Screwworms and Maintenance Culture

It appears that screwworms, a type of maggot that lays eggs in livestock, which the US eradicated in the 1950s, have returned to the country. This will cause billions of dollars in damages.

“No victory is so complete that it cannot be undone by a handful of careless middle managers who don't grasp the importance of the system they have been charged with maintaining,” wrote Matt Shapiro, continuing: “Some group of people were in charge of holding the line on the screwworm barrier. They failed. And, having failed, they then failed to act quickly enough to fix the problem. Maybe they didn’t raise the alarm, or maybe the alarm wasn’t loud enough. Maybe the people in power who were supposed to hear the alarm didn’t realize how severe this problem was. This is a problem that should never have gotten this bad. It always seems that, in situations like this, everyone and no one is to blame.”

If you want to read the details about the eradication, the establishment of a barrier in Panama protecting the Central- and North-American countries above it, and the recent failure to maintain it working, I direct you to Matt’s article. Here, instead, I will answer the following question: The maintenance of large-scale projects is tricky, because smart and driven people do not want to work on projects offering limited growth opportunities, and because it’s hard to stay alert with regards to threats one did not experience on their flesh; how can we prevent complacency and preserve competent executing even in these situations?

Complacency problems require cultural solutions

The first half of the solution is the realization that the default trajectory of large-scale maintenance projects is toward complacency and that, crucially, incentives do not change that.

Do not get me wrong: incentives are powerful in most situations; just not for maintenance projects. This is because of a few reasons:

• Incentives work better on ambitious people, but ambitious people do not want to work on maintenance projects, nor should we want them to, due to high opportunity costs. Conversely, less ambitious people have lower receptivity to financial incentives.

• Incentives work better in projects whose lead time between input and output is short. Maintenance projects tend to have a large lead time, in the sense that maintenance quality can degrade for years without cracks showing.

When incentives are ineffective, we shall turn to cultural solutions, which are largely about creating and sustaining habits that maintain complacency low and quality of execution high. Here are some examples of what this could mean in the context of maintaining the screwworm barrier:

• Proactively discuss complacency instead of hiding it under a rug. Repeat, often, that the greatest danger is complacency. Explicitly mention the logical reasonings that might lead one to become complacent and collaboratively discuss how to prevent them. Explain that no negative event happening for years is not a reason to believe that the current level of investment in maintenance is excessive and could be lowered.

• Regularly remember the failures of the past. There’s a reason why, in Europe, many countries have a day of remembrance where institutions share stories about the Holocaust: we must remember how bad the past was and that it might revert to being bad if we let our guard down. (How would I improve the day of remembrance? By discussing not Nazism specifically but authoritarianism in general.) Similarly, everyone working on the project must be reminded how big a threat screwworms were and still are.

• Regularly remind your people that dystopia is the default, and the current utopia only exists because of past projects that must be actively maintained. Just like poverty, and not prosperity, is the default for the human race, we must remember that screwworms are the default, and their absence is only due to the hard work of a small group of people, and will cease once that work ceases.

• Regularly reinforce the good work, even when it seems unnecessary. That’s because if people do good work and they don’t get acknowledged, they will soon stop doing it, or do it as superficially as possible.

• Take near misses seriously. When failure is catastrophic, you cannot wait for it to happen before implementing corrective actions. Instead, you should continuously be on the lookout for near misses: incidents, mistakes, and misunderstandings that did not lead to material consequences. Take near misses as seriously as consequential incidents: investigate what went wrong and implement the necessary adjustments to ensure it never happens again.

• Do all of the above more frequently than you think is necessary. That’s because of a natural bias called risk homeostasis that misleads us into doing less than necessary to fight low-saliency threats.

• Do it as if it were a question of life or death. When you say maintenance is important, people will not take your words at face value. Instead, they will check whether your actions match those of a person who truly believes maintenance is important.

As I said, the above represents only half of the solution. Here is the other half.

Cultural solutions require skip-level in-person interactions

Managers in large hierarchies, such as those necessary to manage a large country or corporation, tend to have managerial interactions only with their direct superiors and subordinates. This creates a game of broken telephone, where each weak link in the hierarchical chain can distort information flows.

To visualize this, imagine being the coach of a sports team, but instead of talking directly to your players and watching them play, you only talk to your assistants. In this situation, the information you receive about how your team plays is only as good as the observation skills of your assistants, and the messages your team receives from you are only as good as the communication skills of your assistants.

Thankfully, coaches watch their team play in person and address them in person, too. The same type of skip-level interactions should also happen within a maintenance project. If the screwworm barrier project is so important, the President should visit the team once or twice during their tenure. If this is unrealistic, at the very least, the President should speak directly about it to a delegate (say, the Secretary of Agriculture) who, in turn, should visit the screwworm team in person. Reducing the number of links from many to two means preventing the dilution of saliency, urgency, information, and recognition.

(Note that, by “visiting the team,” I mean both the person or committee responsible for managing the project, and the people working on the ground.)

The same reasoning applies to the person whose job is to lead the project. They should “visit the grounds” to observe the operations and meet the line employees at least monthly. This is not only to communicate the importance of the project and fight complacency, but also to observe how local managers and supervisors do their work (Do they know what’s going on? Do they take near misses seriously?) and to evaluate the mood (Do people look tired or complacent?).

Of course, I’m well aware that the above takes precious time, which is the resource that managers and leaders lack the most. But it is necessary to sustain good outcomes over time, especially for maintenance projects.

I’m not saying to dedicate more time to maintenance projects than necessary; just an amount that matches the project’s importance, without deluding ourselves that they can succeed even in the absence of building an appropriate culture.