A few years ago, I borrowed my father-in-law’s fishing boat. Before I left, he showed me how to operate it and deal with any particulars. One piece of his instruction grabbed my attention: “After a few hours on the water, you’ll notice that it will start to fill up with water. When that happens, just bring it up to speed, pull the drain plug, and it will all drain out. Then put the plug back in before you slow down.”

He said all of this with a relaxed tone as if he’d done this maneuver a hundred times without incident.

Many of you would have left the boat right there. I decided to just go with it. How hard could it be?

Out on the water

Then, I went out on the water on my own. The boat worked well, and we had a great time fishing. After a few hours of use, I noticed a build-up of water around my feet in the rear of the boat. It was time for the maneuver.

I remembered everything my father-in-law told me, but now, all of the ways this could go terribly wrong became very obvious to me:

1. I needed a nice long straightaway. I didn’t want to cross another boat, wake, shallow, or shoreline while doing this.
2. I needed to keep one hand on the tiller and bend over to reach the drain plug without inadvertently steering or slowing the throttle.
3. I needed to hang onto that drain plug tightly and not drop it into the lake.
4. I needed to look straight ahead and behind me (where the drain was) simultaneously to maintain situational awareness.
5. What happens if the motor stalls while the plug is out?!?
6. After the water drained, I needed the dexterity to insert the drain plug while bouncing across the lake at speed.

The good news is, that I managed to pull off “the maneuver” without incident. I also immediately realized how crazy this was, then bought and installed an automatic bilge pump. I try to make a habit of returning borrowed items better than I received them.

We’re all guilty of this

At this point in the story, you might be judging my father-in-law’s process for handling this issue, but we all do things just like this in our daily work.

Once upon a time, I developed, customized, and extended a user activity report for a platform I managed. The complexity of steps I had to go through to generate the report was on a Rube Goldberg scale. Because it was my own creation and because I performed the steps regularly, I could reproduce it with minimal effort. However, I had no hope of ever handing it off to someone else.

I had intentions of re-writing the report from scratch in a more sustainable and automated way but never got around to it. I eventually left that role and made it someone else’s problem. I’m not proud of that.

The solution

This is one of the reasons companies bring in external consultants to examine processes for improvement. We are so used to how things are done that we are often oblivious to the insanity of how we work. Yes, it all works, but if one thing goes wrong, and we aren’t there to catch it, then it all falls apart. That fragile state is exactly the place we find ourselves day after day.

You don’t always need a consultant to help identify these “opportunities.” Software development has a process called “peer review” which is designed to catch code that very well may work, but it only makes sense to the developer who wrote it.

I heard about a company that forced all employees to take week-long contiguous vacations every year so that they could find and fix control weaknesses and fragile processes that were too dependent on a single person.

It’s your turn to install the bilge pump

I told this funny story because it’s extreme and memorable. You probably thought to yourself, “I’d never do something crazy like that.” Hopefully, you see now that we all do. It’s human nature. Only when you hire a consultant, conduct a peer review, hand off during vacation, or lend out your boat, do the chronic process problems really get addressed.

It’s humbling to let someone else see your mess of a process. Be gentle. Then, pay it forward. If someone lets you “borrow their boat,” make sure you return it better than you found it.

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