Most people think that a mistake is a sign of a weak mind and they believe that if you just try harder you will stop making them. They think that being careful is a shield against the mess of the world and they tell their workers to pay more attention and they write long books about how to be better at your job.

I spend my days smelling things and I can tell you that trying harder does not change the way a scent behaves and it does not change the way data moves through a broken system either. If you have a bottle of perfume that leaks then it does not matter how carefully you hold it or how much you love the scent because the liquid will find the crack and it will ruin your rug. The same truth holds for an office where a customer moves house and the staff has to change their address in seventeen different places.

Designing for Failure

The mistake is not the fault of the girl behind the desk who is trying to do her best between two phone calls and a lunch break that she will probably skip. The mistake belongs to the person who built the seventeen places and then told her that she just needs to be more careful.

If you give a human a job that requires seventeen perfect clicks then you are asking for a failure and you are using math to set a trap for your own people.

The Ball of Knots

I tried to fold a fitted sheet this morning and I felt that same kind of anger that an office worker feels when the computer asks for the same data for the fifth time in an hour. A fitted sheet has no corners that make sense and it has no edges that want to stay straight and it is a piece of cloth that wants to be a ball of knots.

You tuck one side and the other side snaps back and hits you in the face and you end up throwing the whole thing in the closet and hoping no one sees it. Most systems for managing a lease or a loan are just like that fitted sheet. They are full of elastic parts that pull against each other and they never quite lie flat and they make you feel like you are bad at your job even when you are doing exactly what you were told to do.

The Propagation of Error

A customer moves from a street in Chicago to a street in Dallas and they call the office to tell them about the move. The administrator picks up the phone and she opens the first screen and she types the new street and the new zip code and she feels good about it.

But then she remembers that the billing profile is a different screen and she has to open that and type it again. Then she remembers that the legal notices have to go to a specific officer at the company and that is a third screen. Then there is the asset location which matters for the tax man and that is a fourth screen. By the time she gets to the seventh screen her mind is already thinking about the next call or the sandwich in her bag and she misses the eighth screen.

The eighth screen is the one that tells the system where to send the letter at the end of the lease and because she missed it the customer will never get that letter.

Six weeks later that letter arrives at the old house in Chicago and the new person living there looks at it and they throw it in the trash. The customer in Dallas is waiting to hear what to do with their machines and they hear nothing and they get angry and they call the office to complain.

The boss looks at the file and see that the billing address is right and he wonders why the notice went to the wrong place and then he goes to the administrator and tells her to be more careful next time. He might even buy a yellow sticky note and write a checklist on it and tape it to her monitor.

The Inevitable Math

It is a confession that the tools are not good enough to do the work and it is a way of shifting the blame from the machine to the person. If you need a piece of paper to tell you how to use a million dollar piece of technology then the technology is the problem and not the person using it.

We call this a lack of care but it is actually just a matter of math. If a person is right ninety-nine times out of a hundred then they are a very good worker. But if they have to do seventeen things to finish one task then the chance of them getting the whole task right drops to about eighty-four percent. If they have to do it twenty times then the chance of a mistake is almost one in five. You are paying people to fail and then you are getting mad at them for the thing you bought.

The Olfactory Truth

In my world of smells we talk about top notes and base notes. The top note is what you smell first but the base note is what stays on your skin for hours. Most software is all top notes and it looks pretty and it has nice buttons and it makes a good show when you first buy it.

But the base note is the data and how that data lives in the deep parts of the system. If the data is not the same in every room of the house then the whole house smells wrong. You can spray as much perfume as you want on the top but you cannot hide the smell of a base note that has gone sour.

One Language, One Place

When a lender wants to keep their books clean they need a way to make a change once and have it stick everywhere. They need a way to look at a contract and an asset and a customer as if they are all part of the same story instead of three different books written in three different languages.

This is why people look for equipment financing software that keeps everything in one place and lets the different parts talk to each other through the same wires. If the billing screen knows what the notice screen is doing then the administrator does not have to be a hero and she just has to be a person. She can type the address once and then she can go back to helping the customer or she can finally eat her sandwich.

We spend so much money on training people to act like robots because we are too cheap to buy robots that act like they have a brain. We tell our staff to watch out for the seventeen screens and we give them bigger monitors so they can see more of their own failures at once.

We think that if we just find the right person with the right level of focus then the problem will go away. But focus is a thing that runs out like a battery and it gets lower every time the phone rings or every time a coworker walks by to ask a question. A system that relies on a human never having a bad day or a tired afternoon is a system that is built to break.

The War Against Tools

I have seen offices where the walls are covered in these checklists and the air is thick with the stress of people trying not to forget the seventeenth step. It is a heavy way to live and it makes people want to quit their jobs and go do something else where the math is not stacked against them. They feel like they are constantly fighting a war against their own tools and they are right.

When you have to fight your tools to do your work then you are not really working and you are just surviving.

Flowing Like Water

The fix for this is not a new training video or a more stern talk from the manager. The fix is to look at the seventeen screens and ask why they are not one screen. The fix is to use the parts of the system that allow information to flow like water from one bucket to the next without a person having to carry it in their hands.

When the data stays in sync on its own then the people can do the things that humans are actually good at doing. They can talk to the customers and they can solve the hard problems and they can help the business grow.

The Neat Cylinder

It is much better to have a system that is simple and strong than a system that is complex and fragile. I finally learned how to fold that fitted sheet by stopping the fight and just rolling it into a neat cylinder and it does not look like a hotel bed but it is clean and it fits in the drawer.

Sometimes you have to stop trying to force the thing to be something it is not and you have to change the way you handle it. In the world of money and machines this means stopping the search for the perfect worker and starting the search for the platform that does not ask its workers to be perfect.

We want to believe that we can win through effort but effort is a limited resource and we should save it for the things that matter. Changing a zip code should not be a test of character and it should not be a gamble with the future of a customer relationship. It should be the easiest part of the day and it should happen in the background while we do the real work of building something that lasts.

If you find yourself staring at seventeen screens then you should know that you are not the problem and the screen is.

You should look for a better way to hold the data so that it stays where you put it and it shows up where it is needed and it never smells like a mistake.