Nothing brings out my inner-Scrooge like those cheap strings of wire and bulbs. The holidays are almost upon us and my apprehension is already creeping in.
What first came as a hundred feet of neatly folded rows and slid seamlessly out of a slender box is now a mess. Worn cardboard bulges like an aged lithium battery, threatening to explode. Get the lights out of the box and you still must disentangle them. Our headphones have cut their cords, but Christmas lights still give us our annual lesson in entropy: only one potential path fits smoothly in that tiny box while infinite other paths are indiscernible from a rat’s rest. Each involves myriads of Gordian tangles of what are at best ‘hooda knots.’1 At least today’s lights reliably turn on when you plug them in.
Generations younger than mine do not know what I’m talking about. Back in the before times, after you got the dammed strings untangled, you next had to hunt down and replace the dead bulbs. This was because if a single light was dead, the whole string would not work. Since the bulbs were wired up in series the electricity couldn’t connect through any loose or burnt-out node.
Families with more money than mine probably just bought new Christmas lights each year. Walmart wasn’t around yet though, so things hadn’t gotten cheap enough to chuck them out just because they annoyed you. Blue-collar homes were left hunting and pecking for each of the problem bulbs. My family kept a small supply of known good bulbs, and we’d slowly work our way down the line, wiggling as we went, testing all the connections and replacing the odd bulb until the string came to life. Only then could you decorate the tree.
The whole process was time consuming and dumb, which is why you don’t see these series circuit Christmas strings around anymore. Today’s lights run a parallel backup wired path, so a single light can’t disrupt the whole chain. That additional wire costs more money, but the time and anguish saved is enough that no one really purchases — or makes — the alternative anymore.
Unless we’re talking about your office and paperwork. Then the series circuit is alive and well.
Digital Carbon Paper
So many digital processes in the military still suck: the paperwork is just digital now. We just used digital carbon paper to copy it onto a screen. The waiting never changed.
We got here through a mix of reasons. Lack of imagination certainly played a role. Our organizations have also perennially harshly restricted permissions. Combined with a historical lack of computers — I’m just old enough to remember when most service-members didn’t have one — the result was we copied the old analog processes onto digits instead of changing how the work moved.
By just recreating antiquated processes instead of innovating, we missed at least two key digital advantages we should be taking advantage of: simultaneous review and effortless tracking. Back in 2011, before I’d started my first digital staffing system, tracking packets required a dozen large green notebooks. Paperwork went slowly from desk to desk, signed in and out of these lime tomes.
Only one person could look at a packet at a time. That meant the lead time was mostly waiting: a week or so at each desk, quickly adding up to 110 days of idling for every combined 10 days of actual staffing. The work was barely consuming any time. The route was. Unlike the innovation we tested in 2011, most units just recreated the old analog process on their computers
Today, we’re not noticeably better. Three separate times in the past month I’ve found our staff stymied by this same old broken process. In the first case, a single form took 30 days to transit 18 desks only to arrive overdue on mine. The autopsy found not a single adjustment by any of those one-and-a-half dozen staffers. Our Model-T spent 30 days on the staff assembly line and never gained a single wheel, bumper, or bolt.
This wasn’t a one-off either. Another packet sat ignored in an inbox for three weeks before a staffer excavated it; it reached my desk a day before it was due. Then there were the two requests that began their journey back in July. Just this week, I finally got them approved by personally walking into our higher headquarters office and chasing them around the building. It shouldn’t take an international flight across the dateline to get digital paperwork approved. That sort of time investment makes wiggling burned-out Christmas lights look efficient by contrast.
Assessing the Assembly Line
GEARs and ETMS are just two of the systems we use to staff paperwork today. And they suck, hence why ‘32 different garrisons have all made 32 different versions of GEARS.’ They principally suck because they don’t reach out to a new horizon but instead to firmly entrench us in the old one. I owe this paradigm to Jennifer Pahlka’s post this past spring, which I’ve written about previously.
My shorthand for her three horizons is this: H1 is the current process, H2 is the innovation step, and H3 is the future potential state. The catch is that innovation step can pull in either direction. H2− uses new tools to entrench the old process; H2+ uses them to move toward new ways of working. Simply replicating paper processes on digits lands us firmly in H2−.
Alternatively, when Captain Erik and the staff I was on built an alternative — <checks notes…> 15 years ago — we took advantage of those two unique digital innovations: simultaneous review and effortless tracking.
First, we made visibility the default, not a scavenger hunt. From the start of any packet, everyone in the chain could see its overall status. At the Group level, I could see a packet that hadn’t even left the company. GEARs can ostensibly do this too, but users have to dig for the overall view. Its default, ‘what’s in my inbox’, gives you a digital version of those hand-written ledgers in green notebooks.
Second, back in 2011, we grouped multiple offices together for review. Each could comment on or correct the packet in place, without downloading it and then having to reupload it. The packet stayed put; the offices came to it.
Unlike paper printed folders, our inline system didn’t get lost in the lawyer’s stack of binders either. Instead, multiple sections could look at the packets simultaneously and annotate their issues or make their tweaks in stride.
If this rhymes with your own staffing problems, start with those two fixes: make the packet’s status visible by default, and let multiple offices review together instead of waiting their turn. Stop making everyone downstream wait for loose or burnt-out bulb.
Other improvements need not be digital. Look at your paperwork assembly lines and ask what each stop actually does: Does it add value? Does it buy down a meaningful risk? Or is it just checking that someone else checked?
Quality assurance (QA) has a place, one where AI agents can help a ton. Look at your ratio of additions versus risk assessment. Not every step needs to add a wheel or a bumper to the Model-T, but a 100% QA ratio rarely makes sense. Most of our paperwork is not for a nuclear reactor. Focus on value added.2
Of course the most efficient digital processes will stall when they reach ‘parking brake’ analog commanders who still require printed folders. In a perfect world we’d be selecting fewer of them, but alas today is not that day.
Regardless, every minute spared along the way buys your team more time.
If we want to create anything new, we need time: time to think and listen, to learn and iterate, to be wrong before we can be right. Perhaps more than anything, we need time to train.
The test isn’t whether the packet lives on a computer. It’s whether it spends less time waiting. Wiggling bulbs is wasted time and energy. Pick one of your packets, follow it from start to finish, and separate time spent working from time spent waiting idle. Then change the route and look again. If the waiting hasn’t shrunk, you’ve digitized the green notebook, not innovated the process.
As in ‘WHO DA HELL TIED THIS F@^%#$ KNOT?
Never require each step to add something. I’ve seen multiple leaders require each step to say something, with one chief of staff providing everyone a list of NSTR synonyms to make it read like work was being done. This is institutionalizing inefficiency and is absurd.
When I was a kid we had to put the Christmas lights up and my job was to take them down. In January… We always took down the lights on New Years Day no matter what the weather was. (It was always cold. If you were lucky it was cold and raining too!) I put out lights 1 year of the 44 I’ve lived here. If you want to see decorations get an invite to the inside of my home.