Ramblemuse Touch Points

An episode of Freakonomics embodied the concept that creating explicit requirements replaces prior tacit requirements. In this episode, a day-care center in Haifa imposed an explicit fine for late pick-ups by parents. In contradiction to the expected decrease in late pick-ups, the explicit fine replaced the tacit penalty of parental guilt and the number of late pick-ups doubled. The monetary fine was less severe for parents than the prior emotional fine and they modified their behavior accordingly. Removing the fees later didn’t bring things back to where they had been. The bell had been rung and couldn’t simply be unrung.

Licensing of massage therapy also seems to be having unexpected side-effects. Before there were explicit state requirements for entry to practice, good schools would teach to tacitly held concepts of what knowledge, skills, and abilities made for a “quality” practitioner. There may not have been an explicit statement of requirements, but instructors knew what was good technique and application and would impel students toward achieving it. That system of evaluation, of tacit standards, is dying if not already dead.

One effect of licensing has been to supplant the tacit conventions, in total, with explicit requirements. Unfortunately, those writing the requirements generally haven’t had an understanding of systems theory. I’m now hearing complaints about corporate schools and career colleges that aren’t creating “good” practitioners. Yet, when I go and look at the prerequisites for licensing or certification, they say next to nothing about what competencies an entry level graduate should be able to demonstrate. At most, the requirements stipulate an ability to sit for certain numbers of hours in certain types of classes, to interact sufficiently well with other students to not make waves, and perhaps to pass a multiple choice exam at the end. There is very little to guide a consumer, a prospective student, a 3rd party payer, or a potential health care referrer in what to expect that a newly licensed entrant would actually be able to do.

As a profession mainstreams and increase entry stipulations, as massage therapy has been doing, the economics of providing training change. When hour requirements push up toward the federal financial aid minimums, 600 hours for loans and 720 hours for full access to grants, pay-as-you-go programs become infeasible, both from total cost and from competition. Financial aid requires accreditation which also raises costs and requires more administrative resources. The response of the system is that career colleges and corporate chain schools take on a new importance — they have greater resources to leverage the higher resource demands than do smaller, stand-alone schools. They also bring with them a recognition that training to specific requirements is an educational business rather that a self-supporting life practice, such as teaching martial arts.

As an educational business, a school is doing a “good” job if its graduates meet the minimum requirements for entry to a profession. If a school is doing this, yet the graduates fail to meet expectations, the problem is less likely to be with the school than with requirements that don’t sufficiently stipulate the expected outcomes from training. Most often this situation seems to arise from the idea that explicit requirements will add to tacit requirements. Almost always, however, explicit requirements, as with the day-care parents, replace prior tacit ones. If you don’t write a complete set of requirements, you won’t get what you expect. I covered this recently in my column Show me your Outcome Competencies.

I recently got John Sterman’s Book Business Dynamics — Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World. The opening lines of the preface state well the premise:

Accelerating economic, technological, social, and environmental change challenge managers and policy makers to learn at increasing rates, while at the same time the complexity of the systems in which we live is growing. Many of the problems we now face arise as unanticipated side effects of our own past actions. All too often the policies we implement to solve important problems fail, make the problem worse, or create new problems. Effective decision making and learning in a world of growing dynamic complexity requires us to become systems-thinkers to expand the boundaries of our mental models and develop tools to understand how the structure of complex systems creates their behavior.

Sterman is Director of MIT’s Systems Dynamics Group and with the MIT Sloan School of Management. Sterman’s book is just shy of 1000 pages with CD in addition. That motivates why, in his speech accepting the Jay Forrester award, Sterman commented that he was instructed to make the speech shorter than the book. Several years back, looking far more briefly at systems thinking relative to massage schools, I wrote the column Ecological Succession. The closing quote from that article applies well to the writing of requirements.

You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.—Yogi Berra