Lately, people have been giving me a hard time for writing and using GuideWire. This is especially so of people who are fans of Bubble Spinner. To these people, I say: Get over yourselves. Bubble Spinner is not that hard. If you can beat level one, you can beat as many levels as you like. Bubble Spinner requires some skill, but there is no correlation between how many levels you beat (or your score) and your skill. You either have the "play Bubble Spinner as long as I want" skill or you don't.

If you haven't figured this out, yet, then I've just done you a huge favor. Now you can save yourself from looking like an idiot when you post a comment somewhere about how I am "helping people cheat."

GuideWire automates a pretty mundane task - calculating angles of reflection based on angles of incidence - so that game players can do something more interesting, like plan how they are going to fire the next few shots. It is not cheating. It is a tool that, in some circumstances, can be used to cheat.

Again, I find myself wrestling with a - "...principle?" "...finding?" "...belief?" I'm going to go with "premise" - of Lean: the vast majority of errors are the fault of the system people are in and not of the people in the system.

In general, I agree and I certainly believe that businesses are better served by clinging to that assumption than the other way around. ...but something is nagging at me. It's always seemed counterintuitive for some reason but I could never quite put my finger on why.

Until now.

My wife and I like to go to the movies in a shopping center in Bellevue. The shopping center is set up a little differently from most: people entering must yield to those leaving. If you think about it, this really makes a lot of sense, but it is not the way things are done normally. Regardless, there are clear signs indicating who should stop and who should go.

Whenever we try to go into the parking structure, we are extremely frustrated. About eighty percent of the people leaving react to some phantom stop sign. We end up waiting as idiot after idiot comes to a complete stop for absolutely no reason while we sit helpless, obeying the traffic signs. I don't mean "one bad apple:" I seriously mean eight out of every ten cars do this.

Whenever we try to leave that same structure, we find ourselves very glad that my arsenal is safely at home as there is always at least one jackass who blows through the stop sign like it is not there. Usually several people follow suit but there is always at least one.

One time, after almost getting creamed by some asshat in an SUV on his phone, my wife asked "Why do these people do this?" That got me thinking. Why do they do it? It was pretty easy to reason out. The bottom line is that the complex works differently than all of the other complexes in the United States and probably anywhere else in the world.

"...but wait." I thought, "I'm looking at this from a Lean perspective, as though this is the fault of the system." The reality is that this is the fault of idiot drivers. The kind of people that make driving - which is very obviously the safest means of conveyance - the most dangerous method of travel. These are people who should not be driving... and they appear to occupy about eighty-percent of the population.

So I'm back to struggling with the whole respect people thing. Respect is earned and people let me down time and again. If you want to say the fact that nobody obeys the traffic signs at Lincoln Square is the fault of the system, then the fault would have to be in the system's inability to identify and weed out those who should not be allowed to play.

Respecting people and understanding the power of systems is definitely part of the equation but there is obviously something to the assumption that people are essentially lazy and stupid, too. Maybe it's like light. Particles? Waves? I say "who cares." These are just models we use to predict behavior and the "people are good" model only seems to work under a narrow set of circumstances with "people are savage and stupid" showing itself to be true most of the time.

Any advice would be most appreciated.