What's wrong with decision-making at the top?

Many companies try to make decisions "at the top" instead of delegating that authority lower down the ladder. In this sense they hope to remain "in control" of what is decided.

Here's the problem - bandwidth. Top management only has so much they can deal with in a given day. So, rather than trying to put in 185 hour days, management does two things.

First, it puts out visible signals that management is overwhelmed, and please stop bringing problems to our attention unless you already know the answer. That cuts out a lot of this flow of information about process defects and makes life look a lot better.

Then, management decides it "prioritize" - which often means that a small subset of the problems that have made it to their desks actually will be dealt with today, and the rest will have to wait to "some other day."

So, management attempts to retain "control" of the process by suppressing news about most things going wrong, and avoiding dealing with most problems at all, at least today.

True, some problems will be dealt with. The serious question is, what are the costs and what are the benefits of this approach. How high are the actual costs of all those problems that are not being dealt with, and the costs of everything downstream that has stopped in its tracks waiting for resolution of the identified problem? These "opportunity costs" are often very high and very real.

Theory Y, bottom-up management, distributed leadership, and lean manufacturing all push the responsibility for problem-solving out of the corporate suite. This does involve letting go of the "control" that is gained by making these decisions, but includes getting hold of the "control" that comes from some kind of solution to the problem being instituted, instead of no solution at all for another day.

In many cases, most of the problems can be resolved at lower levels than upper management -- the ship isn't as responsive to the helm, but on the other hand it has stopped taking on water and no longer feels like it is about to capsize, and that funny noise has stopped -- so, there IS a ship left that can be steered, somewhat.

I fret about the

FEMA national incident management plan

because it is largely a plan to change all the reporting responsibilities and send issues to the "top" for resolution. Bandwidth, I think, will be the issue. A single large issue can claim 100% of the top executives' attention, closeting them in secret somewhere, while the phones go unaswered on every other issue that is, as requested, carefully flowing up the chain of command. That simply is unworkable in a large-scale emergency which is, well, when it is needed the most.

We have this long-standing heritage in this country of success based on top-down management and it is hard to let go and "shift the paradigm" to empowered employees making most decisions. In Katrina, it was the US Coast Guard that was most effective at rescuing people, becuase they had authority already delegated to each ship captain to do whatever made sense in an emergency.

Interesting idea.

Disaster Prepareness using Web-based tools

I put another paper online:
Web-tools as potential assistance to Public Health Preparedness and response tasks.

Abstract

Faced with the prospect of natural and man-made emergencies for public health, it is worthwhile to see whether any of the new software tools might help. The new "web-2" tools have changed in a surprising way - they are easier and more fun to use. These tools are often free of charge, require no installation, consume no disk-space, and require no IT-department support -- all of which meet constraints that public health workers have faced in the past. The focus of these new tools is on cost, agility, simplicity, ease-of-use, and collaborative work. This paper reviews what tools are available, and how they might fit into the set of public health tool-box. Finally, training issues and other barriers to adoption are assessed, with an eye to figuring out what University-based Disaster Preparedness centers might do to make this technology legitimate, more accessible, and better utilized.

There's also a discussion of rules-based "plan generators" instead of "plans" in the appendix.

Spiritual solutions for technical problems

If we reframe an intractible "technical" problem as a "spiritual" problem, it can reveal a hidden solution.

Here's an example. I worked in a lab once where we had special glass vials we needed to do our tests. The supplier was back-ordered over 3 months and we ran out and were stopped cold. So, this was clearly a "technical problem." Then I found out that there were crates of these vials 40 feet away in the next lab down the hallway. But, we weren't allowed to use those, because that researcher had a long-standing gripe with out lab's boss over some incident 10 years prior, and they weren't on talking terms.

The point is, solving the underlying spiritual problem of lack of reconciliation of these two researchers was an alternative way to get our lab functioning again.

This is not an isolated case. In fact, when you think about it, there are many "techical" and "economic" problems in our own lives that would go away if we addressed some interpersonal spiritual issues that are in the way. I hate to think of what fraction of corporate and national resources are spent trying to make it possible for us to avoid facing our broken personal relationships and dysfunctional organizations.

What brought this to mind this morning was an article in the New York Times on new $400 antennas that increase your cell phone's reception.

Coaxing More Bars Out of That Cellphone
New York Times
March 1, 2007

Garbled conversations and dropped calls are the bane of cellphone users — not to mention the dead zones where calls cannot go through to begin with. But some recent products are designed to overcome these annoyances, improve cellular reception, and, in some cases, even extend coverage....

So, probably, if everyone spent an additional $400, we could get better reception. That would be the "technical solution."

Take a minute before rushing on and consider what a "spiritual solution" would be. Hint - it would involve cooperation instead of fragmentation between people, with each person trying to reinvent the wheel on their own.

Here's another clue. Glance at my prior post
One laptop per child - grid computing for the poor.

The New York Times covered this yesterday (november 30,2006) in an article "For $150, Third world laptop stirs a Big Debate" by John Markoff. Compare to "Microsoft would put Poor Online by Cellphone", also by John Markoff, Jan 30, 2006.

According to Markoff's article yesterday "Five countries — Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria and Thailand — have made tentative commitments to put the computers into the hands of millions of students, with production in Taiwan expected to begin by mid-2007." Much of the rest of the article deals with pricing, technology, and competing views about the impact of this computer on education.

That misses the most important aspect of this, in my mind, which Markoff mentions near the end of the piece:

One factor setting the project apart from earlier efforts to create inexpensive computers for education is the inclusion of a wireless network capability in each machine.

The project leaders say they will employ a variety of methods for connecting to the Internet, depending on local conditions. In some countries, like Libya, satellite downlinks will be used. In others, like Nigeria, the existing cellular data network will provide connections, and in some places specially designed long-range Wi-Fi antennas will extend the wireless Internet to rural areas.

When students take their computers home after school, each machine will stay connected wirelessly to its neighbors in a self-assembling “mesh” at ranges up to a third of a mile. In the process each computer can potentially become an Internet repeater, allowing the Internet to flow out into communities that have not previously had access to it.

The distinction between "computers" and "cell phones" has become almost irrelevant these days, so what does this suggest.

It suggests that a different way of connecting cell-phones to the national grid would be to have them able to self-assemble a communications grid, in real-time, borrowing a little spare capacity from any other phone or computer in the neighborhood.

In other words, I don't really need my phone to be in line-of-sight to a cell-phone tower if the phones cooperate and silently set up their own relay chain behind the scenes. My phone can talk to my upstairs neighbor, which talks to the phone 2 floors above that, all the way to the top of the building, where someone's phone can talk to another distant building's phones which in turn are in line of sight of the cell-phone tower on the other side of the mountain. Voila, I have a path for my call.

We don't need new $400 antennas for each cell phone - we only need the existing cell phones to talk to each other.

Aside from finding a clear path, the phones could also automatically deliver much more power. This is the sort of thing that radio astronomers use, to connect 20 different radio antenna "dishes" across the world into a single virtual antenna that can be "virtually" pointed directly at the target, delivering thousands of times the effective power because it all goes the right direction instead of off into space.

The downside is that different phones and phone systems and even people would have to be willing to let "their" phone participate as part of a larger social grid. The upside is that this would work even in some Katrina type disaster, and auto-assemble a pathway from the existing phones to a cell-tower or satellite that could relay calls out of the disaster area.

The changes are essentially all in software and procedures. Probably this could be done with existing phones today, if we, collectively, decided that's what we wanted to do.

Without a single new cell-phone tower, or a single dollar being spent for new hardware or phones, everyone in the country could get 100 times better service.

There are no "technical" reasons we couldn't do that.
There are only "spiritual" reasons we put up with that make us dysfunctional.

This kind of problem is very widespread, especially in the USA today, where cooperation and collaboration seem to have gone the way of the phonograph in many places. We're all working overtime, way more hours than any other country, trying to make the payments on purely technical solutions that we mistakenly think we need to solve our issues.

Quoting my earlier post, looking at the chaos caused by lack of communications following Katrina in New Orleans,

By W. David Stephenson International Conference on Complex Systems June 26, 2006

So we know that emergent behavior is possible even under the trying circumstances of a terrorist attack or a natural disaster.

... Equally important but less understood by decision makers, unlike landline phones or the broadcast media, these devices are themselves increasing networked, self-organizing, and self-healing. In many cases, such as mesh networks that were originally developed for the military in battlefield conditions and now are being used by civilians, the networks don't require any kind of external networking: simply turn them on and the network self organizes.

I am convinced that such a networked homeland security strategy is feasible today, using existing technology and requiring much less time to create and deploy than some of the costly, dedicated emergency communications systems government is creating. Equally important, by facilitating those three qualities needed in a crisis: flexibility, robustness, and self-organizing, it could transform the general public from hopeless victims, waiting for aid that may never come, into self-reliant components of the overall response. To paraphrase Dr. King, which will it be, chaos, or community? [emphasis added]

On a larger scale, communications is just one problem we saw in New Orleans. Tens of thousands of cars left the city with one passenger, while a hundred thousand people were stranded without transportation. Food and water were hoarded not shared.

One explicit principle of the Baha'i faith is where this line of thinking ends up, and it's a lesson
that Michigan and the USA need to pay attention to. The economic downturns can be viewed
as "technical" problems, yes, but that hides the much closer, much cheaper solutions, that don't
require new technology.

PRINCIPLES OF THE BAHÁ'Í FAITH

#10 -
A spiritual solution to the economic problem.



I'm reminded of the monkey traps used in some countries. A cocoanut has a hole cut into the side, just large enough for a monkey's paw to fit into it. Then the cocoanut is chained to the ground, and some delicious nuts put inside it. Then we wait. The monkey comes along, smells the nuts, reaches in, grabs a handful, and then can't get it's overstuffed hand back out the hole. At that point people can just walk over and drop a net on the monkey, who will refuse to let go of the nuts that are "so close."

Americans have this fixation on having to fix everything with individual solutions - everyone has to have their own car, their own house, their own everything -- and even the phones or computer lines, if not being used, can't be shared with others for a whole variety of invented "legal" reasons.

There's a lesson here. In our case, it's not some guy with a net coming after us, it's the entire economy going south on us, loss of jobs, etc. Within each company, there's a collapse of innovation, all to protect this competitive concept and a myth of rugged individualism, that probably was never true. Like our SUV's that dress like they're going off-road, but never do, we have these attitudes that dress like we don't need anyone else to survive, but we do.

If we admitted that, and went from there, most of the rest of these problems could be solved. It's like everyone is trying to be the most fanatastic word or note in the universe, and forgetting that great books and great music need lots of different words and notes to work.

We need each other. We don't need more technology to make up for our lack of friends. We need to help each other learn how to make friends again. It seems to be a lost art for at least one in five people in the USA today. We should fix that, then see how much "depression" is left.