A soul in agony can fight its way out of this. Think about the philosopher Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return. What if time is not a line but a circle and you are destined to relive your life over and over again? Then ask yourself this question:

Are you the person with whom you would like to spend eternity?

That is what the wolf taught Mark Rowlands¹ and what my brother Buzz (a Kelpie Labrador cross) taught me. Buzz was the time keeper. At five pm each day he would place his head in my lap and look up at me. If there was no response he would snout my wrist making typing impossible. It was time for a run and a ball chasing session at the local park. These moments were repeated with the precision of a real time operating system, most days, for ten years. Watching Buzz enjoy these moments never failed to lift my spirits. He’s gone now but I still meet him in dreams … living happily, in the moment, until eternity.

Buzz

Yes, the wolf lives in the moment and takes great pleasure in it. The wolf does what wolves do and accepts the consequences, without excuses and without complaint. The wolf is driven by what he needs to do to survive, it’s in his DNA and his training from birth in the Wild.

Engineers can learn from the wolf. It is so important because we are responsible, not only for our own lives, but for the survival of others. Think on this: the meaning of your life is to be found in those high moral moments, complete in themselves, when you act. When you point blank refuse to deploy a system that has not been thoroughly tested,  when you refuse to commit to an end date without proper scope definition, when you say no to a manager who wants design to stop and coding to start RIGHT NOW! These moments are never pleasant but in them you touch the best you can be, you put away what you have and what you want and find out who you are.

So, in the moment, do it because you know it’s right. Do it because it’s what engineers do. Do it because you want to be the person with whom you will spend eternity.

———————————————————————————————————————————————————

End Note

1. Rowlands, Mark (2008), The Philosopher and the Wolf, Granta Books

This is the story of a philosopher who raised a wolf called Brenin and learnt from him. This book has many profound insights on the human condition and, as such, is a recommended read for engineers. It is most likely to be appreciated by anyone who has loved an animal. I was fascinated to recognise Brenin’s behaviours in my beloved dog Buzz who passed on one month ago. I have Mark to thank for the realisation that Buzz was not my pet – he was my brother.

Oarsmen

They rowed early through the morning mist

Barbarians

in silence

except for the muffled beat of wood on rollick

and with each stroke their oars lifted in perfect rows

to catch the water and pull through

then surfaced

blades rotated and curving up

shedding droplets

skimming the current at equal height

and the oarsmen bent to their task

each in his own meditation but connected to the other

and the rhythm in one was the rhythm in all

and the boat moved forward against the current

leaving no wake

as if it were part of nature.

Have we made a huge mistake using technology to document technology? Have we used too much active storage leaving nothing that could be recovered 2,000 years from now with a spade and a brush?

Should our history ever power down, who will know our nature? Were we peaceful or warlike, compassionate or ruthless, intellectual or earthy, good or evil, prosperous or poor? This could happen, the evidence is strong. Every day thousands of us lose a day’s, a week’s, a year’s work with the errant strike of a delete key or a head crash in a geriatric hard drive that should have been retired a year ago.

My question is: if this did happen on an apocalyptic scale, destroying all record of our science, technology, literature and art, would it matter and if it did what should we do to preserve our history? In Barcelona to visit my eldest daughter Julianne I heard a story that set me thinking.

Catalunya

I am leaving Barcelona. Waiting in line at coordinate G2 on a sun-bleached Catalan tarmac. Easyjet.com, Spanair, Ryan Air and us: Iberia Flt 6775 en-route to Madrid, home of those Castilian bastards who, in 1469, sent an army up here to take over and still think Catalunya is part of Spain.

The Saracens

Catalan history is a long story and a good story. Catalonian territory was first settled in the Middle Palaeolithic period (300,000 to 30,000 years ago). It was colonized by the Ancient Greeks and the Carthaginians who ultimately clashed with the Romans, who moved in around 200 BC with the express purpose of establishing a base to attack Carthage (today’s Tunis). The Saracens came and then the Visigoths. Finally in AD 801 Wilfred the Hairy allied with the Emperor Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious, to throw the Saracens out of Barcelona and create the independent state of Catalunya.

The Catalonians love their land. They are possessing of and possessed. It is in their poetry, songs and dances; around every corner and in every town square, written in the simple steps passed from one generation to the next, eternal and unconquerable. Their Catalan dialect says a lot with little. A sixteenth century poet monk expressed it with a simple quatrain:

L’Emigrant

Dolça Catalunya, (sweet Catalunya)
patria del meu cor, (homeland of my heart)
quan de tu s’allunya, (to be far from you)
d’enyorança es mor. (is to die of longing)

Jacint Verdaguer

Catalan Galley

The ancient Catalonians were merchants and seafarers. Barcelona built the largest war ships in the Mediterranean. Galleys crewed by six hundred slaves, twelve to a oar, fought the Turks freeing up trade routes and preventing the Mediterranean from becoming an Ottoman lake. In modern times Catalunya claims Antoni Gaudi, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí as its native sons and channels its natural aggression into sport. FC Barcelona is more than a football club, it is a symbol of Catalan culture. Its titanic battles with Real Madrid (referred to as El Clásico) relive ancient conflicts with canon fire echoing through the city on each Barcelona goal.

Feeding

Now our turn but one; ahead the Ryan Air jet rotates into a hazy blue sky revealing its silver line of hull as it lifts, tilts upward and executes a lazy left turn. Our engines throttle up and I feel the familiar thrust as we accelerate to takeoff. I wonder how much longer this can last. How much longer can humanity afford to feed kerosene to these engines so I can make a snap decision to visit Julianne in Barcelona and fly half way around the world in thirty hours?

It’s true that everything both organic and man made needs sustenance. The Castilians fed on the Incas. I feed on large corporations that need systems engineers. Contractors feed off me and, in Barcelona, the pickpockets feed off everyone. They’re a feature of the city more numerous than the pigeons in the Plaça Catalunya but less prone to violence than the vultures that nest in the mountains of Pyrenees to the north. Most visitors to Barcelona will make their acquaintance, singly or in gangs, at the tourist haunts where crowds gather to watch the jugglers and mime artists.

Julianne’s first contact occurred while sitting on a ledge near the Plaça Catalunya. A man sat beside her gesturing at a map and asking directions in the rapid Catalan klacak-al-ack. She felt her bag slipping away and quickly turned to face the second member of the gang, her bag in hand, frozen in space by eye contact. Jule is a gentle soul who often finds it necessary to state the obvious. “You’re too slow man,” she said. “I’m sorry,” he said, and gave it back to her.

Strike One

Juggler

My last day in Barcelona was full of adventure. I toured Antoni Gaudi’s unique apartment building La Pedrera and met up with Jule to visit the Parc De La Ciutadella where everyone goes to practice what they do. Jugglers, tightrope walkers and tap dancers warming up in the rotunda for the salsa dancers that come out after dark. We walked to the Plaça Catalunya through the narrow streets of the old town. They were mostly deserted save for a few small children playing at the intersections. Balconies with shuttered windows and wrought iron balustrades arced above our heads, scenes layered with 2,000 years of civilization demanding to be photographed. In between shots I held my camera by the zoom lens in my right hand, the strap dangling down.

It was like a marlin strike. A violent tug on the strap from behind. I instinctively clamped down on the lens casing, let out a primal yell and swung around to see a teenager in a blue tea shirt and new sneakers retreating back down the street. He stopped at the corner to observe. Our gazes locked. It seemed like he was inviting me to chase him. Maybe to meet his friends further down the lane. I declined. After all I still had the camera with the 1,300 shots of Barcelona. I also had the sense that I was not a victim of an attempted robbery, just joined in a game with a naughty boy who should have been playing with a ball and a stick.

We moved on and met Jule’s friend Clare and her baby son Eloy at the Plaça Catalunya. Fully sensitised I became aware of the space around me and tucked everything in. Nothing dangling down. It turned out that Clare had had a similar experience with a mobile phone. The phone strap had been dangling from her jeans; bait for the piscine pickpocket.

Strike Two

Gay Pride

There was a gay pride march from the Plaça Catalunya to the Plaça Espanya. We joined the throng, falling in behind a double-decker bus. It was cut off at the top and populated with dancing gays hurling condoms at the crowd below against a background of pumping rave music.

There was a festival at Espanya. We stayed till dusk watching the drag queens posing by the magic fountains. Finally we headed back into town for dinner. The Espanya metro station was crowded as you would expect so I was not alarmed at being jostled as I stepped onto the train. Being aware of the space around you isn’t much help when it’s full of people leaning in, but when I felt the brush of a woman’s hand swathed in silk I put my hands over my pockets just in case. The crowd seemed to fall away as I passed through the sliding doors.

Eloy Meets the Drag Queen

Clare had boarded the train ahead of me and was seated watching. She yelled to check my pockets. “That was a tactic,” she said. “A gang of five surrounded you while you were boarding then fell back onto the platform before the doors closed. Two girls and three boys.” Barcelona had touched me again. It was developing a distinct rhythm worthy of the grace and manners of a seventeenth century minuet: step forward one two, reach down, gesture at pocket, remove wallet, step back one two, bow, “Thankyou sir,” doors close, change mark; but with no profit, nothing was missing. I saw no faces, just felt the presence of the anonymous hand. It must have been a wonderfully delicate thing, just as soon gliding across a piano keyboard as caressing the lining of my jeans.

The Gypsy Woman

In the cafe of the Organic Market we debriefed my successes at amateur crime fighting, then Clare told us the story of her two friends who had not been so lucky.

Carmen and José had come to visit Clare from Mexico City. Soon after their arrival José’s bag was snatched in the Plaça Catalunya. In the bag was a laptop computer and on the computer was the only copy of his PHD thesis. Five years of detailed scientific reasoning gone, José took to his bed in hysterics.

A gypsy woman raised on the streets of the city in the lake of the moon, Carmen did not see finality in this, just a temporary setback. The next day she returned to the Plaça Catalunya, sat on a bench and waited. She returned the following day and the next until the gang reappeared. She waited until they marked a tourist then walked up to the pickpocket with the stolen wallet and pushed him to the ground. It was a calculated move. She was soon surrounded by the rest of the gang. But there was hesitation. Some primal disposition, even amongst thieves, to be polite to ladies. The scene was almost comic. The Artful Dodger and Fagan’s gang in a standoff with a feisty, frizzy haired, five foot nothing Mexican chick.

Carmen grasped the moment. “Now you listen to me,” she said, “We come from a poor country and most of what we have was on that laptop. I beg you. I plead with you. We will give you everything we have left if you will just return it to us.”

Silence. The blue bus left for the airport, the occupy protesters chattered in their tree house, someone returned a bicycle to the rank across the road. Eyeball to eyeball with its underworld Carmen prodded the conscience of Barcelona and waited for goodness.

La Boqueria

A New York crack head would have pulled the trigger and taken the twenty bucks, a Changhai triad might have cautioned you with a non lethal knife slash and melted away, but the Barcelona pickpockets paused. There was a moment of reflection and maybe even empathy. The Catalan memory of oppression: the murderer Franco and his fellow traveller Hitler, Castilian bastards and Saracens devoid of mercy. Then one of them came forward, wrote down a telephone number and handed it to her. “Call this number,” he said, and they were gone.

The next day she called and got a deep male voice. “Meet me on La Rambler by the Boqueria entrance,” it said. “You’ll be watched. Any sign of police and you will never see us again.”

La Rambla is a wide and inviting promenade that stretches from the Placa Cataluna to the Port of Barcelona. La Boqueria is a frenetic produce market where anything edible that walks, crawls slithers or grows from the Catalan earth is on sale. The entrance draws you in with a promise of fresh fruit and vegetables but as you go deeper past the sleeping dogs, forests of hanging leg ham and the stiff fish you find the true guts of Barcelona where bull’s testicles can be had for two Euros a piece.

The following day Carmen waited in the crowd at the entrance. Then he was next to her. He towered over her with his dark unsmiling features and black hair slicked back. His powerful presence made her feel small and naked under her clothes. He was relaxed and matter-of-fact but at the same time very aware. No obvious circumspection though, no furtive glances. The way had been well prepared. She’d felt the eyes on her for the past thirty minutes, since she first entered La Rambla. He was at home. There was no law here.

“Come,” he said and strode into the market. She watched him for a second and, making a snap decision, naked or no, hurried after him.

El Raval

The rear exit of La Boqueria teases out into a network of narrow lanes that forms Barcelona’s infamous neighbourhood: El Raval, home to a multicultural population of 50,000. El Raval became famous as Barcelona’s den of thieves. Immigrants from the Spanish regions of Aragon, Galicia and Andalusia and later from North Africa were drawn there by the promise of work in the 1950s and 60s. The desperation of poverty soon led to drug dealing and street crime. The Catalans blamed it on the xarnegos (dirty wog foreigners). The tourist guides say it’s safe there now but any Catalan will tell you not to go there without a local who knows the score.

Silent and setting a cracking pace the man plunged into El Raval with Carmen walk-running behind. The light dimmed as the lanes narrowed and the balconies leaned further in from above. Men stood in doorways smoking cigarettes and giving her their frank male once-overs as she hurried by. What was behind those doors? She imagined cavernous dungeons, subterranean pathways and revolvers on beside tables. Her anxiety grew as the depth of their penetration left her lost amongst strangers. He stopped and banged on a heavy door. She could hear several bolts being drawn. “Wait here,” he said and disappeared inside.

Balcony Watchers

The door opened directly onto the street, there was nowhere to sit, nowhere to hide. She stood exposed, self conscious, heart pumping, unsure what to do with her hands. The exertion of running had soaked her wild silk blouse, it clung to her body. Then the eyes were on her again. She looked up. Two scantily clad women leaned on a balcony rail. For a moment the one in the black petticoat let her gaze brush over Carmen with an attitude of appraisal.

The mind plays cruel tricks. Was black petticoat a madam seeking new blood for her house or just a mistress, fresh from the arms of her lover and thinking about dinner? Carmen’s thoughts delivered her a perfect image of Mariano Fortuny’s Odalisque, the painting she’d admired in the Museu Nacional D’art De Catalunya that same week. Was this her fate? A simple data recovery mission gone badly wrong – the life of a respected academic broken down into violence and sexual submission to some hairy Berber in a remote Moroccan harem?

Odalisque, Mariano Fortuny

Muffled angry voices issued from within the apartment. The man burst through the door and onto the street one hand behind his back and in a bad temper. He came up to her and stood close. So this is how it ends, she thought, lamenting the gentrification of academia that had left her without a knife. Unarmed she made her fiercest street face and blurted, “You can’t have me. Never!”

He dismissed her with a look of annoyance, “You think we’re evil,” he said, locking her in place with black eyes. Pausing to still his anger he looked over her head, down the street, over the cobblestones, past the shuttered windows and back a millennia in time maybe to the sight of twelve galley slaves humping their oar down to the port, a thousand yard stare mingled with a look of tragedy.

“It’s necessary to eat,” he said to no one in particular. “Morality is a luxury. It can come later.”

With an act of will she watched him haul his mind back to the present and look down on her once again.

“I am a professor of history, emeritus, unemployed, fired. The past holds no meaning for them. But I hope you will remember us with some kindness.”

From behind his back he produced the silver case. A faint smile flickered across his face.

“Here,” he said, “Give this to your man of the books. Tell him to keep on.”

She took it as he moved by her, turned on the corner by the store and dissolved into the maw of El Raval.

Unburdened of fear and the weight of the balcony watchers, gripping the silver case with white knuckled glee, in clear air and sunshine, Carmen found her way back to La Rambla. Life had begun again. Five years of scientific history back in play. She thought of José, restless in the night, bound in their twisted sheets. How will I bring it to him she mused. I will wear the red dress. Yes.

Endurance

Girona Alley

My flight navigates to cruising altitude. We briefly track north along the Costa Brava. I look down on the shoreline of rugged cliffs and wonder how many galleys were wrecked here in search of safe harbor. Does it matter? What profits us to know of these things? Will the death of history be a loss? Napoleon was contemptuous. “History is a fable – agreed upon,” he said.

We execute a left turn over the ancient walled city of Gerona and track south west for Madrid. I look for the ramparts and alleyways Jule and I had explored late at night two days before.

We land at Madrid-Barajas Airport and I trail through the usual melee looking for my Dubai connection. I come upon a large back-lit photograph of several figures perfectly composed. It’s stunning, a visual that stops time, as though it came from eternity and will live there always. I put down my bag and take it in. This is what draws me to these classic cities. Random art placed on the track of normal life. At Charles De Gaulle Airport a sculpture occupies a seat in a departure lounge, a circus clown mosaic sprawls across a wall in the New York city subway and this – unexpected and wonderful. I unpack my Nikon for one last photograph.

Las Meninas Tribute, Madrid-Barajas Airport

Twenty-five hours on I arrive at my front door in Brisbane, Australia and rummage for my door key in its hiding place among the golden canes. It’s 10.00 am, too early for sleep if I want to beat the jet lag so I unpack the miniature poster art I’d brought at the Museu Nacional D’art and upload 2,000 shots of Catalunya to my desktop for review on the big screen.

I am pleased with my catch: the alleyways of Barcelona’s old town, the architectural genius of Sagrada Família, the monastery at Montserrat with cameos by Jule, Clare and Eloy, Gerona and the art of Salvador Dali in his museum at Figueres – and then, the very last shot, the intriguing photo art of Madrid-Barajas. There is something strangely familiar about it. The overall composition, the contented dog at rest in the foreground, the artisan with the camera to the left, the mirror in the background and the figure pausing on the stairs in the rear. I glance at the poster art strewn across my desk. One piece in particular catches my attention: Las Meninas (Spanish for The Maids of Honour), a 1656 painting by Diego Velázquez, the leading artist of the Spanish Golden Age.

Las Meninas, Diego Velázquez

Amazing! In transit through Madrid-Barajas I had stumbled upon a modern tribute to Las Meninas, the same composition, the same mood, but in the modern context. Digging deeper I learn that Las Meninas has been one of the most widely analysed works in Western art. It has been hailed as representing the “theology of painting” and Velázquez’s supreme achievement. The unknown Spanish photographer was not his only admirer. Pablo Picasso did a series of fifty-eight paintings interpreting the work in his own style.

I gaze at the modern Las Meninas and wonder if my predicting the death of history was a little rash. If Las Meninas is any indication history can be relentless, layer upon layer it pursues us, and its objects of value find a way to endure.

Las Meninas Interpretation, Pablo Picasso

But what of human wisdom? How will it persist when the only characters we carve into stone today spell out the names of the dead and their eulogies? There must be a strategy because the Frenchman was wrong. True history is no fable, it’s precious because it cannot lie. Its lessons carry eternal truths. If history dies so does wisdom. How to preserve it then? I’m pessimistic about computer technology. You could say, “Look out! With the shutdown of this Internet server Carmen’s story and its moral will be lost.” But it’s a mistake to think we can codify morality on a hard drive. The things that matter, what’s real in our lives, are more organic than that.

Keeping On

The holiday is over and work begins again. I’m back at my desk dealing with systems engineering issues. It’s been quite a mission, hauling my thoughts back to the present up through the layers of Catalan history. To make things worse, since Barcelona, I’ve had this nagging feeling of being short changed. Picasso had Velázquez’s genius to interpret, guide and nurture him. Las Meninas gave him “the theology of art” on a platter. Artists aren’t alone, modern philosophers can also draw from a body of work stretching back past Aristotle, Plato and Socrates to Pythagoras. But what about us? What wellspring of inspiration do systems engineers draw from? Where are the great and the good to throw their shadows across our profession? Where are the great works to be admired and emulated? Where are our theologies, our grand unified theories (GUTs)?

Jack Garman, Apollo 11 Error 1202

Our short history has thrown up some excellent candidates but we don’t celebrate them, just take a fragment of what they’ve done and move on. What young engineer can tell you who wrote the Apollo Guidance Computer’s real-time operating system, the software that landed the first men on the moon and became the foundation of modern fly-by-wire systems? Whoever heard of Jack Garman, a twenty-something NASA engineer who literally stood behind the curtain at Houston Mission Control and, off the top of his head (some say from a cheat sheet under his blotter), told Neil Armstrong to ignore Apollo Flight Computer error 1202 and continue with the lunar landing?

No, it’s not yet in our nature to celebrate the past but I wouldn’t self flagellate over it. In fact I’m over the constant negative self-talk we practice, reliving software failures. The fact is we’ve come a long long way in a very short time. We just have to appreciate that in the context of other disciplines we have not yet reached teenage. We are child barnstormers, the sort of people you need to kick off something brand-new.

I have some affinity with Jack Garman. Thirty years ago I was manually loading assembler language programs into a computer controlling a very large chemical processing reactor. We couldn’t afford a test machine so we tested our control algorithms live. I can still remember the fear of getting it wrong but somehow I never did. I had mentors who trained me well and I mentored others. We got away with these grossly unsafe practices because management never did understand what we were doing. Not so today, creeping maturity has drawn a line under that kind of behaviour.

Does Systems Engineering Have GUTs?

Professional maturity manifests in many ways. One encouraging sign for systems engineering is the current dialogue over grand unified theories. The theologians have arrived and are hard at work.

Shirley Gregor¹ describes three characteristics of theories:

1. They attempt to generalise local observations into more abstract and universal knowledge (example: to deal effectively with massive complexity you must look for the outline of big things)
2. They represent cause and effect (example: incorrect and incomplete requirements specifications result in high defect densities in delivered software)
3. They aim to explain or predict a phenomenon (example: the behaviour of a system emerges from the interaction of its parts and cannot be predicted by examining components in isolation).

So do we have any GUTs? Do we have a way of explaining the essence of this discipline to students? To impart a deep understanding of professional insights and judgements we need thought processes and vocabularies rich with systems engineering wisdom.

Ivar Jacobson, et al² suggest: formal systems theory, decision theory, organisation theory and theory of cognition. Gems of wisdom and scenarios of cause and effect offered are: Alan Davis’s 201 Principles of Software Development³, Fred Brooks’ The Mythical Man Month⁴, and various bodies of knowledge (e.g. the SWEBOK⁵). They are all on the table but which one of these is an object of value with a way to endure?

Stay with me while I apply the Las Meninas test. If we transported ourselves 2,000 years into the future and looked back, which one of these might be credited with saving the human race. In extremis I’m leaning toward “systems thinking”.

Just imagine …

Light Speed

José relaxed at his control pulpit by the observation portal of the light drive chamber. Tucked into a forward lobe of the star ship SV Barcelona, his station offered the most spectacular view on the ship. It was sought after but exclusive. Two troopers stood at the entrance hatch with orders to kill anyone approaching without the coded implant of a Svelte.

It was the eve of a special day, one of only two possible in the life of a Starfleet officer – the return to Earth from a fifty year space mission. The captain had auspicious news. Their arrival would coincide with a solar eclipse where, from the aspect of their docking bay, the Earth would move across the face of the sun. They’d have a grandstand seat all the way in and arrive at the moment of total symmetry. It was a good omen, one to move even the most stoic of space troopers.

Despite their standing as the crème de la crème of society’s intelligentsia, star ship crews were a superstitious lot. A life in space connected you minute on minute to the fundamentals of human life relegating values to the archaic, some said to the upper Palaeolithic, an attitude so well described in the literature:

… the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision of solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe.

Gary Snyder

And tribal they were, each member assigned well defined “common work” in the operation of man’s most complex and sophisticated machine.

The Sveltes

José was one of five Sveltes aboard the Barcelona. His role was to manage the star ship’s propulsion systems. Sveltes were the most highly educated of crew members. A fully qualified Svelte was a product of prenatal genetic profiling followed by thirty years of training commencing shortly after birth. Their charges, the light drives, were massively complex engines that drove star ships through space at many times the speed of light allowing man to routinely fulfil his dream of intragalactic travel.

José had been busy for the past three months reconfiguring the light drives for deceleration through several layers of light speed toward a relative docking velocity of zero at Space Station Alpha in Earth orbit. The approach deceleration phase was the best time of a mission. The Barcelona strapped on like a giant exoskeleton, the Svelte’s mind an organic component of the massively complex light drive control systems, multi layered in their hierarchy, each level with its own function, constraints and rules of interaction, executing the orders of its parent and passing back the status information needed for higher order control tasks. And at the highest order, godlike, was the reasoning of one man, José.

There was no other profession like this, all agreed that the role of a Svelte was more than a job, it was a calling. The smarter-than-human computer often termed “the singularity” had failed to materialise in millennia of scientific advancement. If it had the sages of Starfleet Command would probably have legislated it out of existence. Man hung on to control of his own destiny, continuing to make the big decisions. Admittedly, with the passing of each century, of necessity, more tasks were delegated to machines moving human reasoning higher up in the hierarchy of man’s ever expanding complex systems – but never to the point where man lost visibility and control. Everyone knew it, that way lay slavery.

And so it was for the propulsion systems of a star ship. Mentally strapped into the light drives’ neurone controllers, José felt the flow of dark energy over its surfaces as though it were his own skin. Through the crosshairs of the asteroid canon he watched the blasters do their work, sensing the minute turbulence from the eddies of sub-atomic particles left in their wake. Thrusters were extensions of his hands and his mind an essential human spark in the formidable transportation system that was the SV Barcelona.

Three hundred meters removed and four decks down on the ship’s bridge the captain was well aware of his progress. Her personal monitor was capable of drilling down into all facets of the ship’s operations. She could even read his thoughts if he hadn’t muted his cogno-transmitter, but, as was the custom, he was obligated to report his status on an archaic voice line and get an acknowledgement.

He flipped a switch and spoke, “Captain, drives secured for sub-light speed, over.”

“Captain. Acknowledged. Out,” came a crisp reply.

She was about to become a very busy lady, navigating the multi-million tonne Barcelona with its precious cargo of minerals from hyper space to a dead stop and an intergalactic anticlimax, punctuated by the dull click and the subtle hiss of an air lock at a space station docking pod. In contrast José’s job was pretty much done, the bridge was in total control, leaving him to monitor light drive operations and be available to deal with exceptions.

In the Loop

In the Loop

He loved it that humans were still in the loop even though unmanned space vehicles had been technically possible for centuries. Initially Starfleet Command went down that path sending robots into space. But all the complex missions failed due to a misguided belief in a rationally ordered universe; that space could be reduced to a mathematical algorithm and conquered with numbers by machines with linear styles, with no need for ingenuity or flair, no place for guesswork or surprise, no chance for discovery and no need for a human being. Harsh experience ultimately taught Starfleet Command that machines deal well with events and objects that appear in an ordered relationship with one another, something that can be modelled, but a human mind is needed to deal with the random tangents thrown up by real life. A deep space mission gone wrong could be saved by human decision-making on limited information tempered by the maturity to avoid recklessness.

Ultimately Starfleet Command made a policy decision that, to advance the science and engineering of interstellar travel, man must “get the feel of the galaxy” and accompany his machines into space, with the caveat that the massive intelligence of these vehicles would not be permitted to dumb down their operators. The creeping slavery of automation would be held at bay, star ship crews would be highly educated, totally familiar with the fundamental science of all systems aboard, capable of rebuilding, reconfiguring and upgrading any system and, most important of all, have the creative drive and scientific wherewithal to synthesise new inventions – create solutions to problems not previously encountered in interstellar space.

This was a practical necessity, Starfleet officers did not have the luxuries of terrestrial scramjet jockeys on their trivial three-hour Sydney – London sectors. A propulsion system anomaly could not be simply handed off to engineering on landing and soon forgotten in the warmth and society of a post flight cocktail party. For a working Svelte in some outer spiral of the galaxy, ten thousand light years from Earth the problem was yours – all yours.

Captain My Captain

In the Lake of the Sun

José neuro-gestured his cogno-transmitter to mute. Alone with his thoughts he took in the view through the portal. The Barcelona had entered Earth’s solar system and the show was about to begin. Without the immediate diversion of work it was hard not to be emotional. Homecoming from a fifty year adventure and out through the portal, blue haloed Earth, home of his heart, a glittering sapphire in the lake of the sun.

The blue planet was unique in the galaxy, no equivalent had ever been found. Forty years into the current mission it had also become a shrine. José’s mother Carme had died. He looked forward to laying a flower, picked from the natural earth, at her grave, in a field, by a river, in Catalunya.

Beating back tears with a well practised thought control routine, he selected the bridge video feed for his personal monitor. Considering the enormity of the task at hand the mood was amazingly calm across all the control consoles. Captain Velázquez was having one of her characteristically empathetic conversations with the first officer over a minor issue of navigation. He loved the sound her voice as did the whole crew. But for him it was different.

Captain my captain, he thought, audacious in commanding, faithful in loving, my lover, my partner, my wife. They’d been together for 50 years – a golden couple. Female ship’s gossip had it that he’d loved her even before they’d met. She was beautiful, clever (she’d topped her class in astrophysics), and the name had sealed it. Carmen.

Engineering Love

Common sense is a valuable commodity. It can take centuries to discover, value and put into practice. There is a Catalan word for it:

seny – an instinctive and reliable sense of order, refusal to go whoring after novelty, natural wisdom

After losing many lives and much treasure, Starfleet Command found seny, mandating that its star ships be crewed by couples with stable relationships. A crew member, on duty, distracted by the pain of a lover’s rejection – anger, jealousy, loneliness, frustration – was a threat to the ship. What minimal recovery of black box thought recorders that was possible from the subatomic debris of the first failed deep space missions had proved this conclusively.

The post mortems were horrific and not for the faint hearted. Walled in by the finite chambers of a space vehicle, human conflict could became explosive. The thought streams trapped by the recorders chronicled the banality of every day living, then inevitably some anomalous interaction between crew members, minor at first, would spiral out of control. Social contagion moved vices stealthily between those nearest. A love affair turned toxic, a minor technical disagreement evolving into a full blown feud. The final seconds where the worst. No investigator ever got used to it. A stream of consciousness spiralling down into the sewer of the worst we can be. Anger, hate, envy, jealousy, avarice – souls in agony. Then a missed way point, an asteroid alarm ignored, then silence. Four thousand thought streams terminated in a nanosecond. A seemingly minute breakdown of the social order spelling the violent end of a mission. At least it was always quick.

As the duration of space missions increased from months to years to decades, disaster causal analysis reports took on a familiar litany. It didn’t matter that the person responsible had intelligence at genius level and, on paper, was the optimum candidate for the job, what killed them all was a human failure to integrate with on-board society. Put plainly, to get along with people. The so-called optimum candidate turned out to be suboptimal when considered in the context of the star ship system as a whole.

The common conclusion was that four thousand lives might have been saved if a less brilliant person with better social skills where put in the job.

Harmony

In response Starfleet Command applied, down the human dimension, the same all pervasive systems thinking that was ploughed into the design of space vehicles. To attract the right people star ship missions had to offer a life, and a highly stimulating one at that. Harmonious human society was an essential characteristic of the star ship system and the foundation of that harmony was the happy couple with the vows of commitment formally recognised in a Starfleet marriage contract.

Who would have thought? Once characterised as “science without soul” by educators in the humanities, systems theory became a natural branch of philosophy contributing to a unified theory of love. Is not marriage a system like any other, with harmony an emergent property? Examining one partner tells you nothing, you must have visibility of both – over time, observing the quality of their interaction over dinner and, most importantly, in situations of extreme stress. The Starfleet boffins didn’t have to look far for a specification.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

Without interaction there can be no enduring love (especially if the partners are physically light years apart) and no marriage system. Without love there is longing and lack of focus, a deadly state for the helmsman of a star ship. But could enduring love be engineered? Could emotional stability be synthesised in a relationship? The poets ran screaming from the room, but Starfleet Command soldiered on. They had no choice as it was clear that man could not explore deep space without a guarantee of social harmony aboard its star ships.

Recruiting policies were revamped. A higher value was placed on social skills, but this created its own problems. It turned out that the pool of brilliant scientists and engineers who happened to be wise, emotionally well balanced and in stable relationships was impossibly shallow. Recruiters dug deeper with the best that modern psychology could offer. They refused to accept that technical brilliance could not routinely coexist with empathy, compassion, wisdom and love. There must be some control that could be exerted on the human condition to synthesize the right kind of behaviour.

Ancient quality management techniques kicked in. If you have a defective component it is probably the product of a bad design and manufacturing process. And so was born the Starfleet human design discipline with a foundation principle of education from birth. But education in what?

Anger

Analysis revealed that a common behavioural link in the event sequence that ended in disaster was the inability to cope with inter personal problems. This gave rise to anger. It snuffed out the lamp of the mind and ultimately extinguished the lives of a star ship’s crew. Aided by some poets and philosophers who, intrigued, had re-entered the room, the analysts clawed their way back to root causes and looked for corrective actions.

One practical solution was training in anger management. It turned out that course materials were readily available, in fact they were five thousand years old, embedded in the philosophy of ancient Athens. The marriage of cross-disciplinary minds had liberated more precious seny. The revelation: philosophy is man’s expression of wisdom and wisdom is man’s last refuge for strength and consolation in times of trouble.

Aboard a star ship troubles were many, all amplified by the isolation of deep space and the impossibility of rescue.

Soul in Agony, Salvador Dalí

Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime Of The Ancient Mariner

The agony. Embarked on fifty year missions, in crisis, alone with their meditations, struggling to make sense of the world, to choose a path with nothing in their technical education to show the way, many tormented souls founded, taking their ships and crews with them. The boffins concluded that something more substantial than an anger management course was indicated.

The Whole and the Parts

Man’s knowledge of his world had become dangerously fragmented. The philosophers had carriage of man’s collective wisdom while the technologists forged ahead penetrating deeper into space, racking up first-order engineering victories, while ignoring the second-order effects – the destructive impact of fifty year space missions on the mental state of star ship crews.

Motorcycle Without Character

Neither discipline had any knowledge or interest in the other – a fatal mistake. Exactly analogous to pulling apart a motorcycle, separately studying the wheels and the engine block, and trying to visualise how the integrated whole should work. In pieces, a motorcycle loses its character and ceases to be a transportation system.

Starfleet Command’s core problem was that it routinely launched space missions with two components flying in tight formation: 1) the space vehicle and 2) is crew. Their mistake was not to recognise these entities as components of a higher order system – a space community and that the “thing” that gave it its most precious property – human survivability – was an outcome of the interactions between and among the crew and its vehicle.

A broader perspective was necessary. Reading philosophy would tell you nothing of light drives. Reading science would tell you nothing of building a harmonious community. Reading both would tell you nothing of the man-machine interactions that would enhance and preserve life (or destroy it if they went squirrelly). What was needed were polymaths, people knowledgeable in a wide range of fields, who could look at the laws of all the disciplines and identify synergies. Then to develop higher order ways of thinking to integrate their fundamental precepts. Then to meet the challenges of the ever increasing largeness and complexity of man made machines. The planners looked back on Leonardo da Vinci and the golden age of Florence and concluded it was time for a resurgence of renaissance man.

The Rise of Renaissance Man

School of Athens, Raphael

By 3000 AD star ships wielded massive destructive power. To match this down the human dimention their crews required super-human discipline. It simply was not an option to have a delinquent captain vaporizing a planet in a fit of pique.

By 3001 AD Starfleet Command had established a modern School of Athens passing on the teachings of the ancient philosophers: Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Seneca, Diogenes, Pythagoras, Epicurus, Heraclitus, Plutarch and Marcus Aurelius, a virtual dream team assembled to instruct their charges on how to live, and, more importantly, on how to wield the immense power of a star ship with integrity, honour and wisdom.

The terrible responsibility for four thousand souls in a space vehicle with a maximum range of twenty-five thousand light years could not be borne by any human being without this classical training. A captain was required to not only master the teachings of the philosophical schools but also to transcend them. Transcendence wrought through a daily struggle to overcome oneself and be stronger than oneself.

In her daily struggle, Carmen had a special affinity for Marcus Aurelius. She referred to him as if they were well acquainted. A warrior emperor, he spent much of his reign away from home directing military campaigns against the barbarian tribes on the northern frontiers of the Roman empire. He was one of the good emperors. Trained in the strict doctrine of the Stoic philosophers he dressed plainly and lived simply avoiding all softness and luxury. The most peaceful of warriors his ideal was quiet happiness in home life. Notwithstanding, he was a successful commander-in-chief whose victories were no less due to his own ability than to his wisdom in choice of lieutenants.

Marcus Aurelius set down his innermost thoughts with intimacy and frankness in a journal that became known as the Meditations.

If thou may not continually gather thyself together, namely sometimes do it, at least once a day, the morning or in the evening. In the morning purpose, in the evening discuss the manner what thou hast been this day, in word, work, and thought.

Marcus Aurelius

The calming single focus of his Meditations eased the stress of command, served self-examination and helped with improvement. They were never intended for publication. Carmen imagined his amusement if told that, four thousand years later, a woman in command of star ship would seek guidance from his reflections in her private time, at the start of each day.

XIII. In my father, I observed his meekness; his constancy without wavering in those things, which after a due examination and deliberation, he had determined. How free from all vanity he carried himself in matter of honour and dignity, his laboriousness and assiduity, his readiness to hear any man, that had aught to say tending to any common good: how generally and impartially he would give every man his due; his skill and knowledge …

Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (AD 170 -180)

Somewhere in her private belongings José knew that Carmen kept a journal. He looked forward to reading it some time before he died.

The Women

Virginia Woolf

The integration of the humanities with science and engineering created a monster discipline. Some said more detail than a single soul could master, and then transcend, in a lifetime. The problem was solved by the women.

From the 21st century women had been freed from male domination. For sure, through time, men had revered them as Madonnas, worshipped them as goddesses and waxed lyrical over their unique qualities.

He liked women’s society, and the fineness of their companionship, and their faithfulness and audacity and greatness in loving which … seemed to him … so wholly admirable, so splendid a flower to grow on the crest of human life.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

But when it came to unfettered access to education, doors closed (Virginia Woolf herself was refused access to the library at Cambridge University). Even when the doors were prized open in the latter stages of the 20th century women were socialised out of science and engineering believing they had no aptitude and showing little interest.

This slowly changed as they began to excel in pure mathematics and showed a strange gender specific aptitude for conceptualising large systems. Their natural empathy, communication skills and ability to reduce complex interactions to simple terms made them natural systems engineers, project managers and star ship captains. They seemed to be better risk managers, more alert than men to the consequences of things (possibly something to do with a genetic predisposition for avoiding inappropriate relationships that might bear unwanted children).

The net result was an increase in the intellectual energy bought to bear on all the disciplines by a factor of 1.7. The remaining .3 was applied to the nurturing of children and made education from birth possible.

The Field

José earliest memory was the warmth of his mother’s embrace, the rhythm of her heart and the sound of her voice, full of ideas. School was in shortly after birth, with the first seeds sown as a set of foundation thought processes that were later brought into full bloom with formal study. She taught him mindfulness, the power vision of single focus thought and laid the foundations of systems thinking. She did it with love and some urgency sure in the knowledge that this learning would some day save his life.

Her favourite classroom was a field, by a river, near their home. On the bank amongst the wild roses, looking down into the swirls and eddies of the pristine current she’d ask him, “What can we learn from this river José?”

Early Childhood Systems Thinking

In a way all children are born systems thinkers. Fresh in its naive simplicity a child’s mind has a natural proclivity to look for the outline of big things, forming an impression of the whole before engaging with the minutiae of the parts. Only those who could carry this child’s mind into adulthood would be capable of dealing with massive complexity, ignoring detail and seeing only the essential properties of things.

From birth then, the student was ready waiting only for the teacher to appear.

José’s mother was an excellent candidate. She’d been a star ship captain, the product of many years of deep space experience. She understood the big ideas behind super-light travel and knew them well enough to explain them simply. Some said that the conceptual leaps required to understand post Einstein physics were beyond most adults and impossible for a child, but she demurred. Among the wild roses in the field by the river she broke the great leaps down into small steps and slowly advanced José’s foundation thinking. It was a grammar much richer than necessary for normal Earth-bound human discourse but essential to survival in the complex machines that roamed deep space.

He learned rapidly taking his lessons as an act of faith and asking many questions. At age four his thought processes effortlessly conformed to the principles of complex system theory although he had no idea that such rules existed.

As he grew older and more self aware and reticent to be thought of as foolish, his questions became more circumspect. At this, his mother checked him, “José,” she’d say, “In deep space, sufficient evidence is never available to reach an irrefutable conclusion. Those who fail to act for fear of making a fool of themselves can never command a star ship.”

Solar Flare

“Ask me a foolish question,” she’d say. “In revealing your thoughts to others you will know more of yourself. Those who are silent in fear of being thought a fool, are fools.”

It was a curious task, raising this man-child, building adult thinking without destroying naivety, instilling courage without instigating recklessness.

José chuckled to himself as the sun loomed larger in the portal. He goosed the gain of the image enhancer and caught his first sight in fifty years of a solar flare. It was one hundred years since he’d first sat with his mother in that field but his memory was clear.

“You can’t be young forever José,” she said. “But you can always be immature.”

Anger Management

In the laboratories of invention and aboard the deep space penetrators, renaissance men and women began to appear. They were as well versed in philosophy, literature and art as the physics of light drives but what distinguished them most from their predecessors was their cross disciplinary agility, their ability to generalise lessons learned in one discipline and apply them to explaining and predicting phenomenon in another. Systems thinking was one of these universal containers of wisdom.

In 3000 AD no light drive tech had ever heard of Seneca, the Roman stoic philosopher. Seneca wrote the book on anger management circa 50 AD. He wrote:

Philosophy moulds and constructs the soul; it orders our life, guides our conduct, shows us what we should do and what we should leave undone.

His thoughts on anger passed into the canon of eternal truth:

There is a moment at the beginning of an emotional episode when we can make a choice – to revenge ourselves on those who have wounded us or to examine our minds, see the beliefs that feed our passions and decide if we want to accept them.

Let us take note of what it is that particularly provokes us. Not all men are wounded in the same place and so you need to know what part of you is weak so you can give it the most protection.

The greatest cure for anger is to wait.

Seneca suggested that excessively optimistic expectations were the root cause of anger, the antidote being to see the world as it is and not throw childish tantrums when it fails to conform to our personal model of what it should be.

By 3100 AD star ship officers were not only intimately familiar with Seneca but also could analyse his philosophy in terms of systems thinking, recognising the synergies.

From a systems perspective anger emerges from a failed attempt at control. The angry bee A interacts with some entity B to achieve some goal, expecting a certain response. When a large gap appears between the expected an actual response from B, anger ensues. The problem lies in the defective model that A holds of B’s behaviour, the model that informs A on how to interact with B to achieve some outcome.

She asks, “Am I too fat darling?”, seeking reassurance that her figure is perfect.

He responds, “You could lose 20 kg sweetheart,” expecting appreciation of his honesty and genuine concern.

She is angry at his lack of sensitivity. He is angry at her failure to respect his integrity. If the goal is maintaining perfect harmony in your relationship with a woman every man with any life experience knows that there is only one answer to that question, “You are perfect for me darling. As always.”

Control and Communication

Projecting the same thinking on to light drive design it becomes clear that the behaviour of the overall system is determined by the interaction of its parts. For those interactions to serve the fundamental goals of the system they must occur in the context of a set of rules. These rules emerge from the models we create of system behaviour. They must be defined communicated and compliance monitored. If expected and actual results differ, there is probably something wrong with the model.

As the complexity of a system increases its functions must be broken up into hierarchies of control. Without decomposition it is impossible for human beings to understand the operation of a complex machine. At each level of the hierarchy there must be rules of interaction. The interaction must be monitored and controlled from the next layer up. Each layer imposes operational goals on the layer below. As complexity increases the systems thinker must engage with these details as the layers deepen in the hierarchy – but at the same time never lose sight of the required behaviour of the system as a whole.

The River Parable

José watched the solar flares boil up and arc over, throwing the rivers of plasma on the surface of the sun into dark relief. He remembered the river of his childhood and its seminal role in his mother’s teachings.

In the beginning Carme had a problem. If all learning involves transfer from previous experience how do you teach a child who has none? A student of Aristotle she found the answer in his Poetics.

Aristotle referred to an interesting phenomenon in human beings. We are all imprinted from birth with the ability to make sense of the world through stories. All human myths and legends are variations of the same story pattern. It repeats in our dreams where symbolic expression is given to the unconscious desires, fears, and tensions that underlie our actions. Stories provide a mechanism to interpret life and can be applied to developing and predicting human behaviour.

Carme set out to humanize science by teaching José the foundation plot of systems thinking, leaving the mathematical details till later. She started with the outline of a big thing.

Gesturing at the sparkling water she’d ask, “What can we learn from this river José?” Then she’d tell him the story.

There was a time when no men or women lived on this land but even so it was a place full of life. The spirit of the river was mother to the tortoises and the fish. The flamingos came to the bank to drink. Lynx, brown bears and wolves roamed the meadows and ranged into the hills. When the rain came the wildflowers grew and sweetened the wind with their scent. The hills, the meadows, the flowers, the river and all living things were the land and the land was in them just as you are part of our family.

Then came a man and a woman. They built a shelter by the river, planted corn and raised a family. They lived in harmony with the land and took only what they needed. As the seasons passed they prospered and learned to love the land that gave them life just as a son loves his mother. But as with a family they had no thought to dominate or own the land, only to be part of it.

As the years passed more people came. The shelter by the river became a settlement, then a small town, then a great city. Men built ships and sailed to faraway lands, trading goods and creating wealth. Machines were built to till the earth and take fish from the river. Factories were built with more machines to make goods for trade. Much of the population no longer hunted in the meadows or fished in the streams and they forgot about the land that gave them life. Instead they sat at desks and spent their days thinking about doing less and earning more.

Then one year the fish in the river died from the pollution dumped from the factories. The people of the city could not drink the water and the children could not swim. Life in the city became unbearable as smoke from the factories fouled the air and the scented breezes from meadows became a distant memory.

In desperation the population turned to its scholars for help. Only then were they ready to listen to the wisdom of the first family to settle by the river: that all things are connected, that no matter who we are or what we do we will always be a small part of a larger system and that taking action to improve our part without considering its impact on the whole may destroy it and us in the process.

Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

Chief Seattle

Listening to his mother, José would look down into the crystal clear river waters and watch the fish swimming in lazy circles among the reeds.

“Where was this city Mare?” he would ask.

“Here,” came the answer.

José heard the story many times, asked the same question and got the same answer. He carried it with him into adulthood where it informed his foolish questions in complex system design reviews.

“What is this system a component of?” he’d ask.

“What are the rules of interaction with other parts?”

“Will optimising this part improve the overall system performance?”

His diagnostic skills were legendary. In troubleshooting a light drive the symptom of failure was often far removed from the cause. Critical problem analysis required a systems engineer with a feel for interactions; the insight to connect a dead fish with human greed and a lack of systems thinking; someone with a primal feel for consequences and a woman like Carme for a mother.

Noblesse Oblige

The red sun boiled up in the portal as the Barcelona’s navigation systems locked on to the approach control tractor beam. There was a palpable sense of relief throughout the ship as the auto pilot engaged to manage final approach and docking.

José was not looking forward to the moment of arrival. Dealing face-to-face with Starfleet’s Earth-bound bureaucracy was the least attractive element of the service. The informal atmosphere aboard ship was replaced with the saluting and kowtowing that he so hated. It was particularly stressful for José as he had special status and responsibilities.

In his early life it had been an embarrassment but as he matured he accepted the responsibility and carried it with dignity. José, in 4000 AD, was the closest you could be to royalty. It seems that every 2000 years humanity is due for an epiphany. At year zero a birth in the town of Bethlehem and the subsequent rise of a belief system restarted Earth’s clock and, 2000 years later, another sequence of events was to be equally profound in its impact. A Mexican couple had an encounter with thieves in the city of Barcelona. An important paper on theoretical physics was lost but through the courage of a gypsy woman and the compassion of a dissolute history professor it was recovered.

In 4000 AD Albert Einstein was revered as an ancient prophet. His general theory of relativity was a start but it was soon overtaken, as were Newton’s theories before him, by the reasoning of his successors. One was a man named José Velázquez who questioned the fundamental law that it would take infinite energy to push mass at the speed of light. Once again general relativity became a special case as the science moved on. José’s paper, pulled from the maw of El Raval by his gypsy wife Carmen, was recognised as seminal.

It took five generations of scientists to develop the physics to the point where it could be reduced to practice by engineers. And that’s when the fun began. As with all new technologies there were many spinoffs. One was infinite cheap energy. The oil wars passed into history to be replaced by uninterrupted centuries of peace and prosperity. Another major innovation was the development of light drives that propelled space vehicles throughout the Milky Way Galaxy.

Space travel was not a luxury. A component of the science had extended the periodic table identifying a new element named Xn5, an essential resource in the manufacture of post-relativity power sources. Xn5 could be synthesised on Earth in small quantities but demand soon required expeditions to recover it from other solar systems. This was the genesis of million tonne space trucking behemoths, the forerunners of the Barcelona.

Dancing Until Late

After a brief stay in Mexico City Carmen and José moved back to Barcelona. The living there was cheap, José was offered an assistant professorship at the University and, most of all, they were drawn to the life and the people. The love and ecstasy of the dance in the squares till late at night distracted José from the harsh discipline of pure science leaving him refreshed to work his theories forward another day. Of course there were many children and children’s children, on down the centuries. As the world awoke to the enormous import of José’s foundation theory and Carmen’s courage in defending it, their story passed into legend. History did not die. The explosion of technical advancement that followed insured it was recorded in minute detail. Carmen and José’s descendants became a millennial dynasty with a tradition carefully preserved with strict training in philosophy, art, science and engineering.

Dolç Mare

The SV Barcelona docked on schedule at Space Station Alpha. The crew looked on in awe as the blue planet passed over the centre of the sun. Crew members who still had terrestrial families looked forward to Earth leave with apprehension, wondering how they would be received after the discontinuity of a fifty year absence. The others, the space orphans, became overexcited tourists swapping notes on preferred holiday destinations.

After two weeks of ceremonial tasks and technical debriefing José handed off his duties to space station engineering and became a free man. Carmen would be busy for another week supervising cargo unloading and briefing the Barcelona’s new captain. It was hard to believe the Barcelona would sail on without them. She knew he needed the time to himself so encouraged him to take the trip alone promising to meet him in Madrid the following week.

The shuttle travelled two metres above the Fluvià, fast moving like a skipping stone over its broad lower reaches and upper rapids, north-west toward the Serralada Transversal. José had the pilot set down on a sandy bank five kilometres from the field. He wanted nothing to disturb its serenity and needed time to see nature and bring his mind to rest. A delicious thought – the power vision of solitude.

Iberian Lynx

As his right foot touched the earth he thought of Neil Armstrong’s “One small step for man” and wondered if it felt the same for him. Earth return for the second and last time. He moved clear as the shuttle edged out over the river, climbed to twenty metres and vanished in a grey blur.

He stood still for a moment and let nature flow over and through him. It was spring and a light breeze brought the scent of wild flowers from a meadow near by. The chuckling of water over rocks caught his attention and he looked down. Channels of blue slipped between the rocks and below the surface a fish swam a lazy figure of eight amongst the reeds. Could he ever reintegrate with planet Earth, he thought? Had one hundred years as a cognitive component of a fully deterministic, highly observable and controllable, man-synthetic light drive array, ruined his chances of re-engaging with the simplicity and randomness of nature?

He set off up country following the river’s course. The morning sun soaked into his bones as he trekked through the forests and the meadows. There was movement in the bushes and he caught a glimpse of a spotted Iberian Lynx with its cub. The magic of animals, back from extinction and this close to the coast, it was a very good sign. The system is working, he thought. How well nature fits together when man replaces domination with integration. Earth is flourishing.

He broke through a line of trees and knew he had arrived. So familiar, his old classroom, the field, by the river, in Catalunya. The mid morning sun slanted through the trees and picked up the brilliant red of a tangled bush of wild roses. He snapped off a sprig and moved toward a slight rise at the river bank. There was a headstone. He sank to his knees and ran his hand across its sun bleached whiteness.

“Dolç Mare,” he wispered. “I am here.”

He felt her impatience as he sat by her resting place. She’d been waiting. In this society and possessed of a tranquil mind, the man-child lingered for the day immersed in the luxury of rambling thought and foolish questions.

“What does this river teach me today Mare?” he asked. “Its waters are clear, its fish are happy. It tells me the system is working. And it works today because the river told us, so long ago, that we are not the whole, only a part, and it is the whole that matters.”

“Does that make you happy Mare?”

So the star traveller, now a simple pilgrim in his reverie, sat in the meadow, chatted to his mother and waited in the weave to connect with the Catalan web of life. He spoke to the lynx and the bear and the eagle overhead and watched the sun in its arc. And finally when it fell beyond the Serralada and the evening chill restored him to practicality, he felt the stem of the rose bush still in his hand. Only then did he permit himself some emotion.

“I miss you Mare. I miss your warmth and your wisdom and the beat of your heart.”

“But you and I have not come to an end because there is none. Your spirit is with me and I will pass it to my children and they will keep on. History will not die.”

And as he laid the rose against the stone, petals pulsing brilliant red against the stark white of the marble, his eye caught some fine lettering carved into the base. He smiled as he read it. Carme, Star Captain, Svelte Master, evangelist of n^th level redundancy, was making sure he got her message. It read:

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my friends John Brannock (town planner, educator and noted futurist) and John Gough (professor of computer science and career educator) for their conversation, insights and wealth of ideas. Many of the thoughts expressed here were also inspired by Nancy Leveson’s book Engineering a Safer World: Systems Thinking Applied to Safety⁶. Of course the seminal text on ST is Gerald Weinberg’s An Introduction to General Systems Thinking⁷. I also congratulate Pontus Johnson, Mathias Ekstedt and Ivar Jacobson² on asking the right question: “Does software engineering have any GUTs”. I sincerely hope that our profession will offer up an answer some time this century.

As for Camen and José, the story is true (at least up to 2011). Thank you Clare Venables for your story and your hospitality in Barcelona.

References

1. Gregor, Shirley (2006), The Nature of Theory in Information Systems, Management Information Systems Quarterly, Vol. 30 No. 3
2. Jacobson, Ivar; Ekstedt, Mathias; Johnson, Pontus (2012), Where’s the Theory for Software Engineering?, IEEE Software, Vol. 29 No 5
3. Davis, Alan (1995), 201 Principles of Software Development, McGraw Hill
4. Brooks, Frederick (1982), The Mythical Man-Month, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co Inc
5. IEEE Computer Society (2004), Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK), Piscataway, NJ, USA: The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., [Online], Available: http://www.swebok.org  [8 Nov 2012]
6. Leveson, Nancy (2011), Engineering a Safer World: Systems Thinking Applied to Safety, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
7. Weinberg, Gerald (2011), An Introduction to General Systems Thinking, Weinberg & Weinberg

So it happened. Life left me alone for months on end to think in a community of one, surrounded by my books and all the music, technology, performance and art I could find on the Internet.

In the morning before dawn I rode my bike 30 km to a coffee shop and talked to my friends, as cyclists do. Gear ratios, magpie attacks, sprint finishes and the greatness of the peloton: Contador, Armstrong, Evans and the patron Cancellara, called Spartacus.

In the day I reflected on my beloved profession and how it’s principles should be taught. I learned web technologies and studied the techniques of on-line teaching and movie making and slowly built a web site. The evenings went in studying Story and it’s application to explaining ideas, in a way that is frictionless – without loss.  Along the way I lost the guilt of working on concepts not billable to a client at month’s end and challenged myself to create something new.

Concentrated reflection made me mindful. I began to observe my own natural creative process and draw conclusions. To be concise I’ve jotted them down randomly in blank verse so as not to waste your time.

You Need Time

Pure synthesis is a selfish occupation.

Marcus Aurelius advises us to,

“… retreat to the inner citadel of the mind.”

Creative icons do little else.

Picasso: 91 years, thousands of paintings,

seven major relationships.

Guernica, Picasso

He took the time.

Others were given it under duress.

Many classics were written in jail:

Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes

Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan and

The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli.

True discovery is not a part time job.

Get time to think.

Sleep On It

It’s best in the morning.

You awake from a good nights sleep

into a world of possibilities.

The problem you passed to your unconscious last night

is solved deep down in your dream-life.

But not always.

The birth of an idea is full of energy,

but in the morning the energy is gone

and what remains may be nothing.

I pin it on a clothes line,

view it from a distance,

read it out loud and,

if it’s still pompous or empty,

ditch it and start again.

Get in the Zone

Geraldine Brooks won a Pulitzer prize.

Geraldine Brooks

She starts her writing day reading poetry.

Then she sits quietly and  listens for her characters.

They talk to her.

I love listening to great creatives.

Marvin Hamlisch composed A Chorus Line.

He wrote his songs on the people in the cast.

Like the dancer who couldn’t sing.

Rhythm is everything he says.

Elizabeth Gilbert gives the best YouTube talk on creativity.

Genius is a “devine attendant spirit,” she says.

It’s not in you, it’s with you -

but not every day.

Then I clear my mind,

demur negative thoughts,

banish anger and,

put away fear.

In calm

I know It will come

from somewhere else

through me, or so Bob Dylan says.

But it must have room.

A Chorus Line

There were side effects after months of this

I calmed down,

lost my fear of aeroplanes and

learned to listen.

But When it Doesn’t Come

I get on my bicycle and hammer up a mountain.

Mountain Hammering

Ideas come out of the bushes.

My subconscious is a close friend,

loyal and true.

Unbidden, it works on problems

long after my conscious mind

has moved on,

then interrupts me with the answer.

So thinking about nothing in particular

is not a guilty pleasure.

Its a solution.

Experience is Mandatory

I’ve seen things.

Lake Tahoe, Nevada

A blood sun setting on the tail plane of a jumbo.

A rush to the overhead lockers for cameras.

An amazing feeling of fellowship amongst strangers

in a shared experience of awe.

Manhattan at night from two thousand feet,

a hang glider descending through the pines

to the shore of Tahoe,

dowop singers at the Met in New York.

Dowop Singers at the New York Met

Images catalogued  while living.

Metaphors latent, waiting to project themselves

onto newer problems.

Twenty-four years after it happened

naked babies on a freeway

connected Fagan inspections in Extreme Review

with vulnerability.

The core of why we hate criticism.

Strong life images endure,

to be dragged out decades later

to inform life in the moment.

My daughter’s friend calls to say,

“Come help me bring my cello on the train.”

I’ll think on it.

You Need Pressure

A deadline is good.

Time’s-a-wasting.

I grab a thought and go with it.

I try not to kill it with doubt.

I write it down.

Keep the pen moving across the page.

"Be Italian" Dance Sequence, the Movie 9

Now I move the words around.

I budget for gestation.

Nothing ever comes to me at once.

First the skeleton, then the rendering.

Great things are made from good ideas

over time, with endless refinement,

through pain,

in deadline death marches.

Watch the movie Nine.

The “Be Italian” dance sequence

was in rehearsal for two months

for a four minute scene.

It’s good!

Let Go

Finally you must push it out.

Publish and move on.

It will never be perfect.

Poems are never finished – just abandoned.

Metaphor is Everything

The US government wanted Indian territory.

In despair Chief Seattle watched a spider work.

How to explain that the land was not his to give?

“Man did not weave the web of life

He is merely a strand in it.”

Abstraction from the spider,

projected on the problem.

Airbus A380 Gull Wing

Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be …”

informs debate on euthanasia.

The Airbus A380 has a “gull wing”.

In the cockpit

pilots strap it on like an exoskeleton.

In software engineering we cannot function

without metaphor:

A380 Exoskeleton

objects, classes, inheritance, polymorphism,

proxy, state, mode, thread, queue, tree,

layer, relation, sequence, semaphore,

selection, iteration, recursion, waterfall, agile.

Metaphor is life critical.

Robert Frost said:

“A person not educated in the workings of metaphor

is not safe in the world.”

To find the sublime metaphor

is to project from temporal life

into eternity.

To invent the games of legend

played in heaven

with the oldest songs ever sung.

The Wicker Goat

Through metaphor we make connections

and open up possibilities

now and forever.

My life is an endless quest for metaphor,

its stuff is everywhere.

I have a wicker goat.

What could it mean?

Bump Into Someone

One-on-one is the best,

people on the borders of your field

or someone totally unrelated.

I spoke to a priest once.

Two hours with an educated man – wonderful.

At Pixar

Steve Jobs positioned the mailboxes and washrooms

strategically

so chance meetings would happen

every day.

Bumping Into Someone at Pixar

My friend Suja targets mentors.

She calls strangers  up for coffee

to chat about – life.

They come.

Reach out.

You can’t do it alone.

Read, Look and Listen

With no input there can be no transformation

and no output of value.

The fertile ground is outside your profession.

The sign on the wall in an art gallery,

Valparaiso Graffiti

the graffiti on an underpass in Valparaiso,

five books on the go at once,

all Shakespeare,

a chance comment on the radio,

a glance out the window.

We humans are unique,

we can imagine ourselves into other worlds.

Don’t get comfortable in your own,

you could lose it.

Copy and Transform

Shakespeare derived the balcony scene

in Romeo and Juliet

from Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta.

Marlowe:

“But stay! what star shines yonder in the east?

The lodestar of my life, if Abigail!”

Shakespeare:

“But, soft! what light through younder window breaks?

It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!”

Leonardo da Vinci's Ornithopter

Bob Kane combined Zorro

with the winged design

of Leonardo da Vinci’s ornithopter and

concepts from Roland West’s early talkie

The Bat Whispers

into a crime fighter he called “the Bat-Man”.

The Wright Flier

Manned flight came from

the Wright brothers’ aerofoil design.

The Wrights’ creative surge atrophied.

They distracted themselves suing competitors

for patent infringement

while others advanced the science.

Higher, faster, safer and then into space.

All creativity is derivative.

There is no shame in copying

if you transform and improve.

Be Silly

A 3M team joked:

Venice

“Let’s make a glue that’s not sticky.”

post it notes

Plastic Surgeon Dr Fiona Wood

exhausted by the lengthy procedures required

to cover burns with synthetic skin mused,

“wish we could spray it on, ha ha.”

  spray on skin.

Romance at the Trocadero

It is necessary to laugh a lot.

Travel is Essential

Get out of your environment and go somewhere else.

If you’re  in jail or powerless to move

it must happen in your imagination.

Hemingway wrote in coffee shops.

I love Venice and the Biennale,

Paris and the epic Delacroix of the Louvre,

Solitude of the Atacama

romance on the roundabout at the Trocadero,

the Catalan pickpockets of Barcelona,

solitude in the desert of the Atacama,

the potted history of flight

in the hanger at the Smithsonian

Air and Space Museum.

Don’t stay at home

it hollows you out.

Do Not Fear the Dark

The creative studio is a dark place at times.

Hanger at the Smithsonian

Get ready for days of self doubt and despair

when nothing comes.

And when you publish

your best work is ignored – silence.

Poverty

Its normal to be despised,

looked down on by people with

secure jobs,

nice houses,

and fat retirement plans.

My actress daughter says,

“Its like being a pig farmer dad.

They can smell it on you.”

Know yourself.

How much do you want it?

Commitment is everything.

But Then it Does Come

And you know it’s good

and you’ve been at it since dawn

and the sun has gone down

and you’ve only just noticed

and now you’re hungry

because you’ve forgotten to eat.

And you don’t care what people think

"I love your stuff"

and you accept that when you put it out there

there will be silence.

But then one day someone says,

“I love your stuff!”

And there’s a buzz in your head

and a feeling of immense satisfaction;

beyond money, beyond time.

Because you know you’ve created something -

New

———————————————————

Postscript

What became of me? Judge for yourself. Here it is and its the best I can do.

Knowledge, Belief and Insight

She embraces me and murmurs, “You engineers … know … don’t you?”

Hey hey. No point in arguing with a California girl, so lovely, with a notion so pure, so beautiful and so true.

“Yes darlin we know.”

Its a Sunday morning, 2am in 1976.  I’m at a party in the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s winding down and I’m on my way home … maybe.

That was then, a delicious thought on the night, but years later a more sober and wiser head tells me that pure knowledge is not enough. Technological advances are organized by lone mavericks who not only present knowledge but also instill belief. And to achieve this you need insight. The ability to create new realities that humanity comes to love even as it looks elsewhere.

What’s the secret? Did Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bazos and Mark Zuckerburg drink from some wellspring of genius? Or did they just know how the story was going to play out.  How did they do that – dictate reality for the citizens of planet earth.

In 2003 I read something that made me wonder: a Harvard Business Review article, Storytelling That Moves People [1].

Believing in Story

You might ask what would possess an engineer to study dramatic theory? In my case the inciting incident was the HBR story. It turns out that some American companies hire Hollywood storytellers to help them pitch investment opportunities to Wall Street bankers. On the meanest street in the world some of these guys have one hundred percent success rates. Why? Put simply while the traditional businessman peddles knowledge (of the business and future market trends), the storyteller sells belief. It seems that a business case wrapped around the emotional charge of an engaging story has a strange power to persuade.

Intrigued, I dug deeper into the tradition of myth and legend, the wellspring of all stories. I put principle into practice and became a believer. Now I put it to you that:

Understanding the fundamentals of a good story will make you a more effective systems engineer.

Story telling communicates and persuades because, regardless of language and culture,  human beings are hard wired to receive information in story forms.  These primal patterns, embedded in myths and legends, are the closest thing we have to a model of the real world. J.K. Rowling once mused, “Human beings can learn and understand without having experience. They can think themselves into other people’s places.”  The evidence is strong that storytelling can have a profound influence on human behavior.  Stories inform our belief systems and, some say, tell us how to live.

Meeting the Story Men

The storyteller in the HBR article was Robert McKee author of Story [2]. Robert trains Hollywood scriptwriters. His students have included the writers and directors of movies such as Forrest Gump, Erin Brockovich, The Color Purple, Gandhi and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Intrigued by Mr One Hundred Percent and sensing a gap in my education I read Robert’s book and was impressed by his insights into human nature. His story metaphors projected effortlessly onto software engineering. I recognised story patterns in all my software projects and his character archetypes explained the behaviour of the every-day cast of characters on a project team. I followed up with Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey [3], Jay Parini’s Why Poetry Matters [4] and finally Joe Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces [5].

Drilling down, I uncovered the canon of story together with its connections. Campbell’s work was informed by Aristotle’s dramatic theories. Campbell drew on everything from the philosophy of religion to bizarre Eskimo fairy tales. Vogler summarised Campbell in a few pages for Hollywood scriptwriters. George Lucas, the creator of the Star Wars, was a student of Campbell. Star Wars played out the mythic form with perfect pitch and eased words into the language with an alacrity not seen since Shakespeare: the dark side, the Jedi and the force.

The wisdom in myth and legend beckoned. I’d fallen down a rabbit hole into a supernatural world populated with strangely familiar characters, events and situations and they began to project themselves onto my life in systems engineering.

Life – the Ultimate Metaphor

In systems analysis and design we constantly seek out abstractions – metaphors. We model control systems with state machines, we represent business processes with data flow diagrams. We use models to make sense of a complex soup of process, data and state. Models allow us to classify and compartmentalise elements of a system so our feeble brains can deal with the complexity. Models also allow us to identify what is missing or illogical.

Our models are our metaphors. We need them to extend the boundaries of thought by extending the boundaries of expression.

Ha! This thought is not mine. I am channelling Jay Parini; but he isn’t talking about technology; he’s reflecting on the purpose of poetry. Does this qualify technologists such as Alan Kay, pioneer of object oriented programming, as a poet of our particular genre?

And so further on down I fell into the depths of the rabbit hole, into the field of time grasping insights along the way, weightless and wondering if, in the field of story, I’d found timeless practical wisdom.

Could story be the ultimate abstraction, the grand unified theory, the wisdom that makes sense of life itself?

Transforming Reality

The world of story is a parallel universe to an engineer. It is a place of unease with the unfamiliar but strangely logical. You meet with the psychological archetypes of Jung and Nietzsche and come upon fundamental truths like Robert Frost’s:

A person not educated in the operations of metaphor is not safe in the world.

You inhale Joe Campbell’s deliciously nondeterministic pronouncement that:

… myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.

True, this sounds like arty BS to most engineers … but then on the six o’clock news you watch an embarrassed politician whine, “Yes we spent $200 million on the payroll system. We did our best but it doesn’t work and we don’t understand why. Maybe we just asked too much of the technology.” And all you see is the modern incarnation of Daedalus, in a suit and tie, lamenting the death of his son Icarus who ignored his father’s advice and flew too close to the sun.

Time passes and you begin to believe in the hypnotic power of myth that is everywhere and through time always the same and most importantly you begin to appreciate the power of language to transform reality, stories told in the pattern of myth match our dreams and resonate with psychological truth. People engage with, remember and are influenced by – stories.

Steve Jobs must have seen this at Pixar as his creatives rolled out the Toy Story movies to commercial and critical acclaim. In this time he perfected his fabled “reality distortion field”, the presence that swirled around him transforming the reality of all in its sway. “No, it is not impossible. Yes, you can achieve my objectives.”

Applying the Story Pattern

There came a day when I had read enough. It was time to introduce story into my training and consulting. My functional safety presentations featured Les Chambers in jeopardy, holding a giant live crab, its lethal pincers seeking out the flesh of my arm, a potent metaphor for risk. More than eight years later the people who were in the room report, “I remember risk and the crab.” The crab, redolent with persuasive dramatic energy, became an international superstar featuring in my latest video on risk management.

Metaphor for Risk

Encouraged by this initial and somewhat accidental success I looked for ways to amp up the dramatic intensity. And it’s borne fruit! My post on Extreme Review featuring naked babies in jeopardy and a clinical dismemberment of a project proposal by space shuttle engineers, resonated with many readers. At least one respondent reported that he had reinstituted a formal review process.

Man is the only creature that can wound from a distance, could it be that he can also persuade at long range – with a story?

In this arcane world, hither to the province of writers and poets, had I found a magical source of influence, had I discovered the user manual for the human race?

It’s worth looking into. Aristotle, McKee, Vogler, Campbell; these deconstructors of the mythic form have a rattling good tale to tell and it begins so …

Once Upon a Time a Long Long Time Ago

In ancient Athens the Greek philosopher Aristotle studied the form of drama, comedy, poetry and tragedy. In 335 BC he published the Poetics, the earliest surviving work of dramatic theory. The Poetics abstracts the story form in terms of mythos (plot), the sequence and arrangement of events and ethos (character), the behaviour patterns of protagonists.

Through history the Poetics was overshadowed by Aristotle’s more famous work The Rhetoric which was of higher value to law and politics – that is until modern times when movies became a multi billion dollar industry. Twentieth century writers and movie makers such as Lucas, McKee and Vogler set these forms to alchemy, fashioning rough ideas into characters and plots that fascinate people. The result: movie blockbuster gold.

But here’s the rub: stories are much more than entertainment, they impact audiences in deep and permanent ways and they help us see ourselves and the world around us more clearly. Stories encapsulate the truth of human nature. Instinctively we seem to know that myths didn’t happen, they just are.

Dangerous Persuasion

The persuasive power of the dramatic form was recognised even in Aristotle’s day. In 388 BC Plato, student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle, lobbied the city fathers of Athens to expel all poets and storytellers. They are corrupting our youth, he argued. They deal with ideas but not in the open, rational manner of philosophers. They feed us ideas in the seductive wrappings of stories causing us to believe even the morally repellent. They are dangerous people. He was right.

How does the U.S. Navy convince thousands of young men to sign up for the most dangerous job in the world: flying strike jets off an aircraft carrier, day and night and in all weather? They use stories.

Take the movie Top Gun. They invited Hollywood aboard the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise and made available several aircraft from F-14 fighter squadron, Screaming Eagles. The result was compelling. The images were irresistible to young Americans. Picture this: Naval aviator Maverick (Tom Cruise) swaggers across a flight deck against a backdrop of F-14A Tomcats, strike jets trailing afterburners rip a flaming trench in the night sky and the clincher: Maverick high-fives his Radar Intercept Officer Goose (Anthony Edwards) with the war cry that went into the language, “I have the need, the need for speed”. “Where do I sign up,” they say.

Would that the energy released in us by compelling stories be projected onto our working life.

Would that the empathy we feel for a Maverick and a Goose be projected onto our customers.

Would that the sharp focus and intense concentration we apply to following the arc of a compelling story be applied to pursuing our customer’s needs toward a happy ending.

Why Engineers Need Story

What has mythology got to do with systems engineering? A lot.

Traditional systems engineers record customer needs in the requirements phase of a project. We look for overriding objectives and themes. We analyse, organise, model, prototype and present our findings. Then we ask, “Is this what you want? Sign here.” Caught like a rabbit in the headlights of a non-rushing project the client signs and we cross the threshold into design. Millions flow in sweat and treasure, our bright shiny new machine comes into being and along the way we learn more, but at the end , too often, to our horror we trip over Pixar’s third rule of storytelling:

#3: Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.

This is a repeating theme already preserved in software engineering myth. Fred Brooks coined it when he managed IBM’s OS/360 operating system development. “Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow,” he said. Where is this written? In his book, The Mythical Man-Month [6]. Where else.

I’ve lived this story twice in my career. The resultant eye watering waste with developers on the street looking for a job isn’t funny. My personal view is that passive acceptance of throwaway systems is no longer an option and that the core of the problem is passive acceptance of the client as oracle. To be concise:

Documenting the customer’s stated needs is the starting point of the requirements phase not its end.

We must assume that some needs remain in the shadows, unspoken, repressed and buried in the collective subconscious.

The analysts’ job is to confront them and bring them into the light of day lest they turn into monsters and destroy us all.

Suppressed, unvoiced needs can be revealed by living inside the customer’s narrative. Story is the diagnostic tool. That’s why we need it.

Storytelling Trumps Oracle Worship

Oracle of Delphi

Oracle worship has gotten man into trouble since before recorded history. The ancient Greeks travelled to the temple at Delphi to consult with the oracle Pythia. They believed she spoke for the god Apollo. Pythia delivered wisdom in a frenzied state induced by vapours rising from a chasm in a rock. She spoke gibberish which the priests interpreted for needy pilgrims. One Pilgrim asked, “Should I join the Athenians in their war against Sparta?” The answer: “Go return not die in war.” Punctuation wasn’t big in those days and in its absence was born one of the first potentially lethal ambiguities, the forerunner of those that beguile us even today in the fine print of engineering specifications.

So what is a systems engineer today, Priest or Pilgrim? I say neither. Sure, listen to your customer but take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Put the customer’s requirements into the context of his overarching story. You may be amazed at what lurks in the shadows.

And to capture the story, complete and correct, in all its factual and emotional glory you will need empathy and a knowledge of the story form. Feel inadequate? Of course you do. Story telling was for the Arts Faculty but if you want insight it’s time to learn the basics.

Enter the poet engineer.

The Business Function of the Story Pattern

Approaching a project the poet engineer sees the client as a mythical being, a hero, expressing a unique mix of archetypes, fallen temporarily from eternity into the field of time.

Up until now the hero has been living a comfortable life in a normal world with all things in balance. Then something happens and the hero’s life is thrown out of kilter. It soon becomes clear that something must be done to restore balance and the hero, often motivated by some dramatic inciting incident, is called to adventure. The hero is launched on a quest for his object of desire, some kind of elixir that when wrenched from the clutches of an arch villain and borne back to the normal world will heal the wounded land and restore balance and harmony.

Bent on his quest the hero launches himself over a threshold into a supernatural world where he endures numerous tests and trials, culminating in an ordeal, usually mortal combat with the arch villain. He defeats the villain, takes possession of the elixir and sets out on the path home to the normal world with the villain in hot pursuit. Within sight of home the hero often endures a second ordeal were the villain takes one last shot before being destroyed. The hero often almost dies but is reborn and transformed by the experience.

The hero crosses the threshold back into the normal world and shares the elixir healing the wounded land.

Armed with this mythic form the poet engineer dismisses the notion of customer as oracle and projects the eternal story pattern onto his client’s business. Its a great ice breaker on the first interview. The opener is not, “What do you want?” it’s, “Tell me your story.” The story pattern helps you walk the customer through life as he knows it not missing a thing. You ask more insightful questions such as: tell me about your normal world; what disrupting forces upset the balance; was there an incident that convinced you something had to be done; what drives you on your quest; what is the elixir that will save your normal world; who are the arch villains arrayed against you?

This is where analysis based on story parts company with classical requirements elicitation. The poet engineer compensates, up front, for human frailty. We think we believe what we know, but we only truly believe what we feel. True engagement with a customer’s needs is therefore a two step process: one, get the feelings on the table; two, distil the truth.

Introducing story invites repressed feelings to boil to the surface. We’re not asking what do you want, we’re asking how do you feel. Effective questions uncover strong emotions, for amongst these shadows live repressed, unspoken requirements. So immerse yourself in the customer’s story, think and feel as your customer thinks and feels, forget about requirements for the moment and think about desire.

Desire

Case study:

A traditional analyst approaches a Medication Tracking System. She does an interview and documents an objective:

The Medication Tracking System shall ensure that all patients receive their correct prescribed drugs.

The poet analyst digs deeper:

Mary Rose was blond, beautiful and three years old.  On a Monday she was admitted to our hospital as a precautionary measure with a mild case of flu.  On Tuesday she was dead. The autopsy revealed she had been administered an overdose of insulin.  She had received the medication intended for the patient in the next bed.  The objective of the Medication Tracking System is to make sure this can never happen again.

Here is an idea wrapped around an emotional charge – a heartfelt outpouring of desire. It’s a story device that engages people and makes them care. Caring is the beginning of empathy and empathy is the beginning of understanding; the first step on the road to accurate requirements.

Desire is at the primal heart of all customer requirements. Desire can be conscious or unconscious. Desire is discovered by understanding the customer’s story at the deepest emotional level. We find desire in:

The back story is the “once upon a time” component of our tale. We meet the hero and learn the history of the normal world. The back story provides the necessary background and rationale for developing a new system.  We also use the back story to identify the supporting cast of characters. Facing the customer for the first time we ask her to describe her normal world before the coming of some disruptive inciting incident.

Example: It was wonderful. My newspaper was a fantastic business mostly supported by advertising income. I had a large staff of reporters and a foreign correspondent bureau.

The Inciting incident dramatically upsets the balance of forces in the hero’s life. Wealth to poverty, life to death, security to jeopardy, freedom to slavery, market domination to also-ran, customer satisfaction to customer indifference, technology mastery to yesterday’s company. In the movies a shark eats a swimmer (Jaws). In our business the inciting incident is often triggered by the arrival of some disruptive technology.

Example: The Internet destroyed my business. Google came along and provided cheaper and much more focused advertising. I lost thirty percent of my income overnight. I can’t just keep firing people to cut my losses I’ll have nothing left.

The inciting incident creates an imbalance in the normal world, develops desire in the hero and launches him on the quest for the elixir.

The Elixir

The elixir is the object of desire. It has the power to restore balance in the normal world. It can be money, fame, power, love, peace, happiness, health, freedom. It’s interesting to note that in myth and legend the most satisfying elixirs are those that bring wisdom and greater awareness. Physical possessions fare badly. In the movie Titanic, Rose (Kate Winslet), as an older woman, throws the priceless blue diamond Heart of the Ocean into the sea at the site of the Titanic’s sinking. It turned out that her elixir was not personal property, it was survival and the blessing of a long and eventful life. Her ordeal had transformed her from spoilt, superficial young woman to spiritual being.

The elixir is a must-have in all stories. Mythic theory tells us that unless the hero returns to the normal world with an elixir and shares it with its inhabitants there will be no healing. Nothing is learnt, there is no transformation in the hero and the adventure must be repeated.

Does this ring a bell? Organisations that do not learn from their mistakes possibly? Companies that do not hold post project reviews that formally recognise what has been learnt and what needs to be improved? Was this the origin of the saying, “Those who do not learn from their mistakes are bound to repeat them?”

The Strength of Desire

The strength of desire can be measured by the risks the hero is willing to take in pursuit of the elixir. The authentic hero is willing to die for it. Anything less and the story gets boring. What represents metaphorical death for a corporation? What are they risking for their elixir? In the software industry it’s usually money and credibility. On one of my projects the cash burn was $70,000 a day.

The insightful engineer measures that desire early as it represents the unifying force that holds the entire project together. Robert McKee calls it “the spine of the story”. Requirements calibrated at high desire represent the core benefit of a system. If you’re working on a project that is losing its desire, find a way to stoke the fires or bail out.

Empathy for Desire

Desire draws the audience into a story. To remain fully engaged the audience must understand what the hero wants and want him to have it. By the same token project teams that do not share the desire to achieve the project’s objectives are at risk of falling apart through lack of interest.

To search in the shadows for unspoken requirements analysts must have empathy, they must feel the client’s desire. Remember that empathy is not sympathy. Sympathy is feeling sorry for someone in a detached kind of way. Empathy is feeling what the customer feels, seeing what the customer sees crawling inside the customer’s skin. The “sympathetic” moviegoer walks out of Titanic commenting, “Shucks, it was too bad they didn’t have enough lifeboats.” The “empathetic” movie buff leaves the theatre in tears.

You can’t achieve empathy without understanding the customer’s story at its deepest emotional level. So, understanding the object of desire is pretty important, which leads me to methods of expressing desire: the concepts of premise and controlling idea.

Premise

The premise expresses the energy that inspires a writer to tell a story. Often expressed as a question, it describes the creative burst that got her going.

Steve Jobs premise:

“What if I could convince all the music companies in the world to sell their music, through my Internet music store (iTunes) so anyone could download it to a mobile device (iPod) song by song?

Everyone on a project should understand the premise and be able to recite it in a single sentence.

Controlling Idea

The controlling idea describes a story’s fundamental meaning. It expresses the principle that guides story design. For example, in the Dirty Harry movies justice is restored because the cop is more violent than the criminals. Deconstructing this statement we have a transition between two states of fortune – Justice/injustice and a reason for the transition.

What was the iPod’s controlling idea? Can we describe in one sentence the vision that created a billion-dollar industry?

The iPod grew out of a primal human desire to have music everywhere at any time. Initially developed by the Sony Walkman, public taste for mobile music was left unsated by the lack of integration of the music industry with technology. The states of fortune here where access to music and lack thereof. Steve Jobs’ multi billion dollar controlling idea was:

The world will gain access to all music everywhere because I will integrate the flow of music from music companies to an Internet store that allows downloads to a simple (and aesthetically pleasing) listening device via the Internet.

Jobs pursued his controlling idea relentlessly, befriending musicians such as Bob Dylan, negotiating with music companies and driving his design team to produce a simple and aesthetically pleasing iPod. Sony could have had that business but it lacked the desire and the controlling idea.

Yes, desire is a very human emotion that we often banish from our projects in favour of cold logic – to the detriment of insight. A project’s descent into disaster often starts on the first day of requirements capture when the analyst doesn’t ask or isn’t told what is really important.  The premise and controlling idea of the business story are lost in the noise of complex features and technological gadgetry.

As a remedy we can preserve important project objectives through strong controlling ideas wrapped around the emotional charge of the story.  In the case of Mary Rose it is logical that patients should get their medication but the image of a dead child will guarantee that the team will crawl over broken glass to make it happen. The poet analyst’s requirement statement also tells us much more about our target system:

1. This application is safety-related.  Failure can cause harm.
2. The system premise is: what would happen if we use technology to make sure that a patient cannot be administered the wrong medication – ever
3. The controlling idea is: this system will prevent patient death or injury through incorrect medication
4. The most important attribute of the system is safety integrity.  This system must improve patient safety not degrade it.
5. The system must be available 24/7.

A developer reviewing the traditional statement: The Medication Tracking System shall ensure that all patients received their correct prescribed drugs could easily miss these five derived requirements.  This is the power of story.

Project as Story

Thus far I’ve applied story theory to requirements elicitation. But its applications are universal. All projects are a story. A project that acts out the mythic pattern is authentic – that is, more aligned with reality and therefore more likely to succeed. I illustrate with the following vignette:

Shadows in the Test Plan

A complex system is under construction at Zentek Systems Co. Confidence is high that the system requirements are correct, unambiguous, implementable and complete. The Engineering manager reviews the system test plan. Given the clean requirements the test team has had a dream run at figuring out the volume of test cases. Their estimates look good. Effort is allocated for test design, test case development, assembly of test equipment and data, test execution and test reporting. The manager approves the plan with little change. The next day he is squashed flat by a beer truck.

He is replaced by a funny looking guy named Jake. Jake’s got an MIT masters in software engineering but he wears a beret and jeans. A rumour goes around that he’s also got an arts degree. The software engineers move away from him on the bench.

Jake reads the test plan, shakes his head and calls the test team in for a review. Dolores, the test team manager, does the talking.

Jake: So tell me your story.

Dolores: Say what?

Jake: You guys have been living a normal existence where everything is right with the world. Now something has come a long and it’s thrown your world out of balance. It’s pretty clear you’ve got to do something to restore that balance. You’ve got to embark on an adventure. So tell me about it.

Dolores: Yeah. We’ve had a life of regression testing minor upgrades. It’s been a bit boring but hey, it’s a job. Now we’ve got this major system to test, its going to be a stretch but I’m sure we can get it done. I guess to restore the normal boring nine-to-five balance in our lives we’ve got to find all the bugs in the system and do our part in getting it delivered with the maximum defect removal efficiency.

Jake: So what are the challenges? What will test your mettle? Where is the “the shadow”, the villain of this story. What or who is setting out to destroy you? And what or who must you defeat to return to your normal world.

Dolores: Bugs are our enemy. Defect removal is our creed. Our job is to find them, all of them and then make sure they’re fixed in subsequent releases of the product.

Jake: Okay then let me summarise. You guys are the heroes of this story. Your quest is to remove the bugs from this product. To restore your world to normality you must grasp the elixir of high defect removal efficiency (greater than ninety-five percent I hope). You will attack these bugs in the belly of the beast (on the physical test floor and in the logical depths of the code body). But that won’t be the end of it. Your initial successes will mean the system will have to be bug fixed and regression tested. So on the path home there will be endless tests and trials to remove the additional bugs injected by the fixes that we all know will occur. Only then can you return to your normal world with the elixir. Am I right?

Dolores: Hallelujah brother. Praise the Lord and pass the test specification.

Jake: Okay but we’ve got a problem. That test plan tells me you’re trying to make reality conform to your expectations rather than seeing what’s there. Real life. You’re going to find bugs, were is the effort allocation for retesting after bug fix. Come to think of it I can find no evidence of effort allocated for bug fixing in the developer’s schedule. This entire project is acting like there is no enemy bent on its destruction. Real life is always a struggle against some shadowy villain. Where is Darth Vader in this tale?

Bugs are the unavoidable outcome of our humanity. We make mistakes. And what our humanity loves to do, it will do – even as we plan and wish it were otherwise.

How will you destroy you enemies? Where are your weapons?

Dolores (sheepishly): We’ll need more time?

Jake: Damn right! There’s your light sword. You’ll need more time in the belly of the beast and on the path home.  Expect an ordeal, not a walk in the park. Let your plan reflect this and resubmit it next week.

Their future duly reorganised in the more realistic mythic form, the team files out. First team member (whispers): Spooky.

Second team member (whispers): I think we’ve just had a risk management lesson.

[Room empties]

Jake (sighs – thinking):

Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen,
Our bending author hath pursued the story. …

Deconstructing the Shadow

Failure to recognise and deal with the shadow archetype incurs billion dollar losses every year.

Swiss psychologist Carl Jung coined the term archetype to describe symbols, energies, relationships and personality patterns that inform the behaviour of the human race. Jung catalogued the archetypes that appear in our dreams and, to his amazement, found them in the myths of all cultures. Archetypes are described in all works on dramatic theory.

An understanding of archetypes gives you a deeper knowledge of the purpose or function of characters in a story and hence people in real life. Armed with these insights we make wiser decisions.

At Zentek the shadow projected the energy of the dark side – the forces that will cause something to go wrong. Buggy software and bug injecting developers. In general the shadow stands for the qualities we abhor, our darkest secrets, repressed feelings, things that haunt us from our childhood, self doubt, secret fears and evil habits we have – but deny. Our shadows appear to us as monsters, devils, vampires and evil aliens. Shadows can also stand for unexplored potential – “roads not taken”. At best they challenge us, at worst, demonstrating the power of suppressed feelings, they stop us functioning.

It’s interesting to note that the most dangerous shadows don’t think of themselves as villains they actually view themselves as heroes serving humanity. For example, Adolf Hitler thought the extermination of the Jews was a righteous service to the world. Religious wars have brought forth the bloodiest genocides in history, all combatants believing that God was on their side. And in the present, puffed up with hubris and infallible self-confidence (not to mention the robust good looks and the snappy suit) how many modern managers wreak havoc in their customer’s business by delivering untested systems too soon. Villains can be sneaky, they often present as heroes; dashing and worthy of emulation, but as the story progresses they express their darker purpose.

In real life shadows appear from within and without. Life is a journey in the countryside and a journey in the mind. The shadow within can be self doubt, the shadow without can be an external enemy bent on our destruction.

In story and in real life the dramatic function of the shadow is to challenge the hero. The resulting struggle brings out the best in the hero and transforms him through the arc of the story. The stronger the shadow the quicker and more profound the transformation.

And then there is the driving force that causes the hero to engage in mortal combat with the villain. The hero wants something: an elixir. Initially shadows always have custody of, or some power over, the elixir. That magical thing which can restore balance and happiness to the normal world. It can be a physical thing like money or the Holy Grail or an intangible like greater-than ninety-five-percent-software-defect-removal-efficiency.

Most important of all for the story to reach a satisfactory conclusion the hero must take action to vanquish the shadow villain. The shadow within his vanquished by bringing it into the light and dealing with it. The shadow without is physically destroyed or made impotent.

By now you will have recognised the shadows in any movie you’ve ever seen. Star Wars’ Darth Vader is a particularly stark example. But by far the more interesting question is how the shadow villain projects onto the real-life experience of the systems engineering project. Can projecting the story metaphor onto projects give us deeper insights into how we plan and execute? Does best practice expressed in story language have a mystical power to influence our audience in ways they might find impossible to withstand leaving memories which are strong and hard to efface?

We shall see.

Systems Engineering Shadows

Using the shadow metaphor Jake exposed its darker purpose – from this we can abstract a wealth of practical wisdom.

All projects have shadows – no exceptions. To deny the existence shadows is to tell a boring story, to live an inauthentic life and, at Zentek, to suffer a failed project. In modern project engineering parlance the term shadow translates to risk: inadequate requirements, unskilled developers, uncontrolled change, untested technologies and the like.  In Zentek’s case the shadow was unrealistic estimates emerging from an inability to accept that things will go wrong. The test manager Dolores had internal shadows of her own. Denial. The inability to accept that something could go wrong and the unwillingness prepare for it.

The hero must act to vanquish the shadow. Interesting stories are driven through their arc by the actions of the hero. No one else. Passive heroes who react to circumstances or do nothing are uninteresting. To act is to discover truth. Inaction leaves us static, stale and unevolved. Project managers that do not act against the threat posed by the shadow, fail. Jake has taken his first action: replanning testing. He has taken the first step toward truth and by so doing has set up his next trial. It’s a truth that his management will not enjoy. His next ordeal will be to sell them the increased cost of testing.

Managing Shadows

Hero, antagonist or villain – which one of these?

An understanding of the shadow archetype gives you greater insight into managing problem team members. The classic example in software development is the technical genius, indispensable in a two-man start up but often a liability as a business scales up.

Steve Wozniak (Woz) is a brilliant man and a sweet guy. The Apple I and Apple II personal computers would not have existed without him. It is also true that had Woz not teamed up with Steve Jobs he would still be working in his garage giving his work away to friends in the neighbourhood. As Apple grew Woz’s inherent shyness and lack of management skills meant that he could no longer participate at Apple.

As the Apple story played out Woz expressed more than one archetype. He started as a hero building brilliant hardware and software and driving the story forward with his actions. Monk like, he sacrificed his time and all else (including the company of women) to make great computers. But deep within Woz lurked shadows: inability to communicate and inability to collaborate effectively with other engineers. Finally when the hardware and software design exercise became too large for one man Woz’s shadows threatened to destroy the company; he had morphed into a villain (from the company’s perspective). At that point Steve Jobs had no choice but to take on the role of hero and act. Woz was metaphorically annihilated.

This is a common scenario in technical teams. Highly intelligent tech-heroes start out as assets but become team killers as the organisation grows. They terrify people with their intellect, extensive background knowledge and inability to suffer “fools”. Often their continued presence is justified by the extent of their knowledge. Managers are afraid to fire them because they know too much. This inaction never bodes well for team productivity for the behaviour of the tech-hero-turned-villain is guaranteed to stunt the creative growth of everyone around him – unless of course he is willing to do battle with his shadows.

Projecting story onto this scenario reveals lack of collaborative skills as a shadow within. The manager’s job as mentor is to bring the shadow into the open and assist the lone hero to destroy it. In a crisis a hero always sacrifices something he values for the benefit of others. It can be a valued possession, his life or, as in this case, something as simple as a strongly held belief.

At the climax of Star Wars in the battle to destroy the Death Star, Luke Skywalker surrenders his dependence on machines to launch his missiles. He shuts down his target acquisition system and uses “the force”. Back in the real world, if our tech-hero accepts that he can no longer do everything himself and must share information and power he remains a hero, if he can’t he morphs into a villain. The villain archetype seldom changes in the arc of the story. He remains equally evil as events play out and, unfortunately, he must be destroyed if balance is to be restored to the normal world.

I accept that none of this is politically correct, but neither is the stuff of myth and legend, our authentic pattern and infallible guide to real life. Stories with heroes that do not engage in mortal combat with the forces of evil lose their audience. Companies that do not aggressively attack their demons die.

Seizing the Elixir

The form, function and criticality of the elixir must be clear to all.

As we have seen the elixir is the hero’s object of desire. Without an elixir the hero has no quest and wanders aimlessly in the ether achieving little of interest (and most of the audience is gone before the credits). To her credit Dolores had a clear understanding of her elixir: high-defect-removal-efficiency. On return to her normal world this will create harmony through high customer satisfaction and low cost of ownership.

Non-performing projects often have no clear definition of their special elixir. Team members can’t state in one sentence why they’re there. I recently contributed to an online forum thread that asked for the top five reasons for having a quality management system. There were comments such as “[to have a] Managed processes helping to ensure consistency”. I don’t think I’d risk my life for that elixir.  How about: “Reduce costs by fifteen percent and double sales.” Now that’s more like it; a cause worthy of (metaphorical) mortal combat.

Here is another positive example: a NASA Space Station commander recently stated one of his mission objectives with clarity and great beauty, “When it’s all over, I want my people to look back on the next six months and think of them as the best time of their lives.”  A classical elixir, honest, useful and true.

All in all teams that have no shared concept of the elixir have low morale and poor productivity. The reasons can be found in a story metaphor. All stories revolve around a hero with a quest. For a story to engage an audience they must know what the hero wants and want him to have it. For a team to spend late nights fighting the forces of evil in the belly of a beast they must share desire. And that desire must be specific and strong.

So far so good. But how far can story metaphors be stretched? My view is that they go to infinity. I’ve seen it play out in all the projects I’ve ever joined. Take for example the secrets of rapid personal development.

The Ordeal, Death and Rebirth.

You can’t win Darth. If you strike me down I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

In Lucas’ seminal scene from the original Star Wars movie, Obi-Wan Kenobi yields to Darth Vader who kills him. But is he really dead? No. He is reborn as a spirit, the very incarnation of “the force” and continues in his role of mentor, always with Luke Skywalker, ever more powerful.

Variations on this scene are essential components of myths, legends and all well constructed stories. A struggle with the forces of evil is not authentic unless the hero almost dies in the act. Wimps need not apply. All the myths, legends and worthwhile real-life experiences that ever were feature the metaphorical (or actual) ordeal, death and rebirth of the hero. The best example is the basis of the Christian faith: the betrayal, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If the ordeal is omitted some primal judge within us senses that the story is not real and we lose interest.

Who could doubt the wisdom of the astronauts who, from the void of outer space, have gazed upon the pathetically thin blue layer of atmosphere that coats our planet; who could not be moved by their exhortations to nurture our environment? For these men and women are the modern shaman’s who have left earth and gone to a supernatural place, sacrificed the normal human need for a comfortable life, cheated death and re-entered our atmosphere to be reborn and forever transformed, their ordeal gifting them with the elixir of new insights. The word “sacrifice” derives from the Latin “making holy”. Could this account for the aura surrounding all astronauts  on their return?

In engineering projects people face ordeals in the form of challenges that they believe are beyond their capabilities. They are transported, sometimes unwillingly, into supernatural worlds and subjected to tests and trials. Most of them triumph over adversity and move on to higher levels of professionalism and achievement. Dolores’ team is currently a rag-tag band of maintenance test wonks. As they are consumed by the adventure of the Zentek project – deadline death marches, late nights on a test floor , so-called code base lines that evolve randomly under their feet, the loathing and denigration of programmers who will not admit to bad code, pitched battles with managers, panic’d and shrill, who want them to stop testing and deliver the product regardless – will harden and temper their skills toward their ultimate rebirth as professional test engineers (scars and all).

The takeaway?

If you want to train a team to the highest level of capability in the shortest possible time give them a job that almost kills them.

Reflecting on The Force

Use The Force Luke.

In Star Wars George Lucas invoked the force as a metaphor for timeless wisdom. Jedi Knights were chosen at birth and trained as exponents of the force in all aspects of life. They were beyond elite athletes; they were sages, supernatural beings capable of amazing feats. Obi-Wan Kenobi’s death at the hands of Darth Vader and subsequent rebirth into the spirit world implied that they were immortals come down from the stillness of eternity for brief movement in time only to return to their spirit form to watch over us all.

This is not so far-fetched. If you’re a Christian this pretty much sums up your belief in Jesus Christ, the Saints, God and Heaven. If you’re an Australian aboriginal have I not just summarised The Dreaming? Even if you’re an atheist you believe in something, don’t you; some eternal truth that guides your daily actions and to which you turn in times of trouble?

No one can say for sure that the force exists, but we feel it’s true (at least our personal version of it) and that’s all that matters. Feelings (not logic) make it a strong influence in our lives. The force of our belief system controls how we filter information, what we remember, what we learn, what we say and what we do. I find it amazing that Obi-Wan’s last earthly words, “I shall become more powerful” have remained crystal clear, fixed in my memory, even though I heard them only once thirty-five years ago (shades of the crab).

The force of story has too strong an influence in our lives to be ignored by the humble engineer. Understanding its power is all the better to listen and remember, to teach and learn and to drive our projects down paths of realism already laid, in abstract form, in the wisdom of myth and legend.

Project Diagnosis with Story

The story form is a wonderful container for all the important questions that should be asked about a project. Who is the hero; what is his quest; how strong is his desire; what elixir will heal the wounded land; what evil lurks in the shadows; where are the mentors; what are the ordeals and how will they transform us? Honest answers breed authentic successful projects. Not even asking the questions guarantees failure.

On the face of it these are puerile questions but woe betide the project that does not pursue the answers with the passion of a hero on a quest.

Richard Sargeant of the Queensland University of Technology conducted a study into the impact of the project management method PRINCE2® on project performance [7]. Put simply the question was “Does it work?” the answer was, “Yes it does if faithfully applied, but because management often underestimates the energy required to transform an organisation from undisciplined sludge into fully functioning project managed enterprise, it sometimes has little beneficial effect.” Having participated in many methodology implementations this rings a depressing bell. Organisations will not transform without a hero in the ranks of management. Projecting the story pattern onto a process improvement project we can understand why.

Process improvement requires transformation of the organisation and its people. Transformation does not occur without ordeal, death and rebirth. The ordeal is lost time on so-called productive work while people are taken out of the workplace and thoroughly trained. They are called to adventure but often waste time refusing the call and fighting the newness of it all. There are tests and trials. The new processes are implemented and some fail. Methods are tailored and they try again. Shadows appear. Questions are asked. “Why are we doing this when the old ways worked – sort of?” Projects using unfamiliar methods run late. The organisation may approach commercial death – non-delivery of important projects. But the hero manager presses on. Then with more efficient ways of working bedded in the organisation begins to see benefits, quality improves, efficiency goes up, costs go down and the organisation is reborn. Tom DeMarco got it right:

Quality is free but only if you are prepared to pay dearly for it.

This scenario simply cannot play out without committed hero managers prepared to sacrifice something they value (job security) for the benefit of others. They must be prepared to put their lives (read careers) on the line for what always will be, on crossing the threshold, a risky adventure. Indifferent managers have weak desire and therefore take a few risks. When failure looms they do nothing, the story is not propelled forward, there is no mortal combat in the belly of a beast, no elixir is seized and returned to the wounded land and, true to the mythic form, the adventure repeats in an endless cycle of failure until either the organisation dies or the worsening imbalance in the normal world throws up a hero with the guts to act.

The Rhythm Ever After

Light thickens; and the crow
Makes wing to the rooky wood:
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse;
While night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.
Thou marvell’st at my words, but hold thee still;
Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.
Macbeth: Act 3 Scene 2, William Shakespeare

The setting sun spears shadows across my desk from the Golden Cane’s outside my window. The rhythm of the day beats into night and I have said enough – I hope – to help you across the threshold of a good beginning.

The crow finds its nest on the lines of the earth’s magnetic field. Man moves through time along the lines of story. It’s pattern delights us, it’s rhythm comforts us. Primal as the tempo of breathing; elemental as the beat of our heart.

And with it we make sense of our life inside the chaos
As with the marching song of the soldier
As with the chant of the poet engineer

This is the reason I was born
I come to live here till I die
I am the brush stroke on the dawn
I am the whisper in the sky

I hear you in the waking dawn
From far beyond the galaxy
I miss you, tears and heart forlorn
Dear one I’ll soon return to thee

To light the mind and feed the soul
The synthesis of dreams
To write the stories still untold
For systems in the human stream

Where workings of our heat’s design
Will keep life safe and true and full
With metaphors sustained in time
Because they’re simple and they’re beautiful

Cheers
Les
les@chambers.com.au

—————————————————–

References

1. Storytelling That Moves People, Harvard Business Review, June 2003, pp. 51-55
2. McKee, Robert (1999), Story: Substance, structure, style, and the principles of screenwriting, London: Methuen Publishing Ltd
3. Vogler, Christopher (1998), The Writer’s Journey, Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions
4. Parini, Jay (2008), Why Poetry Matters, New Haven: Yale University Press
5. Campbell, Joseph (1968), Hero With a Thousand Faces, Princeton: Princeton University Press
6. Brooks, Frederick (1982), The Mythical Man-Month, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co Inc
7. Sargeant, Richard et al (2010), Creating Value In Project Management Using PRINCE2®, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), [Online], Available: http://www.prince-officialsite.com/Resources/Resources.aspx [18 June 2012]

The Approach

Flying in from the North the scene from my starboard window was flat out stunning. The pilot dipped a wing on final approach, the blue sky rolled and the Harbour Bridge and the white sails of the Opera House rotated into view. Beautiful big brash Sydney.

Such a day. I had a right to feel good. I was carrying a million dollar proposal that, I was confident, would be accepted by a major client: IBM. My company had specialized knowledge of a small corner of the IBM software empire that guaranteed us zero competition.

It turns out that to represent the Kanji character set in IBM compiler products they needed an extra byte. Double byte enablement of IBM system software had become a cottage industry worth seven figure sums of money to small software houses. We were one.

Over the years we had developed a collaborative relationship with IBM. They were friends rather than masters. I was supremely confident, IBM was our puppy, on its back, paws in the air waiting for me to scratch its tummy.

We landed with a subtle bump and rolled to a gate. I deplaned and hurried up the air bridge into the terminal and through to the cab line.

Out of Gas

Into the cab and off, en route to IBM’s headquarters at Cumberland Forest AKA KOALA Park, a 40 minute cab ride; time to focus on the day ahead and the honeyed words that might be necessary to explain away any bumps in the estimate. I don’t talk to cab drivers on the way to a sales call. I’m usually too engaged in rehearsing the sales pitch. I seldom even know where I am or pay much attention to the scenery. So we had almost come to a stop when I noticed the absence of engine noise. I re-engaged with the moment just in time to hear the almost human sigh that an LPG powered vehicle gives out when it runs out of gas. The driver pulled over to the curb and there was silence.

Not a problem, there was plenty of time. We piled out of the cab and pushed it to the nearest service station only 200 meters away. Gassed up we were soon on our way with me back in my reverie.

Rescuing Naked Children

Two naked children walked onto the freeway in front of us. The driver made to change lanes and maneuver around them. Maybe he wasn’t a parent. I yelled, “Stop. Stop now! Pull over!” I de-cabbed, trotted over to the kids who were about to step into the fast lane and said hello. They were no older than three. I took their hands and together we slid down the freeway embankment and across a service road towards a row of houses. They could not have walked far so I approached the nearest driveway in search of a parent. There was no sign of life but for an Alsatian who trotted out from under the house with a menacing growl and a flash of sharp teeth.

I froze in place and reviewed my risk profile. Not only was I on the dog’s territory but also I probably had hold of the two youngest and most beloved members of its pack. This dog was definitely not up for a tummy scratch and we were never going to be friends. Meanwhile back in the taxi a million dollars worth of unconverted business was burning a hole in my briefcase and 30km further down the freeway was a room full of IBMers waiting expectantly. How could cruel fate seize such a day, dawned with such promise, to bury it deep in the bosom of so dark a comedy? Bill Gates had to buy a tie on the way to sell PC DOS to IBM. I have to save two naked babies and be savaged by an Alsatian? Wonderful!

A matter-of-fact voice issued from the house, “Merl the kids have got out again.” The children let go of my hands and ran inside followed by the dog, his pack recovered, his fangs retracted and my work done, apparently.

The Space Shuttle Men

Back into the cab and on to Koala Park. I was half an hour late and after another half an hour of telling the story, of the sighing cab, the naked babies and the Alsatian to a fascinated array of blue pinstriped people I presented our submission.

3 Million Lines of Code With < 300 defects

At this point in history IBM was diversifying from pure sales of big iron to software services. IBM did write software but only of the serious kind, operating systems and on-board flight software for NASA’s space shuttle. To launch their software services initiative they tasked what software development talent they had as evangelists to spread operational experience throughout the organisation. So it turned out that my two reviewers were veterans of IBM’s Federal Systems Division; they were space shuttle men.

It transpired that these men were not ordinary humans. They were fresh from a project that had delivered three million lines of code with less than three hundred errors. They were polite but earnest Americans with a disciplined presence about them, the kind that makes you want to sit up straight in your chair without being asked.

Their mission was to hold a torch to my belly, evaluate the quality of our submission and determine if my company could be trusted to modify IBM systems software products. Nice guys. The nicest grim reapers I’ve ever met.

The Extreme Review

The shuttle men had clearly read the submission thoroughly, each of them bearing a neatly documented defect list. They briefly explained the review process and mentioned a guy named Fagan[1]. It sounded ominous. I assumed they weren’t alluding to the Dickensian character from Oliver Twist. I read the lists upside down. Each defect was classified with an acronym. There were annotations indicating severity levels and blank cells on the page for verification of corrective action. At the bottom there was a cell with the title “Defect Density” and a number.

They started out by asking me about the process we used to create the cost estimate. I didn’t have a satisfactory answer because we didn’t have a process. I danced around the subject until they moved on, glancing at each other.

They started at the beginning and methodically worked through each page of the document, each reviewer raising issues from his personal defect list. I had the sense of being zoomed in on with laser-like focus. Every pixel of every font examined. The inspector’s gaze sliding over the curve of a P and dropping to examine the full stop. Is it necessary? Now he zooms out and takes in the flow of one word to another, one sentence to the next. Now he extracts, evaluates and judges my ideas in perfect rhythm with the odd asynchronous stabbing of the cognitive red pen on detecting an ambiguity, an inconsistency, an incorrect fact.

As the review progressed I could feel them breaking in. Boring through my outer shell to that inner softness that renders you vulnerability mortal; the wanting to be loved, the fear of criticism, the dread of rejection.

There was no love here but neither was there humiliation. Maybe just discipline born of a life lived with a horrible responsibility. The countdown to launch; the certain knowledge that screw-ups meant death for seven astronauts in front of a world audience with streaks of flame in the sky, with post mortems that run for years as the earth gives up its debris piece by blackened piece, not to mention the faces of the people, now members of the extended NASA family, partners and children at the graveside, and a life of eternal damnation for some simple mistake that might have been caught in a more effective review.

Their urgency was palpable. The consequences of failure had accelerated the evolution of their review process. The discipline was in their nature and not to be forsworn for less critical application domains. It didn’t matter that this was a harmless double byte enablement project, this wasn’t going to be a ticklish torch to my belly, nor was I going to be scratching anyone’s tummy. This was main engine thrust.

They tore our submission apart with surgical precision, identifying elements of the quote that had been double dipped (an honest mistake on our part). I had a flashback to an epic fist fight with a class mate at boarding school. He was a trained boxer. It went on for 2 hours until he finally knocked me senseless. After a while I actually began to admire his work. His punches would appear from nowhere and slam into my face. Luckily the IBMers were more focused on my work. Their blows were precisely targeted, accurate and completely righteous. All the while they remained in good humor and, when it was over, delivered their exit decision in polite civility. “Due to the high defect density in your submission, you need to perform corrective action and resubmit for full review.” We shook hands and bade farewell.

Exit

Back into a cab and out onto the freeway, we sailed past the baby house. They’d be having their dinner by now and then to bed to dream of trucks in the fast lane and the anguished face of the stranger on the freeway. Three faces had filled my day. The innocence of children, the primal pre-feeding gape of the Alsatian and the look of professionalism in peer review. In two hours I’d been dragged onto some higher, more evolved plane of systems engineering that I never knew existed. Now my company would have to come with me if we were to do business with IBM. I remember feeling no pain and wondering why.

Creativity and Pain

Reviews can be excruciating for the unevolved. In fact the entire writing process is redolent with pain. You struggle with ideas and search in vain for the words to express them. And in the back of your brain there plays a negative litany that will not go away. Elizabeth Gilbert summarised it beautifully in a TED talk:

Aren’t you afraid that you’re going to work your whole life at this craft and nothing’s ever going to come of it and you’re going to die on a scrap heap of broken dreams with your mouth filled with bitter ash of failure?

Finally words do appear. You push them around with a mouse endlessly cutting and pasting until thoughts congeal into ink and you begin to fall in love with your words on the page. They take on intrinsic beauty self evident to you and ergo to the remainder of humanity. Or so you think.

Then heaven descends to earth, dreams are crushed by reality, beauty is no longer what it has been, even the gods become ordinary. You lay your work at the feet of your peers – and they savage it.

Going Naked

To submit your work to criticism is to reveal yourself. To go naked in public. Some authors liken it to inviting the world into bed with you.

For sure in polite society public nakedness is an unnatural act. Edouard Manet scandalised Paris with his painting Le Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass) depicting a naked woman picnicking with two men (see the banner above). The Paris Salon jury of 1863 called it an affront to the propriety of the time and rejected it out of hand.

In stark contrast IBM’s twentieth century salon had demanded my nakedness and inspected every zit. It grabbed me by the scruff of the neck, held my face to a mirror and made me look at myself as those, more evolved than I, saw me. I was reminded that systems engineering is not polite society. Sure, going naked is unnatural but so is every other aspect of a disciplined life. It’s learned, evolved and can’t be achieved without pain.

Dealing With Fear of Criticism

Afghanistan, June 11, 2010. An Australian SAS troop runs into an Taliban ambush. Ignoring withering fire from three elevated machine-gun emplacements Corporal Ben Roberts-Smith single-handedly silences two machine-guns and is awarded the Victoria Cross, Australia’s highest military honour.

When asked how he deals with fear he says, “Recognise it and understand it clinically. Generally, fear manifests itself as adrenaline so if you can recognise it you can control it. In my opinion, being able to control fear is what determines bravery.”

The review room is not a battlefield. A high defect density in your work is probably not going to get you killed. But just like Ben, getting over the fear of criticism requires you to recognise your humanity and learn to deal with it. Accept that there is an element of vanity in everything you publish. You have an ego which blinds you to defects in your own work, you make unconscious assumptions that are not valid for all situations and you hold beliefs that become transparently illogical when voiced out loud to others.

Professionals recognize and deal with these natural pathologies by embracing peer review. Even Ernest Hemingway, an icon of American literature, invited friends over to help him remove superfluous words from his manuscripts. Always the honest professional he said that, “the first draft of anything is shit.”

So there you have it, if you aspire to professionalism, be honest, accept criticism and harden up – unless of course your being reviewed by bozos.

Recognising Bozo Review

I like to put my inquisitors under pressure. Edgy reviewers are much more productive. I create positive tension by telling them the shuttle men story with the punch line, “For you, they’re a hard act to follow, I hope you’re up to it.”

There is such a thing as bad criticism. Steve Jobs was a world champion at it. For example, he asked his marketing team to come up with names for a new Apple Computer. They responded with five options one of which was “iMac”. His response was: “they suck”. He began to warm to iMac but continued, “I don’t hate it this week, but I still don’t like it.” Whenever his creatives asked him what he wanted, a common response was, “you’ve got to show me some stuff, and I’ll know it when I see it.” Worse he had a nasty habit of humiliating people in public, not only criticising their work but also trashing their personalities, flinging indictments such as “I’m trying to save the company here and you’re screwing it up” and using choice adjectives such as “stupid”. At times it got so bad that wiser heads would take him aside, explain how hard everyone was working and suggest: “When you humiliate them, it’s more debilitating than stimulating.”

Jobs was a creative genius working in a supernatural world where futures were predicted and then delivered. He was so often right that his people endured his tantrums putting it down to creative passion. Most of us don’t get cut that kind of slack. Most of us live in a world where defects are banal and more easily defined if we choose to be diligent. At the micro level it’s an ambiguity, an incorrect fact an inconsistency or maybe just a missing full stop. At the macro level it’s a non compliance with a pre-existing specification or it might be a violation of an agreed upon best practice.

In our normal world there is no excuse for bozo review. Bozo reviewers turn up at meetings without thoroughly reading the target document. Bozos make “this is crap” comments that denigrate the author, they gesture fecklessly at paragraphs with vague pronouncements of “I hate it”, and worse, they scrawl lone red coloured question marks in the margin of documents. What could this mean? Other classics from my recent past include, “rubbish”, “it’s tacky” and “you’re trying to show off”.

Suffice to say that any utterance from a reviewer that does not directly, and in the most efficient manner possible, contribute to the improvement of the work under review is bad criticism.

Reviewers! If you can’t be explicit it won’t get fixed, and as for character assassination; changing a person’s personality can be a lifetime project, most people over the age of five are pretty much hard wired – better to concentrate on what can be improved in the space of an hour and that is: the quality of the work.

The Reviewer as Teacher

I weep for organisations that don’t review regularly. The insightful review is the most effective teaching tool we have. For a start, reviewees have their heart, soul and skin in the game. You’ve got their full attention. You’re dealing with their baby, the piece of themselves they’ve nurtured into life for weeks and sometimes months. Precise, improvement oriented problem statements delivered in a non-threatening environment find an impedance match to the creative brain. Advice passes through with no component reflected back. Reflection on what went wrong followed by corrective action is the most effective learning process known to man.

Well at End

In the week following the review we fixed the defects and resubmitted our proposal. It was accepted and my company went on to develop a multimillion dollar line of business with IBM.

My day with the shuttle men happened 25 years ago yet I remember it as though it were yesterday. I remember it for the sighing broken down cab and the naked babies on the freeway but mostly for the relentless professionalism of those earnest Americans.

In a single afternoon they opened my eyes to a new way of operating. I was naked in public but felt no shame because they accepted me as I was and focused on my work with a bent to improvement. Talk about an accelerated education! Many things:

that to review is to judge and be judged, not only by what you give to your peers, but by what you do not take away; dignity

and to accept critique is to stay young and open to the possibilities

and beware the vanity of vanities lest they morph into conceit and perhaps then to arrogance leaving you all the while learning less and less to an end point of nothing

and keep your cheek to the Earth, aware of your flawed humanity but comfortable in your own skin – naked or no, for as Baudelaire said:

The body’s beauty is a sublime gift
that extracts a pardon for every infamy

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Note 1
Michael Fagan invented a formal process for finding defects in development documents such as programming code, specifications and designs. His seminal paper on this subject was published in a 1976 IBM Systems Journal. More than thirty years later his inspection process is still recognised as one of the most effective software quality assurance techniques. Fagan inspections can be applied to software development at all stages of the life cycle.

Refer:
Fagan, M. (1976) Design and code inspections to reduce errors in program development, IBM Systems Journal, Vol. 15, No. 3, pp. 182-211, [Online], Available: http://www.mfagan.com [19 May 2012]

The Category Killer that Wiped out a Faculty

Please consider this scenario:
EDUcorp is a for-profit corporation  focussing on business opportunities in education. It partners with industry and a professional engineering society to create an electrical engineering degree program that is delivered over the web. Its partners are the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Boeing, Google, BHP and so on.

EDUcorp’s electrical engineering degree becomes an international standard sought after by students and employers alike. It becomes the Google of electrical engineering courses with a 65% global market share – the one course that every electrical engineer does. How did it achieve this? Let’s look at it from the perspectives of both the student and the entrepreneur.

Why Students Sign Up

1. There are no entry qualifications or restrictions. The course is hard but if you do the work and pass the exams you get the qualification and a new life.
2. The course is cheap. The asking price is 10% of the cost of an Ivy League university. The course is more affordable for individuals and governments can sponsor more of their poor, brightest and best.
3. The learning materials and teachers are the best in the world. The course materials promote rapid learning, are engaging and fun. Even the most complex mathematical concepts are presented in an easy to understand fashion with inspiring talks from the originators of the technology — the best in the world.
4. The WEB delivery mechanism integrates seamlessly with the student’s lifestyle. The younger generation is used to getting its information from smart phones and tablets. Texting and Facebook have become an obsession, electronic devices are a normal part of life. Protestations by academics that teaching and learning is a social experience requiring human contact have merit but it doesn’t seem to be recognised by the modern student who is increasingly absent from lectures and tutorials if the information can be sourced online.
5. Probability of success is high. The high quality learning process encourages student candidates who would not normally attempt traditionally difficult courses of study. Students sign up for complex mathematics, science and engineering programs, they are motivated to try and they succeed.
6. The course is motivating.The course not only imparts knowledge but also instils belief. Belief that the material is important and useful (refer video: Motivating the Systems Engineer). Motivated by gender specific advertising using female role models, women sign up in droves.
7. Students learn faster. Animation, graphics and interactive simulations help students learn complex concepts faster (refer video: The Project Planning Process). Adaptive learning techniques allow students to progress at their own pace. Smart software detects the student’s weak points and automatically adapts the course materials to improving their understanding.
8. The course can be taken anywhere in the world. All learning materials and lectures are delivered over the web. Practical work is done with simulations. Where this is not possible, on site training is achieved with short-term residential colleges and internships at major corporations, working with real-world problems.
9. Students make useful international contacts. Students meet their international lecturers and classmates in special interest groups with forums and videoconferencing. Cross-cultural relationships are formed that endure for the rest of their professional lives. You’re a computer nerd and you get to chat with Bill Gates.
10. Short-term residential training integrates with surfing. Australia is a very popular venue for short-term residential training when necessary.
11. The graduate has a 100% probability of getting a well-paid job. The qualification is recognised and sought after world-wide because: a) the degree is endorsed by the IEEE and b) many of the world’s corporations (the employers of talent) are directly involved in the training effort.

Postscript: See Stanford professor Daphne Koller’s initiative at the end of this post.

Why an Entrepreneur Would Target Education

1. There is significant pent-up demand. The world has millions of competent people who are locked out of higher education due to lack of capacity. Harvard has a 5.9% acceptance rate. The Khan Academy has four million users.
2. It’s profitable. The user community is endlessly scalable. The business is not restricted by buildings and places in lecture rooms. Course development costs are high but the reach is global. The cost of adding 10,000 students to a course is trivial compared to that of the traditional university model.
3. It’s not capital intensive. The business is intellectually intensive. It requires talented brain cycles as opposed to bricks, mortar and machinery. Online universities do not have to fund sporting teams and research facilities that do not directly address teaching technologies.
4. Staffing is not a problem. The availability of funds allows EDUcorp to hire the best in the world to produce the best course materials. EDUcorp has no trouble attracting talented employees and joint-venture partners. Its work environment is Utopia for a committed teacher and highly stimulating for world renown technologists and artists. You get to interact with the best scientists, mathematicians, inventors and creatives of all professional persuasions. Ridley Scott meets Stephen Hawking and you.
5. Research provides a rapid return on investment.EDUcorp spends millions with cognitive scientists to better understand how people learn without a teacher in the room. Teaching technologies are constantly researched and upgraded. Research on teaching has an immediate return on investment.
6. Competition is minimal.The business model is hard to replicate. Innovation in teaching becomes a nonnegotiable necessity. EDUcorp views course development as a creative industry performed by a cross disciplinary team. Each learning unit has input from technologists, mathematicians, cognitive psychologists, script writers, moviemakers, animators and graphic artists. There is an aggressive focus on creating the best in the world hitherto unknown in education. This will be easy to justify because it will be shown to the world – adored by the world – paid for by the world.
7. Barriers to entry are high. Traditional universities are starved for funds by uninspired government policy and unable to apply these types of resources to course development. The courseware that many universities have put online is not competitive. Lessons follow the traditional model of chalk and talk. For example, MIT Open Courseware’s exposition of the calculus has a lecturer with a cheesy grin pointing at equations on a blackboard. He obviously knows his stuff but from the student’s perspective he’s flat-out boring. Putting a lecturer on TV adds no value. In contrast an adaptive learning approach with exciting graphics and animation would convey the same information in much less time with much more student interaction.
8. High quality makes the product unassailable.EDUcorp differentiates its product from the competition by its stunning high-quality. It achieves this by applying standard quality management processes to learning unit development. The effectiveness of teaching methods is constantly monitored by learning unit managers supported by cognitive psychologists. Where concepts are not well understood by students, learning materials are redesigned to improve cognition. For example, a project management class has difficulty absorbing and applying the fundamental principles of Earned Value Management. The course is redesigned with a 13 minute video featuring an animation that describes the big idea, how it came about and how it is applied to projects (see: Earned Value Management Basics). This process is repeated relentlessly for every concept in every learning unit. Over time the quality of the educational product makes it universally attractive wiping out any competition.
9. There is easy access to funding.Corporate partnerships fund the business. Close cooperation between the educator and the employer is mutually beneficial. The educator understands what the employer needs. The employer gets to evaluate and employ the graduating talent. The benefits are a no-brainer for corporations who provide funding with a highly predictable return on investment. Investments in US education technology companies have tripled in the last decade reaching $429 million in 2011, according to the National Venture Capital Association. Adaptive learning company Knewton alone received $33 million.
10. The opportunities for spin-offs are endless. EDUcorp not only provides full feature degree courses but also publishes useful stand-alone components of its learning materials as just-in-time learning modules for people who have task-based learning needs. For example, “How do I plan a project?” Google indicates that 13.6 million people a month ask this question.
11. The business model is sustainable.Broadband telecommunications will continue to support and enhance the networked education model. For example, technologies such as 3-D high-definition television and haptics will make hitherto undreamed of teaching methods possible. Imagine a trainee surgeon reaching into a virtual human body and feeling the liver.
12. It has massive growth potential. Business growth will match population growth. The business will scale with population. This is not possible with the current university model. There is not and will never be enough teachers to educate the growing population of planet Earth. We are making babies faster than we are graduating teachers. Our only solution is to adopt a model that leverages the skills of our forever limited teacher community.

Someone Will Do This

The Internet focuses the intellectual power of the world’s innovators. Some refer to it as “the singularity”. At some point this focus will be turned with burning heat on education. As a developer of web applications I can guarantee you that if you think of it, it’s probably been done or is about to be done.

Someone will do this.

Someone is already doing this in various educational sectors. For example, your need to learn about any PC tool or web technology can be satisfied at Lynda.com for an annual subscription of $250. A community college course is no longer necessary. Other online education resources include Mitx, Knewton, The Khan Academy, Udacity, Udemy and UniversityNow. Upcoming startups include the Minerva Project, an online university conceived by Ben Nelson the CEO of Snapfish. Nelson has raised seed funding of $25 million.

The online education community also has its own news outlet: EdSurge. Other organisations such as Educause track and aggregate advances in learning technologies.

American venture capitalists have also been busy. Rethink Education and Learn Capital are good examples. Just check out the amazing portfolio of investments on Learn Capital’s web site. Matt Greenfield at Rethink Education has interesting perspectives on the future of ED-Tech. He recently blogged:
I would not be at all surprised if, someday soon, Google or Facebook or Microsoft bought a young education company for over a billion dollars. Education is at the core of civilization, and every other human activity now revolves around it.

Arguing for and Against Online Education

Professional educators point out that there are three essential components to a university education:
1. Learning
2. Socialisation
3. Credentialling
and that the online university is inadequate as it deals with item one only, there being no socialisation and any credentialling that may be attempted is by its faceless nature, highly suspect.

People with immediate experience of running global online universities counter with the following arguments:
Addressing socialisation: students who, but for the existence of an online university, would have no access to higher education at all are happy to forego social interaction. Some special interest group clusters do form in various cities. People meet in coffee shops and socialisation does occur. The Minerva Project plans to formally organise clusters offering students the opportunity to join a cluster in their hometown or the country of their choice. This already happens in locations such as New York where many schools have no campus, the campus is New York City.
Overall the feeling is that a lack of socialisation outside the traditional Internet chat room is a negative but it does not seem to significantly impact the graduate’s performance in the workplace.
Regarding  credentialling: companies desperate for skilled labour are increasingly willing to interview candidates with certificates from online universities. As these institutions build brand recognition this will become commonplace. You could say that the ultimate validation of a student’s qualifications will move from the university exam room to the workplace.

Extinction of the Traditional University

If you are a university and do not aggressively engage with this model you risk extinction. The commercial opportunities offered by new media in education are too compelling to be ignored by for-profit enterprises. Failure to engage with these technologies will therefore be the end of the road for some of our educational institutions.

Even if a university does offer an online degree it will still have to fight to survive. To enter the Internet marketplace is to stumble into a giant cacophonous bazaar with millions of rug salesmen competing for attention, some of them the best in the world at what they do. The Internet community is harsh and demanding, judgement is swift, capturing thirty seconds of a user’s attention span is a bonus, but one negative impression and click your gone. There is no respect, your academic stature counts for nothing, you are simply what you’ve placed on the web page. Communities of interest tend to select only one or two winners in any application genre. There is only one Google and one Facebook. By the same token it is likely that only one or two electrical engineering degree courses will attract the brand recognition necessary to make them a viable business. To go viral you must do something special, something “insanely great” as Steve Jobs used to say. How many people do you have with the innovative insights of a Steve Jobs in the hallowed halls of a traditional university? How many of your academics have the wherewithal to survive in the viciously competitive Internet environment?

I suspect the apocalypse will not arrive as a meteor. It will be slower and more subtle. Education will become more compartmentalised, more focused and more contextual. People will learn at their desks with web delivered training. Category killer courses will arrive and slowly eat away at the bread-and-butter of the traditional university. Professionals-to-be will slowly gravitate to the cyberspace Ivy League. They’ll be driven there by the forces of high quality, low cost, ready availability and high return on investment: a certain high-paying job. The best and brightest educators will be attracted away from backward looking universities into utopian jobs in the new educational paradigms. The less talented will be left to bore the socks off a diminishing student body. Enrolments will slowly drop off and, over time, the lights will dim to an eternal dark.

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Postscripts

7 August, 2012

Aggregating the Best of the Best On-line

In this Ted talk Stanford professor Daphne Koller presents the Stanford initiative to aggregate all the best lectures on any subject into a single portal and to promote online education. It has been hugely successful with hundreds of thousands of students from all over the world. Its big advantage is that it is free.

http://www.ted.com/talks/daphne_koller_what_we_re_learning_from_online_education.html

The portal is located at:

http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses

Quality and Safety Are a Hard Slog

Quality and safety don’t come easy. I’ve been trying for a lifetime and its a hard slog. I recently had this demonstrated at a hazard analysis session for a motorway intelligent transportation system. A room full of wise men facilitated by a consultant reflected on potentially dangerous failure modes for a variable speed limit sign (VSLS). They determined that, if a VSLS went squirrely, rapidly displaying random speed limits this did not constitute a hazard. When we came to test the signs on a real motorway, the engineers responsible for the motorway (who were not present at the hazard analysis) would not allow us to expose live traffic to a sign that might “go random”. We had to put a bag over it and have a guy climb a ladder and see what was happening under the mask. An aggregate of 100 years of operational experience made them uncomfortable with doing that kind of thing. Score one for gut feel.

So to recap: we followed the form, we performed a hazard analysis as per ISO 61508 Functional safety of electrical/electronic/ programmable electronic safety-related systems [4] – tick. But the people in the room didn’t have the operational experience to recognise credible hazards so the process failed. A more methodical approach using documented hazard discovery techniques [3] may have helped but the key missing factor was experience.

If You Really Want Quality Get an Artist

Pure standards compliance adds no value when you venture into those parts of the work that require an artist, someone who creates, not an operator who follows a procedure. The architect Christopher Alexander [1] studied structures and spaces that people love. His view of quality was:

We need to develop deeper insights into what people perceive as quality.
And they need to be precise …
… the living space you are creating for people’s intellect. It must match the way they want to live in the world. It must become almost organic – part of them.

Alexander found places where people feel alive and documented them in a form he called an “architectural pattern”. This was his definition of quality. He was, by the way, in full compliance with:

ISO-9001 Quality management systems — requirements clause 7.2.1 Determination of requirements related to the product
subclause b) The organisation shall determine … requirements not stated by the customer but necessary for specified or intended use, where known …

If you ask anybody about the places where they feel “alive” they probably won’t be able to tell you. Alexander found these places through a lifetime of observation. Do you get the picture? “Determination of requirements” is easy to say and very hard to do. You need an artist like Alexander.

In those situations where information inputs are obscure, unquantifiable and endlessly variable and where the aggregate of potentially right answers runs into the thousands, the operator, good and true and bent on compliance,  opens the operating manual, looks for a policy, a procedure, a formula – anything  … and is … well … disappointed … even angry. Faced with the need for independent thought our subject is well and truly flummoxed. In contrast the artist draws on innate creativity and decades of training, observation and experience to develop a course of action. For example, Steve Jobs was famous for his ability to make impossible things seem possible by “distorting reality”. So there you go. An implementable description of a reality distortion machine is probably a bridge to far for a procedure writer.

Standards Do Have a Role

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that standards are useless. They are the framework that surrounds, structures and nurtures the creativity and experience that flows from good people and we need to refine them further.

Take for example the safety standards: ISO 61508 and Cenelec 50126/128/129. I think they’re useful. We need them to put “form” into a functional safety program [2]. They give a project’s safety authority a license to operate (especially if functional safety gates are attached to contractor progress payments). Without these standards in the compliance section of a contract I doubt whether much functional safety work would be done at all in large multidisciplinary systems projects (when you’ve got em by the progress payment their hearts and minds tend to follow). In this case safety “function” really does follow “form”.

The Problem with Software

Proclaiming software is “quality” or “safe” because your IT methodology complies with a procedural standard is dangerous. To standards committees I say: Can we come clean guys? Can we write down the fundamental philosophies behind our approach to producing safe, quality software? For example, words to the effect:

We are currently unable to calculate the probability that a body software will perform a target safety function. This is so because software is nearly all design. Very little assembly and replication is involved. We are therefore vulnerable to the systematic errors of human beings and the unfortunate fact that their work products can never be fully tested. However, if software developers are properly trained and follow prescribed processes we will allow the software they produce to be deployed in high integrity applications (we won’t allow them to claim it is that reliable mind you – we just have this warm feeling that it won’t do anything particularly evil).

I spent the first 10 years of my engineering career programming chemical reactor control systems. It was utopia. I was surrounded by wonderful people. We were controlling chemical reactions that could explode. Anyone showing the slightest lack of focus on safety in their work suddenly disappeared. Then they gave me control of the accounting and management information systems at the plant. I noticed a distinct drop in the skill levels of the IT people when compared to the control systems engineers. The accountants told me they could do without their systems for a month. The control systems could not fail for more than two seconds. To develop safe software you need talented people.

When to Give up Writing Procedures

Have you ever written a procedure so complex that it was never used? Did your people throw it away and just apply their common sense and experience? If so you were probably trying to describe an art not a process. When dealing with vagueness and complexity your best option is to employ trained professionals and trust their judgement. Alexander said:

… you rely on the patterns in your mind to be creative. The maturity of these patterns together with the way you combine them determines how good you are.

Modern science seems to agree. Cognitive psychologists view the human brain as a highly effective cryptographic device allowing us to decipher an avalanche of complex inputs in an instant, sometimes without conscious thought. In equal measure our pattern matching capability automatically throws up courses of action for situations we’ve seen before. In an experienced professional this cognitive library runs to thousands of patterns. We therefore should attempt to document only the simplest and most common processes – memory joggers to the less skilled. Even if they could be defined, publishing the rest would generate a massive tome that no one would ever read or value. Instead we must put people in situational harms way and let them be absorbed one by one  - a strategy we loosely call: living.

The problem of distinguishing definable process from art is not unique to software development. Others in parallel universes have been equally confounded. For example, in the world of literature, writers have been trying to discover the “form” of a compelling story for some time. Some headway has been made, refer: “Hero with a Thousand Faces” and “The Writer’s Journey”. Hollywood scriptwriters use the structures described in these references to create blockbuster movies. They key into the way our brains are wired. It turns out that human beings engage with stories if they are told using certain forms. The research time frames are daunting though. The first paper on the subject (“The Poetics”) was published by Aristotle circa 350 BC.

Finding Quality

It’s autumn 1797 and a young man stands on a hillside in Somerset, Southern England, looking down upon the Bristol Channel. He’d walked 20 miles that day and is feeling ill. He takes a drop of opium to settle his stomach and falls into restless sleep. He later wrote, referring to himself in the third person: “… he has the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines – if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort.”

Porlock Bay, Bristol Channel

When he awoke he had the full recollection of his inspiration but was momentarily distracted by a visitor. On returning to his poem his memory failed him. He goes on: “… with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast.” Here are some fragments of what remained:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
…
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge finally published Kubla Khan in 1816 at the urging of another romantic poet Lord Byron. Byron had a daughter Ada. In 1835, Ada married William King. William and Ada became the Earl and Countess of Lovelace in 1838. The newlyweds had their honeymoon at William’s country estate, Ashley Combe at Porlock Weir, Somerset. The mansion overlooked the Bristol Channel and was surrounded by exotic terraced gardens in the Italian style.  Ada cherished her new home and went for many long walks in the hills overlooking the channel. Two hundred yards from her home was the very spot where Coleridge had the restless sleep that brought forth Kubla Khan.

In 1833 at the age of 17 Ada became a regular visitor to the house of Charles Babbage the man credited with building the first computer. She was introduced to Babbage by Mary Somerville the lady who translated into English, the works of the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace. Babbage called his machine The Difference Engine. Ada and Babbage became lifelong friends.

In 1834 Babbage conceived of another computing device he called the Analytical Engine. Ada was transfixed by its potential. She called herself “an Analyst (& Metaphysician)”. She fully understood the machine’s design and rightly saw its potential as the first general-purpose computer. Historians have anointed her the first computer programmer. In the early 1980s the US Department of Defense, concerned by the diversity of programming languages, many of which were hardware dependent and none of which supported safe modular programming, developed a language for military applications. They called it Ada.

If there is a point to this story it is:

True quality emerges from human creativity, it goes around and comes around and we are all connected. It issues forth in floods from “mighty fountains”, it lies dormant in “sacred rivers” but when it does appear we should do our best to capture it and not be distracted like Coleridge. The purpose of the modern quality management system is to nurture and give structure to creative ideas – to provide paths for their rendering into working products. In contrast a QMS that has lost its way over regulates people’s actions to the point where they are so straight jacketed  by the demands of compliance that they have no time and little desire for creative thought.

Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner goes on:

… yet still the sails made on
A pleasant noise till noon
A noise like of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune …

This passage refers to the slapping of the sails aboard a vessel marooned on a windless sea. This ship is going nowhere. Don’t let this happen to you. The creative voice may be speaking to you now. Listen.

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References

1. Christopher Alexander, (1979), The Timeless Way of Building, New York: Oxford University Press
   See my review at: http://www.chambers.com.au/forum/view_post.php?frm=2&pstid=181
2. Functional Safety Management, [Online], Available: http://www.chambers.com.au/glossary/functional_safety_management.php [7 Mar 2012]
3. Hazard Discovery Techniques, [Online], Available: http://www.chambers.com.au/glossary/hazard_discovery_techniques.php [7 Mar 2012]
4. The 10 Minute Guide to IEC 61508, [Online], Available: http://www.chambers.com.au/public_resources/functional_safety_unmasked.pdf

Further Reading

1. Quality Management, [Online], Available: http://www.chambers.com.au/glossary/quality_management.php [7 Mar 2012]
2. Benjamin Woolley, (1999), The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason, and Byron’s Daughter, United Kingdom: McGraw-Hill

Patterns in Bad Behaviour

Valuable lessons are seldom learned in bliss. As catharsis for a painful experience I once had, I offer you one of mine:

The manager of a large project, a small component of which was a safety critical system, chose to go live with the system prior to completion of system test.  In my professional view this placed the public at risk. To put it mildly I was extremely angry. Nothing in my university education or thirty years of systems engineering had prepared me for this. Nothing I could do or say could get this decision reversed. I had no idea how to respond to such a blatant disregard for systems engineering best practice. The system failed in use. Luckily no one was hurt.

What follows is the sum total of my reflection and research on this subject.  It is an attempt to channel what anger is left in me to some useful purpose.  My research revealed that the management behaviours I experienced matched an ancient pattern: Deus Ex Machina, a plot device used by bad playwrights.  Further, the best response to Deus Ex Machina is equally ancient.  It’s called “speaking truth to power “.

At some point in your career you will encounter Deus Ex Machina. In my case  it was frustrating  but had nowhere near the impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster which provides my case study. When you experience it I hope, after reading my story, that it will find you better prepared than I.

The Tragedy of Deepwater Horizon

Some time prior to his high dive Mike witnessed a tipping point in management decision-making.  He called it “a chest bumping incident” where a conservative process for capping the well, proposed by the drilling contractor Transocean, was overridden by a BP executive who mandated a faster but riskier procedure.  The motivation was time saving and hence cost reduction and the result: a high pressure methane gas release on Deepwater Horizon’s deck, ignition, eleven deaths, destruction of the rig and a 87-day oil spill that continues to foul the Atlantic Ocean.

Speaking Truth to Power

Could this disaster have been averted if the Transocean contractor had pushed harder for his conservative well capping strategy?  Possibly not. As with most disasters the cause cannot be traced to a single event, there were many contributing factors.   However it is acknowledged by the subsequent commission of enquiry that multiple instances of pushback on bad practice would have saved the day.

The act of speaking against the strongly held beliefs of those more powerful than yourself was given a snappy title by the Quakers in the 1950s.  They called it, “speaking truth to power ”.  “Power” can refer to a testosterone fueled boss of ecclesiastical bearing secure in his exclusive relationship with a higher power and convinced of his invincibility.  Power can also be vested in a set of commonly held beliefs (sometimes the result of corporate group think). Mathematician, astronomer and philosopher Galileo spoke out and suffered a triple whammy of consequences with his outrageous assertion that the Earth and planets revolve around a stationary Sun. His pronouncement had him dragged before the Inquisition in Rome in 1633. For speaking truth to 1) the established dogma of the Catholic church, 2) his holiness the Pope and 3) God, he was forced to recant, his books were declared blasphemous and banned and he was confined to internal exile in Florence until his death ten years later. As they dragged him away this giant of 17th century science and technology whimpered, “Eppur si muove” (“And yet it does move”).

No question, speaking truth to power is dangerous. In researching this subject the first thing I discovered was that human reflections on speaking truth are older than time.  Further, the associated patterns of behaviour and predictable outcomes have been documented and played out in myth, legend, theatre and real life literally millions of times. The ancient Greeks were the first to document the risks of exercising virtue in a virtueless world.  Speaking truth to power is a central theme of Sophocles’ fourth century BC play Antigone. Early in the play King Creon’s guards draw straws for the life threatening task of informing the King that his niece Antigone has defied a recent edict and has the popular support of his subjects. Creon refuses to back down believing that submitting to public opinion would be a sign of weakness and a threat to his power. In a courageous act Creon’s son Haemon tells his father, “Your presence frightens any common man from saying things you would not care to hear.” Fast forward to modern times.  Would you like the job of telling Jack Welch, Andy Grove, Rupert Murdoch or Larry Ellison that, “you are wrong, wrong, wrong!”

Today speaking truth to power can still get you killed (I cite: Muammar Gaddafi’s Libia, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, the Mafia). In the systems engineering context it can get you fired and ruin your career. On the other hand not speaking truth to power can cause the destruction of companies and the death of innocent people.  King Creon’s failure to listen brought death and ruin to his family and destroyed his country. In real life, on Deepwater Horizon, failure to communicate and act on good engineering advice killed eleven people, caused the world’s worst oil spill and cost billions.

So how do we recognise a situation where moral courage is required? How does a professional engineer decide to either suppress his or her moral objections or summon up courage and make a stand? The answer lies in recognising patterns in situations and human behaviours, understanding your options and formulating considered responses. This is how I came upon the Deus Ex Machina pattern which is best illustrated by the events at Deepwater Horizon.

The Postmortem

In May 2010 President Barack Obama established the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling (“The Oil Spill Commission – OSC”). The OSC’s report is available on line [2]. Among the conclusions are:

The explosive loss of the Macondo well could have been prevented.

The immediate causes of the Macondo well blowout can be traced to a series of identifiable mistakes made by BP, Halliburton, and Transocean that reveal such systematic failures in risk management that they place in doubt the safety culture of the entire industry.

Among the list of management failures were:

(1) ineffective leadership at critical times; (2) ineffective communication and siloing of information; (3) failure to provide timely procedures; (4) poor training and supervision of employees; (5) ineffective management and oversight of contractors; (6) inadequate use of technology; and (7) failure to appropriately analyze and appreciate risk.

In describing BP’s interactions with its subcontractors the report lends credibility to Mike William’s story as follows:

BP‘s contractors were unduly deferential toward BP‘s design decisions. A Weatherford centralizer technician described the prevailing view as ―Third party, we do what the company man requests. In several instances, BP‘s contractors expressed private reservations about the plans and procedures at Macondo but did not more forcefully communicate to BP that there were better ways to do things.

Not speaking truth to power (and not listening – Creon-like) is proving expensive. BP and its subcontractors Transocean Drilling, Halliburton and Cameron International are currently defendants in a civil suit. BP and its partner Anadarko Petroleum alone are facing $US17 billion in civil fines.

Another interesting aspect of the report was its depiction of the inexeroable drive to save costs. From the report:

Bias in Favor of Time and Cost Savings
On any drilling rig—no matter who is the operator—―time is money.  BP leased the Deepwater Horizon at a rate of about $533,000 per day. The high daily cost made the rig the single  greatest expense for drilling the Macondo well.  It also gave BP a strong incentive to improve drilling efficiency.
The Chief Counsel‘s team observed that the Macondo team understandably made individual decisions consistent with an orientation toward efficiency but did not step back to consider what the safety implications of those decisions were when taken together.

Here’s the rub. Every day BP managers could summon up 533,000 reasons to ignore any engineering advice that might delay the project. This paragraph leapt off the page and resonated in my guts. This is the money/time steamroller that I faced when suggesting a delay of one to two weeks to complete system testing. In addition I was up against prior commitments to politicians and the public which transformed the steamroller into a runaway train. Would you stand in front of a runaway train?

My point is: if you are going to speak truth to power you had better: 1) have courage and 2) be prepared.

Corrective Action

The OSC report recommends increased regulation of offshore drilling especially in deep water and enhancing the independence, technical capability and integrity of regularity agencies. It also recommends that oil companies develop specialised Safety Cases for each rig addressing both construction and operation. It notes that this is standard operating procedure in North Sea drilling. It also recommends improvement of well containment technology. In a tone of barely concealed  frustration it rages against

… the simple inability-of BP, of the federal government, or of any other potential intervener – to contain the flow of oil from the damaged Macondo well.

Overall it endighted BP for allowing rapidly evolving technology to outstrip its ability to manage risk.

Finally the report makes the surprisingly candid admission that no amount of government regulation will stop another Deepwater Horizon. Future safe operating must spring from the safety culture of the organisations doing the work. The word “culture” is used 17  times.

So there we have it. Culture. The shared values of an organisation. The ideas and behaviours that you would hang on to even though, when tested by circumstance, they might cause you pain. This is where a safety culture operates, at the most primal level of the human psyche, conscience on one hand and greed on the other.

Wielding Technology With Wisdom

On a proud day in 1975 I stood on a stage and accepted and electrical engineering degree from a University Vice- Chancellor. I did not bow as was the custom (I recall I winked at him). This was my day and my degree, I had knocked myself out for four years to get this far and I was not going to bow to anyone for it.  The implications of accepting  this qualification were clear and exciting .  It gave me a licence to operate, to build systems that improve the lot of humanity and, in the process, have fun with many fast moving technologies. It took me more than 30 years to fully appreciate another implication: it gave me the power to save people’s lives or, by inaction or incompetence, be responsible for human suffering and death.

Engineers are taught technology, they receive no instruction on how to wield it with wisdom. My engineering course did not cover ethics or philosophy. I have to say that for more than 30 years this was not a problem at least  until that fateful day when I sat in a meeting, faced a cost/time runaway train and realised I had no response.

Picture this. A project manager surrounded by the aura of power, confidence, hubris and the divine right to rule  that is implicitly bestowed on the leader of a half billion-dollar project looks down from his throne and,  referring to the  functional safety program says, “I thought we weren’t going to do this.”  When shown system test results that reveal many serious defects he works through them downgrading the severity level of many test failures. In previous meetings he had crashed the system development schedule. That is, given us the end date and told us to rearrange all the tasks accordingly. This the scheduler dutifully did creating a schedule that everyone knew was impossible thus rendering impotent any serious attempt at professional project monitoring and control.

There was a sense amongst the team that somehow we should be fighting back .  This was a blatant violation of everything we knew to be professional,  honest and right. But how?  How can you buck the momentum of a massive project proceeding inexorably to delivery.  How can you do what you know is right in the face of massive cost/time pressure and political will?  How can one be a righteous person in a  unjust world? Upon reflection there was no magical solution.  But I do know this:  1) at this point my engineering education clocked off!  2) at this point my classical education should have kicked in – the wisdom of the ages providing persuasive arguments for full support of the safety program and 3)  at this point the lack of a classical education could have got someone killed.

Deus Ex Machina

Deus Ex Machina is a Latin phrase in common use in the classical theatres of Greece and Rome (400 BC to 400 AD). Its meaning: “god from machine” refers to a plot device commonly used by bad playwrights to extract themselves from story problems – usually endings. Bereft of ideas, they would simply manufacture climaxes by having actors portraying gods lowered onto the stage on a platform with ropes and pulleys (hence the term “god from machine”). Apollo or Athena would then settle everything determining who lives, who dies, who marries and who is damned for eternity.

Even at the time, this was recognised as contrived, aesthetically unsatisfactory bad practice, indicative of a playwright lacking in creativity. Greek philosopher and polymath Aristotle, student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great criticized the device in his “Poetics”, where he argued that the resolution of a plot must arise internally, following from the previous logic of the play. He said:

It is obvious that the solutions of plots too should come about as a result of the plot itself, and not from a contrivance, as in the “Medea” and in the passage about sailing home in the “Iliad”.

If a safety critical project where a play and the plot a functional safety program plan, its passage home should be the full implementation and testing of the recommended safety features in the systems product. The abrupt  termination of the story by the contrived, illogical and unsafe intervention of the uninformed was recognised as bad practice in 300 BC and remains so today.  The analogy of “safety interrupted” to a Greek tragedy is prophetic. Greek tragedies typically end with half the cast dead and the rest damned for eternity, the living dead, cursed to live with what they’ve done.

Recognising the Deus Ex Machina Archetype

The key to dealing with bad behaviour is to first recognise it for what it is.  For example,  psychologists use archetypes as a  diagnostic tool for treating  mental illness. An archetype is a model of human behaviour. An understanding of the archetype informs the treatment process.  I was fascinated to note that just the act of informing  a manager that he was acting out documented pathological  archetypal behaviour caused him to stop short and reflect on what  he was doing. I have called the archetype  that contributed  to the Deepwater Horizon  disaster and appeared in my personal situation: Deus Ex Machina.

The Deus Ex Machina pattern:

1. Technical specialists in possession of the facts make informed evaluations of safety risks and formulate risk management strategies.
2. Recommendations are made to management who have the power to act (or do nothing) and are ignored. The reasons: a) cost/time pressure, b) ambition, c) political expediency, d) hubris, e) ignorance of the technical issues in play, f) ego.
3. Management cuts corners. Design, construction and operational risks are taken.  For example, risk management programs are cut short or eliminated to save money or, as in my case, schedules are crashed, test programs are not completed and safety critical systems are deployed prematurely.

Left unopposed the Deus Ex Machina pathology is likely to cause dangerous failures which result in loss of life, destruction of property and environmental damage.

Post-incident behaviours often include telling lies and attempts to shift the blame from managers to technical people.  Protestations that, “I didn’t know it was going on” are common.

Opposing Deus Ex Machina

Ok.  So a so-called management god has parachuted into your project and is telling you to do things you know are wrong and potentially dangerous. You’ve recognised the Deus Ex Machina archetype . Now what do you do?

MIT social scientist Albert O. Hirschman offers three options to employees who disagree with company policy:

1. Loyalty. Remain a loyal “team player” (shut up and do what you’re told)
2. Voice. Try to change the policy (speak truth to power)
3. Exit.  Tender a principled resignation (quit).

Loyalty

In normal circumstances company loyalty is a good thing. Loyalty and teamwork builds cohesive organisations that can do great things. Loyalty secures promotions and improves lifestyles. This alone is enough to drive most people down that path regardless of what a company does. Everyone has a mortgage and kids to educate. Add to this our human need to be accepted by our peers. To be ostracised and alienated from our friends is to be less than human.

To move your position from loyalty to voice can be a difficult decision. Disasters involving loss of life are high impact low frequency events. Probability is always involved. Specific incidents are almost impossible to predict. They are often the result of a slow and tortuous degradation of a company’s attention to safety. Witness Union Carbide at Bhopal and BP at Deepwater Horizon.

In making the decision to speak out ask yourself :

1. By remaining loyal am I colluding with a bad course of action that may harm innocents?
2. By saying nothing  am I lending my name, and any credibility it may invoke, to an immoral act?
3. By doing nothing am I supporting a boss who has forsworn company values, professional values or both?
4. By not voicing am I providing a negative role model for my organisation?
5. Is loyalty to this company more important than my professional reputation?

Point five may be more important than you think. Jesse Gagliano was Halliburton’s cementing engineer on Deepwater Horizon. The OSC report goes on:

Documents show that before the blowout, BP engineers thought Gagliano was not providing “quality work” and was not “cutting it”. They highlighted that Gagliano had a habit of waiting too long to conduct crucial cement slurry tests. Three days before the blowout, Morel complained that he had “asked for these lab tests to be completed multiple times early last week and Jesse still waited until the last minute as he has done throughout this well.” Morel found “no excuse” for the tardiness.

Guilty or innocent, Gagliano’s name is mentioned 17 times in a disaster post-mortem report commissioned by the President of the United States on the world’s worst oil spill. Would you like that on your resume?

Voice

Let’s be clear.  By giving voice to your objections and speaking truth to power I am not talking about voicing disagreement on minor detail or suggesting a small change in a course of action. I am talking about a major step to the left, spending millions where no millions were budgeted,  delaying by weeks when no delay can be tolerated. I am talking about declaring that the Earth revolves around the sun in conflict with established dogma that the sun revolves around the Earth.  And by doing so directly challenging the decisions, authority, integrity and wisdom of powerful people.

Before you voice consider the following:

1. Are your arguments based on demonstrable fact rather than emotion?
2. Is there any whiff of self interest in your position?
3. Are you personally clear on the moral issues involved – what  is moral wrong being committed here?
4. Are you doing this out of spite, anger or intense dislike of an individual?
5. Do you understand the consequences of your actions and do you accept them?

Be strategic about delivering your message. To gain traction your fact based argument must be delivered in a clinical professional manner to the right people at the right time.  Delivery may not be a single event. It may be more effective to put your case progressively over a series of progress or planning meetings.

Demonstrate empathy. Show real concern for the management position. “Yes, I understand we need to deliver on time but sticking to that date is likely to have these negative consequences  …”  To demonstrate empathy is to experience the emotions of those who you are attempting to influence.  Remember Bill Clinton’s famous response, “Ah feel your pain.”  Bear in mind that regardless of how a manager may present himself he is probably not evil. He is more likely ill informed, not technically literate and focussed elsewhere (on costs and schedules).

Declare your motivation. Make it clear that you are acting on your professional understanding of right and wrong.

Present facts. In the special case of a functional safety program you need two things: 1)  A Functional Safety Plan and 2)  Records such as hazard logs, safety requirements specifications and test results that lend credibility to the safety effort.  The Functional Safety Plan signed off by the boss is your license to operate. It gives you the right to raise objections if the project is deviating from plan. I had a plan but my mistake was not pushing it high enough in the project hierarchy. I learnt from bitter experience that the plan must be signed off by the person with the organisational power to delay the deployment of a system and allocate money and other resources if they are required. Had I done that the sentence, “I thought we weren’t going to do this, “  could never have been uttered.  A plan commits its approver to a course of action.  If there is no sign-off there is no commitment.

Drawing the boss’ attention to the detail of a Functional Safety Plan on a large project can be problematic, on multibillion-dollar projects it’s nigh on impossible. Don’t be daunted, insist.  It seems, by necessity, the managers of very large projects are more politicians and technologists.  It is therefore unlikely that just e-mailing a copy to the boss will procure understanding. You must eyeball him. Sit down with him and go through it.

If despite your best efforts you are still ignored and as a last resort, consider appraising senior people of the legal term “wilful blindness”. It means looking the other way, putting yourself in a position where you will be unaware of facts that may render you liable. This is the core of Rupert Murdoch’s problem with the News of the World phone hacking scandal. Most legal jurisdictions hold that if you intentionally fail to be informed about matters that make you liable, you are still responsible in law. A typical response of senior people after a disaster is “I didn’t know xyz behaviour was going on.” Refer BP, News International, Royal Bank of Scotland, Enron and Lehman Bros. In the engineering context senior people must be made aware that the project has a functional safety program, that it is a life and death matter and that should their actions either knowingly or unknowingly reduce the effectiveness of the program they will be liable for the consequences.

Control your anger. Anger is a delicious emotion but it has no remedial effect. The need to voice often arises in the emotionally charged situations you find in deadline death marches.  People are overworked and irritable and the boss is totally focused on a delivery date. Anyone who threatens that date often becomes the enemy. The motivation to voice often arises out of anger. Anger at a situation. Anger at an individual. It made me angry to see the discipline of Functional Safety Engineering denigrated, devalued and literally plowed under by cost/time pressure.  Substantial bonuses were being paid for early delivery and I was in the way.

To be an effective advocate you must control your anger. In his reflections on anger, Aristotle says there are times when anger is called for and appropriate. In fact, if one does not become angry over a grave injustice, he says one cannot be considered virtuous. The secret is in knowing when to be angry and then how to direct it usefully. The virtuous person, he says, becomes angry at the right time, over the right issue, and to the right degree.  This is good advice.  In a modern business environment an angry person can easily be characterised as an out-of-control malcontent whose pronouncements are not worthy of consideration.

Recognise you are not alone. If you speak out you will be, at least in a physical sense, alone.  The less courageous will draw away from you. Your peers may even tell you that your passion is unseemly and unprofessional.  You’ll be accused of being disloyal, not a “team player”, an angry malcontent, someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about, someone who doesn’t see the big picture … and so on.

But you are not alone. Be aware that you are something more than an engineer presenting a technical point of view. You are an advocate. You speak for thousands of dead; past victims of avoidable dangerous failures (reflect on the eleven dead of Deepwater Horizon). You also speak for human beings who unknowingly may not have long to live if your recommendations are ignored. I like to calmly announce to rooms full of angry managers that not only do I speak for past dead and those whose lives are threatened but also the millions of engineers past and present who have developed the best practices that are being violated on this project (“I got you surrounded,” I say). In short, you represent the quantifiable truth as we currently know it. It’s also helpful to point out that these best practices are embodied in the international standards usually called out as conditions of contract. Our contract!!

Make them feel small. The larger a project the more multidisciplinary it becomes.  The people in charge may not be experienced Systems Engineers and therefore not value the systems engineering discipline or even accept that there is one. I struck one manager who felt he was qualified to give us technical direction because he new how to operate a personal computer. In managing this perception it is useful to think of a cathedral. Go to one and experience the high vaulted ceilings, the massive space and by comparison your own insignificance – a speck of dust in the scheme of things.  You can have the same experience by just looking up at the stars. It has a calming effect on everyone regardless of religious persuasion.  The the basic science, mathematics, technologies, processes and practices emanating from millions of man years of thought and practice are our cathedral. Make it clear to detractors that we are operating from a massive body of knowledge and to act against accepted best practice may expose them to unwanted risk.

Classify the bad behaviour. Make the players aware that they are engaging in a behaviour pattern that has been documented in the literature for more than two millennia, a pattern that has a high probability of ending in tears (reference the Deus Ex Machina Archetype).

Hold them to their commitments. You did have a Functional Safety Plan … didn’t you? They understand its content … don’t they … because you reviewed it with them … didn’t you? And most important of all, their signatures are on it; they made a commitment … didn’t they?

Make the consequences real. Many people view safety as a worthwhile idea but a somewhat abstract thing, easily pushed into the background when profits are threatened. Causing a human being to act requires wrapping that idea around an emotional charge. Make the consequence of death real, emotional, palpable and possible to those who would make bad decisions. I tell the story of a chemical engineer I once worked with. He undersized a pressure relief system on a pilot reactor killing a lab technician. I met him 15 years after the incident, the eternal sadness of remorse was still in his eyes.

The executives who took risks with Deepwater Horizon have had their “religious experience”. The concept of people dying is no longer abstract to them. By now they are card carrying risk managers. If you can contribute to someone having a simulated religious experience before the fact you may have done them a great service.

Keep a diary. After-the-fact memories quickly fade. I guarantee you at some point you will have to remind someone of what they said or agreed to. You will also have to recall your own actions with perfect accuracy. This is not possible without a diary. Log who said what to whom and what was done on what date. Record decisions and their associated rationale and make sure you have copies of critical documents such as plans, safety requirements specifications, hazard logs and test results. Assume that one day a commission of enquiry will knock on your door and ask what went wrong and what you did to prevent it. If you are a safety authority your door will be the first they approach.

Exit

The decision to remove yourself from the situation (quit your job , fire the client) is usually driven by concern for your professional reputation and your ability to live with yourself.  Attempting to change a bad situation with a principled resignation is usually ineffective.  High profile people who have taken this step more than once report that the outcome may not be negative.  It can enhance your professional reputation and if you’ve behaved professionally absolve you of legal liability (remember the diary).  The people who have threatened you with not-eating-lunch-in-this-town-ever tend to move on or end up in jail and new horizons soon present themselves.

Unfortunately for engineers a resignation will not make an unsafe system safe .  If you feel strongly enough about it  you may elect to blow the whistle (engage with regulatory agencies or the media).  This step should not be taken lightly, gather up your evidence and take legal advice.

The Ethical Duty of a Systems Engineer

The Deepwater Horizon incident serves as a reminder of what man-made systems can do if poorly managed. And with each passing year we roll the dice on bigger technological risks. With each passing year, unknowingly, the general public’s dependence on us increases. Travellers routinely board larger and more complex aircraft taking safety for granted, people travel in driverless trains, uninhabited air vehicles circle overhead, we implant computing devices in our bodies and citizens make their homes closer to the blast range of chemical processing plants unaware of their dependence on safety systems.

Those who commit Deus Ex Machina are not evil, they are unknowing. In this environment we systems engineers are responsible for keeping people safe. Only we truly understand the technology, its potential for good and its dark side. Everyone else is helpless. Knowingly or unknowingly they trust us.

We have an ethical duty to come out of our mathematical sandboxes and take more social responsibility for the systems we build – even if this means career threatening conflict with a powerful boss. Knowledge is the traditional currency of engineering, but we must also deal in belief. The techniques of persuasion must become part of the engineering toolbox. If the safety integrity of a system is compromised by a bad management decision it is our duty to speak truth to power and change belief systems.

The alternative is to risk enduring regret for the shortened lives of the people who put their faith in our skills. Think it over and I’ll leave you with this:

Cowardice asks: Is it safe?
Expediency asks: Is it politic?
But Conscience asks: Is it right?
William Punshon

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References

1. CBS News (2010), Video Extras: Escape From Deepwater Horizon, Survivor Mike Williams Recalls His Harrowing Escape, [Online], Available:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnrIE8TrgSA [4 Mar 2012]
2. Oil Spill Commission (2011),  Deep Water: Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling, [Online], Available: http://www.oilspillcommission.gov/ [4 Mar 2012]

Further Reading

1. O’Toole J., Speaking Truth to Power: Old Tales and New of Leadership, Organizational Culture, and Ethics, [Online], Available: http://www.scu.edu/ethics/practicing/focusareas/business/truth-to-power.html [4 Mar 2012]