The Pattern Emerges

Had the Best Value Inn I was camping out in been in town even half the size of Harrisonburg, the casual observer could have easily justified sending me for a reasonable suspicion drug screen. Since Cozad, NE may have had a population of around 2,000 people at the time, I was thrilled that I didn’t have to get a place in the closest town nearby; Kearny was about 30 miles east and didn’t have many more options to choose from. 

While my lodging choice wasn’t necessarily terrible, I can’t say the same for many of the decisions I made back then when it came to our vehicles. Buying a crappy car was one thing; we did what we could with what we had to work with. But routine maintenance and repairs were a completely different story. We’ve been blessed to have access to trustworthy mechanics, but they still need to be paid. With our finances so tight, we kicked the routine maintenance can down the road as far as we could - every single time - which usually ended up getting done when we had to take the car in for something else more urgent. Even then, it was always a question of what would be the minimum we could do to keep the wheels turning. There are so many stories I could include here. I won’t with hopes of maintaining some credibility (and to avoid the post-traumatic stress it would likely cause me).

Had the breakdown Cindy called me about while I was in Cozad, NE been the only one, we may have been able to write it off as back luck. It most certainly was not the only one! That was part of a repeating pattern, and that pattern should have served as a leadership classroom. Unchecked scarcity, which drove each of my decisions to slap a band-aid on every car (and other) issue that came at us then, turns minor failures into a daily grind that tests every ounce of purpose we claim to have. I distinctly remember standing in the hall of that library in Cozad thinking, “What the hell is the point…?” and feeling completely helpless. It’s tough to focus on training someone to work safer when you’re thousands of miles away from the person who needs you most and you can help them in a time of need.

In that same time period, though, my behavior-based safety role led to me being involved in nearly every incident investigation at my home facility. In every one, we applied various root cause analysis tools to be sure we identified the driving factors. It’s easy enough to point fingers at the injured individual, but that rarely prevents recurrence. But discovering the primary issue gave us a chance to eliminate similar or worse scenarios in the future, in our plant and others doing the same kind of work. Had I thought to apply that same approach personally at the time, specifically to the glaring patterns in car breakdowns, it may have dawned on me that those band-aid fixes weren’t saving us time or money; the long term costs were much greater.

Cumulative resource failures (should) force us to stop reacting and start tracking every detail - planting the seed of mastery of detail. Thankfully, my professional experience helped me initiate this in my personal life - eventually. Once I did, the results were immediate. That skill set served us well in 2020 when the complete care facility we were paying nearly $12k/month allowed my 96 year old grandmother to fall more than twenty times in 90 days but couldn’t seem to identify why it was happening. More on that later, though. Before that, we’ll dig into how the ripple effects of scarcity spill over in every aspect of our lives. First, I want you to think about one “leaky” resource in your life (a budget item, a time drain, or some repeated small failure) over the next week or so. Note any hidden costs you may not have noticed before and one thing you can do to change the pattern.