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I was reading an article called Murphy Laws of Computing ("http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976909007") and came across this one:
9. A complex system that doesn't work is invariably found to have evolved from a simpler system that worked just fine.
....and it struck me how well this applied to any structured procedure. And it has a corollary:
Any simple system that works just fine will almost inevitably be massaged into a complex system that does not work as well, if at all.
I guess maybe we could call this the 'Peter Principle' of structured procedures. I am sure that you have seen it happen time and time again. I know I have.
For example: I work for a company that has occasion to end up with a fairly large quantity of odd sized but 'usable to somebody' pieces of material. So rather than throw them out they instituted a system that marked such 'culls' at the time they were created into one of five price categories and they were offered to customers as a service that also made a little extra money. The system worked fine and customers that only needed little odd sized pieces of stuff could get it and the check out system knew how to handle them and all was fine. Convenience on one side and a little extra money on the other. Then apparently someone decided that maybe lots of good stuff was being taken out of the store as 'cull' so a policy was put in place that required the checkout people to measure and describe, in detail, in writing, on a special form, each and every piece of cull material they checked through. This had to be done while the customer (and all the others waiting behind) waited the extra couple of minutes in the check out line. In other words, what had been a service for a small fee to customers now became a major annoyance to customers for a very nominal income to the company. (cull pieces ranged from .5 to 4 dollars a piece)
Well you say , maybe a lot of stuff that was not really 'cull' was going out under that guise! Then if stuff that should not be classified as cull was being classified as cull, monitor the cull bins and correct the procedures for classifying material as 'cull' as needed. Or if stuff that was not actually classified as cull was being checked through by cashiers as 'cull' (for friends or for a kick back or whatever) then monitor the suspect cashiers. Every minute of every day, of every cashiers station, is 'on camera' and every transaction of 'cull' material is pinpointed by the cash register system. (That is after all how they know if a cashiers checks through cull material and fails to fill out the dumb, time consuming form.)
I mean think about it! If a cashier wanted to do a favor for a friend it would be much simpler to not 'ring up' a piece of material at all, than it would be to ring it up as some relatively rare cheaper item.
The point is that experience shows that this 'complication to the point of uselessness' phenomenon is almost universal. It lead to the fall of Rome, the decline of aristocracy, and it will probably lead to the eventual fall of all current governments, democratic or otherwise. It appears to be ingrained in human nature to complicate all our social structures to the point that they collapse and we have to start all over again. I wonder how many Atlantis's there have been?Tags: business, education, money, politics, technology
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