Uncle GDP, cocktail in hand, puts his arm around you and points out to the beach from your condo’s balcony. You can hear birds, their feathers slicked tightly to wings and chests, standing on the coast line screaming. The rocks on the beach around them are black and wet, the ocean itself undulates slowly like a black silk sheet clipped to a clothes line on a gently gusty day. The Prestige is sinking in the background; it is being tugged out to deeper waters off the coast of Spain to mitigate the damage, in the hopes that it will drop to the bottom of the frigid ocean and its remaining cargo will solidify two miles below the surface.
Over the next several days you watch as the French Navy brings oil trapping nets and provides them to Galician fisherman, and workers create a floating barrier to protect the coastline. Dead birds sit on the beach like incredibly lifelike onyx statues. Fish begin to wash in, on their sides, and workers quickly execute oil spill disaster plans. A preliminary cost for the cleanup and lost economic activity is estimated at $42 million. The good news for Spain, however, is that the oil spill will reflect as a positive event at a macro-economic level. Uncle GDP smiles at you drunkenly and winks.
I look at the world through my quality geek lens. As a result, I see in this story events that will repeat themselves, because the system is not designed to discourage them. Until the system is re-designed to honestly account for the costs of oil spills and similar events, so that they become net negatives at the macro-economic level, they will continue to happen. That is how decision-making processes operate. It’s a stomach-turning realization, that this kind of event is designed in to our system.
In the context of our quality conversation, an oil spill such as the one caused by The Prestige represents waste on a tragic scale, and highlights a critical problem with GDP as a success measurement system.
Quality geeks understand that all waste, from an oil spill to a loading dock stacked with rotting fruit, is the result of a defect or defects in a process, and should be rooted out of the system. All systems have waste, but due to poorly designed success measurement systems like the one built around GDP, most of it is hidden and most of it is ultimately accepted as a cost of doing business. The problem is that many of the success metrics commonly used by organizations, like their macro-economic Uncle GDP, routinely ignore or downplay the impacts of waste. The cumulative impact of all this waste resonates on a global scale. The waste is real, it’s sickening, and it can be easily found by perusing the newspaper on most days.
It’s rare that a single metric can be used to define success or failure, and the problems with using GDP to define a country’s economic success perfectly illustrate why. Quality geeks at all levels should bang the drum for the implementation of business review processes centering on the use of balanced scorecards. By marrying ourselves to dishonest or incomplete definitions of success we create systems that encourage their own slow deterioration. This holds true both on the organizational and the global scale.
