Enough
Over the course of my adult life, I have found it necessary to rein in my perfectionist tendencies in many situations, to recognize that the cost to achieve the ideal outcome is sometimes too great or that it remains beyond my grasp. One such situation occurs when, during my weekly trip to the supermarket, I come to the toilet paper aisle.
I am a frugal person and therefore inclined to select the toilet paper that represents the most cost-effective use of my money. The difficulty arises when considering how to factor in all the variables that would demonstrate which of the available choices is the best buy. These variables include price, the number of rolls in the package, the length of each roll, and the number of plies. There are qualitative characteristics that might be taken into account as well but, frankly, I give up before I get to that point. There is a cost associated with the time required to make all the necessary calculations, time that could be devoted to a pursuit more pleasurable and rewarding than getting the cheapest toilet paper.
I also have my reputation to consider. I suspect that many would look askance at associating with someone who spends an inordinate amount of time, calculator in hand, staring a piles of Charmin, Northern, and Cottonelle.
My solution is simple, if not especially elegant. I buy the same brand in the same size package each time I need toilet paper. If it is on sale, I buy two.
The political scientist Herbert Simon coined the term "satisficing" to describe my behavior. The term is a portmanteau of "satisfying" and "sufficing." The perspective that led to its description was the recognition that, in real life, individuals are not always the supremely rational actors describe by economic theory.
There is another, more common, word we use to describe the decision to satisfice: enough. In the ancient history of the English language, "enough" conveyed the sense of perfection and completeness. Now we use it to mean sufficient. My process of deciding which toilet paper to buy might not be a supremely rational choice but it is sufficient to my purposes. It is enough.
It might fail the test of perfect rationality, but enough is an acceptable standard to use when making decisions.
Until it isn't.
Early in my city management career, an employee of the library visited me in my office to share his belief that the library director was stealing money from their receipts. This occurred not long after the advent of video cassette recorders, but before the proliferation of Blockbuster and other movie rental outlets, when many small town libraries saw a niche business opportunity that fit well with their expertise in loaning books. As a result, the cash drawer which formerly had collected nickels and dimes from overdue fines now contained ones, fives, and tens from film rentals.
I was a bit skeptical of the accusation. There was a suspicion of wrong-doing but no clear proof. The director was not popular with some members of the staff, so I worried this was an effort to set her up for a fall. My solution was to meet the employee at the library early on Monday morning, the day when funds were taken to the city clerk's office for recording and deposit. He and I counted the funds on hand together, I wrote down the amount which we both initialed, we locked up the building and left. I drove around the block to make sure the whistleblower did not come back and take some of the money himself.
I directed the city clerk to let me know the amount of the deposit brought to her office by the library director. When she did, it was $20.00 short. I fired the director after she confessed to the embezzlement.
I also instituted a simple system for keeping track of payments at the library. Staff members would record each transaction on generic numbered receipt forms with carbon copies. The copies would accompany the deposit when it came to the city clerk's office. The clerk would compare the amount of money with the total of the receipts. This approach to the problem lacked sophistication but I thought it was enough.
It wasn't. A year or so and two library directors later, the city's auditors asked me to verify library receipts. This was a routine test of our system, perhaps a result of the earlier incident. I obtained the weekly records of deposits made to the library account and compared these amounts with the receipt copies. They didn't match. Another library director confessed to embezzlement and was fired.
What went wrong with the system I thought was enough? When I asked the city clerk how this could have happened, she told me that, contrary to my clear instructions as to what should occur, they did not compare the receipt total with the funds deposited. Enough, it turned out, was not enough. (I might have wanted to discipline the city clerk for dereliction of duty but it was an elected position.)
Circumstances like this highlight a potential pitfall of relying on enough as a standard of decision-making: things will sometimes go awry. Manager, recognizing this, might be tempted to develop elaborate and seemingly fool-proof procedures to avoid the embarrassment of systems failure. Good luck with that. The lazy ignore procedures and the malicious find loopholes.
What is needed is finding a spot on the loose-tight continuum that will work with most people most of the time, recognizing that tightening further is not without its costs.
This is particularly evident in small organizations such as the cities for which I have worked. None of them had sufficiently large finance department staffs to segregate duties to the level that would completely satisfy auditors. At some point, the organization concludes how many people are enough, and hopes for the best. When enough proves to be inadequate, and embezzlement occurs, procedures are refined.
I have found that it is sometimes difficult for members of the governing body to understand that there are costs associated with operating too close to the tight end of the continuum. In one community where I worked, we had a long relationship with a consulting firm and used them routinely for engineering design and construction supervision services for street reconstruction projects. One year, Council asked that we solicit proposals from other firms, and selected one whose calculated cost for services was a few dollars less than the firm's we had been using. Problems arose almost immediately in areas related to the quality of inspection services. Additional costs were incurred for services that the other firm automatically included in their fee. We paid more in the long run, even ignoring the additional costs associated with developing a request for proposals, analyzing submittals, interviewing firms, reviewing a new contract form, and preparing a recommendation for the council.
Selecting toilet paper, designing a receipt system, and selecting a consultant offer similar views of what Herbert Simon called bounded rationality, the idea that decision-makers rarely, if ever, conduct rigorous analyses of the myriad variables characteristic of choices. Instead, they find a satisfactory result, one that they conclude is enough. When they find enough is not enough -- that the choice is not satisfactory -- they will consider adjustments. In this respect, they are demonstrating a thought process akin to Bayesian rationality in which probabilities are adjusted based on new information.
Incomplete information will always be a problem for executives when addressing complex problems in which other humans play a part. If all actors were perfectly rational, there might be some hope for us. That they are not has given rise to the study of behavioral economics through which, it is hoped, a better understanding can be gained as to what influences the decisions people make and why.
Few who choose local government administration for careers are behavioral economist. For those of us who must get along just doing the best we can, then, our efforts are better devoted to determining what is enough, given the limited information and time available, and revising our thinking when we find we are mistaken in our beliefs. Enough might never be enough but it will have to do.