One of the blessings and curses of my special little spot on the autism apectrum is that I am not a linear thinker. I think in webs. When a change is proposed, I can see how that change can benefit or impede the entire system, as in every department or procedure in a company. I can spot problems before they occur, or point out ways that changes will disrupt efficiency and then suggest solutions, so that that change can be a positive thing, rather than a potential roadblock. I don’t do this out of a desire to professionally embarrass people. I do it because I genuinely want the change to be a success.
On the rare occasion when people like me are viewed as beta testers or consultants or collaborators, that ability is viewed as an asset. But that is extremely rare. And that’s where bureaucracies go wrong.
The bureaucrats involved allow their egos to get in the way. Most administrations view me as someone who is trying to make them look bad, when in fact, I’m attempting to help them shine. I believe that if you allow your team to tweak things to make them even better, it increases the success (and the morale) of the team as a whole.
Too many managers think that the best way to make themselves look good is by making the people they supervise look bad, as if they are the only person who is actually competent. In fact, it’s the very opposite. The better your team looks, the better you look.
When a change is implemented without first consulting the very people it will impact, that usually leads to a lot of wasted time and or backpedaling, because the front line people are the ones who know exactly how the processes play out. Running ideas by them is not some admission of your incompetency. In fact, it’s a way to improve your odds of success. But most managers skip this step, and go right to the “because I said so” point, and live to regret it when things don’t go to plan.
Here’s an example of how I’ve seen this play out in real time.
I used to be a Maintenance Management Systems Engineer for the Florida Department of Transportation. Basically, that’s a fancy way of saying I analyzed and managed data regarding production, personnel, equipment and materials so that we’d be able to determine how we needed to budget our money for the following year, and make sure we were using the current year’s money efficiently. Because of this, I had a good sense of the entire work system of our department, and could see how things flowed from one area to another.
I kind of saw it like neurons flowing down various pathways in a brain. You want everything to flow smoothly. You don’t want one area to get overloaded. You don’t want something to cause a blockage. You want all areas to communicate properly. You don’t want increased flow in one area if it causes decreased flow in another. (I didn’t know I was autistic back then. I assumed that’s how everyone thinks. Apparently it isn’t. That still blows my mind.)
Anyway, we were in the process of repaving a 3-mile stretch of state highway that had experienced a great deal of drainage issues in the past. It was a dense residential stretch, and so there were driveways along the route on both sides of the road. So, we’d be building a highway, a deep drainage ditch on both sides, and therefore would have to include pipes under everyone’s driveways, and repave the first 10 feet of their driveways accordingly.
We would, of course, have to maintain the highway, ditches, and pipes in perpetuity. Cue the cash register sound effect. Fine and dandy. Whatever will be, will be. Naturally, these expenses would have to be tracked.
The way we tracked maintenance projects is by assigning them a code. If a crew worked on code 12345, for example, and used trucks abcde and fghij, and 5 employees worked on it for 8 hours and used 80 bags of concrete, I had a lot of good data to figure out the type of job they were doing, the square footage of concrete the job required, and the cost of said concrete, how many manhours it took (and the salaries and benefits that it cost us), and the wear and tear on the vehicles and the maintenance thereof and the fuel, and travel time to and from, and so on. And over time, we’d get an average cost and have a good sense of how many times we had to do jobs like that a year, and how much money we spent on such jobs, and therefore how much money we should allow for them in the future. Make sense?
But here’s where it gets stupid. The codes we were using for the ditch/pipe maintenance were stormwater maintenance codes, and my director wanted me to create a different code for not only every single driveway, but also a separate code for each side of every single driveway. And since many of the properties had more than one driveway, there were about 150 of them along that three mile stretch of road. So we’re talking about 300 new codes.
When she told me this, my web thinking went into overdrive. First, it went straight to our head office for our district, and on to our state office. They would be baffled, because there is no reason on God’s green earth that anyone would want a breakdown of the specific expense required to maintain one specific side of one specific driveway. And they’d be awfully irritated to have to add up all 300 codes in order to get a grand total, which is what they’d be much more likely to need.
Then, my web thinking went to the crews who would actually be out there in the hot Florida sun, actually doing the maintenance. They would never drive all the way out there to maintain just one side of one driveway. They’d most likely be hitting dozens of driveways in the course of a day. And I guarantee you they weren’t going to waste their time, sitting in their hot trucks, covered in wet concrete, flipping through pages of notes, trying to make sure they were using the right code for the right driveway so that their paperwork would be accurate. They’d just slap a code down and move on. So the data couldn’t be accurate anyway. And with individual codes, they’d have to fill out separate paperwork for each and every project. So they’d be wasting valuable time filling out a mound of paperwork every day, and back then, we’d have had a data processor who would then have to input that data into the computer when her time would be better spent doing something else, and an archivist who would have to maintain the record for 7 years in case there was a lawsuit, and then someone to shred the paperwork afterward.
When I politely asked if we could create a stormwater code for each one-mile stretch, or even a code for each mile on the east side of the road and one the west side of the road, and attempted to explain my reasoning, my director said no. Her mind as made up. So, I spent several days doing what I was told (and yes, there was a code for that, too).
In an effort to at least try to make everyone’s lives a little easier, I created a spreadsheet so they could at least make a wild guess as to which code to use based on the address. Then I printed out the spreadsheet for everyone who would be impacted, and attached a memo that said something like:
“When the construction on Highway xyz is complete, we will have a huge increase in stormwater work codes. Attached please find a spreadsheet of those codes for your convenience. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.”
The result? The next day, the memo was on my desk. In big red letters, like she was my junior high school English teacher, the director had written, “Don’t use the word huge in a memo. It’s unprofessional.” and signed her name. I taped it up on the wall beside my computer, ostensibly as a reminder not to use the word huge in a memo, but actually as a reminder of how stupid and petty the woman could be.
The fallout was the crews were furious about the codes, and just chose one for the day at random, used it, and that made it look like they spent an inordinate amount of time and materials on one tiny patch of ground each day, and I was constantly having to justify that to district headquarters. And district headquarters was furious that their time was being wasted on this foolishness, and that they were having to explain it each month to state headquarters. The data was all skewed. But hey, my director slept soundly, secure in the knowledge that her authority hadn’t been questioned.
It was that kind of idiocy that made me quit that place and become a bridgetender, but I’ve since discovered that idiocy is everywhere. My old director is long gone from that place. If I still knew anyone in that office, I’d love to call them up and ask if they’re still using 300 codes for that stretch of road when 1, or at the most 6, would have been sufficient.
But then, nobody listens to me.
My advice to bureaucrats would be to look for the web thinkers around you. Stop seeing them as irritants. Take advantage of their skills. Autistic people add value to organizations if you take the time to truly see and hear them. They are an untapped resource.
And be honest. Deep down, aren’t you sick and tired of discovering, over and over again, that what they had tried to warn you about actually happened?
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