A different model of what's wrong

Mental concepts or models of life are ways of throwing out most information to focus on a few bits that seem more important to insight than all the others. Different models give different answers to questions such as

• What's wrong?
• Why doesn't this work?
• Where is it broken?
• Where should we intervene?
• If we intervene there, should we push or pull?
• If we did that, what effect would we expect to see and when?

It's miserably cold and rainy out, with snow coming this way, so I'm staying inside this morning and working on something more abstract, while I eat breakfast -- such as what a model of the nature of Life and Evolution would suggest is "the problem" in our economy.

Might as well, nothing else seems to be working, and the models used by the government seem to change daily. Meanwhile, they argue over what it will take to stop GM going bankrupt, which again depends on what you think is wrong. Different camps point to:

• too many government regulations
• too few government regulations
• health care costs
• unions -who make unreasonable demands
• management - which makes unreasonable demands
• consumers - who make unreasonable demands
  
• "the economy"
• Housing and mortgage defaults
• Nuclear above-ground testing
• Ozone
• Godzilla
• Unfair competition from larger companies
• Unfair competition from smaller companies
• Hedge funds and banks
• tree-huggers
• commies and socialists
• liberals or conservatives
• lawyers
• dentists
• side-effects of anti-depression meds
• Not enough team collaboration and consultation
• Too much team collaboration and consultation
• Too much decentralization
• Too little decentralization
• Alien invasions, UFO's, and demon possession
• breakdown in the moral fiber of our nation
• God's punishment for [ pick your sin and sinner ]
  

Given that range of diverse opinions about what is "obviously" "the cause" of the current problems in the industry, it seems there is room for one more.

You don't have to "buy" this - just consider it as yet one more possible model, and see where it leads. In particular, see if it leads to an idea we haven't tried yet that seems affordable and that won't interfere with other initiatives underway.

So, my new model of the day looks at the nature of Life - which is clearly and unambiguously organized in a kind of hierarchical and overlapping fashion. Cells are alive, but cells form multicellular thingies that are themselves alive in a whole different way, such as cats and dogs and people and you.

Individual instances of any type of thing collectively form "a species", which itself has many properties of living things, including being the abstract object that really evolves over time. (Individuals don't evolve, at least very much in terms of DNA arrangement, once they are born.)

There is a running argument in biology as to whether genes evolve, and animals are a side effect, or animals evolve, and genes are a side effect, or species evolve, and both genes and individual animals are side-effects.

In my model, they are all evolving, in inter-related but partly independent fashions.

The key feature of this particular multi-level model of life is that each level of Life has its own, largely independent, existence and rules of life and Life. Each level can forget, most of the time (but not all the time) that the other levels exist at all.

You can forget that your body is made of cells, unless your behavior, such as consuming some chemical, affects how the cells work, and then suddenly it matters and un-becomes invisible.

Similarly, management of a company, say GM, or of a country, say the US, lives in its own world with its own rules, and can easily forget that the cell-equivalent (workers / citizens / "consumers") matter -- until some behavior suddenly damages them (or bankrupts them) and they become un-invisible to "the economy".

These actors,however, are all still "people". Just as there are living structures smaller than "people" (such as cells), there seem to be (by this model) living structures that are larger than people, namely corporations and nations.

Smaller, in this sense, means things that make up something, and larger means, things made up of something.

But, our bodies are not "just" a pile of chemicals, or ten trillion cells - they have unique features that only make sense at a person level - such as going to the dentist. Much of "our" lives we spend dealing with issues "mortgage refinancing" that simply have no equivalent at the cellular or atomic level. If we could talk to our cells, it would be a very short and frustrating conversation, pretty much what one gets when management and labor sit down together.

So, let's assume for the moment that Corporations (with a capital C) are themselves life-forms that are dimly aware of their environment, dimly aware of the people who make them up, and yet exist independently (mostly) doing their own things that are similarly unintelligible to us.

We have, in other words, created a new level of multicellular life, called Corporations, which have their own life of struggling with each other, their own rules, and their own economy that is often entirely decoupled from the economy individual humans live in.

What has changed, in a baffling way to these corporations then, is that the health of "the consumer" has suddenly changed. Before this level was a reliable source of income or labor and as invisible as illegal immigrants to our food-processing company stockholders, and now, suddenly, the problems of individual humans have intersected the problems of the corporate world.

The US government is struggling to fix the problems of corporate life forms, because, at their scale, these are the only ones that matter or are even visible. Corporate life forms are trying to stay afloat by laying off 20% or more of their workers, because that always used to work, but it doesn't any more, not once EVERYONE is doing the same thing at once.

Intersecting all this is the confusion and confounding of "management" of a company and the company or industry itself. If there is no such thing as a corporate life form, other than an extension and echo of the top manager, then the company and the leader are the same thing.

However, most of our corporations and industries exist and continue to function even though the top management may be dysfunctional or absent entirely, or entirely engaged in internal power struggles. The plane continues, for a while to fly, even though the crew is having a huge fistfight.

So one thing we need to distinguish, when possible, is the survival of the current pilot and crew, versus the survival of the airplane. In many cases, the two seem to have diverged, and the crew is more interested in stripping the plane and bailing out than in saving the plane.

But the question here is where "the problem" is. Where is this whole multi-level system of cells, humans, corporations, and government breaking down?

This gets to the crux of the matter. Is it the humans at the top who are blind to any world except their own, a fact that is obvious from below but invisible from up there? Or is it that the higher life form, the corporation or nation, is insufficiently well formed to understand how important its constituent people are to its own existence?

In other words, assuming that most of what we see at a national level is a struggle of corporations and Corporate life forms, do they grasp that trying to survive at 'the expense of" their own cells is a losing strategy?

There is a lot of evidence that this fact is not evident. Congress is obsessed with trying to bail out or save the Corporate life forms, at the expense of the individual composite cells (ie, us.)

It is not surprising that humans at the top of such corporations or government become blind to the realities of cellular-level life. This is no longer where they operate.

If corporations are an independent living species, then the problem we face is that this level entity is too stupid to realize what it depends on.

And the solution that suggests is to make corporations more, not less, capable -- if that can be done in such a way that they don't destroy the entire planet that they also rely on in the process.

In other words, imagine that Corporations are "mostly alive", and "dimly aware" of what depends on what, and what part of individual humans and the earth's ecosphere they rely on to survive, which used to be invisible before there were so many Corporations sucking so much out of us and the planet.

Then, an intervention point, in that model, if we could find it, would be to make the Corporation brighter at perceiving long-range, long-term consequences of decisions IT makes, where the humans in it are mostly just there for show, acting as if they are making the decisions, kind of the way humans think they are making decisions that their bodies and brains made minutes earlier, as MRI studies now show.

This gets to the core question of how emergent, synthetic, multi-level life forms perceive the world, and learn about it, including what is connected to what.

Surely the basic laws of cybernetics apply to such learning. Things that have immediate consequences are easier to learn. Things with distant or delayed consequences take longer to learn.

The model says we're struggling with the wrong thing, trying to figure out WHO should be the humans at "the top" of meta-organisms that don't really rely on "the top" for leadership or guidance any more. The thinly veiled secret of those at the top is that they are also clueless and not in control of what's going on, despite their massive marketing effort to persuade everyone that they are just crucial and should be paid massive sums for their invaluable contributions.

We should take some time, remove the individual humans from the equation, and look at how the overall system is organized, and self-organizing to perceive the world around it and to improve its own ability to perceive and act and make alliances and adapt. Such seeing has to extend downward to humans and cells and plants and the ecosystem, as well as upwards to nations and planetary composite life forms that Corporations are themselves cells within.

This seems abstract, but it may be very real. It is certainly outside the normal box!

A few points in closing.

One is the key assumption that collections of things do not just have 'emergent properties", but that the emergent properties themselves take on a persistent, self-perpetuating "life of their own" that no longer depends directly on the collection of things that initially made it. Life has, in some sense, like an electromagnetic wave, been radiated outwards and no longer depends on the existence of the broadcast antenna. In fact, the corporate entity may turn on its founding fathers and expel them and go off its own direction, and often does.

The huge mental barrier to this concept is the idea we have of "life" being a property of collections of cells that are touching in a more or less fixed arrangement, although even that breaks down if one includes blood and white blood cells, etc.

To "see" or visualize the type of "life" I'm talking about, you may need to just follow the feedback loops and see what aspects of things are self-regulating, self-perpetuation, self-repairing, self-defending, DESPITE the efforts to go a different way by the employees ,management, stockholders, regulators, etc.

It is, ultimately, not DNA or proteins or genes, but the existence of these abstract "feedback control loops" that seem to be the universal property that defines something that behaves as if it were "alive". If we look at it from that point of view, this includes all biological life, but now includes as well ecosystems, the planet, corporations, major religions, etc. as living things.

This would also suggest that the key aspects of information transfer, the web and Google, for example, are at the core of the thinking neurons of this meta-being that has taken shape, or is taking shape around us even now.

That in turn suggests that the place to look for successful new product innovations for Google or Web-3 systems is beyond collaboration into synthesis of smaller-scale living units, something akin to "teams" but way beyond them, as well as synthesis of dyads of people that have a life beyond that of each of the two separately.

What structure, system, framework, boost, database, service, etc. would catalyze the emergence of such multi-human life forms, detect them, make a space that nourishes them and makes them bright enough to surround us safely instead of destructively?

That may be the question some people should be asking. That may be the gap. It's not just a question of groupware and collaboration and working-together, or of fixing 'broken" relationships or marriages. It's a question of what the positive side is, what levels of emergent life we can make with and out of our interactions with each other.

What kind of network service would detect and facilitate the closure and stability of such closed, feedback loops between individual agents -- the substrate of Life itself?

NOW you're talking "market share" and pent-up demand.

Wade

Why are so many flights delayed?

Although my flight made it home from Baltimore, my flight there was canceled, and on the way back the two flights on adjacent gates to mine were canceled.

Northwest Airlines, with a hub in Detroit, seems to have led the pack, with 14% of its flights canceled two weeks ago, stranding over 100,000 passengers.

An article in this morning's paper confirms that it's getting worse. It also notes something I realize I should have seen myself, since it's one of those scale-dependent thingies: the delays counted by airplane are nothing compared with the delays experienced by passengers. The airline calls it a 1-hour delay, but it causes a missed connection and an overnight stay, or even longer, waiting to get re-booked, because all the other flights are already full too, and you're not the only one who got bumped.

Here's some numbers from the Times:

Ugly Airline Math: Planes late, fliers even later
New York Times
Jeff Bailey and Nate Schwebber
July 5, 2007

As anyone who has flown recently can probably tell you, delays are getting worse this year. The on-time performance of airlines has reached an all-time low, but even the official numbers do not begin to capture the severity of the problem.

That is because these statistics track how late airplanes are, not how late passengers are. The longest delays — those resulting from missed connections and canceled flights — involve sitting around for hours or even days in airports and hotels and do not officially get counted.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ... determined that as planes become more crowded — and jets have never been as jammed as they are today — the delays grow much longer because it becomes harder to find a seat on a later flight.

But with domestic flights running 85 to 90 percent full, meaning that virtually all planes on desirable routes are full, Cynthia Barnhart, an M.I.T. professor who studies transportation systems, has a pretty good idea of what the new research will show when it is completed this fall: “There will be severe increases in delays,” she said.

Over all, this could be a dreadful summer to fly. In the first five months of 2007, more than a quarter of all flights within the United States arrived at least 15 minutes late. And more of those flights were delayed for long stretches, an average of 39 percent longer than a year earlier.

Moreover, in addition to crowded flights, the usual disruptive summer thunderstorms and an overtaxed air traffic control system, travelers could encounter some very grumpy airline employees; after taking big pay cuts and watching airline executives reap some big bonuses, many workers are fed up.

If a flight taxies out, sits for hours, and then taxies back in and is canceled, the delay is not recorded. Likewise, flights diverted to cities other than their destination are not figured into delay statistics.

About 30 percent to 35 percent of Continental’s passengers make connections between flights

A spokeswoman, .. added that many delays are caused by weather and thus do not reflect the airline’s performance.

...That is a typical level of missed connections, but Continental’s flights that day were 89.6 percent full, so finding seats on later flights for some passengers was difficult.

Continental also has a new system that sends e-mail messages — and, beginning next month, text messages to cellphones — informing connecting passengers on late flights how they have been re-booked.

It also is moving ticket kiosks inside the security area so passengers can print new boarding passes without going out to the main ticketing area or having to wait in line for a gate agent to help them.

The system, however, re-books people on the next available flight with a confirmed open seat and that is not always as soon as people might expect. Some are told their new departure is in three days.

“That causes them to go berserk,” said David Grizzle, a senior vice president at Continental. Often, on standby, people get out sooner, he said.

I also noticed that Northwest Airlines had attempted to solve this problem by institutionalizing the response. They now had entire special carts to make it easier for large numbers of passengers to attempt to make new bookings faster.

From the point of view of "lean" practices, and the Toyota Production Model, this represents one of the worst wastes possible - trying to become more efficient at doing work that shouldn't even be done in the first place. The risk is that the "workaround" will partly work, and then dig in for the long haul and become part of the new "normal" process, replicated 500 times in other places. New vendors will spring up to build even "more convenient" re-booking carts, and to lobby for sustaining this practice.



What might be done instead?

The first thing is to identify what the problem is. The problem is not thunderstorms or a feud between the traffic controllers and the FAA, although those contribute. The problem here is one of those pesky physical laws that I've been writing about, and what "the Yarn Harlot" pointed out as man's persistent desire to make "ten less than nine" and the delusion that maybe it just hasn't been rotated the right way yet and somehow this will "fit."

The law in question is called "Little's Law", and it looks innocent enough. It says that for any system the "cycle time" to process one unit (or passenger) goes up towards infinity as the system becomes full, and goes up much faster if there is more variability in the processing time for any individual step.

I can't easily find an authoritative textbook online, but here's the key info from a wafer fabrication newsletter "fabtime". (The same law applies to semiconductors as to passengers.
WIP = Work in process)

The relationship between cycle time and WIP was first documented in 1961 by J. D. C. Little. Little’s Law states that at a given throughput level, the ratio of WIP to cycle time equals throughput, as shown in the formulas below:

Throughput = WIP / Cycle Time

In other words, for a factory with constant throughput, WIP and cycle time are proportional. Keep in mind that Little’s Law doesn’t say that WIP and cycle time are independent of start rate. Little’s Law just says if you have two of these three numbers, you should be able to solve for the remaining one. The tricky part is that cycle time and WIP are really functions of the start rate.

Oh, and that tricky part is the devil in the details. What this really says is that as you try to jam more and more stuff through the same process, as it fills up the process starts to run into conflict and congestion costs, and the actual throughput starts declining rapidly, while "work in process" (passengers waiting for a flight) climbs towards the sky.

Fabtime's tutorial, shows a graph of the result, that shows that effect.

What this shows is that not only does the "cycle time" expected for a unit in this system (a passenger) to be processed (get home) go up, it goes up rapidly to multiples of the time it would take on an uncrowded system. So, for a very consistent, low variability process, the blue line,
trying to operate at about 90% full capacity will cause the process time to be six times the time it would take at 10% full. If the process has more variability (thunderstorms), this knee can be reached much sooner - at 65% capacity.

This is as true for service work and management work as for producing widgets or silicon wafers. Past a certain point, trying to shove more work through the system only slows down everything. So, the right thing to do is to find the sweet spot where the most work actually gets done, and resist the temptation to now try to fill every open space with more work. For wafer fabrication, this is about 85% "full". In other words, at the maximum throughput, 15% of the system will be empty, just "sitting there". This drives management crazy.

What typically happens is that people don't believe this result, even if they know it. (The delusion factor is strong, and surely 10 can be made less than 9.) None of the outside stakeholders, or visiting brass from the parent company understand this law, and a piece of idle equipment is surely a mistake and needs to be doing work! Or so it seems.

So, now, our friend, the feedback loop, comes into play. Once this knee in the curve is passed, and output starts to slow down due to congestion, the typical response of management is to go ballistic and push harder, trying to jam even more work through the system. This slows the system down more, which leads to management pushing even harder and starting even more work in process.

Then psychosocial factors come into play. Management becomes convinced that the employees must be goofing off, and become irate. "Surely that is true, because the total throughput is going down!" they think. Meanwhile, the swamped employees, seeing more in their in-boxes than ever and becoming exhausted trying to deal with all the internal delays at getting the simplest thing done, also become testy and hostile.

Meetings are held to discuss why so little is getting done, which takes more time, further slowing down the process. Labor strikes. Management retaliates, further cutting production and sales and revenue, which makes stockholders even more desperate to make up the losses with even more bookings. We end up with a positive feedback loop that rises until something breaks.
That's where it appears to be today.



If you click on that diagram, you can zoom it up to a readable size.

(That diagram is most of a Causal Loop Diagram, as developed by Systems Dynamics folks like Worcester Polytechnic Institute, or MIT Professor John Sterman (author of the tome Business Dynamics), drawn with Ventana Software's Vensim software that could put in numbers and actually run the simulation to see how this unfolds. This sort of reasoning is described by Peter Senge in his book The Fifth Discipline, where he uses an example of a beer production and distribution system to show how things can fall apart even when everyone is doing a good job, as they see it, because of "system factors" and "feedback loops". People interested in that would be interested in the whole Systems Dynamics Society. )

This occurs in a great many companies today. Unfamiliarity with Little's Law loads the gun, psychosocial factors cock the hammer, and every new thunderstorm or glitch pulls the trigger as everyone involved - stockholders, management, labor, and passengers, blame each other for the problem -- which is really a "system problem" not a "bad person" problem.

When this kind of thing happens to any health care delivery system, such as a hospital, it becomes a public health problem. When this kind of thing damages nerves and business effectiveness which leads to more pressure which damages nerves and leads to obesity and heart attacks and layoffs and no health insurance, it becomes a public health problem.

This is the kind of "systems thinking" competency I'm hoping the new ASPH Core MPH Competencies will lead to, so people can see this effect and head it off at the pass.

The biggest single controllable step here is to lower the blame factor, and realize we're all in this together. Myths and delusions and a norm that management's job is to crack a whip and push harder and harder come into play in a bad way when it is the system that is slowing down, not the employees. (Take it up with God, I guess, if you don't like Little's Law.)

Going around and around this loop is one of the major factors winding us all too tight these days, both humans and corporations. Maybe understanding what we've run up against can help defuse it and lead us back to a saner world for everyone.

At least, that's what Public Health hopes, in my view.

Wade