Where Have you Gone Joe Dimaggio

It’s been more than three months since you’ve written a word. What’s going on here?

Writer’s block?

Resistance?

Laziness?

Lack of commitment?

Did you abandon the pen the way you’ve abandoned the core exercises you are supposed to do to strengthen the muscles in your lower back?

No, none of that.

Life happened. Work happened. One kid changed jobs, another went to grad school. Spring turned into summer and then into fall. The Knicks won a championship that no one saw coming. Baseball season turned into football season and somehow there are Halloween decorations in the neighborhood and candy displays in the supermarkets. The nights and mornings now have the delightful chill that is a reward for making it through the unbearable, unrelenting heat and humidity of August in New Jersey.

While I was AWOL I’ve crisscrossed the country a couple of times. I’ve had lots of alone time in rental cars and hotel rooms late at night to think about what I was trying to do with the moonshots and why I started writing in the first place.

The truth is that the moonshots were a hubristic overreach. That’s not to argue that the moonshots are not needed. If anything, my travels underscore their urgency. They were an overreach because I don’t have the answers to education, housing, healthcare, transportation, or fiscal responsibility any more than I can explain the New York Jets championship drought. I’m not a policy expert. I’m not a budget expert. I was weighing in on critical issues without the knowledge or experience to propose solutions that were economically or politically viable. There is a tremendous difference between observer and practitioner. None of this, of course, is a surprise to you.

I’m a systems thinker and integrator at my core and going forward I’m going to use my

wide-angle lens rather than the practitioner’s more narrow zoom. The time away crystallized my thinking about the dynamics of large organizations and the challenges they face. All of the issues are connected and we can’t solve any one of them in isolation. This logic holds in business the same way it holds in government and policy.

About a million things have to go right to land a man on the moon and bring him home safely again. The rocket can’t spontaneously explode on lift-off, the telemetry system has to guide the rocket on its path, the crew has to survive in zero gravity, the lunar module has to separate from the command module and land on the moon with enough fuel to blast off and rendezvous with the command module a few days later.

The moonshots I’ve been thinking and writing about have equally daunting dependencies. Healthcare, education, entitlements, transportation, and housing are all systems of systems that work in concert. Thinking about housing in isolation without considering transportation, education, and healthcare is incomplete thinking.

A beautiful walkable downtown like Dublin, Ohio cut off from the region’s major employers by a non-existent public transportation network is neither a housing problem nor a transportation problem. It is a cross-domain challenge that touches housing, transportation, economic development, healthcare, infrastructure, and education. There’s no single government agency that owns the entire problem. The solutions cross boxes on the org chart.

We used to build great things, take small steps and giant leaps. Why do we struggle to do them now? It is because we keep confusing failures of execution with failures of policy. In some cases they are failed policies. In others they are failures of coordination. We cannot confuse or conflate the two.

The struggle to execute is not rooted in desire or capability. It is rooted in the architecture of competence. The architecture that enabled the lunar module to touch down on Tranquility Base has not disappeared. It has atrophied. From now on my writing will focus on rebuilding that muscle.