Musings of an Analyst

Over the years, I have enjoyed studying topics, like the Civil War, that are not directly related to my career as part of my approach of seeking to improve.  Shelby Foote once said “The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things…”  Lincoln’s speech at Cooper Union, the Gettysburg Address, and his second inaugural all prompt reflection for me in different ways.  While there are lots of opinions on the value or appropriateness in seeking to learn from war-time leaders and war-time experience, I have found that there are lessons I can personally learn from those leaders and those periods.  Shelby Foote also stated that “Grant was something rare in that or any war. He could learn from experience.”  While, I am not U.S. Grant, I have found that it helps me to seek to learn from experience.  In the vein of seeking to learn from experience, I have felt for years that Robert E. Lee had an impressive ability to lead and manage large organizations.  As part of a class that I took on leadership lessons from the Battle of Gettysburg, I took away an understanding Robert E. Lee thought “My duty is to prepare the troops and ensure they are in the right position.  Then, I leave the rest to providence.”  Whenever I read about Lee, I often ask myself “How?  How did he do that?”  In my quest to try to answer these questions, I came across a series of books by Douglas Southall Freeman called “Lee’s Lieutenants” that helped me on my personal journey.

My takeaway from these books is that there are parallels between Lee’s approach and the “generalship of engineering” that J.E. Gordon referenced and that Michael Griffin built upon.  Early in the civil war, according to Freeman, the Confederate army had numerous instances of “poor staff work” that led to groups not knowing what they needed to do, when they needed to act, or how they were to coordinate with other groups.  This “poor staff work” led to poor performance in the lead up to campaigns and during the campaigns.  By contrast, Lee stressed this staff work as part of his broader theme of ensuring the troops were ready.  Lee’s mastery wasn’t just an understanding of strategy and tactics.  He understood the importance of ensuring groups were well fed, equipped, and understood what they were supposed to do.

The study of Lee and how we worked with his team reminded me of the “Two Cultures” of Engineering that Michael Griffin described in his March 2007 lecture at Purdue.  In this paper, Griffin talked about the “art and science” of system engineering and how those two cultures work together.  Requirements definition, verification plans, interface definition, and change control processes are often associated with the science of system engineering.  However, Griffin also described the importance of the “art” of engineering or the “generalship of engineering” that is required to will a new system into existence in a way that ensures the system will work safely and as expected.  This is more than ensuring that each individual analysis has been done correctly.  It is ensuring that all of the analyses, designs, and decisions have resulted in a coherent system.  The “staff work” that Lee used to ensure his groups were prepared and in the right place.  This “staff work” is analogous to the “science” of system engineering.  But, just like good “staff work” wasn’t enough on its own, good system engineering “science” isn’t enough on its own either.  It needs to be paired with the “art” of system engineering or the “generalship of engineering” that is analogous to the strategic planning that Lee (and other good generals) apply.  In the case of Lee, this took the form of positioning and application of reserves.  In good program management, the recipe is very similar.  In the “generalship of engineering,” the application of reserves often takes the form of strategic application of margins, redundancy, and an intrinsic understanding of how sensitivities and uncertainties interact with the margins and redundancies.

In December of 1961, Feynman said “Today we do not have the power of expression to tell a student how to understand physics physically! We can write the laws, but we still can’t say how to understand them physically. The only way you can understand physics physically, because of our lack of machinery for expressing this, is to follow the dull, Babylonian way of doing a whole lot of problems until you get the idea.”  In 2007, Griffin talked about the parallels to engineering.  He contended that there isn’t a well-defined way of teaching the “generalship of engineering.”  For me, this brings us back to the wisdom of Grant.  I have tried to learn the “generalship of engineering” by seeking to learn from experience.  My own experience and that of others.  For me, this has taken the form of an ongoing effort to learn from my own successes and failures.  It often has required me to revisit and relearn topics that I studied many years ago.  For me, I have learned to seek to apply John Dewey’s quote “We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflecting on experience.”  I learn and grow from reflecting on my experiences and seeking to apply the experiences of others to what I am doing today.  Sometimes, this is as simple as reflecting on how I can better get my team prepared and into the right position.  Sometimes, it is asking myself if it is time to “leave the rest to providence” and let the team perform.  Sometimes, it is thinking about what I can learn from the importance of good “staff work” for effective integration.  But for me, the most successful approach has been to seek to learn from reflecting on experience.