Measure the Shade
Part I: A Prescription for Toxicosis
James Auvil is a career officer who writes health policy for the U.S. Army and provides health care fraud expertise to federal entities. This article contains the views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense or the United States Government.
When Dr. Leonard Wong and Dr. Stephan Gerras published their study last month on dishonesty in the Army, I not only acknowledged the problem, but I acknowledged that I own the problem along with the rest of my generation. We didn’t create it, but we unknowingly fed it in the name of progress and transparency. Previous generations failed to slay this beast and now the sword and pen rest in my generation’s hands. Luckily, my generation is uniquely qualified to fix this problem — just ask Dr. Wong.
Dr. Wong and I go way back, although our relationship was one-sided. He doesn’t know me personally, but he does understand me. He wrote a paper about me and published it in October 2000. I am the quintessential Xer he described 15 years ago. He wrote, “Generation X was born between 1960 and 1980”. I was born in 1969. He continues, “Generation X developed a cynical, pragmatic, survival mentality as they experienced a world much less idyllic than their Boomer predecessors. …Xers became the ultimate latchkey children. Being alone and fending on their own, the young Xers learned to rely on themselves and developed a confidence often misinterpreted as arrogance.” Check. “…Xers developed a skeptical nature about authority as people and institutions around them let them down repeatedly.” Big Check. “They… learned to trust only themselves.” Little Check. I've never had any problem trusting subordinates once they demonstrate competency, and that doesn't take long. I confess my trust issues have always been linked to large organizations, superiors and peers in that order because they continually demonstrate that they don’t trust me. I entered service as an Armor officer in 1991 and Dr. Wong studied my year group.
When I first came on active duty, Baby Boomers filled the field grade and general officer ranks and they still fill the most senior ranks. Today 37 of the 39 active duty 4-stars were born before 1960. The average age of Senior Executive Service leaders was 54 in September 2013 and the 2012 SES Report indicated 50% were older than age 54.3, putting half of them in the Baby Boomer generation. Dr. Wong described their generation, too: “Boomers worked relentlessly in pursuit of goals, often at the expense of marriages, family and personal lives… the overworking Boomers brought zero defects, careerism and new accusations of micromanagement to the Army.”
In 1996, GEN (USA, Ret.) Dennis Reimer noted a command climate study by the Army Research Institute indicated the return of a “zero-defects and ticket-punching mentality” that existed in the 1960s and 1970s and, “The state of ethical conduct is abysmal.” These problems existed before the Boomers and before the most recent study on Army lying, but the Boomers brought these problems to a new level. Dr Wong wrote, “As Boomers moved into the senior ranks of the officer corps, their driven nature flourished in the post-Cold War environment. “24/7” became the norm and bigger and better QTBs became commonplace.”
A Major General once told me he established his career goal as a cadet at West Point: he was going to be a General Officer. That required him to make it to Colonel first, so after his Infantry company command, he transferred to Transportation Corps to give him the best chance of becoming a Colonel. He gave me a coin. I threw it away. Healthy careerism is about accomplishment, not recognition and rank equals recognition. Dr. Wong continued to explain the experiences of Baby Boomer Captains versus Xer Captains and concluded the study with suggestions to solve the most pressing issue at the time: junior officer retention. The Army downsized following Operation Desert Storm from 780,000 to 480,000 and was bleeding talent. Officers who separated consistently reported a lack of understanding as a primary reason for leaving.
I’m going to assume the reader is familiar with Dr. Wong’s generation study from 2000 because his outstanding work drives my theory of what happened psychosocially, particularly within the military, between 1995 and 2015. For brevity, I'll break it down Barney-style: the most driven Boomer leaders mentored some high-performing Xer leaders and created a hybrid that I’ll call Boxers. This wasn’t just a DoD phenomenon, this happened across large public and private organizations. Boxers are cursed with unlimited drive (a Boomer trait) and the absence of trust (an Xer trait). Whenever a Boxer assumes a leadership position, writes policy or fills a primary staff role, woe follows. Boxers provide too much guidance, crushing innovation and subordinate initiative in the process. Boxers are significantly threatened by setbacks and negative events that can be linked back to them, even in the most peripheral or distant ways. They tend to over-react when people make mistakes. They pathologically reframe failure as success. They are shameless masters of Blue Falconry. Boxers have an affinity for assigning blame and exaggerating impact.
The children of Boxers unsurprisingly embrace the idea of microaggressions, as they’ve learned from the best how to create the conditions to assign blame. Boxers are unjustifiably insecure, risk-averse and apologetic-by-proxy which leads to ridiculously conservative and reactionary policies. Boxers believe the adage, “when in charge, take charge” only applies to them, so they never put subordinates in charge of anything. They joyfully assign responsibility while hoarding authority. In short, Boxers are paranoid control freaks covered in Teflon.
Boxers execute toxic leadership perfectly. Over the last two decades, they leveraged technology to systematically kill trust across organizations by withholding subordinate freedom of action (centralizing power and breeding a permission seeking force), mandating excessive reporting (readiness, Unit Status Reports, Quarterly Training Briefs, mandatory administrative training), shifting individual responsibility onto the organization (the ubiquitous reflective belt, TRIPS tool, weekend safety briefings, personally owned vehicle inspections, pinning Soldiers’ isolated bad decisions on the chain of command), crafting excessively restrictive or directive regulations (purchase requests, TDY policy, AR 670–1, UCMJ, self-reporting requirements, civilian hiring/firing policy, acquisition policy, Joint Federal Travel Regulations) and applying those regulations inequitably by rank, gender, organization or special interest (judicial vs non-judicial punishment for sex crimes, fraud, misconduct, financial waste).
The prototypical Boxer policy is an over-reaction that fails to solve the problem coupled with metrics that fail to capture the impact relative to the need. If a Boxer wants to shade a picnic table, he/she doesn't buy an umbrella or move the table into nearby existing shade. The Boxer plants an oak tree and requires subordinates to report the daily growth rate in inches during the morning stand up meeting. The Boxer becomes frustrated at the dismal rate of progress and demands his staff make the tree grow faster. The staff understands that, much like organizational culture, this is a slow-growing hardwood and heroic measurement efforts won't make the tree grow faster. The tree needs time to grow, but staff members don't have the luxury of time, so they respond by measuring the oak in centimeters, which increases the daily status report number by 254% with no change in actual growth. Still frustrated by the lack of progress, the Boxer demands additional staff effort to make the tree grow faster. They switch to millimeters and include an additional 1000% increase in the number on their annual evaluations despite no change in actual growth.
As the Boxer spins up the stress levels, staff members become creative. They report the amount of fertilizer added, by chemical component. They send a senior NCO to a technical forestry school so she can return and spread her knowledge via a Train-the-Trainer program. The staff begins to track and report hours of mandatory forestry training. They measure the daily temperature, humidity, barometric pressure and hours of sunlight. They report the volume of water poured on the tree each day and the number of leaves. Staff members work hard to display metrics on fancy slides, but measuring the tree won’t make it grow. When a Boxer plants an oak, measure the shade. When you measure impact rather than effort, poor decisions and ineffective programs become shamefully self-evident.
The oak is not only a fitting representation of a metric-driven staff death spiral; it represents the Boxer policy lifecycle. Someone plants a manageable sapling (idea) which eventually matures into a nice tree (program) that has direct and measurable benefits. Under perfect conditions, the tree eventually provides the intended benefits, but fails to address the problem when it is most acute. Boxers use creative metrics to sidestep the uncomfortable fact that their solution does not solve the immediate problem. Soldiers continue to get sunburned sitting at the table by the little tree. By the time the tree matures, someone’s moved the picnic table, or solved the problem in another way (full length uniform sleeves, reauthorized the patrol cap) and we don't need shade at that location anymore. Unfortunately, the oak doesn’t stop growing and Boxers keep planting additional trees. Over decades, the trees become a forest and begin to compete for resources. The largest trees become heritage items that no one dares to cut down and by an ironic twist of fate, the sheer density of trees starts to make all the trees unhealthy as their roots compete for the same, dwindling resources. The Army has plenty of shovels to plant new trees, but doesn't own a single chainsaw. With a few fantastic exceptions, this is the state of Army policy today. If we measure the shade, we will find plenty of overlap and we won't need as many trees. It’s time for Paul Bunyan to go on a rampage.
The safest way to thin the policy forest is to understand the circumstances that created each tree. If those circumstances no longer exist, kill the tree. If only some of the circumstances still exist, cut off all the unnecessary branches. This is my basic litmus test. In a perfect world, each major policy would have an easily accessible decision/reason timeline. The internet makes this research simple in some cases like the Army urinalysis program. Timelines frequently explain policy origins and make it easy to determine when a program has gone off the rails or outlived its usefulness. Military drug testing began in 1971 with a directive from President Nixon to identify service members returning from Vietnam who needed rehabilitation. Do we still have drug-addicted service members returning from Vietnam? No, so kill the program. Is there value in a drug testing program? My personal opinion is the value doesn’t justify the expense and effort for today’s all-volunteer force. If the leaders in my generation decide the value of drug testing exceeds the effort and expense, we should create a new right-sized, end-user oriented program from scratch. We need to critically analyze every major policy in this way.
Successful policy change will drive cultural change and restore trust in the organization. In Part II, I’ll explain why it’s my generation’s duty to grab the policy pioneer tools to prune the trees and thin the forest.
