RE: TARGET SETTING

["John Constantine" <john.constantine@cox.net>]

Vic Forte speaks to the Katrina complex. Should the moral of the story be to
create yet one more level of command/control in the form of a 'czar' of
Emergency Management, if the result is to be that much further removed from
the realities on the ground?

Many plans were in place, all of which were well known by the participants
involved, all in agreement as to who was to do what. Then, when the
hurricane came, no one seemed to know who was in charge, what was to be
communicated to whom, and one result appears to have been to forget the
purpose in mind (as Vic points out). 

(The farther out you go, the behinder you may turn out to be.) Those on the
ground knew what they needed, but as one went up the chain of command, the
fuzzier the battlefield became.

(No Child Left Behind) - NCLB's emphasis on a 'standard' is a target with
negative consequences, a grinding wheel with no brakes. How far from the
schoolroom is the 'upstream'? But that's for another time. 

Suffice to say that, without a working alternative, it appears to make sense
to shrink the variation in whatever the process and overall system happens
to be, as best we know it. In the Katrina example, it was a great idea to
plan on paper, play out the plan with communal interaction, but the reality
of the ground made all the difference in the world to those for whom the
entire enterprise was designed. Would it have made a difference if they
participants, the supply chain, had engaged in systems' thinking? Yes. Would
a czar have made a difference? No.

As Vic said:

<Better to devote the time spent devising ingenious targets and carrying
out measurements to instead working hard at sharing purpose with others in a
way that makes targets unnecessary.>

_____________________________
John Constantine
john.constantine@cox.net
Cave Creek, AZ