THE PERENNIAL CONUNDRUM -- THE RELUCTANCE OF INSTITUTIONS TO LISTEN -- WILLIAM L. LIVINGSTON, IV's "DESIGN FOR PREVENTION"

THE PERENNIAL CONUNDRUM – THE RELUCTANCE OF SOCIETY TO LISTEN

WILLIAM L. LIVINGSTON, IV’s DESIGN FOR PREVENTION – AND THE OILRIG DISASTER IN THE GULF OF MEXICO

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 9, 2010

“The Design for Prevention is the engineering process. The engineering process is the assault on complexity. Any method, to be a method, is defined apriority (i.e., presumed), before deployment. A goal-seeking method is composed of tasks; each task goal-seeking as well. What goes in is specified as well as what is to take place. What comes out to feed and trigger the on following task meets specifications. The D4P is a fundamental problem-solving strategy, a conscious and directed intervention especially configured to deal with the outrageously complex as it engages the future. Prevention design is all about dynamic vulnerabilities.”

William L. Livingston, IV, Design For Prevention, 2010, page 4.

* * *

We have a monumental disaster currently going on in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana with millions of gallons of oil already in those fragile ecosystems, and all because an oilrig blew up.

The media is full of hand wrenching, executives and politicians are covering their asses, and Rube Goldberg methodology has been employed to cap the major leak dropping a humungous tank a mile down into the murky waters to cover the leak and pump up the oily mixture to the surface.

Let us say those engaged are successful, that 85 percent of the leaking oil is finally capped, and only 15 percent is still leaking into the gulf. We will hear of man being triumphant once again, able engineering of the crisis management team staying the course if not saving the day.

Lost in all this would be the fact that it never needed to happen.

The current mantra is “we haven’t had such a disaster in forty years.” No one seems to appreciate how inane and self-serving this remark. We should never have a disaster at all if the front-end engineering that Livingston has advocated for years was part of the drill.

THE PROBLEM WITH HINDSIGHT

DESIGN FOR PREVENTION is neither understood nor appreciated. Livingston knows this. “Those that don’t have the conceptions to handle complexity can neither detect nor name the threats they face.”

The oilrig was an exploratory one owned by Transocean (RIG) and leased by British Petroleum for $500,000 a day mainly with Transocean people manning the rig.

The oilrig was in the process of being converted from an exploratory rig to a oil producing rig. This required front-end reengineering.

Now we know, if the preliminary analysis proves accurate, that leaking methane gas combined with the heat of the conversion caused a series of combustions that ultimately led to the collapse and disintegration of the oilrig taking with it eleven lives.

Could this have been avoided?

Let me answer it this way, Livingston’s book develops a painstaking case for designing the maximum prevention into the system with a systemic and systematic analysis of every possibility at the front-end with a constant looping back for checking for errors and making adjustments with absolutely nothing ever taken for granted any-step-of-the-way.

Livingston and a cadre of similar thinking individuals over time have had a reverence for first principles and natural law. It could be said that Nature lifted her regal head when the methane gas was torched and the rig exploded. It should have been apparent from the first that Nature cannot be defied. DESIGN FOR PREVENTION understands this and abides accordingly.

* * *

Livingston is a professional engineer writing to professional engineers. I am not a professional engineer but trained in the same sciences that leads to such professionalism.

The society we enjoy is a product of the engineering mind, heart and soul of its practitioners, engineers with the foresight to think in terms of the future, not the past, to acknowledge and anticipate the consequences of defying Mother Nature, not only in the technical but also in the sociological sense.

Rudy Starkerman, a Swiss trained mathematical physicist, has discovered that the ultimate group size for conducting meaningful discourse is FIVE OR LESS. More than five, we start creating hierarchies, power cells, and pyramid building. We see this happening in teams of five or more. This supports my own empirical experience. I have had constant reminders of how true Starkerman’s work is in fact.

Every engineer should read this book. I say that because engineers must daily deal with being under appreciated, undervalued, and under acknowledged when they put forth foresight propositions of prevention.

Livingston clearly presents the corporate mess that we seem never to be able to escape. I’ve called this mess, “corpocracy,” and have outlined some of the errors it produces. Livingston, however, has nailed it, and in doing so reveals much that is wrong with contemporary institutional society.

INSTITUTIONS AND THEIR HOLD ON US

At this point, I should mention these are my views and not the author's as I have read his book. I am expressing how it has registered on my psyche. This should not be a surprise because each person brings his or her own personal, geographic and demographic baggage to a book, what Livingston calls our “cognitive biases.”

He explains how institutions interfere with first principles. There is nothing wrong with institutions, per se, he says, it is what they have become.

(1) Institutions in order to survive have taken the stance of being infallible. Infallibility leads to rules and regulations while demanding obedience, loyalty and conforming behavior to arbitrary standards that have little to do with their function.

(2) Institutions are stultifying because they are closed systems. Closed systems are not free. They are committed to the status quo. This leads to conformity, replication, duplication, and business as usual no matter the internal tension or accelerating external demands. It compromises their ability to act expediency, judicially and effectively to competitive challenges.

(3) Institutions sustain themselves by constant measuring people in accordance with arbitrary standards of conformity, control and order. Standard measurement is practiced with grades in school and performance appraisal in the work environment.

(4) Arbitrary measurement reifies errors as institutional conformity magnifies vulnerability to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, entropy. According to this law, everything is going from useful to wasted energy. Another way of putting it, with entropy, everything is in an inevitable state of dying. To reduce the swiftness of this death march requires negative entropy. At the institutional level, this means the constant reinvention and looping back to resolve issues rather than be mastered to the death by avoiding them.

(5) Institutions by their protocol are committed to hindsight thinking being disinclined to promote foresight thinking. This is why crisis management is so typical of institutions. It is why linear thinking rules the day. It is why they seem to be in a continuing cycle of facing and solving the same problems over and over again. There is no escape when problems are solved with the same thinking that caused them.

(6) Institutional authority is a poor motivator because it encourages complicity rather than compliance, blind obedience with indifference to operational consequences and institutional goals. The most successful employee is the one who never makes waves, and therefore goes down with the ship.

(7) Institutional mindsets form cultures geared to ideologies that treat prevention as a pejorative rather than as a survival strategy. Consequently, they avoid rather than embrace prevention. This leaves them open for 800,000 practicing attorneys to carry the ball when it is dropped. We shall see this in the wake of the BP oilrig explosion as certain as day follows night.

(8) Institutions cannot operate without hierarchies. Hierarchies with their infallibility and chain-of-command construction cannot but spawn disturbances. Complexity has accelerated the rate and magnitude of these perturbations. Institutions confront complexity with CEOs acting as if on automatic treadmills while confusing poison with medicine as remedy. We have seen this with GM, Wall Street, the Vatican, and the Greek government, and subprime real estate meltdown, Ponzi schemes, on and on. We can always explain everything after-the-fact.

(9) Institutions are locked into hindsight. Livingston writes, “More than 99 percent of all courses offered in the educational system, top to bottom, are hindsight based. The subject matter taught, art or science, is based upon history, lessons-learned, and past discoveries. Pragmatic foresight or foresight engineering, the soul of design, is not offered at all. It takes hindsight to get into the university (GPA, SAT’s) and hindsight is all you take out of it.” For years, I have been a critic of the MBA program, mainly because of this. Livingston shows a similar contempt for the MBA “case studies” of Harvard University, which are totally hindsight instruments.


THE INDIVIDUAL IN THE INSTITUTIONAL MAELSTROM

Livingston goes on to show how important it is for the individual to be his own authority, to be autonomous and free thinking, and how critical it is for him to be self-regulated rather than arbitrarily controlled by some institution.

Society is in transition and transformation. It is a matter of first principles and there is no point in forcing or challenging the status quo but rather the prudent thing is for the individual to go with the flow.

In Hard transparency, there is no charismatic appeal for trust and faith. It takes intelligence. Problems today have the property of "multiplicity," that is, they go far beyond the capacity to solve them. Livingston says, "If you want to get by a multiplicity obstacle, you have to go around it." You bow to Mother Nature, and continue on.

For institutions to survive, they must become more vulnerable, more open and fallible to the errors of their ways. Creativity can only function in an open system. Creativity is required today in view of the mounting complexity. Here are a few Livingston quotes:

(1) “Bottom up has functionally displaced top down even while the military organizational chart stays the same.”

(2) “The makeup of the cast doesn't matter. Thinking incompetence is the same thing as sincerity; the number of issues and their rate of growth have already overwhelmed institutional defenses. It is, exactly, like Chernobyl when plant operations quietly went past the bright line where reactor controls still worked. Crisis response activities will only spread the damage.”

(3) “You cannot acquire the requisite cognition of pragmatic foresight from an environment desperately stuck on status quo.”

* * *

Leaping forward, Livingston has a way of capturing the essence of his argument in telling charts, schematics, and tables. Here is one of my favorites.

ROUTINELY ENCOUNTERED PURSUITS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE

(1) Change corporate culture.

(2) Adjust “tone at the top”

(3) “Fix” a mismatch

(4) Safety through hindsight

(5) Challenge infallibility

(6) Reduce entropy without intelligence

(7) Giving responsibility for results

(8) Fixing Yin-made (hindsight) problem with Yin

(9) Motivate an institution to alter its ideology

(10) Risk management through hindsight

(11) Start programmatic foresight before the institution has granted clearance

(12) Omit the Front End at the Front

* * *

As he has written elsewhere, the purpose of a system is what it does (POSWID). Intelligence isn’t an IQ score. Intelligence is what it does. Self-regulation is impossible in rule-based systems. Problems are not solved but controlled. This makes control theory imperative.

I don’t mean to leave you up in the air but to give you a sprinkling of the gems in this remarkable book. The author has given me permission to put it on my blog, but I don’t have the software to do so. Meanwhile, I hope I’ve given you a little food for thought.

Be always well,

Jim