Who needs process, anyway?

Over the last couple weeks I've written about different ways that process-development can go wrong: either by piling too many procedures atop each other, or by imposing ungainly external constraints. But who really cares? Wouldn't it be easier to do without formal processes altogether? Think of all the trouble we'd save!

Do we really need processes? Of course it depends. It doesn't take much of a process to play Tag with your kids at the park (so long as you all understand the rules of Tag). But you absolutely need a clear process in order to bake a cake. Let's break down the difference. When do you need a defined process?

We can start with baking a cake. You need a process there because there are fundamental dependencies between the steps. For example, you have to mix the ingredients together into a batter before you put in all in the oven: if you try to bake the ingredients separately—the milk, the eggs, the flour, and the baking powder—you'll get a mess that can't be mixed together afterwards. Then again, you have to let the cake cool before putting on the frosting, or the frosting is likely to melt and smear. So any activity whose steps involve internal dependencies is implicitly a process, and should be understood as such.

Process-definition is also useful when you have an explicit list of requirements that have to be met, because when you specify a mandatory sequence of steps you can check that each requirement in turn is addressed somewhere. The procedures that I described as examples in my two most recent posts—the permitting procedure to build along the California coast, and the jury service reimbursement procedure—are both examples of this type of process. In both cases, there are legal requirements that have to be met. And so the government* defined explicit procedures to follow, to ensure that no requirement is missed.

You need processes when working with machines, for several reasons. Most basically, machines require uniform inputs in order to work correctly, and they deliver uniform outputs. In fact, you can almost say that a machine is a process—nothing else—worked out in steel and wire. But for that reason, the human activities around the machine—feeding it, tending it, and the like—have to be deterministic, and therefore procedural. Beyond that, working with machines means watching for safety issues and performing regular maintenance. Each of these tasks has its own list of requirements. And we have already seen that the best way to meet a list of requirements is to define a procedure. So in addition to operational processes around machines, we have to define safety processes and maintenance processes as well. 

One critical use-case is often overlooked: you need processes when several functions have to work together. (This is also called the division of labor.**) This is because each role is focused on its own work: Engineering is designing new widgets; Production is building them; Logistics is shipping them; Sales is selling them. For the most part, everybody understand his own work but has only the foggiest clue what anyone else is really doing. And yet everyone depends on the work of everyone else. So as soon as a work package has to be handed off from one person to the next, there are only two choices: either the two workers stop everything to discuss the hand-off in detail, or else each work package is proceduralized so that the hand-offs are always the same. Obviously the first approach is impossible, because it would bring all work to a halt. But that means the introduction of defined processes is necessary to support the division of labor. 

Let me mention two other use-cases briefly. Defining a process is helpful when training someone to do a job. As I have remarked before, there have been any number of times I've taken over a job from someone else who "just knew" how to do it, and the first thing I always do is to write a checklist (even if only for myself). And finally, defining a system of interlocking business processes is a useful tool for understanding the scope of your business as a whole—for example, if you are preparing an improvement initiative.

Is there anything that process can't do? Of course. Process can't make you smarter. It can't make you creative. And it can't make you successful. Processes are necessary in all the use-cases I've just described, to avoid the confusions and failures that would be inevitable without them. But by themselves, processes are never sufficient.

Steve Jobs talks about this in a brief clip available on YouTube. (This clip is extracted from a longer interview that you can find here.)

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* In both of these examples, this was the State of California. 

** See Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776, 1784, etc.), Book 1, chapter 1.   

       

Constraints can spoil processes

Last week I wrote about one of the ways that process definition can go wrong: namely, when you layer one process atop another without rethinking the whole activity in an integrated way. But there are more ways besides that one.

Another common failure mode is when external constraints prevent you from working in a convenient way. In a sense it sounds too easy just to blame external constraints, because we'd like to think that if we were only clever enough we could overcome them. But that's not always easy to do.

Jury service procedure

The Los Angeles Federal Courthouse, by Daniel L. Lu
(user:dllu) Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, LINK.

A couple of months ago, I got a summons in the mail to appear for jury duty in Federal District Court in downtown Los Angeles. That's more than 90 miles from where I live. The summons included a phone number which I was to call the day before—any time after 2:00pm—to confirm whether I was really required to appear. And as a concession because I lived so far away, they were prepared to reimburse me for a hotel room.

Here's the procedure for securing reimbursement:

1. Call the day before (after 2:00pm) to confirm that I am required to report. (Assume "Yes.")
2. Call a nearby hotel to book a room. Ask for the "government rate." (The Court supplied a list of nearby hotels with government rates.)
3. Drive to the hotel.
4. On the morning of the first day of service, check out of my room and advise the hotel that I am on jury service so I might be back.
5. When I come back from the first day, ask for my room back again.
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 every single day of jury service until I am released.
7. Pay the bill with my own funds, and then submit the defined paperwork to get reimbursed.

What's wrong with it?

I read this procedure, and right away I wondered, "Did the people who wrote this procedure ever actually try to book a hotel room in downtown Los Angeles?" As a procedure, it seems to reflect no awareness of the procedures of the hospitality industry. I see two critical gaps at the very least:*

• Hotels in prime locations often book far into the future, but I can't book my room until after 2:00pm on the day before my service starts—because the Court might not need me. And the letter was clear that the Court will not reimburse cancellation fees.
• If I check out of my room every single day, what is the likelihood that it—or any other room—will still be waiting for me when I get back at the end of the day? Probably greater than zero but less than certain. So I might find myself suddenly room-less. But if I keep my room and the contending parties come to an agreement in the hallway, the Court will dismiss me from jury service and won't pay for the following night. 

In the end it all worked out. I have family in the area, so my need for a hotel was not critical. And the Court dismissed me without asking me to appear. But the process issue stuck in my head.

Why is it like this?

When we run into difficult processes like this one, it's always tempting to blame the people who designed them. But in this case I think that the real blame has to lie with the external constraints that the system has to obey. And those constraints are not so easy to wave away.

• Most of the problem stems from the Court's unwillingness to plan more than a day ahead. But they can't. There is always the possibility that the litigating parties might come to a last-minute agreement, or that the case might be dismissed for some other reason. So the Court really doesn't know more than a day in advance whether a given pool of jurors will be needed.
• Of course it would be nice if the Court were willing to be a little flexible on this point, granting jurors a day's leeway before or after to allow them to make their plans in advance. But some jurors would be sure to abuse such leeway.
• In the same way it might be nice if the Court summoned only people who already live locally, so that the need for a hotel never arose. But that's hardly fair. Serving on juries is one of the basic duties of citizenship, along with voting. If only locals had to serve on juries, then people who happen to live near a Courthouse would carry an extra burden that never fell on those of us who live far away.
• Alternatively, we could multiply the Federal District Courts until everyone in the country lived near enough to one to count as "local." But that would mean a lot more courts! Do we need that many? Do we (as taxpayers) want to pay for that many? Maybe not.

Maybe there are clever solutions that I can't think of. But it's not an easy problem. The constraints are imposed by the unpredictability of the legal process, and by topics (like fairness and cost) governed by the political process. So changing the constraints means reworking one or both of those processes, neither of which is likely to be easy.** 

In developing your own procedures, try hard to avoid the situation where you are squeezed between such implacable constraints.

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* One additional topic is that if I call the Court at 2:00pm and only afterwards call a hotel, I'm likely to get on the road by about 3:00pm. This means arriving in Los Angeles at the peak of the afternoon traffic. That outcome may not—strictly speaking—count as a failure mode of the procedure. But it would certainly be a nuisance.

** As I have observed before, when the Quality process conflicts with the political process, the political process usually wins.

    

It doesn't take a conspiracy!

Last month, Southern California was hit by a battery of wildfires. Los Angeles County alone was struck by at least nine (two of them crossing the border to Ventura County as well), of which three—the Hughes Fire, the Eaton Fire, and the Palisades Fire—each burned over 10,000 acres. The Eaton and Palisades Fires each started on January 7, and were still burning three weeks later (though by then they were mostly contained).

There may be more to say about these fires from the perspective of problem-solving and preventive action, once there has been time for more of the analysis to be done. But for the moment I want to address a different kind of discussion, one that broke out almost as soon as the fires did.

Social media conspiracy theories

Pretty much as soon as the first homes went up in smoke, people on social media blamed it all on a wicked conspiracy. The gist of the argument seemed to be that:

• if you take too long to rebuild your home (some posts said the limit was two years, while others said it was three) then you lose the protection of Proposition 13 to keep your property tax rates low; 
• and for people whose net worth is all tied up in their home, higher property taxes could force them to sell at ruinous prices; 
• but the number of permits required by the State of California to build in these exclusive areas is so great that building is sure to take too long; 
• and therefore the fires must have been set by Bad Guys who wanted to scoop up a lot of prime real estate at bargain prices.

Maybe I don't need to say this, but the social media posters who jumped on this bandwagon didn't get all of their facts quite right. 

• Yes, it's true that there are some restrictions on what kind of a replacement structure you can build while keeping your old tax base—if you replace a doghouse with a mansion, you can expect a reassessment—and some of those restrictions also take account of how fast the rebuilding happens. 
• But the formulas are more complex than the doomsayers claimed, and more generous. (The current rules were implemented by Proposition 19, passed in 2020, and you can find more information at this website here.)
• 
  And yes, it's true that the State of California normally requires a lot of permits to build in some of these areas, specifically so that you don't ruin a neighborhood that's already there (inhabited by people who moved there before you did) by putting up something that doesn't fit the natural or social environment.
• But when everything has burned to the ground, those considerations aren't as relevant. As a result, California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order on January 27 suspending permit requirements under the California Coastal Act and directing the Coastal Commission not to interfere. (Although in fairness to the social media warriors, this executive order came more than two weeks after they started alleging conspiracies. So maybe that delay played a part in motivating them.)   

January 27 was also the day that evacuees from the Palisades Fire were allowed to return to their homes, just three days after President Trump visited Los Angeles to urge expeditious rebuilding and to promise federal aid. So on the whole, the government's response has been a little better than the doomsayers feared.  

Bad Guys are no smarter than the rest of us

But suppose they had been right. Suppose the rules were as bad as they said, and pretend for the moment that nobody had lifted a finger to invoke emergency powers or to speed these processes along. In that case, could we have legitimately inferred a conspiracy?

No such luck. Even in that case, we might well be looking at no more than bad process management.

Where conspiracy theories go astray is to assume the Bad Guys are smarter in carrying out their Evil Deeds than we are in handling normal problems at work or at home. Product development in the technology sphere routinely faces unplanned delays and sudden changes in the scope of work. And yet somehow we hear that the Bad Guys pull off their plans without clumsy mistakes or slipping schedule. Really? Where can we find these guys? I guarantee they'd make more money from legitimate jobs!

On the other hand, if you accept that even the Bad Guys are just normal humans, then they make the same mistakes the rest of us make. And what that means is that when things go wrong, the problems are more likely to result from normal human ineptitude or bad luck than from malice.*

Better process management

Fine, if it wasn't the work of Bad Guys, then how exactly did it get so hard to acquire the permits to build a house along the California coast? I don't know the real answer, and won't without doing some research into the history of the California Coastal Commission. But I assume that this situation is just the result of bad process management.

Once upon a time, someone must have noticed a risk that something bad could happen if a person tried to build a house without checking for some condition first: maybe it meant checking that the ground was solid enough to build on. So the state implemented a procedure that you have to check the ground before you build. Later, someone else noticed a risk that something else bad could happen if you didn't check for another condition first: maybe this time it had to do with making your house out of flammable materials. So sure enough, the state implemented another procedure to check your materials before you start. That meant two checks before you start building, and two permits to prove that you did the checking. 

And so on. 

This is the lesson for process management. Let's say you have defined a process to do something, and it's working well enough, but then a new situation comes along. The easiest thing in the world is to write a new process and overlay it on top of the first, to deal with the new circumstance. Now someone has to follow them both. Then another new situation comes along, and another, and another. Are you going to keep writing new processes, and force people to follow one after another after another? Too many people do just that, and it can grind your operations to a halt.** 

The real answer is, Don't do this! Instead, rethink your whole system from the beginning. Start over from scratch and work out a single process that accommodates all the subtleties and special cases that you are now aware of. Anything else will bog your people down and immobilize them. But the point of a process is to get things done. 

The State of California may have created a situation where the only way to build a house expeditiously in certain areas is through executive orders and emergency action. When it comes to your own work, learn from that example instead of imitating it. 

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* Hanlon's Razor encodes this insight as: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

** This is part of why I have argued before that "Procedures which are easy to write, are hard to implement."

     

Don't work against each other

Last week I explained what's wrong with using quantitative targets to measure your employees. There's one other risk you might run, but I didn't discuss it there because (unlike the others) it doesn't really derive from a flaw in applying the metrics themselves.

Say you offer a bonus to the highest achiever in a certain area—the one who packages and ships the most widgets, or something. This is probably a number that is easy to calculate; and if you are in the business of packing or shipping widgets, there's no obvious hidden bias. The problem, rather, is that you risk setting your people at odds with each other, because they will compete internally to get whatever reward you offer to The Winner. 

We are so used to thinking of competition as a spur to great achievement, that it's easy to forget how it can also shred your organization's ésprit de corps. If Fred and Max are both likely contenders for the prize, they might both lose sight of the bigger picture in the rush to win. In the extreme case, if it looks like Fred is going to pack more than Max, Max might sabotage Fred's work so that he falls behind. In a sense this is just an instance of "unhelpful optimization," which we have discussed before. What makes it especially poisonous is that the members of an organization have to be able to rely on each other or the organization falls apart. This is not just a mathematical misunderstanding which drives suboptimal behavior. This can strike at the heart of the organization itself.*

Of course your mileage may vary. If wages are generally fair, and if the prize is mostly symbolic—a stuffed plush toy, say, or a loaf of zucchini bread—then people will likely treat the competition with a sense of fun. Last year Fred won, this year Max won, next year maybe it will be Ermentrude, but in any event the whole team can go out for pizza afterwards with a good heart. But if your people do not feel that wages are fair, and if the prize is really substantial, then the effects are going to be corrosive.

You already have to compete against other firms in the marketplace. At least inside your own walls, your people should feel safe.

This clip from the movie "A Beautiful Mind" sums up the issue elegantly.**

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* To be clear, this is hardly a revolutionary insight. The earliest thinkers to address social organization were already aware of it. See, in particular, Plato's discussion of exactly this topic in Laws, near the beginning of Book 1, Stephanus pages 625D-628E.

** Comments on YouTube seem divided over whether this clip correctly explains the concept of Nash equilibrium. I'm not an economist, so I have no idea whether it does. But it is a great scene.  

       

The mismeasure of performance

We've been talking for the last couple of months about metrics: how to make them work for you, and what common issues to avoid. And there's no question but that they can be very powerful. Rightly applied, quantitative metrics can give you unparalleled insight into the behavior of a process, allowing you to fine-tune it to improve efficiency and eliminate errors.

If metrics can tell us so much about our processes and machines, it is only natural to want to apply them to our people as well. After all, if Fred is more productive than Max, isn't it only fair for us to know this, and to reward Fred accordingly? It seems like an obvious line of thought, and in fact many companies have some kind of performance appraisal system in place.

So it's interesting that a number of high-profile voices have spoken out against the whole concept of annual performance reviews. Jack Dorsey—co-founder of Twitter and CEO of Block—is famously against them. Perhaps more seriously, so was W. Edwards Deming, who identified annual performance reviews as one of his "Seven Deadly Diseases of Management."

What's wrong with reviews?

If metrics are generally so useful, and if the use of metrics to evaluate human performance sounds so plausible, what's wrong with it? Why are Deming and Dorsey—and others, to be sure*—so opposed to them?

Jack Dorsey By cellanr - ,
CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

Their main objection is empirical: Deming and Dorsey both observe that no system of annual performance reviews ever seems to deliver the benefits that it promises. On the whole, performance doesn't improve. (Indeed, over time it may degrade.) People go through all the motions, but no one's heart is in it. And in the end the organization is left doing no better than it would have done without these reviews.

That doesn't mean that either Deming or Dorsey wants to do away with feedback between manager and employee. Not at all. They just argue that asking employees to hit numerical targets is an unreliable way to generate feedback, and talking only once a year is far too little. 

• More precisely, Deming advises that 90-95% of an employee's performance is determined by the system and not the employee's individual initiative, so improvement efforts have to focus on making the system better and not simply on making the employees more zealous. He agrees that it is important for employees to feel motivated, but argues that the most effective motivations come from the work itself, and from feeling fully engaged by the organization's leadership.
• For his part, Dorsey recommends ongoing, real-time conversation between employees and management on how well the work is getting done, along with focused coaching where needed to improve an employee's skills in the moment. Why wait another eleven months if you can address the topic now and get past it?  

How can this be?

This is all logical, so where did our original line of thought go wrong? What's wrong with applying the basic logic behind metrics to measuring human performance?

The error came in forgetting the cautions we have already observed about the use of metrics, because every single one of them applies to this use case. 

• We can't measure everything, so we have to choose to track this instead of that; but every time we choose a metric, the choice has a hidden bias which will skew the results one way or another. 
• When people know they are to be rewarded or punished based on the outcome of a particular metric, they will optimize the metric at all costs, even if that means undermining the organization's larger goals. 
• And often there are critical facts which can't be quantified, and which are therefore left out of account by any metric. 
• With respect to this last point, it's true that you don't have to quantify everything, and that sometimes a very simple number is enough to give you the guidance you need. 
• But that's mostly true when the choices you have to make are very simple. Human behavior, though, is wonderfully complex and subtle; and for anything complex and subtle, the risk is high of missing it completely unless your measuring tool is equally subtle. 

All in all, managing human behavior with a numerical dashboard is likely to miss all the things you really need to know. 

So yes, measure your processes. Measure your tools. But when it comes to your people, talk to them instead. You'll learn a lot more that way. 

Maybe I can end with a definition I saw recently, posted online by the reliably-entertaining Ralph Aboujaoude Diaz:

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* See, purely as an example, this recent post in LinkedIn.

           

Calibration in wine-tasting

A couple months ago, I ran across an article about wine-tasting that I promptly lost and have not been able to find again. But it made some interesting points about calibration, so—as part of the current series on measurement—I'll try to reproduce the gist of it here. Since I can't find the article I can't give you a footnote to substantiate the factual claims I make about wine; but I think you'll agree that they are mostly common sense.

We all know that there is a difference between Good Wine and Bad Wine, and also that Good Wine generally costs more. But this article suggests that we recognize at least three levels: Terrible Wine, Good-Enough Wine, and Great Wine. And the differences between these levels are revealing.

As you climb from Terrible Wine to Good-Enough Wine, the price goes up by a bit but generally not by a lot. At the same time, the overall quality improves dramatically. Most wine drinkers can tell the difference between Terrible Wine and Good-Enough Wine.

But when you then climb from Good-Enough Wine to Great Wine, the variables shift. With this step the price may shoot up much higher. The wine gets a lot better too, but what is interesting is that not all wine-drinkers can taste the difference. More precisely, anyone can tell that the Great Wine doesn't taste quite the same as the Good-Enough wine. But unless you have a trained palate, you may not be able to distinguish the subtleties that make this bottle worth ten times as much as that bottle. Even so, those subtleties really do exist. But it generally takes a trained palate to recognize them.

What does this have to do with calibration? Everything.

In wine-tasting, your palate is the measuring instrument; the wine is the object to be measured; and its quality is the dimension in question. And the point is that the measuring instrument—your palate—has to be calibrated to meet the requirements of the measurement. But this calibration is of two kinds. 

• On the one hand, you want to make sure no one is leaning on the scale; or in other words, that the measuring instrument reads zero when the inputs are (in fact) zero. 
• On the other hand, you want to make sure that your measuring instrument is capable of the readings you need. If you need nanometer precision, don't use a yardstick. But if you are measuring carpet, don't use a nanomeasuring machine.

These principles apply exactly to the measurement of wine. 

• The first requirement—that your palate should read zero when you aren't tasting anything—means that you shouldn't be distracted by other flavors. You can achieve this by taking a bite of something with a neutral flavor before sipping your wine.* 
• The second requirement means that your palate has to be trained to match the use case you have in mind. 
• If all you need is to find a table wine that will complement your hamburger or your Halloween candy,** you have to be able to tell the difference between Terrible Wine and Good-Enough Wine. And for that use case, a greater sensitivity might be wasted. 
• 
  On the other hand, if you are judging premium wines at the highest level—or if you are trying to re-create Alexandre Dumas's experience drinking Montrachet***—well, for that you need both sensitivity and training.

Once again, as always, what you need all depends on what you are trying to do.   

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* Note, for example, the care with which the Comte de Rueil offered his guests olives between each course to cleanse their palates before tasting the wine, in Dorothy Sayers, "The Bibulous Business of a Matter of Taste," in Lord Peter (New York: Harper & Row, pp.154-167.)   

** Yes, this is really a thing! See for example this blog post from October 2022.

*** Dumas once declared that Montrachet should be drunk only “on bended knee, with head bared.” It is supposed to be the best white wine in the world, or one of them.

   

FMEAs—Reducing the risk of failure

This morning, Manufacturing Tomorrow published my article, "FMEAs—Reducing the risk of failure." It's their article now so I won't post the text of it here, but you can find it by following the link. I hope you find it useful!

 

Working with metrics that don't tell you much

We spent the whole month of December talking about metrics: how to create them, and how to avoid some common pitfalls associated with their use. Before we leave the subject, I want to address one more topic: What about when your metrics don't give you all that much information?

The first thing is to check how much information you really need. If you obviously need more than you are getting, that's almost like having no metric at all. Then maybe you need to create one, using whatever tools you have available. But not so fast. Sometimes even just a little data can be enough.

My son, Graham Mills, is a soil scientist, and recently he and I were talking about the kinds of measurements commonly used to classify Western rangeland. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has defined a strategy called Assessment, Inventory, and Monitoring (AIM). The standard source for this methodology is this publication,* which explains that:

Core methods generate indicators which represent the minimum information necessary to describe three key ecosystem attributes: soil and site stability, watershed function, and biotic integrity …. Nearly everything we value about ecosystems depends on these attributes. These core methods can also be used to generate many additional indicators that directly inform multiple management objectives, such as maintaining wildlife habitat, biodiversity conservation, producing forage, and supporting watershed health. Modifications to the core methods are discouraged as they limit the ability to combine and compare datasets, and thus describe ecosystem attributes at multiple scales.**

So far, so good. The catch, as Graham explained it to me, is that the actual measurements of soil health represent such a small fraction of the total characteristics of the soil that they are still maddeningly vague. It is, for example, not really possible to develop a solid theoretical understanding of the changes that have taken place over the years on a particular stretch of rangeland. To anyone with a scientific background, this limitation is frustrating.

Frustrating but not immobilizing. It turns out that soil scientists can still work with the AIM results.

The key is that the range of possible actions for restoring damaged or depleted rangeland is so very narrow. BLM scientists understand that rangeland is a biological system, and that systems—by definition!—are self-organizing and therefore unpredictable. So there are only a very few interventions permitted at all; and all of them are familiar and well understood. Plant this kind of bush here. Plant that kind of ground cover over there. If there is human garbage clogging a freshwater spring, remove the garbage. And so on. 

The list of approved actions is very short. And therefore a complete quantification of all possible soil characteristics is not needed. If the soil is seriously damaged, do this; if mildly damaged, do that; if already thriving, do a third thing—or maybe nothing at all. It turns out that that's enough to cover it.

As in so many other cases, the first step is to understand what you really need and want. Only then can you set about getting it.     

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* Herrick, J.E., Jornada Experimental Range, 2018. Monitoring manual for grassland, shrubland, and savanna ecosystems. USDA - ARS Jordana Experimental Range, Las Cruces, NM.

** Ibid., p.1.

Photo credits: G. Mills, May 2021.      

Why are you an auditor?—REDUX!

It's the New Year,* and I hope 2025 will be good for us all! In case any readers are still coping with a surfeit of champagne, let's start with something light.

A few months ago, I published a post asking "Why are you an auditor?" I told the story of Amir, who took a job as an auditor in order to learn how to manage a business. His plan was that, once he had learned how to run a business, he was going to quit auditing for entrepreneurship.

After writing this article, I posted notices pointing to it in a number of venues. One of these venues was the myASQ community, where Anthony DeMarinis of AJD Quality Solutions responded with the answers that he gives his students to the exact same question. I've wanted to share them with you ever since I read them, and this looks like a fine time to do so.

Top 10 Reasons to Become an Auditor

10  Get to see the big picture with exposure to Top Management

 9  Benchmark other areas and promote Out-Of-Box Thinking

 8  Good way to increase your personal knowledge and keep your job

 7  Paid time off and a diversion from your regular job

 6  Acquire transferable skills to prepare for the next layoff

 5  Experience with conflict resolution (which may come in handy at home)

 4  Free dinner at fancy restaurants with the Auditee

 3  Opportunity to network and look for another job

 2  You're not the Auditee and get to hassle someone else for a change

 1  Unlimited POWER!!!

Once again, I wish you all a very Happy New Year! Let's do good things in 2025.

  

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* OK, technically that was yesterday. But it's only been 2025 for a scant 32 hours so far.