Second Life for executive education

I've come to believe that a key catalyst in the revitalization of American industry is getting middle and upper management to start using relatively new models such as the Toyota Way, Theory Y, and other techniques of empowering employees and distributing the workload further down the organizational hierarchy.

The US National Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine has similarly recommended empowering "microsystems" or front-line teams as the intervention that has proven successful in raising quality and lowering costs in hospitals.

And, where these techniques have caught on and worked, they have worked very well. The problem is, that's not very many places. There are far more failures than successes at this sort of cultural transformation of existing industries.

There are several big problems that I see.

One problem is that this change involves collaboration, and that's not something that single people can do. Even the IOM recognized that changing the behavior of a single doctor, in an unchanged culture, was up-hill to the point of impossible. The common wisdom in Public Health's field of behavioral modification also holds that any change has to be multi-level, and address higher levels of context and the individual, not just the individual. But, like one person with a phone, one is not a very helpful number. You need a larger critical mass before this behavior change can become self-sustaining and pay off.

So, it's hard to get started. There is no "good place" to start for those who want to.

The second big problem is that it is paramount that command and control not be lost during this transitional hand-off from central control to distributed control. That's huge, and generally not mentioned in these how-to books. We know how centralized control works, and we can find examples of distributed control working, but there are very few published examples of getting from one to the other successfully. The trajectories all seem to go through a disruptive middle ground where it is unclear who is responsible for what, with the expected results. In hospitals or the Army or aircraft cockpits or nuclear power control centers, disrupted control can result in a large loss of life.

So, a revised golf swing might be far better than then one you have now, but it is almost certain that transitioning from one to the other will involve a period that is worse than either. If a company is barely above water as it is, a period of worse performance may not only test faith in a process, it may simply not be survivable. If you can't get from here to there, it hardly matters how good "there" is.

A third problem is that the CEO or top executive staff might not like the idea of sharing power, losing the limelight, and losing the justification for being paid 100 or 1000 times what front-line workers are paid, regardless how beneficial this is to stockholders. It's hard to expect them to have an unbiased, altruistic interest in the good of the company at their own expense.

And, the fourth and biggest problem mentioned is "culture," or the self-sustaining, self-regulating norms for "how things are done here." Again, any single individual going up against culture, even the CEO, risks being brought back "into line" with the culture. As I've modeled this before, the culture is effectively a living thing with its own survival paramount, and one that has been rewarded for keeping things "in line" with the status quo.

Culture is far stronger than simple passive mass or inertia, which change when pushed on, even if annoyingly slowly. Culture, when pushed on, is as likely to retaliate and break your arm as it is to change direction.

Where are we?

OK, aside from the fact that the culture and the management team will conspire to fight back or comply maliciously, that there's no place to start, no visible route that works, and damn few role models, this is a great idea.

You can immediately understand why, say, brand new hospitals in Dubai or Bankok have a huge competitive advantage is starting with a blank slate, no legacy IT systems to stay compatible with, no legacy culture to fight back, a lot of space, and cheaper labor with fewer regulations. As Harvard Medical International pointed out in the Keynote address to the latest HIMSS virtual conference, they can also hand-pick administrators and clinical staff from day one that agree to a transparent, quality-oriented culture.

So, one way around all these obstacles is to forget dealing with them and just start over somewhere else. That's one model.

That doesn't do much for John and Mary Smith, or the local community here in the US though. Is abandoning the US and walking away the only model?

This is the point at which I suggest we look at using the best technology we have on this problem. It is, however, a social problem. So it requires social technology.

What's "social technology?"

There are many new tools that have only come to fruition in the last few years that are available to aid collaboration and employee empowerment. Many of them fall under the "Web 2" category, meaning they are on-line tools where the users are all active participants and content suppliers, not just passive consumers of content. An example is the op-ed columns of the New York Times, where a few paragraphs of opinion results in several hundred replies and replies to replies within a few hours, adding a lot of depth and richness to the conversation.

Some tools are more complete suites of collaboration software, with video and audio and shared-white-boards and files, which vendors are rushing into right now. Examples of more developed packages are on the website of the University of Michigan's School of Information under the mouthful "Technology Mediated Collaboration". I've taken their graduate class in that, SI689, and checked it out, and the short of it is that there is great potential but it's harder than it looks to get this working -- for the reasons I describe above.

Another reason it's hard is that most IT programmers still think in terms of single-users and "human interfaces" between man and machine, and don't think through the fact that it's really man-machine-man interface, in fact it's a many-people-to-many-people interface or a social product they are implementing the technical part of. As a result the designs tend to be inflexible and miserable, accompanied by the designers whining that the software works fine but the problem is "bad users" or a "bad culture." This is like designing an interstate highway with right angle turns in it, and complaining that bad users keep driving off the road -- the road is fine, so long as no one actually tries to use it.

Again, unless you deal with how the culture and command and control systems are all going to be migrated from point A to point B and not have serious issues in the middle, you haven't solved the right problem. This is not something "IT-people" even recognize, let alone own, in general. In their minds, this is just "implementation" which is like taking out the old PC and putting in a new one - what's the problem?

Still, these are not the most powerful social technologies out there. The most powerful one we have, in my mind, has a very low profile and looks at first glance like an innocent game. An example is the "Second Life Grid" by Linden Labs.

"Second Life" is a 3-D, multi-player virtual world in which people can wander around, build things, interact with others, run businesses, farm, fly, explore fantasies, whatever.

"Second Life Grid" is Linden Lab's name for their offering that world-construction site to anyone who wants to build or script an experience for whatever reason they want it. They have a corporate and educational branch as well.

Harvard, Stanford, New York University, Texas State University, and others have started using this tool. (A 16 page list of them is here.)

So, you might say, big deal. Aside from inane things like flying and walking through walls, how does this help get my management staff and culture through the transitional problems we discussed above? Why not just put people in a room and teach them the old fashioned way?

There are several huge advantages of training in a virtual on-line world. One is that it avoids the need for physical travel to some site, with all the costs and hassles that involves these days.

A second is that the virtual world is open 24-hours a day, 365 days a year. This means it's open from home to an executive who suddenly realizes they have 8-9 pm available because something got canceled. Everyone doesn't have to be in the same place at the same time.

The third advantage, but possibly most important one, is that Second Life can be anonymous. No one knows who you really are in real life.

This is huge. Everyone has some ego, but top executives or government officials or doctors have huge egos, to the point where they are totally resistant to any experience where they might look awkward or stupid or confused in public. And they tend to hang around with a small group of similarly minded people in a culture that supports or demands that personality.

So what we need, and what Second Life (or some equivalent) provides, is the ability to put on a different body, hang with a different group of people, and try out different ways of behaving without anyone knowing it's you.

This is huge. Most top executives can't even walk into a room without the whole nature of the conversation changing to fit their old personality and role. They have no idea what goes on when they aren't changing the rules just by being there, "observing." They are so used to dominating a situation that all they see anymore is a reflection of themselves in the survivors around them, and get no useful feedback about changes they should make in themselves and the way they behave. No one is honest with them.

With a different personality, all that changes. You could come to a virtual meeting of white males as a black woman, say, and suddenly understand first hand what it's like to be invisible in public with your opinion totally ignored or punished. Or, flip side, they could learn how to behave so that they aren't so over-bearing that lower-ranking people in their vicinity are not terrorized or intimidated into silence. They can practice that sweet-spot between authority and being perceived as being open to criticism.

Just getting doctors to behave in a way that let nurses raise a question, once, dramatically improved the tragic error rate in hospitals in the study Dr. Peter Pronovost did. Doctors had little idea how much they were intimidating the staff into silence, possibly based on some incident of flying off the handle 3 years ago that is still reverberating around the culture.

Or, you could join a group that is actually collaborating to get something done, instead of everyone trying to "win" every meeting and make everyone else look bad, and feel what it feels like to collaborate - an experience many MBA's have apparently never had.

The truth is, one day in Business School, as an MBA student, we covered a case in Personnel class and I suggested, naively, that the managers could consider collaborating to solve it. After a few second silence, the class burst into hysterical laughter. The concept is simply not even on the table for people trained in that way.

They literally cannot imagine managers cooperating.

That's a problem. And it's a problem that some hours in a virtual-life simulator could potentially fix.

No commercial pilot steps into a cockpit today who hasn't practiced various collaboration scenarios over and over and over in the simulator first. It matters, and it works.

Professor Bryan Sextan at Johns Hopkins found that 74% of commercial aircraft accidents occur on the first day new teams of people are in the cockpit together for the first time.

Hmm. First, it shows the power of collaboration, and teamwork, in flying something as complex as a plane, which is way simpler than flying a business. Second, it makes me ask why those people aren't required to practice collaborating with each other in a simulator before they try it out for the first time on the plane I'm on.

And, third, it raises the question of why we think management teams, or Boards of Trustees, can possibly collaborate well, honestly, and frankly if they've only practiced doing it wrong and never practiced doing it right.

Issues of time, cost, availability, and ego can all be dealt with by virtual-life simulators. I suggest we apply that technology to management teams as a way of passing on the fire, and having anyone, anywhere in the world able to role play to help mentor new anonymous mangers over their psychological barriers to this new way of acting.

There are literally hundreds of "content providers" looking for business at setting up new virtual worlds in Second Life, which is the only one I've looked at so far. I have no financial connection to Linden Labs -- I just think this is a very cool product that is worth investigating and supporting.



I just can't think of any other way to address the training gap for executives that doesn't take 20 years internship at Toyota, and we don't have 20 years to figure this out regardless. Interactions with others can only be learned by interaction with others, not by watching power-point presentations, or videos, or reading about it. This training goes into a different part of the brain than normal school-work anyway. The experience is required to change deeply-based beliefs. Even Toyota says that training for the Toyota Way requires actions first that change beliefs, not vice-versa.

Here's a way to generate, moderate, and improve those actions. It's a massive multi-person "game" setup at Linden Labs, so there would be no problem adding 10,000 people in a week to the system a their end.

I think we need to apply "Lean" to lean instruction. GM couldn't grasp that model change-overs could take less than 6 weeks until Toyota did them in 6 hours. Learning to control your alpha-rhythm in your brain takes 20 years on a mountain in Tibet, or 5 minutes with a clinical biofeedback monitor. Sometimes, technology can help.

Just because Toyota took 20 years to learn something doesn't mean, say, that all Michigan businesses couldn't learn it in 20 weeks of sponsored time in Second Life, or some such tool. That's the kind of breakthrough technology that scales up that we need to grab and run with.

Wade

exec ed photo by by Jimee, Jackie, Tom & Asha
Teamwork (crossing stream) by ___________
pool by by prettywar-stl

How long does it take to change a culture?

We have ways out that we don't see.

Our whole world is like the scene near the start of the movie Labyrinth where our heroine and a worm are walking down a seemingly endless pathway around the castle, and she finally blurts out "There's no door!" and the worm corrects her and says "Yes, they're everywhere! There's one right there. You're just not seeing them." Then her vision "clicks into place" and she finds the door, no problem.

As they say, "Some things you have to believe to see."

There is hope.

This is the consistent message that various religions of the world have tried to embody, that commerce in the form of "The Toyota Way" or "Making the Impossible Possible" teaches, and that, at last, science is starting to catch up and understand and accept as legitimate, as it gets enough computer power to model the feedback loops involved.

While we tend to think of "culture" as being a huge, almost unchangeable rock or "supertanker we're trying to turn", in point of fact it can change overnight.

Did you ever have this happen to you? There's a person you knew a long time and had pretty fixed view of, and then you find out something you never knew about them or about their life or past, and it changes everything in an instant? Suddenly you realize you'd been misinterpreting them all that time, just to see things "in a new light"?

This, dear friends, is the kind of "new light" that we need to understand the workings of, and get a lot more of.

We tend to rush on by and not pause to realize, "Whoa. That's exactly what I need."

In fact, we need to start manufacturing "new light" bulbs and lay out a power grid for making them shine, or maybe even a wireless broadcast power system would be better -- the cellphone model not land-line model.

Please slow down your reading and "reflect" on this for a moment. I'm not talking about magic or mysticism or "Kum-bay-ya by the fire" here - I'm just talking about exactly the same kind of sudden realization that all of us have had and can relate to.

We could call it a "magic moment", but it is only amazing in impact. We usually spend zero seconds reflecting on exactly how a complete transformation of our thinking can occur in 1 second. It is kind of surprising, isn't it?

What is called "one-time learning" is the same way. We tend to think of learning as something that is hard, requires buying expensive textbooks, going to class, studying for hours or weeks, taking exams, and maybe we get and maybe we don't. But take a 4 year old child somewhere where they get a cookie, and see if they remember that fact the next time they are in that neighborhood. Of course they do. Effortless, one-time learning. No study required. No memorization of facts. It just goes in and stays.

I've heard "true art" described as a way of making a person experience something that has the effect that they never see the world the same way again after that.

Actually, this is pretty much the meaning of the word "repent" in the Christian Bible, to re-think something in a dramatic new way, to re-conceptualize it, to re-frame it, to "turn and be saved." It's not magic or I don't know what, it's just an "Oh, my God!" moment of realization of something that was always there that you were blipping.

And as soon as perception changes, behavior follows along and changes. The "impossible" becomes "possible." Everything is somehow different, in a new light.

If you dig under the covers in "The Toyota Way", it is clear that the end point, the goal of all the fancy tools and techniques, is actually just to get to a new way of seeing things and seeing each other. They use the term "philosophy" and say the whole way is based on it. To me, that word smacks of years of academic study and Ph.D's and makes the concept seem almost impossible.

So, I'm going to apply the Toyota Way to itself, to thinking about the whole process of transforming ourselves to the Toyota Way, and ask "Why do we imagine it should take years or decades of struggle to accomplish?"

I don't think it does.

I think we could do it in an afternoon, if we drill down and figure out what it is that we're not seeing that we need to see, and how to make that a vivid one-time-learning, flash of realization experience - with every camera flash in the whole company going off at the same second.

Flash. Realization. Exact "same" world, and yet, suddenly, in an instant, entirely different.

I mean, Toyota looked at US auto companies struggling to convert assembly lines from one model to another in 6 weeks, and asked "Why can't we do that in 6 minutes?" and realized they could, and now they do. The barrier was all in their heads. Some things you have to believe to see.

Now that we have a whole new technology of incredibly realistic, life-size 3-D simulation virtual worlds, you'd think we should be able to script whatever interactive experience we want someone to have, and do the whole thing in under an hour, tops.

This requires challenging the "common wisdom" that the Toyota Way involves some kind of magic learning that cannot be described and only can be pointed to indirectly that takes years and years of labor to grasp.

Well, that's what some high priests of yoga said about certain physiological control they had learned to do, and it did take them decades, thank you, to do it the old way, but we can do it in 5 minutes with biofeedback now. It's 2007, not 207.

I recall Tony Robbins mentions in one of his self-help books that someone asks him how long it takes to change a deeply embedded belief or behavior, and he responds "How long do you want it to take? We can change that this afternoon."


We don't really have the luxury of taking another generation to turn around the economy of Southeast Michigan. We need something we can do in "months" not "decades". A lot of people need help. A lot of businesses need help. The edge is way too close for comfort.

If we can just focus on how "new light" works, it becomes possible.


Wade

(Image of a self-assembling tower crane adding a new section to its own top as it grows is from "How Science Works"; "Friends forever" image is by the author.)

When and how should we question authority?

New York Times piece today relevant to thinking about Toyota's Production System,
as well as topics of mindfulness, high-reliability, and how to teach and reach new MPH students that I discussed a few weeks ago in "What I learned at Johns Hopkins last week" where I bemoaned the fact that the students "just sat there, unresponsive."

The Times article, by Norimitsu Inishi
Japan Learns Dreaded Task of Jury Duty
NY Times July 16, 2007

Japan is preparing to adopt a jury-style system in its courts in 2009, the most significant change in its criminal justice system since the postwar American occupation. But for it to work, the Japanese must first overcome some deep-rooted cultural obstacles: a reluctance to express opinions in public, to argue with one another and to question authority.

Well, that certainly sounds like the class I was in. What insights can we gain from this cross-cultural view?

They preferred directing questions to the judges. They never engaged one another in discussion. Their opinions had to be extracted by the judges and were often hedged by the Japanese language’s rich ambiguity. When a silence stretched out and a judge prepared to call upon a juror, the room tensed up as if the jurors were students who had not done the reading.

Well, in my case it's likely that, literally, the students had not, in fact, done the reading and were in no rush to call attention to themselves and get a follow up question back to them that would reveal that fact. And they were reluctant to ask a question that all by itself would show they hadn't done the reading.

One more snippet is worth quoting:

Hoping for some response, the judge waited 14 seconds, then said, “What does everybody think?”

Nine seconds passed. “Doesn’t anyone have any opinions?”

After six more seconds, one woman questioned whether repentance should lead to a reduced sentence....

After it was all over, only a single juror said he wanted to serve on a real trial. The others said even the mock trial had left them stressed and overwhelmed.

So, I for one will be watching with great interest to see how this evolves.

One point I have to note regards our country's history efforts to try to implement abroad things that work for us at home. Sometimes we seem, like a teenager, with our 230 years experience, to be confidently giving advice to 5000 year-old civilizations -- maybe akin to a 2.3 year old trying to advise his 50 year old parents on how to run the household.

Maybe things are as they are for a good reason. Maybe, messing with a cultural system we don't even pretend to understand and casually plannint to replace one part of their system with one that "works for us" will have, shall we say, "unintended consequences."

As I said there, the classic paper in this field is Jay Forrester's congressional testimony:
"The Counterintutive Behavior of Social Systems",
http://web.mit.edu/sdg/www/D-4468-2.Counterintuitive.pdf

Quoting the abstract:

Society becomes frustrated as repeated attacks on deficiencies in social systems lead only to worse symptoms. Legislation is debated and passed with great hope, but many programs prove to be ineffective. Results are often far short of expectations. Because dynamic behavior of social systems is not understood, government programs often cause exactly the reverse of desired results.

I am deeply concerned about not just this context-blind approach to trying to walk in and transform existing cultures, that as far as I can tell we are not very good at, but at extensions of this mental model to deciding we are going to start tinkering with DNA.

My daughter recalled a conversation she saw quoted with China's former Chairman Mao meeting with the head of France around 1980 or so, and being asked what he thought of the French Revolution. Mao's response was "It's too soon to tell."

I can't help but note that W. Edwards Deming came up with key quality improvement ideas decades ago in the USA, which was totally uninterested in them, so he went to Japan, where he was welcomed as a hero and passed along ideas adopted by Toyota that have directly led to Toyota's impressive performance. So, maybe Japanese culture had some positive aspect to it that we should be careful not to damage when adding our new "jury duty" feature.

The systems literature shows that it is generally impossible to change just one part of a complex living system without impacting all the other parts. Living things are not machines, with sub-assemblies we can just remove and replace with the latest version. This has the feeling of someone removing the propeller from a small private plane and installing a jet turbine in 98% of the cabin space, since "jets are better than props." Hmm. Not always.

Maybe a better example that I recall actually happening was the period when the US was complaining about Japanese "barriers to entry" of US car sales in Japan, back in the mid 1970's.
GM was offering a car that had the steering wheel on the left side (Japanese, like British, drive on the left side of the road and have steering wheels on the right side of the vehicle.). Also, the cars were too large to fit down most alleys and many streets in Tokyo, too large to park anywhere, and guzzled gas that was running at ten times the US price. And the car interiors were scaled for 6 foot Texans, not 5' Japanese. And, the car had no place to put a bicycle in it for the rest of the commute once a parking place was found. The US attributed low sales to wrongful Japanese barriers to free trade. The reality was that most Japanese couldn't use that car if you gave it to them for free. The basics of marketing once upon a time, when I went to Business School, were "know your customer" and "Be driven by what the customer values, not what you think they should value." In "lean manufacturing" this would be called "pull" or "value chain".

But, then, we were too busy assuming things and talking to shut up and listen.

We were violating Japanese traditions from nemawashi (walking around and gaining consensus before taking action) to the "lean" concept of genchi genbutsu (going down to the floor to see for ourselves before making pronouncements from afar of what is wrong.)

As even Wikipedia realizes:

Genchi Genbutsu (現地現物) means "go and see for yourself" and it is an integral part of the Toyota Production System. It refers to the fact that any information about a process will be simplified and abstracted from its context when reported. This has often been one of the key reasons why solutions designed away from the process seem inappropriate.

So, I'm not sure this particular government policy has a learning curve and won't explode in our face when we turn it on. Maybe this has been deeply considered. Maybe not.

If the objective is to damage Japan's culture and gain a competitive edge, or at least remove their edge over us, then I suppose random tinkering might be a good idea. If the objective is the much harder task of improving the functioning of a 5000 year old civilization, it might be good to be mindful of any indications that our mental model doesn't match their reality, so we should stop what we're doing and address that and update our model with more current information. That's the key to high-reliability performance, and avoiding nasty surprises. The article gives no indication that the policy implementation is contingent on it actually working in practice when implemented.

In the classic PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act), there is that "C" step, "check" that what we did had the desired effect, not an unexpected contrary effect, in case we missed some crucial fact.

That's not a bad model.


W.

Being a robot - 101: The cybernetic loop

I realized that I was just assuming that everyone knew how robots think.
Or for that matter, how babies think when they have to grab something.

We usually think of actions as big chunks, such as "Catch the ball."

Robots have to operate on a much more detailed, step by step level, with everything spelled out for them. Nothing is certain, so everything is just a process of getting a little closer and seeing if anything broke yet. And repeat.

They do this by following a very simple loop, over and over again. Spot where the ball is. Push your hand towards it a little bit. Remember that your hand doesn't always end up where you were trying to push it. Figure out which way the ball is NOW from your hand. Push your hand that way one notch. Figure out again which way the ball is now. Push your hand. Etc.

In a diagram, it would look something like this:
Congratulations! If you understand that diagram, you are much closer to understanding how anything works. Actually, I think you're one huge step close to understanding how almost everything works.

There is a cycle of action, looking, planning, action, looking, planning, etc. Over and over.

The "planning" tends to be very short-range, uncomplicated planning - but what it lacks in complexity, it makes up for with speed and persistence and never getting bored.

So here's a very powerful fact about life. Not only does "a journey of 1000 leagues start with one step", but sometimes the ONLY way to plan that journey is one step at a time.

In fact, a series of small steps is a thousand times more capable than one big step, regardless how clever you are, and regardless how well "planned" that one step is. It took computer scientists almost 50 years to figure out that many small computers is actually much better than one large computer for getting work done. It took "artificial intelligence" workers about 30 years to figure out that many small, dumb rules added up to a better way to work than one huge, complicated rule - and it was easier to write and easier to fix too.

Why is this? Imagine that you are on one side of a small woods and you want to get to the other side.

It is very likely that there is no direction you can pick to walk in a straight line that won't bump into a tree.

But, if each step can be a slightly different direction, there are thousands of paths you can use to walk through the same forest without running into a tree.

What's the moral? It seems so "obvious" now, but it baffled scientists for 50 years -- a "curved" path is more flexible than a "straight" one. You can get places with a stupid little loop as guidance that no amount of clever planning can get you if you have to move in one step in one straight line.

This kind of cycle with many tiny steps and a very short pause to think between each step is called a "cybernetic loop". It looks deceptively simple, while it is amazingly powerful.

It can keep on working if the wind is blowing, without having to be reprogrammed. It can keep on working if the ball is rolling on a bumpy hillside. It can keep on working if your robot arm is rusty and doesn't always move as far as it used to when you push it, and sometimes it sticks entirely. This deceptive little loop is all the computer programming required, essentially.

Now, it will work a little better if the robot has some learning capacity and has done this kind of reaching thing before. The robot may learn that it should reach for where the ball will be, not where it is now.

You learned this so long ago you have forgotten that you learned it. Imagine a baseball game where the batter hits a high, fast ball and the guy in the field runs towards home base instead of towards where the ball looks like it will come down again, because that's "where the ball is now."
So, yes, taking the speed of the ball into account does help. But that's a minor change to the program. The same loop works, except the "planning" step is a little bit longer.

So, this is profound wisdom I'm giving you here. It took all of mankind 50 years to figure this out, and some haven't got the news yet. You get it for free, right here, right now.

So, let me run it by you one more time. Here's the same moral, or same story, in slightly different words:

A plan of action that involves a repeated cycle of very small steps, with some looking and thinking between steps, is much more flexible, and much more "powerful" than trying to "solve" any problem in huge step.

Furthermore, if the world is complicated, and tends to have hills and bumps and wind gusts and rusty arms, you can be guaranteed that no "single-step" plan will ever succeed. In that case, ONLY a multi-step approach will get you where you want to go. If your job involves "going through the woods" and around trees that you don't even know about yet, it is much easier to plan to go around trees than try to "collect data" on the location of every tree, put it into some huge list or database, print out a map, and find "a straight path" through the forest.

This doesn't say "don't bother planning." It does say, "don't waste your time trying to find a linear solution to a curved path." There are millions of curved paths that can work just fine, in cases, like the woods, where there is no straight path possible.

And, one more time through it, from the Institute of Medicine's perspective, as in dealing with small teams (called "microsystems"). If you are dealing with a "complex, adaptive system" (like a hospital), it is way more powerful to just rig up the team with eyes and a feedback loop than it is to try to have hospital management "plan" how to improve things. Ditto for "The Toyota Way", or the power of "continuous improvement" or what Demings taught, or a "plan do check act (PDCA) cycle".

Empowering your front-line employees by giving them "eyes" and a little room to maneuver on their own to get around "trees" is a very powerful strategy that works in practice.

It is based on the most powerful "algorithm" we know of today - the "cybernetic loop."

Oh, yes, one more tiny thing. Since this is such a powerful "algorithm" or "paradigm" or way of doing things, much of Nature and your body already knew about it and uses it.

Public Health is sort of vaguely discovering that the "action" step always needs to be followed with a "reflection" or "assessment" step, but hasn't yet sprung to the fact that it is reinventing the wheel, or more precisely, the cybernetic loop, yet one more time. It hasn't figured out that many smaller steps adds up to a more powerful path-generator than one large step.

And, sigh, enterprise budget processes don't reflect this wisdom. For years I fought with the fact that Universities tend to have "annual budget cycles", and enterprise computing is seen as coming in only two flavors: "maintenance" and "huge projects". Maintenance money can only be spent keeping things the same. Huge Project money ("capital budgets") can only be used to take, well, huge steps in a big straight line, and the big straight line, or "project plan" has to be computed up front and committed to before starting.

Well, duh, no wonder that doesn't work. That CANNOT BE MADE TO WORK. There are too many unknowns and unknowables, too many rusty arms, too many trees.

But every time it fails, the "solution" is to plan every LARGER steps next time, with a much BIGGER database that lists every single tree and bush and pothole. THEN, oh boy, you betcha we'll succeed.

Nope. That's a bad algorithm, a bad paradigm. The cybernetic loop model tells us the answer is way back at the other end: continuous, incremental, small improvement steps. Steps driven by local "feedback" that doesn't even involve upper management.

You can get to places you need to go with a million simultaneous tiny, sensible steps that people can understand that you cannot get to with one huge project, regardless how many billions you spend on "planning" it. Our whole accounting system, meant to help us spend money wisely, is causing us to spend it foolishly.

As the IOM report realizes - "We don't need a billion dollar project -- we need a billion, one-dollar projects." (paraphrased from "Crossing the Quality Chasm"). This isn't "sour grapes" or "some dumb idea" -- this is the most profound wisdom humanity has come up with yet.

It's kind of the Chinese approach. If every person picks up one piece of trash a day, it's way more successful than if every person sends $1000 per year into a central location where we build the Institute of Trash Pickup and study the trash-pickup problem and produce endless reports and finally some huge trash collection system that doesn't really work but is really expensive to maintain when they're not on strike (thank you, John Gall, for that insight.)

Ditto for installation of some kind of automated physician order entry system or other massive cultural change of the way things are done. It may seem "hard" to figure out what huge new system, in one step, will get us from point A to point B. Hmmm. Maybe that's because there aren't any "one-step" solutions to getting through the forest, and we need to reconsider our approach. Maybe a million tiny adjustments will solve two problems at once: the "What do we do?" problem, and the every popular "How do we implement it?" problem.

Ten thousand tiny search engines (people) each looking for one tiny step that is possible and totally understood that would help "a little bit" actually constitutes a "massively parallel supercomputer" that can outstrip almost any other way of "solving" BOTH of those problems simultaneously. That's really cool, because it turns out not to matter how great a solution is on paper or at some other site, if there's no way to get it implemented here without spilling the coffee and crashing the bus. That's the lesson Toyota learned. Forget central planning, which the Soviet Union demonstrated doesn't work. Empower the troops to use their eyes and brains and good judgement and make a million adjustments of 0.001 percent size.

It's an incredibly powerful algorithm. It doesn't require brilliant central planning officers. But it does require believing that the ground troops have enough brains to carry their coffee across the office without spilling it, even if they just waxed the floor. Turns out, according to Toyota, that's probably true.

Oh, yes, I almost forgot. It would seem to make sense that, if this cybernetic doodad is so powerful, that it is in operation already in billions of places around us in society and biology. That would argue that it might be worthwhile to have cybernetic doodad detectors, and cybernetic doodad statistical tools available to use to spot and describe and tweak such thingies.

Most of the last 6 months postings to this weblog have tried to make that argument, in more complex ways, and maybe that's my problem.

The American Indians knew this - that the Great Spirit worked in circles, not lines. Taoism knows about circles and cycles. "Systems thinking" involves accepting that there are important places where feedback loops just might possibly be involved.

We're so close now. Bring it home, baby!

(Posted in memory of Don Herbert, "Mr. Wizard", who died last week, and taught millions of kids, including me, basic science-made-easy on his TV show.)

Heading upstream

There's a very basic concept in Public Health known as "going upstream". The cartoon above illustrates the concept. (if you "click" on the picture it should zoom up to a bigger size.)

Imagine our hero, Tim, sees smoke coming up over the mountain, but he cannot see the source because the mountain is in the way. Say the smoke is killing the crops and Tim wants to "fix" the problem. Where should he go to start looking for the solution?

He could head towards the largest amount of smoke, to the right.
He could head towards the "center" of the problem, directly above.
He could head towards the "worst problem area" or densest smoke, to the upper left.
or
He could follow the smoke "upstream", going around the mountain or possibly over it, until he finds the "source" of the smoke.

I relate to this problem. I was in Edmonton once, visiting, and went to the top of a high rise building to catch the view. We saw all this distant smoke and asked where it was coming from. They said, "Oh, that's from a forest fire in the Rocky Mountains, about 45 miles west from here." So, we got in the car and headed west and went to fight the fire, 50 miles up a dirt logging road from Revelstoke. I'll describe our narrow midnight escape someday.

But, the point is, it is not really true that "Where there's smoke, there's fire." Many people seem to take that much too literally, and head for the densest smoke to look for the fire. Others head for the "center" of the visible problem, and others head for the largest amount of smoke.

In Public Health, we're taught to forget all that, sigh, pack a bag, and head "upstream" to locate the actual source of the problem. Often the source is not visible from where we are.

So, whether it's cancer along the Mississippi river, or developmental problems from lead paint poisoning, or gunshot wounds in the Emergency Room, we follow the Toyota Way and ask "Why?" at least five times - the same way you always got in trouble with your parents when they told you to do something.

For example - Why are so many children getting poisoned by old lead-based paint? Because the paint is peeling off and hasn't been replaced.
Why?
Because they live in terrible housing that's falling apart and neglected.
why?
Because they're poor and the poor are exploited and no one seems to care. Because despite tremendous technology, we can't make decent housing for $1000. Because despite amazing science we can't make companies and jobs that seem able to stay alive and in business. Because the people who could help don't realize there is a need, or are overwhelmed with how large the need is. Because the people who live there don't realize they could get subsidized housing in a much better place and don't know how to "sign onto our website and register for housing now!"

Why?

Now, you're getting into culture and how we distribute resources and education, and how we help or don't help each other, and how we respond to need by hiding the problem and pushing it out of our backyard into someone else's, instead of fixing what's wrong.

The Toyota Way really emphasizes that problems need to be brought to the surface, and made visible, so they don't fester and result in bad results later. Here's a view out of the window of where I'm currently writing this. Can you spot a "hiding" place and see what's happening here?


A huge pile of trash has built up just around the corner and out of sight of the main road.

In any Toyota plant, or anywhere near it, you would not find such a thing. They find they get better results if they deal with problems as they arise, instead of letting them stack up until the total pile becomes so overwhelming that no one wants to even think about it anymore.

Well, I hear a reply, that's because everyone is overwhelmed and stressed-out these days and no one has TIME to deal with "other people's problems."

Why?

This is actually a puzzling problem, related to multi-level depression or something. The "poor" in this country are poor at $10,000 a year, versus $200/year in India or China, if that. I think the figure is that something like a billion people earn less than $1 per day on this planet.

Why?

What's the most intriguing to me is that people in the US seem so fragmented and often unwilling to help each other out, or be helped, even when there are many really good-hearted people who are trying to help.

Or, even when the problem becomes desperate. A family about to lose their home because the mortgage payment just doubled on their fancy new loan would rather lose the home than try to have a second family move in and share the space and share the mortgage payment.

Why?

Because people just don't know how to get along with each other and things always turn bad.

Why?

After easily 5,000 years of written history, why is it that people haven't yet figured out how to get along with each other? If this is a big deal, here, in poverty, in Iraq, why isn't THAT what we study in school, from kindergarten through PhD level work, instead of algebra and physics?

"Because we need all this science and technology to save us from the mess we've made of things here."

Umm... Isn't the dependence or science and technology and the rejection of "learning how to get along" precisely the reason WHY we just spent $1,000,000,000,000 on the post-9/11 "homeland security" and war? That would have bought a lot of houses. Isn't the failure of management and labor to talk one of the big reasons GM lost its lead in the auto business and had to layoff hundreds of thousands of workers?

Well, for "cultural reasons" learning to get along is not a high priority.

Why?

In my book, it keeps coming back to this. We have what appear to be "technical" or "production" or "cost effectiveness" or "safety" problems, and they appear to be intractable, unsolvable by anything we can do. Then we find that "anything we can do" excludes the one thing that seems like it WOULD help, namely, putting a lot of resources into understanding how people should work together, relate, overcome conflict, and fix each other's roofs.

Why?

And that is precisely the point of the "Health, Behavior, and Society" focus on the role that "culture" and "distal factors" play on the visible immediate problems in front of us.

Don't look at the smoke. Go find the fire. Put the fire out, and the smoke will stop.

One last thought - some people argue that this kind of reasoning is no good because it doesn't involve mathematics. They've somehow deified the idea that there is such a thing as rigorous qualitative reasoning. I'm against sloppy thinking, sure.

But I've had more math than most people in this discussion. I've had 6 years of calculus, quantum mechanics, general relativity, statistical thermodynamics, etc. I taught financial modeling to MBA's.

Too often, the request for more math is an effort to avoid doing something that you already know you should be doing. We know enough now, with no more math at all, to know that a root cause of most of the mess we're in is that we don't know how to live with each other and work together. If we could solve that single problem, most of the rest would just dissolve, like a pearl necklace with the thread pulled out.

But, for those who insist on math, and are so deeply rooted in the culture of worship of "hard sciences", be of good cheer. I'll give you the math and you can be happy. You just may need to "come to the mountain" a little and learn about feedback control loops and all the rest of the non-linear, loop-based mathematics that YOU, dear you know who I mean, have been avoiding hoping that everything would fall neatly into linear causality, open paths with clear starts and finishes, and the General Linear Model and its grip on research.

And, in fact, with a little Laplace Transform wizardry, even those dreaded loops will flatten out and you can use your existing math and solve the problems with STATA -- even though the basic assumptions about unbiased estimators won't be met. Who ever checks those anyway?

So, enough. I'm off to breakfast.