As you may have noticed, I have changed the banner on this blog to include five books I have written. I began this blog when I had completed my Good Products, Bad Products book (briefly described on the left), and was teaching a class with the same name in the Stanford Engineering School. with a good friend named Dave Beach. It focused on products of industry and important characteristics of quality that could not be quantified. If you look at my posts, especially in the early days of the blog, you will see lots of material on this topic.
My interests on quality had always gone beyond industrial products, and the last few posts I wrote and my return to creativity and innovation are an indication of that. I still have constant gripes about the products of industry, mostly resulting from industry's short term desire to make money. I am in the middle of one right now, based on the software in my Mac computer. When I began working on my book a couple of years ago, I resolved not to upgrade my operating system or various programs until I was done, because I wanted to focus on the writing. But of course I could not get away with that. My many editors did upgrade, which resulted in my having to learn different tricks in layout, track changes, and such things, upgrade Photoshop, etc. Now that I am finished I have upgraded the operating system and seem to bump into continuous pesky little changes that reflect ideas software people had that seemed to them to increase the usefulness of the computer. Phooey. Computers are tools, like pianos or airplane controls. Once you learn how to use them, you don’t want to come up against minor changes.
But improving quality, whether it concerns can openers or the overall quality of life, depends on creativity and innovation. And many problems these days involve very large numbers of people. Evidence is in your newspapers, and has to do with complex problems such as medical care, war, climate change, traffic, housing, education, and so on. I have theories about why such problems are becoming so obvious, and I mention this in my last few posts. They have to do with increasing populations, major changes in technology, and the relative slowness of evolution (which I believe in absolutely). I have given talks on this and am writing a book with has the working title of Homo Demi Sapiens (half wise humans). I agree that we are the smartest form of life so far (assuming we define what “smart” means, but do not think that we are as smart as we think we are. We are equipped with habits of many years ago when life was simpler, and not equipped well to solve many contemporary problems when it comes to change, even though we are responsible for much of this change. We have major blocks.
As an example, we respond to complex problems very slowly and underestimate the time, effort, and expense of solving them. Think of medical care, a properly demanded service these days involving a wide variety and large numbers of people on the care side, even more various and numbers of care seekers, and a relatively small number of people in the government that have practiced medicine or been seriously ill. We are now coming up on an election, in which few candidates or their advisers are actively involved in medical care. As you know, we have had a medical program entitled Affordable Medical Care (Obama Care) for ten years. It seems to be working, with some problems that can be diminished over time. But two years ago, Trump was elected, vowing to stop Obama Care and put in place a Terrific Health Program (Trump Care? For which he gave no details). Now, as a comparison, we seem to have a high regard for the intelligence of the British, and they have a health care program called the National Health Service. It was put into place in 1948, over 70 years ago, and they are still working on improving it.
We seem to be wired to think in the short term. That probably worked 30,000 years ago when we hunted and gathered in small tribes. It does not work now. It is a huge conceptual block in our solving major problems. If we wipe out species with our large numbers (including ourselves) they will not come back. If we pollute our environment beyond a certain point, that species may be us. Our kids are not going to solve these large problems, because they too will be thinking in the short term (their life span)
As a rather amusing comment on this short term view, I was working at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, When John F. Kennedy announced that the U.S. was going to put a person on the moon in ten years. JPL had been traditionally occupied with rocket and jet propulsion for the army and was instantly made part of NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and told to perform a number of unmanned/womanned spacecraft missions leaning toward getting human passengers there and back.
This was an amazing challenge for the newly named NASA. No one was even sure of the exact location of the moon, much less how to control the temperature of a spacecraft, provide one with power, control it over long distances, or build a system strong enough to people there and back and survive the necessary launch and landing. But it happened, partly boosted by the “Space Race” with Russia, partly by a nasty congressional investigation when the first six Ranger spacecraft failed in their mission, and partially because of amazing public interest in, and support of the mission
But one day, early in the project, some of we then young engineers were talking to a wise and elder engineer about how in the world the Aerospace business was going to accomplish this mission in such a short time, He explained to us that it was an important and expensive project and if you wanted to get a lot of money from congress, you should propose something heroic that members of congress could point to as a high point of their congressonal career. There was wisdom there. Congress is probably a bit loath to commit large amounts of money for projects to be completed 50 years from now.
When I am talking about such things as global warming or polluted seas, people often tell me “let the kids worry about it”. A suicidal approach. We have to develop the skill of pursuing large scale projects that outlive us as individuals and affect large groups of people—long term thinking about large populations.
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