I work in technology that means that I spend a lot of my time working with technologists.
There’s a saying:
“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”
Unknown
This pithy proverb is a central feature of The Law of Instrument of which Abraham Maslow and Abraham Kaplan were both contributors.
The concept is that we all carry around a bias to overuse familiar tools.
Within my world the technologists tend to solve problems by using technology, this our bias. Being a bias, it constrains our thinking to the parts of a problem that can be fixed by technology, but it goes further than that. We tend to solve problems with the latest, new-and-shiny, technology. If we are honest; quite often we find some new-and-shiny technology, then look around for problems to fix with it. That’s the way that our minds work.
What this approach gives us is a Heath Robinson (Rude Goldberg if you are American) set of solutions where we have bolted different bits of technology together to produce an outcome of a fashion. Things work together, but not in the best way, and certainly not in an optimal way. Part of the system are over-engineered while other parts haven’t received any engineering at all. Multi-million-pound systems are linked together by spreadsheets or someone manually typing something.
Technology is what I know, but it’s not the only place where I see this problem. I like to watch how the system is working in restaurants, so many of them are poster children for this. In its simplest form you see bottlenecks in the flow from table to kitchen, everything is good at the table, everything appears to good in the kitchen, but the linkage between the two is a disaster. There’s one café I go to where the kitchen always looks like it’s working seamlessly, but you only have to sit and watch for a short while to realise that the food storage is at the other end of the facility with staff running through the tables to grab boxes of ingredients. I was sat in another cafe a few months back and noticed that the clean cutlery was stored in a low drawer below the point-of-sale equipment. You could either reset a table, or do all of the meriad of things that you do on a point-of-sale device, but not both. This was a popular cafe and people were constantly phoning to book tables meaning and the person on the phone was regularly apologising to customers that they couldn’t answer their query because they couldn’t get to the point-of-sale equipment. Added together there was a lot of staff time spent waiting for this little corner.
My dad has recently spent time in hospital, another exemplar of the craft. Each role appears to have created its own way of doing things which I’m assuming worked for them, but from the patient’s perspective it was utterly chaotic with overlapping and competing priorities.
Imagine a car, and I’ve seen this done, where someone decides that they are going for sporty. They replace various parts of the engine with high-end equivalents. They even get the car firmware updated to improve the available horsepower. Having spent a small fortune on innovative technology they get into the car and the engine sounds sweet. Pressing on the accelerator releases a beautiful low growl. Shifting into gear they press down on the accelerator again and go nowhere. There’s a squealing noise and smoke billowing from the tyres then a lurch forward. While it is possible to get this car moving without spinning the wheels it’s very difficult and within a couple of weeks the tyres need replacing. What’s more the local council has decided that it’s time to resurface the main road near to their house and the delays are awful. What’s more they receive an update from their insurance provider who has decided that the modifications to the car will more than double the premiums. Is this really better performance?
It often helps to take a few paces back, look at the bigger picture and fix the biggest thing that you see. Let’s be conscious of our biases and, for me, realise that technology can only take us so far, and sometimes it will take us backwards. We need to think about the system and not just the parts.
Header Image: This is Derwentwater on a wintery day. It looks cold, it was cold, but it was also beautiful.
Graham Chastney 