Archive for April, 2014
The Onagawa Reactor Non-Meltdown
Posted by Bill Storage in Risk Management on April 19, 2014
On March 11, 2011, the strongest earthquake in Japanese recorded history hit Tohuku, leaving about 15,000 dead. The closest nuclear reactor to the quake’s epicenter was the Onagawa Nuclear Power Station operated by Tohoku Electric Power Company. As a result of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that destroyed the town of Onagawa, the Onagawa nuclear facility remained intact and shut itself down safely, without incident. The Onagawa nuclear facility was the vicinity’s only safe evacuation destination. Residents of Onagawa left homeless by the natural disasters sought refuge in the facility, where its workers provided food.
The more famous Fukushima nuclear facility was about twice as far from the earthquake’s epicenter. The tsunami at Fukushima was slightly less severe. Fukushimia experienced three core meltdowns, resulting in evacuation of 300,000 people. The findings of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission have been widely published. They conclude that Fukushima failed to meet the most basic safety requirements, had conducted no valid probabilistic risk assessment, had no provisions for containing damage, and that its regulators operated in a network of corruption, collusion, and nepotism. Kiyoshi Kurokawa, Chairman of the commission stated:
THE EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI of March 11, 2011 were natural disasters of a magnitude that shocked the entire world. Although triggered by these cataclysmic events, the subsequent accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant cannot be regarded as a natural disaster. It was a profoundly manmade disaster – that could and should have been foreseen and prevented.
Only by grasping [the mindset of Japanese bureaucracy] can one understand how Japan’s nuclear industry managed to avoid absorbing the critical lessons learned from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. It was this mindset that led to the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant.
The consequences of negligence at Fukushima stand out as catastrophic, but the mindset that supported it can be found across Japan.
Despite these findings, the world’s response to Fukushima has been much more focused on opposition to nuclear power than on opposition to corrupt regulatory government bodies and the cultures that foster them.
Two scholars from USC, Airi Ryu and Najmedin Meshkati, recently published “Why You Haven’t Heard About Onagawa Nuclear Power Station after the Earthquake and Tsunami of March 11, 2011,” their examination of the contrasting safety mindsets of TEPCO, the firm operating the Fukushima nuclear plant, and Tohoku Electric Power, the firm operating Onagawa.
Ryu and Meshkati reported vast differences in personal accountability, leadership values, work environments, and approaches to decision-making. Interestingly, they found even Tohuko Electric to be weak in setting up an environment where concerns could be raised and where an attitude of questioning authority was encouraged. Nevertheless, TEPCO was far inferior to Tohoku Electric in all other safety culture traits.
Their report is worth a read for anyone interested in the value of creating a culture of risk management and the need for regulatory bodies to develop non-adversarial relationships with the industries they oversee, something I discussed in a recent post on risk management.
Incommensurability and the Design-Engineering Gap
Posted by Bill Storage in Engineering, Innovation management, Interdisciplinary teams on April 4, 2014
Those who conceptualize products – particularly software – often have the unpleasant task of explaining their conceptual gems to unimaginative, sanctimonious engineers entrenched in the analytic mire of in-the-box thinking. This communication directs the engineers to do some plumbing and flip a few switches that get the concept to its intended audience or market… Or, at least, this is how many engineers think they are viewed by designers.
Truth is, engineers and creative designers really don’t speak the same language. This is more than just a joke. Many posts here involve philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn’s idea of incommensurability between scientific paradigms also fits the design-engineering gap well. Those who claim the label, designers, believe design to be a highly creative, open-ended process with no right answer. Many engineers, conversely, understand design – at least within their discipline – to mean a systematic selection of components progressively integrated into an overall system, guided by business constraints and the laws of nature and reason. Disagreement on the meaning of design is just the start of the conflict.
Kuhn concluded that the lexicon of a discipline constrains the problem space and conceptual universe of that discipline. I.e., there is no fundamental theory of meaning that applies across paradigms. The meaning of expressions inside a paradigm comply only with the rules of that paradigm. Says Kuhn, “Conceptually, the world is our representation of our niche, the residence of the particular human community with whose members we are currently interacting” (The Road Since Structure, 1993, p. 103). Kuhn was criticized for exaggerating the extent to which a community’s vocabulary and word usage constrains the thoughts they are able to think. Kuhn saw this condition as self-perpetuating, since the discipline’s constrained thoughts then eliminate any need for expansion of its lexicon. Kuhn may have overplayed his hand on incommensurability, but you wouldn’t know it from some software-project kickoff meetings I’ve attended.
This short sketch, The Expert, written and directed by Lauris Beinerts, portrays design-engineering incommensurability from the perspective of the sole engineer in a preliminary design meeting.
See also: Debbie Downer Doesn’t Do Design
Arianna Huffington, Wisdom, and Stoicism 1.0
Posted by Bill Storage in Uncategorized on April 3, 2014
Arianna Huffington spoke at The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco last week. Interviewed by Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg, Huffington spoke mainly on topics in her recently published Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder. 2500 attendees packed Davies Symphony Hall. Several of us were men.
Huffington began with the story of her wake-up call to the idea that success is killing us. She told of collapsing from exhaustion, hitting the corner of her desk on the way down, gashing her forehead and breaking her cheek bone.
She later realized that “by any sane definition of success, if you are lying in a pool of blood on the floor of your office you’re not a success.”
After this epiphany Huffington began an inquiry into the meaning of success. The first big change was realizing that she needed much more sleep. She joked that she now advises women to sleep their way to the top. Sleep is a wonder drug.
Her reexamination of success also included personal values. She referred to ancient philosophers who asked what is a good life. She explicitly identified her current doctrine with that of the Stoics (not to be confused with modern use of the term stoic). “Put joy back in our everyday lives,” she says. She finds that we have shrunken the definition of success down to money and power, and now we need to expand it again. Each of us needs to define success by our own criteria, hence the name of her latest book. The third metric in her book’s title includes focus on well-being, wisdom, wonder, and giving.
Refreshingly (for me at least) Huffington drew repeatedly on ancient western philosophy, mostly that of the Stoics. In keeping with the Stoic style, her pearls often seem self-evident only after the fact:
“The essence of what we are is greater than whatever we are in the world.”
Take risk. See failure as part of the journey, not the opposite of success. (paraphrased)
I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to dance better than myself.
“We may not be able to witness our own eulogy, but we’re actually writing it all the time, every day.”
“It’s not ‘What do I want to do?’, it’s ‘What kind of life do I want to have?”
“Being connected in a shallow way to the entire world can prevent us from being deeply connected to those closest to us, including ourselves.”
“‘My life has been full of terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.'” (citing Montaigne)
As you’d expect, Huffington and Sandberg suggested that male-dominated corporate culture betrays a dearth of several of the qualities embodied in Huffington’s third metric. Huffington said the most popular book among CEOs is the Chinese military treatise, The Art of War. She said CEOs might do better to read children’s books like Silverstein’s The Giving Tree or maybe Make Way for Ducklings. Fair enough; there are no female Bernie Madoffs.
I was pleasantly surprised by Huffington. I found her earlier environmental pronouncements to be poorly conceived. But in this talk on success, wisdom, and values, she shone. Huffington plays the part of a Stoic well, though some of the audience seemed to judge her more of a sophist. One attendee asked her if she really believed that living the life she identified in Thrive could have possibly led to her current success. Huffington replied yes, of course, adding that she, like Bill Clinton, found they’d made all their biggest mistakes while tired.
Huffington’s quotes above align well with the ancients. Consider these from Marcus Aurelius, one of the last of the great Stoics:
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.
Confine yourself to the present.
Be content to seem what you really are.
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
I particularly enjoyed Huffington’s association of sense-of-now, inner calm, and wisdom with Stoicism, rather than, as is common in Silicon Valley, with a misinformed and fetishized understanding of Buddhism. Further, her fare was free of the intellectualization of mysticism that’s starting to plague Wisdom 2.0. It was a great performance.
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Preach not to others what they should eat, but eat as becomes you, and be silent. – Epictetus
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