Chapter 2: The First Cycle

The pencil stops at the third box.

Fantaw has drawn the cycle six times now, once for each step, each copy cleaner than the last, and it is the third box that keeps snagging him, the one marked result. He sits at the desk with the lamp pulled close and the page squared under his hand, and the problem is not the drawing. The problem is that he cannot fill the box in.

Behind him, on the shelf, sits the whole book in a binder, five chapters, four hundred-odd pages, printed single-sided because the copy shop on Churchill Avenue charges by the sheet and he was too cheap to pay for both sides. Nine months of work. The final note on the last page is still bright in his head: Map the system. Define the result. Measure what matters. Protect resources. Act on evidence. Learn from the outcome. Then improve the system and begin the next cycle. He had written that closing line on a good afternoon, with the window open and the traffic on the ring road making its long noise underneath, and it had felt finished. It reads differently at this desk, on a weeknight, with the actual numbers in front of him.

The actual numbers are the reason he cannot sleep.

A yellow folder sits on the corner of the desk, the one he brought home from the office because he wanted to look at it "properly," a word that has so far meant moving it from the briefcase to the desk and then not opening it. He opens it now.

Inside is the quarterly printout for his own department, the one he signs at the bottom because that is what his position requires, and a smaller sheet he asked for last month when a question would not leave him alone. The sheet has three columns and eleven rows and it took the finance officer, a woman named Hiwot who keeps her own ledger because she does not trust the system, about two hours to assemble. He had asked for it as a favor and told her it was for "a review," which was true in the way that most of his requests to Hiwot are true.

The columns are simple. Quarter, amount, and description. The description column for every row is the same.

Miscellaneous.

The amount column is not the same. Q1 of last year: 84,000 birr. Q2: 96,500. Q3: 121,000. Q4: 138,400. Then this year, on the same pattern: 141,000, 158,000, 167,300. Three years of quarters, and in the last nine the line has nearly doubled. Fantaw has signed every one of those requisitions. He knows the signatures, his own initials in the corner of each page, small and fast, the way he signs anything that comes to his desk late in the afternoon.

The second sheet Hiwot gave him is the one that matters. He had asked her, quietly, one Friday, to list what was actually bought with the money. Not the category. The things. She had looked at him for a second longer than usual and then said she would see what she could do.

What she could do is a page and a half of line items. Fantaw reads the whole page twice, marking nothing, and then he takes his pencil and starts to tally.

Printing and binding of workshop materials: 12,400. Transport for a stakeholder visit to the regional bureau: 8,900. Refreshments for a two-day validation meeting, sixty participants: 19,200. A consultant's per diem, three days: 9,000. Replacement of a projector bulb: 3,600. A driver's overtime: 1,850. Stationery, assorted: 6,700. A lunch for the district steering committee, eleven people: 7,400. Air time for phone follow-ups: 2,300. A calendar printed for the new year: 4,100. And then, on the second page, smaller items, and at the bottom a line that stops his pencil. Repair of office furniture: 5,200.

He does not remember any furniture being repaired. He turns the page over and looks at the reverse, which is blank, and then turns it back. He has been in this office for six years. He would remember. Or he would have, before this.

The tally so far comes to 90,650 birr, and the total for the quarter the sheet covers is 141,000. That leaves 50,350 birr unaccounted for by the line items Hiwot could pull, which she explained in a note at the bottom: "Some items were grouped. Some were paid in cash. Some went through the regional office and I couldn't get the vouchers." Three sentences, in her careful handwriting, and Fantaw has read them six times and each time they read the same.

He lays the pencil down on the page, and the point of it rests across the word miscellaneous, and he sits with that.

The book is on the shelf behind him. He wrote, in chapter one, that a development manager is a system architect, that the work is to see the whole system of resources, people, processes, decisions, markets, risks, and feedback, and to improve it deliberately. He wrote that the first level of managerial thinking is task thinking, the second process, the third performance, the fourth systems, the fifth strategic systems. He wrote all of that with a straight face, and he believes it, every word, and the page in front of him is the proof that believing it and practicing it are two different jobs.

Because the cycle has six steps and he cannot finish the first one. Map the system. He has the system on the page. He can name the people: the staff who request, the department heads who sign, the finance officer who releases, the regional office that reimburses. He can name the process: request, review, approval, disbursement, retirement of funds. He can name where the money lands and who never sees it again, which is almost everyone, including, until a month ago, him.

What he cannot name is the result.

The miscellaneous line has been funding activities for nine quarters. It has paid for workshops and visits and lunches and one projector bulb, and if someone came into this office tomorrow and asked him what that money was supposed to produce, what the outputs were, what would change in the district because 141,000 birr left the account in the last quarter, he would have to answer with a list of activities. We held a workshop. We held a validation meeting. We visited the bureau. That's not a result. He knows that in his bones. He wrote it in chapter two, which he hasn't even drafted yet, that activities are not outcomes and outputs are not impact, that a manager who confuses the three is managing motion instead of value.

The room is quiet enough to hear the refrigerator in the small kitchen at the back of the flat humming through the wall. Fantaw reaches for the pencil and puts it down again, twice, and then he does what he usually does when the page will not behave, which is to stand up and walk to the window.

Below, the street is dark and wet from an afternoon rain that has kept the dust down for once. A few minibuses idle at the corner, and a woman with a tray of roasted barley walks past the gate, and a dog Fantaw has seen a hundred times is asleep in the same spot it always chooses, between the wall and the transformer box. There's a light on in the third-floor flat across the way, where a family he doesn't know is watching television, the blue flicker visible through the curtain.

He should call his friend Getachew. That's what Getachew would say if he were here, and Getachew is right more often than he is wrong. If the numbers don't sit right, ask a question, get them on the table, and let the other man explain himself. That's how you keep the lines clean and the accounts honest and nobody goes home with a grudge. Fantaw has been meaning to call him for two weeks. he goes back to the desk and pulls the chair in.

The phone comes out of his pocket, not the landline, and he finds Getachew's number and dials it. It rings three times.

"Fantaw. At this hour."

"Sorry. I know."

"Two minutes. I've got the little one on my lap, so you are competing with a cartoon."

"Two minutes is enough. I need to ask you a question about a line in the budget."

There's a rustle on the other end, a chair, a cartoon turned down. "Which line."

"Miscellaneous."

A short laugh. "Which quarter."

"All of them. That's the problem. It's been growing for three quarters, more than that, nine quarters, and I can't tell you what it's producing. I've got the requisitions and the amounts, and I've got Hiwot's list of what was bought, which I think is a partial list, and I still can't put my finger on the result. Every item is something we did. None of it is something we got. Does that make sense."

"Perfect sense." Getachew's voice is softer than usual, the way it gets when he's holding the child. "What are you going to do."

"I wrote the book and I can't do the first step. Map the system. Define the result. I put down the result box. The other five steps, I know them. The result, I can't fill it in."

"So fill it in."

"With what."

"With what you'd defend in front of the auditor. Not the workshop. The thing the workshop was for. Why did you hold the validation meeting. What changed because sixty people sat in a room and ate, and drank tea, and signed a form." A pause while the cartoon says something on the other end. "You don't need me to answer that, Fantaw. You need to answer it. That's the whole point of your book, I think. That the answer has to be in the system, not in the man's head."

"Which is fine until the man's head is the system."

"Then put it in writing."

Fantaw hears himself exhale. "Alright."

"One more thing. Whatever you find, don't do it quietly. The line has a keeper. I don't know your office, but I know offices. Somebody is going to have a reason for the way it's been running."

"I know."

"You say that like you don't."

"I know," Fantaw says again, and this time it's slower, and they let the line run for a second, which is the thing he likes about Getachew, the way the man does not need to fill the air with advice he hasn't asked for.

"Okay. I have to go. The little one has opinions." The line clicks off.

Fantaw sets the phone down on the page with the tally and looks at the numbers again. And then he picks up the phone and calls the office number of the person who controls the line, a woman named Almaz Tesfaye, director of administration and finance. He gets her voicemail, which is what he expected, and he leaves a message that he wants ten minutes of her time tomorrow, first thing, about a budget review. He does not say which line. Which is, he realizes, standing in his own kitchen with the light on and the water running while he waits for the tea, a kind of cowardice. He should have said which line. He'll say it tomorrow.

The tea is too hot and he burns his tongue and drinks it anyway.

The next morning is Thursday and the office is in the middle of its usual low-grade weather. Two of the program officers are arguing about a vehicle in the corridor outside his door, one insisting that the quarter has already been booked out for the field visit and the other insisting that it hasn't. Fantaw walks past them with his folder under his arm and does not intervene, because the argument is a management problem with a process solution and the process solution is a calendar, and he has a different problem this morning.

Almaz Tesfaye's office is at the end of the corridor, past the kitchen, with a window that looks out on the back lot where the compound's three vehicles park. Her door is half open. He knocks on the frame.

"Come in."

The office smells of paper and instant coffee. Almaz is standing at her desk, not sitting, her reading glasses pushed up on her forehead, one hand on the arm of her chair, and she waves him in without looking up because she is reading something on the desk. She is a compact woman in her late forties with a habit of finishing whatever sentence she is reading even when a person is standing in front of her. The desk is neat: an inbox tray on the left, a smaller tray on the right, a landline phone, a mug with a crack down one side, a photo of three children on the corner. A wall calendar, four months behind. A printout of the current-quarter budget, the real one, not the version that goes to the region, and on it her own pencil marks, dense and small.

"Ten minutes," she says, and straightens up. "You said ten. I have fifteen, but I'm giving you ten, because at ten-thirty the regional audit team calls."

"That's fine."

"Sit."

Fantaw sits. He puts the folder down on the edge of her desk and opens it, and Almaz watches him do it, her hands now at her sides, and he has the sudden and unwelcome sense of being a man about to be told something obvious.

"This is about the miscellaneous line," she says.

It is not a question. He has, of course, told her what it was about by walking in with a folder, and this is the first of the day's small mistakes.

"Yes."

"Which quarter."

"All of them."

Almaz's face does not move. She sits down across from him and folds her hands on the desk.

"Explain," she says.

He lays the two pages out on the desk between them, the requisitions with his initials in the corner and Hiwot's list, and he goes through it in the order he organized it last night. The quarter-over-quarter growth. The description column that never changes. The line items, and the gap between the line items and the total. He does not accuse her of anything. He is careful of that. He states the facts and stops.

Almaz listens with her eyes on the pages and her mouth in a flat line. When he finishes, she does not speak for a moment. She takes the requisition sheet and turns it around to face her, and studies her own signature on it, a loop of cursive that extends past the bottom line of the form.

"You asked Hiwot for this," she says.

"I did."

"She works for me."

"She does."

"You went to her directly."

"I did," Fantaw says, and the room gets a little smaller. "I should have come to you first."

"Yes." She says it without heat. "You should have. But it's done now, and Hiwot should not be pulled into it, so I will not pull her. I'll ask what the point of this is."

"The point is I can't fill in the result box. I have activities every quarter. I don't have a result. I've been signing this line for three years and I couldn't tell you what it's producing. I want to know what it's producing."

A small breath goes out of Almaz, almost a laugh, not quite. She rocks back in her chair and the vinyl creaks.

"You want to know what it's producing," she says. "Ask the district. Ask the bureau. Ask the cooperatives in the six woredas who call me when the money is late and call me again when it arrives. That is what the line is producing. Relationships. Access. The ability to pick up the phone and get a driver on a Friday afternoon. You know what it also produces? Flexibility. Do you know what happened in the third quarter of last year, when the regional office changed its reimbursement rule with no notice, and we had a validation meeting already booked for sixty participants and no line to pay for the room? I found out on a Monday. The meeting was Wednesday. If I had to write a requisition and send it up the chain and wait, we would have cancelled. Instead I moved it, and the workshop happened, and the participants got what they came for. That is what the line does."

"Then let's measure it."

"Measure what, Fantaw. Measure a phone call? Measure a Friday afternoon?"

"You can measure it. Outputs. Number of events completed. Number of participants. Number of follow-ups closed. Money per completed output. It's small, I know it's small, but it's something. A count per quarter against the spend."

Almaz looks at him for a long second. Then she pulls the small stack of sticky notes from the edge of her desk and writes, in her dense small hand, the words "output count per quarter," and sticks the note to the corner of the requisition sheet.

"You've been in this office six years," she says. "How many times have you signed a miscellaneous requisition."

He knows the answer, or an approximate one. He'd rather not say it.

"It's the line that everything small comes through. Yes. I've signed a lot of them."

"You have. Every department head in this building has signed a lot of them. You signed four last month for your own unit. And not one of them had an output count on it, and not one of them named a result, and you were fine with that until you weren't." She taps the note with one finger. "I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying if you want to change the rule, you change it for everyone or you don't change it. And there is a reason it exists the way it does."

"I know there's a reason."

"Then you know the reason is people. The head of the district steering committee is a man who will not come to a meeting without lunch. The regional officer who signs our reimbursements has a nephew who needs a ride to the training now and then. The file clerk who found a missing voucher last year, when the audit people were two days out, she did it because I asked her on a Friday and I bought her a snack while she stayed late. If I have to write a rule for every one of those, half of them never happen, and the work is worse. Not the accounting. The work."

Fantaw has no answer that is short enough and true enough for the room. He knows what she is saying. He has said the same thing himself, in the same office, to the same kind of objection, at least a dozen times, before he wrote a book about making the system visible.

"I know," he says.

"Say what you came to say."

"I came to say I want to run this one cycle on this one line. Just this one. Define a result, put a measure on it, run it for a quarter, and see what we learn. Not a new rule. One line. One measure. If it turns out badly, we stop, and I'll say I was wrong in front of you and anyone you like."

Almaz takes the sticky note off the requisition and turns it over, writes on the back, and puts it down where he can see it. "One quarter," she says. "Not the whole line. The new spend. Anything I already committed stays where it is. And I want to see the measure before you start, not after."

"Agreed."

"And Fantaw." She waits until he looks up. "Don't ask Hiwot for anything again without telling me first."

"Agreed."

"Now go. I have the audit call."

He stands, and she does not, and he gets as far as the door before she says one more thing, in a tone that is neither warm nor cold, which is exactly the tone he remembers from the day she hired him.

"You've written a book about this," she says. "That's what I hear."

"Something like that."

"Then you should know the people who need it most are the ones who think they don't. Go on. Close the door."

The rest of the morning belongs to the office, not the folder. There is a field team leaving for the woreda at eleven and a vehicle log to sign, and a program officer named Dawit stops him in the corridor to ask about a reporting deadline that has moved twice and about which the regional office has sent three different emails, and Fantaw spends twenty minutes with him at the printer going through the three emails and working out which one supersedes the others. This is real management, and he is, he notices, better at it than he is at the yellow folder. The paperwork is not the problem. He can do paperwork until the light goes out of the window.

It's the box that won't fill that keeps him off balance.

At lunch he takes a tray to the small table by the window in the canteen and eats alone, which is unusual, and while he eats he takes out the notebook he keeps in his jacket and writes, in the plainest hand he can manage, the following:

Result to be produced by the new spend on this line, this quarter, in one sentence: "By the end of the quarter, at least twenty program staff across three departments will have completed at least one approved task, with the paperwork retired, that would have been delayed or cancelled under the written-requisition rule."

He reads it back. He crosses out "at least twenty" and writes "fifteen." He crosses out "across three departments" and writes "across the office." He reads it again, and it is still awkward, and it is also a sentence he can defend.

Then the measure, which he writes underneath, in the same plain hand:

Output count: number of requisitions retired with all supporting documents in the quarter, divided by the money spent on the new portion of the line. Related to that: number of days between request and disbursement for the new spend. If the same people are using the new line every quarter for the same task, that is not an output; that is a habit, and I will say so.

He looks at the two sentences for a long time. He has been writing about measures for nine months, and it is one thing to write that a measure should be small and unglamorous and another thing to write that the measure of his own line is a count of completed tasks per birr. It is a very thin measure. It will not go on a brochure. It will not impress anyone at the region. It is the kind of number Hiwot could pull in an afternoon, and it will tell them nothing about whether the district is better off, and it will tell them everything about whether the line is doing what it claims. he eats his lunch. Somewhere behind him a group of staff are laughing about something, and the noise is normal and good.

The afternoon is a blur of signatures and a short meeting with the regional liaison by phone. He leaves the office at six, later than he meant to, and walks the fifteen minutes to the coffee house near the roundabout where Getachew is already sitting at a small corner table with two macchiatos, one of which he slides across without being asked.

"You look like someone who asked a question," Getachew says.

"I did. She pushed back. She pushed back well."

"On what."

"On the fact that I've been signing the same line for six years and only got bothered about it after I wrote a book about being bothered about it."

Getachew's eyebrows go up. He has a wide face and a slow way of taking his coffee, and he laughs with his whole chest when he does. "That's a good pushback. Did you have an answer."

"Not a good one. I had the piece that mattered. I said I'd run it on one line for one quarter, and I'd show her the measure before I started, and if it turned out badly I'd say so."

"And she said yes."

"With conditions."

"Then you won the meeting, Fantaw. Conditions are how you know you won." He drinks. "So what's your measure."

"Completed outputs per birr."

"Completed what."

Fantaw tells him, in the plainest words he can find, and while he talks Getachew watches him with an expression that Fantaw has learned means he is being taken seriously by someone who is not sure yet whether to agree.

"It sounds small," Getachew says when he finishes.

"It is small. That's the point. It's a number I can pull from the file in an hour. The line's been there for three years and nobody's ever pulled it."

"Then pull it."

"I will. Next week."

"Next week is not a real answer. Do you know what's wrong with most people who write books like yours?" Getachew holds up a hand before Fantaw can answer, which is another of his habits. "They write the diagnosis and they leave the medicine to someone else. You found the leak in your own roof. Fix the roof. Don't write another chapter about how important it would be to fix the roof."

"I'll pull it tomorrow."

"Tomorrow is Friday. Everyone's out by noon. Pull it Monday."

"Monday, then."

"Good." Getachew takes a long drink and sets the cup down. "There's one more thing. The line has a keeper, and you told her you'd show her the measure. That means she'll see the number before you do, and if the number is bad, the argument about whether the number counts will start before you've said anything. You should be ready for that."

"I know."

"You have a plan?"

"I have a notebook."

Getachew laughs, and they sit for a while without talking, which is its own kind of answer, and Fantaw walks home with his hands in his pockets and the notebook squared against his ribs.

Monday morning, he pulls the file.

Hiwot brings it in a plastic crate, three years of requisitions and retirements bundled with rubber bands by quarter, and sets it on the corner of his desk with a look that tells him she expects to be asked to do more and has decided in advance to be helpful about it.

"Thank you," he says. "This is the last thing. I promise."

"You'll ask for one more thing," she says. "Everyone does." And she goes, and Fantaw opens the first quarter.

It takes him three hours. He does it by hand because the numbers in the system are not reliable and because he wants to see the paper. He counts requisitions, and retirements, and delays, and he writes each count in the notebook in a column. By one o'clock the numbers are in front of him, and the notebook page reads:

Q1 last year: 14 requisitions, 11 retired, average 9 days request to disbursement.
Q2: 17 requisitions, 12 retired, average 12 days.
Q3: 21 requisitions, 14 retired, average 16 days.
Q4: 26 requisitions, 15 retired, average 21 days.
This year Q1: 29 requisitions, 16 retired, average 23 days.
Q2: 31 requisitions, 15 retired, average 26 days.

The columns tell a story he did not expect. Requisitions have more than doubled in six quarters, from 14 to 31. Retirements have grown much more slowly, from 11 to 15. And the average time from request to disbursement has nearly tripled, from nine days to twenty-six. He checks the last quarter three times because he is sure he has made an error, and he has not made an error. The line is not, on the evidence, producing flexibility. It is producing a backlog.

He sits with that for a moment, and then he goes one level deeper. He picks the ten most recently retired requisitions and reads each one end to end, which takes another hour and by the end of it his eyes are tired and his coffee is cold. What he finds is not dramatic. It is worse than dramatic. It is dull. Each requisition is for something real, a workshop or a visit or a payment, and each one has a retirement file that was assembled, as far as he can tell, at the last possible minute, often with a photocopy of a receipt that has been photographed at an angle and printed grey, and often with a signature in the corner that is not the signature of the person who requested the money. The line is not corrupt. He does not find one birr that went astray. He finds that the line has no owner. Each requisition is a small piece of the office's daily life and no one has ever been responsible for the whole. he sits back in his chair and looks at the crate. He is, if he is honest, enjoying himself, and this is a fact he notes with some discomfort. He is enjoying the puzzle. He is not enjoying the answer.

At four he goes down the corridor to Almaz's office. Her door is open, which is not the same as inviting, but it is close enough.

"Ten minutes," he says.

"You had ten minutes on Thursday."

"This is different. I have the numbers."

She waves him in. He sits. He lays the notebook on her desk and opens it to the page, and she leans in and reads the column of requisitions and retirements and average days, and he watches her face as she does it. It changes very little. She reads the page twice, and then she sits back and folds her arms, and the room is quiet.

"That's the flexibility," he says quietly. "I don't think it's working as designed."

Almaz does not answer for a moment. When she does, her voice is the same steady register as Thursday, but something has moved behind it.

"You should have pulled these numbers a long time ago," she says.

"I know."

"We all should have." She picks the pencil off her desk and turns the notebook around, and writes, in the margin next to his column, three words: retirements per quarter. "The count you wrote in your plan is fine. This is the number I want to see on the requisition review every month. Retirements, not requisitions. You want to show me completed outputs? Then show me retirements, and show me days, and if either of them gets worse I want to hear about it before the regional office does."

"Agreed."

"And Fantaw." She sets the pencil down. "You said you would show me the measure before you started. You did. Good. Now run it. And when you publish whatever it is you're going to publish, you'll have one line in there that I don't want you to leave out."

"What line."

"That this is not an accounting problem. It's an ownership problem. There is a difference, and most people never see it." She closes the notebook and pushes it back across the desk. "Go home. It's Monday. It will still be Monday tomorrow."

It is still Monday when Fantaw gets back to the flat. He eats standing up at the counter, rice and a little leftover stew, and then he sits down at the desk with the lamp on and sets a fresh page in front of him. He does not open the binder. He does not need to.

On the page, he writes the six steps of the cycle at the top, one under the other, and under each he writes what happened this week.

Map the system. The line has a map now. Requisition, review, approval, disbursement, retirement. Requisitions 14 to 31. Retirements 11 to 15. Average days 9 to 26.

Define the result. One sentence, written down, defensible. Fifteen completed outputs this quarter, retired, on tasks that would otherwise have been delayed.

Measure what matters. Retirements per quarter. Days per requisition. Not the workshop. The thing the workshop was for.

Protect resources. The measure protects the money by protecting the time. The line eats days. Days are the resource.

Act on evidence. The evidence says the line is producing a backlog. The action is to run one new portion of the line against the measure, and to report the count every month.

Learn from the outcome. Not yet. The quarter has to run first. And the learning, when it comes, will not be his alone. He has Almaz's condition written in the margin of his notebook, and he has Hiwot's three sentences at the bottom of her list, and he has Getachew's voice in his ear telling him to fix the roof instead of writing about it.

He reads the page back. The cycle is not broken. That is what he meant to test, and the test has an answer, and the answer is that the cycle is fine on the page. It is the manager who breaks at step one, every time, because step one is not a diagram. Step one is walking down the corridor to the person who controls the line and asking a question that will make an enemy if you ask it wrong and make a mess if you ask it right. The book never said that. He knows now that chapter two will have to.

He puts the pencil down and turns off the lamp, and in the dark the refrigerator hums, and the notebook sits open on the desk with the six steps and the words retirements per quarter at the bottom, which is the number he will bring to Almaz on the first of next month, whatever it says. That is the commitment. He can still walk it back. He knows he can, because he has walked back commitments before, with a smooth sentence and a full calendar and a good reason. This time he has written the number down, and Almaz has seen it, and the notebook is the only witness he needs.

The street below is quiet. A minibus goes past with its horn, and the dog is in its usual place, and somewhere a radio is playing one of the long evening programs that runs until the electricity cuts. Fantaw sits in the chair a little longer than he needs to, and then he stands up and goes to bed.