It’s all about money... Isn’t it?

An excerpt from an actual government brief assessing preparedness (minor changes added to preserve anonymity):

  

"Optimum Preparedness allows management to analyze preparedness performance in a cost environment.  The ratio of expected to actual preparedness is multiplied by expected budget to determine how much money should have been spent to reach current preparedness levels.  The ratio of expected budget to actual cost is multiplied by expected budget to determine cost to achieve expected preparedness levels."

It's kind of bureaucrat-speak gobbledygook, but that's not the point.  The point is that when all this is taken apart and made understandable is this: The underlying assumption of this major government organization is that more money will fix any problem. 

Literally - any problem.  There is no reference to any procedure, no reference to any personnel condition or manning level or training status, no reference to equipment needs, no assessment of reasons for underperformance, no lessons learned.  The one and only point of analysis here, the assumed determining factor for organization preparedness (and by extension, organization success or failure) is money.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that increasing the amount of money for a given venture will not improve preparedness if money was not the problem in the first place.  What if poor preparedness is due to poor training - or poor leadership – or miscommunication - or a natural disaster?

Even if insufficient funding does coincidentally turn out to be the problem, increasing the amount of money dedicated to fixing it will not help unless those extra funds are correctly applied.  If the reason for poor preparedness is too few vehicles in the company fleet, and an extra million dollars is spent to increase national marketing and put an ice cream machine in the CEO kitchen, then preparedness will not change.

The assumption that increasing funding will solve any problem may be an example of our epidemic of obsession with digital analysis, in which everything must be expressed in numerical form.  Dollars are a convenient way to digitize any problem - even if they are not the right thing to be assessing in a specific situation. 

Perhaps this assumption is simply the result of our current political environment, in which a problem is not considered solved unless and until truckloads of money have been dumped onto it.  This is how we've run up the largest peacetime deficit in US history, with little or nothing to show for it.

It is disturbing that the US government implicitly assumes that any given problem must be essentially due to underfunding… but not really surprising.  A common refrain heard in the halls of a certain major government facility is, "In the end, it's all about money."  Unfortunately, I have heard that line a multitude of times from any number of different people.  That does not make it any more intelligent.

Gryphem