UVALDE, BOEING, COJONES, and Shared Values
It took the US JD 604 days to acknowledge the glaring truth: the police response to the May 24, 2022, deadly Uvalde, Texas, elementary school shooting was “a failure that should not have happened.”
Well, duh!.. One year, seven months, and 25 days, and nearly 600 pages later, the report highlights “a sweeping array of training, communication, leadership and technology problems that federal officials say contributed to the crisis.” I find this pathetic and laughable – if not for the deaths of 19 kids and 2 adults who fell victim to one wacko while 376 “law enforcement officers” couldn’t stop him. That’s enough people to fill two Boeing 737 Max 9s!
I wanted to call them “376 wackos,” but that would be wrong. They aren’t wackos. Most of them believe they’re doing an “okay” job, even though most Uvalde residents think differently. Both sides are right.
Now, here’s the kicker: bureaucrats follow the rules, report “results,” and suggest “corrections when things go awry ” – to “results” or the report. Here’s another one, compiled from 260 interviews and 14,000 documents and videos. Impressive, as always, and TL,DR.
Here’s what you may want to consider without the 600-page report
1. There was no “lack of leadership.”
What’s “leadership” are you talking about? Let’s use a more locally understandable terminology: lack of cojones.
2. The lack of cojones is not the root cause either.
Albeit obvious from day one, from minute one rather, the reported cojones deficiency is not the fault of the officers. It is the fault of their chiefs, the chiefs’ chiefs, and the entire system that we live in: they all should have never been selected for this job.
Those guys came off the production line destined to do other things in life. If not for the “progressive” HR policies, regulations and rules, they could have made a decent career as salesmen, drivers, insurance brokers etc. etc. – in many occupations that do not require the specific values that are must-have if you dedicate yourself to public safety.
It took them over an hour to find the key to the room that apparently was not locked. That “delay” happened because all their guts didn’t want to get into trouble, not because someone did not have a pair of leaderships or whatever they are called locally.
People are driven by their values. Nothing personal, but driven by their self-protection values, these people always stay “on the safe side,” making safe decisions (or none at all), and protecting their jobs above everything else.
3. Don’t blame the AR-15: it’s just a tool
I am all for the complete ban on all kinds of firearms. There are enough statistics that show a clear correlation between guns and homicide rate, but how many more Uvaldes we need to ban them?
The problem is with the lawmakers. The lawmakers, just like their “innocent” law-enforcing nephews who “did nothing wrong” during the Uvalde crisis, share the same self-preservation values that drive their actions. Their entire army, from a county AG – all the way to the Speaker of the House, do not have the cojones to challenge the “culture” supported by the wide majority – or the wild majority rather – of gun-lovers a.k.a. rednecks. They call it “democracy.”
4. Boeing and Uvalde share DNA
Boeing, your typical public company, shares a lot of DNA with Uvalde. The common genetic makeup, seen in many top-notch businesses, involves misguided talent selection processes that promote individuals unsuitable for their roles. This propels overall system inefficiency, triggering a vicious cycle.
Let’s just note their love affair with DEI, already discussed. This DEI fallacy has been a catalyzer of their malaises that recently resulted in serious incidents and most likely will lead to more.
It would be unfair to call them “surprises”: they are not at all unexpected. The unionized workforce is a proven indicator of a serious health problem for any company, even a very popular one. Basically, that’s the only merit unions have today.
Preaching “excellence” and promoting DEI while having unionized employees is like discussing smart investment strategies while carrying a credit card debt. When a company is managed by a true and honest leader (and not by a career manager), workers do not need anyone “protecting their rights.”
Where do we go from here
Without reading the 600-page Uvalde report and without waiting for a yet-to-come much longer report on the Boeing doors flying separately from the airplane, we will hardly benefit from any more of those discoveries. Again, the government bureaucrats diligently describing them on our tax money will be offended: Lessons Learned are important! Like the innocent officers in Uvalde and DEI-anxious career managers at Boeing, these overworked bureaucrats are absolutely certain that they’re doing their best.
Of course. But those lessons become “learned” only if and when we have learned something. Apparently, after thousands of wacko- or techno-induced deaths, we DO NOT HAVE learned anything. Not at Boeing, not in the area of firearms legislation, not in numerous other areas. Because we tend to be looking for the lost key where there’s enough light, i.e. more convenient and comfortable, and not where we may have lost it.
True, Boeing ongoing issues may not be solely attributed to a flawed talent selection process but could also be influenced by other external factors. But 99 percent of those issues will boil down to the predominance of “shareholder value,” and now DEI fallacy, over quality and safety that are defined almost entirely by the human factor.
We need to move the focus from continuous attempts to correct past mistakes – to creating conditions that make those mistakes highly improbable. As those mistakes are predominantly human-generated, the focus must be on the right selection of humans for each job – from school security and fuselage production all the way to the Speaker and President. At the “individual contributor” level, this is more achievable than one may think: ensure that their basic values are aligned.
The top of this vertical may take a generation to change. But if we do not start paying attention to the human factor where it is already in our control, then other factors will continue winning over. Uvalde and Boeing news will become the new normal, and we’ll follow the Mayas or the dinosaurs, depending on where we see ourselves on the planet.
What will be your preference?