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Musings Report 2024-33 8-17-24 The Catastrophic Consequences of Under-Competence
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The Catastrophic Consequences of Under-Competence
We all understand human error: someone was tired and misread the situation, or they were impatient. We also understand incompetence: the individual simply didn't have the knowledge and experience needed to make the right decisions and take corrective action.
Author Charles Perrow studied organizational weaknesses that generate flawed responses to what he calls "normal accidents," responses that made the situation far worse. In other words, the system itself increases the risks of normal accidents becoming catastrophic accidents.
"Normal Accidents analyzes the social side of technological risk. Charles Perrow argues that the conventional engineering approach to ensuring safety--building in more warnings and safeguards--fails because systems complexity makes failures inevitable. He asserts that typical precautions, by adding to complexity, may help create new categories of accidents. (At Chernobyl, tests of a new safety system helped produce the meltdown and subsequent fire.) By recognizing two dimensions of risk--complex versus linear interactions, and tight versus loose coupling--this book provides a powerful framework for analyzing risks."
Essayist Samo Burja has provided a nuanced account of how the knowledge and skills needed to design industrial organizations and modify their complex systems decay as knowledge/experience are proceduralized, and more recently, automated by algorithms.
The End of Industrial Society
In his analysis, industrialization was fundamentally the reduction of skilled labor to procedures that unskilled labor could perform at a fraction of the cost of workshop-based technologies. This required mass schooling to prepare the labor force to work in factories, what Burja describes as "human capital of the industrial type."
As the economy shifted from industrial to post-industrial, the corporate office demanded the proceduralization of white-collar work, much as factories proceduralized the production of goods. This required mass schooling in the university system, which proceduralized "human capital of the white-collar type."
In the same way that craft skills were viewed as unnecessary in the specialized, proceduralized factory, white-collar work was also de-skilled into siloed specialties and knowledge of procedures.
Systemic (deep) knowledge went by the wayside in favor of what historian David Graeber famously called "BS work:" following procedures of data processing, compliance, oversight, etc. This dynamic led to the over-production of white-collar work, for there is no end to the layers of complexity that can be added, which then require their own layers of precautions, compliance, etc.
Here is how Burja summed it up: "The solution of overproducing white-collar jobs is at first natural and then dysfunctional. Bureaucracies decay in a way that is much less visible than the decay of factories."
In other words, the knowledge embedded in the culture and the workforce decay, impoverishing the intangible networks of experience, skills and shared values that Burja calls "Social Technology."
Correspondent Robert R. coined a phrase which describes this erosion and eventual loss of knowledge/experience: under-competence. This describes something that goes unrecognized: the worker is competent in terms of following procedures to deal with normal situations and normal accidents, but completely incompetent when the situation demands an experiential working knowledge of the entire system and how to respond to situations outside the norm.
In effect, our reliance on procedures and algorithms has stripped us of competence outside the narrow boundaries of normal transactions and normal accidents.
Accumulating experiential working knowledge of the entire system requires sustained investment of time and effort, and this is now viewed as a needless expenditure: why train people for situations which are rare and may never happen?
We can understand this experiential expertise as a type of human-capital buffer or redundancy. The classic example of a buffer is wetlands which absorb the fury of a hurricane, lessening the damage to inland cities.
Redundancy is maintaining an alternative supply of critical components or an emergency backup. Both buffers and redundancies are costs which organizations that optimize efficiency strip out of their systems. This is why the global supply chains are now so fragile and vulnerable to disruption: maintaining buffers and redundancies increases costs and reduces profits.
If we seek to optimize reducing costs to maximize profits, then why waste time and money training workers to know more than the minimum needed to complete their procedural tasks? And since specialization is how we increase efficiencies, why train workers to understand the system outside their specialist silo?
In this way, we've reduced human-capital buffers and redundancies, exposing the system to catastrophic failure if routine procedures and algorithms are incapable of responding to fast-developing crises.
We can illuminate the organizational dysfunction and the under-competence of the workforce by examining the OODA loop: observe, orient, decide, act. Under-competent employees have been trained to observe within their own silo; events cascading outside their silo are beyond their recognition because they have no previous experience of fast-moving, atypical, non-linear situations. Lacking any experience, they're incapable of contextualizing the entire situation, much less orienting themselves as actors with imperfect knowledge who must nonetheless decide and act.
This is how we've devolved to organizations that are intrinsically dysfunctional and prone to failure, and workforces that are under-competent, appearing competent in typical situations but incompetent in any situation outside procedural norms.
I suspect that this describes the institutional and on-the-ground responses to the fast-moving fire in Lahaina, Maui, and many other atypical crises and emergencies.
We are all prisoners of our own experience, and if we've had little real problem-solving, limited real-world experience and little training in independent analysis and working through the OODA loop, then what are our prospects when faced with novel, fast-moving circumstances?
Robert R. used the phrase "algorithmically-driven under-competence," which speaks to our growing dependence on algorithms to fly the aircraft, monitor production processes, schedule deliveries, and so on. We now trust the systems to operate themselves: if everyone follows procedures, everything will work out just fine, and so knowing how things actually work in complex systems is superfluous.
This confidence in the systems' inherent reliability makes sense until a normal accident occurs, and a gauge fails, or a sensor freezes up, or a fire that was deemed extinguished re-ignites. Then the tightly bound (what Perrow calls tightly coupled) systems experience cascading failures that the employees no longer have the experience to understand.
It's comforting to trust the system to manage itself, and to save itself from trouble without our having to take responsibility for high-risk actions taken with imperfect knowledge.
This is reminiscent of the delusional confidence expressed by elite Romans in the waning days of the Empire: Rome was eternal, and the imperial system would magically restore order by itself. The elites spent their days trading complaints about the spotty mail delivery, until their messages went undelivered.
Under-competence is the fatal flaw in the global optimization of cost-cutting to increase profits. As complex systems we no longer understand break down from normal accidents / failures, events will cascade into run-to-failure, and nobody will know how to restore what's broken because it's no longer anyone's job to know that much.
Highlights of the Blog
The Super-Wealthy Have a Problem 8/16/24
It Became Necessary to Destroy the Global Economy to Save It 8/13/24
These Six Drivers Are Gone, and That's Why the Global Economy Is Toast 8/12/24
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
The second lychee harvest is underway. Harvesting hundreds of pounds of produce is an order of magnitude (or two) above a typical home garden. It's a lot of work, not just harvesting but cleaning, sorting, bagging and distributing the bounty. We don't sell, we share, so it's more work to distribute it all compared to dropping it all off at a wholesaler. But it's an amazing experience. This photo is of one section of one of our three lychee trees. We delivered 75 pounds the other day and didn't even touch this tree.
What's on the Book Shelf
The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century.
From Left Field
NOTE TO NEW READERS: This list is not comprised of articles I agree with or that I judge to be correct or of the highest quality. It is representative of the content I find interesting as reflections of the current zeitgeist. The list is intended to be perused with an open, critical, occasionally amused mind.
Many links are behind paywalls. Most paywalled sites allow a few free articles per month if you register. It's the New Normal.
No one buys books--some startling statistics: 96% of books sell less than 1,000 copies. The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.
Cancer rates in millennials, Gen X-ers have risen starkly in recent years, study finds. Experts have 1 prime suspect.--obesity driven by a diet of ultra-processed foods (UPFs)...
Why Paper Checks Refuse to Die
Why Is the Government Encouraging a Taxpayer Bailout?
Finance and Medieval Fairs
Older Adults Are Sharing The "Hardest Truths" About Aging That They've Had To Come To Terms With, And It's Incredibly Honest.
Visualizing The Top 10 Emerging Technologies In 2024
Will A.I. Kill Meaningless Jobs? And is that so bad?
The Urban Family Exodus Is a Warning for Progressives: In large urban metros, the number of children under 5 years old is in a free fall.-- could the fact that cities are completely unaffordable except for the wealthy have something to do with this?...
Global Climate Change Impact on Crops Expected Within 10 Years, NASA Study Finds (via Cheryl A.)
Excessive Internet Use Disrupts Key Parts Of The Teenage Brain
What Those Symbols on the Dollar Bill Actually Mean
"Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly." Franz Kafka
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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