Nancy's Parable

"How does this one feel? " the salesman smiled. The O.R. analyst admired the suit jacket in the mirror. "It looks really good on you," the salesman added. "You'll be a hit with the ladies."

The analyst laughed, as he had been thinking the same thing. The salesman, an older fellow who had obviously been selling men's clothes for a long time, knew his business.

"I wish it was as easy to be a hit with bosses and clients," the analyst commented ruefully. "It seems the ones who most need the kinds of work I do take the longest to appreciate it!"

"What do you mean?" the salesman encouraged him.

"I'm an operations research analyst," the younger man explained. "I do scientific studies to improve decisions - all kinds of decisions. But some decision-makers just don't think in those terms. They want things to 'feel' right, whatever that means, and logic and math scare them. Doing a good analysis for them is really difficult, because they question all the wrong things and dither forever before implementing the recommendations. It's frustrating!"

"I know what you mean," the salesman sympathized. "I find it's a lot easier to sell a good suit to a customer who comes in here knowing quality when he sees it."

"And good service, too" the analyst grinned. "That's why I keep coming back here."

"Well, then," the salesman suggested, "why can't you apply the same idea in choosing where to work? Maybe trying to sell to the people who need you most is the wrong strategy. If we want to sell good suits, we don't go looking for badly dressed people."

"I think you're right," the analyst exclaimed. "I did have one experience, about two years ago, that got me thinking I might be working for the wrong people. I'm used to working for government policy-makers. You'd think they would just want good analysis and base their decisions on that, but

more often they wanted a scientific-sounding justification for whatever they'd already decided they preferred. Sometimes they got sneaky about it, too - they wouldn't tell me what to conclude, but if it wasn't what they wanted, they'd nit-pick the analysis to death. If somebody else gave them a much worse analysis with the conclusion they wanted, that's who would get the compliments, and the follow-on work.

"But then," the analyst continued, "I got this one little piece of work from a law firm. You'd figure lawyers want support for their own position even more, right? Well, that's not how it was. They were the ones who kept telling me to go wherever the evidence took me, and adjusted their arguments to fit my analysis. They were a lot more considerate, too. I'd sure like to find more work like that! I'm just not sure how to go after it."

"I hear legal work isn't something you can chase, exactly," the salesman said. "People tell me they just keep their names out there, and lawyers recommend them to other lawyers."

"That's what I hear, too," the analyst affirmed.

"But maybe you could use a different way to choose among the prospects you have," the salesman went on. "From what you mentioned earlier, you seem to be trying to work for the ones you think need your kind of expertise most, right?

The analyst nodded.

"Well," the salesman continued, "wouldn't it make more sense to look for people who have already benefited from the kind of work you do, and showed that they would use it?"

"That sounds like great advice," he affirmed. "But how did you get there? It seems obvious now that you put it that way, but it wasn't obvious, at least to me, before."

The salesman chuckled. "Many years ago, when I was in high school, we had this big dance," he recounted. "I don't know whether things work this way anymore, but back then, it was up to the boys to ask the girls to dance. I was new at this, and I resolved to dance with every pretty girl there. There was this one, an especially pretty brunette named Nancy, who didn't want to dance with me. After a while, I realized she was trying to hide whenever she saw me heading her way. My attention was not only not welcome, it was bothering her, and she was complaining to her friends about it! It was embarrassing, but it taught me an important lesson, and not just about girls at dances."

"Yes?" the analyst asked. "Tell me!"

The salesman explained, "I realized pretty quickly that I would have been better off to keep on dancing with the ones who wanted to dance with me. I know it sounds simple, but if you think about it, it's a mighty good system! And I have Nancy to thank for it. Too bad she never let me get close enough to tell her."

Authors note: Shortly after last issue's parable appeared, the Centers for Disease Control announced that amantadine (Symmetrel) and rimantadine (Flumadine) are ineffective against many of the newer strains of influenza. It is still a good idea to see a doctor quickly if you get flu symptoms, but maybe the next alert will urge you to balance the risk of exposure in the waiting room against the likely benefit of treatment. The main point, that you shouldn't keep acting on old information and assumptions without re-examining them, remains as valid as ever.