COMMENT FROM READER TO, "SOMETIMES THE PROBLEM IS STARING YOU IN THE FACE!"

COMMENT FROM READER TO, “SOMETIMES THE PROBLEM IS STARING YOU IN THE FACE!”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 13, 2010

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A READER WRITES:

Hello Jim,

Without fail, I read the things you write. It has become my personal stimulus package.

This recent piece was as disturbing as it was provocative. Disturbing in the manner of creating discomfort, which lingered to the point I had to re-read it several times. I found the same to be true with D4P. Thanks for opening that door. Unfortunately, it is difficult to get past a couple of pages per session, as it starts my mind racing off in numerous tangents.

I was thinking about "SOMETIMES THE ANSWER..." and remembered a line from the HBO series "Band of Brothers."

A soldier talked about being scared. A war hardened lieutenant responded with a line about the essence of a soldier in war. To paraphrase: Accept you are already dead. It allows you to act without mercy, without compassion, without regret.

I began to think of the business people we have seen over the last couple of years in congressional hearings and other interviews. They appear to have mastered the art of walking dead. Is this what it takes to be a leader in the 21st Century?

Mr. Livingston's assertion that business looks back may only apply to subordinates. Today's leaders look forward but appear to be narrowly focused in their forward view. The rest of the company can attend to the customer, the environment, continual improvement and quality. The CEO is only focused on shareholder wealth. I can pick on Wayward Heyward, Toyoda, Mulally, Nardelli and whatever government agency is running GM these days, but it's not their fault. They were taught that business is competition to the point of being war. When a lot of these guys were mid-managers in the 90s, the hot book was "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu (6th Century BC).

Take the quote, "Never will those who wage war tire of deception." Most of these folks took that as an admonition to be ever deceptive.

The unintended consequence of business as war is careless treatment of all. Customers die, the corporation markets its concern and gets richer in the end. Johnson & Johnson sells contaminated acetaminophen and overdosed pills for children then tries to hide it with a phantom recall (deception.)

Toyota blames unintended acceleration on floor mats (more deception.)

Toy manufacturers blame poisoned paint on the Chinese rather than their own inadequate testing procedures shortchanged by a desire to make a quick buck.

Rudy Giulliani is interviewed on CNBC and complains of the damage Obama's "extortion" of $20B will do shareholders. This is the guy who resurrected his political career on the backs of terrorists and volunteer rescue workers now dying from breathing in toxic dust. That interview summed up why he didn't make it out of the early primaries. Still, he's a revered "leader."

I understand and share your passion for engineering and the hard sciences. Think about how many of our CEOs have risen from those ranks. Rising to authority without a sense of mercy towards the unempowered, without compassion for those who become the dross of our corporate machinery, without regrets for the damage done to society and the environment, is the output of our culture and, if we allow it to continue, eventually will define our purpose.

Michael

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Michael,

Thank you for your perceptive remarks. There is no question to my mind that business has been treated as war. Your reference to Sun Tzu is also valid even to this day. I must confess I have read “The Art of War” with compelling fascination. I think the thrust of William L. Livingston’s DESIGN TO PREVENT gets inside such matters.

Obviously, D4P is a book directed to professional engineers who have to deal with litigious matters brought on by design failures. Livingston has created a manual for front-end design of such systems to prevent such perturbations, and a bevy of lawyers to come down on engineers like a swarm of locusts.

Livingston has asked me to supply an epilogue to the next edition of this book, not from a professional engineer’s perspective, but from my own experience as an organizational development (OD) consultant and practitioner.

That said I don’t think he would have any trouble with your remarks. The beauty of his book is that he better than anyone before him, in my experience, gets inside the nature of that most human problem, the failure of organizations to D4P, and to act consistent with the mission.

His directness and clear identification of the nature of this problem is likely to encounter what he calls our “cognitive biases.”

He breaks down the problem into content (technical), context (culture) and process (focused end).

CONTENT

We get lost, he says, in the technical because we are overwhelmed by complexity. He addresses this obstacle by pointing out that complexity best be avoided by going around it with due consideration consistent with natural law.

CULTURE

Culture is considered for how powerful it is in directing, controlling, managing and, alas, misguiding organizational behavior. He is emphatic, and I have found his emphasis well placed, in that culture cannot be changed. Culture is.

He doesn’t leave it there. He uses the trigger of entropy to explain how culture has impeded process by a number of debilitating cultural biases. To wit:

(1) Institutional infallibility.
(2) Business as usual.
(3) Status quo.
(4) CEOs assuming the role of infallible authority and failure to deliver.
(5) Obsession with complexity.
(6) Obsession with means at the expense of ends.
(7) Dependence on hierarchical authority without seeing its severe limitations.
(8) Obsession with hindsight thinking.
(9) Inability and disinclination to foresight thinking.
(10) Organizations operating as closed systems.
(11) Failure of organizations to learn from mistakes.
(12) Failure to appreciate such minds as Turning, Ashby, Starkermann, et al.
(13) Failure to appreciate the purpose of an organization is what it does.
(14) Failure to recognize intelligence is not what “it is” but what it does.
(15) Failure to appreciate the constant war between Yin-Yang.

Livingston would have no trouble with your reference to the failure of the men and organizations to which you allude. His point would be how could it be otherwise? This is all behavior moving swiftly to entropy.

Every note of his music resonates with my empirical experience.

PROCESS

Process is the essence of his expertise as a professional engineer, consultant and educator. The cover-up games of duplicity, chicanery and outright fraud are often the result of a failure to maintain the right focus and emphasis.

Process is the problem solving methodology and procedure. It is a roadmap that guides the organization to its intended ends. As you read, you see a constant review and reassessment of where the process is, given where it intends to end. Chronic problems are addressed in situ with loop back corrections as problem occurs in the problem domain. This is how control is manifested.

Unfortunately, we are a solution driven culture looking for problems to solve. We see this in the BP fiasco in the Gulf of Mexico.

Livingston understands this mentality. Complexity has been so overwhelming that we solve problems we understand with solutions we know rather than face the problems we actually encounter.

He points to the popular notion, which is totally wrong, that the "problem domain" is incoherent and riddled with contradictions. It is the solution domain that is so riddled as we have seen demonstrated ad infinitum in the Gulf.

LEADERSHIP

You are correct. Many CEOs have engineering backgrounds. This in itself is not surprising given the nature of our technological society. As I have alluded to, and Livingston shares my concern, they are often graduates of MBA programs, programs dedicated to "case studies" or hindsight thinking. I can think of no other acculturating experience that has been more damaging to foresight thinking than this vocational training.

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DESIGN FOR PREVENTION, in my view, is a leadership manual for CEOs as well as boilerplate for professional engineers. Were I thirty years younger, I’d take it on the road and hawk it in creative exchange with these people. My hope is that someone reading D4P is so inclined.

Be always well,

Jim