THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE -- THE FOUND THEN LOST AGAIN "SOUL OF THE ENGINEER"

THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE,

THE FOUND THEN LOST AGAIN “SOUL OF THE ENGINEER”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 10, 2014

The critique that follows is so typical of bright, gifted young engineers, full of idealistic fervor and professional dedication, and therefore all the more disturbing. 

Novelist Arthur Koestler's "The Ghost in the Machine" is mentioned because the brain and the body, thinking and feeling, people and organizations are not often in sync with each other, and the relationship need not be so conflicting. 

It is the reason I have republished an essay written a score of years ago ("The Lost Soul of the Engineer"), providing a sample of the tension between engineers and technocrats.

For those interested, Robert Campbell plays off of Koestler's novel in his "Two Faces and Three Brains," which is the idea that our primitive or reptilian brain is built upon, not abandoned explaining many of our perturbations, including the dual conflict between our creative and self-destructive personalities.  Organizations, as it happens, demonstrate the same conflicting duality. 

In this short narrative of an engineer, you are introduced to the confluence and conflict that he experiences as a young engineer fresh out of the university.

You are shown how well workers and managers function as a team during crisis. 

You are also shown how important framing the problem before taking action is, and how hard this young engineer worked to manage the process, knowing he could not solve the problem, as problems are never solved, only controlled.  He demonstrated this insight with the remark: Leaks were reduced to below 200 and mostly minor leaks, serious leaks were fixed immediately.

Moreover, he and his manager were a team, while he discovered in the process that he had executive ability not only to manage the process but to lead a large disparate cadre of folks working the project to successful fruition.

Then what often happens happened to this young engineer to his surprise and consternation -- the company was sold to a bean counting firm and the working culture changed immediately.

This was apparently done without any thought of how disruptive and counterproductive it would be to the morale, motivation and disposition of the people affected.  The carpet bagging technocrats came in and took over, and workers could take it or leave it.

The engineer did what I advise:

When the culture you're in no longer suits you, since you cannot change the culture, you have no choice but to leave, and find a more suitable work situation.

That he did, his boss didn't.  His boss stayed the course and died.  It is situations like this the reason why I write my books.

JRF

THE FOUND, THEN LOST AGAIN "SOUL OF THE ENGINEER"

NOTE: This is an engineer’s account of his experience in his own words.

When I first went to work with the natural gas utility natural gas had just come from the West.  Hamilton was a steel city in a rapidly growing area not far from Toronto and conversion from manufactured to natural gas with twice the calorific value, dried out all the 50 year old gas mains.

The leak count was infinite and a few houses had blown up. A couple people had been killed. The company had exploded in size many times and there was no organization to handle it.

I had graduated in Chemical Engineering the year before and after a short stint with a corrosion control company I accepted a job solely responsible for corrosion and leakage control with the gas company at age 22. I didn't know any better.

There was only one leak surveyor, no corrosion technicians, no maps showing where the gas mains were along a couple thousand miles of city streets in Hamilton and suburbs and most of the leaks were not fixable. The pipes were riddled with leaks for endless miles and the supply system was a buried mystery, dependent on the memory of a few old timers.

So I had to come up with a plan to replace the whole city, bringing in new intermediate pressure gas supplies in an ordered way to replace the old system. Fortunately there were records of where repairs had been made in the past so these old gas main locations could be plotted on large scale city maps and with other inputs maps were gradually pieced together.

I was responsible for a drafting department of a couple dozen, a couple engineers to assist designing a new gas main grid, support staff issuing hundreds of gas main replacement contracts as well as new gas main extensions along with directing a contract construction inspection staff.

In short I was giving direction to gas company construction forces of a couple hundred, plus several hundred contract forces in addition to developing drafting, corrosion, and leak survey departments, all of us learning together as we came out of chaos.

This included developing formal systems of communication between all these groups as well as the sales and accounting departments. I was in my early twenties and was working long hours but everyone was because the need was so great and there was a great working spirit in the company then.

It wasn’t a boss employee relationship. We were in the thick of it together and there was absolutely no political infighting or top heavy bureaucratic controls. It just worked spontaneously.

After 7 or 8 years we got the leak count down below 200 mostly very minor leaks and ones that were potentially serious were fixed immediately.

It was just when things were running like clockwork that the company was taken over by a much larger sprawling company that wanted to centralize everything in a new head office a couple hundred miles away.

They were an operational disaster. Nothing worked right. They had blown up the Metropolitan Stores in Windsor for example. They churned out a computer stock report 4 inches thick that was useless, since it showed many negative quantities in stock. Max-mins were set by the Accounting Department so Operations had no control of the material supplies they needed to do their job.

They would recover scrap pipe to sell at less than the cost of recovery to build a slush fund so they could buy needed supplies independently at the local hardware store.

A head office staff bureaucracy of hundreds choked the whole company. We would have lost control of our record and mapping systems and be back operating in the dark.

Our computerized stock system was tailor made to replenish the stock on each truck each night to be ready for the next day. Each truck was an extension of the warehouse. We would be left with a 4 inch thick printout from head office that was useless and lose control of material purchases.

So that is when my interest in organization structure began in earnest.

In my late twenties they were sending down teams of “Staff Experts” to figure out how to centralize and reorganize us. These experts were not responsible for anything themselves. They had no line authority over me so it turned into a prolonged dispute and I had an exceptional boss and friend who supported me.

The CEO of the parent company was an Accountant so it was decided that a financial argument was needed. I had the resources to put on average about 8 to 10 people on the project to assess every formal and informal communication in the whole company, count every telephone call, every filing reference, every copy of every form, every link needed between every working group in the company essential to the integrated working of the whole company.

It took about 9 months. The final report, summarized into a couple hundred pages of charts and tables, showed that what they wanted to impose would not meet our communicative needs and we would lose control. It would take a supplementary system to implement it involving considerably more people, not to mention the countless thousands of pieces of paper that would flow into a black hole in Head Office. It was neither financially nor operationally justifiable.

The report was factual and could not be discredited. It stalled the Head Office “big wheel bosses” but I knew it would not stop them.

I left at the end of the year. They did back off implementing some of their measures. My boss was removed to the small town of Brantford and died of a heart attack several years later.

I don’t think such a detailed study of a company’s formal and informal communications has been done elsewhere. Because of the grid like mesh of tangled communications it is very difficult to do in a company of any size. All large companies have serious organizational problems. They can be ameliorated by mutually considerate and cooperative behavior but it is not a full solution. It was out of this difficult task that insights into the cosmic order came.

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