Andrew Moreno says:
In a message dated 96-01-23 21:12:46 EST, you write:
>How do people know when someone is being dishonest, unethical and
>criminally negligent as opposed to being unable to manage complexity -
>i.e. they just made some mistakes?
This is a question that I have been pondering for a very long time. Here
are my tentative conclusions:
Usually you don't know, if whatever is being dealt with is complex.
One of my long-ago project experiences involved a government-sponsored
project for about $500,000, involving a contract with the US Office of
Education. The company that won the award blew all the money in the first
six months. When the government investigators went to their location to
inspect their financial records (something that the government was
entitled to do under the contract terms), the company locked them out.
After over a year of studying the matter, the government decided that it
would be more expensive to prosecute than to drop the matter. The
official rule included this idea: "stupidity is not a prosecutable
offense".
I do believe that there is a large amount of work being done involving
complexity that is completely unresponsive to what is now known about
complexity. I think most of this is being done because the actors (often
high-level managers in big companies) have no idea of what is available.
Moreover, these people are often influenced by well-known gurus who also
have no idea of what is available.
The question that arises is: why don't these people know what is
available and relevant?
My answer to this goes back to the one institutional type in our society
that has as its primary role in life to promulgate knowledge, after
assessing it and constantly studying it. That institution is the
"research university".
Having postulated that some time back, I finally decided that it was
correct.
Now I am considering for the future the WORLD'S LARGEST CLASS ACTION
LAWSUIT. I'm not a lawyer, so I can't institute such a thing. But what I
have been able to do is to begin to develop a concept of "due process".
This concept follows the standard scientific practice of quantification,
which allows measurements to be made and correlated with documented,
archival practice.
Since we now have four measures of complexity of problematic situations,
and since we are accumulating every month more data to add credibility to
the validity of these measures, the time will come when it will be
possible routinely to show that people who ignore these measures are
violating sensible due process conditions, and can be found culpable.
What they do will ultimately be comparable to measuring electric current
by wetting a thumb and holding it ten feet away from the wire carrying the
current.
The WORLD'S LARGEST CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT can then be instituted against
every research university in the world that has led its graduates to think
that they were prepared to manage complexity using the standard Operations
Research tools, standard statistical tools, differential equation models
that lack logic integrity or consistency, etc., etc. Imagine what could
happen. Every research university could be put out of business, and new
ones could arise that do things responsibly.
Lawyers could become rich enough to endow law schools that recognize the
truth set forth by people like Lavoisier and Leibniz, concerning critical
attention to the integrity of languages (both Lavoisier and Leibniz were
educated as lawyers).
We could stop all this reengineering and firing people by using modernized
concepts of management that do not produce conditions which appear to
require reengineering.
We could put most of the business school journals out of business, and
replace them with entreprenurial ventures that value scientific findings.
We might even be able to stop TV ads on paid cable channels, which is like
double-taxation of dividends.
Maybe this harangue has already exceeded the limits of good taste. Bye.
-- John N. Warfield Johnwfield@aol.com