A plague of process
By TigerHawk at 4/29/2008 09:36:00 PM
American society has made process as important as outcome, and it is sucking the energy out of us. It is increasingly true that it is not what you did that matters, but how you did it. It is making us slow and cautious, and that will be fatal to us because the competitive advantage of Americans is in being fast and risky.
There are countless examples in the business world, from Sarbanes-Oxley to ISO-everything to endless compliance training lest one quotes Jeremiah Wright or an episode of Seinfeld in front of an easily offended employee. Process is now so sacrosanct that we are not actually allowed to question its importance; if an executive were to speak out against the status of process, he would be deemed to have undermined the "tone at the top," which is taken to be a critical element of -- you guessed it -- a robust process.
Suffice it to say that I am not questioning the importance of process. But if I were I might notice that one big problem with the cult of procedure is that it gives officious people a lot of power. I respectfully submit into evidence two cases from the evening linkage.
First, a Dartmouth professor was so offended by her students' criticism of her that she is suing them under federal civil rights laws. Presumably she did not choose the obvious cause of action -- libel -- because truth is a defense. Either way, she took refuge in a lawsuit rather than looking at herself in a mirror and asking whether she ought not just become a better teacher.
Second, a fan goes to a baseball game, buys his 7 year-old "lemonade," and is obviously startled when a security officer informs him that "Mike's Hard Lemonade" has alcohol in it. The obvious solution is to arrest the man and consign his child to foster care because, gee, an understanding reprimand would not be part of the prescribed process.
Do we really believe that these stories and thousands like them, which reverberate and impress even those of us who have never been treated shabbily by a process, are not changing America for the worse?
