A Drop In The Ocean

By Roy D. Follendore III

May 22, 2002

It has been twenty one days since the last entry and I have been thinking about the things that I have been writing in Issues over the past two years. I have been thinking about the things that have been going on around us. The Internet puts people in the center of this planet's news. The problem is that most of the news is being generated by people with specific goals and intentions. I don't mean that people write in the sense of a true journalist documenting the news. I mean this in the sense of a marketer wanting to garner support for a product. The Internet is full of this kind of news. I started writing Issues just to put a few ideas out there that are broader and deeper than that news. I would like to do so today.

There is a code in the Federal Government that makes everything an issue or a concern, rather than a problem. The overall concept for this is formed around the idea that that problems would not exist without issues and concerns. But more than that, from a certain perspective there is a professional distance that is put between you and the problem if you only deal with the issues and concerns. In bureaucracies this is important, since individuals do not generally have the power to do the right thing. Bureaucracies are designed the way that they are to isolate individuals from the power that they would otherwise have. This distribution of power makes most of the people within bureaucracies interchangeable as well as expendable. The fact is that bureaucracies are mostly a good thing. Bureaucracies make the process of control within large groups predictable and stable. Bureaucratic attitudes of problem solving influence who and what we are at all scales of our existence.

In a real sense, predictability and stability are benefits of ignoring problems, in favor of issues and concerns. On the other hand, as any medical doctor or engineer will tell you, issues and concerns are words that both describe problems as well as the symptoms of problems. If people running organizations are fundamentally interested in personal gain, then a predictable and stable operation toward that gain becomes most important. Herein rests the essence of the dilemma within bureaucracies. It appears to be much easier and far less expensive to wash over symptoms than it is to solve problems.

This idea is propagated at the point of hiring of individuals within corporations. The ability to make problems disappear is generally considered to be a valuable asset to a corporation. People are hired all the time on the basis of their appearance that masks their personal flaws. The typical system of hiring new employees is designed to look for individual character flaws and cast out those applicants who have them. The people who are hired at the top are those who are best at appearing to be predictable and stable. What is wrong with this you say?

Perhaps nothing if you actually get an employee who is perfect. The problem is that no one actually is perfect. We all have imperfections and blemishes from life. People can wear their imperfections as a badge of honor to demonstrate their courage in learning and recovering from their mistakes. Other people simply learn to hide their imperfections to get in charge. The people who get through the employment and promotional screening process are the ones that set the philosophical standards for the organization. They are the ones who refuse to allow the identity of problems on their shift. They are the ones who choose to accept the resolution of issues and concerns as problem solving. Let me illustrate this through my own earliest personal and profound experience.

As a child of the 1950's within a well organized grade school, my teacher became concerned because I was being disruptive and kept looking on other students papers. Since I had previously been an A student, she resolved that issue by documenting my disruption, and punishing me to the point where I was not disruptive. My parents found out too late that I had become nearsighted and could not see the board from the back of the class. I was disruptive because I could not see the assignments and I simply had no way to explain myself. The tragedy was that I failed that year. I lost a year of work, my friends, my status and my self esteem in ways that would never be fully regained or understood until I became an adult. I lost my identity because of a single teacher's attitude of dealing with classroom issues and concerns, rather than the root common problem of a child becoming nearsighted. My otherwise well meaning teacher failed in her obligation as a teacher by absolving herself of my physical handicap as a student.

As I got older I realized that my experience was just a drop in the ocean.

There exists a societal machine that recruits and promotes the "pretty" people who do not witness and learn from their mistakes within our world and that has become a dangerous problem. This machine is not some conspiracy, it is a structured kind of feedback byproduct from a naive attempt at optimizing ourselves organizationally and ignoring the consequences of our philosophy in doing so. It constantly gives us the illusion that perfection exists, while it consistently fails us in end. It exists within our school systems to whom modern parents have opted to turn their children over and it exists within the companies that hire them when our children graduate from college. It exists within the governments that we pay for with our tax dollars.

This problem is endemic as it opposes our fundamental goals for which we have created these organizations. It is a problem that denies the value of human dignity and it is a problem that threatens basic moral dignity. It is the same root problem propagating the Israel and Palestinian conflict, the war on terrorism, Columbine high school student shootings, Aids, poverty, hatred and racism. It was the cause of the world wars. It was the cause of Chernobyl and the loss of the Challenger space shuttle. It was the cause of Enron and the loss of the World Trade centers. This is a real problem that threatens the very civilization of this planet.

Mankind has reached a point where our organizations will continue to catastrophically fail us if we continue to ignore the fact that problems are not symptoms. If we are to survive we must find ways to organize ourselves to identify, prioritize and respond to real problems and not just issues and concerns.

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