Forrest Gump, everyone's favorite turn-of-the-century systems analyst,
has explained to us that "stupid is as stupid does." Well, Mr. Gump may
be right, but he leaves us with the unsolved question, Why does stupid
do? The answer is, Stupid does because stupid doesn't think about what
it's really doing.
For example, consider restaurant systems. The music in a great many
American restaurants is chosen not to please customers but to please
buspersons and waitrons. There are few sights more ridiculous than that
of a roomful of white-maned customers straining to hear each other over
acid rock. And yet, when asked about the music, a restaurant owner will
usually say, "What music?"
Or transportation systems. A few years back there was a hilarious
newspaper story about a bus driver who routinely sped past passenger
stops because he wanted to keep to his schedule. A transit department
spokesman defended the driver as a model of efficiency.
We will leave computer systems as an exercise for the reader.
What system stupidities have in common is, literally,
thoughtlessness. There is "no there there" inside the heads of stupid-
system tricksters and no ability to form an "I-Thou" relationship with
other human beings. The restaurant customers are thought of not as
people but as food eaters; the overlooked bus passengers are thought of
not as people going home to their families but as obstacles to staying
on schedule. And rudely treated computer users are thought of not as
fellow sufferers of the information age but as drains on the valuable
time of support staff.
But let's face it: the reason that a lot of stupid, thoughtless,
"inconsiderate" systems never get fixed is that they are actually quite
effective--in their own limited way. After all, dinners do get served,
and the bus does provide fast travel (for the fortunate few who are able
to board it). And yet effectiveness can be a very crude measure of
success. You may remember from Charles Lamb that roast pork was first
discovered when a fire destroyed a village and immolated a pet pig
trapped in a thatched hut. After the roast was finally consumed, the
villagers fell into a great sadness--which lasted only until they hit
upon the highly effective solution of acquiring a new pig and burning
their village down again. But perhaps they could have found a better
way.
The point is that measures of effectiveness can be just as
misleading as measures of efficiency. What we need are some measures of
mindlessness, meaning the degree to which a system is inconsiderate to
humans. A good measure of mindlessness (or "inconsideration") would
probably be the percentage of time that system administrators spend
thinking about the system as an abstract, solvable problem, because the
more time administrators spend that way, the more likely they'll be to
come to the realization that you--the restaurant customer, the bus
rider, the computer user--are the ultimate systems problem: a total
nuisance who complains about the service, refuses to read the manual,
takes up everyone's time, and is ungrateful. The system would be better
off without you, and everyone knows it.
The only hope is that administrators learn to "just say no" to
abstraction and pay close attention to living, breathing, concrete
customers. They might do well to follow the example of the Kpelle farmer
in Liberia interviewed by psychologist Sylvia Scribner (as reported by
Morton Hunt in The Universe Within). Scribner said to the farmer, "All
Kpelle men are rice farmers. Mr. Smith is not a rice farmer. Is he a
Kpelle man?" The farmer's answer is wonderful; he said simply, "I don't
know the man. I have not laid eyes on the man himself." The
psychologist, of course, wouldn't just let it die, and insisted, "Just
think about the statement." But the farmer was adamant: "If I know him
in person, I can answer that question, but since I do not know him in
person, I cannot answer that question." The scientist pleaded, "Try and
answer from your Kpelle sense." But the farmer concluded decisively, "If
you know a person, if a question comes up about him, you are able to
answer. But if you do not know the person, if a question comes up about
him, it's hard for you to answer it."
Well, not being Kpelle farmers, we modern Western types (managers,
systems administrators, educators, businesspeople, journalists, pundits)
are routinely able to answer questions when we have no knowledge of what
we're talking about, because we think we have logic on our side. And we
do. But logic doesn't put thoughts in our heads, and it doesn't protect
us from developing whole grotesque systems with Kafkaesque policies,
curricula, rules, job descriptions, and so on, that take on lives
entirely of their own. Of course, doing that is just plain stupid. And
stupid is as stupid does.
Thank you, Forrest.
John Gehl is editor and publisher of Educom Review. [email protected]