NETTING IT OUT

The New Complexity Management

I have had a working assumption for awhile – we all have one or a few of these, don’t we? Something to keep the mental gears oiled and in good working order when our minds are not otherwise actively or productively engaged?

One of my working assumptions – stay with me on this – is that we are increasingly over-estimating our collective intelligence, and over-designing our world, our processes, our gadgets – our things – as a result.

In the supply chain world, there is the idea of complexity management.  I first encountered this idea at AMR Research several years ago  (See Steve Hochman‘s articles, Part 1 and Part 2 on the AMR Research website), and I have been fascinated by the topic since.

The increasing complexity of our world, then, and – perhaps – the increasing importance of complexity management in its various forms, are fascinating to me.  Equally fascinating to me are stories that highlight the perverse effects that complexity has on our daily lives.

I was very interested, therefore, to read a story on the front page of yesterday’s Boston Globe, by Robert Gavin: “When Stints on payroll hurt the jobless“.

You would need to read this article to learn that the state of Massachusetts and the federal government do not want you to work.

That’s right – they do not want you to work.  Despite all of the talk about the unemployment rate, and the federal government’s focus on addressing the unemployment rate – the state and federal government do not want you to work.

This conclusion is unavoidable.  Federal law has been written in such a way that, even in these tough times, an unemployed worker receiving unemployment benefits can see their unemployment assistance decline if they make the ‘mistake’ of taking on part-time work that pays less than they were making full-time.

Intended or not, federal law has created a disincentive for an unemployed worker to work.

The argument can be made, of course, that this is simply the perverse effect of unemployment assistance – that it is “assistance” that supplements one’s earnings, but is not a guarantee that one’s income will not go up or go down.

Fair enough.  The fact remains, however, this assistance is in fact discouraging people from working, and sending the very real message that your state and federal government will penalize you financially if you do work.

See how complex things have become? Worse, while those who are unemployed (disclosure: I am currently receiving unemployment assistance while in day 400 of a job search) go through their daily and weekly anxieties about making ends meet with their unemployment assistance, Massachusetts officials reportedly advised the federal government of this back in November.  While Massachusetts’ Senator Kerry is reported to have sponsored some legislation, we must still wait, three months later, to learn whether the federal government really does not want you to work, or just wrote bad law with unintended consequences.

So perhaps the high unemployment rate is not that surprising.  I have never accepted that there are not things that federal government can do to put people back to work.  Paying people to not work is, in my mind,  probably not one of the better ideas the government has ever had. Closely followed by taking this long to fix a problem that, arguably, should not have happened in the first place.

I say – if you are going to create the complexity, then you accept the responsibility to manage the complexity.  How’s that?

February 18, 2010 - Posted by Robert Eastman | Ideas, Technology