AT ABOUT 10:30 A.M. on Saturday, November 13, 1993, eighteen-year old Jennifer Koon finished her shift at a psychology clinic in the suburbs of Rochester, New York. She was excited about that evening: an outing with a friend to hear Billy Joel in concert in Syracuse.
Jennie was 5-foot-4 with blonde hair, brown eyes, and a wide smile. She loved going to pumpkin patches. She had adopted two wolves: Teddy Bear and Cris. Jennie was studying to become a child psychologist at St. John Fisher College, while working part-time at the clinic as a receptionist.
After she left the clinic that morning, Jennie drove her Mazda compact to the Pittsford Plaza. First stop: an ATM machine. With some cash in hand, her next stop was right across the street: Bruegger’s. She purchased a dozen assorted bagels to take home.
When she was walking back to her car in the parking lot of the strip mall, she realized she was being followed by a tall man in his late twenties. A minute later, he grabbed Jennie and threw her in the back seat of her car. Jennie screamed.
She was driven away from the mall and held captive for the next two hours. She was beaten and raped.
Jennie somehow managed to dial 911 from her wireless phone. But the emergency dispatchers could not determine the phone’s location. Jennie’s phone did not contain a localization technology—what we now call the global positioning system, or GPS; it would not be available for public use until 1995. Tracking her location was virtually impossible.
Her tormentor kept prodding his half-brother—who had been picked up on the way—“Why don’tcha just do her?”
Then came a gunshot.
The bullet ruptured one of Jennie’s lungs, came out through her arm, hit the glass window, and landed between her feet. The half-brother then ran away.
Jennie knew this was her end. The 911 operator kept asking “Hello? Hello? Can I help you?” The entire call was being recorded. At one point, the abductor was seen stopping the car and then banging Jennie’s head against the passenger side window.
“Please, please, take me to the hospital,” Jennie said.
Another bullet followed—this time to her head.
Later that afternoon, Jennie’s body was found in her car in Orpheum Alley, a run-down part of Northeast Rochester.
THE NEWS DRAINED every ounce of life out of Jennie’s parents, David and Suzanne Koon. David Koon worked as an industrial engineer at Bausch & Lomb, a manufacturer of vision care products. That Jennie was abducted from a busy shopping mall, raped, and killed in broad daylight with no eyewitnesses was mind-boggling to Koon. He couldn’t comprehend it. Neither could the police.
Two weeks later, Koon started his own investigation into Jennie’s murder. He visited the mall every Saturday for eight weeks. Like an urban anthropologist, he observed and talked to people. Koon took copious, detailed notes and mapped out the perimeter of the mall. He pinpointed the locations of cameras, magnetic alarms, and even plainclothes security staff in the department stores. To his surprise, Koon found that individual stores had tighter security than the plaza; in fact, one particular store had more security measures in place than there were in the entire plaza. “That’s nuts,” Koon thought. “The stores protected their merchandise but not the customers.”
Koon approached his county legislator, making a clear-cut case for installing security cameras and closed-circuit television in the mall. No response. Koon thought he could do a better job than the legislator; at least he could respond to letters. So he campaigned and ran for the county seat while working full-time. He lost by six hundred votes—by a narrow 51-to-49 margin for a seat that had been uncontested for fourteen years.
In the months that followed, Jennie’s assailant was captured. Eventually, he was sentenced to thirty-seven and a half years to life in prison. Koon was relieved, but he felt his job was not complete. In fact, it was just getting started. He ran for an assembly seat that opened up in a special election. He was out every evening during the harsh winter of 1996, knocking on doors and explaining his motivation.
This time, Koon succeeded.
KOON GREW UP in Ellamore, a small sawmill community near the Monongahela National Forest of West Virginia. He lived a hundred yards from the three-room school that covered all grades from first through ninth. The house was heated by a coal-fired potbelly stove. Koon’s grandmother fixed lunch for everybody. His dad was a mechanic.
Koon worked in his dad’s shop on the weekends, “I always got the job of replacing the exhaust system on automobiles. I was crawling around under the car and the rust would fall in my eyes. I hated it,” Koon said. Koon is now in his midsixties with platinum hair; his brown eyes are piercing yet kind.
On a frosty Thanksgiving weekend with low-hanging clouds, Koon and I met for lunch near his home in Fairport at a TGI Fridays alongside the New York State Thruway. Tuning out the high-tempo Lady Gaga remix in the background, I asked Koon to tell me about his first day in politics as an assemblyman.
This is how it went.
Koon and his wife had breakfast with the speaker of the assembly. “We basically had a nice conversation, but nothing about what was going to happen in session that day,” Koon remembered.
The legislative session started that afternoon. Koon was introduced and got a standing ovation. “This is pretty cool,” he said to himself. Following the introductions, the members were asked to start voting on bills. “I didn’t even know what a legislative calendar looked like, let alone what bills we were voting on,” Koon admitted to me. He sat there with no background or briefing materials about the bills. “The lady behind me said, ‘Pssst Dave . . . today, just vote the way [that other person] votes because you’re a marginal and she’s a marginal.” So, Koon sat there and watched the board to see how the other person voted, and that’s how he voted.
“I didn’t even know what a ‘marginal’ meant. I found out after I asked someone about it; I was a Democrat in a Republican district. That was my day one in politics,” Koon said. “That’s how naïve I was when I went from the world of engineering into the world of politics.”
He had political power without an instruction manual.
“I had no clue.”
HENRY BADILLO, Charles Wertenbaker, Andrew Melnikov, and Max Guarino were New York teenagers who wanted to form a band. Around 9:30 p.m. on Friday, January 24, 2003, after spending nine dollars on candies, cookies, and a Starbucks Frappuccino at a City Island gas station, they did something unusual. With their guitars, they hopped into an 8-foot fiberglass dinghy and started rowing into the frigid waters of the Long Island Sound. The air temperature was 33 degrees Fahrenheit.
About twenty minutes later the dinghy started taking on water. One of the boys dialed 911 from his cell phone. His voice was riddled with fear and confusion. The call lasted twelve seconds. It ended as the boat, and the boys, went down in the water.
The emergency operator at the call center—known as a public-safety answering point—was not able to register the precise location of the accident and decided that there wasn’t enough information to notify rescue authorities. There was no way to pinpoint the boys’ whereabouts. An appalling fourteen-hour delay in the start of the search operations fanned the flames of public outrage.
The boys’ bodies would surface and wash up on shore later that spring.
This was New York City’s Jennie Koon moment.
IN ALBANY, David Koon had been championing the need for an improved 911 system for public safety. He knew the nuts and bolts of the GPS technology, but that alone was not sufficient. He needed to adapt and play the political game. Learning how to read legislation and how to get a bill passed was like learning a new language and customs of a foreign culture. Several deal-making sessions and draft legislations later, Koon’s ideas had gone nowhere. He had redoubtable opposition. The governor vetoed his bills three times.
In the world of policy making, it sometimes takes a tragedy to inspire common sense. Unfortunate as it is, the deaths of the four boys in the rowboat accident served as a poignant impetus for a national conversation on public safety. “I put their deaths on our governor’s shoulders,” a more politically conversant Koon thundered to the media. Crucially, this boating accident brought Koon’s proposed legislation for combining GPS and 911 back to life.
The discussions and arguments in the state assembly and senate reached a political crescendo. Not long after, New York’s legislature overrode the governor’s fourth veto and passed an “enhanced 911 law.” Other states followed suit. New York became the first large state to meet the enhanced 911 standards of the Federal Communications Commission.
Weeks after the law passed, Koon was agitated. No one had a clue how to implement the legislation. “Nobody ever came back to me and talked to me about how to do it,” Koon recalled. “They just saw it as a political issue that they could gain a lot of popularity over. They started using my cause for their reelection campaigns and so on.” Much to his dismay, Koon was denied a place on a bipartisan state commission that was to begin implementing the enhanced 911 law. “I was basically shut out because I didn’t have enough seniority. I was the young punk on the block that was pushing everything,” Koon said. “It really upset me.”
Koon started to focus on the technology side of tracking—a subject that his mind had an affinity for. GPS offered pretty high-quality information, and the public-safety answering points would be able to track callers to within a couple of meters of where they were. But the resistance came from phone carriers. They wanted to stick with a triangulation approach, wherein signals are sent to three different towers to pinpoint a person within roughly 200 yards. This level of precision might seem sufficient if you’re stranded in a cornfield in upstate New York, but it would be a big problem if you were stuck in Midtown Manhattan. In a thicket of high-rise buildings, the rescue authorities might not even know which building you were in, let alone the exact floor and room.
Koon’s fellow legislators seemed to be from a different world. “They had no idea what global positioning systems were for,” Koon said. “I mean, I had to teach them starting from latitudes and longitudes!” At the same time, Koon continued to educate himself on the technical aspects of modern communication systems. His vision was foreordained: a robust safety system. He then worked backward—using the engineering traits of structure, constraints, and trade-offs—to achieve a goal often hampered by political hurdles.
Even before the bill was passed, Koon met with legislators individually, trying to move his case forward. He would pose questions like, “If you call 911 now, can the dispatchers tell where you are?” He got blank stares or naïve guesses. “They will not have a clue where you are, because you’re on a wireless phone. They know the address of your land line, but your cell phone isn’t that way,” Koon explained to them.
“And oh my God, sometimes it was like talking to a wall! They didn’t understand that this needed to change, and that we had to do something to put this safety system into place,” Koon said. “At times, it was very, very frustrating because I was talking to legislators that have been there for twenty, twenty-five years and they think they know it all.”
After the law was passed and implementation ramped up, Koon soon faced a barrage of requests for interviews, keynote addresses at conferences, and testimonies in Washington. One technology bulletin profiled Koon this way: “The word ‘hero’ is too often thrown around too lightly. But if you define a hero as someone who battles the odds, fights powerful opponents and works his way through daunting obstacles to accomplish something that needs doing and to make a difference—well, then, David Koon is a hero.”
Over time, people came up to Koon and began thanking him for his leadership. A public-safety answering point official told Koon about an elderly couple who had accidentally driven off into a wooded area. Nobody could see them. When they called 911, the emergency responders located them and dispatched help within minutes.
In another instance, a man fell off a snowmobile in remote wilderness upstate. He broke his back and was lying on an icy slope. Nobody knew where he was. He himself didn’t know where he was. Nor had he told anyone he was going out. He was in tremendous pain, and the only thing he had with him was his cell phone. He called 911. Within the next fifteen minutes he was located and rescued by emergency responders.
“I would have frozen to death out there,” the rescued man would later tell Koon.
“You saved my life.”
IF SEDATING A POLICY issue is easier than solving it, then how does efficiency fit in? As Koon found out, the ideals of efficiency that work well in the tenets of engineering may become spineless in the soap opera of politics. That’s perhaps because politics is the art of compromise, and engineering is the art of trade-offs.
“There is nothing more inefficient than the concept of government. It was designed to be inefficient,” Koon said. “You cannot remove or redesign the elements you want that are not working because there are vested interests in every sphere of the government. Everyone has a way to justify their own existence.” Even worse, in the chronic “obstruct-and-resist” style of operation—what political scientist Steven Smith calls the “senate syndrome”—a disenchanting obsession with “procedural warfare” on legislative proposals quells productivity.
As an industrial engineer, Koon tried his hand at making his own office efficient. He did time and motion studies similar to the ones that helped Clarence Saunders’s Piggly Wiggly and the Toyota company’s production systems. How much time did each step toward resolving a constituent’s inquiry take?
Driven by the data, Koon reorganized his office. He kept a log of every phone call, e-mail message, and letter. He tracked the status and outcome of those requests. The more he learned about the inefficiencies of government, the more he wanted to tackle them.
“I got to know all of the agencies and the people in charge,” Koon said. “I then wanted to change the agencies because I had so many constituents coming to me and saying, ‘I called the so-and-so department and was on the phone for almost an hour. I talked to ten different people and nobody could answer my question.’ ”
It took a tenacious decade, lots of patience with the attitudes, platitudes, and bedraggled customs of the legislature, and a host of rejections for Koon to get his bill passed in Albany. “An engineer is a change agent, and here is a system that doesn’t want to change,” Koon observed.
“It drives me crazy.”
IN THE WORLD of public policy, rhetorical bravado is often strangely more powerful than matters of substance. Culture shock aside, many engineers are self-declared introverts. As the old joke goes, an extroverted engineer is someone who looks at the other person’s shoes while talking, whereas an introvert looks at his own.
Paul Tonko is an unusual introvert. “I’ve been looking at my own shoes quite a bit lately, and they’ve been pathetic,” he joked in his office on Capitol Hill. Tonko is one of the very few engineers elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. In the past, as an assemblyman in upstate New York, he partnered with David Koon on the enhanced 911 legislation in Albany.
After coming to Washington as a congressman, Tonko found himself surrounded by lawyers. He’d sometimes joke with them: “You’re taught to defend the innocent or the guilty, the good or the bad . . . As engineers, we’re taught to decipher what works for this problem, and what solutions are acceptable.” In the world of engineering, prudence supersedes popularity. “I’d love to be popular,” Tonko admits, “but before I’m popular I need to be right.”
Lawyers far outnumber any other professional group in the democratic political systems of many countries. This selection bias depends, of course, on the political culture of a country. For example, in China the phenomena of large numbers of engineers becoming politicians “goes hand in hand with a certain way of thinking,” noted an article in the Economist. “An engineer’s job, at least in theory, is to ensure things work, that the bridge stays up or the dam holds.”
Perhaps this is where “politicians and engineers are completely different,” says Claire Curtis-Thomas, who migrated from the world of mechanical engineering to become a member of the British Parliament. “We are not of the same world. I think politicians understand us less than we understand them. They probably say we are silly-nilly retentive and don’t understand anything.” On the contrary, when everyone is narrowing in on deal making or trying to win an election, an engineer is likely to look at the big picture and try to find new synergies. Only certain cultures seem to recognize and encourage that talent.
An engineer’s mind is an inference engine. Engineers take clues from nature and apply them to their work. “We fit well within a natural context. We don’t seek to argue with things,” Curtis-Thomas observed. It was a surprising insight from a politician—a role that inherently relies on argumentation.
Harmony in engineering may well be quite different from political harmony. Engineers are “absolutely wedded—hands, feet, and fingers—to the concept of balance in all things,” Curtis-Thomas said. “Everything on the left must balance with everything on the right or it doesn’t work; the universe is out of kilter.” To truly appreciate the concept of balance, one must be comfortable knowing why something is the way it is, and whether or not it might change its position. In a way, thinking about balance could mean operating like an adjustable stereo equalizer: balancing the volume, adjusting the frequencies, and filtering out the noise.
Just the idea that we can logically break down a system to its essentials while not losing sight of the big picture—modular systems thinking—was almost revolutionary among Curtis-Thomas’s colleagues in Parliament. “By and large, [engineers are] seen to be rather dull but hugely reliable,” Curtis-Thomas added. “Given the choice between dull and reliable over creative and mostly unreliable, you pick.” It’s a trade-off.
It may all come down to a form of “inner confidence,” as former U.S. Senator Ted Kaufman describes it. Kaufman has degrees in engineering and business management. Before being elected to the senate in 2009, Kaufman served as the chief of staff for Senator Joe Biden. “You’re not intimidated by complex problems involving the use of jargon and esoteric words of a particular period that you’re involved in,” he said. This confidence is intertwined with real nervousness about being wrong in a public setting, let alone in influential lawmaking sessions.
Some journalists and more than a few politicians show no reluctance to make bold pronouncements beyond their areas of competence. Many people with a technical background are uncomfortable with that approach. Why? “In a sense they’re cautious,” notes Ralph Cicerone, a climate scientist with a background in electrical engineering, and the president of the National Academy of Sciences. “So, venturing off into politics is not really aligned with the way scientists and engineers think, because they really don’t want to make mistakes. The other thing is, they don’t want to oversimplify. In the world of governance and politics, even to be able to talk to people, you have to speak in simple language.” While that may explain why scientifically trained people hesitate to venture beyond their spheres of competence and comfort, it also underscores the need to blend experience with social intelligence.
“The soft stuff is actually the hard stuff,” says Gordon England, who has twice served as the U.S. secretary of the navy, and once as deputy secretary of defense. It’s not surprising that many decision makers actually don’t like to make decisions, England points out. It’s easy to defer or outsource them rather than taking the risk of making a poor decision.
But the challenge in politics is that people are focused on different things. They use different words to describe what they want, resulting in a cognitive bias called frame mismatch. Imagine this scenario: You get into an elevator and push the lobby button. The elevator stops and you get out, thinking it’s the lobby, but it turns out to be the fourth floor. But you know you didn’t push the fourth-floor button. In your mind, when the elevator stopped it was at the lobby. What you didn’t know was that someone on the fourth floor had pushed the button to hail the elevator on its way down. That’s not part of your mental model, because you can’t know that. It’s a hidden variable, and politics has loads of hidden variables.
In making the case for the enhanced 911 system, Koon’s challenge was to be a three-way communicator. He had to educate his fellow legislators about the need for an intelligent tracking system. He was talking with various technology firms to better understand the communication systems in operation. He was also connecting with his constituents to make the case for their safety and well-being; after all, Koon’s reelection depended on their votes.
LISTENING IS A fine art. “We go in and try to fix peoples’ lives as an engineer. We know how a manufacturing system works, but we have no idea what’s going on in their personal lives,” Koon said. As an elected official, people came to him seeking help on personal matters—anywhere from having a speeding ticket nullified to changing a specific clause of the divorce law to asking help for a child with disabilities. “I mean, it’s just that sort of thing that your ears aren’t used to.”
Koon is an exemplary listener. With age, he has also developed hearing loss that forces him to pay extra attention. But he honed his listening skills years before he first ran for the assembly seat, when he spearheaded a different community effort. He called it the Rochester Challenge Against Violence.
There were seventy homicides in the Rochester area in 1993. Jennie was the sixty-ninth victim. The Rochester Challenge was unlike anything Koon had done in his life. For others it was community organizing, but for Koon it was an exercise in root-cause analysis. He led hundreds of volunteers in programs to identify sources of violence, to help predict and derail potentially violent behavior.
Taking time off from his day job, Koon came across scores of people marred by conflict. “A woman opened her purse and gave us a butcher knife. She was going to kill her husband after he was asleep,” Koon said. He also told me about a ten-year-old boy who was afraid he was going to die. It turned out that the kid was trying to sell snub-nosed .22 revolvers for $25 a pop, and 9-millimeter guns for $110 each on the street. “We got him out of his home. His mom was a drug addict and he was the one supporting her habit.”
For Koon, these experiences were revelatory.
CAN THE PRINCIPLES of engineering be applied to politics? It depends. Politics runs on feelings, not formulas. Importantly, as with comedy, timing matters a great deal in politics. As Abraham Lincoln argued in the Ottawa debate of 1858 against Stephen Douglas, “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.”
A good number of engineers tend to put more weight on useful end results than on social interactions—although every engineer would agree that both are important. A good framework to help explain this point is the empathizing-systemizing—or E-S—theory developed by British psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen.
Empathizing engages diffuse neural processes that help us relate to others. This is in stark contrast to the deliberative, rule-driven systemizing processes that cultivate discipline. A healthy balance between empathizing and systemizing can yield powerful outcomes.
Sometimes the systemizing ability is in overdrive, Baron-Cohen explains. And in reality, such an imbalance may mean a range of social disorders on the autism spectrum. Syndicated cartoonist Scott Adams has succeeded in personifying socially awkward behavior through Dilbert, a bespectacled character who is “an electrical engineer in a big company. He is tremendously skilled and extremely focused in technical things, has almost superhuman capabilities in areas he’s interested in, but is weak in some of the more mundane things, like fashion, social convention, manners, and dating.”
“Engineering is the paradigm case of such an occupation,” Baron-Cohen and his colleagues wrote in a controversial paper published in the scientific journal Autism. “This is because it primarily involves a good understanding of objects rather than people.” Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak describes it this way: “It’s really more a characteristic where you don’t socialize. You don’t talk the normal language. You kind of feel embarrassed. You’re an outsider. You become very scared to open your mouth around normal people. You hear people coming up, doing their talk about ‘Hi, nice day,’ and the small talk starts up, and you don’t even know the clues of how to do it. I don’t to this day.”
And in the even nerdier parlance of the late astronaut Neil Armstrong: “I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer—born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in the steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace, and propelled by compressible flow.”
PERHAPS KOON’S role model for balancing empathy and rationality was Jennie herself. As he once put it to a journalist from Newsday, “Even her voice on that [911] tape was not of fear or hysteria. It was a calm, still-thinking-rationally voice, even knowing what was about to happen. I listen to that tape over and over; that’s the bit Jennie taught me about death and dying.” Koon still carries that tape in his suitcase wherever he goes. It keeps him grounded, he told me.
One Sunday afternoon some years ago, Koon was driving home from church on the interstate, deep in thought. He heard a mellow voice that he hadn’t heard in a while.
“Dad, I’m proud of you.”
He immediately pulled the car over to the side of the road. He looked around. He checked the back seat. He rubbed his eyes.
There was no one.
“I lost it,” Koon said. “I sat there and cried for fifteen minutes.”
