Knapsack: How we got where we are
There’s a quote often passed around credited to Ed Deming or Peter Drucker, that appears to go back to a Procter & Gamble executive named Arthur W. Jones. It fits all of the above, and is useful to think about.
"All organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get."
In other words, if you don’t like your outcomes, you need to change your processes, your operations, even your leadership.
This gets trickier with communities and even, I’ll venture, cultures. But I think it’s a truth, or at least a truism, we should engage with. If our community is perfectly designed to create the results we’re getting, what does that mean?
One thing I keep coming back to is the continued eruption of "self-storage facilities" across the country. We have so much stuff (and yes, I could use a different word for stuff) that we pay people a deceptively small amount to build a cheap enclosure with a lock on the door and let us use it by the month or year. If you have a storage unit, I invite you to multiply your monthly rental times twelve and contemplate it. I can wait.
Yeah, that’s more than you thought? Wait until you multiply that figure times five or ten. Then compare that amount to the value of the stuff. Hey, I’m not saying storage units are a scam, I’m not blasting the rates charged, I’m asking about the outcomes we’re creating.
Our culture is perfectly designed to cause us to purchase and hold onto more stuff (ahem) than we can keep in our living quarters, which themselves are on average double the square footage of the generation before us. Interesting to consider, no?
Likewise, as I shuttle frequently between Columbus and Indianapolis, I see the expansion of vast inhuman structures all along our expressways. I’m not saying the businesses in them are inhumane; I don’t know enough to have an opinion. But the lack of human scale along our highways, the building of vast expanses on concrete pads with tip-up concrete walls with steel supports propping up trusses and light metal roofing, each with a small somewhat human scaled habitation of sorts wedged into one corner . . . oh, I get it! Way stations for stuff, on its way from manufacture to sales to consumption.
Then we store it in a vast distribution of units as well as attics and basements and garages around the country. Our society is perfectly designed to cause us to consume and squirrel away and . . . hmmm. If this isn’t the outcome we want, how do we change it?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller and preacher in central Ohio; he’s thinking out loud is all. Tell him about your relationship with stuff at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
This article originally appeared on Newark Advocate: Knapsack: How we got where we are
