What's Best Next

Why Nuclear Meltdowns Happen

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Yesterday we learned from Malcolm Gladwell about why plane crashes happen. Surprisingly, “plane crashes are much more likely to be the result of an accumulation of minor difficulties and seemingly trivial malfunctions [as opposed to major mechanical failures].”

Interestingly, the same factors are at play in creating most major disasters and industrial accidents, including nuclear meltdowns.

The near-meltdown at Three Mile Island is a case in point. A number of minor errors that would have each been harmless in themselves combined to create a near catastrophe. In fact, even four of these errors happening together would have amounted to nothing. But with each error, there was some freakish, incredibly unlikely related error at just the wrong spot to render the previous error significant. After a sequence of five of these, the plant was almost at a meltdown.

The story is quite incredible. Here it is, from Gladwell’s book Outliers (p. 183):

One of the most famous accidents in history, for example, was the near meltdown at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear station in 1979. Three Mile Island so traumatized the American public that it sent the US nuclear power industry into a tailspin from which it has never fully recovered. But what actually happened at that nuclear reactor began as something far from dramatic.

As the sociologist Charles Perrow shows in his classic Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, there was a relatively routine blockage in what is called the plant’s “polisher”–a kind of giant water filter. The blockage caused moisture to leak into the plant’s air system, inadvertently tripping two valves and shutting down the flow of cold water into the plant’s steam generator.

Like all nuclear reactors, Three Mile Island had a backup cooling system for precisely this situation. But on that particular day, for reasons that no one really understands, the valves for the backup system weren’t open. Someone had closed them, and an indicator in the control room showing they were closed was blocked by a repair tag hanging from a switch above it.

That left the reactor depending on another backup system, a special sort of relief valve. But, as luck would have it, the relief valve wasn’t working properly that day either. It stuck open when it was supposed to close, and, to make matters even worse, a gauge in the control room that should have told the operators that the relief valve wasn’t working was itself not working properly. By the time Three Mile Island’s engineers realized what was happening, the reactor had come dangerously close to a meltdown.

Here’s the point:

No single big thing went wrong at Three Mile Island. Rather, five completely unrelated events occurred in sequence, each of which, had it happened in isolation, would have caused no more than a hiccup in the plant’s ordinary operation.

That is simply fascinating in itself. But let me be anti-climactic here by drawing out a lesson for our productivity.

Here’s the lesson: If you keep your routine systems humming along well (getting your email to zero every day, processing your inbox daily, etc.), who knows what far greater complications you may be saving yourself from?

By keeping the basics going along well, you may be heading off an accumulation of small complexities in your life which in themselves may not be a big deal, but which may just have ended up combining with a few other insignificant complexities to create a perfect storm. Perhaps not a nuclear meltdown, but perhaps a very, very bad day.

Confronting the Buffet Dilemma

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Seth Godin had a good post the other day on the dilemma faced by any organization that wants to grow the base that it serves:

If you want to grow the size of your customer base, you need to confront the buffet dilemma.

Any decent buffet has foods that please 85% of the population. Meats, cheeses, potatoes… the typical fare.

Once your business hits a natural plateau, it’s tempting to invest in getting more people to come. And what most buffets do is double down. Now, they have bacon, plus they have beans with bacon and turkey-wrapped bacon. Now, instead of one chocolate cake, they have three.

This is essentially useless. You haven’t done anything to grow your audience. The base might be a little more pleased, but not enough to bring in any new business. And the disenfranchised (the vegans, the weight watchers, the healthy eaters, the kosher crowd) remain unmoved and uninterested. And one person like this out of a party of six is enough to keep all six  away.

What does work? Going much deeper or a bit wider:

Deeper would mean a bacon-focused buffet, a dozen bacon dishes, including chocolate-covered bacon. Deeper would mean a chocolate-obsessed dessert bar, ten cakes, fondue, everything.

Deeper gets you people willing to drive across town to visit you. It’s remarkable. It’s not like every other buffet but a little bit bigger. It’s insanely over the top. People will bully their friends in order to get them to come.

The other choice is wider. Instead of adding a handful of dishes that mildly please the people you already have, why not add brown rice and tofu and vegetarian chili? Now you’ve opened the doors to that last 15%.

Why Airplane Crashes Happen

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Malcolm Gladwell has a highly fascinating discussion of plane crashes in his book Outliers.

It is not what you would expect! The reasons behind most plane crashes provide an excellent (and sobering) lesson in the role of communication and teamwork, and the accumulated significance of independently irrelevant, small things. Plus, it’s just plain interesting if you fly a lot (and, like me, every time you do, you think about crashing — even though you know that only 1 in 4 million commercial airliners are lost to an accident).

From Gladwell’s Outliers (pp. 183-185):

Plane crashes rarely happen in real life the same way they happen in the movies. Some engine part does not explode in a fiery bang. The rudder doesn’t suddenly snap under the force of takeoff. The captain doesn’t gasp as he’s thrown back against his seat.

The typical commercial jetliner — at this point in its stage of development — is about as dependable as a toaster. Plane crashes are much more likely to be the result of an accumulation of minor difficulties and seemingly trivial malfunctions [emphasis mine].

In a typical crash, for example, the weather is poor — not terrible, necessarily, but bad enough that the pilot feels a little bit more stressed than usual. In an overwhelming number of crashes, the plane is behind schedule, so the pilots are hurrying. In 52 percent of crashes, the pilot at the time of the accident has been awake for twelve hours or more, meaning that he is tired and not thinking sharply. And 44 percent of the time, the two pilots have never flown together before, so they’re not comfortable with each other.

Then the errors start — and it’s not just one error. The typical accident involves seven consecutive human errors. One of the pilots does something wrong that by itself is not a problem. Then one of them makes another error on top of that, which combined with the first error still does not amount to catastrophe. But then they make a third error on top of that, and then another and another and another and another , and it is the combination of all those errors that leads to disaster.

These seven errors, furthermore, are rarely problems of knowledge or flying skill. It’s not that the pilot has to negotiate some critical technical maneuver and fails. The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication [emphasis added]. One pilot knows something important and somehow doesn’t tell the other pilot. One pilot does something wrong, and the other pilot doesn’t catch the error. A tricky situation needs to be resolved through a complex series of steps — and somehow the pilots fail to coordinate and miss one of them.

“The whole flight-deck design is intended to be operated by two people, and that operation works best when you have one person checking the other, or both people willing to participate,” says Earl Weener, who was for many years chief engineer for safety at Boeing. “Airplanes are very unforgiving if you don’t do things right. And for a long time it’s been clear that if you have two people operating the airplane cooperatively, you will have a safer operation than if you have a single pilot flying the plane and another person who is simply there to take over if the pilot is incapacitated.”

Gladwell goes on to analyze several specific crashes and draw out the significance for communication patterns, team coordination and, more importantly to his point, the role of culturally absorbed mindsets in how we go about those things. As with the whole book, it is a very, very enjoyable and fruitful read.

What's Not Best: Fake Real Handwriting

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I received a mailing from a fundraising consulting company today advertising a new “cutting edge technology” that they can offer to their non–profit clients: a font that looks like real handwriting but in fact is not. In other words, fake real handwriting.

This is appalling. Why would a non-profit want to use this service? Plain and simple, the thinking behind this seems to be: “We can make your donors think that they are reading real handwriting so that they will feel that the message is more personal. Then, they might give more.”

If you could read the fake-real handwriting in the image above, you’d see this perspective come out as well. But you don’t have to read that to see it. What can the value be in fake-genuine handwriting (they are calling it “genuinely penned handwriting”) if the person knows that it was created by a machine?

If you know that a machine created it, then it no longer seems personal. So the purpose of this “genuinely penned” stuff seems to depend upon the person thinking it is real. But if you think that it is real, then your assessment of the “personal nature” of the writing is not based on reality. In which case, in a very real sense, you’ve been tricked.

Why do certain direct marketing companies — and, in turn, the non-profits who use and follow their consulting services — reduce themselves to such tactics?

This company is being added to my list of things that should not exist.

Make a "Best Of" Twitter List

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Squidoo has just launched a way to create a “best of” list of your favorite tweets on a specific topic. Godin writes:

Twitter is immersive. It washes over you. But what happens when a great link or clever post goes by?  Squidoo just launched a promotion around the new TwttrList tool. The power of this tool is that it turns the momentary stream of tweets into a permanent sign post. A curated best of instead of a random time-based river. You can chronicle a conference, or highlight great posts about your brand or event.

This lets other people find your collection of the best tweets on Google, or see a series of messages without the noise in between. Here are a few good ones.

Don't Try to be the "Next" Something

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From Seth Godin on why it’s a bad idea for Microsoft to attempt to be “the next Google” with its relaunched search:

Microsoft, home of the Zune, has just announced that they’re going to launch Bing, a rebranding and reformatting of their search engine. So far, they’ve earmarked $100 million just for the marketing.

Bing, of course, stands for But It’s Not Google. The problem, as far as I can tell, is that it is trying to be the next Google. And the challenge for Microsoft is that there already is a next Google. It’s called Google.

Google is not seen as broken by many people, and a hundred million dollars trying to persuade us that it is, is money poorly spent. In times of change, the rule is this:

Don’t try to be the ‘next’. Instead, try to be the other, the changer, the new.

Read the whole thing.

(By the way, this does not deny that there is wisdom in the words “geniuses copy.” Most new things are not wholly original — and shouldn’t be. The key is to take what is indeed excellent from what has been done before — and relevant to what you are doing — but to do it in your own way, integrating it with other excellent ideas [some of which may be unique to you] such that you are creating a new synthesis. That’s how you create something new.)

What Makes a Job Meaningful?

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From Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent book Outliers: The Story of Success:

Those three things — autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward — are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether our work fulfills us. If I offered you a choice between being an architect for $75,000 a year and working in a tollbooth every day for the rest of your life for $100,000 a year, which would you take? I’m guessing the former, because there is complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work, and that’s worth more to most of us than money.

I think most of us resonate with Gladwell’s assessment of the three things make work meaningful: autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward.

Patrick Lencioni, who wrote the book The Three Signs of a Miserable Job, similarly points to three things on the flip side — three things that make a job miserable. They are: anonymity, immeasurability, and irrelevance. If we flip them around to state what makes a job meaningful, we get: not being ignored, measurability, and relevance.

Lencioni’s three differ slightly from Gladwell’s. Both have measurability in common (that is, a connection between effort and reward), but they diverge slightly on the other two.

These three lists are not mutually exclusive — they both capture very important and profound realities.

But it’s probably also the case that they are talking about different things. Lencioni would probably say that you can have autonomy and complexity and still be miserable if you are anonymous and if there is not someone specifically — even if it is just one person — to whom your work matters (relevance).

The reason is that Lencioni points out that “being miserable has nothing to do with the actual work a job involves. A professional basketball player can be miserable in his job while the janitor cleanign the locker room behind him finds fulfillment in his work. A marketing executive can be miserable making a quarter of a million dollars a year while the waitress who serves her lunch derives meaning and satisfaction from her job” (pp. 217-218).

I would put Gladwell and Lencioni together like this. Gladwell points out the conditions that make a job intrinsically enjoyable. As with Lencioni, that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with level in an organization or other such matters. The person cleaning the locker rooms after the basketball game can have complexity, autonomy, and a connection between effort and reward in his job.

But, no matter what your job is, if you do not also know that it matters to someone (even if only your boss) and are not to some degree known and appreciated by others around you (not anonymous), you are going to be miserable. Likewise, no matter what your job is, you can bring those things (plus measurability) to it in order to make it satisfying.

Putting this all together, let’s strive to make sure that our jobs (and the jobs of those we manage) fulfill both the characteristics that Gladwell points to and those that Lencioni points to.

What I Learned About Productivity from My Son's Kindergarten Class

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When I walked into my son’s kindergarten class last fall, I had the same reaction that I recently blogged about with Taco Bell. My thinking was: “These folks are more productive than I am!”

At Taco Bell, it stood out to me that they weren’t getting over-granular (that is, overly specific) in defining their next actions. The work units for the cooks were “make combo meal 4,” not “grab some cheese out of the bin….” For many people using the GTD approach, it’s easy to fall into the trap of making your next actions too specific. The result is that your next action list no longer tells you what you actually need to do — instead of identifying your next work units, it is only identifying the first step of what you actually will get you started into a more involved task. The Taco Bell cooks show us not to do this. Put on your next action list your next work unit, not your next literal, super-specific step (unless that super-specific step is the extent of your work unit).

At my son’s kindergarten class, the issue related to another common error when it comes to managing next actions.

In the short time that I was there, the kids in the class learned about the days of the week, the alphabet, and all sorts of other stuff. I also got a feel for how things go throughout the rest of the day, and most days in general. It was amazing to see everything that they were able to do in a day. And, how they were able to do it “stress-free.”

Which created a contrast in my mind. Here were a bunch of kindergartners basically implementing “stress-free” productivity without even knowing it, whereas I sometimes find that the GTD system — which promises “stress-free” productivity — sometimes creates more stress. What did this kindergarten class know that I didn’t?

The answer wasn’t hard to see. It came down to one fundamental, core concept: There was a place in their schedule for everything that they needed to do.

That’s it. Very simple.

We “get” this idea when it comes to organizing space: if you are organizing a closet, for example, you know how much stuff you have to put in the closet and how big it is. The stuff that you want to keep in the closet gets a spot. The other stuff doesn’t. And to the extent that you have stuff in your closet that doesn’t have a spot, your closet is disorganized.

But when it comes to organizing our time, we forget this. And — I hate to say this — GTD sometimes fuels this problem.

GTD can easily create a project-based mindset. It teaches you to have a list of projects, which you create next actions for, and those next actions go on your next action list. But it doesn’t train you to connect those actions with your actual schedule. And it, in part, seems to do this intentionally, because of the failure of so many systems that rely on a “daily to-do list.”

The problem that results is that you have a long list of next actions and no defined time to do them. The result is that you feel like you should always be doing them. Which is stressful. You are “always ready,” but your list often sits as you are unable to get to it.

Now, this is not necessarily an intrinsic to the GTD system. I doubt, for example, that David Allen has this problem. He’d probably say “nothing about GTD is contrary to defining a time to do your next actions.” And he’d be right. I’m simply speaking from experience of what I see tending to happen with people (including myself). It is easy for many of us to forget the fact that if you want to get your next actions done, it won’t happen magically. You have to define a time in your day to work on them.

Being intentional in this way does not eliminate the fact that we will do many of our next actions spontaneously, when we find ourselves right by Target, for example, when we have some Target items on our errands list. But this spontaneous component will actually happen more often if you also have a scheduled time to work on your next actions.

The other issue here — which, in my opinion, is even more significant — is this: What about ongoing, non-project stuff you need to be doing?

GTD can create a very project-based mindset. Your focus can be to get your projects done. But what about the ongoing things you want to be doing and advancing at?

This is where the kindergarten room was so brilliant. They had a defined time each day to work on the days of the week and alphabet. They also had defined times for reading and some other things. The teacher didn’t just have those things on a next action list to do “when we get the chance.” She was intentional about them.

Here’s the lesson: Don’t just define a time to do your next actions in general, although that alone is helpful. You should also define about 2-5 key ongoing priorities to you and schedule slots of time each week in your calendar to work on them.

You don’t need to create next actions for these areas. That’s part of the point — if HR is one of your many responsibilities in your job, for example, there is a lot of value in saying “from 3-5 every Thursday afternoon I’m going to think about HR strategy.” You don’t want to have to rely only on HR-related projects to keep your HR responsibility in motion; define some operational time for giving focused thought to the area and then work on the most important things that come to mind then.

More can be said on this — lots more. Lots, lots, lots more. What I need to do is define the time to pull that set of posts together …

Wise, Unexpected Advice from Peter Drucker

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I’m enjoying the book A Class with Drucker: The Lost Lessons of the World’s Greatest Management Teacher. The advice is not unexpected for Drucker, but unexpected when compared to much of conventional wisdom. Here is the table of contents, which gives a good reflection of this:

  1. How I Became the Student of the Father of Modern Management
  2. Drucker in the Classroom
  3. What Everybody Knows is Frequently Wrong
  4. Self-Confidence Must be Built Step by Step
  5. If You Keep Doing What Worked in the Past You’re Going to Fail
  6. Approach Problems with Your Ignorance — Not Your Experience
  7. Develop Experience Outside Your Field to be an Effective Manager
  8. Outstanding Performance is Inconsistent with Fear of Failure
  9. The Objective of Marketing is to Make Selling Unnecessary
  10. Ethics, Honor, Integrity and the Law
  11. You Can’t Predict the Future, but You Can Create It
  12. We’re All Accountable
  13. You Must Know Your People to Lead Them
  14. People Have No Limits, Even After Failure
  15. A Model Organization That Drucker Greatly Admired
  16. The Management Control Panel
  17. Base Your Strategy on the Situation, Not on a Formula
  18. How to Motivate the Knowledge Worker
  19. Drucker’s Principles of Self-Development