Evening Must-Read: Clay Shirky on the Extraordinary Healthcare.gov Management Failure…

I can understand Barack Obama not yet realizing that after the news has filtered through five layers of bureaucracy, each with a direct incentive to take a step in the optimistic direction, what is reported to you is not what really exists. But Kathleen Sibellius was Governor of Kansas. And Marilyn Tavenner? They really have no excuse for not knowing better…

Indeed, Barack Obama really has no excuse.

You can say that he was just a senator–and that this is an argument that one should have a constitutional amendment that only people who have completed a full term as governor of a state should be eligible for the office of president, cough, John Beshear–but Lloyd Bentsen was just a senator too, and when he became Treasury Secretary he scattered a great many people from his senate office throughout the Treasury bureaucracy, and so acquired an extra cross-cutting information system. And the Kangxi Emperor scattered the hereditary bondslaves of his Manchu clan throughout the mandarinate… You gotta find some way to walk the trading floor, and if you don’t, you cannot imagine that you know what is going on.

Clay Shirky has very smart things to say about this:

Clay Shirky: » Healthcare.gov and the Gulf Between Planning and Reality:

For the first couple of weeks after the launch, I assumed any difficulties in the Federal insurance market were caused by unexpected early interest, and that once the initial crush ebbed, all would be well. The sinking feeling that all would not be well started with this disillusioning paragraph about… a staff member at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services… his superiors told him…

[…] in effect, that failure was not an option, according to people who have spoken with him. Nor was rolling out the system in stages or on a smaller scale, as companies like Google typically do so that problems can more easily and quietly be fixed. Former government officials say the White House, which was calling the shots, feared that any backtracking would further embolden Republican critics who were trying to repeal the health care law.

The idea that “failure is not an option” is a fantasy version of how non-engineers should motivate engineers… invented by a screenwriter, riffing on an after-the-fact observation about Apollo 13…. Failure is always an option. Engineers work as hard as they do because they understand the risk of failure. And for anything it might have meant in its screenplay version, here that sentiment means the opposite; the unnamed executives were saying “Addressing the possibility of failure is not an option.”