From 1975 until his retirement in 1988, Senator William Proxmire from Wisconsin published a monthly winner of his Golden Fleece Award.  A fiscal hawk, Proxmire aimed to expose what he considered a wasteful use of taxpayer money.  The idea was quite popular and I remember many a newscaster gleefully exposing the latest in government waste.  Years later, in some discussion on scientific research, the Golden Fleece Awards came up again.  The grant money for fundamental R&D came overwhelmingly from government agencies like the DoE, DoD, NIH, etc and research grants were often the “winners” of Proxmire’s award.  We discussed one of these winners in depth: a research program to understand the sex lives of roaches.

I can see the eye brows raising.  The sex lives of roaches?  That seems a fairly ridiculous thing to study.  Except it wasn’t.  The researchers were investigating pheromones, those naturally produced agents that attract a member of a species to breed.  All jokes aside about actually wanting roaches to breed more, the identification of a cockroach sex attractant led to a fairly useful invention:  The Roach Motel.  Pre-Roach Motel, you would need to spray a poison around your kitchen or bathroom to hopefully banish the beasts (good luck with that).  The Roach Motel, however, attracted the roach to the “device”, which it entered and found the nicely contained poison.  (“Roaches check in….but they don’t check out.”)  For anyone with small children or pets, this was a huge safety improvement.  Now, pheromones are part of our common vernacular and are a critical part of the pest control industry.  Worth a little basic understanding of the sex lives of roaches.

There are several jumping off points from here on which to build an essay.  I could talk about how important basic research is and how scary it is that the US has severely reduced its support for fundamental knowledge building.  I could talk about how the practical application of knowledge is often a twisty turny unexpected road and most often cannot be managed through the use of Gantt charts, but patience in funding R&D is a topic for another time.  No, I want to go more general.  What the above example inspires in me today is this thought:  If something looks simple, or ridiculous, or stupid to me, my first thought is that I just don’t know enough about it.

A wonderful aspect of being retired is that I now have the time and the mental energy to read a whole lot more than I did while I was working.  I was a great skimmer, before.  And a great buyer of books and magazines that would pile up.  Now, not only do I have time to read these things; but being a lover of non-fiction, I have time to let my curiosity take me further into answering those follow on questions.  What I invariably find is that the truth has nuance and what I thought was fairly clear cut is not quite so clear.  For example, right now I am reading a lengthy treatise on Cliven Bundy—the Nevada rancher who has been fighting the Federal government for the right to graze his cattle on federal grasslands without paying a fee.  Reading the backstory is giving me a much greater understanding of where the Bundys are coming from.  While I still don’t agree with most of their positions, I do see a different way to have the conversation to come to an agreement.  And couldn’t we all do with a bit more understanding of where others are coming from?

Before I went to grad school at Penn State, I was a city girl who ardently opposed sport hunting.  I remember walking on College Avenue one day, seeing a car drive by with a deer strapped across the roof rack.  “How can they just kill these magnificent creatures?!” I would judgmentally exclaim.  Then I began to talk with my new friends, many of whom had been sport hunters all their lives.  I learned about deer overpopulation because their natural predator, the mountain lion, had been driven out.  I learned how deer were starving.  I learned about the true sport hunter and the ethics of sport hunting:  only fire when you can make a clean kill, use the meat, follow the state game rules.  I still abhor people who sit on the tops of hills with a high powered rifle, just knocking off animals for the fun of it.  But I understand and appreciate true sport hunting.  I appreciated it even more after I had a car accident with a deer!

In a business environment, assuming “easy answers” brings a lack of understanding across business functions that need to work together to accomplish a goal.  Things always look simple from a distance.  If you are in sales and you need a tweak to a product to close the deal, that tweak can often seem pretty minor–unless you are the process engineer who needs to figure out how to do that tweak.  Magnify this difficulty ten times when someone gets the “bright idea” to enter a new market without sufficient research.  Distance from the details always makes things look simple and straightforward.  We’ve talked about assumptions.  Don’t assume that just because you don’t know how difficult something can be that it must be easy.

This issue is exasperated in large organizations where those several layers above the people doing the work do not understand what it takes to get something done.  I remember a time when a hurricane flooded out a production facility.  Once the flood waters receded, a team was put together to assess the damage and execute repairs.  These people worked day and night for several weeks.  It was an amazing effort!  The quick turnaround saved the company loads of money in lost sales.  I was in a meeting where this result was brought up in side conversation. The senior manager’s take was “Geez, why can’t we get people to work like this all the time?” DO YOU HAVE ANY FREAKIN’ IDEA WHAT THOSE PEOPLE WENT THROUGH?  No, you don’t.  You were too far removed from the details of the effort. That was not sustainable! 

In this current world, where we are inundated with sound bites from all directions, resist the temptation to just accept what you read and hear.  Consider the source.  Dig a little bit to find all sides of the story.  As with other topics we’ve discussed, though, you do need to pick your battles.  It is time consuming and mentally exhausting to try to research every little thing.  However, never doing it is just as dangerous.  Even just retaining the consciousness that you may not know enough to judge is a very good thing.  Certainly you would want people who might judge–or misjudge–you and your actions to take the time to understand.  So even if you don’t have the time to dig into it, at least remember that if what you are hearing sounds ridiculous, simple or dumb, you probably just don’t know enough about it.