I realized I have even more to say about this allegorical post.

Dale Earnhardt, Jr., famously said one time, “If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’,” While I understand the competitive spirit he has that drives that line of thinking, it really got me thinking about my allegory about where the lines are, when you are in single-minded pursuit of some small set of KPIs.

I think what bugs me is there are people who will read my above post and think in their heads, “Sounds to me like it’s working as designed.” (You have to be a bit creative in your thinking; obviously I don’t think a lot of people go around deciding to risk lives and break the law, but I wanted to be obvious in my allegory in order to make my point.) There’s a school of thought that says this is just typical corporate risk management. Even if there is an incident, if the total cost of addressing the issue is lower than the cost savings that came from creating a situation where the incident could occur, then it is still considered a “win” from a business perspective.

I don’t think a lot of people go in making these conscious decisions. If you asked them they would stick to their ethos of “quality” and “ethics”. But when they are actually making decisions, in pursuit of optimization of metrics the emergent behavior will skew towards skirting the rules, if not outright breaking them, in order to achieve that optimization. How many times have you heard someone at work say, “Yeah, there’s a rule that says X, but it slows us down so we just go around it.”

I do think, however, that there is a small set of people who outright find ways to circumvent any and all rules, policies, or even laws, to achieve their ends. The issue as I see it is, if that behavior brings success to them, then we are systemically encouraging that behavior.

I really don’t know how to address this issue, especially at scale. You just have to rely on people’s good intentions and good faith, I guess.