Who’s setting priorities for the government shut down?
One of the hardest things for a manager to do is to set priorities. We face an array of conflicting demands on our limited resources and are often confronted with things that are urgent but not important as opposed to things that are important but not urgent. It becomes almost impossible to set priorities when you're told to shut down non-essential operations. How do you decide which services are essential?
It seems obvious that there are a number of people in our government that haven't figured out the answer to this question. While I am always hesitant to draw conclusions from mainstream media articles without hearing from the agencies concerned, there are a number of issues connected to the government shut down that give me pause:
- California National Guard aircraft repair crews are furloughed. These crews repair the aircraft used to support wildland firefighters throughout the state. At least four major fires are burning in the state as of this morning.
- The Centers for Disease Control have halted disease monitoring, just in time for the start of the flu season. This means our ability to detect outbreaks of disease or incidents of tainted food are curtailed.
- Scientists at the US Geological Survey who monitor earthquakes are on furlough. While a lot of the detection systems are automated, the ability to interpret that data rests with these missing scientists.
A common mistake when deciding on essential services is to look at the obvious without actually doing a path analysis. What this means is we tend to look at the end service and who provides it without considering that many of these end services are the product of multiple hands. I once took a team of unit leaders to help staff a disaster without realizing that none of us knew how to do simple tasks like prepare slide presentations.
I'm not criticizing the decisions noted above. They may have been made for good reasons. But reducing our ability to support vital services by limiting logistical and intelligence capabilities makes no sense. If this shut down continues, as it seems it will, we need to seriously rethink our priorities.