I realize the assertion in the title of this post may sound outlandish, so I should start by clarifying: when I say “thinking and acting like a transit agency”, I don’t mean showing up late, or perhaps not at all, or being in a chronic state of disrepair, or anything like that. But there are certain things I’ve learned from more than a decade in the industry (and even longer watching transit agencies from the outside) which may teach us some useful, relevant lessons about how we lead our own lives.

  • Root Cause Analyses and Corrective Action Plans: Recently, a few things happened in my life that (a) would have been preventable had I taken certain actions, and (b) were undesirable outcomes. In order to have prevented the undesirable outcome, I would have needed to have taken certain actions at a particular time, and I failed to do so. These things really bothered me, and I spent a good long while ruminating afterwards. But, then I decided to do something about it. Why had I failed to take the necessary actions? I therefore conducted a Root Cause Analysis. I walked through the events and I asked myself why, at each juncture, I had not done the thing I should have done.

    I did this in the manner of a blameless postmortem. My intention was not to beat myself up; I had already done more than enough of that. My true intention was to learn. I learned that some of the things I should have done I had procrastinated over for various reasons, and by the time I stopped procrastinating, it was too late to take action. In other cases I would have needed to do things which felt unfamiliar or outside my comfort zone, and it was easier to do nothing, even though that led to a poorer outcome later on.

    After I had identified the root cause for each of the cases, I devised a Corrective Action Plan. How do I prevent this from happening in the future? How do I interrupt the chain of events which led to the unpleasant outcomes in the incipient stage? I literally wrote these things down so that in the future, when similar circumstances arose, I could point to the CAP and say “I am doing these things because the CAP said so”. When that means forcing myself outside my comfort zone because I know it’s the right thing for overall outcomes, I can say “because the CAP said so”. It may seem maladaptive, but it’s a little conceit which seems to work for me.

  • Operating Restrictions and Safe Operating Restrictions: When I was a kid, I made a lot of rules for myself. Many of them had no apparent origin and no clear rationale. Many of them have persisted well into adulthood. For example (and this is a mild example), I reflexively decline whipped cream when it is offered—say, on a slice of cake or pie, or atop a fancy beverage. Not because I am lactose-intolerant, and not because I have any particular dislike of whipped cream, just because.

    Now, I’m not trying to say that people shouldn’t have rules. It’s good to have some kind of guiding philosophy, a code, some North Star. But if you are making rules for yourself for no apparent reason, it’s worth asking some questions.

    I work in the business of signals and train control (a fancy way of saying CBTC implementation), and when a new train control system is being commissioned, we have lists of Operating Restrictions and Safe Operating Restrictions. These are exactly what the name says: things you must not do because they would lead to an untoward operational outcome (a safe but undesirable state, like the train control system halting train movement), or worse, for an SOR, an unsafe state.

    OR and SOR lists generally define not only the restriction itself but also why the restriction exists, and what conditions must exist to lift the restriction (i.e. a new software release, a hardware change, etc.).

    This is a useful model to think about the rules we impose on ourselves. Do you literally need a spreadsheet (or a SharePoint list, or a database) of ORs and SORs for your life? Maybe. But at minimum, you should be able to articulate to yourself what you are doing. You should be able to articulate that you are imposing a restriction on yourself, and why you have done so, and what conditions must exist to lift that restriction, and whether that restriction is safety-critical.

    The alternative is that you simply box yourself into a smaller and smaller world of neuroticism. You lose so much to “oh, I can’t do this”, “oh, I can’t do that”. Why? It’s one thing when there is an articulable, justifiable reason. It’s one thing to say “I can’t eat x because I have a severe allergy to it”. That goes on the SOR list. But what about other things? You watch the world going by, you watch your friends living their lives and having fun while you stand on the sidelines saying “oh, no, I can’t do that!”, and for what? Show me where on the OR list it says I can’t do that!

I am not trying to claim that transit agencies are paragons of functionality. Indeed, many have all manner of problems, some brought on by decades of disinvestment, and others brought on by political dysfunction and infighting. But these are two particular models where I think there are useful lessons to learn.