Toilet Paper: A rough draft

Here's one of the "tool boxes" I will include in Work the System. I wrote this just this morning so it's a very first draft. I am not satisfied with an end product until I have done 8 to 10 rewrites so don't pay too much attention to gramatical clumsiness or error. But this was fun so I thought I'd include it now. -sc

Toilet Paper

As an example of systems thinking, and at the risk of an awful pun, reaching for a piece of toilet paper is the bottom line.

The act of loading toilet paper on a toilet paper roll is a system –a system that proceeds in a lineal fashion until the goal is accomplished (step 1: approach the sink. Step 2: open the cabinet door underneath. Step 3:  reach under the sink and grasp a package of toilet paper. Step 4: Take the protective wrap off the roll. Step 5: approach the toilet paper dispenser, etc.)

Ask yourself this question: right now, in your own house or apartment, is the paper roll loaded on the dispenser with the free end of the paper on the outside of the roll where it is more easily grasped? Or, is the leading edge inside, toward the wall, where one must reach a bit awkwardly underneath the roll to retrieve it?

Color me finicky but over the years I have made an informal tally of this question. My results? Outside of hotels and motels where professional housecleaners have been taught how to do it, it is a nearly 50-50 split with a slight advantage going to those who chose “outside.” This means that very few of us think one way or the other about how the roll is to be inserted in the dispenser.

So, Very few people have ever thought of this triviality and of course that is OK. Does it really matter? Of course not – but the question of whether it matters is not the point here. The point is my simple expose of the lack of systems thinking by the vast majority. Here it is: Since having the retrieving end of the paper on the outside of the roll makes grasping the paper simpler, why don’t people load the paper in that way? Is the task made more difficult? Not at all. But deciding to always do it in this way would require a one-time consideration of the process – in this case just a few seconds of time – and we westerners are not prone to consider processes, even one so ubiquitous as this one.

Again, this is a silly example but get past that to see that in considering loading the paper differently, you are putting yourself “outside and above” the heretofore mindless “system of loading toilet paper.” You are refining the system to make it produce better results every single time it is done in the future.

There are two lessons here: First, a tiny improvement in a recurring system can add up to geometrically better results over time. Second: the systems of our lives are everywhere and for the majority of us, most of those systems are not seen much less perfected.

Actually, there is a third and more visceral lesson here: Because you have considered these words, and although you may or may not load your rolls in a deliberate way, from this point forward in your life you will think about the process each time you reach for toilet paper. This is a small slice of ingrained systems thinking and the purpose of this book is to help you see things in this way in every aspect of your life.

In the west, toilet paper is a mandatory accessory. It may be the one thing that all of us have used daily for all our lives and, as an illustration of a system that is right there but invisible, it’s perfect.