When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. — Maya Angelou

I’m going to start by doing something remarkably counter-cultural. I’m going to take responsibility for something.

In the run-up to my retirement, I trusted. I trusted my management even after I had accumulated a great deal of evidence that the trust was misplaced. I paid for that. It was my mistake, and I should have known better.

Trust is not the error. The world works better when people extend it. It is faster, cheaper, with less friction and less misery. The error is extending it to people who have already shown you, repeatedly, what they are. That isn’t generosity. That’s naivety, and mine was stunning.

Trust Broken

Trust and integrity are precious resources, easily squandered, hard to regain. They can thrive only on a foundation of respect for veracity. — Sissela Bok

To unravel my own naivety, go back six or seven years. Two things were happening then that bear on it.

The first was a large problem at the lab. It was expensive, it was embarrassing, and it was serious enough to draw a congressional investigation. The second thing I learned only later: that problem ultimately cost the lab director, Steven Younger, his job.

Around the same time, I fell into a vigorous discussion among senior staff about the research environment and its systemic failures. Forty or fifty of us worked up a white paper on how to fix it. A subset of us then agreed to meet with the lab director, and Vice President of Research to discuss the critique and suggest fixes. We met in the Lab director’s conference room, twelve senior technical staff and these two executives. We each spoke. We laid out the problems as we saw them. Then we waited for a response.

What we got was among the most unprofessional things I witnessed in my time at the labs. Dr. Younger began with a series of boasts about his own prowess as a researcher. He then turned on us for having the audacity to criticize the lab and its environment. He was belittling. He was angry. He was disrespectful to every person in that room. His arrogance was over the top and profound. Some of what the staff had raised was evidently more than he could take, and he was done pretending otherwise. No wonder he was sacked soon after.

The irony arrived later, when I understood that he was on his way out over the very problem we had come to talk about. His conduct in that room was not a departure from the culture that produced the failure. It was a demonstration of it.

Broken Institutional Trust

Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. — Barbara Tuchman

The congressional investigation produced a report. The eagle-eyed reader will already have guessed where that report lives now: behind an official-use-only marking, out of view.

It contains a plethora of scapegoats and almost nothing identifying the actual source of the problem. The actual source was simple and it was obvious. The lab failed to put subject-matter experts into peer review early in the project. Those experts would have seen the problem and named it while it was still small. That was precisely why they were kept out, their review would have slowed things down and raised issues nobody wanted raised.

So the problem grew. It became far more expensive and far more embarrassing than early scrutiny would ever have been. The maxim of finding defects early was violated. The cost was massive.

The mechanism is the same one Dr. Younger displayed in that conference room: the reflex is to make the problem go away rather than to solve it. Hiding is cheaper than fixing. I had seen the identical reflex years earlier, in the same program, from Dr. Cilantro. He took exception to criticism of his staff not over the quality of their work, but over their systematic over-classification of it and the belligerence with which they met a review and any serious question. The same arrogance, in a different room, wearing a different face.

The other half of this unsavory sandwich is what happened to me more recently, with the report I flagged as problematic.

I am a subject-matter expert in the full scope of what that report covered. I was avoided. I was avoided in the earlier work, where the goal was to check the verification box and move on. When the more recent report identified real problems, there was no willingness to face them. There was only the old reflex again: bury it, and slap a classification on it to make the burial official.

Here is where my naivety deserves examination.

In every one of these episodes, I assumed the importance of the mission would win. I believed that national security — that nuclear weapons, of all things would finally force managers toward the right decision, whatever their inclinations. Surely the stakes were too high for anything else.

Sadly, that was foolish of me.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. — Philip K. Dick

The stakes only work as a constraint if someone is still checking the answer against the world. As the distance from physical reality has grown, so has management’s confidence that reality is theirs to define. Nothing intercedes anymore. Nothing arrives to stop a stupid decision that no objective fact supports. You can simply declare the outcome and move on.

The Buck Stops Somewhere Else

The President — whoever he is — has to decide. He can’t pass the buck to anybody. No one else can do the deciding for him. That’s his job. — Harry S. Truman

Something more pernicious is happening in the wider society, and the labs are only a local instance of it. The examples set at the highest levels are of people — usually men — who take no responsibility for bad decisions or for the damage those decisions cause.

The debacle around the reflecting pool is as clear a case as you could ask for. Far too much money went to incompetent contractors who did poor work. Rather than own the decision to hire them, the president blamed other people. He invented people, and invented events, offered to explain away work that was simply bad.

Truman’s maxim has been revised. The buck stops somewhere else. I have witnessed firsthand, that revision reaches well beyond the Oval Office. It has permeated everything.

Trust Versus the Untrustworthy

Every bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and intentions secret. Bureaucratic administration always tends to be an administration of “secret sessions”: in so far as it can, it hides its knowledge and action from criticism. — Max Weber

You cannot work for people you cannot trust. Once trust is broken it is very hard to repair. So I left the people I could no longer trust.

More than that, I had stopped believing in the social contract between staff and management at Sandia. Some managers maintain a healthy, respectful relationship with their people, and those managers are a pleasure to work for. They may even be the majority. The problem is the substantial minority who operate on a different premise: that trust runs one direction only. They are in charge. Your job is to do what you are told. They do not worry about the truth; they decide what the truth will be.

Note the asymmetry. Staff are expected to trust that management is giving them the right direction. Management is expected to trust no one and explain nothing. Sandia too often operates without transparency even internally, and from the outside it operates without visibility at all.

The contrast with Los Alamos is instructive. Los Alamos is famous. It earned that fame with a starring role in the making of the atomic bomb, and Oppenheimer recently pushed it back into public view. Sandia has none of that notoriety, and revels in not having it. Invisibility is not an accident there. It is a preference.

I came to understand that this is exactly what the institution wants. Sandia does not want the spotlight, and its employees are encouraged to be invisible along with it. Management uses that darkness. It is what lets an organization cost the government an extra billion dollars, mislead the public about the cause, and drift quietly back into obscurity.

Measured against that, mislabeling a report as export-controlled is laughably small stakes. That is rather the point. Each episode that ends without consequence teaches management that the approach works. There is no penalty for unethical behavior. There is, in practice, a reward.

Coda

Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome. — Charlie Munger

This is what an incentive structure tilted toward unethical behavior produces. It stops being a defect and becomes a feature. The absence of ethics turns into a vehicle for advancement, and competence becomes optional — worse than optional, because competence is expensive and difficult. Why pay for it? You can message success instead and skip the hard part entirely.

That is a recipe for institutional decline. No one is responsible for it.

Everyone is.