It’s taking everything inside me right now to want to keep writing. Of course I am still showing up and still writing, but the key part of that statement is the want to part. I knew this would happen, and maybe that’s why I’m doing it, to somehow engineer myself out of this self-induced writers block. Every system is perfectly designed to get the result it gets. I heard this quote in an episode of Armchair Expert some time ago. And by some time ago, I’m guessing it was probably sometime last week. Anyways, I just Googled the quote. It’s by some now deceased engineer named W. Edwards Deming, who is well esteemed for his writing in The New Economics For Industry, Government, Education, Out of Crisis, and my favorite, purely for its seemingly-vague-but-probably-too-technical-for-me-to-even-understand title, Some Theory of Sampling. Gotta love it. Also I’m assuming this dude’s esteemed. I actually have no idea who this guy is beyond his Google pop up bio.
But back to the quote: Every system is perfectly designed to get the result it gets.
Hmmm...it’s all coming back....lemme back it up (Is it fat enough? When I throw it back, is it fast enough? If I speed it up, can you handle that?...now watch me throw it, throw it back, throw it back…ahah ok enough of that)
Anyyyyywhooooooo…
The guest on the episode was Dan Heath, who, according to Wikipedia, is “an American bestselling author, speaker and fellow at Duke University’s CASE center” (CASE standing for Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship). He was invited on the podcast to discuss his new book, Made to Stick; Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.
Somewhere along the course of the episode, made possible by Zoom, in between some technical difficulties, also made possible by Zoom, Dan told a story that would both describe one of his personal and professional beliefs, and the reason I stuck onto the W. E. Deming quote.
You and a friend are having a picnic by the side of a river, and you just spread out your picnic blanket, you’re getting ready to eat, and then you hear a shout from the direction of the river. You look back, and there’s a child thrashing in the river, apparently drowning, so you jump in, you save the child, and you come back to shore. And just as your adrenaline is starting to recede, you hear a second shout. You look back, there’s a second child drowning, so back in you go, you fish them out, then there’s TWO more children. And back and forth, back and forth you go, and it's exhausting! All of this life-saving work! Then you see your friend swimming to shore, [s/he] steps out, and starts walking away as though to leave you alone, and you go, “Hey! Where are you going? I can’t do this by myself!” and your friend goes, “I’m going upstream to tackle the guy who’s throwing all these kids in the river!”. (Dan Heath, Armchair Expert with Dax Shepherd, Episode 205)
He goes on explaining that this is exactly the pattern we get stuck in at work, in life—that we “just get stuck reacting to things” instead of “making our way upstream to deal with things at a systems level that could’ve potentially prevented us from needing to be in the river fishing out drowning kids” (Heath).
Yo hold up. Like two seconds after saying all of this, he goes, “Probably my number one quote I learned in researching this book is this one by Paul Batalden…” and I thats where the music in my head screeched to a halt….Who the fuck is Paul Batalden and why when I googled every system is designed perfectly to get the result it gets DOES W. E. DEMING SHOW UP?! Someone’s being a goddamn imposter...or, as my Nepal trip leader, Hemant once said, so stoically, “nothing is ever being created for the first time”...or something along those lines. But what about the iPhone??
Okay, well I already hyped up W. E. Deming, and y’all know I ain’t revising what I said above (#1 rule of me writing on here), so here’s a lil about our new friend and runner up author of our favorite new systems quote, Paul Batalden. Hopefully the internet will be truthful to me this time. Hmm...ok, on first glance, I’m starting to think this Paul dude actually co-opted our dear Deming’s quote. First of all, he has no google bio...negative clout points… AND he’s alive ‘n kickin’, so either he, as a young boy, crafted the quote for Deming to use in his incredibly niche engineering books, or, more plausibly, the quote was miscredited.
Anyyyyyywaysssss…
If not already completely evident, I am back into “wanting to write” mode, so my job here today is done. I’ll leave it to you to contend what the “point” of this was.