Screwworms and Maintenance Culture

It appears that screwworms, a type of maggot that lays eggs in livestock, which the US eradicated in the 1950s, have returned to the country. This will cause billions of dollars in damages.

“No victory is so complete that it cannot be undone by a handful of careless middle managers who don’t grasp the importance of the system they have been charged with maintaining,” wrote Matt Shapiro, continuing: “Some group of people were in charge of holding the line on the screwworm barrier. They failed. And, having failed, they then failed to act quickly enough to fix the problem. Maybe they didn’t raise the alarm, or maybe the alarm wasn’t loud enough. Maybe the people in power who were supposed to hear the alarm didn’t realize how severe this problem was. This is a problem that should never have gotten this bad. It always seems that, in situations like this, everyone and no one is to blame.”

If you want to read the details about the eradication, the establishment of a barrier in Panama protecting the Central- and North-American countries above it, and the recent failure to maintain it working, I direct you to Matt’s article. Here, instead, I will answer the following question: The maintenance of large-scale projects is tricky, because smart and driven people do not want to work on projects offering limited growth opportunities, and because it’s hard to stay alert with regards to threats one did not experience on their flesh; how can we prevent complacency and preserve competent executing even in these situations?

Complacency problems require cultural solutions

The first half of the solution is the realization that the default trajectory of large-scale maintenance projects is toward complacency and that, crucially, incentives do not change that.ShareCopy

Do not get me wrong: incentives are powerful in most situations; just not for maintenance projects. This is because of a few reasons:

• Incentives work better on ambitious people, but ambitious people do not want to work on maintenance projects, nor should we want them to, due to high opportunity costs. Conversely, less ambitious people have lower receptivity to financial incentives.

• Incentives work better in projects whose lead time between input and output is short. Maintenance projects tend to have a large lead time, in the sense that maintenance quality can degrade for years without cracks showing.

When incentives are ineffective, we shall turn to cultural solutions, which are largely about creating and sustaining habits that maintain complacency low and quality of execution high. Here are some examples of what this could mean in the context of maintaining the screwworm barrier: