Sometimes it is fascinating to see how people’s narrow conception of problems
artificially limits the range of options they consider. For example, last year
I drove my neighbor, who did not have a car at the time, to a local Burger King
to buy some kids meals for her children. At the time they were doing a Pokemon
promotion and the store we visited had ran out of the Pokemon toy. So when we
get up to order the kids meals, the person taking orders informs us that sorry,
they’ve run out of the toys. We try to explain we don’t care about the toys,
we just want the meals to no avail. We ask to speak to the manager and get the
same runaround — sorry, but we’re out of the toys. We don’t care about the
toys, just give us the kids meal. It just isn’t getting through his skull. We
go to McDonald’s and manage to get some kids meals for the now very hungry children.
That event didn’t surprise me since they hardly stock the Burger King with
geniuses and the people there aren’t exactly paid to think. On the other hand
the high priced consultants and human relations folks at the university I work
at keep making a similar error in reasoning. The university completely overhauled
its performance evaluation system, and is beginning to train everybody on using
it. One of the main changes that is being touted is this: the old system graded
people on a 1 to 6 scale (with 6 being best). HR claims to have improved that
by, get this, saying they’ve replaced the number ratings with four letter grades.
Of course each possible grade represents a distinct level of performance and
the “grades” are clearly going to be converted into numbers somewhere along
the way to produce statistics showing the distribution of ratings, but the HR
folks keep repeating the same mantra — we have replaced the old number rating
system with a letter grade system.
Me? Like the folks in Spinal Tap, I have relabelled my amplifier to go up to
11, but I’m thinking about ditching the numbers and replacing that with letters
from A to K!