Editor's Section




Fine Scale Feedback

Two items from England illustrate the significance of fine scale feedback. The first is the Houses of Parliament and the second is the Titanic.

The famous Houses of Parliament with its clock tower Big Ben are home to the mother of parliaments. You might think these traditional English structures were carefully and properly built from the ground up. You would be wrong. If you search the internet and scour the various websites devoted to these historic buildings you will find references to almost every aspect of them but this.

The Houses of Parliament are constructed from stone that is sedimentary in origin. That is, the stones are cut from rock that developed over time by material settling at the bottom of ancient waters. This means the rock is actually layers, rather different from, say, granite such as is found in the Canadian Shield. Sedimentary rock is fine for construction as long as its layers are horizontal, that is to say, parallel to the ground. This keeps the pressure on the layers and they don't complain.

But if the rocks are placed with the layers perpendicular to the ground then the layers can flake away over time. And that is what is happening with some of the rock at the very bottom, foundational stones of the British House of Commons.

It was thought that the Titanic sank because a long gash opened in its side when it hit the iceberg. But once the sunken wreck was examined it turned out that the gash was itself not sufficiently big to cause the huge ship to sink, or at least to sink as rapidly as it did. Close examination showed that the steel plates of its side had separated when pressed from the inside by the water that had entered the hull.

Some folk, being laudably more curious than most, snooped around and found some of the Titanic's rivets. For those who are not familiar with ship building technology, the old steel hulled ships were constructed from large plates of steel joined with rivets whereas modern shipbuilding welds the plates together, usually with robotic welders. Welded joints are at least as strong as the steel itself.

When the Titanic's rivets were subjected to metallurgical examination it was found that they had been very poorly made. The metal from which they were made was not properly mixed together and there were significant weak spots in some of the rivets. Enough rivets failed (i.e. fell apart!) to have allowed the plates of the Titanic's hull to separate under pressure.

Now, the Houses of Parliament will probably go on for a while yet, at least until somebody figures out how to put a jack under the walls so the crumbling stones can be replaced. The Titanic, however, is long gone.

These two examples illustrate sensitive dependence. A small difference in the way the stones were laid in the Houses of Parliament would have precluded today's problem. Proper management care and monitored quality control in the manufacture of the rivets and the Titanic might today be moored as a tourist attraction in Florida or California.

However, there is an even finer scale factor, and that is mind. We're back to our old friend reification.

In each of the above examples, it is fair to ask whether the project managers thought the small details were beneath them.  It is also fair to ask about the project managers and the directors, whether these errors would ever have occurred if the bosses had invited into their homes the business and industrial equivalent of the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind.  We suggest the Lord's comments to the first century clergyman have excellent application in the business world of the new millennium.