"Not My Job"

"In the spring of 1988, I visited the headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Air Command based in Omaha, Nebraska... Our military guide led us into the underground headquarters and showed us how one could communicate with every missile silo and bomber base in America. At the end of our visit, he took us on board the giant aircraft that the U.S. president would use during a nuclear attack... The plane was jam-packed with communications gear and trailed a huge antenna so that the president could communicate even with a submarine commander submerged in the depths of the Pacific Ocean. Everything was planned down to the last detail -- and a trained crew of eighty stood ready to take to the skies at any time of the day or night."

"When our guide paused for questions, I raised my hand. 'Not to be presumptuous,' I asked, 'but if I were in the president's shoes in the middle of a nuclear crisis, the first person I'd want to talk to would be the Soviet premier so that we could figure out how to stop the war. Do you have a communications link on this plane to the Hot Line and a Russian translator on board?' The Department of Defense official looked me straight in the eye and answered, 'Communicating with the Russians is not our job. It's the job of the State Department.'"

This somewhat long quote is from the book, "The Third Side"by William Ury, which I'm almost finished with. There are a lot of interesting stories in this book that I'll relate over time, but this particular episode is early in the book and is related to stuff I was thinking recently about.

When Ury tells this story, he's trying to motivate the reader to act and assume an active role when they encounter conflict, particularly when they are not one of the directly involved parties. This message rings particularly true for me because I've always been distressed/annoyed/frustrated when I encounter the "not my job" attitude where necessary actions are identified but left deliberately undone, supposedly excused by some unclear chain of responsibility. Or, even worse, realizing that identification may create responsibility, some choose to remain deliberately blind in order to avoid unearthing a need whose fulfillment might fall into their lap. This kind of behavior is so frustrating to me, that it's easy to categorize the people who do such things as degenerate, and dismiss both them and their actions. But upon closer inspection, this behavior is much more complex and not necessarily irrational. Let's go back to Ury's story from the top.

In a situation like the one posed, when the stakes are so high, Ury wants it to seem self-evident that any party with knowledge of a problem, regardless of their pre-existing level of involvement, should take action. But there are often compelling reasons why this happens. Take the relationship between the Defense and State departments in this story. Should the military "take the initiative" and start handling the issue of communication with the Soviets, the State department would probably be far from pleased that a "rival" has intruded on their prescribed responsibilitys, and an inter-departmental turf war would result. In the end, the President might need to break up the fight and remind each side of their boundaries. Nothing will have changed and taking initiative would become even more difficult in the future. A few rounds of this sort of thing would dissuade any rational person from straying far from their paper boundaries.

But the madness doesn't end here. Identifying a problem can create problems of its own when one is paralyzed from acting. Recall all the 9/11 intelligence "scandals" about analysts who identified the terrorists and the precise risks they posed yet whose reports went nowhere. It's easily plausible that upon seeing the level of interdepartmental collaboration necessary to utilize their intelligence, those in more executive positions weighed the risk as not great enough to pay the political cost of taking the bold initiative necessary. Only in the aftermath of a problem turned into a crisis do these things come to light and blame placed. Now, the identification itself has become a liability. Better to just be blind.

Well, okay, that's a pretty cynical view of things, but not entirely unrealistic. Sure, government is a often cited as a protyptical example of bureaucratic dysfunction, but it seems like this kind of thing could strike almost anywhere as a function of basic human nature and organizational behavior. It seems like smaller organizations with flatter hierarchies and more flexible areas of responsibility would be less likely to fall into this "not my job" syndrome. But still, I've seen it happen in structures so small and so flat that there must be other forces at work here as well.

Part of it may be the qualities of individuals, especially in smaller places. Would those who have been personally burned after taking the initiative or those who have never tasted a personal victory as a result their own actions be more likely to try to absolve themselves of responsibility rather than take charge of results? How contagious is personal initiative or "not my job"? Can organizational structures be built that filters for certain characteristics while supressing others? Can organizational structures emerge that inadvertently select for less-desirable characteristics?