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."