Perspective on Perspectives

In 1957, the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai featured Alec Guinness playing Colonel Nicholson, a British prisoner of war who is the head of POWs in a Japanese jungle prison. To get better treatment for his men, he negotiates helping his Japanese captors build a working railroad bridge using his engineers. It works and he takes over building the bridge that he believes will demonstrate the superiority of the English soldiers. Meanwhile, recognizing the vital war importance of the bridge, Allied commandos are sent to blow it up. But when the Colonel finds a wire in the sand connected to the detonator, he brings it to the attention of the Japanese Commandant. As the commando’s shoot him for trying to save the bridge, he realizes what he has been doing as he is dying and asks himself, “What have I done?”

Obviously, as a British soldier, he has lost perspective. Or he hasn’t lost perspective per se,but he has become singularly focused on the wrong perspective. This is remarkably easy to do and, I would argue, it’s not easy to change one’s perspective. At a minimum, it requires honest reflection. In today’s hurried, media-immersed, over-committed world, it’s difficult to take time off to reflect on your perspective. Perhaps it is the focus of your life’s goals, whether you are overly focused on your job versus your family, or whether your political party has a short-term win. 

If periodically corrected over time, the harms can be minimized. But if it is not, it can lead to outcomes that may not be realized until it is too late (like when you are dying, as happened with Colonel Nicholson). But it can also happen to organizations. In another excellent movie, The Post, the owner of the Washington Post Katherine Graham finds out that her friend, Robert McNamara (Secretary of Defense), has known that the Vietnam war is unwinnable. She confronts him saying, “You knew it was unwinnable, yet you continued to send young men to die.” McNamara explains that his study was intended only to provide “perspective” for future historians on our involvement in Southeast Asia. Even though the Defense Department, and presumably the politicians knew the war was unwinnable, the war raged on for four more years resulting in over 2500 more American deaths.

One way that regulatory agencies lose focus is when they focus on their activities, or personal objectives, rather than outcomes. FDA is a public health agency and the outcomes they should be focusing on are the health and safety of the American people. 

But the focus is often on things like the number and size of the regulations they issue every year. For example, when FDA passed a huge regulation on seafood safety, it was about ensuring that Congress would not transfer responsibility for seafood from FDA to USDA. In another instance, in honor of a former FDA employee, FDA passed a regulation on smoked fish that he had been working on before he died. It was issued but complying with it made the fish inedible. The regulation was recalled.

In another example, to keep the pace of regulations up, the science was manipulated. In a nutrition rule, I walked into a meeting to hear the Center Director talking to the Nutrition Office Director about a new academic paper. He said, “If we can move this (regulation) out quickly, say in the next day or two, we can just say we never saw it (the new paper).” She said, “That’s right, if we acknowledge it, it shows why this will never work. I’ll get the rule out quickly.”

Yet, if the regulation wasn’t going to work and it wouldn’t improve public health, it was wrong to publish it. Of course, producing some number of regulations may be exactly what Congress is looking for when it comes to funding. This implies a lack of perspective that is much larger. 

Those are just a few examples and there are, no doubt, thousands more. Perhaps there will be many Colonel Nicholsons asking what have they done?