Careful what you wish for… ;-)
It was one of the stranger coach deliveries… a customer had just left our Florida facility with a brand new bus… and took a two lane shortcut to the highway.
He said he heard a bump… looked in his rearview mirror and saw an 8 foot alligator rolling onto the shoulder. Apparently his duals had run over its’ tail… and set it spinning.
Depending on how you feel about alligators… what followed was good news… or bad. Apparently just dazed, it sprinted safely into the grass.
It seems that protecting alligators has worked… and there are now tons of them lurking in Florida, many creating mischief… and some doing worse…
In my area we have seals.. lots of them. Since the Federal Government started protecting marine mammals in 1972, we have more and more. Like people, they love lobster, and compete with fishermen for them and all sorts of fish. Gee, sometimes they cheat and break into traps and nets.
AND, since sharks love seals (as entrees), Great Whites are steadily marching towards us.
My folks used to say “be careful what you wish for… you might get it”, which seems to apply to seals and alligators.
Being careful about what you wish for should involve considering the consequences of success. It’s not entirely unpredictable that an abundance of alligators might attack pets and (tragically) children. Who could have predicted that protecting seals would produce… lots of seals?
There seem to be two practical applications here.
When business tries new things, the big worry seems to be “what if we fail?” A good point, but you also need to ask… can we handle success?
Occasionally I’d get desperate calls from customers who needed equipment quickly for a contract they just “won”. They hadn’t considered that equipment they needed might not be readily available.
Or, if you win this bid, can you hire (and train) enough drivers? Get the financing necessary to ramp up?
You get it, if you mess up this part pain, or worse, follows.
One wonders if legislators and regulators have ever considered the consequences of success.
First, you have to define “success”
At one point a Federal bureaucrat defined it as “zero fatalities” in the motorcoach industry, and set out to achieve that goal.
Who can argue with safety? Who can argue with cuddly seals? Both are good, but overdoing it can be counterproductive.
In the case of safety, preventing accidents is good, but some of the methods used may be harmful.
In order to impress you...a bit of Latin “Reductio ad Absurdum”. We can make buses 100% safe by governing them (and every other vehicle that might hit them) at 5 mph. In fact, that works on two levels… accidents would be very gentle and no one would be willing to ride, so zero casualties. SUCCESS.
By tipping the regulatory balance too far, we make it difficult for small companies to survive, and raise larger company’s’ overhead. Compliance costs...make that cost too high and passenger counts drop. We’ll have fewer bus accidents (and fewer buses), but more folks will die in cars.
This argument is not for no regulation, but for less. It seems regulators are marching towards “success” in all sorts of paperwork perfection, but is that success creating other problems? And how much does it really impact safety? Who suffers if they don’t figure on some predictable consequences? (hint… it’s not the bureaucrats)
Other than sharks, one hazard of diving is a ruptured eardrum. When it occurs underwater, divers get disoriented because cold water enters the inner ear and messes with their mind. When it happens the correct thing to do is… nothing. Wait 15 seconds... the water warms, and the brain reboots.
Panicking, and flailing about, only makes things worse. Lots of problems resolve themselves without government intervention, and “success” can dangerous. Before we, or the government, get involved in solving problems, it would be wise to give careful consideration to what we hope for, and what it would look like if we got that wish.
You can only hunt wild turkeys in season around here, and as a result, we have LOTS of them. They’re intimidating because they’re taller than my car, and they march down the middle of the road in rowdy gangs.
BUT, it came as news to me that they can fly, and spend the night perched in trees.
Knowing a bit of biology, it didn’t come as a complete surprise to me that they pooped, but the volume is staggering, and when they’re in a tree above my parking spot…
When wise regulators wished for the turkey population to rebound by limiting hunting… I wish they’d have pictured what success would look like on the roof of my car. Perhaps I should send them a sample.
