Responsible Problem Management

Our present approach to producing products tends to limit the amount of information needed by those potentially affected by the products to adequately avoid waste and other adverse impacts. This can be traced to how businesses treat problems.

Some problems are known (identifiable and understood) and can be fixed based on experience and a basic learning curve; while others, or parts of others, are unknown along with how they can be fixed. A problem is typically identified by the differences between observations and expectations, which is the function of testing. Understanding the problem is more challenging because it involves finding the causes of those differences (troubleshooting). Testing and troubleshooting together are considered a task that is often performed by a person or team, just as fixing the problem can be considered a task performed by a person or team.

Both "finding" and "fixing" tasks are often performed simultaneously, resulting in some fraction of the overall problem being fixed over a given time. Fixing the problem stops when its total cost exceeds either the available resources or the cost of living with what's left to fix. This economic approach to fixing problems has the important downside that the finding task is also stopped, which limits knowledge about how much is really left to fix and makes its assessment more of a guess.

Some simple modeling using basic learning curves shows that, as a rule of thumb, the effort required to find and fix a practically unknown problem is three times the effort required to fix an entirely known problem, assuming that each task uses the same number of people and everyone performing those tasks has at least average preparation and proficiency. If guessing is unavoidable, then prudent planning would include this margin. If knowledge about the minimum effort is unavailable, then we can assume (also as a rule of thumb) that it will be ten times the effort that an ideal team under ideal conditions would need to expend.

In my experience, most of the "find" task is typically done during research and development, before large-scale production of a product is even attempted. Most potential problems are identified and fixed during redesign of the product. Also, it is common to complete only up to 80% of the find task prior to production, which my modeling suggests is the result of a plan to use the minimum effort for both finding and fixing (instead of just fixing).

The 20% difference in quality may or may not be found by customers, whose feedback could be incorporated into future "products" along with new features that justify them paying more. This is a way of masking and evading twice the acknowledged economic cost (whose largest component is essentially effort). The physical cost still exists, however; and can become much larger when the product is used in a dependent relationship with other products and conditions that are combined in a system. If a system's performance degradation becomes large enough due to multiple problems that haven't been totally fixed, then an additional cost may be added to fix it, some of which is indirectly due to deficiencies in an individual product and is thus passed along to the customer of the product.

One way that a producer can ensure keeping their own cost down is to define product performance to only include what they choose to totally fix. The success of this strategy depends on knowing what that is before they set expectations for the product with their customers, and having a way to deflect responsibility for the consequences of what they missed. This may be one reason that businesses try to eliminate government oversight in the form of inspections and regulations beyond what they explicitly promise to their customers, because accountability for consequences of what they missed could force the cost back on them.

Application of the precautionary principle would also force the cost on the producers, by making them assess the impact of their products on people and environments where the products might be used, and not deploying products where any of those impacts are negative. A major argument against this is the stifling of innovation which might result in advantages over existing products, an argument that is implicitly built into biological evolution, a process of creating "products" (species) that die out if they don't provide an advantage to procreation.

Since the main test of products is their continuing sale to customers, and sales can't be made if customers die before they buy, it might make better sense to ensure that full investigations of problems and potential problems are conducted, either by businesses or agencies of the public, and the the results released to everyone for evaluation. The investigations and release of results would continue as the conditions, environments, and underlying understandings change beyond those originally considered.

Key to enabling evaluation would be development of truly universal and quality education that includes unbiased access to basic knowledge, understanding, and skills, along with experience in the investigation of products over a wide range of types. If the complexity of products exceeds the ability to adequately investigate and evaluate them, then people would become less likely to accept them and they would ultimately be discontinued.

Efficiency Revisited

In "Efficiency and Completion Time," I discussed how the amount of time it takes to complete a generic task typically takes longer than the minimum possible time. I've since explored the math behind that observation, and how it might vary across the world's population using insights described in "Changing People."

It turns out that what I called the "efficiency" of performing a task is equivalent to what we commonly know as a compounding interest rate on a credit card we're not paying off, where we are exponentially depleting the remaining amount of the task. If efficiency varies randomly from zero to one across the population, then the 68% of people in the central bulge of the bell curve will have efficiencies between about 0.4 and 0.6. That is, a typical person will accomplish between 40% and 60% of the remaining part of a task during a period of time that is the best case for accomplishing the entire task, which includes preparation and perfect luck. Very skilled people working on state-of-the-art projects, in my experience, are at the high end of "typical" efficiency, which is at the low end of the top 16% of the population that includes only one person who can achieve the task in the best-case time.

Realistically there is a limit to luck, which based on my testing experience is around 95%. This means that multiple attempts at a task are unlikely to all achieve more than 95% of it. Typical people take about 3 to 6 times as long as the best case to complete 95% of a task. Only 47 people on our whole planet could accomplish 95% of a task in the best-case time or less (notably, at the beginning of civilization this number was ten – at least two breeding couples – with this efficiency).

Of course, tasks are extremely variable, which would seem to make these kinds of comparisons meaningless. That variability is, however, covered by the definition of best-case time, which includes the influence of such things as technological aids, the education available to the population, and inherent complexity. Efficiency is explicitly tied to just what humans can do, which is subject to finitely limited physical and mental capabilities that influence the performance of all tasks, so the time to complete a task must be measured as the time that humans are involved in activities that support it, which includes education, skill development, and acquisition of resources.

It is also important to note that each person may not have the same efficiency for all tasks: for example, someone with 20% efficiency for one task may have 80% efficiency for another task; the bell curve simply represents the number of people who have given efficiencies. Tasks may also have common aspects that allow people to have about the same efficiency for multiple tasks, especially those that enable them to meet their basic needs in a natural environment.

In this context, our social infrastructure, which includes education, can be seen as a means of accelerating the effective completion level of common tasks to a point where further action on specific tasks takes a reasonable amount of time, especially those that affect the goals of the society – the most critical being its survival. This also involves preparing people to cooperate (another common task) so they can collectively benefit from each other's strengths (high efficiencies), and offset each other's weaknesses (low efficiencies) under changing conditions that force adaptation through performance of modified or additional tasks. With a random distribution of efficiencies across the world's population, it would take seven times the best time to prepare 99% of the population to do a common task in the best time; that factor, and the limit of time available (perhaps 13 hours per day) would determine how many common tasks could be prepared for.

One of the most common tasks in human history is our joint effort to dominate the natural world, which materially translates into maximizing our consumption of ecological resources (our ecological footprint). Our achievement of the task on a per-person basis has accelerated, with the best-case time since the beginning of civilization shrinking through radical changes from more than 220,000 years to around one year, and the appearance that we may have already achieved the task around 2011 and are now going backwards.

Rebuilding the Commons

Common values. Common knowledge. Common world. These are required for a society to function. They must be built. They must be maintained. They must be respected.

They are in serious disrepair, and so is the global society that depends on them.

Last year, in a fictional retrospective from the next century (“A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century”) I suggested a “Commons Development and Maintenance Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (CDMA), which required all adult citizens to give one in seven days of their time to building and maintaining the commons.” I was thinking primarily of the physical resources we depend on, which are declining at such a rate that, given realistic expectations about people's performance, a goal of 14% annual growth in renewable and reusable resources will be necessary to avoid total calamity. Whatever mechanism we actually decide on, this work on the “common world” must be done on a worldwide basis, but it will be unsustainable without values to motivate people, and knowledge to have a decent chance of success.

Differences in values seem to be at the root of a lot of our problems. To the extent that we disagree, or our values don't extend to all others, we tend to work in opposition instead of toward a future where we can at least survive, and ideally all thrive. Communicating with each other about what we believe is right and wrong is critical to identifying and dealing with the differences that divide us, and finding any common ground that exists. If our values are too far apart, then we should seriously consider creating societies with shared values that do not have enough power to interfere with each other, but provide opportunities for their members to move if their values change (technically we already have such societies – nations and corporations – but many have both the power, and desire, to interfere with others).

The accuracy and accessibility of knowledge determines how well we can define and reach our goals. Common knowledge helps us to efficiently interact with each other and coordinate our activities. Education is perhaps the primary mechanism for creating common knowledge, and it is losing effectiveness for a number of reasons, not the least being that there is far too much disagreement about what should be “common.” There is also the problem that the quantity of information is so great that many people cannot personally verify its accuracy or usefulness, and must therefore depend upon other people to translate it and vouch for it, people who may have an incentive to distort or outright lie.

I have written extensively about each of these elements, and come to the conclusion that everyone should devote some time to “building and maintaining” them, in addition to avoiding their deterioration during other activities. Perhaps one day a week (14% of the time) is still a good target for any or all three, since they do depend on each other. My personal preference is to spend more time, especially on common values and knowledge since their deficit seems to be the greatest impediment to creating a healthy world.