Phil's blog page
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This contains random thoughts for wider appreciation!
Contents
Phil's Principle.
I guess most of you have heard of the Peter Principle. This is the
principle that people in an organisation rise to their level of
incompetence.
So in a fully mature organisation everyone is incompetent at their job
(except perhaps the Chief Executive). This is supposed to happen
because
while people are doing a good job they get promoted, until they get
promoted
into a job they are not able to do, where they stay. However, this can
take some time to happen as promotions are generally only annual.
Therefore
there are probably a fair proportion of people who haven't had time to
reach their level of incompetence, and so can do their job well.
To speed up this process some companies have found a different
way of
ensuring that as many people as possible are at their level of
incompetence.
This is by delegating down responsibility, until it reaches an
incompetent
person, where it stops. This can be much faster than the Peter
Principle
above as it doesn't need to wait for annual reviews. However, it can be
just as effective at ensuring tasks are given to people unable to
action
them competently. To ensure this is the case, the manager who has
delegated
the responsibility must ensure they do not overrule the subordinate,
make
the decision for them, or micro-manage them in any other way. This is
Phil's
Principle!
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Rumsfeld Uncertainty Scale
I recently received an email from our MD, which told me not to continue
with a cost saving for our machines. Although I had been working on
various cost saving initiatives,
I didn't know about this particular one, couldn't exactly understand
what it was from the email, but could recognise it was a new task that
I hadn't previously known about. I gathered from this that other people
had been working on this, but I wasn't aware of that up until the
email. So it appeared I had been in a state of total ignorance about
this task, but this had been converted into a state of only partial
ignorance by reading the email. This reminded me of the often mocked
statement by the former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. I think
in fact that the statement is much wiser than most people give it
credit for, and can add clarity to many situations. The quote is:
"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to
me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we
know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there
are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the
ones we don't know we don't know."
The email from my MD had moved a previously unknown-unknown (ie the
cost saving work being done by other people) into the status of
known-unknown, ie I now knew something was being done, but not what it
was. Eventually I found out what it was, raising it up to the top
level, or a known-known.
So to make known/unknown issues clear, I propose a new scale of
uncertainty, and I'll call it the Rumsfeld scale, signified by °Ru.
(Unfortunately both R and °R are already taken as units of measure,
and Ru is an element, atomic number 44). The scale is arranged in order
of the quote, so a first category Rumsfeld issue (ie 1°Ru) is
something we know we know. A second category issue (2°Ru) is
something we know we don't know, and the third category are the
unknown-unknowns (or things we don't know we don't know), 3°Ru. An
example of 1°Ru is the name of the day after Tuesday. An example of
2°Ru is (for me) whether Donald Rumsfeld has any middle names, and
if so what they are: I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be hard to convert
this into a 1°Ru with the help of Google, but it is currently
2°Ru. As to an example of 3°Ru, I can't give you one: I can
only know about 3°Ru facts after they have stopped being 3°Ru
and changed into either 2°Ru or 1°Ru. (This is a bit odd,
having a category for something that can only have been discovered
after it stopped existing, but I think it can still be useful.) I don't
think the other logical category, unknown-knowns makes much sense, but
just in case we can use 4°Ru for these, if there are any.
Schrodinger's cat is probably the most famous 2°Ru, turning into a
1°Ru when the box is opened. If you didn't know Schrodinger had a
cat, that would have been a 3°Ru for you.
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Safety
Trump Card
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Safety Trump Card is a phrase I coined whilst working for a company who
make high value engineering equipment for pharmaceutical companies.
During the time I worked there, this company became more aware of
safety issues, and implemented ever more imposing procedures and
processes in a bid to make the company safer. However, there rarely
seemed (to me at least) any significant hazard that actually required
reducing. What I became aware of was that whatever the issue, and
however inconvenient the fix, being able to claim that safety was being
improved would win the argument. So more or less regardless of how
minor the hazard reduction, or how expensive the "solution", safety
would always win. Just like a trump in cards: the 2 of trumps would
beat any other suit's Ace. Hence the "Safety Trump Card" which would
always win (except against a higher valued safety card of course). By
the way, use of this phrase is not generally recommended as a way to
endear you with senior members of your company, especially anyone who
has any safety responsibility.
As an example of the safety thinking of some senior members of the
company here is a tale. I was once working in the workshop, and stood
on a chair (normal chair, no wheels) to remove some cardboard boxes
from on top of a machine. I was spotted by a senior member of the
company who commented that lots of accidents were caused by standing on
a chair. I was not particularly impressed with this, and decided to
check how dangerous standing on a chair really is. The company had just
introduced a new way of assessing hazards in our equipment in order to
see what protection was needed. (The machines were in some cases quite
capable of causing serious injury, so putting safety interlocked guards
around them is definitely necessary, and an appropriate target for
hazard analysis.) So I decided to check out the hazard from standing on
a chair. The method is to assess the likely injury (I judged a broken
arm the most serious credible injury), the frequency of exposure (once
a month) the likelihood of an accident at each exposure (one in a
hundred say, or perhaps one in a thousand), and it was only going to
affect one person (me). Multiplying all the ratings for these factors
gave a Hazard Rating Number of only 3, well below the threshold of 10
(10 being the level the company used to decide some additional measures
are necessary, eg a guard rail, safety harness). So I emailed my
department (engineering) to reassure them that I wasn't being reckless,
and that it was safe to occasionally use a chair as a step. This didn't
go down too well. It was made even more irritating to management when
another engineer pointed out that even if there were three of us on the
chair, it would still only get a score of 9!
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Cambridge
Congestion Scheme
It isn't exactly clear why to most people, but Cambridgeshire County
Council is trying to impose a Congestion Charge onto people driving in
Cambridge (city). This is currently only in the "consultation" stage,
but the last big project that went through "consultation" is now going
ahead, despite there being around 4000 letters of objection, but only 3
supporting. That was the "Guided Bus", or more amusingly called the
Misguided Bus. The Guided Bus will cost over £110million, and
is
basically a disused railway line being concreted over so that only
special buses (ie guided ones) can use it. You may not know about
guided buses, but they are so popular and widely used, that council
officers had to travel to Adelaide (yes, the one in Australia) to see
one. In order to allow emergency services access to any buses in
crisis,
there also needs to be a standard road constructed alongside as the
emergency vehicles won't be able to get onto the busway because of the
kerbs alongside which do the guiding. You couldn't really make it up,
could you? For some reason (not clear to me) this is preferable to
simply reopening the railway and sending trains along it.
Back to the congestion charge. Things may be different this time as
some conservative councillors (supposedly the party supporting the
charge) are opposed to it, and the main protagonist of the guided bus,
Shona Johnstone, has just resigned from leadership of the council
because
of some (minor, I personally think) irregularities during the botched
appointment of a Chief Executive for the council. The general thrust of
the scheme is that anyone driving within the city boundary between 7:30
and 9:30am will be charged up to £5 per day. This is probably
the
most congested time of day, although 4:30 to 6:30pm is pretty close.
Oh, yes, and Saturday all day when you can't move on most
roads. Many people blame the school-run mums for the
congestion,
but having
done rather too much commuting out of Cambridge, I don't actually think
much traffic contains school pupils. The reason traffic drops during
school holidays is that lots of parents take holidays with their
children, and this reduces the volume of traffic enough to more or less
remove congestion. So far, the council isn't making any distinction
between people coming into the city, people leaving the city, or those
travelling within the city. In their view, everyone is adding to the
congestion, so everyone must pay. Although to all rational people this
is obviously nonsense (people leaving the city aren't congesting the
city, although the other two categories probably are), the council is
sticking to this line. Perhaps it is so they can give something away in
the negotiating process of consultation, and appear to be listening, or
perhaps they are just a bit dim.
However, what is the congestion charge supposed to be for? The promoted
view is that the money raised by the charge will be put towards better
public transport, which people will be glad to use. The city roads will
be empty, save for the large number of buses. [The roads may even get
empty enough for the guided buses to venture into the city centre
without getting jammed in traffic.] Everyone will be happy, and saving
the planet. However, I have an alternative theory. I think that the
idea is to price relatively poor people off the roads in the morning
leaving them empty for all the parents wanting to bring their children
into Cambridge to attend the many public schools. Parents sending
children to public schools aren't going to notice a mere £5
per
day, when school fees are about £100 per day, and the
depreciation on their 4wheel drive will be about the same. To these
parents, £5 per day to have the roads cleared of all the
riff-raff so that they can zoom up to the school gates must seem like a
bargain. No wonder the conservatives on the council are in favour.
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