Pick Up The Dust Bunnies

Saul Kaplan
January 15, 2009

For a week I have been walking past a warren of dust bunnies in a visible corner of the stairwell on the way up to our new BIF office. For the first couple of days I noticed it but thought nothing of it. By day three and four, I wondered how many other people had noticed it and walked right on by. I also began having pangs of guilt for not picking it up myself. By day five it was clear that the bunnies were here to stay. Think about all of the dust bunnies that we walk by on any given day, either ignoring them or hoping that someone else will pick them up.

Dust bunnies can be small things like a pair of shoes left in the family room, dishes in the sink, stale bread in the cupboard, or a bicycle in the driveway. Everyone has their pet dust bunnies. Although they annoy us, we don't do anything about them other than to complain.

How about the dust bunnies in your organization? Just to highlight a few: Job descriptions that have nothing to do with the job, out-of-date content in your website, antiquated processes that are easy to fix, and even worse, antiquated processes that have no value, but keep going just because they always have. Are your customers treated like dust bunnies? It's infuriating for customers expecting attentive service to be treated like one while listening to muzac on hold or being passed from department to department before giving up.

Dust bunnies can also be big things. Don’t let the euphemism fool you. How many real problems do we either ignore or hope and expect that someone else will fix? Are we treating the big problems of our time like dust bunnies? Urban education and elder care come to mind.

How many times have you driven by an urban school not giving a second thought to what has happened to education for our inner city youth? A report last year from America's Promise Alliance and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation showed 1.2 million students drop out of high school each year. That's about one every 26 seconds. Worse yet, the report found that only about half of all students served by the main school systems in the nation's 50 largest cities graduate from high school. The current state of our public education system, especially in our country’s urban centers, should be an outrage and must be transformed. Yet most of us simply drive by.

How many times have you passed a nursing home without even thinking about the care that is delivered there or the conditions that many of our elders live in? The current elder care system can not handle the needs of today’s population and is certainly not prepared for the impending explosion of baby boomers about to enter the same system. Did you know that 90% of nursing homes in this country are understaffed? When the boomers are ready for nursing home care these needs will no less than double. That means we will need over a quarter of a million more registered nurses and more than a half million certified nursing assistants. Couple that with the fact that the boomers have a very different expectation for how and where they want to age. The current system must be transformed. Yet most of us drive by.

Why don’t we just pick up the dust bunnies both small and large? The most common excuses include: It's not my job, if I wait long enough someone else will, someone else must have already had the idea, I can’t influence it, or the worst excuse of all, I just don’t care. These are just excuses. If you are bothered by dust bunnies like I am, then I suggest that you just pick them up. No more waiting for others to do it. No more thinking that someone else has the idea. Because they don’t. No more thinking that you can’t influence the outcome. Because you can.

In a previous BIFspeak post, I described the need for “A Passion Economy” We need passionate leaders who believe in a cause and will stop at nothing to achieve their goals. I think a passion economy focused on health care, education, and energy independence would be a good place to start. In a passion economy, dust bunnies are not tolerated.

It may seem like a small thing, but it was important to me....

Today, when I came to work, I picked up the dust bunny.