A Much Bigger Story Than Benghazi or Niger

Focusing on individual events can distract us from the systems that make those events more probable.

In the 1980s, the Japanese were taking market share from American and European car makers. One study at the time found that German car makers were reaching the same level of quality as the Japanese but needed three times as many employees to do it. Some German car makers were employing as many people at the end of the line to fix cars as some Japanese car makers were to work the line. When Japanese workers encountered an error they had authority to shut down the whole line and initiate an investigation into why the error had occurred. Rather than just fix the error at the place, they might change the upstream flow of work to lower the probability that someone would make that error again. Japanese workers were regularly fixing the system while Germans were regularly fixing cars.

Which brings me, curiously enough, to stories about our military. Right now, media and politicians are focused on the story of how four soldiers were killed in Niger. This is very similar to the focus on the four dead in Benghazi in 2012 and this focus on individuals misses a more important story about policy, the system that makes these tragic events more or less probable.

First of all, let’s assume for a moment that anyone killed in service to our country deserves honor and their families deserve acknowledgement and gratitude. Let’s further assume that whether or not they died in an incident that got an enormous amount of coverage, their families are equally shattered by this loss. Whether they were the only one killed that year in service to their country or one of 2,000, the trauma and grief their families suffer is real and they deserve our support.

Stalin was quoted as saying, “One death is a tragedy and a million is a statistic.” Perhaps it is because we can’t comprehend 2,000 deaths as easily as we do 2, we are made numb by the bigger number and saddened by the smaller. The media is currently gripped by the story of Myeshia Johnson, the pregnant widow of La David Johnson who received a phone call in which Trump’s offer of comfort included the phrase, “He knew what he was signing up for …” Yet a much bigger story is playing out here that is obscured by the odd way the media fixates on a Benghazi or Niger but ignores the bigger story about how many widows and widowers are experiencing what Myeshia Johnson is.

If you appreciate the tragedy of Chris Stevens death (he was the ambassador killed in Benghazi) and the grief of Myeshia Johnson, you have to be humbled by the thought of losing more than a thousand soldiers a year. Between 1980 and 2010, an average of 1,575 American military were killed each year. Each year. During that time the lowest it ever dropped to was 796 (that was in 1999) and it rose as high as 2,465 (in 1983). In only six years during that 31-year stretch did the number killed drop below 1,000. (1996 to 2001.)

Each death involved a real person and deserved its own story but our policy made the number killed each year remarkably consistent. Policy was the bigger story than any one of those deaths because it was policy that made the number of those deaths so remarkably consistent for so long.

And then the most remarkable thing happened. The number killed steadily fell. In 2010 the number killed was 1,485. Then, in 2011 467 died. In 2012 it was 314, 2013 was 132, 2014 was 60, 2015 was 28 and then in 2016 it was 30.  30 is 2% of what it averaged from 1980 to 2010.

It’s not true that each of these numbers are mere statistics. We aren’t equipped to comprehend 1,575 grieving families and all their friends. We can scarcely comprehend one. But the limits of our empathy shouldn’t excuse the obvious: a year in which 2,465 of our military are killed is 82 times worse than a year in which 30 are killed.

Obama deserves criticism for reneging on his threat to intervene in Syria. His decision not to send in American troops may have resulted in more civilian deaths in the last few years. But Obama also deserves respect for his decision. For one thing, he couldn’t see the next move. Who takes power once Assad is out and how does that lower the number of casualties and refugees? (Not only did our invasion of Iraq result in somewhere between 100,000 and a million Iraqi deaths, it created millions of refugees. Attacking a country doesn’t guarantee a fall in casualties.) It is not clear whether his decision to keep troops out of Syria resulted in more Syrian deaths.

It is clear that during Obama’s last six years our American troops were safer. Only a fraction of the number who would have died with previous policies died during his last six years in office. This deserves more attention than it has received. Had our service people died at the same rate in Obama’s last six years as they had in the 31 years prior, 8,418 more of them would have been killed. 8,418 grieving families and their friends. 9 times more grief and tragedy than actually occurred. This is not just a statistic. It is not just a story. It is 8,418 life stories that get to be told in radically different ways. And it is not just their stories. It is the stories of their children who get to grow up with both parents. Or the story of the children who were born because a mother or father lived well past the date they would have if they had been deployed under the policies of a president more eager to put boots on the ground.

Progress doesn’t come from fixing each tragic event after it happens. Progress comes from making changes to the system, or in this case to the policies that determine how our troops are deployed.

Foreign policy that spares the lives of 8,418 soldiers may not seem as gripping as tragedies that take the lives of four but they matter more. If we’re going to be factual about it, they matter 2,000 times more. That, it seems to me, deserves at least as much attention as a tragedy in Benghazi or Niger.

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Data sources on military casualties are harder to find now. Sites that formerly posted data now yield up an error. Here are the places I went for data months ago and just this week. It would seem the Trump administration or someone in DoD wants to make these numbers less transparent.

https://www.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas/pages/report_by_year_manner.xhtml

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Releases/Customrelcat/12003/?Page=3

https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32492.pdf

https://www.defense.gov/casualty.pdf

Your Blog Author Visits Japan

In early 2001, I made a couple of business trips to Japan. I flew through Osaka and stayed and worked in Kobe for a total of about 3 weeks. At the time, I tried to describe some of what I noticed. Here are a few excerpts.

Kobe gets larger every day. They continuously expand available land by dumping dirt from the mountains into the bay – regularly creating new islands. Eventually this small mountainous island may be a large flat continent.

If you live in Japan there is about a 99% chance that your race is Japanese. Even with odds that high, it still turns out that I’m not.

The Japanese have made more progress learning English than we have at learning Japanese. The drawback, of course, is that once you do something you risk doing it poorly. From a piece of stationary I took away a new mission statement that I wished I’d had when teaching for Covey: “I will be a gladdest thing under the sun. I will touch a hundred flowers and not pick off.” By contrast, I could feel superior because my Japanese was flawless: nonexistent, of course, but flawless. I was told about a sign over a toilet that said, “After using, please remember to flash.”

I was shopping in a department store in a mall and was a little surprised to hear American rap played as background music. I was even more surprised to hear lyrics like, "Where are my bitches? Where are my whores?" I looked around the store but the whores and bitches didn't seem to be there: I found myself surrounded by diminutive, older women, who were modestly dressed and seemingly unaware of the questions that had just been posed.

I learned that one ought not to check into a “Love Motel,” even though they are more common than regular motels. They charge by the hour and expect you to provide your own love. The use of such motels is reportedly quite common among co-workers, particularly boss and secretary. This kind of team building could explain the high levels of cooperation and teamwork evident in the Japanese work place. It might even result in more bonding than the ropes exercise.

My client figures that it costs 2.5 times as much to live in Kobe as it costs to live in Cincinnati. Housing is 7 to 8 times as much. Even electronics made by Japanese firms cost more in Japan. That might be why they feel obligated to give you more than 100 yen for every dollar: just think how bad it would be if they didn’t.

Reportedly, many Japanese rent and have little or no hope of owning a home: this in the second largest economy in the world. The average apartment is about 600 to 800 square feet and may well house three generations. It might be enough to drive you to seek refuge in a love motel.

Kobe is full of pachinko parlors. These are crammed with noisy machines, some of which look like electronic slot machines and others of which are designed to take ball bearings in one end and (if you win) send more ball bearings out the other. I guess that the really big winners set up a machine shop. These parlors are not just full of extremely loud machines; they pipe in even louder music in a vain attempt to drown out the loud machines. It is the audio equivalent of using far too much cheap perfume to cover up perfectly hideous body odor.

The Japanese are rarely fat. Apparently they consider obesity a specialty and expect sumo wrestlers obtain this state for them, the way we expect certain groups of people to take out our trash or issue stocks. There is none of this wandering around moaning about being 20 or 30 pounds overweight; one is either lean or able to break a bull’s back in a single sitting.

I wander through every experience confident of two things: I’ll do the wrong thing and doing the wrong thing is what they expect of me as an American. I find this to be such a calming belief that I’m thinking of adopting it in my daily living when I return to the States.

In the nicer restaurants the chopsticks are quite significantly tapered. This means that squeezing the middle together still leaves a significant gap at the end, making it quite difficult to actually grasp pieces of food smaller than a quarter-pound hamburger. They must do this for the amusement of the waitresses who stand discretely off to one side watching.

Stay in an American Marriott and you have by your bed a Bible and the Book of Mormon. Stay in Osaka and you have beside your bed a New Testament and the Teachings of Buddha. I wonder if you were to stay in the Galapagos Islands if you’d find a Bible and The Origin of Species.

Many Japanese practice Shinto. It is not a religion as we think of it, with rituals and regular times and days for services. Rather than believe in a God they believe that spirits from past lives are scattered throughout the living world and ought to be reverenced. This decentralization of spirit means that there is little conformity in worship. Such a religion contrasts rather starkly with the conformity in every day living. Compare this with our Christianity and a single God to worship in a society full of non-conformists and diversity. Perhaps the opposite of our daily living is what seems to us most heavenly. That might even explain the growing number of people in urban centers who have adopted environmentalism as their new religion.

While watching some older Japanese perform their rituals at a temple – a very open affair given that the temple was outdoors at a popular tourist location – I wondered what they thought of modern science. I turned from this temple to see a sign directing me to the “labatory.” Whether they’d misspelled lavatory or laboratory or simply seen the two as interchangeable, I took it as a clue as to their opinion of modern science.

The Japanese have a network throughout the country that allows one to purchase most anything. It’s not the Internet – it is vending machines. These vending machines sell hot and cold coffees and teas, and soft drinks (Calpiss and Sweat are a couple of the more popular brands – apparently they even drink with the end in mind, a very results-oriented country). I’ve been told that you can even buy such oddities as crickets and underwear through them. They also sell alcoholic beverages through vending machines. Imagine an unmanned machine dispensing beer only a block from a high school when the drinking age is 21. Imagine no students using the machine. Imagine it isn’t even imagined to be an issue. Either you have a very weird imagination or you live in Japan. The glasses and cups in which they serve drinks are enormously small – maybe 4 ounces or so. The apparent benefit to this is that, in a country with lines and congestion in even the hallways and elevators you can at least be alone at the urinal.

Red heads are more common than I would have guessed. Japanese women spend three to four times more on cosmetics than American women (measured as a percentage of income). Many of them highlight their hair, which results in a reddish tint. Add blue tinted contact lenses (and some of them do) to the blonde hair (and some do highlight it that much) and looking on you might almost think you were in California.

There is a lovely odor to this country. In a sit down restaurant they give you hot towels to wash your hands and face after you sit down. The aroma from them is subtle but quite lovely. The floors are cleaned before they even come close to getting dirty, as opposed the floors in public places in the States that are dirty before they ever get close to being clean.

Even in fast food restaurants (yes, I confess to eating at there partly for speed, partly for the sense of knowing just what to do with the food and partly to avoid paying more than $20 for a meal) they serve you with precision and grace. The napkins are neatly folded. The bags are neatly folded. The fish sandwich is neatly lined up – meat, lettuce and bun. I suspected that even the ice in my drink was floating in a neat row. These people pay more attention to a routine task than some American men pay to an entire marriage.

On the trains in Japan people face the age-old question of what to do with the eyes in such close quarters. Do you stare at strangers? Do you look beyond them through the windows to the scenery that flashes by every day? Do you look at the floor, paying more attention to your peripheral vision than to the center of your gaze? In the last few years the Japanese have solved this problem: they stare at their cell phones. At first I thought this a curious answer to the question of where to place one’s gaze. Then I learned that they were checking their email – even surfing the web. [A practice that has become common here since 2001.] Although they are repeatedly instructed to avoid using cell phones on the train, many of them do so rather compulsively. The cell phone has become the modern rosary beads of travel, worried by a motion similar to what little Italian women engaged in while traveling on horse-drawn carriages. Now, instead of receiving spiritual messages of dubious content and origin these modern travelers receive error-free transmissions of dubious value and relevance. They call it progress. And the reason that they are asked not to use their cell phones on the train is because in such close quarters the signals interfere with pace makers – occasionally causing an incident, triggering arrhythmia or even an attack. Changes in technology and culture do not take us beyond this simple truth: communication affects the heart.

W. Edwards Deming's Birthday

October 14 is W. Edwards Deming's birthday. Born in 1900, he delivered his last four-day seminar from a wheel chair, within a month of when he died in December of 1993. In his last couple of years, he'd end up in the hospital from time to time and the doctors would examine him and then say, "He's just old." After resting up, he'd head back out to conduct more seminars, desperate to change the prevailing system of management. Even in my thirties, I found it exhausting to conduct three and four day sessions. As much as I admire his philosophy, I envy the passion he had for his work and personal mission even more.

Deming's message seemed to have two dimensions. One had to do with seemingly abstract concepts and the other had to do with the individual.

Walking through a GM plant in the late 1980s, he muttered, "The worker must be released." Three of Deming's 14 points were to "Drive out fear," and to remove barriers that rob employees and managers of "their right to pride of workmanship." As I work with a variety of companies, I still see little evidence of this as a goal and a great deal of evidence of the benefit of making them goals.

Deming's management philosophy he labeled a "system of profound knowledge." It includes four elements: psychology, a theory of knowledge, appreciation for a system, and an understanding of variation. He convincingly argued that one could not, and ought not to, be in management with at least some rudimentary appreciation for these four elements.

By psychology, he was referring to the importance of respecting intrinsic motivation as essential to creativity, problem-solving, and quality. One example of what he meant by variation is the use of control charts by factory workers as tools to improve quality, perhaps the most visible element of the quality movement with which he was often associated. Appreciation for a system is complex, but it basically points to the importance of orchestrating parts, processes, and people to work well together. Finally, the question at the heart of theory of knowledge is simple but profound: how do you know what you know?

The Japanese gave Deming a great deal of credit for their economic revival after the devastation of World War II. What became known as the quality movement, or TQM (total quality management) became very popular in the U.S. as Japan gained large shares of automobile and electronic markets in the U.S. While American and European companies were focused on rework and blaming individuals, the Japanese companies that drew from Deming's teaching were focusing on system-wide improvements. At one point, the German and Japanese luxury cars had the same quality, as measured by flaws; but the Germans were using as many people to perform re-work at the end as the Japanese were using for the entire production process. Last year, the profits of Toyota (a company that has given huge credit to Deming) were more than the next five largest car companies combined.

Deming argued that bad managers focused on finding individuals to blame whereas good managers focused on changing the system: they had appreciation for a system and knew that an individual who may appear bad in one system can thrive in another. Progress comes from creating and modifying systems that allow real individuals to get real results. Understanding what to attribute to the system and what to attribute to the individual depends on understanding variation - seeing the difference between common cause (outputs caused by the system) and special cause (egregiously bad or amazingly good results that come in defiance of the system).

To this day, most managers still practice management without an articulated theory of management. Much of what animates management practice is little different from what once animated Indian rain dancers, a reliance on exhortations and slogans and tradition that has inspired hundreds of Dilbert cartoons. That management so often lives at the intersection of science and the occult is not something for which we can blame Deming. He tried to transform us. Perhaps, in time, he still will.