Absolutely Dave, you have articulated very succinctly the root of what seems to be a collective common sense bypass in our society. A classic example is the mindless way in which Health and Safety legislation is misused to stop perfectly harmless activities.

Another dimension of the problem seems to me to be an inability to understand and evaluate risk. The media love a story such as 'Risk of [something bad]'. Then a scientist gets asked is there a risk of [something bad]? Since you can't prove a negative he/she will have to acknowledge that there is a risk. Just as there is a risk that my laptop might explode in my face while I'm typing this. This kind of nonsense means that we focus enormous attention on tiny risks and not enough on real risks.

Absolutely true. And it is so incredibly hard to reverse. Once an organisation is caught in process hell there is almost no way out of it again (If you happen know of an organisation that has reversed process hell please let me know as I'd be glad to find out what they did).

And funny, I just blogged about my experiences with a Dutch bank. They (temporarily) lost my money during a transfer and while everyone was following procedure the result was an incredibly bad customer experience.

Just today in The New York Times, an op-ed appeared - Why the Hungry Refused Help - citing a study by NYC's Urban Justice Center which found that of 9,500 recipients of food stamps surveyed, more than 5,800 had their benefits cut off within 20 months of enrollment. Evidently the vast majority of the 5,800 remained eligible for aid but didn't show up because they couldn't deal with the paperwork.

I couldn't agree more that in our zeal to fight fraud we've created a system of absurdity. But I also think there's something else going on. A system of simplicity means that current jobs would certainly be lost. And that's an issue no politician or government official wants to touch. It's far easier to continue heaping on the pile.

There is a difference between procedures and process. There needs to be a process for dealing with handbag snatch cases, but there does not need to be a collection of 40 procedures. Processes can be improved, and such improvement could come - often does, I suggest - from making them simpler. The problem doesn't come from process per se, but from failing to re-examine, then optimise, existing processes. There are techniques for doing this, such as Six Sigma. And of course there's that good old fashioned approach called 'common sense' ;-)

I think I would favour common sense over Six Stigma any day ...

Dave -- thank you for those last two sentences. I may just print it out and stick it on the wall of my workstation. It sums up a large chunk of my working life, alas.

Toby

This topic also relates to Deming's ideas on variation.
He distinguished between common causes of variation (arising from the system itself ) and special causes (arising from particular circumstances at the time). Failure to distinguish between the two causes results in the continual addition of extra requirements to achieve uniformity (as if uniformity was the ideal). The alternative is to work towards consistency.
Consider a school example: a teacher sends a note home that is not well considered and causes a 'problem' (unacceptable variation). Treating this as common cause variation (as if all teachers will consistently make such errors) the school policy then requites all teachers to to submit all notes to senior staff (for checking) before they can be sent home. The result is a lot of extra work for senior staff and a decline in communication between teachers and homes since the communication process has become more complicated and difficult.
The alternative approach would be for some assistance for the teacher to communicate more thoughtfully in future.

Ivan Webb
Launceston, Tasmania