Battle of Jutland LO7747

Ray Evans Harrell (mcore@soho.ios.com)
Wed, 5 Jun 1996 17:11:30 -0400

Replying to LO7718 --

What a terrific post! Just a few additions to it from my own area
of work.

David Hurst (dhurst1036@aol.com)said:
-Don't maximize one measurement of performance at the expense of
others. snip

I wonder why we are so unable to carry this to the whole
of the society with the balance that is necessary between
the various intellectual, emotional, commercial, spiritual
and educational elements. We seem only to be concerned
with adding to the complexity of our one little area until
we hit the current wall of human understanding and are
"blown out of the water." Example, the NYTimes yesterday
on the front page published a declaration of war on all
weekend spiritual pursuits by many of the companies operating
in the United States. They called it the 12 hour work day
and it eliminates the employees ability to worship on the
weekends. I am not Judeo-Christian-Moslem and I don't do
mine on weekends but living in NYCity where everyone takes
their religious holidays very seriously, I was struck by this
incredible slap in the face by the local arrhythmic plant
managers.

-Don't benchmark variables just because they are easy to measure.
Aided by incentive schemes, an organization can easily end up being
very good at doing something that doesn't make much difference. snip

The local government and business interests seem dedicated to
turning the natural complexities of education into the simple
search and maintenance of a job. Sort of a grand Trade and
Industry Vo Tech approach to learning. With children who
can't type, never had a bookkeeping course, think shorthand
is a foreign language, believe that a bigger and better something
is preferable to good literature and great music. The easy
approach is to make all of the educational elements be competitive
with one another, assign a hierarchy and then cut the funds.
Sounds like a congressional approach to the military.

-Don't allow ad hoc tinkering with systems design without
considering the systemic implications of the changes.

More of the above. It doesn't matter what brings you down as
long as it causes you to fail, everything is equivalent.

-Mistakes are opportunities to learn. The German Navy had no
systemic failures in their ships during the battle, but this was
the product of learning rather than planning... snip: the
German navy would never have allowed their gun crews to remove
the flash doors in the way the British did!

If your mental models create worlds that give the incorrect
reason for the mistake then nothing is learned, its just
excused. In that case you have to distrust the intent of
the person with the model. The military is very clear about
people who put their own mental models above the military
model.

-When things go wrong, look for systemic causes first before
blaming individual components. It is all too easy to mistake the
symptoms for the disease and in complex systems causes can be
located far away in space and time from their effects.

Why was that fourth leg too short? Not: "The Goddamn leg
was too short!"

It is amazing how simple things become when your life is in danger. It is
also amazing how attractive the infantry is because that danger is an
easier way of shutting off the chatter in the head. If you don't you die!
On the other hand the only place that people are objectified in the
military is far from battle. You are all too aware of the humanity that
you share with your comrades and even your enemy. That stress syndrome
won't let you get back to that place where people are just pawns. Too bad
that we can't have the same feelings about people whose lives and families
are thrown away in the normal everyday of things. To my way of thinking
it is not only immoral but bad business, but I'm old fashioned about that.
If a student should finish their work with another teacher and they are
running to me to avoid the conflict, I would send them back to their
teacher to finish. It is the right thing to do. I also send customers to
competitors when I can't help them. I believe in the system.

Ray Evans Harrell
mcore@soho.ios.com

-- 

mcore@soho.ios.com (Ray Evans Harrell)

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