I remember playing with Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets, and Legos as a kid. There was a lot to be learned from these activities. Never mind the little lessons - the pieces never fit back in the box, some pieces will be found under the couch in a month or two, or you can really hurt yourself getting poked with a thin piece of metal. Those are the easy lessons.
One of the best lessons I learned, is that many times, regardless of how well I thought out the foundation, I would get to the point where adding more pieces made no sense. Adding pieces would make the pending failure even larger. When I got to this point, I would pull the product apart, put it back in a pile, and start from scratch. I'd apply the lessons I learned in my first attempt to my next iteration.
Other times, I would try to reinvent what I was building into something different. "I started with a house... where did that pointy side come from? Oh, who cares, I'll turn it into a boat. A big ugly boat. At least it won't feel like I wasted my time...".
Frequently we allow ourselves to become too deeply involved in what we are building, and as a result we are unable to see that we can't achieve our original objective using what we presently have. We can't continue to try and add on, tweak, or modify it, because all of this will just add to the costs when we fail, and be that much harder to start over. In fact it seems like the larger the scale, the harder it is to see how bad things are, and we continue to apply effort thinking that if we just do a little more, all will be well. If we stay the course, it will all work out.
I started to think of what I learned from an Erector Set as I looked at the challenges in our public school system, entitlement programs, bloated government bureaucracies, sickening levels of deficit spending, and ballooning national debt. The investment may be in emotion, time, money, effort, paycheck, fat union benefits, or voting block payoffs. This crosses party lines, and impacts the taxpayers the same.
Many of our government agencies have morphed into something different from what they were envisioned to provide, and have grown at a rate much faster than the general population has increased. They often do this as a self preservation tactic, to show value where maybe they would have a hard time measuring against their original mission. Our government is full of these. I won't mention any specific examples, since I am not writing this to be partisan.
When is it time to pull it apart and start over? How can we convince the people who are invested so heavily in their own large-scale, real-life Erector Set failures that it's time to start building from scratch? I don't have the answer, I was hoping you did.
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One of the best lessons I learned, is that many times, regardless of how well I thought out the foundation, I would get to the point where adding more pieces made no sense. Adding pieces would make the pending failure even larger. When I got to this point, I would pull the product apart, put it back in a pile, and start from scratch. I'd apply the lessons I learned in my first attempt to my next iteration.
Other times, I would try to reinvent what I was building into something different. "I started with a house... where did that pointy side come from? Oh, who cares, I'll turn it into a boat. A big ugly boat. At least it won't feel like I wasted my time...".
Frequently we allow ourselves to become too deeply involved in what we are building, and as a result we are unable to see that we can't achieve our original objective using what we presently have. We can't continue to try and add on, tweak, or modify it, because all of this will just add to the costs when we fail, and be that much harder to start over. In fact it seems like the larger the scale, the harder it is to see how bad things are, and we continue to apply effort thinking that if we just do a little more, all will be well. If we stay the course, it will all work out.
I started to think of what I learned from an Erector Set as I looked at the challenges in our public school system, entitlement programs, bloated government bureaucracies, sickening levels of deficit spending, and ballooning national debt. The investment may be in emotion, time, money, effort, paycheck, fat union benefits, or voting block payoffs. This crosses party lines, and impacts the taxpayers the same.
Many of our government agencies have morphed into something different from what they were envisioned to provide, and have grown at a rate much faster than the general population has increased. They often do this as a self preservation tactic, to show value where maybe they would have a hard time measuring against their original mission. Our government is full of these. I won't mention any specific examples, since I am not writing this to be partisan.
When is it time to pull it apart and start over? How can we convince the people who are invested so heavily in their own large-scale, real-life Erector Set failures that it's time to start building from scratch? I don't have the answer, I was hoping you did.
If you like this post, please use the buttons below to share it with your social network. You can also subscribe to this blog using the RSS feed button on the right.
____________________________
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