A paradigm shift
I have been in Los Alamos since 1989. There is always a lot of job stress on people who work at the Lab.
Here is a possible way to reduce that stress and to start to diversify the Lab.
In weapons testing, there was a strong view that everything had to be done by deadline and had to be 'perfect.' Perfection was never really achieved but there was a lasting unstated rule that everything had to be 'perfect' and that lack of perfection, even by a little bit, could not be said out loud.
A different approach, one that is common in ground breaking research, is to assume that nothing is perfect, that everything is really just a draft that will be improved later.
With the "Everything is a draft" (admittedly a really high quality draft that is better than anyone else's draft) approach, people are empowered to go off in new directions and to admit to mistakes along the way. Also the pressure to try to be perfect all the time disappears.
Once more LANL folks can admit to mistakes, it seems that the flavor of the place would change.
Thoughts?
posted by Eric at
4:55 PM
3 Comments:
Eric -
The scientific method is entirely about making mistakes, it is called hypothesis formation and testing. I know you know this.
LANL project managers, public affairs officials, and administrators, by virtue of the the stakes involved in nuclear testing (and related projects in national security) have surely been prone to insisting on "perfection" but only the most obtuse would imagine that such was possible.
(many) Politicians and (most) watchdog groups, on the other hand *are* obtuse and *do* demand perfection, if only because their goal IS to shut us down or radically change our mission (or given no better alternatives simply discredit us).
The huge budgets (both $ and time) for the development and testing of nuclear technology (especially weapons) reflect the stakes at hand and the engineering practices extant in those fields includes extensive testing and what would otherwise seem to be exhorbitant safety margins.
I hear you indicating that what has become known as "a culture of arrogance" is the result of working on extremely high stakes programs. I agree with you on that. Many of our ranks have been trained by their circumstances to be ever yet more careful than they might be... there is more than their next paper or their reputation or career at stake. Lives and even the fate of nations may lie in their hands.
But there are plenty of scientists at LANL who work on projects other than Nuclear Weapons... where the stakes are usually somewhere between those of the academic and the industrial scientist. The former might fail to publish and thereby perish (unless (s)he has tenure already) or the latter may fail to produce and be replaced by someone who can.
If there is an aversion to acknowledgeing mistakes at LANL by most of the scientists, it would be as a reaction to the undue scrutiny and distorted press coverage applied for at least a decade.
- Darko
I agree.
Thanks.
I've seen this in other industries, too. The most prominent example I can recall is one where year-end bonuses were directly tied to performance indices which were intentionally manipulated to never, ever indicate a missed deadline attributable to the company. Rather there were a number of 'customer codes' that were used with regularity even if the real issue was known by nearly everyone to be a scheduling or crew size issue.
There's a catch-22 that often accompanies the pattern that can bite you in the backside though. For example, when an additional crew member was being requested, it was difficult to justify and eventually was denied because there wasn't a 'scheduling or crew size related issue', instead there were customers who had the crew standing idle while the job was held for their reasons, according to the documentation anyway.
In the end, I don't think anyone cared as much about the work bogging down, as long as they got their bonuses at the highest dollar value possible. It was sad, in a very profound way.
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