Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

The follies and pitfalls of a trade study.

One of the more wasteful things governments, persons who work for governments, do is commission a trade study.

Go forth, study something, and report back to us.

Time passes. Persons run about asking questions and reading readings. The money flows. Keyboards clickety-clack, spots appear on computer screens, and toner is electrostatic-ally adhered to previously white paper. The commissioners fight off sleep to the last page, stand, and proclaim:

I already knew all this stuff. Why did I pay you to do this?

The question is of course rhetorical as no will utter the response. Hence, folks like me write blog posts like this.

How it all goes wrong:

First, the trade study is commission is vague. A few sentences direct the study-ers. The study-ers attempt to read the commissioners minds, but they are study-ers, not mind readers, and, well, it all flops. The commissioners need to write specific instructions. They commissioners need to provide specific questions (in writing). The commissioners need to write much more than they want to write.

The usual I’m-a-commissioner-not-a-writer response is, “They (the study-ers) are supposed to know what I want. I’m not supposed to write a trade study telling them what to study!”

Too bad.

Second, the commissioners underestimate how much they learned by reading the trade study. There is something called Hindsight Bias (see Heuert’s groundbreaking text on all sorts of mental biases). We all tend to underestimate how much we learn when we read.

The result: not good. Good taxpayer money is wasted. Persons on both sides lose trust in one another. Knowledge is not accumulated. Bad decisions follow.