Musings of an Analyst

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  • Engineering generalship, Robert E. Lee, and the “Two Cultures of Engineering”

    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…

  • Systems, Change, and The Revenge of the Bureaucracy

    In my career thus far, I have gotten the experience working in a number of different organizations and a number of different organizational constructs. I have learned lessons from each. Recently, I have been reflecting on how to organize those lessons and how to apply them to enable better outcomes. As I have thought about…

  • Similarity and Synergy, but Not the Same

    One of my mentors was often encouraging me and the others he was guiding to broaden your beam.  In various ways, he was always encouraging us to learn more, widen our aperture, understand how our efforts fit in the bigger picture, and to better understand the other parts of the big picture.  At some point, this led…

  • Don’t let the house stand in the way of the project

    My father’s recent passing has me reflecting on some of the things that he taught me that I am only able to begin to fully appreciate as I get older.  He owned and managed a plumbing, heating, and air conditioning business for decades.  On breaks and during the summer, I worked in various jobs for him until…

  • Analogies, things I know, things I don’t know, and how those things interact

    Years ago, one of my favorite mentors shared his view that if you don’t understand an idea well enough to explain it using an analogy, you don’t understand it.  In hindsight, I think this was his version of the quote attributed to Einstein that “if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”  Over…

  • Certainty, uncertainty, and what we choose to believe

    It seems that people have been inventing stories to make sense of events for as long as people have been.  Nassem Taleb, in Fooled by Randomness, commented about people’s tendency to create narratives to explain events.  In his view, people tended to create deterministic narratives to explain random events or outcomes that resulted from uncertainty. Taleb believes that “You…

  • Deadbands, Feedback, and Organizational Dysfunction

    Years ago, I decided to accept a position that led to me transitioning from a high-volume industry with frequent product changeover and intense market forces to a low-volume industry with greatly reduced connectivity to market dynamics.  My boss at the time provided me a bit of perspective and advice that has stuck with me over the…

  • Complexity, control systems, and how I think about applying ideas from control systems to organizational dynamics

    Real systems are messy, noisy, difficult to measure, and can be a challenge to control.  Organizations and organizational dynamics often exhibit analogous behavior. In control systems, it is common to analyze linear single input single output systems.  There is a lot that can be done with those tools.  However, applying these tools comes with accepting some compromises.  Addressing complexity…

  • Where are we, where should we go, and how do we get there?  GN&C systems as a metaphor for organizational management

    Organizations, like spacecraft, rockets, and airplanes, rely on guidance, navigation, and control systems. Recently, I have been thinking about the similarities between guidance, navigation and control (GN&C) systems, the management and leadership systems in organizations, and how learnings from one type of system might be useful to the other type of system.  At their core, GN&C…

  • Feynman, the Hagakure, and the potential for propulsion via farts

    When I was in college, much of the physics curriculum didn’t quite take for me.  As I got later in my academic career, some of the ideas started to make more sense.  Now, many years later, I have been seeking to relearn some of the material.  To be honest, some of that relearning is probably learning things for…