You can’t win. Play anyway

One of the first office jobs I held was the summer after my freshman year in college. I worked for McDonnell Aircraft Company. as a material accounting cost clerk. MDAC was a defense contractor that made F-4 Phantom Jets and the Gemini space capsule among other things. Today it is part of Boeing.

I was a very lowly cog in a large complex system. My job was to write up the accounting entries to make sure that the inventory systems were in sync with the actual inventory. Some auditor would go out on the factory floor and count how many left-handed wing tips were sitting somewhere along the assembly line. My entire job was to compare the auditors count of actual inventory with the number recorded in the accounting system and then write out the journal entry to adjust the number in the accounting system to match the number that the auditor had found on the factory floor.

It was as mind numbing as you might imagine. I wrote the entries by hand onto paper forms that had to be reviewed and approved by my supervisor and then sent off elsewhere to be punched onto punch cards and fed into the computer located three buildings away.

There is one entry that sticks in my head. The auditors reported that they had counted three Pratt and Whitney jet engines on the floor. The accounting system thought there were four. How do you lose a 16-foot jet engine? Not my problem and no one else seemed terribly concerned. I wrote up the journal entry and it happily flowed off into the system.

You don’t design and build fighter jets with a handful of smart people. You need a complex system of people and processes and technology working together to pull it off. People, process, and technology is one of those cliches that gets thrown around a lot in organizations. I didn’t know the cliche at the time, but I was living in the middle of its reality.

This was when I began to grasp the complexity baked into large organizations. There are two choices for how to play in this environment. One is to be content with occupying a particular niche in the greater whole. The other is to wonder how it all fits together. Clearly, I opted for door number two.

I chose the word “play” intentionally. There is another lesson that I found in my time as a clerk. You have to accept that systems don’t always match reality. You have to build in mechanisms for correcting when systems and reality fall out of sync. And those mechanisms have their own weaknesses. Complexity and perfection are not reconcilable. Order is always battling chaos.

When I was learning physics, we learned about the second law of thermodynamics and the notion of entropy. There was some nasty math involved but our teacher summed things up this way:

Life is a game. You can’t win. You’re going to lose. You can’t get out of the game.

That leaves you with the option of playing simply for the sake of playing. A good lesson for all seasons.