DR. FISHER'S EPILOGUE to DESIGN FOR PREVENTION -- AUTHOR LIVINGSTON'S ENGINEER AS PRAGMATIST!

DR. FISHER’S EPILOGUE to DESIGN FOR PREVENTION

AUTHOR LIVINGSTON’S ENGINEER AS PRAGMATIST!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 25, 2010

* * *

REFERENCE:

This is submitted as Epilogue to William L. Livingston IV’s second edition of DESIGN FOR PREVENTION.

* * *

PREAMBLE:

Daniel H. Pink, in his book “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future” (2006), states, “We may not all be Dali or Degas, but today we must all be designers.” Pink claims the future belongs to a different sort than left-brain thinkers such as lawyers, accountants and engineers. He envisions the cerebral baton being handed off to designers, inventors, teachers and storytellers, creative and empathic “right-brain” thinkers.

That is all very well to envision, but the world has been created and built, the world we all enjoy, by left-brain thinking engineers. The problem, and author William L. Livingston IV addresses this, is that barriers to the sustainability of engineering design have been mounting as they encounter social cultural constraints. Pink's "right-brain" thinkers have encountered these same barriers. Livingston recognizes this as the “compass of competency” realizing the technological (content) and sociological (context) realms must be met and satisfied to complete the process (ends intended).

Engineers are problem solvers, and Livingston is an engineer and inventor holding more than one hundred patents. He systematically, and I would add courageously, undresses institutional society to its natural naked state. He does this by uncovering manmade barriers that affect all society, non-engineers as well as engineers, right brain thinkers as well as left brain thinkers. In the process, DESIGN FOR PREVENTION is an empathic story of our times.

Although I come out of the discipline, my life’s work has been mainly in human engineering. That said D4P is the most compelling reading I have encountered in decades.

This is not to suggest the book is about barriers. Rather, it is a guide to and appreciation of the inevitability of natural law in all aspects of life. In the process, it shows how natural law works in the most mundane of circumstances, and how to use it more effectively, especially as designers of prevention systems blindsided by litigation.

We live in a time when things are falling apart, when safety and security issues are put on the back burner or on hold with more attention given to immediate profit and self-aggrandizement. The engineer is not alone in suffering for this attention, but the engineer is central to our manmade universe. The lessons natural law teaches the engineer apply to us all.

* * *

NATURAL LAW AND ENGINEERING

The laws of nature are irrefutable and often ignored but always at our peril. It is as consequential for humanistic engineers as it is for professional engineers. Livingston shows how institutional infallibility, command and control authority, rigorous policies and procedures, and the maintenance of business as usual practices in the face of changing demands can prove disastrous. My organizational development (OD) consultancy work confirms his thesis. Here is one example:

* * *

The Fairfax County Police Department (FCPD) outside Washington, DC grew from 84 to 840 sworn officers in ten years. The department, despite its appreciation, was run as if it had remained its original size. It was micromanaged to the extreme by a resolute command staff. In addition, every new officer, whatever the skill base, spent three years on patrol before reassignment.

One thousand African Americans were transferred from metropolitan Washington, DC to Herndon, a small community in the county’s jurisdiction, without a clear design, plan or objective. Herndon African Americans came, over time, to congregate around a shopping center in their isolated community with spontaneous social activities forming something of a ritual. It was the place to hang out for the youth as no recreational facilities had been provided. Unemployment among young adults was over fifty percent.

With no separate youth center, entertainment took the form of mounting loud speakers on the roofs of some shops in the center blaring out music day and night. Young people would drive cars around the center, car horns a blasting.

This practice riled the white community. It eventually resulted in the city council issuing a noise ordinance necessitating the dismantling of the loud speakers along with imposing a curfew on the black youth. Anger simmered.

The more aggressive young males vented their spleen by ignoring the curfew. A 27-year-old man in particular was the boldest. Seemingly always in trouble with the law, he acquired something of hero status among his peers and younger boys.

The cocky black man became a special case to one particular white FCPD officer. One day this officer caught the youth driving with a suspended license and followed him to the 7/11 store in the center. There the youth and officer had a confrontation. The officer pushed the black man into the convenient store’s cooler. The youth grabbed the officer’s nightstick to defend himself hitting the officer on the shoulder and arm. The officer unloaded his service revolver on the man killing him. A riot followed.

Word spread about what had happened. Fires were started. The shopping center went up in flames. FCPD was not organized to deal with a civil disturbance of this magnitude. It lacked the training, protocol, leadership, and even equipment including flack vests. Several hours passed before flack vests were acquired from another county. Meanwhile, firefighters threatened with a rain of Molotov cocktails retreated to safety. The center continued to burn and the chaos grew as firefighters waited for police protection.

A stalemate ensued as black leaders refused to talk to police negotiators. Hours went by before a white police officer, a man demoted for stealing a hunting knife out of stolen properties, came forward. He had a good relationship with the black community, the only officer that did, and was able to eventually quell the riot.

American Management Association brought me in to study the situation after the fact. It was soon apparent that the design of operations was decades behind current police requirements. Several anomalies were discovered including the hand counting of complaints while computers at headquarters were sitting idle. A computer specialist with a master’s degree was in the field but hadn’t as yet completed his three years of patrol. The intervention became the subject of my master’s thesis (A Social Psychological Study of the Police Organization: The Anatomy of a Riot).

What has this to do with DESIGN FOR PREVENTION? It is offered to show D4P is as relevant to human combustibles as to material combustibles, as much a guide and source of appropriate algorithms as the physical system designs by engineers.

* * *

Natural law cannot be ignored for a second in the social or material world. If it is ignored, all hell threatens to break loose. Entropy alerts us to the fact that everything is in a state of flux returning to stasis, or zero energy. We know also that spontaneous combustion is a type of combustion, which occurs without an external ignition source. It is usually a slow process that can take several hours of decomposition/oxidation with heat built up to a point of ignition. The emotional climate in the African American community of Herndon was primed for and parallel to such ignition.

Nature is unrelenting. It has no conscience. It has no morality other than natural law. Nature simply “is.”

The great benefit of DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (2010), beyond looking at design and legal challenges professional engineers face, is how the social and cultural fabric of society complicates such efforts.

* * *

WHEN ENGINEERING RISKS EXCEED NATURE’S LAWS

D4P was published before the British Petroleum oilrig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico killing eleven men, and spewing hundreds of millions of barrels of crude oil over a three-month period. A confidential survey of workers on the Deepwater Horizon in the weeks before the oilrig exploded indicates that many concerns about safety practices were not voiced for fear of reprisals.

In this survey commissioned by the rig’s owner, Transocean, workers said that company plans were not carried out properly and they often saw unsafe behavior on the rig. Some workers mentioned poor equipment reliability and the lack of priority for planned maintenance. “Run it, break it, fix it,” is the way one worker put it. “That’s how we work.”

Much of the controversy centered around blowout preventer rams and failsafe valves, which failed to stop the surging well. Why this was so remains one of the biggest remaining mysteries of the disaster.

Curiously, essentially all rig workers felt able to voice safety concerns, but these were restricted to issues that could be resolved directly on the rig. No one was to challenge the thinking of the chain of command hierarchy or its conduct of business. It speaks to the infallibility of authority that Livingston so carefully elucidates. It was considered unwise to report actions leading to potentially “risky” situations without reprisals.

As one worker put it, “The company is always using fear tactics. All these games and your mind gets tired.” Nearly everyone among the workers believed the Transocean system of tracking health and safety issues on the rig was counterproductive. Rhetoric and reality were on different pages.

Many workers admitted to entering fake data to try to circumvent the system. This is known as “See, think, act, reinforce, track.” The consensus was safety was a charade. The disaster unfortunately proved this to be the case. Livingston captured the essence of this in his “ready, fire, aim” and “run, break, fix” discussion in “Have Fun At Work” (1988). I mention it here because it is not a new problem of concern to him. He does not see the corporate learning curve appearing in an ascending arc. Rather, it seems relegated to repeating the same errors in judgment and the same crisis management routine as if devoted to the same circular logic. Livingston puts a human face on this conundrum.

* * *

LOOKING BACK TO THE FUTURE – THE GULF COAST IN 2030

Now that the oilrig is capped, the cleanup is in progress, national media is camped on the site reporting daily on the evening news the status of the cleanup, the US Coast Guard is a palpable presence, and British Petroleum is acting as a concerned if not fully apologetic participant in the disaster cleanup pouring mega dollars into the mix, there is little sense that all of this will be played out in the not too distant future, but history suggests otherwise.

Cleanup will retreat to hit and miss, the national media will be long gone, the US Coast Guard off to other adventures, while British Petroleum will be playing coy with all its promises as the only ones getting rich in the affair now are carpet bagging lawyers.

* * *

Even the university crowd, all those scientific experts that have played a role in this drama, who have used their science and laboratories to minimize the damage and to put the best face on the disaster, will fade into oblivion, as funding for the science now underway will be withdrawn.

* * *

Every indicator is that we are a knower not a learner society, a crisis management society, a society in the present panic of now. We are consumed with concern during a crisis, but are apt to quietly retire off stage to business as usual once the crisis is over.

It is why DESIGN FOR PREVENTION is so significant. Livingston understands and gets inside the psychodrama, the collusion, the greed, the litigation, the corporate posturing, the promises and dodges to reveal how professional engineers can anticipate, navigate and circumvent the societal predilection to the heroic at the expense of the mundane. Nothing is more important than defining manmade problems in real terms before they go awry.

* * *

Some twenty-one years ago on March 24, 1989 the Exxon Valdez tanker struck a reef near Valdez, Alaska. The ship spilled millions of gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound killing hundreds of thousands of seabirds, destroying billions of fish eggs, crippling the salmon fishery industry, and virtually wiping out the Sound’s herring. This happened when the ship’s captain was declared legally drunk.

Twenty-one years later:

(1) Exxon’s endless lawsuits continue with millions of pages of documents. Fishermen, cannery workers and others have yet to find out how much they may ultimately receive in compensation for their losses.

(2) The payout of $1.6 billion represents what Exxon Mobil Corporation will make to plaintiffs, maybe. The company continues to fight the matter.

(3) Some 6,000 litigants have died since the first lawsuits were filed. Some 32,000 plaintiffs remain.

(4) Twenty (20) percent of what the plaintiffs will get will be vacuumed up by some 80 law firms that have represented the plaintiffs.

(5) No scientific study was conducted for the Exxon Valdez cleanup workers. The possible health risks and hazards to cleanup workers resulting from an oil spill remains a mystery.

In point of fact, going back to 1989, Exxon made nice for months after the disaster but once the bloom faded from public outrage Exxon brought in its heavy hitters and played hardball with litigants and continues to do so to this day.

* * *

BP Oilrig Disaster of 2010 will look a lot like Exxon Valdez Redux in 2030 for a few simple reasons.

(1) Institutions are organized as corporations with the sense of being a law unto themselves.

(2) Institutions are not learning but knowing organizations.

(3) Institutions will go back to that knower role once the murky waters clear a little.

(4) Institutions are committed to hindsight thinking and that is why they are always entertaining new disasters.

(5) Institutions are built around the idea of infallibility with a rigorous chain of command, a definitive protocol where loyalty and obedience are vigorously enforced, and where the status quo and business as usual are maintained as if the disaster never happened.

(6) Self-regulated individuals obedient only to their own muse and creative thinking threaten institutions with their penchant for foresight thinking.

* * *

Lawyers have a symbiotic connection with this closed corporate institutional system. Lawyers feed off it on a rich diet of collusion with corporate alliances. A combination of industry recklessness and failure to DESIGN FOR PREVENTION led to the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe. It was as much a failure of the Federal Government as it was British Petroleum, as much a failure of our individual unquenchable thirst for oil as it was for our reluctance to change.

As sobering as the failure for action after the crisis response was for the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and is likely to be for the BP Gulf of Mexico oilrig disaster, it is not a new pattern, and therefore is likely to be repeated.

The evidence is that the blame game takes precedence over learning and responsibility. On May 11, 2010, leaders of major oil companies acted like middle aged little boys in dark suits who could never envision failing as did British Petroleum. The Chairman of the Boards of four of the largest oil companies broke their nearly two-month silence on the major spill in the Gulf of Mexico before a Congressional hearing. In unison, they blamed BP for mishandling the well that caused the disaster.

Seeking to insulate their companies from the continuing crisis in the Gulf, and the political backlash in Washington, the leaders of Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Shell and ConocoPhillips insisted that they would not have made the same mistakes that led to the well explosion and the deaths of eleven rig workers on April 20, 2010.

Yet, sad to say, on closer inspection not a single one of these oil companies had a DESIGN FOR PREVENTION plan anymore sophisticated than what BP had, nor did any of these companies have a strategy to deal with such a disaster should it occur.

* * *

ALL TOO HUMAN – WHEN NATURE IS DISREGARDED

The value of DESIGN FOR PREVENTION is that it recognizes that the problem of intention and delivery cannot escape the human dimension or its labyrinth of false turns and comedic interludes. It has always been the case, as demonstrated in this eclectic collection of disasters of the past, all of which could have been prevented.


The SS SULTANA was a Mississippi River steamboat paddle wheeler destroyed in an explosion on April 27, 1865. It was carrying Yankee officers and men to their homes in the north. They had been in Confederate prisons. The ship had a capacity for less than one-half of its 2,400 passengers. An estimated 1,800 passengers were killed when the ship’s four boilers exploded. The boilers had been ill repaired for this load. The boat had to zigzag north to combat the raging currents of the Mississippi’s swollen spring waters. This forced the overworked boilers to bang against each other. Add to this the captain deactivated the boilers’ safety valves to attain maximum speed. The disaster received little attention in the press as President Lincoln had been assassinated a few days earlier.

* * *

The BHOPAL, INDIA UNION CARBIDE disaster of December 2, 1984, was the worst industrial catastrophe ever. A leak of methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas initially killed 2,259 with the government’s death toll estimate surpassing 16,000. Some 8,000 died within the first week and another 8,000 from gas-related diseases. The Bhopal complex is still a toxic site today.

During the night of December 2, 1984, large amounts of water entered tank 610, containing 42 tons of methyl isocyanate. The resulting exothermic reaction increased the temperature inside the tanker to over 392 degrees Fahrenheit, raising the pressure to a level the tank was not designed to withstand. This forced the emergency venting of pressure from the MIC holding tank, releasing a large volume of toxic gases into the atmosphere. The gas flooded the city of Bhopal, people waking with a burning sensation in their lungs, thousands dying almost immediately.

* * *

The CHICAGO FLOOD occurred on April 13, 1992, when the damaged wall of a utility tunnel beneath the Chicago River opened into a breach at the Kinzie Street Bridge. It flooded the basements of retail stores and an underground shopping district in Chicago’s Downtown Loop with an estimated 250 million gallons of water.

New pilings were required at the bridge. Unbeknown to the work crews there was an abandon tunnel under the bridge that had once transported coal and goods. A piling did not actually punch through the tunnel wall, but caused it to crack with mud oozing out. Inspectors noted the seeping and issued a work order calling for a repair job costing $7,000. This was delayed because of bureaucratic red tape. Once the tunnel was breeched and the downtown flooded, the clean up cost the city of Chicago nearly $2 billion. Fortunately, no one was injured or killed.

* * *

SAMPOONG DEPARTMENT STORE in Seoul, South Korea collapsed on June 29, 1995. It was the largest peacetime disaster in South Korea history with 501 people killed and 937 injured.

The fifth floor literally cracked around the stanchions with the store full of shoppers. These cracks had been noted months before but nothing was done about them other than to move displays to hide the eyesore. When the cracks spread and the floor finally gave way, the entire building collapsed falling like a house of cards. Some 40,000 shoppers visited the store daily.

Several design factors came to light after the fact. The original building was designed to be four floors, but the owners wanted a fifth floor. The first architectural firm declined the job stating the building couldn’t support another floor. A second architectural firm disagreed and went ahead with the fifth floor.

In addition, the building’s air conditioning unit of some 50 tons was installed on the roof of the fifth floor, imposing a load of four times the building’s design limit. The building was also constructed on unstable ground. It also came to light that inferior concrete was used with the iron rods in the concrete, which were poorly placed especially in the upper floors. The building was less than six years old.

* * *

Each disaster was accompanied by the appearance of complicity between engineering design and operations, between builders and architects. The contingencies in each instance signaled the potential for disaster, yet poor maintenance and excessive risk management were allowed to continue. It is impossible to imagine ethical professional engineers knowingly exceeding the limits of natural law.

This brings me to why D4P is so valuable. In my book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007), I attempt to show how we stayed the same, missed the changes, wouldn’t face them, and left the future up for grabs. I describe the untenable social constructs of our society that keep us stuck. I failed to get inside these constructs and to show their faulty construction.

Livingston does not have this problem. It is truly remarkable the way he gets inside the very nature of what prevents us from making real, sustainable and constant progress. He reveals what is there if we but have eyes to see. If we don’t have such eyes, he gives us such eyes. He does so without flinching, without apology and without mercy. He is not a prophet of doom but an advocate of engagement. He takes the reader through the social minefield and deposits him safely on the other side of good sense. He does this with such breadth and depth that new mysteries are uncovered to create a roadmap of discovery.

THE RELEVANCE OF HUMAN ENGINEERING IN D4P

Livingston peals away the societal onion to reveal it has no core, as it is a total invention of the genius of man but without any possible escape from the laws of nature. In German Nobel Laureate Gunter Grass’s book, “Peeling the Onion” (2008), he says, “Peeled, the onion renews itself, it brings tears, only during the peeling does it speak the truth.” Livingston’s D4P is a book like that onion. These are a few of such truths:

Society has invented institutions that operate as if infallible, meaning neither institutional authority nor operations are to be questioned.

A hierarchy has been created to dispatch this infallible authority with due diligence to maintain the status quo and conduct business as usual whatever the countermanding requirements might be.

Since infallibility implies without error, there is little or no learning from false steps. They are repeated again and again, unresolved in circular certitude.

Institutional behavior is contrived at the expense of candor with charisma taking precedence to purpose, rhetoric to action, cosmetic change to real change.

Creativity is stultified because it requires an open, fallible, corrective, learning climate and this is not possible in the conventionally constructed organization.

* * *

The beauty of science is that when some lesson of nature is revealed it can be replicated with unerring consistency. Once you factor man in the equation, as Livingston points out, cognitive biases immediately contaminate the process. “Universal Law,” he points out, “is a universal language, reading the same to lawyers and engineers alike.” It reads the same to artists and artisans as well.

Livingston devotes a great deal of attention to the conundrum that exists between hindsight and foresight thinking. His compelling argument is to find a common ground between the hard transparency of natural law and civil law, between ethics and engineering practices, between the hindsight of strict rules and pragmatic foresight.

My take on D4P is something of a departure from its central thrust but on a parallel track, and that track is human engineering. The human side of engineering has been my beat. It is ironic if not surprising, knowing the man as I do, that he has been able to crystallize the disturbances that throw modern man off stride and into the paradox of his dilemma.

D4P provides a concise and usable frame of reference to human engineering that should serve the pragmatic engineer well.

THE PARADOXICAL DILEMMA

If there is a criticism of this work, it is there is too much of too many. Livingston has distilled a complete library in a single volume. D4P represents the challenge of professional engineers in the age of litigation. It does so by introducing the engineer to the dynamics of human engineering, dynamics that may at first blush appear to have little to do with engineering, but Livingston is directing the engineer’s mind to its most vulnerable aspect, the constant collision between polar opposites, Yin and Yang.

It is not that the engineer is unfamiliar with this litany of complementary opposites. It is that he fails to get inside them, as we all do, as Livingston is working at a conceptual level that is not germane to most of us. He turns the polar opposites inside out, as he would an engineering problem and thus gains control of complexity instead of, what is all too common with Yin and Yang, having complexity controlling us.

When unions came to power immediately after WWII, they became as hierarchical, bureaucratic and hindsight oriented as such employers as General Motors. If anything killed American manufacturing over the last sixty years, it has been unions mirroring the face of corporate management and then acting in collusion with it.

Livingston writes, “In Yin (hindsight thinking), there is only one political sin: independence; and only one political virtue: obedience. In Yang (foresight thinking), politically there are neither sins nor virtues, only self-motivated goal-seeking.”

* * *

If this were offered as rationale for where we are and how we got there, the reader could go oh-um, but it is not. Livingston is explaining the autopoietic and homeostatic dynamic, the paradox central to the complementary opposites of Yin and Yang:

(1) Yin is hindsight oriented and looks to what it already knows; Yang is foresight oriented and looks to what it can find out.
(2) Yin is infallible and looks to perpetuating that mystique; Yang is intelligent and therefore vulnerable to change, changing conditions, and contradiction.
(3) Yin is obsessed with means; Yang is committed to ends.
(4) Yin develops hierarchies if more than four people are involved; Yang is flat and interdependent when less than five people are involved.
(5) Yin seeks answers in analysis; Yang discovers answers in synthesis.
(6) Yin says, “yes” to the Nash Equilibrium; Yang says “no” to it.


An entire seminar could be devoted to exploring these interfering gaps between Yin and Yang by pealing the onion of institutional infallibility, authority, self-righteous omniscience, and hindsight thinking. It is of no value to push an institution to act in a way contrary to its nature, anymore than it is possible to redirect a hurricane from its destructive path. Livingston knows cultures cannot be changed, but they can be avoided.

TRUST AND SELF-CREATION IN THE DIALETIC OF STRUCTURE/FUNCTION

What can we do? We can design to prevent the damage from being catastrophic. Problems are controlled, not solved, and treating chronic problems at their source materially improves outcomes.

Livingston exposes a number of human engineering myths with operational alternatives to make D4P a possibility. With Yang attractors, rules and the chain of command are considered impediments to goal seeking. Self-control and self-regulation replace hierarchies with the core element of trust, which is reciprocity. A cultural climate of trust reinforces and supports trust. It is not that there is no room for hidden agendas. There is no necessity for them.

The application of intelligence can neither be sold nor embraced by an institution. Intelligence only functions in a fallible system, and such a system cannot be an institution. Scary stuff?

Livingston writes, “Anything that clings to the doctrine of infallibility, cannot also be intelligent.” This can be an academic institution, an ideological organization, or scientific consortium. Only workers can assemble the best criteria for shelving the rulebook and going with intelligence. Rules originate from hindsight thinking. Put another way, the deification of hindsight is necessarily attended by the persecution of foresight.

Paradoxically, we must have Yin to have Yang, and Yang, Yin. They are two social system attractors and complementary opposites that together constitute a greater whole.

* * *

D4P can be studied at many levels far removed from engineering and litigation, per se. Leadership, for example, is assumed to be a top down hierarchy. Yet, today the art of warfare is not being advanced by generals, but by engineers. Nor is the explosion in commerce and industry being advanced by CEOs, but by technologists. Still, the anachronistic models persist.

The very idea of a hierarchy signifies the institution holds infallibility as its centerpiece. No hierarchy has survived without its rules, its business as usual practices, its infallible authority, and its unsullied loyalty. Management, whatever the institution, calls loyalty to rules, a display of “intelligence,” when it means “obedience to authority.”

* * *

In hindsight, information is gathered, not created. Ever since the Peters and Waterman book, “In Search of Excellence” (1982), we have been off the rails thinking excellence was something that could be sought, not created. The popularity of the book, and all like it that followed, indicate how deeply entrenched we are in our social programming of hindsight thinking. Livingston is merciless as he peals this onion to reveal it has no core.

“Core truths in life lay deeper than verbal descriptions,” he writes, “what we perceive as true is organized into belief systems.” We all come to believe them to be true when in fact they are inventions. Belief systems bring more attention to describing rather than defining problems. We have seen this in the oilrig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. It took nearly three months to cap the well after millions of gallons of crude spewed into the Gulf while countless descriptions of what to do were considered. Imagine if foresight had such a device ready in its failsafe prevention.

* * *

There is an army of minds in this D4P that step out of the shadows to take a stand and enlighten us.

William Ross Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety reduces complexity to manageable levels.

Rudy Starkermann devises ways to avoid what he calls “multiplicity” by going around it.

Alan Turning of World War II decoding fame explains his mathematical proof of “Joint Restriction,” which is that “rules of action held as infallible cannot also be intelligent.”

Kurt Godel’s “Incomplete Theorem” is mentioned in support of Turning’s thesis to demonstrate an absolute mathematical cleavage between infallibility and intelligence.

John Forbes Nash, the subject of the film, “A Beautiful Mind,” and winner of the Nobel Prize for his contribution to Game Theory, introduces us to the Nash Equilibrium, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

We also are introduced to the “Abilene Paradox,” an expression that may be strange to us, but not the concept. The Abilene Paradox represents a group of people collectively who decide on a course of action that is counter to the preference of any of the individual members of the group. Sound familiar?

Then there are strange words such as “autopoiesis” that you may not find in your dictionary. It means “auto (self)-poiesis (creation), and expresses a fundamental dialectic between structure and function.

Complexity is another word with which we are all familiar but it is more like a mountain we never plan to climb. It is there and always has been there. Livingston sees complexity differently. He looks at complexity not as that mountain but in terms of our limited capacity to fit it into our limited cranial limits. “Goal seeking is productive to purpose only when it is within the realm of the achievable.”

If we cannot climb the mountain, we can find a path around or through it with the appropriate tool kit. Complexity need not overwhelm us if we weigh the interference. It is important to respect boundaries for “To end right you must start right.” You don’t fight Mother Nature but live in the now with her. This is pragmatic.

D4P is the epistle of the pragmatic engineer living in the “now” in terms of the god Janus looking both ways at once in the present, while Yin (hindsight) and Yang (foresight) complement each other. Livingston illustrates the dilemma with this: “An institution emphasizes its past into a barstool and then sits on it?” It is time to get off the barstool. Enjoy a good read!

* * *