From the time I was five years old until I went to college, I spent several weeks each summer on the Ojibwa Indian Reservation at Cass Lake Minnesota. We lived on Norway Beach in the Chippawa National Forest. We held Title and Deed to our home, but the property immediately surrounding our home was on the Indian Reservation. We had many friends on the reservation, and I even played a summer of Legion Baseball on the Cass Lake Indian Team. My first Cousin Korann Livingston Showalter’s father was 100% Chippawa.
One of my father’s closest friends from childhood was Jim Burneett who was a Chief and served on the tribal council. On Sunday’s he also preached at the Baptist Church on the Reservation. Jim was an incredible carpenter and had every imaginable tool and machine in his shop and on his truck. The most remarkable thing I ever saw him do was build a 90 foot “L-shaped dock” with 4 X 4s 2 X 4s and 2 X 10s with an ax and nails and no other instrument or tools. He had milled and cut the wood to size before he got on to the job site—this was before the days of companies like Trust Joist. He did this all-in-one day from 430 AM until 10PM.
It was my first lesson in preparing for the job ahead of time. Years later when I had the opportunity to teach younger surgeons I would have them go into an empty operating room the night before a big case and pull their own instruments for the next morning and make sure the first pack of instruments was all in the order that they were to be used—ala Jim Burnett. On occasions the scrub tech for the cases would join them. In fact, one of the residents and a scrub tech would later get married and I always believed that it might have been one of those late-night rendezvous that helped move the relationship along!
When I taught trauma courses and tactical courses in San Antonio to surgeons, physicians, corpsmen and medics, we practiced the same thing. Years later, I was given the opportunity to watch the Blue Angels in Pensacola from their pre-brief, to their show and then the out brief. Same thing as watching Jim Burnett build a dock or preparing for the operating room. Everything is visualized ahead of time, and afterward there is an out brief.
I’ve watched attorneys do the same thing in preparing for a case or even a deposition. The good ones over prepare. The average ones think they don’t have to prepare. Several of the smart ones think they are so smart they don’t have to prepare.
I mention all this because they are examples of what leads to COMPETENCE. Competence is gained from the habits of preparation. Competence is gained by the habit of perpetual practice, self-examination, adjusting and then executing better the next time.
What I see today at all levels of government looks more like perpetual motion that it does competent execution. 80% of people working in our municipalities and state government are hardworking and carry about them a sense of service. Not all are competent, and the reason is the process of governance does not demand constant assessment and evaluation. Heck if you waste $120 million on the Idaho Health Data Exchange —so what!
Or what about 1/3 of Medicaid enrollments being fraudulent and the same number of billings from providers being mis-coded or up coded! Who cares? Is there an out brief? Does anyone even know what is expected to happen with many of these programs before it happens? What ever happened to the after-action report about the Idaho Covid mitigation strategies? IDAHO DOGE—are WE THE PEOPLE as gullible as they think we are?
Our legislature is full of competent people. Farmers and ranchers. Doctors, lawyers, teachers’ businessmen, and fathers-mothers—husbands—and wives. If they conducted their personal or professional lives the same way they conduct the process of governance, they would be out of business and some of them might be in jail.
The process of governance in Idaho could be far better than it is. The problem is that those in power—Republicans all, want to stay in power, and they believe that if they rock too many boats the people who are really in power—IACI/IMA/IHA/IEA they will stop supporting them, and find some other “huckleberries” to take their places. They are better than that and so are we. Like I said, why can’t they perform in government as well as they do in their own private worlds, families and businesses?
They need to start thinking ahead. They need to look back after an action is taken and see if they could have done things better. They need to start governing competently! Jim Burnett was a competent leader. He ran his tribal council, he ran his ministry, and he performed his carpentry work exactly the same way.
We need more competent leaders in Idaho government, in Idaho municipal government, and in Washington DC.
