Post Office Parable

Kimberly Chapple
Editor

I'm a firm believer that the best solution for any problem stems from initiating dialogue and the resulting synergistic effect produced when more than one person's perspective navigates an issue.

As design engineers, I need your help on this one.

I'm worried. It seems that people are designing themselves right out of their systems. Humanity takes a back seat to technology when systems are designed to override human decisions. Why does this happen? Aren't we smart enough? I see examples of this in press releases crossing my desk. I hear about it in random conversations, such as one with a major defense contractor's engineering manager who told me about a plane crash that occurred when the craft's computer overrode the pilot's command to "pull up" during an air show. I've experienced it in day-to-day business operations. It's almost science fiction. Remember Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove: or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb"?

In my own Dr. Strangelove kind of way, I have a true story for you called "Post Office Parable: or, It's not how much you know, it's how much you care." A few weeks ago we experienced a problem with a direct mail piece. We should have mailed it 3rd class, but instead posted it 1st class and applied 1st class postage to 3,000 mail pieces. Following regulations, the post office refused to deliver the mailing and we almost had to scrap the whole thing. It didn't make much sense. Couldn't the post office keep the 1st class postage and mail the pieces 3rd class? Give the extra money to charity. Pocket it. Have lunch on us. Do anything, but please just mail our Trilogy of Design Engineering piece.

I was told it couldn't be done. So I went to pick up the mailing. However, when I got there I felt I had to give it one more try, as I hadn't talked to the "right" person, the person whose perspective we truly needed to come up with the best solution. I put my "dialogue is the key to solutions" and "if you don't ask, you'll never know" mantras to the test. And they worked.

I met the person in charge, Woodrow Kee, manager of business mail entry, in the parking lot. I explained our problem and asked for help. He listened. Then he explained: He wanted to help. He was very familiar with Designfax and Medical Equipment Designer, had worked with the delivery of our magazines for years. But he couldn't authorize the mailing because the million dollar, high-tech piece of equipment that reads the postmarks was designed with sensors that simply would not recognize our mailing. And it wouldn't allow any intervention at the human level to override the system's "decision." Ironic for a mailing destined for the very manufacturers whose engineers probably designed these components, don't you think?

Here's where the story gets good. People cared. And people came up with a solution. Not only did Mr. Kee devise alternatives, but he opened up the discussion to his staff. His assistant had the greatest solution of all. It was amazing: the dialogue, the synergy, the solution.

The moral of the story? There are such things as happy endings. Good things do happen at the post office. Good things do happen when people ask. And when they listen. Technology shouldn't replace that.

kchapple@designfax.net (Responses to this column may be shared with other readers in our new section, Reader Connection, introduced this month.)

"Many of us achieve only the semblance of communication with others; what we say is often not contingent on what the other has just said, and neither of us is aware that we are not communicating." --- Desy Safan-Gerard