The Peculiar Longevity of Things Not So Bad

I recently listened to a sermon by Fr. Mike Schmitz where he brought up something called the Region Beta Paradox. I had never heard of it before…but haven’t stopped thinking about it since!

Here’s the idea in its original form. Say you have a simple rule for getting around town. Anything that’s within a mile of your house you walk to. Anything farther than a mile you bike.

Now compare two errands. The first is nine-tenths of a mile away, so you walk it. The second is a mile and a half away, so you pull the bike out of the garage. Because biking is so much faster than walking, you actually arrive at the farther errand first. The trip that’s nearly twice the distance takes less time, for one reason only. It crossed the line that made you get on the bike.

That zone past the cutoff is what researchers call region beta. Distance and travel time stop lining up the way you would expect.

Psychologists took that same shape and applied it to human suffering. Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues published a paper on it in 2004 with a title I wish I had written but instead shamelessly stole for this blog article: “The Peculiar Longevity of Things Not So Bad.”

Intense pain crosses a threshold. It activates something in us. We call the doctor. We see the therapist. We have the hard conversation. We change.

Mild pain never crosses that threshold. So nothing activates. And it lasts.

Fr. Mike’s version was simpler and hit harder. One person can be miserable for a single month and decide to get help. Another can feel blah for ten years and never do a thing about it. It’s not that bad. Put another way, it was never bad enough.

Comfort doesn’t just slow improvement. It hides the need for it.

I’ve been thinking about this in terms of continuous improvement for several days, because I can’t count how many processes I’ve seen that weren’t bad enough to fix.

The machine that catastrophically fails on a Tuesday gets a cross-functional team, a root cause analysis, and a follow-up meeting on Friday. The machine that’s quietly run at eighty percent of its capability since 2019 gets nothing. Nobody is upset about it. Everybody has planned around it. The workaround has a name, and the name has a nickname.

That machine is safe. Not because it’s good, but because it’s tolerable.

The same is true of the report nobody reads that somebody still spends four hours a week producing. The changeover that everybody agrees takes “about an hour” and has taken about an hour for as long as anyone can remember. None of it is bad enough to trigger action, so it simply flies under the radar.

Which raises an uncomfortable question. If our improvement efforts only activate when something hurts badly enough, our improvement efforts are being scheduled by our pain tolerance. And pain tolerance goes up over time.

No standard, no problem

Here’s where I think lean has an answer, and it’s not the answer I expected when I started chewing on this.

Taiichi Ohno defined a problem as the gap between the actual condition and the standard. That definition is doing more work than it appears to. Without a standard, there’s no gap. There’s only how things are. And how things are can’t be a problem, because a problem requires something to be measured against.

So the standard is the threshold.

This is why standard work isn’t paperwork and it’s not bureaucracy, even though it gets treated as both. A standard is a device for lowering the bar at which something counts as abnormal. Without one, a changeover that drifts from forty five minutes to sixty is just a slow Tuesday. With one, it’s a deviation, visible on the board, owned by somebody, with a countermeasure due.

Every good lean mechanism works this way when you look at it closely. The andon cord exists so that a small problem gets treated with the seriousness of a big one. Lowering the water level to expose the rocks doesn’t create problems, it forces mild chronic ones above the line where somebody has to act. Going to the gemba to see for yourself puts you in physical contact with the low grade friction that never makes it into a report, precisely because it is not bad enough to report.

Lean, in other words, is a system for manufacturing urgency about things that aren’t that bad. That’s the whole trick.

Neither hot nor cold

The homily ended somewhere near Revelation 3:16, where lukewarm is the condition that gets spit out. Hot and cold both have a direction. Lukewarm has none. It just persists.

I don’t think this is only a spiritual observation. The opposite of continuous improvement isn’t failure. Failure is loud and failure gets addressed. The opposite of continuous improvement is tepidity, which never announces itself and therefore never gets a countermeasure.

The organizations I worry about aren’t the ones in crisis. Those tend to move. The ones I worry about are the ones that have been fine for fifteen years.

So here’s the question I’ve been sitting with, and I’d encourage you to sit with it too.

What in your work is annoying enough to complain about, but not bad enough to fix?

Go set a standard for it this week. Then the complaining stops being a mood and starts being a gap.

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