Fred Nickols writes about "Backcasting" and other jargon, hype and
confusion anent Mr. Gantt's original approaches.
In addition to agreeing (as usual) with Fred's incisive comments, I'd
like to relate them to my own primary training: organic chemistry. At
least since the '60s, most synthetic chemists have been schooled in
"retrosynthetic analysis." Large molecules are so complicated and
subtle that inspection rarely yields an obvious synthetic route from
available starting materials. (This is further complicated by the
modern availability of tens of thousands of building blocks.) So we
are taught to start dissecting the target, in ways supported by
intuition and training, until we are back to familiar territory.
I have been interested to observe that many of my organiker colleagues
are pretty good project managers, and that most use this back-analytic
approach in many areas of their professional lives. I wonder if it's a
skill or methodology that could be applied early in the general
education curriculum?
Alaric Naiman
--
anaiman@scigen.co.uk
There are two kinds of things:
those that can be categorized, and those that can't.