Everything Is Obvious (27 page)

Market-based solutions and prize competitions are both good ideas, but they’re not the only way that centralized bureaucracies can take advantage of local knowledge. A different approach altogether begins with the observation that in any troubled system, there are often instances of individuals and groups—called bright spots by marketing scientists Chip and Dan Heath in their book
Switch
—who have figured out workable solutions to specific problems. The bright-spot approach was first developed by Tufts University nutrition professor Marian Zeitlin, who noticed that a number of studies of child nutrition in impoverished communities had found that within any given community, some children seemed to be better nourished than others. After understanding these naturally occurring success stories—how the children’s mothers behaved differently, what they fed them and when—Zeitlin realized that he could help other mothers to take better care
of their children simply by teaching them the homegrown solutions that already existed in their own communities. Subsequently, the bright-spot approach has been used successfully in developing nations, and even in the United States where certain hand-washing practices in a small number of hospitals are being replicated in order to help reduce bacterial infections—the leading cause of preventable hospital deaths—throughout the medical system.
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The bright-spot approach is also similar to what political scientist Charles Sabel calls bootstrapping, a philosophy that has begun to gain popularity in the world of economic development. Bootstrapping is modeled on the famous Toyota Production System, which has been embraced not only across the Japanese automotive firms but also more broadly across industries and cultures. The basic idea is that production systems should be engineered along “just in time” principles, which assure that if one part of the system fails, the whole system must stop until the problem is fixed. At first, this sounds like a bad idea (and it has led Toyota to the brink of disaster at least once), but its advantage is that it forces organizations to address problems quickly and aggressively. It also forces them to trace problems to their “root causes”—a process that frequently requires looking beyond the immediate cause of the failure to discover how flaws in one part of the system can result in failures somewhere else. And finally, it forces them to look either for existing solutions or else adapt solutions from related activities—a process known as benchmarking. Together these three practices—identifying failure points, tracing problems to root causes, and searching for solutions outside the confines of existing routines—can transform the organization itself from one that offers solutions to complex problems in a centralized managerial
manner into one that searches for solutions among a broad network of collaborators.
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Like bright spots, bootstrapping focuses on concrete solutions to local problems, and seeks to extract solutions that are working from what is already happening on the ground. However, bootstrapping goes one step further, sniffing out not only what is working, but also what
could
work if certain impediments were removed, constraints lifted, or problems solved elsewhere in the system. A potential downside of bootstrapping is that it requires a motivated workforce with strong incentives to solve problems as they arise. So one might legitimately wonder whether the model can be translated from highly competitive industrial settings to the world of economic development or public policy. But as Sabel points out, there are now so many examples of local successes—footwear producers in the Sinos Valley of Brazil, wine growers in Mendoza, Argentina, or soccer ball manufacturers in Sialkot, Pakistan—that have flourished on the strength of the bootstrapping approach that it is hard to dismiss them as mere aberrations.
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Most important, what both bright spots and bootstrapping have in common is that they require a shift in mind-set on the part of planners. First, planners must recognize that no matter what the problem is—creating a more nutritious diet in impoverished villages, reducing infection rates in hospitals, or improving the competitiveness of local industries—chances are that somebody out there already has part of the solution and is willing to share it with others. And second, having realized that they do not need to figure out the solution to every problem on their own, planners can instead
devote their resources to finding the existing solutions, wherever they occur, and spreading their practice more widely.
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In effect, this is also the lesson of thinkers like Scott and Hayek, whose proposed solutions also advocate that policy makers devise plans that revolve around the knowledge and motivation of local actors rather than relying on their own. Planners, in other words, need to learn to behave more like what the development economist William Easterly calls searchers. As Easterly puts it,

As different as they appear on the surface, in fact, all these approaches to planning—along with Mintzberg’s emergent strategy, Peretti’s mullet strategy, crowdsourcing, and field experiments—are really just variations on the same general theme of “measuring and reacting.” Sometimes what is being measured is the detailed knowledge of local actors, and sometimes it is mouse clicks or search terms. Sometimes it is sufficient merely to gather data, and sometimes one must conduct a randomized experiment. Sometimes the appropriate reaction is to shift resources from one program or topic or ad campaign to another, while at other times it is to expand
on someone else’s homegrown solution. There are, in fact, as many ways to measure and react to different problems as there are problems to solve, and no one-size-fits-all approach exists. What they all have in common, however, is that they require planners—whether government planners trying to reduce global poverty or advertising planners trying to launch a new campaign for a client—to abandon the conceit that they can develop plans on the basis of intuition and experience alone. Plans fail, in other words, not because planners ignore common sense, but rather because they rely on their own common sense to reason about the behavior of people who are different from them.

This seems like an easy trap to avoid, but it isn’t. Whenever we contemplate the question of why it is that things turned out the way they did, or why people do what they do, we are always able to come up with plausible answers. We may even be so convinced by our answers that whatever prediction or explanation we arrive at may seem obvious. We will always be tempted to think that we know how other people will react to a new product, or to a politician’s campaign speech, or to a new tax law. “It’ll never work,” we will want to say, “because people just don’t like that kind of thing,” or “No one will be fooled by his obvious chicanery,” or “Such a tax will reduce incentives to work hard and invest in the economy.” None of this can be helped—we cannot suppress our commonsense intuition any more than we can will our heart to stop beating. What we can do, however, is remember that whenever it comes to questions of business strategy or government policy, or even marketing campaigns and website design, we must rely less on our common sense and more on what we can measure.

But measurement alone is not enough to prevent us from misleading ourselves. Commonsense reasoning can also mislead us
with respect to more philosophical questions about society—like how we assign blame, or how we attribute success—where measurement may be impossible. In these circumstances too we will not be able to restrain our commonsense intuition from coming up with seemingly self-evident answers. But once again, we can suspect it, and instead look for ways to think about the world that benefit from understanding the limits of common sense.

August 4, 2001, was a Saturday, and Joseph Gray was having a fun day. Gray, a fifteen-year veteran of the New York City Police Department, had finished the late shift that morning, in the 72nd precinct in Brooklyn, and he and a bunch of his colleagues decided to stick around the station house to have a few beers. Shortly before noon, by which stage a few beers had turned into several beers, several of them decided to have lunch at the nearby Wild, Wild West topless bar. Officer Gray, apparently, was particularly pleased with the decision, as he stayed there all afternoon and into the evening, even after the rest of his friends had left. It was puzzling behavior, considering he had to report to work again later that night, but perhaps he was hoping to get there a few hours before his shift started and sleep it off. Regardless, by the time he poured himself into his burgundy Ford Windstar van, he had drunk somewhere between twelve and eighteen beers—enough to put his blood alcohol content at over twice the legal limit.

What happened next isn’t completely clear, but the record indicates that as Officer Gray drove north on Third Avenue, under the Gowanus Expressway overpass, he ran a red light. Definitely not good, but also perhaps not a big deal. On any other Saturday evening he might have sailed right on through and gotten safely to Staten Island, where he planned to pick up one of his drinking partners from earlier in the day before
returning to the station. But on this particular night, he was not to be so lucky. Nor were twenty-four-year-old Maria Herrera; her sixteen-year-old sister, Dilcia Peña; and Herrera’s four-year old son, Andy, who were crossing the avenue at 46th Street at that moment. Officer Gray struck the three of them at full speed, killing them all and dragging the poor boy’s body for nearly half a block under his front fender before coming to a halt. As he emerged from his vehicle, witnesses claimed his eyes were glassy, his voice was slurred, and he kept asking, “Why did they cross?” over and over again. But the nightmare didn’t end there. Maria Herrera was also eight-and-a-half months pregnant. Her unborn baby, Ricardo, was delivered by cesarean section at Lutheran Medical Center, and the doctors there fought to save his life. But they failed. Twelve hours after his mother died, so did baby Ricardo, leaving his father, Victor Herrera, alone in the world.

Almost two years later, Joseph Gray was sentenced in State Supreme Court to the maximum penalty of five to fifteen years in prison on four counts of second-degree manslaughter. Gray pleaded with the judge for mercy, claiming that he’d never done “anything intentional in my entire life to hurt another human being,” and more than one hundred supporters wrote letters to the court attesting to his decency. But Justice Anne Feldman was unsympathetic, pointing out that driving a half-ton van along city streets while intoxicated was “equivalent to waving a loaded gun around a crowded room.” The four thousand members of the Herreras’ community, who signed a petition demanding the maximum sentence, clearly concurred with the judge. Many felt that Gray had gotten off easy. Certainly Victor Herrera did. “Joseph Gray, fifteen years is not enough for you,” he told the courtroom. “You will get out of prison one day. And when you do,
you will still be able to see your family. I will have nothing. You killed everything I have.”
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Even reading about these events years after they took place, it’s impossible not to feel the grief and anger of the victims’ family. As Victor Herrera expressed it to one reporter, God had blessed him with the family he’d dreamed of; then one drunk and reckless man had taken it all away from him in an instant. It’s a horrible thought, and Herrera has every right to hate the man who destroyed his life. Nevertheless, as I read about the repercussions—the protests outside the police station, the condemnation of neighbors and politicians, the shock waves through the community, and of course the eventual sentence—I couldn’t help but think about what would have happened had Joseph Gray come along an instant later. Naturally there would have been no accident, and Maria Herrera, her sister, and her son would have gone along their merry way. She would have given birth to Ricardo weeks later, hopefully lived a long and happy life, and would never have thought twice about the van speeding erratically along Third Avenue that summer evening. Joseph Gray would have picked up his fellow officer in Staten Island, who presumably would have insisted on driving back to Brooklyn. Gray might have gotten a reprimand from his supervisor, or he might have gotten away with it altogether. But regardless, he would have gone home to his wife and three children the next day and gotten on with his quiet, unremarkable existence.

OK, I know what you’re thinking. Even if Gray’s driving drunk did not make the accident inevitable, it did increase the likelihood that something bad would happen, and his punishment was justified in terms of his behavior. But if that’s
true, then versions of his crime play out all the time. Every day, police officers—not to mention public officials, parents, and others—get drunk and drive their cars. Some of them are as drunk as Joseph Gray was that night, and some of them drive just as irresponsibly. Most of them don’t get caught, and even the few who do are rarely sent to jail. Few are subject to the punishment and public vilification that befell Joseph Gray, who was labeled a monster and a murderer. So what was it about Joseph Gray’s actions that made him so much worse than all these others? No matter how reprehensible, even criminal, you think his actions that day were, they would have been exactly as bad had he walked out of the bar a minute later, or had the light been green, or had the Herreras been momentarily delayed while walking down the street, or had they seen the car coming and sped up or slowed down. Nevertheless, even if you subscribe to Judge Feldman’s logic that everyone who is driving a van drunk down a city street is a potential killer of mothers and children, it is hard to imagine charging every driver who has had a few too many drinks—or these days, anyone texting or talking on a cell phone—to fifteen years in prison, simply on the grounds that they
might
have killed someone.