A view of the Mathematical Bridge at Queen’s College in the swirling snow last Sunday. At this point, I was on the verge of suffering frostbite and now respect photographers who brave the elements to snap shots.

 

The two biggest news stories in the UK this past week have been the Sarkozys’ visit and the opening day farce of Heathrow Terminal 5. I quickly grew weary of the British tabloids’ obsession with Carla Bruni --- it is almost Diana all over again.

 

I was more interested in what’s happening at Terminal 5. In summary, anything that could go wrong is going wrong for BA, the sole airline operating at Terminal 5. Everything from a near complete breakdown of the baggage handling system to employees arriving late because they could not find the staff car park.

 

I told GG that Britain’s inability to handle mega-projects is due to their best and brightest shunning engineering as a career. Being a humanities student, she was naturally skeptical of my reasoning. But engineering is one of the most rigorous disciplines in terms of managing complexity. You are taught modularisation, critical paths, and stress testing, all valuable skills when managing complex projects. I am not arguing that a humanities background does not prepare one for complexity, but rather that in general, relying on a group of engineers would mean that most projects are delivered without Terminal 5-style implosions. Many of these projects will not be ground-breaking, but you know they will work.

 

On the other hand, the engineer’s mechanistic view does have limitations, particularly when a problem is not as clearly defined as building a new airport terminal. The world cannot be neatly reduced to a spreadsheet or computer model. This is why I never liked discussions in my previous organisation when we used words such as “levers” to describe our actions. There was this almost Victorian, pre-quantum scientific belief that our economy was a vast machine which could be controlled by intelligent people pulling on various levers to either accelerate or release pressure on the system. Reality is of course much more complex.

 

We know the first order effects of our actions, but it could be the second- or third-order implications that are more important in the long-run. The difficulty of course is that these secondary effects could have a huge time-lag, which makes it very difficult to ascertain cause and effect. This ignorance might be trivial when systems are stable and secondary effects are minimal, but the risk is always there that they could blow up in your face.

 

 

One last point about the engineer’s mechanistic view of the world. Another danger comes when you apply this view to management, in what I call management by KPIs. Again the idea is that one can reduce an organisation to a series of indicators, give people aggressive targets and let the organisation run on auto-pilot. The leader is there to crack the whip when targets begin to slip. Such thinking is quite pervasive --- during a discussion at my previous organisation, a very senior person effectively closed all discussion by taking this line. Other warning signs that your organisation is being managed solely by KPIs are :-

 

    i.    there is standardisation in areas where standardisation is not truly required, eg format of certain reports;

    ii.    lots of horse-trading over targets;

    iii.    discussions being cut short by the retort :”so how is this going to meet our KPIs?”

 

Again, I am not saying that KPIs are not important nor am I advocating a return to the bad old days when performance was not counted or accounted for. KPIs are definitely vital when an organisation is in maintenance mode, ie operating in a clearly-understood environment and the intent is to grow slow and steady. But management solely by KPIs just sucks the creative life out of any organisation. Just ask yourself : if MLK, LKY or Gandhi had led their movements through KPIs, would we have desegregation in America or independence for Singapore and India?