Here’s one of my favourite stories from Atul Gawande’s book, Better:

“Five years later, Albert Sabin published the results of an alternative polio vaccine he had used in an immunization campaign in Toluca, Mexico, a city of a hundred thousand people, where a polio outbreak was in progress. His was an oral vaccine, easier to administer than Salk’s injected one. It was also a live vaccine, containing weakened but intact poliovirus, and so it could produce not only immunity but also a mild contagious infection that would spread the immunity to others. In just four days, Sabin’s team managed to vaccinate more than 80 percent of the children under the age of eleven—26,000 children in all. It was a blitzkrieg assault. Within weeks, polio had disappeared from the city. This approach, Sabin argued, could be used to eliminate polio from entire countries, even the world. The only leader in the West who took him up on the idea was Fidel Castro. In 1962, Castro’s Committee for the Defense of the Revolution organized 82,366 local committees to carry out a succession of weeklong house-to-house national immunization campaigns using the Sabin vaccine. In 1963, only one case of polio occurred in Cuba.”

It describes a classic contradiction: what was Albert Sabin trying to improve? Answer: he was trying to vaccinate lots of children. What was stopping him: injected vaccines were slow to administer, and because every child had to be individually vaccinated, lots of vaccine was required and the time needed to inject everyone was considerable.

A classic vulnerability-versus-speed or vulnerability-versus-amount-of-substance conflict. Which, if we look both up on the Contradiction Matrix give us the following ranked list of Inventive Principles:

Of which, Sabin’s solution deployed three:

Principle 35, Parameter Change – switching from an injected to an oral vaccine, and, perhaps more significant…

Principle 13, The Other Way Around – using a ‘live’ vaccine, and,

Principle 9, Prior-Counteraction – producing a mild contagious reaction in the first children to be vaccinated, that would then spread to many of the other children.

Sabin, of course, didn’t have access to the Contradiction Matrix when he devised his genius solution. His solution, however, offers us exactly the sort of case-study that our research continues to feed into the Matrix. So that everyone else in similar situations is able to access that genius.

Do as I say not do as I do. Welcome to the Nassim Taleb fanclub. A group that has recently turned quite snarky when it comes to criticising institutions that don’t understand risk in the way that they do. The WHO in particular has come in for a lot of criticism from the Taleb wannabees in recent days for their ‘don’t wear masks’ advice.

The gist of this Taleban (too close to the edge?) argument has been that you don’t wait for evidence in order to decide to wear a seat belt. Wearing a seat belt, they will quite rightly argue – per the Precautionary Principle – can only help. There is an upside/downside asymmetry in favour of seat belts.

I posed the question whether any of the community also wore crash helmets and fireproof clothing when they got in their cars. The answer was a deafening silence. The sort of silence you get when someone realises their argument has a massive hole.

I didn’t even get to the part about data. The compiled data from the United States suggests that up to 3 % of vehicles involved in fatal crashes have a related fire event, and that over 5 % of fatalities occur in cars having caught fire, up to one third of the deaths being directly caused by fire. Surely, therefore, we should all drive in flameproof clothing. The Precautionary Principle says so. There’s only upside, right?

What the Taleban (I’ve decided I can get away with it…) don’t seem to understand, or want to understand is that we all draw the line somewhere. The line between precaution and precautionism. Nearly everyone wears a seatbelt, nearly no-one outside of motorsport wears flameproof overalls to go and pick the kids up from school.

The precautionary principle is good. But only up to a certain level. Somewhere along the spectrum of precautions we could take to mitigate risk the downsides start to outweigh the upsides.

The current should-I-shouldn’t-I debate over masks is happening, I think, because different people put the decision on different sides of the dividing line.

From a TRIZ/SI perspective what’s happening here is the debate serves to tell us there is a contradiction. We want precautions and we don’t want precautions. And if we’re smart, that should mean there is an innovation opportunity.

Before that’s possible, however, it’s a really good idea to arm yourself with the requisite facts. Another point that seems lost on the Taleband (how about with a ‘d’?) I tried to give them some actual facts regarding masks filters and Covid-19, but I guess it sounded and looked too technical to them, so they tried to pretend they hadn’t seen it. No-one likes to be outside their comfort zone. That’s why the WHO isn’t apparently listening to the Talebanned (too far? Or wrong way around – is this the name for people Taleb has blocked?). The WHO know epidemiology and healthcare but they clearly don’t understand systemic risk. Or, probably, the Precautionary Principle. Or, very definitely, the idea of solving contradictions.

But its exactly the same knowledge-blindness, stay-in-comfort-zone issue being seen from the Taleband. They’re clearly uncomfortable with not only epidemiology, but also thermodynamics and filter design technology.

Discomfort, however, is not a valid excuse for continuing to spout half-science. They might think there is only upside in what they’re suggesting, but when we add in the other half of the story, the downside can and in most cases does very easily outweigh the up. Precaution becomes precautionism.

This means, ultimately, they’re failing their own skin-in-the-game test. True, the most ardent of the Taleband have changed their Twitter thumbnail photo to now show them wearing a mask. ‘Look,’ they seem to want to say, ‘see how I’m practicing what I preach’.  Some of these people have over 30,000+ followers. They might think that by recommending mask-wearing there’s no downside, but because, after you add in the actual science, in reality there is net downside, they’re potentially causing harm to lots of people. People who, when things do go wrong, rest assured the Taleband will be holding up their hands and saying, ‘nothing to do with me, mate, blame the Precautionary Principle’.

Every innovator, meanwhile, by definition, has to have genuine skin-in-the-game. They know that relying on half-science is a guaranteed whole way of ensuring they end up amongst the 98% of innovation attempts that fail.

Speed is important right now. Building parachutes after jumping out of the plane is a pretty good metaphor for the times. Last I heard though, there’s still time to read the parachute design manual before you jump.

The manual telling us that precautions are good, but too many precautions are not. Too many precautions mean a contradiction needs to be solved. Solving those contradictions helps put you in the 2%.

Speed wins in a crisis. We knew that. One of the consequences is our collective societal knee-jerks more often than not mean we end up doing dumb things quickly.

Every time I do our ‘save the Titanic’ exercise in workshops, within 5 minutes every group ever has found all of the resources that would ever have been needed to keep all the passengers and crew alive. And yet, on the night, 1500 people died. Death by, in some cases quite literally, jumping before thinking.

Fear and confusion does this to us. Ready, fire, aim. In crisis times, the job is to try something, see what happens, learn from it, and try again. Crossing your fingers that the thing you tried doesn’t turn out to be so dumb that you don’t survive the experiment. Fire before aim. I get it.

But when Tom Peters first popularised the aphorism, even though he switched ‘fire’ and ‘aim’, he still left ‘ready’ at the start of the process. Like with the Titanic exercise, ‘ready’ is all about that five minutes at the beginning where we take a deep breath and think logically and rationally about the situation.

You can be fairly certain this ‘ready’ stage hasn’t really happened when we start to hear conflicting advice from experts. This is what we’re seeing at the moment regarding masks.

The World Health Organisation is telling people, ‘don’t wear masks if you’re not sick’. On the other hand, those that understand systemic risk say wearing a mask ‘can’t do any harm’ and so therefore we should do the opposite. Two separate instinctive knee-jerks that together serve only to confuse the average person in the street.

From a ‘ready’ perspective, when two smart groups of people are telling you different things that you’re probably dealing with a right-versus-right contradiction. And that contradiction needs to at least be managed before you make a personal decision regarding whether you’re going to go looking for a precious mask or not.

The heart of the contradiction is this. An argument between two different types of expert. The WHO and the epidemiology community possess lots of domain knowledge about pandemics. A lot of it is is based on statistical information.

The risk/complexity community, on the other hand, doesn’t have any domain knowledge relating to the spread of viruses, but they do know that the WHO’s statistical foundations are in reality ‘naïve probabilism’ when taken at the systemic level. In a complex environment, getting to where you want to get to (ending the pandemic) means the main basis for action is working from where you are to where you want to get to with heuristics that present a change vector that progressively gets everyone pointed and moving in the right direction.

The two perspectives – subject matter expert domain knowledge and integrative risk and complex systems knowledge – can be presented as a 2×2 matrix like this:

What the matrix ought to remind us is that where we need to try and get to is the top right hand corner. Answering the mask question is not about picking a side in the either/or debate, it is about solving the contradiction between the two differing perspectives and thus getting the best of both worlds.

If we’re going to do this properly, the integrative-knowledge axis of the plot needs to include all of the ‘out-of-domain’ knowledge that is relevant and not included in the domain knowledge axis. So, in addition to understanding risk and complex systems, we ought to add to the list things like human psychology and, in the case of the Covid-19 virus, some knowledge of virus and droplet aero/thermodynamics and, if we’re thinking about masks, the design of filters. Now we’re presenting ourselves with a pretty tall order. In order to meaningfully answer the ‘should I wear a mask?’ question we need someone with the requisite level of knowledge of epidemiology, risk, complex-systems, human psychology, thermodynamics and filter design. I don’t think there are too many of those people around.

Or maybe there is. Maybe this is where TRIZ/Systematic-Innovation comes into the story. The basis of the TRIZ aphorism, ‘someone, somewhere already solved your problem’ is that the whole method is built from knowledge accumulated by looking across all of the world’s different domains. It offers a first-principles synthesis of everything.

As someone that has used TRIZ for the last 30 years and been developing it for the last 25, while I can’t claim it has made me an expert in any of the needed domains, it has enabled me to go and find the experts and ask them the right questions.

What this then means is, to take a first example, looking at the WHO declaration that Covid-19 is not airborne, but is rather transmitted in droplets of saliva and mucus. Big droplets don’t stay airborne for very long, and will not travel much more than 1m from their source (hence the 2m social distancing rule – 1m plus safety factor).

As far as they are concerned this is statistically true. But, when we bring a little thermodynamic knowledge to bear on the problem, we have to also take into account the fact that the liquid that forms the droplet will inevitably evaporate. The rate at which this will happen depends a lot on ambient temperature, pressure and air movement. A typical 50micron water droplet will evaporate on a typical UK Spring day in around 120 seconds. If the droplet is on, say, the surface of a mask that is being breathed through, the evaporation rate will be significantly higher, and so the droplet will evaporate in around 60 seconds (this is an experiment that’s fairly easy to reproduce yourself… sneeze onto a surface that allows the resulting droplets to be visible (I used a piece of slate) and see how long they take to disappear, first by just leaving the slate to dry, and second by blowing on it).

The importance of this is that after less than two minutes, the droplet that was carrying the virus has evaporated, leaving the virus exposed. This being the case, there is now a question about whether it is able to become airborne. Whether or not this is going to happen, again depends on a number of factors, some of them relating to the ambient conditions and some relating to the virus itself. Now, the aerodynamicist needs to know the size and density of the virus particles. The data is still coming in as far as Covid-19 is concerned, but reliable reports (Reference 1 from South Korea) suggest a diameter of between 70-90nm. This is small. So far I’ve not been able to find any figures on the specific volume or density of Covid-19 – which in itself is a worry, because it means the epidemiologists don’t think this knowledge is important. It is important.

If we don’t know the specifics of Covid-19, we do know the details for other corona viruses. Their density is around 1.37g/cm3. Asuming Covid-19 is in the same ball-park, this tells us that, yes, Covid-19 will very definitely become and stay airborne. Like for like, it is slightly worse, but similar to cigarette smoke.

What this now means is that, the sneeze that lands on the ground will evaporate after a couple of minutes and allow any wind to lift the virus particles up and blow them into the atmosphere. Once up in the air, they are very likely to stay there for some time. Now the issue becomes how long they will continue to be viable. Another current unknown, although figures of between a few hours and a day are circulating.

More importantly, as far as our mask problem is concerned, is recognising that a sneeze droplet from someone else’s sneeze landing on the mask I might be wearing will evaporate after less than a minute, leaving the virus particle itself on the surface of the mask.

So, now the question becomes whether this virus can get through the mask and into my mouth. Now we need the filter designer’s knowledge. Will a 70-90nm diameter virus get through the mask filter? Fairly obviously, the answer to this question depends on the mesh size of the filter. There’s been a lot of mention of the N95 type filter in recent days. The ‘N95’ designation means that when subjected to certification testing, the respirator blocks at least 95 percent of very small (0.3 micron) test particles. Which basically means, to a Covid-19 virus N95 looks like lots of really big holes. The equivalent of throwing a tennis ball through a basketball hoop. N95s will absolutely stop sneeze droplets from entering the wearer, but after the moisture has evaporated, the remaining virus particles will easily get through the mask. If not on my next breath, a later one.

This is not to say that the N95s are useless, but what it does mean is that if you’re wearing one in the vicinity of a sneeze, you’ve got about 60 seconds to change it for another one (ideally sterilising the old one rather than throwing it away) if you want to stop virus transmission.

We could go on to talk about sealing around the sides of the mask – another significant design flaw in most masks – and we could also look at load factors (i.e. how many virus particles does a person need to ingest before they’re likely to become symptomatic and get the disease (about 10 is the emerging knowledge, but we still don’t know for sure)) but I think we should now say ‘so much of the hard science’. Now let’s have a look at some fuzzy human psychology. The risk/complexity world says we should all wear a mask because, ‘it can’t do any harm’. While this might be factually true if humans were 100% reliable automatons, the reality is that a number of very human quirks come into play.

The first is that, when we’ve taken a precaution we think is going to work, we think we’re safe. Every safety feature car manufacturers add to the vehicles we drive, we all compensate for by driving worse. In other words, the safer we think we are, subconsciously the more risks we allow ourselves to take. Example 1: we don’t take social distancing so seriously. Example 2: we know that hand washing and not touching your face is good WHO advice. But when you’re wearing your mask, suddenly it becomes more okay to touch your face. Plus, the mask is often a bit uncomfortable and irritating, so there’s a tendency to ‘have’ to touch the mask more to adjust it. Thus, if you’re not washing your hands every ten minutes, transferring more virus to the surface of the mask.

This is where I think the risk/complexity people have been naïve. The blanket assumption ‘it can’t harm’ does not take account of the real world. The same as when they’ve been declaring that ‘100% lockdown will stop the virus completely in ~15 days’. 15ish. I can’t remember their precise number, but in reality I don’t need to because I know that there’s no such thing as 100% lockdown. In the real world people need to go out and get food. They need exercise. They get bored. We go out.

Anyway, that’s a story for another day. Today’s question is should I wear a mask?

What do we know, now looking at the world from the top-right hand both/and perspective of our domain knowledge and integrative knowledge matrix? i.e. taking into account both what the WHO says and the risk/complexity people say and adding in some actual facts that are needed to properly answer the question.

1. If you’ve got symptoms, you wear whatever mask you can to help reduce the spread to others.
2. If you’re working around Covid patients, you should have a mask considerably better than N95 (see the hazmat suits worn by Chinese doctors and nurses).
3. If you’re the average citizen out in public (why aren’t you locked down?) unless you have a fully sealed mask with a filter mesh size less than 70nm, it is virtually pointless and will probably lull you into a false sense of security, so don’t wear one. Especially if you having one means that a medical professional doesn’t get them because you’ve hoarded them all (…stop being selfish, while you’re at it).
4. If you can’t get the ‘it can’t harm’ meme out of your head and are going to wear one anyway, remember not to touch your face or the mask, wash your hands regularly and change the mask (or, better, sterilise and re-use) probably just as regularly.

At the end of the day, everyone makes up their own mind on these issues. A lot of people – bottom left of the matrix – actually, it seems, don’t want the truth. Or maybe they’ve just become so jaded after several years of fake news that they’ve just decided to blank everything out and listen to whoever shouted the loudest. The sort of people that listen to prats like Tim Martin telling them its safe to go and drink in his pubs.

Ultimately, to paraphrase Nassim Taleb, don’t listen to what people say, watch what they do. When I decide to go to the supermarket later this week I have risk-taking skin in the game. Will I wear a mask? Based on the top-right hand corner of the matrix, I will not be wearing a mask.

When I worked at Rolls-Royce, I guess because I was perceived by my bosses to be the person most open to ‘weird’ ideas, I was the nominated person to receive the letters occasionally sent to the Company from individuals claiming to have re-invented the jet engine. They averaged one or two a week. Meaning that, after a few years, I’d had the pleasure of reading several hundred suggestions. After the first few dozen, my initial excitement had begun to diminish. The ideas were already falling into what later became two distinct categories. The first came from the person that had not thought to check on whether someone in the industry had already thought of the idea. The second, depressingly more frequent category, came from people that didn’t understand the basics of how the world works. Things like physics, Bernoulli’s Equation, the Laws Of Thermodynamics, and gravity. Don’t get me wrong, my mind wasn’t and still isn’t closed to the possibilities of breaking some of these Laws (I’ve done it successfully myself on a couple of occasions), but there ought to at least be an attempt to understand them first. Needless to say, in all the time I received and responded to these approaches there was not a single occasion when anything tangibly useful appeared. Nothing even close. The ratio of bad-to-good was infinite. It was like Open Innovation before Open Innovation existed.

These days, we still get some of these kinds of approach from people. Only now it’s a cornucopia of things rather than just perpetual-motion-powered jet engines. Mainly, though, I get to meet people in client companies that find themselves in the same role I had at Rolls-Royce. Only now times have changed. Firstly, they tell me, the flow rate has increased considerably. Secondly, the level of in-company paranoia has increased exponentially. No-one wants to be the person that turned down the Beatles.

It only takes one or two cases for this paranoia to become extreme. The knowledge that Hoover turned down Dyson, for example, when he approached them with his cyclone vacuum cleaner. As it happens, I met several times with the person at Hoover who did the rejecting. He insisted he would do the same thing again tomorrow. I could empathise with him. Even after the fact I’d approached the company in pretty much the same way Dyson had, only with a far better way of cleaning floors than a cyclone. But that’s another story.

Spool forward a few years to 2010 and a client asked us to get involved in the emerging Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf Of Mexico. The client wasn’t BP or a competitor of BP, but rather someone interested in Open Innovation. Which, thanks to Henry Chesbrough’s 2003 book had already become a thing. A shiny bright dysfunctional thing. Our brief was to watch what happened when BP decided to embark on their own Open Innovation experiment. The Deepwater Horizon oil-spill was an almost impossible to solve problem. Thinking it would help allay some of the already horrendous public relations damage caused by the incident itself, someone at the company figured, ‘let’s tell the world what the problem is, and lots of people will turn up with answers’. 300,000 responded within the first week. Humans love a crisis. Especially when the crisis belongs to someone else and we have no skin in the game. Humans love to help.

Pity the fool, though, that had to work their way through those 300,000 suggestions. 299,999 of which were very likely to have come from the knowledge-vacuum person who took time out of writing to Rolls-Royce to explain how to re-invent the jet engine.

Frankly, you need a small army of people to go through that many ideas. A small army that BP clearly didn’t possess. So, less than two weeks after the call first went out, the media started to hear from some of the call responders. ‘I told them what the answer was, but they haven’t listened,’ was their clear message. Something done, I’m sure, with the best of intentions had quickly turned into a PR disaster. If it hadn’t been for the BP CEO, Tony Hayward, committing the all-time worst PR blunder in history, its possible that BP could have killed the Open Innovation mess for good.

Thankfully for Henry Chesbrough, but not so good for everyone else, Open Innovation survived Deepwater Horizon, and Chesbrough got to spread his naïve, ill-conceived claptrap even more broadly.

Which brings us to the Covid-19 pandemic. This time a global crisis that has already, just weeks in, shown everyone the human spirit in all its manifest forms. The occasional profiteer – who, one of the best things to come out of the social media echo-chamber-creation machine, have been universely called out for their evil ways – but mainly the literally millions of people wanting to help. Simultaneously heart-warming and utterly chilling.

When half a million Brits answered a call to volunteer to help out the NHS, that’s the heart-warming part. Volunteering to deliver prescriptions, help prepare food and do portering jobs, we see humans quite literally at their community-minded finest.

But then, on the other side, oftentimes the ‘help’ ends up being the precise opposite. We’ve been asked to work on a couple of the emerging bottleneck problems – ventilators and masks. The world doesn’t have nearly enough of either. Both problems are serous, but the ventilator shortage is the most life-threatening. Not surprisingly, many public officials started to put out calls for more ventilators. A classic Open Innovation play.

Finding technical solutions to both problems has been easy. That’s what happens when you have a method. The real issue, we predicted, is going to be fighting through the noise. We’ve already seen some of the consequences of this in the UK. Big, sexy ventilator contracts offered to (Government supporting) Dyson on the one hand, and a small company that already makes ventilators being ignored on the other. The sort of state incompetence both Orwell and Kafka would have rejected as too far-fetched.

We’re back in Deepwater Horizon territory here. Only this time hundreds of thousands of human lives are at stake. Tens of thousands of helpful – jet-engine re-inventing – souls that are clogging up the system with naïve, time-wasting crap. Worse still – like Deepwater Horizon – many of these people are precisely the same highly opinionated ‘geniuses’ that will soon be going to the media to moan about how they aren’t being listened to. Thus compounding the problem even more. Not only are those in charge wasting time ploughing through hundreds of nonsensical ventilator rescue suggestions, but now also having to justify to the press why they haven’t responded to all the amateur Professor Branestawm wannabees.

Strongly opinonated people are really important in an innovation context. But only when they have the know-how to back it up. The world doesn’t have enough of these know-how-and-opinion ‘fixer’s right now. Meaning we end up with a million and one bulls in the ventilator shop and a growing number of Cassandra’s, pulling their hair out with frustration at the lack of attention they’re getting. In normal times, the cream has time to rise to the surface. In crisis times, tragically, wrong answers thrive while the needed answers wither on the vine.

Not that its for me to make any kind of public plea, but if I could, it would to politely request that those beautiful people that want to help, but have no relevant know-how should stop clogging up the communication channels and stay out of the way. Go do the shopping for the locked down vulnerable members of the population. Grow some vegetables. Volunteer to help farmers pick crops. Save lives, stay home, shut up. Let those with the actual knowledge – the quiet ones, the Cassandras – do what society now needs them to do. This is their time.

I left home for the first time in over a week this morning. Food shopping. After seeing a week’s worth of stripped supermarket shelves on the News, I figured I’d shop at the local village store. My slight trepidation disappeared the moment it was my turn to step across the threshold. Everything I wanted was there. None of the shelves were bare. There were no ‘maximum two purchases’ notices anywhere. Just my normal village shop.

Why do people panic-buy in supermarkets and not in local shops?

First principles.

Everyone stepping into a supermarket steps into a world of anonymity. Pile too many toilet rolls into your trolley and you might get one or two people shaking their heads at you in pity or disgust, but chances are you won’t ever see them again, and if you do they won’t recognise you anyway. Plus, you’ve probably already worked out that if anyone actually has the nerve to challenge you, you can easily lie and say you’re shopping for others as well as for yourself. Not to mention the fact that the moment one person starts piling too much into their trolley, it gives everyone else permission to do the same. And within minutes the supermarket has become a community of anonymous hoarders. No recriminations, no downside. At least, not until you go back a couple of days later to find the shelves are bare.

In the village shop, on the other hand, everyone knows everyone. Being the anonymous hoarder is not an option. Take more than you need and, guaranteed, next time you’re out for a walk, everyone else in the village will have been told. There goes that selfish-asshole. Not the kind of label that anyone wants. The kind of label you’ll be no closer to shedding five years later.

Reduced to first principles, humans are simple creatures. ABC-M. Autonomy, Belonging, Competence, Meaning. Going to the village shop offers up a simple reminder of how transitory the Belonging part of the story can be. We all want to belong to something. Six miles away at the local Asda, I get to belong to the anonymous-hoarder tribe, just doing what’s best for my immediate family; five miles closer to home, and I’m part of a community that makes sure not just my family but everyone else’s family is okay.

Locally speaking, we beats me every time.

There aren’t many universals in life, but the S-curve offers us one of them. S-Curves are everywhere and apply to systems of every kind. When viewed from a business, industry or societal perspective, the S-curve features a number of, again universal stages:

After having the first flickers of an idea for a new way of doing things, the first job is to somehow make it work. Then the job becomes making it work properly. Then maximise performance. Then efficiency. Then reliability. Then convenience. Then, when there’s nothing left to improve, the final job becomes one of minimising cost.

Thanks to the Japan-triggered quality revolution of the 1970s, most industries have become extremely good at accelerating this sequence of events. To the point, now, where almost every domain on the planet finds itself at the top of its current s-curve.

Perhaps the most iconic examples of this can be seen in the automotive industry. Thanks to the Model T Ford, the automobile is quite literally, to steal the title of the book that sparked the Lean movement, ‘the machine that changed the world’. That this happened, is, overall, an amazing achievement. By the end of the 1990s, however, when we started working with several automotive OEMs on ‘5-day’ car projects, the industry was already at the tail-end of the ‘maximise convenience’ stage. The big idea underpinning these projects involved refining logistics operations to the point where a customer could go into a car dealership, choose their car, choose all of the different options – colour, trim, engine size, air-con, carpets, tinted-windows, sound-system, etc – and then have it delivered to them five days later. The OEMs quickly found themselves in a race. If they can do a 5-day car, we need to be able to offer 4. And then 3. Until, finally, someone asked the question, ‘does the customer actually care whether their car arrives in 2, 3, 4 or 5 days?’ and realised the answer was – for the most part – no. At three-days, the customer was effectively saying, they now had enough convenience. And so, having tightened up the logistics side of the car production story, the attention shifted full-on to cost reduction. To the extent that Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers of components are now expected to sign up to contracts that had future delivery options tied to guaranteed cost reduction targets. The fight for reduced operating costs has become vicious. It has also, in order to enable maximisation of these cost reduction demands, caused the industry to become very strongly interdependent. Having components lying around the factory as inventory is very ‘expensive’, and so every OEM insisted on ‘Just-In-Time’ deliveries from suppliers. Armies of Six Sigma black belts get trained. All of them told that variation is bad, and that their job is to remove it. So everything gets segmented into manageable chunks and the boundaries between chunks get frozen. Then came Lean-Six-Sigma black-belts. Now, ‘waste’ was added to the list of bad things. In fairness to the originators of Lean, their definition of what waste was and wasn’t was quite broad. One of them, for example, was the waste of a ‘lost customer’. Alas, the Lean Six Sigma blackbelts stuck on the production line had no control over what customers did and did not buy, and so this ‘waste’ got conveniently swept under the carpet, and the focus shifted to the wastes found on the production line. At first there were lots. Then came the ‘lean with consequences’ phase. This is where teams realised that when they removed what they thought was waste created an unexpected adverse consequence somewhere else. Probably in somebody else’s silo. So then there was no choice but to work across silos and derive even more coupled solutions. To the point where eventually no-one has any wriggle room any more. That’s when teams start going around in circles. And the innovators give up. I remember a project with a Tier 1 supplier of gear-shifts. They wanted to get some electrical power into the gear-shift in order to add some potentially valuable new functionality to drivers. Alas, getting a 12v cable into the gear-shift meant passing it through various other parts of vehicle real-estate that came under the control of other Tier 1 suppliers. Attempts to negotiate with the other Tier 1s responsible for these other bits of real-estate quickly showed that a win for the gear-shift meant only downside for the other bits. End result: no innovation. Multiply that to include every other massively optimized, massively over-coupled vehicle sub-system and component and what you end up with is complete paralysis and, today, a sector that is amongst the worst innovators on the planet. This is the Dodo-Lean stage. Not only does innovation become increasingly impossible, but, resilience decreases exponentially (https://www.darrellmann.com/dodo-lean/).

Only healthcare, education and financial services are worse. Mainly because they’re even more over-coupled. Perhaps the all-time iconic example of the over-coupling that emerges when cost reduction is taken past the ‘with consequences’ phase and into the Dodo phase is the 2008 GFC-triggering US sub-prime loan market. Bundling together lots of crappy, ill-advised, un-vetted loans into bundles to ‘reduce risk’ turns out to be a way to massively increase systemic risk. And offers up ample proof that over-coupling results in people looking after the pennies thinking the pounds will look after themselves, without realising that this aphorism doesn’t make sense in a complex interdependent world.

In theory, the GFC was a way of creating the sort of crisis that is often needed in order to stop the over-coupling effect. What’s supposed to happen when a system makes the discontinuous jump from one s-curve to the next is that everything has the opportunity to de-couple. Everyone realises that the current rules don’t apply any more and that the crisis offers permission to go and explore new and better ways of doing things.

Except that’s not what happened after the GFC. Instead, regulators imposed even more rules and constraints. And thus added even more coupling effects into the industry. This was called ‘kicking the can down the road’ by most economists and commentators, but from an S-curve perspective, what it really ended up being, was an even bigger accident waiting to happen. The industry over-over-coupled and thus made itself even more vulnerable to external disruption. As we’re perhaps already beginning to see in the form of a perturbation called Covid-19.

Whether the financial world has learned the lessons of over-coupling I’m not sure. I suspect not. This time around, however, Covid-19 is a toppling domino that looks like it could easily topple several others. Covid-19, too, looks like it has pushed the world off its current S-curve. Which means that at least some of the other toppled industry dominoes will do what’s supposed to happen during a crisis. The rules get re-written. First up, de-coupling happens because when some organisations realise they can’t survive stuck in their current over-coupled world, they have to get inventive and go find other ways to earn their way in life. The flashlight company that switches – in 8 days no less – to becoming a hand-sanitizer producer. The automotive OEM that sees car sales plummet and realises their stark choice is to either close the doors or finally do what customers have been demanding for at least the last decade, and start offering ‘mobility’. Something that companies like Uber, Ola and Lyft have understood since their disruptive inception, of course. A shift that the current over-coupled automotive industry has been scared of even contemplating.

The de-coupling transition phase between one s-curve and the next is rarely pleasant. When the transition in triggered by crisis, it is never pleasant. Except, of course for the innovators – that small cadre of people that live their lives in the between-curves limbo world – since they now find themselves in their element. Lots of great problems to solve, lots of exciting opportunities to exploit. Lots of rules they have permission to break. The innovators know that whoever makes it through the de-coupling transition gets to be the one who determines how the world re-couples during the early phases of the new S-curve. Given that the typical societal S-curve duration is around 80 years (https://www.darrellmann.com/history-rhyming/), whoever de-couples and re-couples the best, gets to live a comfortable life for the next 50+ years… before they too succumb to the ‘inevitable’ temptations of cost reduction and another round of over-coupling. History doesn’t repeat, but, as the over-couple-de-couple-re-couple pattern shows, it very definitely rhymes.  

Termite mounds are often held up as examples of emergent structures. How a set of simple ‘instructions’ hard-wired inside the termite brain can produce enormously complex structures.

Every termite mound is different.

But not so different that a passerby wouldn’t recognise it as a termite mound.

A lot of people skirting in and around the world of complex systems make proclamations to the effect that no outcomes are predictable in a complex environment.

The similarity of termite mounds reminds us that this is not completely true. It might be true enough to tell us that the best way to operate in a complex environment is by making use of iterative processes – try something, see what happens, use the results to formulate our next iteration, repeat. This I agree with. Whoever iterates best, and learns fastest wins. What I don’t agree with, though, is the idea of complete unpredictability. There’s a lot we can’t know, but that’s not the same as knowing nothing.

One termite is simple. A colony of termites is complex.

One human is complicated. Two are complex. Seven billion are complex, bordering on, and occasionally tipping into, chaos.

Is there something that happens when the levels of complexity increase that make it impossible to predict what will emerge?

Well, clearly yes, but the only meaningful way by which to even begin to answer this question is to look at what is happening at a first principles level. The small number of ‘instructions’ in the termite brain are that species set of first principles. With humans the first principles ‘instruction set’ is a little bit bigger. But not much. We all want to be autonomous, we all want to be acknowledged and ‘belong to the tribe’, we all want to feel competent, we all want to do things that are meaningful. The way you were raised by your parents will impact the way you raise your own offspring. The ‘complete’ set of these first principles is looking like a page in a not much longer book of first principles we’ve been gradually decoding over the course of the last decade.

I can’t be sure we’ve unravelled the whole story. Which is a worry. But not so much of a worry that it prevents us from deploying another first principle: if you don’t know the absolute, make use of the relative. In other words, look for stuff that has changed.

So long as the termite mound-building first principles remain unchanged, all termite mounds will look like termite mounds.

So long as the human society first principles remain unchanged, all human societies will look like human societies.

One of the most controversial of our seeing-the-future models is the GenerationDNA four-generation cycle first revealed by the work of Strauss & Howe. We’ve spent the last twenty plus years trying and failing to disprove the model. Meanwhile, during those twenty years, the societal patterns predicted by the model have all come good. Things (like pandemics) happen at random, but peoples’ reaction to those events is not random. Until such times as our collective first principles change, we will keep seeing the same patterns emerging.

Occasionally the first principles have changed. The shift from hunter-gatherer to agrarian societies, for example. Or the shift from agrarian to industrial. Or – maybe – the shift from industrial to some kind of ‘knowledge’ economy. That part we don’t know yet. What we do know, however, is that the world has jumped off its current S-Curve in the last month, and over the course of the next 3 to 4 years will make its stumbling journey to the next one.

It is during these stumbling years that we have the possibility that the set of first principles shifts. In the worst case, they shift for the worse. If the alt-right populists have their way, for example.  More likely is that the pendulum swings so that a few contradictions get solved, some don’t and some new ones will appear. Consequently, some things in life will get better, some will get worse and others will stay the same. Ideally, if we embark on the journey with some kind of map, we solve the most significant contradictions so that more things get better than get worse. I’m putting my hand up for this strategy. There is a map. It’s sketchy in places, and probably a little wrong in others, but it is a map drawn from a knowledge of complex systems and first principles. Which, at this point in time, as far as I can see, are still the same ones that mankind carried 80 years ago. And 180.

I’m fortunate to be invited to lecture on a number of Lean programmes. My usual job is to provoke Lean professionals so that they’re able to recognise when it is appropriate to deploy lean-thinking, and when it is not. The main times it is not appropriate is when systems find themselves at the top of the S-curve. Top of the S-curve means that a system has hit a fundamental limit and as such ‘optimization’-based improvement techniques won’t work any more.

For the most part, my words, I’m sure, fall on deaf ears. Especially when I suggest that, thanks to several decades of lean-thinking and continuous-improvement activity, nearly every enterprise on the planet finds itself sitting at the top of an S-curve.

About ten years ago we started to identify three different phases of Lean. The first phase is what we called the ‘Low-Hanging Fruit’ Phase. This is the time when it is relatively easy to find examples of waste inside an organisation. And, when we take steps to eliminate that waste, there are no adverse consequences. The waste was genuine waste.

The second phase starts when attempts to eliminate waste begin to deliver unexpected adverse consequences. This is what might be thought of as the Whack-a-Mole or ‘Lean-With-Consequences’ Phase. This is the period when Lean improvement professionals increasingly find themselves spinning around in circles, gradually realising that every time they think they’ve solved one problem, another one pops up.

Then, finally, there is the third ‘Dodo’ Phase. This is the phase where so much ‘waste’ has been stripped from the system that it is unable to react when the outside world changes. As happened with the now-extinct Dodo.

In nature we see the evolutionary pressures of ‘survival of the fittest’ favour systems that waste less than those around them. But natural systems that optimize themselves too much tend to be the ones that become extinct. The Dodo offering us an iconic example. In its original environment, since most of the Dodo’s food was found on the ground in jungle-like environments, the ability to fly was not nearly so advantageous as having big thigh muscles that allowed the bird to run. Hence, over time, birds with smaller wings and larger thighs were more likely to thrive than those with big wings and small thighs. Putting evolutionary energy into flight-worthy wings was ‘wasteful’ from an evolutionary perspective, and so there came a point where the Dodo was no longer able to fly. Evolution favoured birds that ‘spent’ their available resources on thigh muscles. This is efficiency at work. Stop ‘wasting’ resources on wings. Fine until a predator appears that is able to run (and shoot!) much faster than the bird is able to do. At this point, the ability to fly would have been really useful. Sadly, it wasn’t possible for the Dodo to ‘re-evolve’ wings fast enough to avoid complete extinction.

A lot of the time, the clients that kindly call us in to help are at the second, ‘Lean-With-Consequences’ Phase. TRIZ is the perfect tool for helping in this kind of situation since the ‘adverse consequences’ arising from an attempted improvement action are, in TRIZ terms, merely the contradiction that needs to be addressed. And resolved.

Maybe our high level of exposure to Phase Two enterprises over the years has been something of a self-fulflling prophecy? Whatever the (probably unknowable) truth, my view of the world was that there were a lot more Lean-With-Consequences enterprises than there were Phase Three, Dodo-Lean enterprises. Now, sitting at the beginnings of the global crisis triggered by Covid-19, and watching share prices plummet, ruthless companies sacking staff and should-know-better large multi-nationals begging governments for handouts, I’m beginning to realise my instincts were all wrong. What we’re all watching right now is a world chock-full of Dodo Lean.

On some level, it often requires this kind of crisis to trigger enterprises into meaningful action. Indeed, we’re already seeing just how creative people can be when they find themselves confronted with rules that don’t apply anymore. In that regard, I’m kind of hopeful that many of the Dodos will be able to re-evolve wings and, to mix the avian metaphors, rise from the ashes (I’d certainly be happy to offer my services to see how we might help prove it). On the other hand, I’m also seeing what we’ve been saying for several years right now, an almost complete absence of crisis-solving creativity at the top of these Dodo-Lean companies. So- called leaders that, for the most part, find it easier to send out redundancy letters to half their staff rather than engage their brains and do what everyone with actual skin-in-the-game at the frontline knows to do: get stuck in, survive, thrive.

We know who you are. Another great thing about crises: its almost impossible to hide. There is no more hiding beneath the parapet. These people need to do the honourable thing and get out of the way. Hand over to people with grit, persistence and a belief that what doesn’t kill you will, in business at least, make you stronger. Step up, or step away.

Fortunately, the Nudge Unit is no longer in charge of defining the UK’s response to the Covid-19 situation. Their reign lasted about 48 hours. 48 scary hours. Mainly because, nudging was only ever intended to be an adjunct to an actual strategy, rather than the foundation of that strategy. The idea of Nudge is simple: once you know where you’re going, design the three or four syllables that speak a thousand pictures and launch them into the public consciousness. Then cross your fingers that enough people respond positively to start moving society in the direction you want. Something like ‘Take Back Control’. Or ‘Drain The Swamp’.

The other reason to be happy they’ve been pushed to the background is because, much as they claim to be built around an understanding of human psychology, from where I sit that understanding is partial at best, and wrong-headed at worst.

Take the Nudge Unit belief – now thankfully dispensed with – that people will only comply with difficult instructions for a short period of time, so, therefore, it is important to only send out nudge-speak when the timing is absolutely right.

What this kind of thinking utterly misses are the various binary switches that exist inside people’s heads. The one I’ve talked about most has been the ‘Sick Switch’ (SI ezine, March 2014). When this switch is in the ‘well’ position, life is normal; once I flick the switch to ‘ill’ I’ve given myself permission to accept that things are not normal. It’s not normal to still be in bed at midday, but it’s okay when I’m sick. It’s not acceptable to goof-off going for a run when I’m well, but it’s definitely okay when I’m ill.

It’s pretty much the same thing with another switch, the one relating to ‘Crisis’. When this switch is positioned at ‘normal’ we might go out to the cinema or to a gig, or spend too much money on a guitar. But when it’s flipped to the ‘crisis’ setting, we know not to do those things. And – most important – as long as the switch stays flipped, we know we still can’t go and do those things. When there’s no crisis, people will get bored with washing their hands ten times a day; when the switch is flipped, while we might still get bored, we wash our hands anyway.

If that’s the case, I hear you say, why is it that a majority of patients fail to comply with their medication instructions? Well, many reasons actually (SI ezine, September 2018), but the overriding one is that something causes us to flip our Sick Switch back to ‘normal’. Our symptoms temporarily disappear, for example, or there’s a big family celebration tomorrow night that we don’t want to miss.

Exactly same idea again with our Crisis Switch. So long as its set to Crisis, we will continue complying with what we’re supposed to be doing in a crisis situation. The simple (first principles compliant) idea being, now we’ve all (well, ‘mostly’ – there are still idiots like Tim Martin and Godfrey Bloom in our midst) flicked the Covid-19 Crisis switch, we need to keep it switched until its safe to flick it back to normal again. Now, there’s a proper job for the Nudge Unit. Hopefully a Nudge Unit that chooses to read more than one psychology text-book in future.

Listening to some of the stories from restaurant owners, shop owners and other small businesses talking about the Government’s offer of providing them with £330B in loans to get them through the Covid-19 crisis, is giving me a sense of impending tragedy. Also a deeper understanding of how the system (unwittingly?) conspires to ensure the rich get richer. Especially the rich that got that way through passive income they didn’t earn. Society’s rent-seekers.

The Government locks-down society and tells restaurants to close for the foreseeable future. They offer to loan money to a restaurant chain so they don’t go out of business. I don’t know the actual numbers but, as a conservative estimate, let’s say half of that loan, should the restaurant owner choose to go down that route, goes to compensating staff who would otherwise lose their jobs. The other half goes to the landlord. The person (or more likely ‘company’) that owns the building. Multiply this by the number of small businesses that find themselves in similar situations and what we end up with is the Government handing over £165B+ to landlords.

The Government is happy, because the restaurants will pay the loans back.

The landlords are super-happy because they keep getting their rents paid.

The restaurant staff are, if not quite ‘happy’, relieved that they still have some vital income.

But, the poor old restaurant-owning entrepreneur is put into a desperate situation because they’re tied up with a debt that is going to strip the profits out of their slender-margin business for the next N years.

What seems utterly wrong about this scenario to me is that the entrepreneur – the person doing all the job-creating work and taking all the risk – loses while the rent-seeker – the person who sits on their fat-arse counting money – wins.  

Not only is this unfair to the individuals involved, it progressively serves to make society more fragile. When people are disincentivised from being entrepreneurial the long-term lifeblood of the economy is removed.

Sure, Government officials will claim, a genuine entrepreneur will still find ways to survive, to be successful and to become rich. The capitalist system is set up in such a way that the struggle is necessary to weed out bad ideas. That struggle mechanism is a vital part of the way things work. Survival of the fittest and all that. I get it.

When people have nothing to lose, its easy for them to make a decision to start a new business. We’ve done it ourselves through the companies we’ve successfully spun- out over the years. The problem – for society – comes when companies and individuals have become successful. Now they have a lot to lose. And so innovation becomes a threat rather than an opportunity. So what do these people do? They buy property. They become landlords. Nice safe income. That even stays safe during a crisis. If the tenants can’t pay, the Government will pay instead. It’s a no-brainer.

Except now the world finds itself in a situation where 98% of the population are in effect paying rent to the other 2%. All of it perpetuated and guaranteed by the Governmment. Who in turn are funded by the 2%. You see the problem.

So, now we find ourselves in another crisis, the innovation challenge is to find ways of breaking this seemingly perpetual cycle of dysfunction. How to help those people that need help, and how to not feed billions of pounds to already-rich rent-seekers.

The imperative for solving the contradiction this time around is that, I fear when the Covid-19 crisis gets as deep as I think it will, if the rent-seekers are allowed to get even richer while everyone else suffers, there will be revolution and the rent-seekers will be guillotined. And the only guarantee if that happens is nobody will have won.

Any and all solution suggestions welcome.

The prize is a functioning society.