Understanding Systems
Josh Kaufman
Lessons
Introduction
16:29 2Rapid Skill Acquisition
37:35 3Principles of Acquisition & Learning
35:20 4The Human Mind
19:08 5Guiding Structure, Environmental Changes
19:30 6Motivational Cues
29:20 7Skill Acquisition Q & A and Discussion
19:06Akrasia & Monoidealism
22:51 94 Methods of Completion
13:14 10Effective Methods for Goal Setting
29:56 11Decision-Making Methods for Productivity
31:10 12Personal Methods for Productivity
45:08 13Power Structures in Business
19:04 14Effective Communication Tools
20:52 15Working with Others
44:07 16Working With Others Q & A and Intro to Systems
15:39 17Understanding Systems
43:32 18Analyzing Systems
45:14 19Analysizing Systems Part 2
31:18 20Improving Systems
40:53 21Standard Operating Procedures
34:13 22Closing Thoughts
11:45Lesson Info
Understanding Systems
we're going to define a couple terms that will help us break down. So we're doing some very basic deconstruction here. We're breaking down the elements of the system in a way that helps us understand how it's operating. And the first idea here is called a flow, and you can think of a flow as a movement of resource is into and out of a system. So So, for example, think of your checking account at your bank. You have a movement of dollars into your checking account when you get paid, and you have the movement of dollars out of your checking account when you spend money right into and out off okay, flow of resources. What are some other flows of resources for things, So imagine a medical practice. What are some flows into and out off your practice? Flow of patient may be patient numbers or patient incoming patients and then patients that are better. And they're leaving directly flowing to flow out of what else flows. Yeah, employees entering your business and employees leaving your busine...
ss. What else leads? Leads leads coming into your business. Some of them you sell and some leads go cold and they exit your process all sorts of different flows. Okay, now, ah, stock is a pool of resource is in a system, so using the checking account analogy, you have money flowing into and out of your account. A stock is the pool of money in your checking account and at any given period of time, it's your checking account balance. You have some money flowing in, some money flowing out. Now, if you want your checking account balance to go up to go higher, what do you do exactly right? You put more money into the account, you make sure less is going out, and the level of your checking account balance increases. So if you want a larger stock emphasised the inflows, get as much coming in as possible and make sure it's a little is going out as possible. If you want the stock to go down, you do the opposite. Decrease the amount of inflows into the stock and increase the amount of outflows. So think of water in a bathtub. You want the level to come up. You make sure more is going in and and none or very little's coming out. You want to drain the tub, you make sure none is coming in. You make sure all of it's going out. That's how these systems type of work are these these type of systems work, so works for checking accounts, works for bathtubs, the most common. The most common type of thinking in business is inventory levels. The amount of a product you have an inventory is a stock, right? How money you have, How many do we have in stock? That's where this comes from, comes from. If you want to make sure your inventory is larger, you make sure you're producing more and more than is flowing out right, So that increases the amount of items that you have an inventory. If you have too much inventory and you want to get rid of it, what do you dio stop producing it right? Or at least slow it down and you want to make sure Moore's flowing out. So maybe you put it on sale to make sure more people are buying it. That reduces the level of inventory. Do you see how this works? So we have flows, inflows and outflows into the system. We have levels of resource is within the system. Those air stocks now slack is the amount of resource is in a stock. So let's say that you have Let's say you're selling cars. You have 20 of this particular make and model of this, this car in stock. Let's say you're selling those cars at an average of one a day. How much slack do you have? 20 days worth of inventory, right? So you can look at the how that what's coming in and what's going out, how much you have at your disposal and how much you need of it. And you can get an indication. Do we have enough stock? Do we have enough to cover our needs over a period of time? Like if it takes you more than 20 days to get more of those model in stock, you have a problem because you're going to run out based on how quickly you're using it. So we have inflows. We have outflows, we have stocks, and we can transform that. Just do a little bit of basic arithmetic, right addition, subtraction, multiplication and division to figure out. Do we have enough? Do we have enough to do what we need to do or do we have? Do we have what we need in order to produce the particular result? Sometimes you don't have enough to produce the particular result, and this is an idea called a constraint. Constraint is a limit on the performance of a system based on a critical input. So if you are looking at how many cars that you're selling and you run out of the stock of cars that people want, that's a constraint on your ability to sell it. You don't have some sort of resource that you need to keep the system operating. A good example here is your car requires a critical input for it to work. It's called gasoline as your car works, uses gasoline, and that runs low, and you have to be able to fill it back up in order to continue for it to work. If you run out of gasoline, the car will not run. Car will actively cease running while you're in it, trying to drive it if you don't have enough right. So a constraint is anything that really limits your ability to get the outcome from the system that you want to get So one of the things how this disappears in a business context and this is a metaphor you can use to think of. A lot of things are systems, principles and business. Imagine a car factory. So at the beginning of the process, you have a bunch of raw materials. You have steel. You have classy of plastic of wire. You have all of the raw things that make up a car. It enters into the beginning of the process, and then it goes through a chain of transformations. So the glass becomes a windshield and the car and the steel becomes the frame of the car and becomes an engine. And you have rubber pipes going everywhere and you have electron ICS going into certain things. And that chain of events happens for a long period time and at the end you have a car very complex process, but it has the same thing. You inflow a whole bunch of raw materials process, process, process, process, process, and then you outflow a car. Now what happens when you're making a car and all of a sudden you run out of glass? Well, you can't make a windshield if you can't make a windshield, the car has to have a windshield, and so the car waits until you get enough glass so you can make a windshield to put it into the car. That's a constraint. There's something that you need to continue the process that doesn't exist, and so everything halts until you get it. There's a wonderful book by an author. His name is Eliahu Gold Rat. It's called The Goal, and this is actually the the Onley business book of it. I've read that followed that that's actually written in the form of a novel. It's a story. It's fascinating. And it totally works because it tells the story of this plant manager who is responsible for making this, this manufacturing company work and one of the things that Gold Rat teaches. He calls this the theory of constraints, and the whole question is what happens? What do you do if your system runs into a constraint? How do you fix it? How do you make sure that whatever system you're running is running as effectively as possible? He calls this the theory of constraints, and this is in the workbook. On page Gold Rat says they're five things there. Five things that you need to do in the same order. When you see a constraint to do what's called alleviating the constraint to make it go away and go, Right says, In any system, there is always 11 and only one constraint. And that is the thing that's keeping your system from from doing as much as it possibly could. So the first step does she have to figure out where it is? It's called Identifying the Constraint. What's holding your system back? Are you waiting on windshields? Are you waiting on engines? Are you waiting on gas tanks? What are you waiting for? First step is finding it. The second is what's called. Exploiting the constraint. You need to make sure that whatever goes into the making of the limited thing in your system is being used as much as it as possible. So, for example, if your car is waiting on a windshield and there's a guy who's responsible for running the windshield making machine, and that guy is taking a two hour lunch break every single day, that break is impacting your ability to deliver windshields. And so the very first and simplest and least expensive thing that you can possibly do is when that guy is on lunch. You have somebody else running the windshield making machine, getting as much out of the current process as you possibly can. So you explain all of the resources that you have. You make sure the critical things are being used as much as you possibly can, but sometimes that's enough. That's not enough. It's still a constraint. And so what you do then, is what gold calls subordination. You start to rearrange the system to make sure that are in the effort to make that part of your process way more effective. So, for example, let's say in our hypothetical car factory that the glass comes in on one side of the factory. The raw material and the windshield making machine is all the way over on the other end of the factory, and you have to drive the glass all the way through this very complicated system to get to the point where you make the windshield support a nation is the idea that well, if that's your constraint, guess what you need to rearrange your factory need to make sure that everything you, everything else in the system can bend around what is necessary to make windshield faster by definition, right? So you don't want to do that before you make sure the windshield making machine is working at capacity cause it's a lot of work, right? So But if it's still your constraint, you rearrange things to make that work. Okay, sometimes that is not enough. So let's say you've rearranged your entire factory. It's getting better, but it's still a constraint. What do you do? The answer is what gold rat calls elevation. Maybe you spend a couple $1,000,000 you buy another windshield making machine, so now you have to instead of having one. Now, why didn't we just do that in the first place? Did not mean I don't have enough need. It's expensive, right? We would rather avoid spending a couple $1,000, on a windshield making machine if we don't have to, so you try to make sure that it's used as much as possible. You reorganize as much as you can because if one of those things work, you avoid spending a couple of $1,000,000 on a machine that you don't actually need. But if you do need it, that's the point where you buy it, right? Usually that works. So what happens is let's say okay, we buy the windshield making machine, we're making more windshields. Everything is good. The next thing that we do is re evaluate the system because our system is different now. It doesn't work the same way that it used to. And if windshields or not, the constraint something else is maybe engines or the constraint. Now and then you do the whole process over again. Engines are the problem. We're going to make sure we're doing our engine stuff. We're going to rearrange the factory again. Teoh. You know, make sure that we're making engines as much as possible. And if we really need Teoh, we'll buy another engine making machine and the cycle goes over and over and over again. So the lean startup craze of measuring and improving and analyzing a system and making a better and better better over time. This is where it came from in a very large sense, right? That's all you're doing. You're analyzing the system. You're making sure you're doing it the best that you can, uh, and you are ensuring that before you spend money, you look at all of your options to make sure you are making an efficient decision instead of just the easiest way. Don't make sense. And, uh, I forget who saying that they love that you use real life examples to explain business like a wipers. I could actually just makes it a lot more appropriate. And Ruth Kalinka said that this car factory example it could also be relevant to home organization. Love it, you know, it's not just business. This is life. Exactly, exactly. Anytime you have a constraint, you have similar things going on. So what I love about the theory of constraints is it's It's a general universal tool. You can use it any time you're trying to improve the system, okay? And actually really quick, MB seven says, You know, I wish it were that easy. Usually there's more than one constraint. So what do you do when there is more than one? You know what? There is never more than one, so one factor will beam or limiting than the other. And so you find whichever is the more limiting factor, and that's the one that's really holding you back. So fix that one first. Yeah, so that's you know, the nice thing about thinking that way is it's easy to get overwhelmed by all of the sub optimal things. But really, when you when you take time to analyze the situation, there's really just one big thing that's holding you back for that one first, Cox asked a related question about large systems. He said, It seems that in large systems there's they have an inertia. They seem to be bureaucratic and unresponsive, though, and they can be hard to change or improve. But does it have to be this way? Consists Can assistant be large and still be nimble and responsive and adaptive? Yes. So where this part gets interesting is ah, let's say, just hypothetically speaking are our window making machine is by the window with a very nice view and lots of natural light on the outside and window machine Guy really doesn't want to move. Well, if you want to make the system work, better window machine guy machine guys going to have to move right. So this is where we could start getting into the communication and the political parts of the organization, right? Sometimes people don't want the system to change. But as a leader and as a manager, if your responsibility is to make the system work better, some things have to happen in the system to make it work better. And there are trade offs to be made there. So, yeah, that's the part. Particularly in large systems where some of these things become really not easy decisions, but become necessary. Okay, Gold after the same thing when it goes on the Chihuahuas lunch break, I in, say to him, I really appreciate the work you're doing. What can you think? A 30 minutes lunch instead of ritual. Otherwise, why do you feel change this in a personal level, you could do that. And so that would be an example of exploiting the constraint by getting the person toe work for right. What you may find is, you know, and this is a pure hypothetical. So, yeah, you could ask the person to work more. Really. The only goal is make sure that machines working all the time make sure the process is continuing. Whatever you can do to make sure that machine is working the whole time. That's what's gonna fix the problem or make things better. Okay, don't Ah, feedback loop. Ah, feedback loop is something that happens. A fascinating thing that happens in a system where the output of a system becomes an input to the system in the next cycle. So as a system is operating, some of the things that are happening in the system some of the things that you can measure being able to see the quality of the output of the system gives you information about how the system is working and that information in and of itself, may be an input to the operation of the system. In general, there's a very dramatic example of this is actually our next concept. This comes from chemistry, of all things. Uh, I really love getting fascinating ideas from all areas of life. And there's this. This comes from the physical sciences. There are some chemical reactions that, when they happen, produce outputs that are the exact same thing as the inputs to the reaction. And so it starts the reaction over and over and over and over again because the output produces the input that produces the output that produces the input and auto catalyzing reactions can become really, really, really huge if left to their own devices over a long time. Right? Nuclear fission explosion is a type of auto canal, Asus, right, breaking apart. And Adam produces energy, which breaks apart of the atom, which produces energy with breaks apart unanswered. And all of a sudden you have this really massive expects. Auto analysis. Here's how it looks in business. I spend a dollar in advertising and I get $2 in profit. I spent $2 of profit in advertising, and I get $4 of profit. I spend $4 of profit in advertising and I get $16 of profit. And you just get this really, really huge feedback loop where the output of the process is more money that you put right back into the same input. You just do it over and over and over and over again. So if you ever wonder how certain businesses become so huge over a very short period of time in terms of revenue or profit, that's how it works. There's a feedback loop operating in the business. They found a way to term and turn a diamond to a dollar and turn a dollar into $10 do it over and over and over and over again over a period of time. That amounts to a huge you choose you business. Does that make sense? So the first lesson is look for the feedback loops, the really important. If you can find some way, some auto catalyzing element in your business, it usually looks like advertising that can help the system grow very, very large, very quickly. Environment. The environment is this structure in which a system operates. So these systems, you know, think of a business. A business does not exist in isolation. It exists with other businesses in the environment. It exists with customers and prospects in the world that are evaluating the business. It exists within a certain government and political structure. There are things around the business that impact how the business works. So the structure in which a system operates really profoundly influences the structure of the system, how it works and how it doesn't work and how it works and doesn't work. It's an idea called a selection test. So in a selection test looks like this for a certain system called the human body. We have certain requirements in order to continue operating as a system. If we want to stay alive, we need certain things. We need a certain amount of air, made, a certain amount of food. We have a certain amount of water. We need a certain amount of nutrients entering our body. There are a lot of things from the surrounding environment that we need. If we want our internal life process to keep going, What happens if you don't get enough air, you die, right? That's called a selection test, right? If for, you know, I don't know what the what the exact medical threshold is. But if you don't have air within a certain period, you will die. Guess what? That is? A function of your environment. So if you're for example, in a burning building where CO two is crowding out all the oxygen and you don't get enough air for a certain period of time, you die. And what a selection test is is something changing in the environment. It's a constraint on a system's ability to keep doing what it does, and if that constraint is not met. The system ceases to function. Businesses have the same thing in terms off customers in terms of revenue, right? So a business is a system where money flows in and money flows out, and if money stops flowing, it in the business will cease to exist. That's just how it works. So, um, sick. The most popular theory of the extinction of the dinosaurs, for example, right, asteroid comes and blows up the earth, and all of a sudden there's no food in dinosaurs to start dying, right? That's a selection chest. Something changed in the environment, and certain systems were able to get our certain dinosaurs were able to get enough food, and certain dinosaurs were not able to get enough food. And the ones that were able to satisfy the constraint were the ones that existed. Same thing happens all the time in business with changing consumer preferences, right? People want different things. People start spending their money on one thing and stop not spending so much money on other things. Those air selection tests for businesses and if you're really nailed the selection test, you thrive, and if you don't you go out of business So this is the whole idea that the the environment around you place and it has an enormous role plays. It has an enormous impact on how the system works over both the short and the long term. So it helps you to understand what the softer deaths actually are right. Does that make sense now? Fundamental feature of how systems work, this idea of uncertainty? We don't know how the environment around us is going to change. We named it may know what we need personally to survive, either literally as a human or metaphorically as a business in the environment. But the environment is changing trains old time, and so that uncertainty. The fact that we don't know what's going to happen in the environment next, there's no way to predict it has really two forms. The first, which most people are familiar with most people think about is a risk on a risk is just the possibility of something happening that would not be good for us in other. In other words, it's unknown, unknown. We don't know when something's gonna happen, but if it happens, we're kind of able to anticipate this would be bad and so we should probably do something about it. And on a uncertainty. True uncertainty is an unknown unknown. We don't know what's going to happen, and those things are going to profoundly influence how we work, how we behave. So uncertainty is something that needs to be thought of. And this is where and we'll get to this thing this afternoon. This is where it makes sense to build flexibility, to build a certain amount of resilience against unexpected things happening into your business. Because if something weird happens, you want to make sure that you have the ability to adapt to changes quickly, as you possibly can, to account for the new reality. If you don't, you may find yourself on the failing end of a selection test. And so it's worthwhile to spend a certain amount of time and energy making sure that you can change Teoh, that you can work with things that are changing in the environment. So uncertainty is effective life in all businesses. Change is also a fact of life. There is no such thing as a complex system that is in Stasis, that never changes. That never, uh, never has a changing environment never has Teoh do anything different because of what's going on. All complex systems are in a state of flux, so uncertainty and change are facts of life. The more you can just kind of wrap your head around that they exist, and you need to account for them, the better off you are. So I'm just going back T things that we talked about yesterday. The two ways that you account for uncertainty and change are two things that we've already talked about. The first is locus of control. There are certain things that you can influence or control. There are certain things that you cannot you cannot control. If an asteroid comes down out of the sky and blots out the sun for 80 years, just can't control it, right? So there's no there's no sense and worrying about it. There are certain things that you can influence and you can control. So that's how you respond to uncertainty, responds to change when it happens. The second that we talked about yesterday was attachment. The more locked in we are to doing certain things in a certain way. If the environment changes, we're in trouble, right, because what we're doing to work in the president. Vier Mint no longer works, and if we're not comfortable working in a different way, we're we're in trouble. So attachment is that ability to say, OK, we've been doing this this way for a certain period of time. It's no longer working. We need to do something else industry that's doing that. They're in the process of doing that right now. Publishing bookstores. So for a while, the Independent bookstore was the best place to buy books, then came along. Barnes and Noble, who had many orders of magnitude, more books than a small local bookstore. People stopped going to the independent and started going to the big superstores. More selection preferences changed right. Bookstores had to adapt in order to survive in that environment. Then amazon dot com came along and people started ordering books online. And all of a sudden, Barnes and Noble is in trouble because consumer preferences change. Something happened in the environment. If the Independence and Barnes and Noble are not comfortable with changing their strategy, guess what? They're going to go out of business. They have to borders second largest books bookstore chain in the U. s did. They weren't able to change fast enough and they went bankrupt. Something at some point is going to come along. And Amazon is going to be the one in trouble because consumer preferences change the way these types of things work. So if you focus on what you can control your not attached to a particular strategy as much as possible, that's what allows you to account for uncertainty and change. Well, let me. So far good. Thank you. Interdependence. This is what makes complex systems even more fascinating when you start t really dig into how they work. System interdependence is systems that depend on other systems in order to operate. Okay. And there are different levels or types of interdependence. Some systems. If another system stops working, the whole thing kind of breaks down. So imagine your car. If your engine breaks down, the whole car shuts down. If you're carb, aerator breaks down, the whole thing shuts down. If any one of probably 20 or 30 different systems ceases to work within the car, whole system shuts down. That's an example. The word for this If you read systems theory books the word for this is couple ing. And so a tightly coupled system is where you have a whole bunch of complex systems working together. And if any one of those subsystems experience is a failure, that fest failure cascades to the entire system and the whole thing stops working, right? So, for example, our human our body is made up of lots of complex systems. They're called our organs. If your heart stops working the hardest, tightly, tightly coupled with the rest of our body, our entire body shuts down. Now, what's called loose coupling is where one system having a failure may have an effect on another system, but it doesn't cause the entire system to fail. A good example of this is imagine. An orchestra conductor is conducting the orchestra Conductor slips and falls down or the first violin hits the wrong note. Does it affect the performance of the entire system? Yes. Does the entire orchestra explode spontaneously? No, right There is an influence there. It just doesn't automatically cascade everything else. And so this is actually one of the reasons in the human body. We have a lot of redundancy, right? We have two kidneys, one of those kidneys could completely shut down, and we could totally survive. It wouldn't necessarily be comfortable, but we could do it. So in general, the more loosely coupled the system, the less things directly rely on other systems to function. The more resilient the system is because something could happen to one of those systems, and the failure doesn't automatically cascade everything else. The more tightly coupled the systems are, the higher the risk of one of those systems failing, affecting the entire thing. So as you're designing a system, it really pays to pay attention to these concepts. What really super relies on something else in orderto work. And how reliable is that thing in terms of working, if it's something that's particularly error prone, you might want to do what we're going to talk about this afternoon in adding some redundancy, adding some backups, doing things to make sure that if a failure happens, it's not gonna kill you. That's interdependence. No counter party risk. Counter party risk is the possibility that another system or another party is not going to do what it's supposed to do. Other people aren't going to deliver what they said they were going to dealer. And so any time your system relies on a system outside of itself for something, there's always the risk that it's not gonna happen. And counter party risk is the idea that you need to figure out how much you're relying on other things for yourself. The function. So there's actually a really dramatic example of this that happened recently in 2008 which was the Wall Street banking crisis, and here's what happened. So these banks were making very risky bets with their money and basically betting $1 in the hopes of earning 30 to $40. But if it went wrong, they would lose 30 to $40 that was super risky and silly would go to another bank and they would say, Hey, we're making this risky bet We would like to buy insurance just in case it doesn't go well so they would buy insurance from another bank. But this other bank was making the same risky bets and getting insurance from another bank, and all of the banks were making these risks and being insured by other banks against those risks. So when it went wrong, all of the banks lost money at once, and when they all lost money, they called it the bank that had insurance from. And they said, Hey, this that went bad. We would like our insurance And they all said to each other simultaneously, we don't have money to pay you Sorry, and the whole banking industry was on the verge of collapse. For that reason, they were all counter parties to the risks of each other, and the bad thing that happened affected them all. Tight coupling. Very highly interdependent, huge counter party risks. So when you're running a business, it really, really pays to pay attention to what has toe work for you to do what you need to do, who needs to deliver on time, on schedule, on budget for you to get the result that you're looking for. And if there's a way of making your system less tightly coupled by having some backups or having some strategies in the event, something was wrong. That's what makes your particular system more resilient. That makes sense. God, with this pain, I think this is someone else's platform. Yeah, so let's say you decide no particular reason. Let's pick on Facebook. Let's say you decide to start a website builder Blawg, build a business, your primary marketing channels on Facebook and all of a sudden Facebook decides to change something that is not good for you. Well, that's Facebook's, right, right? It's their software. It's not yours. I can do whatever they want, but if you are, you are solely dependent on that particular channel to run the business. Sorry, nothing you can do. Same thing happens to businesses that you search engine optimization as their primary marketing strategy. Google tweaks something in their algorithm and all of a sudden there on page 50 instead of on page one, it destroys businesses literally, and so any time. If you could. If you could see that there's some really dramatic counter party risk there, it's in your best interest to add some flexibility at some adults. Okay, a few more ideas. Second order effects is the idea that every action, everything that happens in in a complex system has a consequence. And what makes complex systems complex is every action has a consequence, and the consequence has a consequence and the consequence as a consequence, and the consequence has a consequence, and very often the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth order. Consequences are really, really different. Provider. Create results that you didn't necessarily anticipate when you made the change or you took the action in the first place. Here's a really dramatic example. At the end of the Second World War, New York City introduced a policy called Red Control, which was We have this a bunch of veterans returning from from the Great Wars. They need to have a place to stay, and they've done their civic duties who we want to make it affordable for them to get housing. So by law, there were caps on in certain buildings. You could, on Lee, charge a certain amount of rent to keep things affordable. Yea, supporting veterans, right, great policy. Here's what happened. So these the landlords of these buildings, we're being charged below market rents, and they found that it was not necessarily profitable to invest their money and maintaining the buildings that were rent controlled. So these buildings over a period of time start to crumble. At a certain point, they crumbled to the point where they're no longer inhabitable and there is less housing in New York City. Less housing means there's still more demand for housing, but there's less surprise supply. And what happens? Prices in New York City for rent go up and stay up. Okay, so you see, there was a decision that was made that had a consequence. That consequence had a consequence, and the end result of that was a policy that was designed to make housing more affordable actually made housing more expensive. That's what happens in 2nd 3rd and fourth order effects. So part of the thing is, try to anticipate or try to figure out OK what is likely to happen. And based on what I know about what's what is likely to happen, what might the effect of that be and try to anticipate down the chain as much as you can before you make a decision? What are the consequences going to do in the grand scheme of things? This is the part of visit. You could never do this perfectly right. This would have required complete and total Amish INTs, which you just totally can't do. There are always going to be unexpected consequences, but the more you can anticipate, the more confident you could be personally that the decision that you're making right now is not going to cause ripple effects that are bad in Laura. Cool. Okay, Last idea in this section. Normal accidents, normal accidents is the idea that a certain number of mistakes, breakdowns, failures are gonna happen. They're always going to happen. There is nothing that you can do to prevent every single bad thing that ever could possibly haven't ever happened in the history of the university. Can't do it. But a lot of times, those are That's the standard that we expect of ourselves. And so what? We do this when something really bad and unexpected happens, and we believe that any level of that is not acceptable. We go into threat, lock down, we go into protective mode. Oh, my gosh. Something bad happened. We need to figure out how to make sure this doesn't happen in the future. It's a normal response. We all do it. What usually comes out of that? This is a second order consequence of that happening. We say Okay, we need to make sure this never happens again. We're going to institute policy systems. Procedures were check steps. A whole bunch of things to make sure that this thing bad thing that happened, never, ever, ever, ever, ever happens again. And guess what that does that increases the interdependency within the system. There's more moving parts. There's more things to manage their arm or systems and subsystems that can break. You're making your system more tightly coupled. What happens when you make your system or tightly coupled You experience another normal accident, and because you're citizen more is more tightly coupled. It's more likely that this accent is going to take down the entire system, so overreacting to these normal bad things happen happening actually makes it more likely in the long run that your system is going to fail. So there's a famous example of this happening, Um, when in NASA space exploration, when the Challenger rocket exploded, there was, ah, piece called an O ring that froze broke really, really, really a catastrophic accident, right? The very worst thing that could possibly happen actually happen. And so NASA actually did a really great thing because they knew this particular theory. That's where this comes from. There's a certain amount of unavoidable risk in doing crazy things, like strapping humans to the end of a big tube filled with hydrogen explosive and rocketing them in this space like you just can't get rid of a certain amount of risk. But what you can avoid is when something bad happens, you can avoid the overreaction to make the system more complicated in a way that introduces more opportunities for failure. So they didn't overreact. And so a lot of the things you know, there have been over the past couple years things that went wrong with space shuttle launches. Right, little part of the rocket breaks off impacts, a heat shield and all that stuff. There's a part of engineering that is okay. Something bad happened. Let's figure out how to alleviate the risks of to figure out how to fix it. But let's not do that in a way that causes us two potential experience, more failure and not less. So a certain number of things are just gonna happen. It's OK. It's OK. What's not okay is overreacting to the point where it makes things worse.
Class Materials
Ratings and Reviews
a Creativelive Student
Josh has a wonderfully comfortable communication style and uses real-world examples to breakdown very complex ideas in a clean, crisp format. He is an excellent public speaker and delivers much more than expected.
a Creativelive Student
I wasn't sure whether I had the time to do this class for two days and if it would be worth it as I'm developing a startup. Josh has continued to surprise me and give me information that if only one of them had occurred I would have been ecstatic with the class. Too many thoughts going through my head right now!! Thank you Josh. In laymen's terms GET THIS COURSE
Borislava
Great class with rich and usefull content, so well presented by Josh!