See if you can guess where my family is on this continuum!
- Something is broken, we know it’s broken, we can fix it right away and we’ll learn from it.
- It’s broken, we know it’s broken, we fixed it, don’t worry, but we learned nothing, it will break again, I’m just doing my job.
- It’s broken, we know it’s broken, but we don’t think we can afford to fix it.
- It’s broken, but we don’t know it’s broken.
- It’s not broken (it is, but we’re not willing to admit it).
- It’s broken, we may or may not know it’s broken, but mostly, we don’t care enough to try to fix it, to learn how we could fix it better or even to accept help from people who care.
At one point we kind of did the second one: we “fixed” it (by writing a half-ass apology, by getting angry and writing nasty emails, telling me it was all my problem, etc).
Now things are solidly in the “toast” end.
Seth Godin writes about marketing, but I find his posts to be relevant to many more areas of life. This list was brazenly copied from “Different Kinds of Broken Systems“.