of Martha, and now I struggled momentarily with whether I should tell them the truth. Expediency won out: I had enough on my plate without facilitating a discussion about how my mystery consultant was my grandmother-in-law. So I carried on with the deception.
“He is suggesting that we need to go back to clearly defining our problem. He thinks we’re spreading ourselves out in too many places, trying to address what are fundamentally symptoms of the same issue, not the cause.”
Stu looked thoughtful for a moment and then said, “He’s saying we’re playing a game of whack-a-mole.”
Mark Goldman, who had been silent to this point, upped his contribution significantly. “Huh?” he said.
Stu explained. “That goofy carnival game. My grandkids play it at the arcade. You plug in twenty-five cents —”
“Join the twenty-first century, Stu,” said Alice. “It’s, like, two bucks.”
“— you plug in your money,” Stu continued, “then you take this mallet, and mechanical moles start popping their heads up on the board in front of you. You try to whack as many on the head as you can before the time runs out.”
“The difference is you get some satisfaction from that game. Here, there are always more moles to whack,” Luigi lamented.
Mark must have had a late night, because it was taking him a while to get the concept. “So, in this case the moles are the problem?”
Amanda made a face. “Yes, Mark, the moles are the problem. You have a mole infestation in your house, or your barn, or wherever the stupid game is supposed to take place. You stand there like an idiot waiting for a mole to poke its head out so you can whack it. But you’re not addressing the real problem. You’re not going to get rid of the infestation by waiting for individual moles to appear and then whacking them. You’ve got to fumigate the whole house. Or nuke it, or whatever you do to get rid of moles.”
“Nuke it?” said Mark. “Wouldn’t that be a little extreme?”
“People!” I said. “As much as I love to wander off topic and relive my days working as a carny —”
“You worked as a carny?” said Amanda. “That explains some things.”
“— which I just made up for effect! Can we get back to talking about the actual issue?”
“I think we are talking about it,” said Stu. “We have a serious mole problem at Hyler.”
“And instead of using nukes, we’re dealing with the individual moles,” added Amanda. “We’re killing ourselves with the whacking, and we’re not getting any further ahead.”
“OK,” I said grudgingly. “Maybe we are talking about the problem. But it’s still an analogy, right? You’re not going to tell me that our issues come down to an actual mole problem, are you?”
“Of course not. Don’t be stupid,” snapped Amanda.
Her comment was followed by an uncomfortable period of silence. Finally I said, “Analogies are great, but sometimes it’s hard to understand what they are referring to.”
Luigi commented, “It seems like an obvious concept, so why haven’t we thought of this before?”
Mark had finally woken up a little. “That part I do get. We’re so busy running around fighting fires that we don’t have time to stop, take a breath, and consider whether we have a mole arsonist on our hands.”
“So now the damn moles are lighting fires?” Stu sighed.
Mark shrugged. “You know what I mean. It’s a common problem — going hard and not taking a moment to stop and think.”
“I’ve got a story about that,” said Luigi. “A guy is driving his car down a country road, and he passes a kid who is running as fast as he can, pushing a bicycle. The guy slows the car down, rolls down his window, and shouts to the kid, ‘Hey, kid, what’s the matter? What’s the hurry?’ Kid pants out, ‘Late for school!’ The man says, ‘What’s the matter with the bike? Got a flat?’ The kid gasps back between breaths, ‘Nope, bike’s fine,’ and keeps on running hard, pushing his bike. So the driver continues coasting alongside the kid and says, ‘You don’t know how to ride it?’ Kid shakes his head. ‘I can ride.’ The driver frowns. ‘So why are you pushing it?’ Kid pants back, ‘Told you, late for school. No time to stop and get on the bike. Gotta keep running to get to class!’ ” Luigi laughed long and hard. The best he got from the others in the room was a groan. “What, you don’t get it?”
“Yeah, we get it,” Leslie said impatiently. “The kid is so obsessed about making time that he doesn’t realize if he slows down and loses a few moments to get on the bike, he’ll get there faster. It’s just that it’s not remotely funny. And as parables go, I would rate it as weak.”
Luigi shrugged. “Whatever. I can’t help your poor taste in parables. But I think it shows what we’re doing — running around solving little problems without taking the time out from firefighting to figure out the source of our mole arsonist bicycle problem.”
“I think you can leave the bike out of that,” said Amanda. “It’s confusing enough as it is.”
I decided to jump in. “That’s exactly it. Unless we stop running around like chickens with our heads cut off and stop letting the moles start fires, we’re never going to figure out . . . uh, if we have moles . . . or should I say, what the nature of our mole infestation really is.”
Mark made me give serious consideration to whether he might be a mole himself by saying, “Why are we bringing chickens into this?”
I waved away his comment. “So, let’s stop whacking moles for a minute. Let’s stop even thinking about whacking moles, and let’s answer the question: what is our mole infestation here at Hyler?”
“It’s the union,” said Luigi without hesitation. “And I can say that because I used to be a union member. They don’t appreciate how bad things are. They just keep asking for more and more, and they’re driving us into the ground.”
“No,” disagreed Amanda. “The union reacts to what we do to them. Our mole is corporate headquarters and all the crap they push down on us. Look at our so-called performance management system. It’s totally dysfunctional and creates a totally dysfunctional workplace, including our crummy relationship with the union.”
“Uh-uh,” said Alice. “It’s our sales team. Will, you’re the one who pointed out they’re discounting us out of business.”
“Figures the accountant would say that,” shot back Leslie. “My sales team does exactly what they’re told to do. It’s the accounting department that doesn’t know what our costs are. How are we supposed to price things properly if you can’t tell us that?”
Things were getting a little heated. Stu interjected in an attempt to be a calming influence. “Guys, it’s all of those things together — it’s us. The people in this room. We’re the problem. And you know why? We’re not on the same page.”
Stu the calming influence didn’t provide much calm. Everyone turned to stare at him. Amanda was the first to speak. “How can you possibly say that, Stu? I’ve been killing myself for the last four years trying to make this place work. And I’d say the same thing for every person in this room. You think any of us want Hyler to go under or offshore? You don’t think we agree on that?”
Stu shook his head. “Having the same goal and acting like we do can be two different things. We all know our relationship with the union sucks, and we know we have to fix it, but what are we doing to make that happen? We just keep grinding on them, trying to make them give us more and more concessions.”
“And all they do is push back on us,” interrupted Luigi. “They just want to take. They won’t work with us.”
Stu cocked an eyebrow. “Are