets – they’re dealing with HUMAN BEINGS.
So, we have SYSTEMS IN PLACE, but still we have Ebola in Dallas.
It would be really helpful if we had a test that detected ebola before someone was contagious, but it seems we have to wait 3 days after the onset of symptoms and contagion to get a useful result (that’s 24 days after exposure.) I hope someone’s working on a test that gives us an earlier warning.
But back to those pesky humans…
You can put any system in place that you want, but you have to realize that with the human element, you can’t count on all those processes to be followed. So don’t just assume that they are – build in extra safeguards.
Maybe you don’t just count on people to be honest about whether they’ve been exposed. Maybe you create 21-day isolation centers for people coming in from high risk countries. Or maybe you don’t let them come in at all.
Free will is the bane of perfection – as tempting as it is to have all that supposed (but impossible) safety, we have to make the best out of the imperfect people we are.
Remain calm and carry on (but try not to carry on so much…)
Just saying…
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William Mangieri’s writing (including his latest ePublication: “Close Enough”) can be found in many places, such as:

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