THE TYRANNY OF TINY THINGS

An old saw in the world of business claims, “Twenty percent of what you do makes eighty percent of the difference.” I think this transcends the realm of Mere Cliché and moves into that of Immutable Truth.

Ask the husband whose unplanned stop at the florist on his way home from the office results in him waking up with a smile on his face every day for a week.  Ask the preacher who decides to make one more visit at the end of a long day and ends up in a critical pastoral intervention and a saved life.  Ask the department head who plans an innocuous weekend for his key leaders at a cabin in the woods just to get away for bit and ends up instead with amazing morale improvements, increased profits, and off-the-chart increases in efficiency. Ask the mother whose unplanned moment of candor with her troubled teenager regarding her own screwed up adolescence brings a parenting nightmare to resolution. Ask the trucker who notices a tiny blemish on the sidewall of a steer tire and has it replaced to be on the safe side thereby saving his life and the life of the lady driving the Corolla who passes him on an icy road an hour later.

Ask those at the helm of the launch of the Affordable Care Act.

I am not sure it rises to the level of Apocalyptic Disaster as the Obama-Is-The-End-Of-America crowd has crowed.  Nor am I sure it is no big deal and will be easily remedied as some in the administration have suggested. But if it is not a big deal, it certainly is a deal. The White House has lost ground. Support is eroding. Confidence is shaken. Uneasiness is taking the place of enthusiastic optimism. “If they can’t get the rollout right, how are they going to deal with my cancer years from now?” With my diabetes … with my congenital heart condition … with my son’s mental illness … with my daughter’s cystic fibrosis?

Who knows what small things done differently and better would have altered the outcome? Twelve lines of code written more carefully? More experienced, more creative, and perhaps more expensive tech consultants who could easily anticipate the problems?  Although no social program of this magnitude has ever been launched without similarly serious problems, you can be sure our friend on the right will be sticking it to us over this for some time.

Wise folks have told us not to sweat the small stuff. Okay. However there is a tyranny to the tiny things – more specifically, most of the small stuff doesn’t deserve our perspiration but sweating the right small stuff will make a big difference. It may make all the difference in the world.