Books reviewed by Raphael Badagliacca
Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It
by Chris Clearfield and Andras Tilcsik (Penguin Press, 2018)
Whether we recognize it or not, our lives are governed by systems. And these systems are more complex than at any previous point in history. They bring us more convenience and greater potential than ever before, but their complexity also creates vulnerabilities that can lead to what the authors of this book call meltdowns.
The appliances in your house, the car you drive, the commercial airliner you board, the traffic flow you join on a busy holiday weekend, the nuclear reactor which brings energy to your region... these are all systems woven into the fabric of your life. Strikingly different catastrophic events - a crash in the Washington metro system, overflow at a river dam, administration of the critically wrong medicine dosage in a hospital, and even reading the wrong winner for best picture at the Oscars have similar causes.
Coupling is a measure of the interdependencies within a system and between systems. Tightly coupled systems have a high measure of interdependency. Interdependencies may be opaque -- invisible even to the guardians and practitioners of the system -- which makes it impossible to know when something is going wrong until it's too late. Tightly coupled complex systems are the most vulnerable and their failures the widest reaching. Think financial crisis of 2008.
As our devices become smarter, they become more interdependent opening them to the vulnerability of design flaws and nefarious players intent upon exploiting them. Because these systems can now do so much more for us we are at greater risk for how much they can do to us when something goes awry.
Common sense illustrations like the fact that the managers tasked with overseeing operations at a dam are no longer on site but at distances miles away staring into computer monitors rather than actually walking the dam creates a new kind of vulnerability. The authors show us how certain steps we take to protect ourselves from failure often backfire.
But this book is not only about bad news. The authors offer solutions and sensible approaches to the problems they raise. Read the book to find out what they are.
The Order of Time
by Carlo Rovelli (Riverhead Books, 2018)
Is there anything more important to our lives that we understand less than time?
In a recent NPR interview of Carlo Rovelli, the interviewer compared the author's writing to science writing as poetry is to prose. Anyone who has read Rovelli's slim volume, "Seven Brief Lessons in Physics" could not agree more.
Consider this image that Rovelli gives us to explain our "blurred vision" of reality. We live our lives as if there is a universal moment in time called "now" that is the same throughout the universe just as we all see a place where the rainbow touches the forest, but if we go to look for it we will not find it. We all understand what the author means when he says our experience of time is personal - some days feel longer than others, some hours feel as long as days...
So, is time different than our perception of it? And where did we get the persistent idea that time passes everywhere at the same speed, something that Einstein in his imaginative genius disproved? As the author notes, this persistent idea of ours is not the result of our direct experience.
And what can any of this have to do with leading an organization forward?
Let's take something easier to understand than time: space. Rovelli, quoting Aristotle, states: "the place of a thing is what surrounds that thing." So space is defined by the relationship of things to each other. Think how differently space in a room is perceived when the furniture is put in a different configuration.
Time also is a relationship. It is defined as the interaction of events. In the long view, even a rock is an event. "The world," says Rovelli, "is not a collection of things, but a collection of events."
If there is a disconnect in our perception of time it is not a question of nature but of grammar. Something in us wants to understand the world through the grammar of permanence when we should be looking through the grammar of change. Everything is always in flux.
For leaders intent upon success, you cannot give the grammar of change too big a role in your thinking or credit too highly how much experience depends on relationship.