Become Aware of What You Don’t See

Hear the dog that didn’t bark

Michelangelo said (though presumably in Italian), “It takes work to remove the traces of work.” What looks effortless, as any professional dancer will tell you, looks that way after hours of unremitting effort. Fred Astaire did not just walk on the set and do the routine impromptu. He worked for hours to make it seem effortless. All that backstage work goes unseen by the audience.

The same invisibility of effort occurs in many fields — public health, for example. Public health professionals work intensely to protect the public’s health, and they judge their efforts successful when nothing happens — everything goes just fine, and so the public doesn’t see the work that was done.

In education, we see that students in some classes always do extremely well, and the immediate response might be to say to the teacher, “You’re lucky to have such good students,” the teacher’s work being much less visible than the students’ successes.

Fire departments spend a lot of time in fire prevention: doing fire inspections, enforcing fire regulations, running fire drills, and the like. When no fires occur, that’s a major success for them, but from the public’s point of view, nothing happened. The Five O’Clock News does not lead with, “No fires today!”

Dentists focus on preventing tooth decay and other problems, doing their best to eliminate the cavities they would otherwise fill. Doctors are an exception to this pattern: most doctors in private practice focus not so much on preventing disease or injury but rather on treating them when they occur. (Success in that sort of treatment is indeed recognized and applauded.) Medical professionals (doctors and nurses) who want to prevent disease and injury tend to go into public health, and their successes are generally unrecognized — because no bad thing happened.

That’s the problem in working to prevent disease, accidents, and other problems: people don’t notice success — “Of course things are going well,” they think — but they quickly notice when things do go wrong (and some even become outraged).

Unfortunately, perhaps because we are so focused on what we can see, we have an unconscious tendency to assume that what we don’t see doesn’t exist or is of little consequence. Thus some will say or think, “I don’t know what they do — probably nothing” or “I don’t see why that takes so long — there can’t be that much to it” without realizing that their judgments reflect their ignorance of the (unseen) effort involved.

Not being aware of the work involved in making sure things go right leads to a serious problem. Cash-strapped governments (underfunded due to insufficient revenue because of tax reductions) must cut costs, and if people are generally healthy enough and preventable accidents are relatively rare, public health programs will be cut — “We don’t need those because things are going well.” If infrastructure — streets and roadways, bridges, sewers, dams, and the like — is in good shape, maintenance will be cut. If people are not getting injured or killed in the workplace, safety inspections will be cut back. If people are not getting sick from what they eat, food inspections will be skipped.

And then, of course, problems ensue.

In considering costs, note that the cost of a cure is 16 times the cost of prevention. All the cutting to save a dime today means paying $1.60 down the road after things go bad. (Figures derived from the rule that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.)

Such cuts are less apt to happen if people — the public and those who work in government — are aware of the hidden work required to keep things working as they should and the costs of fixing them if they are not maintained.