SideWise Thinking

Hume’s Guillotine (Red Herrings Part 23)

2012-01-24T06:00:00.012-05:00

Part 23 of Red Herrings covers still more responses to arguments that distract from the argument rather than address it directly. This week, the is-ought problem.

Is-Ought Problem

The “is-ought problem” is also known as Hume’s Law or Hume’s Guillotine, first articulated by Scottish philosopher David Hume in his 1739 work A Treatise of Human Nature.

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.

As in the case of many logical fallacies, it’s not necessarily the case that “is” precludes “ought,” but rather that “is” doesn’t constitute a sufficient proof by itself. To reach a conclusion of “ought” requires additional argument.

The problem is easier in goal-setting than in morality. For example, if you want to win a race, then you ought to run quickly. However, whether you ought to want to win in the first place is a different question.

All-Natural (Red Herrings Part 22)

2012-01-17T06:00:00.003-05:00

Part 22 of Red Herrings covers still more responses to arguments that distract from the argument rather than address it directly. This week, the appeal to nature.

Appeal to Nature

There’s nothing inherently wrong in appealing to nature as part of an argument, but it becomes a red herring logical fallacy when it turns into an unwarranted assumption. The form of the logical fallacy is:

N is natural.
Therefore, N is good or right.

U is unnatural.
Therefore, U is bad or wrong.

A medicine made with “all natural” ingredients could well contain arsenic and uranium, which hardly qualify as safe. The definition of “natural” itself can be twisted using judgmental language, which you’ll see in various arguments against homosexuality.

But that’s just a load of santorum.

I Am Curious (Yellow) (Red Herrings Part 21)

2012-01-10T06:00:00.001-05:00

Part 21 of Red Herrings covers still more responses to arguments that distract from the argument rather than address it directly. This week, the naturalistic fallacy.

Naturalistic fallacy

The naturalistic fallacy was first described and named by British philosopher G. E. Moore in his 1903 book Principia Ethica. It describes the problem of trying to prove an ethical claim by appealing to a definition of “good” in terms of natural properties such as “pleasant,” “more evolved,” or “desirable.” For example, if something is both pleasant and good, inferring that “pleasant” and “good” are therefore the same quality is one bridge too far.

Moore stands in contrast to philosophers who argue that “good” can be defined in terms of natural properties we already understand. Instead, Moore argues that properties are either simple or complex, and complex properties are made from simple ones. Complex properties can be defined by breaking out their simple components, but the simple ones are indefinable. You can define “yellow” as the color of a ripe lemon, or as the primary color between green and orange on the visible spectrum, or as electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength between 570 and 590 nanometers, but none of those are sufficient to help a blind person perceive what you’re talking about. As Justice Potter famously observed about pornography, “I know it when I see it.” But that doesn’t enable one to produce a meaningful operational definition.

Thank God It's Friday! (Red Herrings, Part 20)

2012-01-03T06:00:00.001-05:00

Part 20 of Red Herrings covers still more responses to arguments that distract from the argument rather than address it directly. This week, judgmental language.

Judgmental language

You can’t take a management or communications course without hearing about the dangers of judgmental language, but it’s a red herring fallacy as well. Like all red herrings, judgmental language skips over the actual descriptive part of the argument and rushes right to the conclusion.

“He hates me” is judgmental language, not because it’s necessarily false, but because it cites the conclusion without citing the evidence. What’s the evidence that he does, indeed, hate you? Perhaps he called you names, he told someone else that he hated you, he went to your boss to complain about you, or he let the air out of your tires. Those are descriptions of behavior, and at some point they add up to sufficient evidence to draw the conclusion that yes, indeed, he does hate you. Alternatively, it could mean something else altogether, such as a desire to take your job or win a promotion. It’s not personal, it’s strictly business.

Judgmental language criticizes or praises, condemns or applauds, evaluates or interprets the behaviors (actions, deeds, sayings) of human individuals and groups. “Obama is a Kenyan socialist” neatly avoids the requirement of citing evidence and goes right for the jugular. Political propaganda tends to consist of nothing but.

There are a number of problems with judgmental language. First, your conclusion may be wrong. Second, judgmental language tends to be resisted and to provoke arguments. Avoid “red flag” words and phrases. Try to stay away from “should” and “ought.” Go with the Joe Friday technique: just the facts, ma’am.

A Cute Angle (Fallacies/Red Herrings Part 19)

2011-12-27T06:00:00.001-05:00

Part 19 of Red Herrings covers still more responses to arguments that distract from the argument rather than address it directly. This week, the Genetic Fallacy.

Genetic fallacy

A guy I went to high school with used to claim that calling someone “cute” was an insult, because “cute” originally meant “bowlegged.” According to the OED, that’s wrong. “Cute” is an aphetic (initial vowel dropped) version of “acute,” and originally referred to someone sharp, clever, or quick-witted. A secondary meaning lists “cute” as a synonym of cur, a worthless dog.

Of course, that’s not the sense in which we most commonly use the word today. If I refer to someone as “cute,” I don’t mean bowlegged, clever, or dog-like — I’m usually referring to someone’s physical appearance. (There’s a sarcastic version — “Are you being cute?” — that refers back to the original meaning, but tone of voice usually makes it clear which meaning we intend.)

The genetic fallacy is the argument that because a word or phrase once meant something different, it continues to mean the same thing, regardless of how usage has evolved. The legend that a “rule of thumb” describes the maximum thickness of a stick with which it was permissible for a man to beat his wife has been debunked repeatedly, but even if it were true, it’s not how we use the term today.

Genetic fallacies aren’t always about language. Australia may have been settled in part by British criminals (as was Georgia), but any conclusion about today’s Australians can’t rest on the legal status of its founders.

We Stand on the Shoulders of Pygmies (Fallacies/Red Herrings Part 18)

2011-12-20T05:00:00.000-05:00

Part 18 of Red Herrings covers still more responses to arguments that distract from the argument rather than address it directly.

Chronological snobbery

We stand, Newton observed, on the shoulders of giants, but intellectually we tend to treat them as pygmies. The practice, for example, of using leeches in medicine isn’t just medieval, it’s positively ancient, with citations going back 2,500 years. When leeching went out of fashion (the late 19th century), it was obvious in retrospect how stupid these ancients were. After all, in those days they still believed the earth was flat.

The red herring of chronological snobbery is the argument that because A is an old argument, dating back to when people believed the obviously-false B, A must therefore also be false. The fact that some ancients (though fewer than you’d suppose) believed the earth was flat doesn’t in itself constitute a valid argument against anything other ancient idea. If you want to discredit A, you have to show it’s false: the proof that B is false may be valid, but utterly beside the point.

Leeches, after all, came back into medical fashion in the 1980s. It turns out that leeches are helpful in the aftermath of microsurgeries, promoting healing by allowing fresh, oxygenated blood to reach the area. The fallacy of chronological snobbery would have led investigators away from looking at a clearly outmoded idea.

Anything You Don’t Say May Be Held Against You! (Red Herrings, Part 17)

2011-12-13T15:30:00.000-05:00

Part 17 of Red Herrings covers still more responses to arguments that distract from the argument rather than address it directly. This week we cover the argument from silence.

Argumentum e Silentio

If I refuse to answer the question, what conclusions can you draw? Unlike most red herring fallacies, this one depends on the circumstances. In pure reasoning, a conclusion drawn from the silence of another is automatically fallacious. But in abductive reasoning (the process of drawing logical inferences), however, it is sometimes quite reasonable to draw meaning from the absence of communication.

If I claim to be an expert speaker of German, but won’t tell you the proper German phrase for happy birthday, which is more probable: (a) I know, but won’t tell you out of spite, or (b) I really don’t know and my claims to be a German linguist are overblown? Common sense suggests (b) is more likely than (a) — after all, it would be so easy for me to just tell you and move on. On the other hand, if I claim to know my wife’s password but refuse to tell you, it’s unreasonable to conclude that because I won’t tell you, I don’t know.

A fallacious use of the argument from silence is to shift the burden of proof. Bertrand Russell wrote that if he claimed a teapot were orbiting the Sun somewhere between the Earth and Mars, it would be unreasonable to expect others to believe him on the grounds they couldn’t prove him wrong. In other words, your silence in being unable to disprove an argument doesn’t constitute proof that the argument was right all along.

Historians sometimes use the argument from silence in drawing conclusions about what one group of people knew about another, on the grounds that some facts are so natural that their omission legitimately implies ignorance.

In American jurisprudence, the right to silence has the effect of barring the argument from silence, although there are some subtle ways to work it in.

Impure Motives (Part 16 of Fallacies/Red Herrings)

2011-12-06T10:36:00.000-05:00

A short installment this week. Part 16 of Red Herrings covers still more responses to arguments that distract from the argument rather than address it directly. This week we cover the appeal to motive.

Appeal to Motive

Scientist A says that man-made climate change is a real threat. Scientist A is a candidate for tenure at a well-known university, and the head of his department believes the same thing. This means that Scientist A’s motives are impure, and therefore his argument is false.

This is the appeal to motive, another subcategory of the argumentum ad hominem. Its special feature is that it’s only necessary to show that there is a possibility of a motive, however small. What’s missing is proof that (a) the motive actually exists, (b) if it does exist, it played a role in formulating the argument and conclusion, and (c) any other proof or evidence offered is ipso facto invalid.

It’s related to general claims of conflict of interest. In the run up to the Supreme Court hearings on the Affordable Care Act, accusations of conflict of interest have been leveled at three justices, two conservative and one liberal. Showing the potential for a conflict of interest isn’t the same thing as demonstrating that the votes of these justices is necessarily corrupt. In the particular instance, it’s more likely the case that the predispositions of the justices predate the events and actions leading to the charge.

Repugnicans and Libtards (Fallacies, Part 15)

2011-11-29T06:00:00.010-05:00

Returning now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, the fifteenth installment of my series on argumentative fallacies continues our list of red herrings — responses to arguments that distract from the argument rather than address it directly. This week we cover the abusive fallacy, the appeal to equality, and the appeal to accomplishment.

Abusive Fallacy

Repugnicans and libtards — who could possibly take seriously anything they have to say? The abusive fallacy is an extreme form of argumentum ad hominem in which name-calling overcomes every other part of the discussion. The objective is to smear the individual and group so completely that anything they have to say is discredited.

When someone surrenders to the abusive fallacy, any pretense of rational discussion goes out the window. If Occupy Wall Street protestors are “dirty, smelly hippies,” there’s no reason to address the substance of any of their arguments. Similarly, if there’s nothing to the Tea Party but astroturf racists, then nothing they say need be taken seriously either.

Appeal to Equality

What does “equal rights” mean? After all, people aren’t “equal” in most normative senses. We aren’t all of the same height, or the same age, or the same weight, or the same IQ, or the same income, or the same education. Though I subscribe fully to the moral concept of equal rights, the logical issues of equality are more complex. For example, I believe in equality of marriage rights, but I don’t accept that a fetus should be considered legally equal to a human being. I believe in freedom, but I’m willing for society to impose imprisonment or other penalties for people who commit certain offenses. Is this logically inconsistent?

No. It’s an example of a logical fallacy known as the “appeal to equality.” In other words, citing “equality” as proof that Person A should be treated the same as Person B is insufficient to make the case.

The argument that gays and lesbians should be permitted to marry, or that a fetus deserves the civil rights of a person, requires additional reasoning. This is important, because we all — properly — make distinctions. The murderer does not have the same rights as a non-murderer; a child does not have the same rights as an adult.

It’s not inconsistent or logically inappropriate to make judgments and distinctions; in fact, it’s required.

Appeal to Accomplishment

In 1970, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling published Vitamin C and the Common Cold, in which he claimed that very large doses of Vitamin C had a variety of health effects. It’s probably fair to say that if I had written that book, no one would have taken it seriously.

The appeal to accomplishment is the logical fallacy that the accomplishments of the arguer serve as evidence in favor of his or her claim, whether or not the claim is necessarily related to the area of accomplishment.

While it’s reasonable to take a close look at a proposition because Expert A claims it’s true, it’s important not to confuse that with the belief that Expert A is necessarily right.

Wikipedia Mon Amour

2011-11-22T04:00:00.024-05:00

The Problem With Wikipedia (xkcd), Randall Munroe
http://xkcd.com/214/

My late uncle Jack Killheffer was science editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica in the 1970s and 1980s. I remember his office in downtown Chicago as a sea of papers. Piles of documents filled most of the floor space. I’ve never been a clean desk person, but his desk was an archeological dig. He was a chain smoker; his ashtray was the size of a small dinner plate and resembled a fireplace that hadn’t been cleaned regularly.

I thought he had the world’s coolest job.

I’ve always liked encyclopedias. Before Uncle Jack joined Britannica, we had an Encyclopedia Americana. I browsed through the volumes randomly throughout my childhood. I seldom forget what I read; I can still trot out all sorts of odd information gleaned randomly from encyclopedias.

The oldest surviving encyclopedia is Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia. He hadn’t quite finished proofing it when he died in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. Given the Greek root of the word (ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία, “general education”), it’s clear his was not the first, and he certainly wasn’t the last. De Nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae ("The Wedding of Mercury and Philologia"), first of the medieval encyclopedias, came out in either the 4th or 5th centuries.

The Arabic renaissance produced the Encyclopedia of the Bretheren of Purity; the Chinese in the 11th century released the Four Great Books of Song (Book 4, The Prime Tortoise of the Record Bureau, contained 9.4 million Chinese characters in 1,000 volumes).

The invention of printing triggered an explosion, including Chambers' Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1728), and the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D'Alembert (1751). Of the great encyclopedias of the 18th century, the Britannica is the oldest survivor, dating to 1768.

I’m proud to note that the first encyclopedia published in the United States was Dobson’s Encyclopedia (1788-1797), published by Philadelphia printer Thomas Dobson (no relation, alas). It was, for the most part, a rip-off of the 3rd edition of the Britannica, with various adjustments made to correct a British bias. Washington, Jefferson, Burr, and Hamilton all owned copies.

Although encyclopedias have a reputation for being objective, thorough, and reliable, accusations (some solid, some less so) of unfairness and inaccuracy have been leveled at just about all of them at one time or another. That’s unsurprising. In our long discussion of cognitive biases both here and here, we learned that misinformation and misperception were fundamental parts of the human condition.

Uncle Jack told me stories about the sensitive political negotiations that took place in pure science entries. People are passionate about facts and interpretations, and both are subject to argument. When I worked for the National Air and Space Museum (NASM), there were similar issues. The Smithsonian’s official position on the relative achievements of Wilbur and Orville Wright versus Smithsonian secretary and pioneer aviation figure Samuel Pierpont Langley is shaped in part by the terms of a contract between Orville Wright and the Smithsonian that contains the following:

"Neither the Smithsonian Institution or its successors, nor any museum or other agency, bureau or facilities administered for the United States of America by the Smithsonian Institution or its successors shall publish or permit to be displayed a statement or label in connection with or in respect of any aircraft model or design of earlier date than the Wright Aeroplane of 1903, claiming in effect that such aircraft was capable of carrying a man under its own power in controlled flight."

There’s been some minor controversy over the years as to whether NASM is unfairly taking sides, but the curators I knew assured me that as far as they were concerned, the facts of the matter lined up just fine with the language of the contract. The Langley claims should have been repudiated. The Wrights were first to fly.

Working in original-source history helped me develop a sense of how much of what we know is the result of a messy and imperfect process. We muddle our way to knowledge, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. We don’t have too many other options. Our knowledge not only isn’t perfect, it can’t be.

For that reason, I’ve often felt that the criticisms leveled against Wikipedia for inaccuracy and bias are excessive — though that doesn’t mean they’re wrong. All encyclopedias are crowdsourced; Wikipedia differs only in that the crowd isn’t paid. Well, not in money, anyway. There are many rewards in writing for an encyclopedia, not least the imprimatur of authenticity and accuracy conveyed by the brand name.

We all know that Wikipedia doesn’t count as a final authority — if you can’t confirm what you say from a more reliable source, no one will take you seriously. But for quick reference, an overview, a list of sources, and some basic preliminary data, it’s unbeatable. I probably use it 8-10 times every single day — four times for this article alone. If my factual need is trivial and extreme accuracy not necessary, that’s enough. When I need more, I dig deeper.

That’s true not only of Wikipedia, of course, but of any other source of information. All data — and even moreso, its interpretation — is suspect. Only by consulting multiple sources and striving for self-awareness of one’s own cognitive biases is it possible to arrive at some reasonable approximation of truth.

Wikipedia culture deservedly throws suspicion on its contributors. A neutral point of view is essential, but Wikipedia frowns most heavily on people receiving money for contributing to Wikipedia articles, ignoring many other sources of bias. There’s a large community of Wikipedia editors-for-hire (I know several of them myself), but the Wikipedia culture forces them to hide their conflicts rather than share them. Wikipedia vigilantes have been known to vandalize pages when a contributor is accused of taking money, but that doesn’t correct the problem, it makes it worse.

Bias is unavoidable, but the best cure for bias is sunlight. Wikipedia is large enough and important enough that it’s legitimate for people to earn money from it. There’s nothing new here; encyclopedia contributors pre-Wikipedia expected remuneration as a matter of course. It takes significant time, effort, and work to write and edit a good article. Volunteerism, as wonderful as it is, can only take you so far.

It’s important for bias and conflict of interest to be revealed, but not to be punished. The process of peer review and vigorous debate should be aimed not at expelling the biased, but rather toward greater accuracy, completeness, and consideration of all points of view.

Wikipedia is running one of its periodic fundraising campaigns now, and in the same way I contribute to public radio, I usually contribute to Wikipedia; I use it enough. I urge you to do the same. At the same time, I tend to think Wikipedia would do well to consider running Google-style ads; when done correctly, they add value to the search rather than corrupt it.

There’s nothing wrong with making money in the encyclopedia business. The most important thing is to get the information right.

The Ol' Yeller Maneuver (Managing Impossible Projects, Part 6 of 6)

2011-11-15T06:00:00.031-05:00

If You Build It, Will They Come?

Earlier, we discussed the story of the infamous automated baggage handling system at Denver International Airport (DIA), which burned through $250 million before being abandoned as unworkable.

There’s nothing inherently impossible about the concept of an automated baggage handling system, though obviously the implementation is tougher than it appears. No, this is the kind of project in which impossibility is situational: a function of the constraints. While we’ve focused on the Triple Constraints because of their universal application in project management, individual projects have other constraints as well.

The airlines themselves, oddly, had little initial involvement in the airport planning. This gave them substantial leverage later in the process. “If you build it, they will come” often carries a hefty price tag. In order to keep its costs down, United Airlines needed the baggage transfer system to take no longer than 45 minutes to route luggage among its flights.

In 1992, the automated baggage handling system was shoehorned into existing construction in what amounted to a “Hail Mary” play. In terms of project scope, the engineering involved amounted to a great leap forward from third-generation to sixth-generation technology.

Performance, obviously, was the project driver, with budget unavoidably the weak constraint. Significant cost and schedule overruns were guaranteed, and to a large extent acceptable — as long as performance goals were achieved.

So far, we have a very challenging project, but there’s no reason for a project manager to propose killing it. It’s not operationally impossible, and the value of closing the gap justifies a very high level of effort.

The Second Frog

The BAE project team officially recognized these key risks:

Very large scale of the project.
Enormous complexity.
Newness of the technology.
Large number of entities to be served by the system.
The high degree of technical and project definition uncertainty.

The most important risk, however, was not mentioned: the complex stakeholder environment. The initial project was simply to serve United. DIA management expanded the contract to cover all terminals. DIA rejected the BAE proposal to build a 50,000 square foot prototype. Scheduling issues with other construction activities caused huge conflict.

There’s the old joke about the two frogs who fell into pots of water. One pot had hot water, and the frog immediately jumped in. The other pot was warming slowly, so the other frog felt no urgency about escaping until it was too late.

BAE was the second frog.

Politically Impossible

Because the project was not impossible from an engineering perspective, the fact that it became operationally impossible because of the constraints of the stakeholder environment tended to escape notice until it’s too late.

On the other hand, political problems aren’t exactly unheard of. Project managers are supposed to perform a stakeholder analysis. This isn’t just about figuring out your customers — it’s about analyzing the political landscape.

The earlier we identify a risk or problem, the more options are available. If you accompany the sales team when bidding on a job, don’t confine yourself to a study of the technical issues. As project manager, you’re going to have to spend your days dealing with the people, and you can’t tell the players without a scorecard. If you detect political dangers, they need to be part of your risk analysis for the job. This need to affect pricing and schedule, not just for your sake as project manager, but for the sake of the entire job.

If you get into the job and find that these issues are getting out of control, you likely don’t have the power to get out of the problem by yourself. You need allies, and you need them to figure out the problem for themselves. Most project managers see reporting (no matter how necessary) as something that takes time away from doing the work. Reporting, however, is a strategic tool to lay the information groundwork with your stakeholder community to bring them toward the correct understanding of the real situation.

The Ol' Yeller Maneuver

The best way to kill a project is to help the key stakeholders and decision makers reach the conclusion on their own, rather than you telling them. Remember that “operationally impossible” means you can’t figure out an answer. Leave open the possibility that someone else might have an answer you’ve missed. Sometimes they do have an answer for you. And if they don’t, they’re more likely to agree with your assessment.

Sometimes canceling a project is peaceful, sometimes bloody. This one ended with mutual lawsuits. That’s a powerful argument for acting early when the project is likely to be operationally impossible.

So let’s wrap up. A project is operationally impossible if you can’t do it within the stated constraints. There might be too little time, insufficient or wrong resources, or unrealistic or wrong performance criteria.

Sometimes the constraints can be changed, be made more flexible, or in some cases ignored altogether. If the constraints can’t be changed, perhaps you can work around them or accomplish the project in spite of its barriers.

If the project’s still impossible — well, earlier I mentioned the idea of an American Movie Classics film festival of great project management movies. Apollo 13 is one candidate…but another is Ol’ Yeller. Sometimes a project manager’s job is to kill his own dog.

If the dog won’t hunt, and can’t be killed, the last solution is self-preservation. While captains are supposed to go down with their ships, we project managers are better off living to fight another day.

The Three Envelopes

There’s the old joke about the outgoing project manager who left three numbered envelopes in a drawer, and told his successor that those envelopes contained the answers to the next three crises the project would face.

Inside the first envelope was a note that read, “Blame your predecessor.” The new person often has flexibility denied to the person previously holding the bag. You may have better luck challenging project assumptions and constraints.

Inside the second envelope, the note read, “Reorganize the department,” because — let’s face it — shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic is a long, noble tradition.

And in the third envelope, the note read, “Prepare three envelopes.” If in the final analysis the project really is impossible, it’s time to get while the getting is still good.

And that’s how to manage an impossible project.

The End.

Getting Around the Constraints (Managing Impossible Projects, Part 5)

2011-11-08T06:00:00.027-05:00

The following series is adapted from a keynote I delivered at the Washington, DC, chapter of the Project Management Institute back in August. Parts also come from my book Creative Project Management (with Ted Leemann), published by McGraw-Hill. (Art by Baker and Hill Graphic Design.)

Managing Constraints

Constraints, operationally, are what stand between you and the completion of a successful project. If you think a given project may be impossible, it’s a function of the constraints you perceive. If the constraints (defined as the borders of the perceived box) can be modified, or if parts of it are optical illusions, then you may have new options available. The game has changed.

How can we change the envelope defined by our constraints? Logic suggests two possibilities. If the constraints are real and have flexibility, you can modify them. If the constraints are imaginary, or have elements in them that are not real, you can get around them. Multiple strategies exist for attacking each area, but they basically boil down to two: change the constraints or get around them.

(There is no "try.")

Change the Constraints

Analysis. Why is it your preferred option best (or sometimes least worst) for the organization? Does your preferred option cause collateral damage elsewhere in the project’s environment? How much of this is political? How do other people view this concern? You have to understand the complete picture to see all the options, and just as importantly, to see all the dangers.

Negotiation. Some constraints are subject to negotiation. If you’re bidding on a contract, there’s a price at which you can’t afford the business. On the other hand, sometimes our organization makes the choice on our behalf. “We’ve already got the contract, this is the scope of work, and this is how much we can spend to get it done.” Probe the constraints to see which are negotiable and which are fixed by circumstances.

Internally, negotiation is the process of making the business case. If you have force majeure to settle the argument, it’s not really negotiation. In negotiation, forcing is not an option. You can only win if you are able to help other people recognize and accept a victory of their own.

Problem solving. Sometimes constraints are decided, other times they simply are. When an organization prepares a budget, they necessarily make decisions among desirable objectives. They could give you more (or less) money; they choose not to. But sometimes the money isn’t there. They would choose to give you more money; they can’t. You can argue with decisions; you can’t argue (though many try) with facts. That’s a problem. Some problems can be solved. In the Apollo 13 case we discussed earlier, they needed a particular resource (a filter cover), but there was nothing at hand to do the job. Then someone remembered the astronauts wore socks.

Requirements management. There is an unfortunate sense in which written requirements too easily turn into holy writ. The purpose of requirements is to define operationally and specifically what the customer wants and wishes to pay for. There’s always a delicate balance between imposing the detail necessary for control and allowing the flexibility necessary for exceptional achievement.

Watch out for requirements that have outlived their usefulness, or had even become unproductive to the mission. A small change in a requirement may be of little consequence to the project’s quality, and still spell the difference between success and failure.

Get Around the Constraints

Creativity. Here is where positive brainstorming rejoins the flow. Systematic creativity – inspiration on time, on budget, and on spec – seems like a contradiction in terms, but professionals in many areas do it as a matter of course. The secret goes back to Thomas Edison’s famous ratio of one percent inspiration and 99% perspiration: creativity is something you can work at. Artists do rough sketches; writers do rough drafts; lightbulb inventors test filament after filament. It’s a process of discovery. As the old joke goes, Michelangelo created David by taking a big block of marble and chipping away all the pieces that didn’t look like David.

Exploiting holes. One of the tricks of structured creativity is understanding that some places are more likely to contain insights than others, and look there first. The flexibility of the weak constraint is one good source of insight. So is available slack or float on non-critical tasks. Weaknesses and cracks in the structure of constraints may be exploitable.

Different approaches. Insanity, Ross Perot famously observed, is doing the same thing over and over again and keep expecting different results. Is there a way around your current obstacle if you switch approaches?

Rethink assumptions. Assumptions can err on the side of optimism or pessimism. Conduct a sensitivity analysis of your assumptions: if it turns out to be true or false, how much impact will it have on your project? Investigate the assumptions with the most potential.

But sometimes a project really needs to die, and the project manager is often the one dispatched to do the dirty deed. There’s a skill to this, as well.

Next Week: The Ol' Yeller Maneuver

Orange Ropes (Managing Impossible Projects, Part 4)

2011-11-01T06:00:00.009-04:00

The following series is adapted from a keynote I delivered at the Washington, DC, chapter of the Project Management Institute back in August. Parts also come from my book Creative Project Management (with Ted Leemann), published by McGraw-Hill.

Sometimes in organizations there is a form of relentless optimism, the corporate cheerleader equivalent of “failure is not an option.” I appreciate the motivational value of positive thinking, but there’s a huge brainstorming value that’s often overlooked in negative thinking. You can’t figure out which constraints may be illusions until you make a list of constraints in the first place.

When people perceive the job they have been given is impossible, or the conditions under which they must labor are unfair or insufficient, it’s usually not a good idea to push optimism down their throats — too often, it backfires and makes the situation worse. It’s no use telling people not to think of negative things, it’s like me telling you not to think about the color orange or about an elephant.

(Are you thinking about an orange elephant now?)

Orange Ropes

Speaking of orange elephants, I don’t know how many of you have ever trained an elephant, but if you want to train an elephant you start with a baby elephant and an orange rope. The color is very important.

You tie the orange rope around the leg of the baby elephant, and fasten that to a stake in the ground. The baby elephant tries to get away, but he can’t break that orange rope.

Over the years, the baby elephant grows to full size, but he’s learned his lesson: you can’t break an orange rope. Now, you can take some flimsy, rotten rope, spray paint it orange, and the elephant will treat it as unbreakable. But if the elephant ever figures it out…he’s free.

Some constraints are fake, and others are real…but they change. Experience can be a wise teacher, or it can blind you to a new and different reality. That’s why I believe that negative brainstorming is a hugely overlooked tool for managing difficult or impossible projects.

Negative Brainstorming

A negative brainstorming process works just like a conventional brainstorming session. Participants offer potential ideas on a specific topic with no criticism or evaluation of ideas or suggestions allowed. The major difference in negative brainstorming is that the specific topic —and the focus of ideas — is negative.

In conventional brainstorming, the focus is on finding creative ways to solve the problem. In negative brainstorming, the focus is on finding all the obstacles, barriers, and events, including internal, external and self imposed, that could prevent completing the project as currently defined.

Here’s a list of good questions to get a negative brainstorming session started.

Why is this project impossible?
What are all the things we can’t possibly do?
What are all the things others can do that will prevent us from accomplishing this project?
What ideas can we think of that absolutely are not worth trying?
What’s the worst possible decision we could make right now?
What could we do to turn this project into a complete catastrophe?
Why are we doomed to fail?

In asking a negative question, I don’t mean to imply that the questions are necessarily accurate descriptors of reality. They don’t have to be. What the questions have to do is to correspond to the cognitive biases that keep us from finding a solution.

Doomed, But Hopeful

We may not in fact be “doomed to fail,” but a negative brainstorming exercise on “Why are we doomed to fail?” is a powerful way to bring the most serious risks and issues to the surface where our team can deal with them.

Negative questions like these can be utilized with all sorts of brainstorming processes, or techniques. Some approaches include having the participants respond in a round-robin style. Another approach is a simple free-for-all where participants offer ideas randomly. The leader can set a time limit or a target total number of ideas before concluding the process. The important thing is to concentrate on finding all the negative possibilities, rather than stop and try to solve the barriers as they are identified during the brainstorming phase of the process.

In negative brainstorming, it’s vitally important to encourage participants to offer even the most outrageous possibilities that could negatively impact the project. Our goal is to elevate concerns from the subconscious background into the conscious spotlight of project management, and we can only do that if we recognize what they are in the first place. If people feel criticized for stupid suggestions, the total number of suggestions will go down, including the not-stupid ones. That’s why, as in all brainstorming processes the initial phase is to gather ideas — not solve problems or criticize specific contributions.

After completing the negative brainstorming session, the evaluation process begins by taking each negative idea in turn and determining (1) if you can overcome the obstacle, (2) if so, how, and (3) if not, what then?

At least some (perhaps most) of the constraints, barriers, and issues you identify will turn out to be both real and solid. That’s completely normal. You are looking for the exceptions. In positive brainstorming, most ideas turn out to be of limited utility, but if you get one winner it can be a game changer.

In negative brainstorming, if most constraints turn out to be solid, but there are exceptions, the project can go from impossible to possible — occasionally even easy — in the blink of an eye.

The CHAOS Report (Managing Impossible Projects, Part 3)

2011-10-25T06:00:00.035-04:00

Photo: Baggage system, Denver International Airport

The following series is adapted from a keynote I delivered at the Washington, DC, chapter of the Project Management Institute back in August. Parts also come from my book Creative Project Management (with Ted Leemann), published by McGraw-Hill.

The annual Standish Group’s CHAOS Report, which tracks software project performance reported these abysmal numbers for 2009:

32% on time, on budget, to spec
44% finished late, over budget, or partially completed
24% failed, cancelled, or abandoned

Why do so many projects fail, either in part or in whole?

Certainly, there are badly managed projects — even some headed by PMPs. But it’s hard to blame a 68% defect rate on poor practitioners alone.

Sometimes the problem is the definition of success. By the logic of project management, the Leaning Tower of Pisa was an abysmal failure: late, over budget, and…well, aren’t buildings supposed to be straight? The Standish Group would clearly label the tower as a failed project, yet if the tower didn’t lean, who today would bother to visit?

The third reason, of course, is that the project was problematic to begin with — arguably or actually impossible. This can happen for a variety of reasons. In the case of Apollo 13, the constraints of time, resources, and performance were established by the situation, not by the will or desire of the project managers or owners. They were what they were — whether they were achievable was a separate issue.

In the Battle of the Bulge, the German Ardennes offensive had already begun. We would be able to get troops to the front to relieve the pressure on beleaguered First Army units, or we wouldn’t. Neither project managers nor project owners necessarily control the constraints that drive their projects.

Sometimes we’re just making a guess when we establish a project’s constraints. The original budget for Denver International Airport was $1.2 billion, and the original deadline was October 1993. The final price came in at $4.8 billion and the actual opening date was February 1995. (The infamous automated baggage system, budgeted at $186 million, wasn’t cancelled until 2005, by which time its construction costs were increasing at a staggering $1 million a day!)

Denver wasn’t an example of engineering or technical failure — no, not even the baggage system. The failure was driven by political considerations, including a nonstop war among several key stakeholders. When customer conflict generates mutually exclusive requirements, “impossible” becomes just another word for nothing left to lose.

In any event, we project managers are hired hands. Sometimes we may do double duty as customers or sponsors of our own projects, but when we put on our PMP hats, we’re here not to decide, but to execute. We are bound by the decisions and choices of others, and sometimes we start the project on the precipice of failure. After all, how many of you get to decide your own timelines, set your own budgets, and establish your own performance requirement?

I didn’t think so.

Still, you don’t want to be too quick to pull the trigger. Let’s imagine that you have a project and your experience tells you it can’t be done. Isn’t delaying the inevitable bad news just going to make the problem worse?

That depends on what you do in between receiving the assignment and giving the answer. Even if your project’s impossible, or at least compromised, there’s still a customer problem needing to be solved. Telling people what they can do and what they can have tends to get a better reception than telling people what they can’t do and what they can’t have.

That’s why the first step in managing a potentially impossible project is analysis. When you analyze an apparently impossible or potentially impossible project, you may learn different things.

You confirm that the project is in fact impossible, and can provide evidence to the customer. You and the customer can begin to figure out what alternatives may exist or how to deal with the consequences of an unsuccessful project.
You confirm that the project as originally proposed is in fact impossible, but are able to find potential changes that will make the project possible, which you can present to the customer.
You confirm that the project as stated is in fact impossible, but are able to offer alternatives and compromises that might satisfy at least some of the customer’s requirements and needs, or close part of the gap.
You can’t confirm that the project is in fact impossible, but you can identify at least some of the risks and challenges you face, which you and the customer can then assess.
You find a creative way around the barrier that made the project impossible, and achieve the original goal.

Even if your analysis leads to the first outcome (it’s just flat impossible), however, your situation is still improved by your ability to give a thoughtful reply with supporting evidence, and your attitude in making a good-faith attempt to solve the problem.

Partial successes (outcomes two, three, and four) are a marked improvement. Even if the project is impossible — or highly risky — as stated, the customer may be able to get a significant portion of what he or she wants. Plus, it’s well known that the first approximation of available constraints may not be the final word. There may be more to draw on. And again, people tend to react better to hearing what they can have, and less well to hearing what they can’t have.

We renovated our house last summer, and the project was on time, exceeded our expectations — and cost about twice as much as we’d planned. We still call it a rousing success, because we never really expected to meet the budget anyway. It was a hope, not a realistic assessment. The Standish Group would call it a failure, but we don’t — and the customer is always right.

The fifth outcome (solve the problem with creativity) is ideal, but often challenging and not always successful. The best direction to find the creative answer is, paradoxically, to focus on the barriers in the first place.

Next Week: The Power of Negative Thinking!

Potentially Impossible (Managing Impossible Projects, Part 2)

2011-10-18T06:00:00.008-04:00

The following series is adapted from a keynote I delivered at the Washington, DC, chapter of the Project Management Institute back in August. Parts also come from my book Creative Project Management (with Ted Leemann), published by McGraw-Hill.

The Most Dangerous Word

At the outset of the project, you may not always know whether the project is possible or not. That’s why the process of managing an impossible — or potentially impossible — project begins at the outset, during the very first stages of project initiation.

Here’s one of Dobson’s Laws of Project Management: The most dangerous word in project management is a premature “yes.”

Premature certainty, whether it’s positive or negative, can backfire. Saying “yes” before you really know what you’ve said “yes” to can result in a world of trouble.

You can also get in a world of trouble by being too quick to say “no.” Even if your experience and wisdom tell you the project’s impossible on the face of it, saying so too quickly will produce a negative reaction. And, frankly, sometimes “no” is just not going to be an acceptable answer.

When you say, “Sorry, that’s impossible,” they think, “You didn’t even try!”

Failure, Alas, Is an Option

Let’s set the Way-Bac machine for April 14, 1970, just about 56 hours into the flight of Apollo 13. With the spacecraft about 200,000 miles away from Earth, Mission Control asked the crew to turn on the hydrogen and oxygen tank stirring fans. About 93 seconds later there was a loud “bang.” Oxygen tank #2 had exploded.

If American Movie Classics ever ran a series of “Great Project Management Movies,” surely Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 would be a natural candidate. Faced with a potentially disastrous accident, project teams overcome one potentially fatal barrier after another to bring the crew safely back to earth, guided by mission director Gene Kranz’s mantra, “Failure is not an option.”

But of course failure is an option, and in the case of the Apollo 13 mission, the odds were heavily stacked against a happy outcome— and everybody (including Gene Kranz) had to be well aware of that fact. Within the overall project “get the astronauts home safely,” there were numerous subprojects, including:

Develop a power-up sequence that draws fewer than 20 amps
Calculate a burn rate to get the reentry angle within tolerance using the sight of the Earth in the capsule window as the sole reference point
Design a way to fit the square command module carbon dioxide scrubber filter into the round Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) filter socket.

That last subproject was vital, because the LEM’s carbon dioxide scrubbers were designed to take care of he needs of two people for a day and a half, not three people for three days. And nobody ever imagined that the command module scrubbers would need to be used in the LEM, so they weren’t designed to be compatible. They’re square, and the necessary holes are round. Meanwhile, the carbon dioxide levels are already past 8, and at 15 things become dangerous, and eventually deadly. As the engineers gather in a conference room, boxes of miscellaneous junk — basically everything that’s loose on board the spacecraft — are being dumped on tables.

Managing a Crisis Project

Let’s look at the project management problem.

It’s easy to build a carbon dioxide filter on Earth; there’s a standard specification, a deadline measured in weeks, if not months, and all the resources you need are easy to acquire. In a crisis situation, such as existed aboard Apollo 13, the project looks a little different.

At the beginning of the project, the engineers involved could not know whether the project would turn out to be ultimately impossible. Impossibility could exist in any of the three fundamental constraints.

Does the time available to accomplish the project equal or exceed the time necessary?

In developing a replacement for the Apollo 13 mission’s overloaded carbon dioxide filter, engineers were constrained by the amount of time until the astronauts became too impaired to build what they designed. If the deadline turns out to be too short, then the project is impossible.

Are the resources needed to accomplish the project less than or equal to the resources available?

The project was constrained by what was actually available on the spacecraft. If their resources are short by even one critical component, no matter how small — a 20¢ screw — the project is impossible.

Are the performance criteria achievable within the outer boundaries of the other constraints?

If the improvised filter can’t be made to work long enough for the astronauts to reach Earth orbit when they can return to the command module, then the project is impossible.

As we all know, the Apollo 13 engineers did come up with a workable solution, but that was hardly guaranteed. Had the constraints been slightly different — less time, fewer resources, more challenging performance standards — the outcome would likely have been failure.

But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try.

Next Week: The CHAOS Report!

If I Had a Lever (Managing Impossible Projects, Part 1)

2011-10-11T07:30:00.004-04:00

When we say “nothing’s impossible,” we usually mean that given unlimited time, unlimited resources, and really flexible performance standards, we can do anything. “Give me a lever long enough and a platform to rest it on, and I will move the world,” said Archimedes, but he was obviously not a project manager. Our projects are constrained: the iron triangle of resources, time, and mandatory scope are only three of the dimensions that restrict our options.

There are many types of impossibility: legal impossibility, scientific impossibility, metaphysical impossibility, and logical impossibility, to name a few. Each has its own definition and its own specific context. Our question is more focused: what does “impossible” mean in the context of project management — and more importantly, in the context of your project?

We define a project as “operationally impossible” if it cannot be accomplished within the boundaries of its mandatory constraints. Of course, seemingly “impossible” projects succeed all the time, and there are a number of proven strategies that work — at least part of the time.

Sometimes a team discovers a brilliant critical insight, or is simply smart enough and good enough to achieve what lesser mortals cannot.
Sometimes the team gets it done by sheer Herculean effort, working harder and longer than anyone expects. The project succeeds, but sometimes the organization pays a long-term price.
Sometimes the team gets it done, but the outcome is compromised. Maybe the project cost more, or took longer, or did less. Sometimes we can point to the corpses of the projects we sacrificed in order to make the current project succeed
And sometimes the team fakes it, slaps a coat of paint on it, and hopes nobody notices that the wheels have fallen off. (Make sure your résumé is up to date first.)

There are, fortunately, some better answers, and in this and the next few blog posts we’ll journey through history to see what lessons we can pick up.

Patton and the Bulge

Let’s set the Way-Bac machine for December 19, 1944, where the Allied High Command is meeting in Verdun to plan its response to the German offensive Wacht am Rhein, popularly known as the Battle of the Bulge.

Elements of the United States First Army, supposedly in a quiet sector of the front, are pinned down in Bastogne. Eisenhower asks the assembled generals how long it will be before Allied forces will be able to relieve the beleaguered Americans at Bastogne. British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery says it will take weeks.

George Patton, commander of the United States Third Army, jumps in. . (Patton, by the way, sounded a lot less like George C. Scott than he did like Ross Perot.)

“I can attack with three divisions in 48 hours,” he says.

The response from the other generals was not polite.

Patton’s boss, General Omar Bradley, was not amused. “Ike wants a realistic estimate, George. You’re in the middle of a fight now. It’s over a hundred miles to Bastogne.”

They were, of course, right to be skeptical. Extricating three divisions from a tough fight and moving them 100 miles in 48 hours? That’s not just difficult, that’s downright impossible.

Let’s see why.

A division is an Army unit consisting of approximately 15,000 soldiers, along with everything they need to do their job. Imagine picking up a town of 45,000, along with all the services needed to keep them going, and moving 100 miles in 48 hours…and forget the interstates; there aren’t any. Just for starters, if you don't have a detailed movement plan, you'll end up with the world's biggest traffic jam.

Armored vehicles are gas-guzzlers, people have to eat, and soldiers need ammunition. That means you'll have to pre-position gas, food and supplies along the route.

A moving division is more vulnerable than a division on defense. That means you need fighting units to protect moving units, and they need more gas and food and ammunition.

A move of this nature requires a planning staff in the hundreds. In World War II, without cell phones, laptops, and GPS units, orders were typed on mimeograph stencils, duplicated, and hand-carried to unit commanders stretched out over an immense area. Today's technology is far superior, but so are the demands involved.

It takes weeks to pull off an operation like this. It really can’t be done in 48 hours. It’s an impossible project — flat out impossible.

And yet it was done.

But wait a minute. If it was done, then wasn’t it by definition possible?

Like with any good magic trick, the key often lies in challenging your assumptions. Eisenhower’s headquarters learned about the German Ardennes offensive late in the game, and that’s why Patton needed to move within 48 hours. But Patton, alone among senior Allied commanders, had anticipated the possibility, deployed his own intelligence resources, identified the threat, and bought himself the extra time he needed. He didn’t do it in 48 hours. He changed the constraints.

There’s a scene earlier in the movie in which he instructs his staff to begin planning the move northward. His staff had several weeks to prepare three different contingency plans. All Patton had to do when the meeting broke up was walk downstairs to his jeep, call his headquarters on the radio, say “Nickle,” and the forces were on their way. (His driver, Sergeant Mims, reportedly said, “I don’t know why they need all them other generals. You and me can run this whole war out of your jeep.”)

If a project can’t be done within its constraints, one obvious approach is to follow Patton’s example, and alter the constraints, but of course, that’s not always an option. Sometimes, the project is inherently likely to fail — but that doesn’t mean you don’t still have to manage it.

Next week — Failure IS An Option!

Riddikulus! (Part 14 of Fallacies)

2011-10-04T13:06:00.001-04:00

More red herrings, argumentative fallacies that distract from the argument rather than address it directly. This week, the final three appeals to emotion: the appeal to ridicule, the appeal to spite, and wishful thinking.

Reductio Ad Ridiculum

Riddikulus! As all Harry Potter fans know, the way to defeat a boggart is to convert it from an object of terror to an object of mockery. While the spell clearly works, in real life, the appeal to ridicule is a type of red herring fallacy in which the opponent presents the original argument in a way that turns it into a mockery of itself, either by emphasizing the counter-intuitive aspects of the original argument, or by creating a straw man to debunk it.

An example of the first approach is the argument, “If Einstein's theory of relativity is right, that would mean that when I drive my car it gets shorter and more massive the faster I go. That's crazy!” It’s also true. The problem is that the effects are not easily measured at automobile speeds, but only become significant as the object nears the speed of light.

The second approach misrepresents the argument in order to ridicule it. “If evolution were true, that would mean that all the apes wouldn't be here any more, since they all would have evolved into humans!” That’s ridiculous indeed — but it’s not actually implied or stated in the Theory of Evolution.

Argumentum Ad Odium

The appeal to spite exploits existing bitterness or dislike in its attack. The various attacks on union benefits (such as retirement), particularly in government workers, relies on the negative emotions aimed at the target group as the primary justification for cutting back or cancelling previously agreed-upon benefits. “Why should people enjoy a comfortable retirement with my tax dollars?”

Wishful Thinking

Wishful thinking is based on the premise “I wish P were true/false, therefore P is true/false.” You see this in a lot of superstitious behavior, from chain letters to the belief in UFOs. Personally, I think it would be really cool if aliens did in fact visit Earth — but that doesn’t make it true.

Making the Kessel Run in Under 12 Parsecs

2011-09-27T06:00:00.002-04:00

From xkcd, by Randall Munroe.

On the OPERA neutrino experiment, the conservative war on relativity, and the operation of science (with a nod to the biggest science boo-boo in Star Wars).

One can understand, if not necessarily agree with, the conservative war on the Theory of Evolution. If you believe that a specific book must be taken literally, and that book states that the Earth was created in seven days, then it is impossible for Darwinian evolution to have taken place. Either the book in question is not literally true, or the theory must be wrong. You can’t have both.

I must admit, though, to being perplexed by the conservative opposition to the Theory of Relativity. I first encountered this when one of my White House speechwriter friends asked me to review an unpublished manuscript ostensibly debunking Einstein. (It was written by a political science major.) The book was filled with bold assertions, dismissal of contrary evidence, and an ongoing hint that relativity was enthroned not because of its merits as a theory, but because of an ongoing conspiracy by what xkcd refers to as the “Science Thought Police.” In other words, it was just like the anti-evolution arguments.

The objection to relativity seems to rest on a semi-religious foundation: the idea that reality is in some sense objective, without uncertainty or variability. There’s an existential threat in the idea that some parts of reality are subjective, variable, or…well, relative. More importantly, the objection goes to the heart of the idea of science itself, the idea that the experimental method, peer review, and testable hypotheses can separate the valid from the invalid. For those whose authority rests on a foundation of “truth,” testability can be quite inconvenient.

Which brings us to the OPERA neutrino experiment, in which the underground Gran Sasso Laboratory measured the velocity of neutrinos from CERN at moving slightly faster than the speed of light (c). The difference is not great — 60 nanoseconds faster over a distance of 730 kilometers (with an expected error of ±10 nanoseconds) — but any evidence that a particle can exceed the speed of light forms a huge challenge to the foundations of modern theoretical physics. (For the curious, the official paper can be found here.)

Not so fast. The researchers themselves have not made any claims so bold. Before publishing, they looked for experimental errors. They re-ran the experiment. They looked at a variety of potential explanations and controlled for as many variables as they could. By publishing the results, they aren’t making the claim that they’ve refuted Einstein, but rather quite the opposite: they are appealing to the scientific community to repeat the experiment and see if they can discover why the OPERA results are incorrect.

That’s as it should be. Given the overwhelming body of evidence post-Einstein that confirms the principles of relativity, an anomalous result deserves to be treated with skepticism. Extraordinary claims, as they say, require extraordinary proof.

In fact, there’s already a strong experimental case that undercuts the OPERA results. On February 23, 1987, light from a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the two dwarf galaxies that orbit our own Milky Way, reached Earth after traveling approximately 168,000 light years. It was the closest supernova to Earth since Kepler’s Supernova of 1604, and the first since then to be visible to the naked eye.

About three hours before the visible light from SN1987A reached Earth, neutrino bursts were observed at three different neutrino observatories. This doesn’t mean those neutrinos traveled faster than light; the visible light produced by a supernova’s collapsing core has to travel upward to the stellar surface, while neutrinos zip right through the intervening material. If those neutrinos were traveling as fast as the OPERA observations indicate (60 ns per 730 km), the neutrino bursts should have arrived nearly four years before the visible light.

What, then, do the OPERA results mean? One possibility — the likeliest, according to most blogging scientists I’ve been reading in the past few days — is that a measurement error did in fact occur. If there’s not a measurement error, and it turns out that the neutrinos do move slightly faster than our current measurement of c, it still won’t “refute” Einstein -- our GPS units (which rely on relativity equations) still work. Einstein, after all, didn’t “refute” Isaac Newton. Newton’s laws work quite well in the majority of cases. It’s only at extreme speeds and under unusual conditions that relativistic differences matter.

What it will mean, if the results hold up under scrutiny, is that adjustments will be made. The models we use to understand the universe will require modification, becoming more accurate. There’s a small chance we’ll discover some important breakthrough that changes our understanding of the universe in materially significant ways.

In that case, the better parallel will be the 1887 experiments by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley involving the measurement of the speed of light in different directions, with the goal of measuring the motion of the Earth with respect to the luminiferous aether. They also didn’t get the results their theory predicted. The difference here was also small enough to be attributed to experimental error, but over time, as the results became more and more solid, it finally became clear that there was something wrong with the aether hypothesis.

Although Einstein’s theory of relativity did not rest on “science’s most famous failed experiment,” Michelson-Morley did serve as evidence that helped the new theory of a constant speed of light gain widespread acceptance.

Dives and Lazarus (Part 13 of Fallacies)

2011-09-20T05:19:00.000-04:00

More red herrings, argumentative fallacies that distract from the argument rather than address it directly.

Argumentum ad crumenam

If you’re so damn smart, why ain’t you rich?

The argumentum ad crumenam, or argument to the purse, suggests that the truth of the proposition can be supported by the wealth of the speaker. If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich? In other words, if you’re rich, you must be smart.

The rebuttal to this argumentative red herring can be made in only two words:

Donald Trump.

Argumentum ad lazarum

The reverse is known as the appeal to poverty. It takes its name from the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31), in which the rich man suffers the torments of Hades while the beggar Lazarus enjoys the delights of heaven.

While there’s significant Biblical support for the comparative virtue of poor versus rich (see Matthew 19:24, “And again I say to you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”), virtue and logical argument don’t necessarily correlate. If it’s not necessarily true because a rich person says it, it’s no more true if a poor one does.

Known by the Company We Keep (Part 12 of Fallacies)

2011-09-13T09:00:00.036-04:00

In the next part of our continuing survey of red herrings (responses to arguments that don’t address the actual argument but merely distract from it, we’ll look at the two types of association fallacies: guilt by association and honor by association. Depending on your point of view, they can be one and the same.

Guilt by Association

Association fallacies take the following form: (1) A is a B. (2) A is also a C. (3) Therefore, all Bs are also Cs. (More formally, (∃x ∈ S : φ(x)) → (∀x ∈ S : φ(x)), which means “if there exists any x in the set S so that a property φ is true for x, then for all x in S the property φ must be true.”

Of course, that’s not at all a necessary condition. The classic rebuttal goes like this:

(1) All dogs have four legs.
(2) My cat has four legs.
(3) Therefore, my cat is a dog.

The PolitiFact Truth-O-Meter recently gave a “Pants On Fire” rating to an August 17 blog post by Texas radio host Dan Cofall, which read in part, “The magic number ‘70’ is the number of members of the 111th Congress who are members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). These are not just politicians who vote left of center; these are card-carrying members of ‘The Democratic Socialists of America.’” (The "70" to which Cofall refers is the membership of the Congressional Progressive Caucus — though I do not believe they actually issue membership cards.)

There are two guilt-by-association attacks here, one direct and one indirect. The indirect attack is in the term “card-carrying,” an echo of McCarthy-era HUAC anti-communist campaigning. The implication goes like this:

(1) Dues-paying members of the Communist Party carry cards.
(2) Members of Group X (Democratic Socialists, ACLU, etc.) carry cards.
(3) Therefore, members of Group X are Communists.

The direct attack takes this form:

(1) The Democratic Socialists of America have a platform with a number of ideas.
(2) Some members of the Congressional Progressive Congress have ideas that overlap with some items on the DSA agenda.
(3) Therefore, all members of the Congressional Progressive Congress are "card carrying" members of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Of course, liberal Democrats and Tea Party members also share some specific ideas (they both like the idea of voting, for example), but it hardly follows that all liberal Democrats are Tea Party members, or vice versa.

The Democratic Socialists are somewhat chagrined. “If we had formal political relationships with 70-odd members [of Congress], we would be making a lot more money” from dues. And as far as they’re concerned, the problem with the Congressional Progressive Congress is that the members aren’t nearly socialist enough — they prefer a third party movement.

Whether it’s “guilt by association” or “honor by association” may depend on your point of view. When Bill O’Reilly said on his January 19, 2005, broadcast, “Hitler would be a card-carrying ACLU member. So would Stalin. Castro probably is. And so would Mao Zedong,” I decided to look at it this way:

(1) Bill O’Reilly and George Bush say bad things about “card carrying” ACLU members.
(2) I think O’Reilly and his fellow-travelers are jackasses.
(3) Therefore, I joined the ACLU…just so I can carry my card.

Hunt/Liddy Special Project 1 (Watergate Part 3)

2011-09-06T09:00:00.019-04:00

Here’s the third part of my occasional series tracing the 40th anniversary of the Watergate scandal.

As noted previously, a big motive in the Watergate cover-up had nothing to do with the actual burglary, but rather with the previous activities of the White House Plumbers Unit. Their first operation, “Hunt/Liddy Special Project 1,” was part of the Nixon Administration’s response to the leaking of the Pentagon Papers by one of its contributors, Daniel Ellsberg, Ph.D. (Ellsberg has appeared in this blog before, in our discussion of the ambiguity aversion effect, better known as the Ellsberg paradox.)

Ellsberg, a former military analyst employed by the RAND Corporation, was one of 36 members of the Vietnam Study Task Force, established by then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to produce an “encyclopedic history of the Vietnam War.” The report “United States—Vietnam Relations: 1945-1967,” was so secret that it was kept from President Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and National Security Advisor Walt Rostow. The final report contained 3,000 pages of historical analysis and 4,000 pages of original government documents published in 47 volumes. It was classified “Top Secret — Sensitive,” meaning that the reason for its classification was that the publication of the study would be embarrassing. The print run was 15 copies.

In October 1969, Ellsberg, who had grown to oppose the Vietnam War, along with Anthony Russo, photocopied the study and showed it to Henry Kissinger, William Fulbright, George McGovern, and others. None was interested. It was not until February 1971 that Ellsberg first discussed the report with New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan. In March, Ellsberg gave Sheehan 43 of the 47 volumes, and the Times began publishing excerpts from the study starting in June 1971. At that time, the nickname “Pentagon Papers” first came into use.

The reaction was much the same as that which followed the WikiLeaks disclosure of State Department cables. While numerous claims of damage to US military and intelligence operations gained headlines, the reality was that the Papers talked about events that had happened years before. Nixon Solicitor General Erwin N. Griswold later called the Papers an example of "massive overclassification" with "no trace of a threat to the national security.”

The Papers effectively became public knowledge when Senator Mike Gravel (D-AK) entered 4,100 pages from the report in the Congressional Record. Richard Nixon originally wasn’t interested in prosecuting Ellsberg or the Times, because the study only embarrassed the Johnson and Kennedy administrations, but Henry Kissinger argued that this would set a negative precedent, and Ellsberg and Russo were prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917.

In order to come up with more evidence to discredit Ellsberg, the Plumbers received their first mission, which took place on September 3, 1971. It was a burglary operation, targeting the office of Daniel Ellsberg's Los Angeles psychiatrist, Lewis J. Fielding. The break-in team reported they couldn’t find Ellsberg’s file, but Fielding himself later said that not only was the Ellsberg file in his office, but he had also found it on the floor the morning after the burglary. Someone had clearly gone through it.

John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, reported to Nixon, saying (on tape), “We had one little operation. It’s been aborted out in Los Angeles which, I think, is better that you don’t know about.” Later, when the whole story came, out, the case against Ellsberg turned into a mistrial because of government misconduct, and all charges were dismissed.

What’s fascinating to me in all this is how unsuccessful the Plumbers Unit actually was. Far from achieving its goal of discrediting Ellsberg, the burglary (and related wiretapping) actually contributed to the dismissal of the case.

You can download the complete Pentagon Papers (including the parts Ellsberg didn't release) from the US National Archives here.

For more on the Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, stay tuned.

Queen for a Day (Part 11 of Fallacies)

2011-08-30T09:00:00.013-04:00

Fallacies involve incorrect or invalid reasoning. Red herrings are a category of fallacy in which the response to an argument doesn’t address the argument, but rather offers a distraction from it. One class of red herrings consists of appeals to emotion, in which a given feeling is used as the evidence for or against a given proposition.

Argumentum Ad Misericordiam

“Would YOU like to be Queen for a day?”

The forerunner to today’s reality show epidemic, Queen for a Day, premiered as a radio show in 1945, only moving to television in 1956, and lasted until 1964. The format involved three different women talking about financial, health, or other emotionally gripping hard times they had recently experienced, and what they most needed to deal with it — medical care, therapeutic equipment, or a major appliance. An applause meter registered the level of sympathy, and the winner had her wish granted, along with other merchandise. (The runners-up also received prizes; no one went away empty handed.)

The appeal to pity (argumentum ad misericordiam) is a red herring fallacy because it doesn’t in itself prove or disprove the proposition at hand. The contestant with the worst problems or greatest need isn’t necessarily the one whose needs are greatest — the winner is the one most able to win the audience’s sympathy.

Pleading with the teacher for a better grade because an “F” means you can’t be on the football team doesn’t mean you deserve a better grade — but that’s not to say the appeal to pity isn’t effective, or that it’s automatically wrong to make or change a decision because of pity. As dustman-philosopher Alfred P. Doolittle so artfully argues in Pygmalion:

I ask you, what am I? I'm one of the undeserving poor: that's what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he's up agen middle class morality all the time. If there's anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it's always the same story: 'You're undeserving; so you can't have it.' But my needs is as great as the most deserving widow's that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I don't need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don't eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement, cause I'm a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song and a band when I feel low. Well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving. What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything. Therefore, I ask you, as two gentlemen, not to play that game on me. I'm playing straight with you. I ain't pretending to be deserving. I'm undeserving; and I mean to go on being undeserving. I like it; and that's the truth.

He won’t win Queen for a Day, but it’s a fine argument nonetheless.

In the law, appeals to pity are not supposed to be made during the trial (though you can sneak it in if you can camouflage it as part of another argument), but they're completely appropriate during sentencing.

Ego Up Ego Down (Part 10 of Fallacies)

2011-08-23T17:33:00.002-04:00

Within the world of red herrings, there’s a subcategory of appeals to emotion. (Red herrings are a category of fallacy in which the response to an argument doesn’t address the argument, but rather offers a distraction from it.) Some of the red herrings we’ve covered, such as an appeal to tradition or consequences, fall into this category. Unlike the ones we’ve covered already, these don’t have an official-sounding Latin title, just plain old English.

Appeal to Flattery

You, dear reader, are clearly someone whose interest in creativity, your orientation toward substantial accomplishment, and your bright shining intelligence is something I hold in awe.

You’re probably one of a very small number of people in the world capable of grasping my newest project management tool in all its ramifications. In capable hands — so terribly rare — these secrets make you unstoppable. People with only normal intelligence will surely fail.

For only twelve small payments of $19,999.99, you can be one of the select leaders of the project management community of the future. Don't you deserve it?

Call today.

Operators are standing by.

* * *

The appeal to flattery is also known as apple polishing and greasing the wheel. By inflating your ego, the arguer tries to implant the idea that if you don’t agree, it’s a sign of your stupidity, ignorance, cowardice, or some other unpleasant characteristic. Done too openly and too thick, it’s immediately transparent. Delivered more subtly, it can be difficult to resist.

Its opposite cousin, “pride and ego down,” is a formal technique used in military interrogation. Here’s the relevant section from Army Field Manual FM 2-22.3, the official guide for interrogators.

US Army Definition from FM 2-22.3

8-45. (Interrogation) The emotional-pride and ego-down approach is based on attacking the source's ego or self-image. The source, in defending his ego, reveals information to justify or rationalize his actions. This information may be valuable in answering collection requirements or may give the [human intelligence] HUMINT collector insight into the viability of other approaches. This approach is effective with sources who have displayed weakness or feelings of inferiority. A real or imaginary deficiency voiced about the source, loyalty to his organization, or any other feature can provide a basis for this technique.

8-46. The HUMINT collector accuses the source of weakness or implies he is unable to do a certain thing. This type of source is also prone to excuses and rationalizations, often shifting the blame to others. An example of this technique is opening the collection effort with the question, "Why did you surrender so easily when you could have escaped by crossing the nearby ford in the river?" The source is likely to provide a basis for further questions or to reveal significant information if he attempts to explain his surrender in order to vindicate himself. He may give an answer such as, "No one could cross the ford because it is mined."

8-47. The objective is for the HUMINT collector to use the source's sense of pride by attacking his loyalty, intelligence, abilities, leadership qualities, slovenly appearance, or any other perceived weakness. This will usually goad the source into becoming defensive, and he will try to convince the HUMINT collector he is wrong. In his attempt to redeem his pride and explain his actions, the source may provide pertinent information. Possible targets for the emotional-pride and ego-down approach are the source's—

o Loyalty.

o Technical competence.

o Leadership abilities.

o Soldierly qualities.

o Appearance.

8-48. There is a risk associated with this approach. If the emotional-pride and ego-down approach fails, it is difficult for the HUMINT collector to recover and move to another approach without losing his credibility. Also, there is potential for application of the pride and ego approach to cross the line into humiliating and degrading treatment of the detainee. Supervisors should consider the experience level of their subordinates and determine specifically how the interrogator intends to apply the approach technique before approving the interrogation plan.

Often the two techniques are used together. An interrogator may flatter and build up the ego of a subject, only to turn around and belittle him, which often speeds the extent to which the subject works to justify and defend the behavior you want to learn about.

Of course, none of this would never work on you.

You’re way too smart.

Not to mention good looking.

(Moran.)

The Enemies List (Watergate, Part 2)

2011-08-16T10:00:00.093-04:00

My occasional series tracing the 40th anniversary of the Watergate scandal began with the establishment of the Plumbers Unit on July 1, 1971. A little bit earlier, on June 24, 1971, came the very first version of what grew into the Nixon Enemies List. It wasn't originally part of the Watergate scandal, though, and only turned into a criminal action on August 16, 1971.

Over time, the Enemies List grew, eventually numbering 576 names (though a few were duplicates). The first version, known as the "Opponents List," consisted of a mere twenty names, in order of importance.

Arnold Picker (United Artists)
Alexander Barkan (AFL-CIO)
Ed Guthman (LA Times)
Maxwell Dane (Doyle, Dane and Bernbach)
Charles Dyson (Dyson-Kissner Corporation)
Howard Stein (Dreyfus Corporation)
Allard Lowenstein (Nassau County congressman)
Morton Halperin (Common Cause)
Leonard Woodcock (UAW)
Sterling Munro (AA to Sen. Jackson)
Bernard Feld (Council for a Livable World)
Sidney Davidoff (aide to Mayor Lindsay)
John Conyers (Detroit congressman)
Samuel Lambert (NEA)
Stewart Rawlings Mott (Mott Associates)
Ron Dellums (California congressman)
Daniel Schorr (CBS)
S. Harrison Dogole (Globe Security Systems)
Paul Newman (actor, not yet a food manufacturer)
Mary McGrory (WaPo columnist).

Discrediting, embarrassing, and distracting these people would become a central political objective of the Nixon administration.

That's not necessarily or automatically wrong. Identifying and fighting your political opponents is perfectly normal, and many tactics are perfectly legal and legitimate. Using the power of incumbency to harness the Federal government to attack them for you, however, is not.

The Enemies List entered the Watergate scandal on August 16, 1971, when White House counsel John Dean explained in writing what the list was for, and how it was to be used. Here's Dean:

"This memorandum addresses the matter of how we can maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with persons known to be active in their opposition to our Administration; stated a bit more bluntly—how we can use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies." (Emphasis added.)

From that point on, it was a crime, and as such fell into the cover up, a project managed by John Dean. (Much of the Watergate cover up had little to do with the actual break-in, but rather trying to keep the lid on the many other illegal activities of the White House staff, most notoriously the Plumbers Unit.)

Strangely, it was Dean himself who first revealed the existence of the Enemies List during his marathon testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee. Daniel Schorr managed to get a copy of the list and read it on the air — unaware that he himself was on it until he came to his own name.

Interestingly, for all the political and moral fallout from the Enemies List, it turns out that nothing much actually happened on the "screw our political enemies front" that used Federal resources. The Congressional Joint Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation concluded that people on the list had not been subjected to an unusual number of tax audits.

Deep Throat famously told Bob Woodward that his opinion of the Nixon men was that the weren't that smart, and I suspect that's true. There's a Three Stooges quality about Watergate, a bunch of overprivileged rich kids playing at superspy intrigue and failing miserably. Being on the Enemies List didn't appear to hurt many of Nixon's enemies, but its revelation severely backfired on its creators.

Little. Yellow. Different. (Fallacies, Part 9)

2011-08-09T10:00:00.007-04:00

Red herrings are responses to an argument that don’t address the substance of the argument — they’re distractions. This week we’ll look at two related red herrings: the appeal to tradition and the appeal to novelty.

Argumentum ad antiquitatem

Tycoon and inventor Alfred Lee Loomis is one of the most important 20th century scientists you’ve never heard of. A nephew of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, it was Loomis who was asked to review the famous Einstein letter suggesting that FDR investigate the fissionable properties of U-235 as a potential military weapon. Loomis, who knew Einstein well, said he thought it was a good idea.

During the First World War, Loomis worked at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, and told stories about his time there. When working with a cannoneer unit, he was puzzled by one of the soldiers, who always walked about 50 paces in back of the rest of the company, and who stood stock-still for hours at a time with one arm slightly raised. Upon investigation, Loomis learned what the man was there for: he held the horses.

The horses were already gone by then, of course, but the soldier remained on duty. Why? It was tradition. There had always been someone delegated to do that job, so he remained.

The appeal to tradition, formally known as argumentum ad antiquitatem, is an argument that a proposition is true because it is in line with some tradition. It’s right because it’s always been that way.

This fallacy rests on two shaky assumptions:

The old way of thinking or behavior was correct when it was introduced.
Nothing materially has changed to alter it.

The argument against gay marriage, for example, rests primarily on the appeal to tradition: gays have not been permitted to marry in most cultures and time periods; therefore, gays should not be permitted to marry in this culture and in this time period. Arguments against blacks or women having full citizenship often rest on this particular fallacy as well.

Argumentum ad novitatem

The pain reliever Nuprin used to advertise its product in three words: “Little. Yellow. Different.” Of them, the third is the key. Nuprin, one is supposed to infer, is a superior pain reliever because it’s newer.

If it’s not necessarily true that traditional is better, neither is the reverse assumption a reliable guide to truth. The appeal to novelty, or argumentum ad novitatem, argues that a proposition is true simply because it’s new and modern.

Newer and more modern may indeed be superior. Next year’s computer will likely have more powerful features than last year’s. Software version 4.3 probably has fewer bugs than 4.2. The claim becomes a fallacy when the newness itself is the only argument being made for it.

Tension, Apprehension, and Dissension Have Begun (Fallacies, Part 8)

2011-08-02T10:00:00.001-04:00

Red herrings confuse the issue by distracting you from the actual argument. From ad hominem attacks against the arguer to ad populum appeals to mass sentiment, they form a major subcategory of logical fallacies. Today, we’ll cover argumentum ad metum, the appeal to fear.

Argumentum ad metum

FUD, “fear, uncertainty, and doubt,” is a marketing tactic that spreads negative information about a competitive product as a way of making it less desirable as an option. Former IBM executive Gene Amdahl (after starting his own competing company), described its use by his former company this way: “FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering Amdahl products.”

It used to be said, “No one ever got fired for buying IBM,” and if you can position yourself as the safe choice, it’s a very powerful argument indeed. The trouble it, it’s a logical fallacy, part of the “appeal to fear,” or argumentum ad metum (sometimes argumentum in terrorem).

It’s a traditional parental argument. “A Red Ryder BB Gun? You’ll shoot your eye out!” In politics, it’s “Vote for Candidate X and it’s the same thing as voting in a Communist dictatorship!” In school, it’s “If you don’t make good grades, you’ll never amount to anything in your life.”

Reduced to its logical form, the fallacy is clear:

Either P or Q is true.
Q is frightening.
Therefore, P is true.

There are a few tricks to using the appeal to fear. First, fear appeals are “nonmonotonic.” That means the persuasiveness isn’t increased with the amount of fear. One study of public service messages about AIDS found that if the messages were too fearful, they were rejected. In addition, a persuasive appeal to fear has to provide you with a way to cope, an action you can take. Don’t buy that BB gun and you’ll keep both eyes. Make good grades and you’ll be sure to make a good living. Buy IBM, and you’ll never be fired.

But none of these is guaranteed.

Won't Someone Think of the Children? (Fallacies, Part 7)

2011-07-26T10:00:00.011-04:00

Red herrings are responses to arguments that ignore the argument and focus on something else. Many, but not all, have Latin names beginning with argumentum ad. Not all argumentum ad fallacies are red herrings, of course.

Nor are they all formal fallacies. Some, such as the argumentum ad Hitlerian, the claim that what you say is false because Hitler once did or said something similar, are more in the line of cute observations rather than official fallacies. For the record, it’s merely a subset of ad hominem with a little “poisoning the well” thrown in for good measure.

Argumentum ad consequentiam

In 1975, the Birmingham (UK) Six were sentenced to life imprisonment for the Birmingham pub bombings, an attack attributed to the Provisional IRA that killed 21 people. The six men claimed to have been brutalized in police custody. Fourteen prison officers were subsequently charged with assault, but were acquitted. The Birmingham Six continued to appeal, but their case was thrown out by Lord Denning of the Court of Appeal, who wrote these amazing words.

“If [the six men] won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous. That would mean that the Home Secretary would have either to recommend that they be pardoned or to remit the case to the Court of Appeal. That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further.’”

This is an example of argumentum ad consequentiam, the “argument to the consequences.” The truth of the premise is determined by whether it leads to desirable or undesirable consequences. The legendary attempt by a Tennessee legislator to pass a bill making π = 3.0 was based on the premise that it would make math so much easier for high school students, who wouldn’t have to wrestle with all those decimal places.

This is not to say that consequences don’t matter, or that they shouldn’t affect decision-making. It’s only that consequences, no matter what they are, don’t determine the truth of an argument.

50 Million Elvis Fans Can Be Wrong! (Fallacies, Part 6)

2011-07-19T09:34:00.000-04:00

In our ongoing survey of red herrings, responses to arguments that don’t address the original issue, they’ve mostly taken Latin names starting with argumentum ad, translated as “argument from” or “argument to.” In practice, the argumentum is omitted: argumentum ad hominem, “argument from the person,” is usually just cited as ad hominem.

Argumentum ad populum

Elvis Presley’s ninth album is titled 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong, but of course that’s a logical fallacy, with no disrespect intended to the King. The fallacy is known popularly as the “argument from common consent,” and more formally as argumentum ad populum. If the majority believes that proposition X is true, then it’s presumptively true.

On February 6-7, 2009, a few days before the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, (February 12, 1809), the Gallup organization conducted a national survey on the question, “Do you personally believe in the theory of evolution, do you not believe in evolution, or don’t you have an opinion either way?” The disappointing answer is hardly surprising to anyone who grew up in the American south. Approximately 39% of Americans believe; 25% do not believe—and 36% have no opinion either way. (The percentage of believers goes up with education—and down with church attendance or Republican party membership.)

Americans who believe in evolution are a minority, but what does that have to do with whether Darwinian evolution is a fact? Polls for or against a given factual proposition are common, but they’re logically meaningless. That is, of course, when the factual proposition under discussion is something other than opinion.

If the factual question is “Do most Americans believe in Darwinian evolution?” then, the factual answer can be determined by a poll. Otherwise, not.

Have Spacesuit, Will Travel

2011-07-12T09:00:00.009-04:00

Michael & Spacesuit, Noreascon 4, 2004

"You see, I had this space suit.

How it happened was this way."

Science fiction readers will instantly recognize the opening lines from Robert Heinlein’s 1958 Scribner juvenile novel, Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. The narrator, small-town teenager Kip Russell, wins a used spacesuit as fourth prize in a soap jingle contest, setting off a chain of events that takes him as far as the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.

I never went that far. But, you see, I do have this space suit.

Aside from the joy any Heinlein fan would find in owning a spacesuit, it’s really not that big a deal. Unlike Kip’s suit, mine never went into space. Nor is my spacesuit suitable for extra-vehicular activity; it’s strictly for inside use. Besides, it doesn’t even have a helmet. Cosmonaut suits from the former Soviet Union in far better shape (not to mention helmets) sell for less than you’d think. The rubber is rotten, the fabric is torn, and there are razor blade slashes all over it. But I’m pretty sure this is the only Apollo suit in private hands.

The pencil marks on the faded tag hanging from the suit read: “Apollo #7 Prototype, SPD-143-3 011, Med Reg.”

Apollo 7, the first manned Apollo mission, was an 11-day Earth orbital, notable as the first manned launch of the Saturn 1B, and mostly served as a test for the redesigned command service module. It was the only spaceflight for two of the astronauts, and the final flight for Wally Schirra, the only man to fly in Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. So, this could be Wally Schirra’s spacesuit, but it could also belong to Donn Eisele or Walter Cunningham, the other crewmembers. It could also have belonged to one of the backup crew of Thomas Stafford, John Young, or Eugene Cernan, who ended up flying the Apollo 10 mission.

Because an Apollo mission required years of preparation, each astronaut received six spacesuits, enough to take care of accidents, modifications, and wear and tear. One of the six would go on the mission; the rest ended up in a big warehouse pile somewhere in Florida. And one day, someone at NASA decided it was time to clean up the warehouse. And if you’re looking to get rid of a few hundred used spacesuits, there aren’t a lot of places you can send them.

In late 1973, I moved from North Carolina to Washington, DC, for a job as a research assistant in the Division of Aeronautics of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum. The famous building on the mall was just starting construction; the museum (such as it was) occupied its old quarters in the Arts and Industries Building, the red brick structure next door to the Smithsonian Castle. (It’s under renovation after having been essentially condemned as unfit for human habitation; a sentiment shared by many of the building’s residents — one of whom who used to refer to it as the “National Roach and Rat Museum.”) We also had a tin shed out back, a Quonset hut that had once housed the engineering group that designed the Liberty engine.

I did research jobs for the curators, catalogued archival materials (unrolling hundreds of aircraft blueprints and piling stuff on them to keep them flat), straightened files, and supervised student interns. And, of course, I worked the warehouses.

There was a rule that mandated no artifact could be moved without the presence of a “member of the curatorial staff.” As I was the most junior person who could be called that, I spent a fair amount of time at our network of warehouses. We were in the old Torpedo Factory in Alexandria (now a collection of artists’ studios), in a warehouse on Lamont Street in a moderately bad part of town, and in our Suitland facility, then known as Silver Hill and now as the Garber Facility.

After the Torpedo Factory collection had been consolidated and moved, Lamont Street was next. While as a “member of the curatorial staff,” my official job was to supervise, but in a practical world, I got a quick course in driving a truck and a forklift, and along with a couple of our laborers, started packing up and moving stuff out to Silver Hill. I complained about it after a few weeks, so my boss got someone in another department to take over. However, that guy pulled the wrong lever on the forklift and crushed a pile of valuable model aircraft against the roof of the truck, so I got the job back a week later.

One afternoon, I pulled up at the loading dock to find another truck pulling out, and there were several pallet loads of spacesuits. Two museum technicians were pulling out the ones in best shape, and hanging them on a rolling coat rack. Because these suits had never been in space, they were going to be a research collection rather than a display one—source material for someone’s future Ph.D. dissertation on the evolution of spacesuit design. Those suits (40 or 50) ended up in a meat locker at Silver Hill. As far as the rest were concerned, that’s where the razor blades came in. The suits not selected for the research collection were slashed (selling them was a no-no for a variety of technical reasons) so they could be marked as "destroyed and disposed of," and then thrown into the dumpster.

Once it was in the dumpster, it was fair game. “Mind if one of those suits follows me home?” I asked the chief tech of the warehouse.

He laughed and said sure. "Don't sell it," he added — as if I would.

Unlike Kip, who named his suit “Oscar,” I never named mine, nor have I ever worn it; I'm too tall. I worked for one astronaut, Apollo 11 command module pilot Mike Collins, who directed the National Air and Space Museum, and during my years there met several others — they were all surprisingly short — I rather expected them to be giants in size as well as in spirit.

My Office

The suit has followed me around for many years, and as a part of restoring my house, I asked my sister-in-law and decorator Elisa Dobson to figure out some way to display the suit. She found a case and figured out a way to support the suit, and now at long last it’s in my office.

I've picked up a few interesting souvenirs in my life, but this one is my very favorite. After all, how many people can claim a Heinlein title for their very own?

I also liked the TV series, Have Gun—Will Travel, and I'm thinking about changing my business cards to match.

Have Spacesuit—Will Travel.

Email Dobson

Washington

Watergate and Me

2011-07-05T10:00:00.026-04:00

“As President Nixon says, presidents can do almost anything, and President Nixon has done many things that nobody would have thought of doing.”

- Golda Meir

Forty years ago last Friday, July 1, 1971, White House staffers David Young and Egil Krogh wrote a memo suggesting the establishment of a secret White House investigations unit in response to Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers. This organization was first named ODESSA, for “Organization Directed to Eliminate the Subversion of the Secrets of the Administration,” by G. Gordon Liddy, but it eventually became better known as the White House Plumbers, from their office location in the basement.

The great obsession of my adult life has been figuring out how people and organizations work. I write business books and military novels because nothing fascinates me more than people struggling with impossible situations, especially when of their own making. Believe me, I know what it's like to screw up, and so when I look at the Watergate cast of characters, I don't see the politics, I see the people, and I feel their pain.

July 1 begins the 40th anniversary of the Watergate scandal, and from time to time I’ll be offering a little commentary along the timeline. I’m a big fan. I followed every minute of the Watergate hearings, and devoured every book by a Watergate player, no matter how obscure. No, I didn't figure out who Deep Throat really was, but I wasn't interested in the detective story that much.

Oh, I admire Woodward and Bernstein and all that, but my heart goes out to John Dean, looking down on the waters of the Potomac with his trunk packed with boxes of potentially incriminating evidence, realizing in his heart that he had become a criminal.

I marvel at G. Gordon Liddy, the closest thing to a real-life James Bond imaginable, presenting, in those pre-PowerPoint days, a complete project management plan on poster board for schemes worthy of Dr. Evil himself. His plan would cost -- finger on pursed lip and a drumroll – two million dollars! (They bargained him down to a mere half-million – as long as Jeb McGruder could check out the houseboat full of hookers personally.)

And, of course, I am enthralled by the man himself -- Richard Milhouse Nixon, forever typecast as King John to JFK's Richard Lionheart, the dark heart of the American soul.

In the movie You've Got Mail, Tom Hanks memorably observed to Meg Ryan that all the lessons of life for contained in the Godfather movies. I had been using a similar line for years, and with no disrespect intended to the great saga, for me the touchstone remains the richly and densely textured the Watergate scandal. In it you can find echoes of any life lesson you choose, for Watergate is the very stuff of life.

I was so into Watergate that when I auditioned for a job as a comic book writer at Marvel in the late 1970s, I submitted a Spider-Man story titled "J. Jonah Jameson goes to Washington," a very thinly disguised story of the scandal with an even more thinly disguised G. Gordon Liddy as a first-rate super villain, if I do say so myself.

Marvel rejected it, saying, “It doesn’t seem aimed at our target demographic.”

More to come...

Agree — Or Else! (Fallacies Part 5)

2011-06-28T05:46:00.000-04:00

Red herrings are responses to arguments that don’t address the original issue. Their purpose is to distract and muddle the discussion.

Argumentum ad baculum

Although French scholar Étienne Dolet (1509-1546) published a declaration of his Christian faith in Cato christianus, he was charged with the crime of atheism and imprisoned. On his 37th birthday, he was strangled and burned for that crime. Giulio Cesare Vanini, an Italian free-thinker (with a decidedly racist bent), had his tongue cut out before being strangled and burned.

The argument against being an atheist was, as you can imagine, quite persuasive.

Argumentum ad baculum, translated as “argument to the cudgel” or “appeal to the stick,” is generically referred to as “appeal to force,” in which force, coercion, or the threat of force is used to justify a conclusion. The general form of the argument is:

   If Person A accepts Proposition P as true, then Consequence C.
   Consequence C is a punishment for Person A.
   Therefore, Proposition P is not true.

Criticize the boss and be fired. Take an unpopular political position and the other side will spend money to defeat you. Argue with the teacher and go to the principal’s office.

The refutation, attributed to Galileo, is simple: “It still moves.” The truth or falsehood of the proposition is not affected by the consequences to the arguer, no matter how severe.

As with many fallacies, there’s also a valid form of the argument, in which the punishment is logically related to the conclusion. For example:

   Drunk drivers are arrested, fined, and may go to jail.
   You don’t want to be arrested, fined, and sent to jail.
   Therefore, you should not drive drunk.

The punishment here is not being used to draw a conclusion about whether it is immoral or bad to drive drunk, but whether it’s prudent given the consequences. If the conclusion were “Therefore, drunk driving is immoral,” the argument would be fallacious. As we’ve noted elsewhere, the fallacious nature of the argument doesn’t make the conclusion wrong — but you need a different argument to support its truth.

Decisions, Decisions

2011-06-20T20:04:00.003-04:00

Decision makers are faced with a host of challenges. Critical information may be unavailable. Certainty may be unobtainable. Consequences may be catastrophic. Conflicting stakeholder desires may be incompatible. And always, the clock is ticking. As a result, people too often try to avoid difficult choices altogether, become trapped in “analysis paralysis,” or pass the hot potato to someone else. The BOGGSAT process (“Bunch of Guys and Gals Sitting Around Talking”) is all too popular. While sitting around and talking may well be part of a decision-making process, a proper structure (not to mention selecting the right “bunch of guys and gals”) is necessary.

The twin challenges of risk and uncertainty complicate the process. In classical risk, we know the probability and impact of the various outcomes. Risk management involves (a) an assessment of the risk, including the probability of its occurrence and the consequence if it does occur, and (b) a decision on what action to take in response to that risk (avoid, mitigate, transfer, or accept for threat risks, and exploit, enhance, share or accept for opportunity risks). In project management, the fundamental characteristics of “temporary and unique” [PMBOK® Guide] mean that we don’t necessarily know the range of possible outcomes, and almost never have reliable probability information.

Critical decision-making information is often subjective and values-driven. An engineering evaluation might tell us that there is a 42% probability of an event happening, and that the consequence involves the loss of $21.6 million and three lives. What such an evaluation does not tell us is whether the risk is worth running. Values—organizational values, mission-related values, ethical values—address the consideration of worth. Some of these values are assumed and implicit. Some can be quantified, and others—usually political considerations—can’t even be discussed on the record.

Decisions often require tradeoffs. A perfect solution may not exist. Each potential choice may have a downside, or may be fraught with risk or uncertainty. In some ways, making the least bad choice out of a set of poor alternatives takes greater skill and courage than making a conventionally “good” decision.

The outcome of a decision, whether positive or negative, is not in itself proof of the decision’s quality, especially where probability is concerned. The odds may be dramatically in favor of a positive outcome, yet low probability events can occur. Equally, if someone makes a stupid decision but gets lucky, the decision is no less stupid in spite of a good outcome. A good decision process improves our odds and results in the desired outcome the majority of the time.

In addition, a decision-making process must often be open and auditable. We must know not only the decision we make, but also the process that led us to that decision. If the outcome is bad, someone else (a boss, a customer, a Congressional committee) determines—with the benefit of “20-20 hindsight”—whether your decision was reasonable and appropriate.

This leads to the rational (if not always appropriate) strategy known as “CYA” (cover your assets), where the decision is made not necessarily from a mission perspective, but in a way that ensures blame and punishment will fall elsewhere in the event of a bad outcome. “A decision,” wrote author Fletcher Knebel, “is what a man makes when he can’t find anybody to serve on a committee.”

If enough time and resources are available, even the most complex problems can be structured and studied in a way that leads to an optimal decision. When time and resources are not available, however, a decision still needs to be made, and your accountability remains unchanged. There’s the story of the person who called an attorney, who listened to the situation and said, “Don’t worry, they can’t put you in jail for that.” The person replied, “But counselor, I’m calling from the jail!”

No formal process or methodology can remove all risk from decision-making. Many tools and techniques can improve decision-making, but ultimately successful decision processes require good judgment. Good judgment comes from experience combined with wisdom. Experience can come from bad judgment. While wisdom is the product of experience, experience does not automatically confer wisdom.

Adapted from "Chapter 18, Decision-Making and Analysis," by Michael S. Dobson, Paul Componation, and Ted Leemann, in Applied Project Management for Space Systems (Space Technology Series), edited by Julie Chelsey, Wiley Larson, Marilyn McQuade, and Robert Menrad, McGraw-Hill/US Air Force Academy, 2008.

And Brutus is an Honorable Man (Fallacies Part 4)

2011-06-14T09:30:00.017-04:00

Red Herrings

Red herrings are responses to an original argument that don’t address the substance of the argument — they’re distractions. The various forms of ad hominem are attempts to discredit the argument by discrediting the arguer. But what about the reverse? What if the claim is that the argument is true because the arguer is an authority?

Argument From Authority

In the argument from authority, we claim that a statement is true because of the person who said it. The general form of this argument goes thusly:

Person A makes claim C.
Person A has particular authority or credentials in the area of claim C, or is a unique position to know the truth about claim C.
Therefore, claim C is true.

It goes by three different Latin names, each of which gives a slightly different flavor to the argument.

Argumentum ad verecundiam is generally translated as “argument from respect,” but verecundiam really means modesty or shyness, a cynical formulation by the phrase’s creator, John Locke. “When men are established in any kind of dignity, it is thought a breach of ‘modesty’ for others to derogate any way from it, and question the authority of men who are in possession of it.”

On June 3, 2011, Sarah Palin famously spoke of Paul Revere, saying in part, “He…warned uh, the British that they weren't gonna be takin' away our arms….” The resultant fight that broke out on the Paul Revere Wikipedia page is about power. The criticism of Palin was treated by her adherents as a form of lèse majesté — as if it were improper and unfair to do anything other than accept her formulation as fact.

Argumentum ad potentiam means “argument from power,” in which the temporal authority of the speaker is the evidence offered for the truth of the statement. That’s what Marc Anthony mocks when he says, “But Brutus says he was ambitious. And Brutus is an honorable man.”

The third version of argument from authority is ipse dixit, or “he himself has said it.” It’s simply a bare assertion, a statement offered without evidence or factual support. You are supposed to believe it purely on the word of the person making the statement. The rule, for example, that one must not end a sentence with a preposition comes from 18th century grammarian Robert Lowth — who made it up.

Of course, it’s not wrong to have your opinions and beliefs influenced by people with particular authority and education. In fact, it’s hard to see how we could avoid doing so. We don’t have the time to learn everything ourselves, and in some cases we don’t have the capacity, tools, or resources. The fact that a given authority believes something can be a reason for us to believe it ourselves, at least as a provisional hypothesis until something better comes along.

What it doesn’t do is constitute a formal proof. For a formal proof, you have to provide evidence of the proposition itself, rather than a list of the credentials of the person making the statement.

Pot, Meet Kettle (Fallacies, Part 3)

2011-06-07T09:30:00.003-04:00

Last week, we began a survey of red herrings, responses to an original argument that don’t address the original issue, with argumentum ad hominem, discrediting an argument by attacking the arguer.

Ad hominem tu quoque

Tu quoque (“you, too”) is a subset of ad hominem in which the character flaw used to discredit the arguer is that the arguer has been inconsistent or hypocritical on the same subject in the past. There are several subsets:

Person A criticizes behavior B.
Person A has been guilty of behavior B.
Therefore, person A’s opinion is invalid.

Although Person A has been a hypocrite, that doesn’t mean A is necessarily wrong. As François de La Rochefoucauld famously observed, “Hypocrisie est un hommage que la vice rend à la vertu.” (“Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue”) A person can indeed be guilty of behavior and legitimately deplore it at the same time. In my own case, it’s fair to say:

Michael complains about ad hominem attacks.
Michael has committed ad hominem attacks in the past.
Therefore, Michael’s complaint about ad hominem is invalid.

It’s fallacious because our individual hypocrisies and failures of consistency don’t prove we’re wrong; sometimes they can even be evidence that our propositional ideal is more correct. Ad hominem attacks are a bad idea, whether or not I have been consistently able to refrain from them — in fact, the fallout from my own violations has tended to reinforce my belief that it’s a bad idea.

Another version of tu quoque is claiming inconsistency. In this version, the form is:

Person A makes claim C.
Person A has previously made claims that are inconsistent with C.
Therefore, claim C is false.

In 2008, Bill Gates said, “People everywhere love Windows.” In 1987, however, Bill Gates said, “I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time.” Although the first statement is arguable (he said as he types on his Macintosh), offering the second statement as a rebuttal to the first is a logical fallacy.

There are two legitimate uses of tu quoque arguments. The first is legal, the maxim that you cannot approach the courts of equity with unclean hands. If you fail to live up to your obligations under a contract, you may not be able to prosecute a claim that the other side has also failed, as long as their failure to perform is linked to your failure.

The other legitimate use of tu quoque is to discredit someone as a role model for a position. If Person A has built a political career on being a faithful marriage partner but turns out to be actively polyamorous, it’s perfectly legitimate to argue that Person A is no longer credible on the subject. That’s different from arguing that Person A’s infidelity proves that faithfulness in marriage is not a good idea.

The expression “pot calling the kettle black” can also describe some forms of tu quoque arguments. Another famous example can be in the punchline to the famous 1960s era Russian joke, “А у вас негров линчуют.” It goes like this. An American and a Soviet car salesman are arguing about which country makes better cars. The American asks, “How many decades does it take an average Soviet man to make enough money to buy a Soviet car?” The Soviet answer? “And you are lynching Negroes!”

Red Herrings and Other Fishy Arguments (Fallacies Part 2)

2011-05-31T15:42:00.001-04:00

Red herrings are responses to an original argument that don’t address the original issue. They are distractions, attempts to throw off any examination of the argument on its own merit. Red herrings can be used by both sides: by the attacker to undercut the original argument, and by the defender to undercut the rebuttal.

One large class of red herring arguments involves shifting the argument from the substance to the people involved. Ad hominem arguments attack the arguer. Ad baculum arguments use threats. Ad populem arguments count numbers. Ad Hitlerian arguments accuse one side of being Nazis, or at least Nazi-like.

Argumentum ad hominem

My great-great-great-aunt Molly Elliott Seawell is a minor figure in the history of American letters. (Her former salon on P Street here in DC is on the Register of Historic Places.) The author of forty-something books, mostly boy’s adventure with some Graustarkian romance, she was famously attacked by Walt Whitman over her 1891 essay, “On the Absence of the Creative Faculty in Women.”

Yes, you read it right. And she was quite serious. A virulent anti-suffragette, Seawell denied that women had any intrinsic creativity. When the obvious counter-example came up, Seawell dismissed her own work as meritless — she was, after all, obviously only a woman.

Ad hominem arguments take a characteristic of an opponent and use that characteristic to discredit the argument. A mere insult doesn’t qualify. For example, “That jackass Joe is wrong because his facts are in error” contains an insult, but the insult isn’t part of the argument: the argument is the claim that Joe’s facts are in error. No ad hominem here.

“Joe is wrong because he is a jackass” contains the same insult, but now it’s ad hominem because the evidence that Joe is wrong is that he is a jackass. Joe may indeed be a jackass, for all we know, but that fact alone doesn’t establish that he’s incorrect.

But what if it does? If the personal characteristic does disqualify someone’s argument, or at least lessen its potency, is it still ad hominem?

Some years ago, I was asked to read a manuscript purporting to prove that relativity was false, and that only a conspiracy of physicists either too stupid or too venal to face the truth was keeping the veil of deceit intact. The author had a journalism degree and had interviewed exactly one scientist, evidently his source for the Einsteinian hoax revelation.

Is it logically incumbent on me to go through the arguments in that book step by step to refute them, or can I simply look at the skimpy credentialing and sourcing and use that as logical grounds to dismiss his argument from serious consideration?

My own answer is yes. In the unlikely event the argument has merit, it will sooner or later convince others. If the argument shows up again, this time in more credible mouths, it will be time for me to reassess.

So the first question is whether the claim is true, and the second question is whether the if-true claim actually discredits the substance of the argument. Which brings us back to Molly Elliott Seawell. Her proposition is, “My work is not creative because I am a woman.” The proposition “I am a woman” is true. It’s also possible that “My work is not creative” is true — I myself am not impressed with her literary gifts. If both propositions of the argument are true, is not the whole argument true?

The problem here is “because.” You can’t assume such a connection. If you want to assert it, you have to offer proof, in this case, that there is not only a correlation, but a causation.

Properly, the burden of proof lies on the shoulders of the side that claims the linkage. If it’s a valid linkage, you ought to be able to prove it, not just claim it. What criteria measure creativity? Are those criteria objectively valid (or at least acceptable by both sides)? What is the actual distribution among women and men? If there are differences, are they statistically significant? Have alternate explanations and theories to account for any significant differences been explored?

That’s a high burden of proof, but it’s fair. If you argue against a proposition by arguing against the person, it’s your responsibility to prove it’s not ad hominem, and if you fail, the argument’s a fallacy.

To me, Seawell’s claim is clearly ad hominem because the claim that her womanhood compromised her creative mechanism is on the face of it ridiculous. It can’t be accepted at face value; the burden of proof weighs heavily against the proposition. But that’s not the way she saw it. Her world (and her books) were filled with subservient Negroes and noble white boys. That was the way of the world, and it thus meant the burden of proof fell on the other side. The general wisdom said that women were creatively inferior; she had popular opinion on her side. But that’s argumentum ad populem, a fallacy for another day.

Fallacies (a New Series in the Manner of Cognitive Biases) - Part 1

2011-05-24T11:49:00.001-04:00

As a follow-up to my series on cognitive biases, here’s the start of a new one: a description of classical fallacies. For the purposes of this discussion, a fallacy is an opinion or position based on invalid reasoning. The conclusion itself may not be wrong, but the argument offered in support of it is wrong.

“He plays a doctor on TV; he endorses this medical product; therefore, the medical product is good” is fallacious not because the medical product being touted is necessarily not good, but because it’s ad verecundiam, an appeal to an authority outside the authority’s area of expertise. If the same authority made a statement about the profession of acting, however, it wouldn’t be ad verecundiam because the actor presumably has standing on the subject.

Just because the actor has standing, however, doesn’t constitute a final proof that the proposition is true. At most, it counts as an evidence point — but it’s a logically valid one.

For the list of fallacies, I’m starting with the list on Wikipedia. There’s another extensive list at The Nizkor Project. The examples and discussion are my own.

Fallacies come in two basic flavors.

Formal fallacies, as the name suggests, are errors of form: regardless of the contents of the argument, or the truth of any of the statements, the argument is invalid on its face. An appeal to probability is one such fallacy: the idea that if something could happen, it necessarily will happen.

There are subsets of formal fallacies. Propositional fallacies are structural errors in logic. “It’s raining or it’s Tuesday; it’s not raining, therefore it’s Tuesday” is a propositional fallacy (affirming a disjunct). It may not be raining, but that doesn’t make it Tuesday.

Syllogistic fallacies also fall into the category of formal fallacies. “Some cats are black; some black things are televisions; therefore some cats are televisions” involves an illicit treatment of the minor term (you can’t assume that the set of televisions and the set of cats have common members because they share a particular color).

Informal fallacies are not fallacious because of their structure, but usually because of their content. Ad verecundiam and its kissing cousin ad hominem both use a personal characteristic to prove or disprove a proposition without establishing that the personal characteristic in question actually determines whether the conclusion is true or false.

I learned a lot doing the cognitive biases series, and I hope to learn a lot on this project as well. If you’ve seen any great examples of any of these fallacies, please let me know.

MacArthur's War

2011-05-17T06:00:00.009-04:00

For our third alternate history novel, Doug Niles and I turned from the European Theater to the Pacific with MacArthur's War: A Novel of the Invasion of Japan. Using the original battle plans for the US plan Operation Downfall and the Japanese response known as Ketsu-Go, we explored what might have happened had we not had the atomic bomb.

Here's the opening of the invasion of Kyushu.

Monday, 19 March 1945

Approaching Beach Pontiac, “Roadster” Beach Zone, Kyushu, Japan, 0815 hours (Operation Olympic X-Day, N-Hour +0215)

As the Higgins Boat churned toward the beach, the chop increased into gray swells, lifting the little landing craft onto the crests, and then dropping it precipitously into the troughs. The bow kept lifting up and slapping hard on the water. Already, nearly a third of the Marines had puked, the vomit mixing with the sea spray and coating the bottom of the boat. Whether the vomiting was seasickness or nerves, Pete didn’t know. From the sickly white looks of terror on a lot of faces—officers as well as enlisted—nerves certainly played a big part.

This was Pete’s fourth beach landing. The first was Gavutu, part of the Guadalcanal, which had been nasty. He’d just made lance corporal then. In the Philippines, where he went from corporal to staff sergeant, the opposition was pretty tough, but he was in a pretty late wave. At Okinawa, the landing unopposed. Nothing from the enemy for about two weeks, then the shit hit the fan.

What else could he do? How else could he prepare his men for what they were about to experience?

“Everybody’s scared shitless,” he shouted over the roaring diesels. “Some get scared before, some during, and some after. Your best bet is to get scared after. Before is okay. During can get you killed.” That was true enough. “I’m scared shitless the whole time, but I keep moving. I don’t bunch up with other Marines. I don’t freeze. Those three things get a lot of men killed. Focus on your job. Afterwards, you can get the shakes. But that’s what booze is for.”

Pete didn’t know if a Marine gunnery sergeant was supposed to admit he was terrified, but it was the truth. The biggest reason he hadn’t died so far, though, is because he didn’t let his fear freeze him. He kept moving. He hoped that advice would make the soldiers a little calmer. A few were listening in, and that was good. Calmness was increasingly in short supply as they got closer and closer to the beach.

As for Pete, he felt the odds were against him. He’d done this before. So many people had died around him, it was simple justice that it would be his turn this time.

Down in the boat, he couldn’t see the action, but he could hear it. A barrage of explosions, swooping aircraft engines, and the occasional gush of water were about all that could make it over the diesels of the Higgins boat. Overhead, the dawn skies had turned brimstone black from the incredible barrage, as if marking a signpost: “You are now entering hell.”

The boat churned onward, bouncing more violently as they neared the breakers. Closer to shore, the Japanese artillery opened up with a barrage so intense it felt like rain. Pete couldn’t stand not seeing any more, so he stuck his head up. His stripes kept the three-man crew from ordering him to keep his head down and the rest of him the hell out of their way, but he stayed carefully to the side anyway.

Plumes of water shot up as shells hit the water. Many rounds fell short, spuming ocean and sand up from the shallows. Other shells hit true. A burst of flames marked the funeral pyre of a nearby landing craft that didn’t make it in—the boat was incinerated, a whole platoon killed, at the moment of impact. Another boat about twenty yards to the right took a direct hit. Pete could see bodies and body parts flying into the air. A minute later, there was an explosion right in front of them. As the boat hit the wave, it was lifted several feet into the air, canted to the right, and came crashing down, knocking men and equipment everywhere. One of his men fell out of the boat altogether. He couldn’t tell who it was. The poor bastard was probably drowning, and there was nothing anyone could do. Maybe he’d get lucky and shed his equipment before he died. Maybe.

Pete could see the boat’s coxswain struggling to keep on course. At least there wasn’t too much danger from mines. Divers had been busy for several nights clearing safe lanes. Still, they might have missed a few.

There was a horrible skidding and scraping sound from underneath the boat as they reached shallow water. The front bow began to open.

“Weapons! Keep ‘em high and dry! Move! Make sure you know where your feet are! Head for cover as soon as you get to shore!” All the platoon sergeants were hollering the same advice at their men. Everybody knew what to do, but when there was live ammo, people tended to forget the small stuff.

“Come on, men! Let’s show those Japs what American Marines can do!” shouted Captain Gilder, and the men piled out of the boat and into the water. The cold came as a shock. The water only came up to Pete’s waist, but some Marines were at chest depth. Holding their rifles overhead, the Marines slogged forward into a hail of machine gun bullets. He could hear them whizzing by like angry bees. He could see them splash into the water. One hit the water directly in front of him only a foot away. He could feel the impact, but not much. Someone screamed, right in his ear, but he didn’t stop to see who or why.

He was in a lottery of death. Skill and experience meant nothing. The bullets hit you or they didn’t. You moved as quickly as you could in the water, but it was agonizingly slow. The water was another enemy, viscous and stubborn and resistant, dragging down his feet with its leaden weight. He pushed on, dragging his boondockers through the soft, shifting sands.

A bullet hit Private McKinlay in the face, spattering blood and pieces of skin and bone around him. He fell backward into the water, probably dead. Pete’s only thought was relief. It wasn’t me. Thank god it wasn’t me. McKinlay was from Ohio, somewhere. That was all he could remember.

Corporal Lichtman, who was ten feet ahead of him, crumpled forward and landed face down in the water. Pete didn’t see what happened. Schubert had been with the company since the Philippines. It wasn’t me. Thank god. It wasn’t me.

More angry bees buzzed by him. Then suddenly there was a sharp pain in his upper right shoulder. Shit! Omigod omigod omigod I’ve been hit! Don’t let me die don’t let me die. His heart pounded in his chest. He vomited the remainder of his breakfast. But he wasn’t falling, wasn’t dying…not yet.

There went one…two…five more of his men. Even those who were only wounded fell with loaded packs into the water. The only ones who stood up again had dropped pack and weapon.

The water was taking on a pink froth, the tinge of curling visible in the curling breakers, the explosions of brine as the waves broke and crashed onto the sloping sand of the shore. The waves dumped more than water onto the beach—they cast limp bodies onto the land and rolled back out to collect more flesh. Some of those bodies lay motionless, soaked and lifeless, while others twitched and groped and clawed their way farther out of the sea.

Ahead of him was the beach, right there. It was only another ten yards or so. Each step he took was an agony of slow motion. He had the strange sensation that the strand of dry land was moving away from him, warping like a funhouse mirror. Waves still carried the detritus of battle, the bodies of Marines cast upon the land as the breakers crested, surged, and broke.

The beach itself looked like the surface of Mercury—the side that always faced toward the sun. It was cratered and alien. A massive DUKW, an amphibious truck that had been torn in half by a direct hit, lay on its side and burned. The huge fire was painful to look at as the intense heat blistered the air for twenty or thirty feet. The constant barrage made the surface roil in a constant tremor. Sand flew through the air in stinging blasts, mixed with spray, tainted with blood. Nothing felt steady.

The beach ahead was littered with corpses from the two earlier waves. Just a quick glance at the bodies told Pete it had to have been hell, worse than any fighting he’d ever seen. Some corpses were intact. Others had been blown apart, body parts strewn randomly and intermixed. Still others had been reduced to a smear of blood, flesh, and char. The air stank. It reeked of petroleum and cordite and gore and shit.

The early waves had put machinery on the beach. A flame-throwing amphibious tank, burned black, still had flames licking out of it. A crewman who had been caught halfway out gave off the smell of cooked meat. He was nearly unrecognizable as a human. Other amphibious tanks, armored amphibian tractors sporting 75mm howitzers, and various American and Japanese fighters had all been twisted into strange modern sculptures by the application of high explosives.

It was all cover, though. Even the corpses.

He felt warmth in the cold water and realized he’d pissed himself. At least no one would know. And he’d done worse. In the Leyte invasion he’d lost control of his bowels. He hadn’t been the only one, though, not by a long shot.

An artillery shell landed at the water’s edge about twenty feet away. The ground shook under him, a miniature earthquake, and sand spattered up in his face, blinding him temporarily. The spray drenched every part of his body that wasn’t already soaked.

He kept slogging through the water, rifle over his head. Bullets buzzed angrily past him to slap against the water. Waves surged from behind him, pushing him. He’d been fighting the water all the way in, and now he hated that irresistible propulsion, impelling him in the direction he had been trying to go.

Another Marine in Fox Company fell. He saw the face, he knew who it was, but for the life of him he couldn’t think of the man’s name. The body hit the surface of the water and began to sink slowly. Who the hell was that? (It wasn’t me it wasn’t me it wasn’t me…)

The water receded below the level of Pete’s knees. He could move faster now, pulling his feet free of the clutching surf. Finally he was on the beach. Twenty more feet and he’d be temporarily safe behind a metal nightmare that looked like it had its origins in a P-38. Other Marines had already reached it. Another artillery shell burst a few feet away. The explosion knocked him sideways. He crawled behind a Marine corpse for shelter.

Pete’s ear hurt. He reached up with his good arm and touched it. When he looked at his hand there was blood. He noticed that all the battle sounds had become distant. The explosion had knocked out most of his hearing.

Pete took a look at the dead Marine. His stomach had been torn open and the guts were spilled onto the beach. He glanced at the face. Private Palermo. Second Platoon. Good looking. He’d done some professional crooning in nightclubs before the war and everybody kidded him about being the next Sinatra. It wasn’t going to happen now.

Pete shouted through the din at Privates Carr and Sullivan, who had just escaped the deadly surf at the cost of their packs and rifles, “Take what you need from the bodies. Rifles and ammunition first.”

Carr looked at him in shock, like he’d just proposed eating the dead. He said something Pete couldn’t hear.“Dammit,” Pete shouted, “Take what you need! They don’t have a use for it any more!”

Then it all stopped mattering to Carr as red flowers appeared on his chest and he, too, crumpled forward. That motivated Sullivan to dive onto his belly and begin creeping forward to Pete’s position.

“Stay the fuck away from me,” Pete yelled. “Groups attract more fire. I don’t want to be hit by the bullet with your name on it! We all meet up at the end of the beach.”

“Fuck you, Gunny,” Sullivan gasped. “I’m gonna take the rifle and supplies off—shit, it’s Palermo.”

Pete suddenly realized he could hear the words through a loud ringing in his ear. His hearing was coming back, though slowly. Pete patted Sullivan on the shoulder by way of an apology. The sudden sharp pain in his arm reminded him that he had a little scrape to take care of, but right now nothing was more important than moving forward. Pete looked around for his next bit of cover, and did a sprint.

Gasping for breath under the weight of pack and supplies, he dived for cover behind the wreckage of the P-38. He felt himself trembling all over. He was wet and cold, colder than he should be.

Fox Company was spread out along several hundred feet of Beach Pontiac. They needed to be pushed forward, when the temptation was to stay behind the first piece of decent cover you found. That was part of Pete’s job.

Crouching low and dodging as best he could, Pete started to work his way across the line, getting his company re-organized, collecting stragglers, and helping men who’d been separated from their teams. Twice he hid behind corpses and felt bullets thud into the already-dead bodies. The spray of blood and other fluids stuck to his face.

In between the P-38 and the burning tank, Pete could see Captain Gilder. He was pointing toward a couple of wrecked tractors about twenty yards ahead of them. “Platoons! Move forward and take cover behind those tractors!” The lieutenants passed the word and the sergeants pushed their men forward—for those platoons that still had a lieutenant. Fox Company was already down two lieutenants, one a shavetail. Sergeants were running the show now.

Pete took a deep breath and started his run toward the tractors. He saw bullets ping off metal hulks and thud into the sand. He could hear them. He felt as if he was running in a dream, his limbs heavy and unresponsive. And then, suddenly, he was almost at the tractor and he dived once again and threw himself on the ground next to Captain Gilder.

The captain said something. Pete couldn’t make it out.

“I stood too near an explosion, Captain. My ears…I can hear a little.”

“How are we doing?” shouted the captain.

Pete panted for a minute, and said, “It looks like we’ve lost about forty so far.” He had been keeping rough track in his head, and the number was bad. That was a casualty rate of around twenty percent. They’d planned on no more than ten percent, and they were only twenty yards away from the surf.

“I thought the Japanese weren’t supposed to fight us at the beaches,” the captain shouted. “That’s what the briefing said.”

“I guess the Japs missed the briefing,” Pete replied.

“Guess so. Shit. What a complete fucking nightmare.”

Pete looked back. At the water’s edge, the Higgins boats were pulling away, heading back to the transports for another load. At a platoon per load, they would be ferrying troops for hours. As he watched, a Japanese artillery shell hit one of the outgoing boats, and the wooden craft exploded in a hail of splinters. At least it was going out, not in, he thought. Then he thought about the three men on board. Three more down.

Gilder’s eyes were glassy, his skin pallid as he looked frantically around. The captain was a bit shell-shocked, Pete knew, realizing that he felt the same way himself. All around them, the carnage was terrific. The American advance was pressing forward slowly, but at a terrible cost. The Japanese defenders were evidently determined to make the Americans pay a high price for every foot of ground. Artillery shells continued to thunder and lighting while machine gun bullets fell like hail.

Gilder took a deep shuddering breath. “Okay. We’ll do it the way we rehearsed it. Our first objective is those machine gun emplacements. We’re right in line for them, as planned.” They had done this landing under simulated conditions four times, and rehearsed it on paper a dozen more. While “no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy,” as the saying went, at least having a plan was a definite improvement over trying to improvise one while people shot real bullets at you.

“Gunny,” the captain said, “get me a real headcount, okay?”

“Yes, sir.” The platoon leaders, the captain, and Pete had walkie-talkies. Pete unhooked his. “Torpedo Two.” Torpedo was a pre-war Pontiac model. Pontiac had stopped making cars for the duration. “Check in.”

“Torpedo Three,” was the first platoon, the only one with an officer left. First Lieutenant Berry had seen the elephant at Okinawa, and had done pretty well. “Eight down.”

“Torpedo Four. Sergeant Schalles commanding. Fifteen down, including the lieutenant.”

“Torpedo Five. Sergeant Townley. Nineteen down, ditto.”

“Torpedo One.” That was Captain Gilder.

Once the captain had a handle on his actual losses—the equivalent of a full platoon—he issued orders. Scouts went out right and left carrying two of the precious walkie-talkies. About ten minutes later, they reported in. The Japanese were holed up in a concrete pillbox on a small hill about forty feet away. There was little cover on the direct line between Fox Company’s position and the Japs. A direct attack would be suicide.

“What do you advise?” asked the captain.

“Circle around and hit it from the rear, sir. More cover there.”

“Roger. Stay in position and report on any changes.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Torpedo One out.”

The captain thought for a moment. “Okay. Gunny, here’s what I want. You take two rifle squads and keep firing. When you hear from me, really open up. I’m going to circle left with the rest of the rifles and our flamethrowers until I’m behind the pillbox, if I can get there. Meanwhile, I want the mortars to circle right, find a good spot, and wait for my signal to send them a little love note from Uncle Sam. Got it?”

“Suggestion, captain.”

“Go ahead.”

“A rifle team with the mortars. In case there are some loose Japs roaming around. And one mortar team here, if you can spare it.”

“Yeah. Okay.” Gilder took a quick swig of water from his canteen. “Go ahead.”

Pete toggled his walkie-talkie. “Torpedo Two to Torpedo Six.”

“Torpedo Six.” That was the scout on the left.

“Mark a route and find a good staging area. You’ve got company for dinner.”

“Torpedo Six. Mark route, find staging area, welcome dinner guests.”

“Confirmed. Two out.”

It took less than five minutes of coordination for Pete to put the teams together. The captain and the mortar team moved out to left and right respectively, keeping low and moving from one bit of cover to another. They now had the other two walkie-talkies, leaving Pete with the last one.

Pete called out, “Good hunting, Captain.”

He had one sergeant, Townley, and a full corporal, Canfield. The mortar team had a lance corporal as team leader. “Let’s spread out the line and fire widely to make them think it’s a whole company back here,” Pete told them. “The better job we do, the better chance the captain has of putting those machine gunners out of commission permanently.” Townley knew weapons, so he could oversee the mortar teams.

Now that they had some cover and were shooting back, a little life was coming back into his men. Pete duck-walked down the line, staying low. He stopped beside one private. “What’s the matter, son?” he asked, even though the private was maybe two years his junior. The private—the name badge read Sanvito—was aiming his rifle but not firing.

“I’ve—well, I’ve never shot at a human being before.”

“I see. The Japs don’t seem to have that trouble, though, do they?”

“No, Gunny. But—”

“I know. It may surprise you, Sanvito, but you’re not the first Marine to have this problem.”

Sanvito, who was clearly expecting to be bawled out, court-martialed, or shot, looked at Pete. There were tears in his eyes. “I can’t!”

“Okay.” Pete kept his voice calm. If he screwed up, he could ruin a perfectly good potential Marine. “Try this. Don’t shoot at human beings. See that wrecked tank?”

“Uh—yeah, Gunny?”

“Shoot at that. It’s not a human being.”

“Okay,” the private said, a slight question mark creeping in at the end. He shot.

“Now shoot at that pillbox. Not at the slit, just at the building.”

“Okay.” He shot again.

“This is suppressive fire, Marine. I don’t care if you kill anybody or not. I want them to keep their heads down and not shoot at us. Can you do that?”

“Well, I—I guess—if you put it that way…”

“Good man,” Pete said, patted him on the shoulder, and moved on. He was satisfied to hear a steady stream of rifle shots. It was hard to shoot at humans. A lot more soldiers—even Marines—failed to shoot their rifles in combat that most people suspected. It was one of the many surprises he’d found when he first became a sergeant.

The second mortar team opened fire. Blasts of sand and smoke erupted from the crest of the dune, where the pillbox was located. The crump of explosions, so close in front of him, seemed more real than the distant artillery, the continuing thunder of the naval bombardment.

The Japanese pillbox was taking quite a pounding. Pete could imagine what they were going through. He’d been on the receiving end of a mortar himself.

The walkie-talkie crackled to life. “Torpedo One to Torpedo Two.”

“Torpedo Two.”

“Am passing to the attack. Stop suppressing fire.”

“Roger. Torpedo Six, cease fire.” That was the second mortar team. Then, off the walkie-talkie, he shouted, “Cease firing!”

Now the noise was coming from the hilltop as the captain and the rest of the company moved in. It was hard to tell the grenades from the flank attackers from the background artillery shelling that was still going on.

It was easy to tell when the constant machine gun fire stopped.

“Looks like the captain did it,” Pete shouted, and received cheers in return. “Move forward by squad.” His two squads and the mortar team began to move forward toward the now-silent pillbox; the squad that wasn’t on the move crackled off suppressive fire while the other Marines crawled and scrambled onward.

The radio burst into noise. “Torpedo Five! Stop where you are! The fucking Japs have—”

The titanic explosion threw the pillbox nearly twenty feet into the air.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” said Corporal Canfield. “They mined the fucking thing and blew the shit out of it when they got breached.”

“Yeah, and they took themselves with it,” Sergeant Townley pointed out.

Pete stood there in shock, and then in horror as the torso of a dead soldier landed right in front of him, followed by a red spray that spattered everyone in his small command. He retched and gagged emptily; he couldn’t help it. He went down on his knees, wracked by dry heaves. The smell of blood and offal mixed with the sulfurous odor of gunpowder kept him in spasms for a long minute, even though there was nothing left to come up.

“You okay, gunny?” Townley asked.

“Yeah,” said Pete weakly. He straightened up as best he could. I must look like warmed-over shit, he thought. Hardly a sight to inspire confidence in his men. “Townley, Canfield, each of you send three men to scout the perimeter for survivors. Don’t go closer than about twenty feet. There may be more mines.”

With Gilder and Lieutenant Berry dead, that left Pete in charge.

There were seventeen survivors. Added to his existing force, that gave him the equivalent of three squads.

One platoon.

That was all that remained of Fox Company.

Fox at the Front

2011-05-10T06:00:00.023-04:00

The second alternate history novel I wrote with Doug Niles was a sequel to Fox on the Rhine, featured last week. Fox at the Front continues the story of an alternate history in which the bomb plot of 1944 succeeded in killing Adolf Hitler.

Critical response to this book was quite favorable. Publishers Weekly wrote, “The authors' attention to military detail and maneuvers would satisfy any drill instructor, and they imbue even minor historical characters with authenticity and personality, demonstrating how an individual's actions and reactions shape history. This is a thoroughly plausible what-if scenario, and as such will please and titillate alternate history fans, WWII buffs, war gamers and others.”

Roland Green in Booklist wrote, “The outstanding sequel to Fox on the Rhine (2000) continues Niles and Dobson's alternate World War II to its bloody conclusion. [...] Character-centered alternate history is not that common, and this is an eminently successful example of it, thanks to Niles and Dobson's work on real and fictional characterizations alike and their choice of Rommel as principal protagonist. Standing head and shoulders above its predecessor, this is must reading for imaginative WWII buffs.”

There's also a Wikipedia page for the book.

This scene from the book's beginning chronicles Rommel's surrender to the Allies.

27 December 1944

Armeegruppe B Headquarters, Dinant, Belgium, 0529 hours GMT

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel had never thought that surrendering would prove to be so complicated. He had personally forced the capitulation of thousands of enemy soldiers in two wars and numerous campaigns, and it had always seemed like a straightforward procedure. He would call upon them to lay down their arms, they would do so, and he would detail sufficient guards to escort them to the nearest POW holding facility. Very quickly they would become the responsibility of some rear echelon formation, and he would maintain his focus on the continuing battle.

But now there was no continuing battle, neither for him nor for his great army group. His head ached and his eye, the one that had been wounded by an Allied bomb the previous summer, watered constantly. This was annoying, but not unprecedented. Sometimes he thought he’d fought more of his battles sick than well. Of course, there was not only the pain and stress of this surrender, but the price for several sleepless nights finally catching up with him.

He took a sip of cold and somewhat stale coffee, and glanced out the window for a moment. It was still dark, new clouds coming in, harbinger of yet more dreary December weather in Belgium. The dark was penetrated by the headlamps of motor vehicles and guardpost lights, a monocolored illumination that gave everything it touched an eerie, unearthly look, as if he was looking at the surface of the moon. With all the fighting this poor city had taken, the resemblance to the lunar surface was even greater. Heaps of rubble were strewn everywhere. At the very limit of his vision, a single tree stood bare and unadorned, facing the elements.

Rommel turned back to the details of the order of battle. Armeegruppe B, consisting of the vast majority of German forces in the West, included three complete armies: the 5th Panzer Army, under von Manteuffel, the 6th Panzer Army, under Guderian, and the 7th Army under Brandenberger. Two more panzer armies had been relocated from the Eastern Front after the Soviet treaty had been signed; they were in reserve behind the Westwall and the Rhine River. While the 6th Panzer Army was stopped at the Meuse, elements of the 5th Panzer Army had already crossed the river at Dinant before the remaining bridges had been destroyed, and were trapped without hope of resupply or relief deep behind enemy lines.

His job was to arrange the surrender of all those forces, and looking at some of the individual divisions and their commanders, he knew that not all of them would surrender. What would happen then, he did not know.

He had another concern, for his wife Lucie and son Manfred. As soon as he realized that surrender was a necessity, he had telephoned Lucie at their home in Herrlingen. Quickly, using agreed-upon code words, he’d told her to grab Manfred and leave. There were people in Bitburg he trusted, and he had arranged a rendezvous there. He worried, but there was nothing more he could do.

The Desert Fox turned back from the window. He was not alone. Sitting at the conference table was his opposite number, General George S. Patton, who had driven in a jeep with a small escort to accept his surrender. Rommel had studied Patton for years, had been aware of Patton even before the war started, but of course they had never met. And while he would no doubt have appreciated a meeting with Patton after the war was over, two victorious generals comparing observations, this was not the meeting he had in mind. Rommel was determined to be gracious, but it was hard not to feel some bitterness as well. Patton and the Americans had such a materiel advantage that the campaign had been lopsided from the start.

Patton, though by all accounts a rather brusque and insensitive man, was obviously aware of the essential awkwardness of the situation. His first words to him had been, “I thought Infanterie Greift An was a masterpiece. I’ve read it fourteen times.”

Infanterie Greift An was Rommel’s first book, a study of infantry tactical operations based on analysis of Rommel’s own World War I campaigns. The book had first catapulted him to public recognition, and had set the stage for much of his later advancement. “Thank you,” he had replied. In an effort to return the compliment, he added, “I thought your advance to the Westwall was rather a masterpiece as well.”

Patton had laughed as soon as the remark was translated. His laugh was irresistible and hearty, much like the man himself. Rommel felt himself almost unwillingly put at ease, to like the American general, even under the difficult and painful circumstances.

While the official surrender had first taken place at the more-or-less neutral setting of the Church of Notre Dame in the lower city of Dinant, the business end of the process had quickly led to the parties relocating to Armeegruppe B headquarters just outside the city. Accompanying Patton was General Henry Wakefield of the US 19th Armored Division, which had successfully attacked Rommel’s flank and blown the final bridge at Dinant, and Lieutenant Colonel Reid Sanger, the 19th Armored’s intelligence officer, who was acting as Patton’s translator. Initially, Rommel had used the translation services of Chuck Porter, a captured Associated Press reporter, but Porter’s German was not up to the challenge of complex technical negotiations, so Sanger was shouldering the load for both sides.

“I believe the biggest immediate challenge is to arrange the surrender of 6th Panzer Army. Their headquarters is here—” Rommel pointed to the map. “—near Namur. I have sent a radio message to Generaloberst Guderian. He sees the rationale in the same way I do, and has agreed.”

“Good,” said Patton, his incongruously high voice standing in contrast to his imposing physical demeanor. “I read his book, too. Our military people did translations of both his and yours. Brilliant. Used it a lot.”

Guderian’s Achtung Panzer was one of the seminal works on the use of armor. “I wonder if this means Guderian and I are both guilty as authors of the crime of giving aid and comfort to the enemy,” Rommel mused, only partly in jest. What he or Guderian could have accomplished, if only he had the resources of the Americans!

Sanger, the translator, laughed before he repeated the sentence in English. Patton grinned when he heard the statement. “Hell, Field Marshal, amateurs borrow, but professionals steal. I thought you knew that. I stole from the best. Haven’t you gotten an idea or two from our side?”

“A few,” Rommel admitted.

“So, we’re even. Right?”

Rommel smiled in agreement. Patton was rather like a tank himself, barreling through obstacles as if they were not there. He was what Rommel thought of as typically American, so cheerfully ignorant of the manners of the European gentry that it was almost charming—almost. “I shall take that under advisement.”

Patton was already onto the next item. His finger was pointing to the large operational map. “So, 6th Panzer Army HQ is here. That’s good. I can ask Hodges to send the 99th Infantry Division from First Army down to meet them. How about the two panzer divisions across the Meuse?”

“Now that they’re cut off from resupply, I don’t think there will be any problems. I note that you have the British XXX Corps near Waterloo that can make contact with those units.” Rommel placed his finger on the map. “I’ve radioed the necessary orders from this end.” He smiled internally. His intelligence about the Allied order of battle and location was good, and he hoped Patton would notice.

Patton did, and immediately riposted with evidence of his own intelligence. “Now, about half of Panzer Lehr managed to cross, and its leading elements are here.” He pointed to another spot on the map, grinning broadly. Patton’s boyish pleasure made it difficult for Rommel to resent the bragging.

“Closer to three quarters of Panzer Lehr is actually across, but yes, the leading elements are here. I’ve spoken with General Bayerlein, and they are withdrawing back in the direction of Dinant.”

“They’ll hit 19th Armored first, right, Henry?” asked Patton, turning to his subordinate general.

Henry Wakefield nodded. “Combat Command B is in the upper city. That’s Bob Jackson. I’ll let him know to expect contact shortly. By the way, General, I’d like to get my engineers up here. We need a pontoon bridge across the Meuse pronto. Plus, I’ve got some wounded I’d like to evac.”

“Good idea, Henry. And see if you can get your kitchens to whip up a hot meal for the boys.”

After the exchange was translated, Rommel interjected. “If my hospitals are more convenient, your wounded are more than welcome. I would offer my own engineers in support of the bridging, but I am in the position of a surrendered foe, so cannot. Officially, at least, we are still enemies.”

“I understand, and I appreciate the offer, Field Marshal. I’ll check with Ballard in Combat Command A - they got the brunt of the fighting down in the lower city.”

“Combat Command A. That was Colonel James Pulaski, correct?” Rommel asked. He had stopped Pulaski once at the Somme, heard him accused of barbaric war crimes in the massacre of Metz, and now was in his current position because of the daring and aggressiveness of that same Pulaski.

“Yes it was. He bought it in the attack. Lieutenant Colonel Ballard ran the tank battalion; he’s acting CO right now.”

Rommel nodded gravely. This was not an uncommon experience, hearing about brave men who were now dead. “Please convey my personal respects to Lieutenant Colonel Ballard. He and his men fought courageously and well.”

“I appreciate that as well, Field Marshal. I’ll pass it along. General Patton, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some work to do.”

“Go ahead, Henry. Holler if you need me.”

“Yes, sir.” Wakefield left the conference room, pulling out a stogie as he went.

The two old adversaries looked across the table at one another. “General Patton, you understand my motives in this,” Rommel stated. “In fact, you have expressed similar thoughts.

The American general grunted in response. “The Soviet Union. That’s right. I guess I’m about the only one who wasn’t shocked down to his boots when the separate peace deal broke. Those Red bastards won’t be satisfied with crushing Nazi Germany; they’ve got designs on all of Europe—hell, all the world!”

“I believe this to be true. Our führer was always surprised that the West didn’t understand that our attack on the Soviet Union was of benefit to them as well as to us.”

“The choice we had was either Commies or Nazis. And pardon me for saying so, but that wasn’t a hell of a choice.”

Rommel nodded. “I understand. But the Nazi threat is over. Kaput. So the choice is easier now, don’t you think?”

“And we pull your fat out of the fire at the same time?”

“We can help you.”

“You’ve surrendered. That means you’re out of the game.”

“I understand. But at least the way is clear for you. This surrender not only eliminates much of the forces that would oppose your advance, but also can deliver a safe crossing of the Rhine far ahead of any schedule you could have set for yourself.” Rommel sat back. He needed to show Patton that surrendered or not, he still had cards to play.

As Patton chewed on the idea, Rommel reinforced. “Armeegruppe B controls a significant section of the Westwall and numerous bridges across the Rhine. I suggest that the Waffen-SS and Wehrmacht troops still under Berlin’s control will want to retake and reinforce the areas I have left unguarded, but it will take some time to do this. General, I am not any longer a supporter of the Nazi government, but I am still a German. Work with me, and I can deliver Germany safely into the hands of the West, and save us all from Soviet domination.”

“It sounds like a good idea,” Patton said slowly. Rommel watched his body language, listened to the sound of his voice while the translator did his work. He was swaying the American armor general, just as he planned, just as he must.

“There’s only one question,” added Patton.

“And what is that?” replied Rommel.

“Will all of your forces surrender?”

“I wish I could be sure.”

Fox on the Rhine

2011-05-03T06:00:00.021-04:00

I've featured nonfiction on this blog, but I thought I'd share sections from the three alternate history novels I coauthored with Doug Niles. Our first, Fox on the Rhine (Forge, 2000), explored what might have happened had the bomb plot of 1944 been successful.

The book also has a Wikipedia page. Our own website is here.

OPERATION VALKYRIE

July 20, 1944

Wolfschanze, East Prussia, 20 July 1944, 1132 hours GMT

The sharp-featured Prussian field marshal approached Hitler's headquarters bunker, trailed by several staff officers. The SS hauptmann standing guard at the door snapped his arm upward in a salute and shouted as a heavy cement truck rolled by.

“Field Marshal Keitel. Der Führer is expecting you. Since they are reinforcing the command bunker, the conference will be held in Minister Speer's barracks.”

“Very well,” the aristocratic commander replied. His face was etched with deep lines, and black circles darkened the skin around his eyes. Keitel turned to one of his accompanying officers and glanced down at the man's solid briefcase. “Did you bring the information on the Replacement Army?”

Colonel Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg instantly tightened his grip upon the satchel's handle. He stood stiffly, nearly as tall as the field marshal, and was every bit his equal as an aristocrat if not in military rank. Von Stauffenberg was a soldier who had suffered grievously for the Reich. A black patch covered his left eye, and his sleeve on the same side was pinched shut at the wrist, hanging empty beside his Wehrmacht colonel's tunic. He clasped his large briefcase in his right hand, even though he had lost fingers there to the same explosion that had claimed his arm and his eye. “Jawohl,” he replied, indicating the briefcase with a nod. He was sweating for reasons other than the oppressive heat.

The colonel glanced over at the footings for the new, large command bunker, a symptom of the Soviet advance. A foreman was yelling at his crew; as always, Wolfschanze, the “Wolf's Lair,” was a beehive of construction activity, with new fortifications being thrown up while the war moved closer and closer.

Keitel noticed Stauffenberg looking at the new command bunker. “The tide will yet turn in our direction,” the field marshal observed.

Stauffenberg looked at his commander. “Yes, Field Marshal,” he replied. “And perhaps sooner than we think.” His face was carefully expressionless, giving away nothing of his true thoughts. Only the beads of moisture on his forehead betrayed his tension, and those could easily be explained by the heat. He knew Keitel was still loyal to the Führer, and would be until the end - which would come sooner than the field marshal could possibly imagine.

Minutes before, Stauffenberg had opened the briefcase and reached inside to crush a glass ampule. The subsequent chemical reaction had activated a fuse. By the colonel's estimate, the bomb in the briefcase would go off in about ten minutes. If all went well, by the end of the day Germany would begin to emerge from the long night of dictatorship and fascism.

Keitel merely nodded, obviously pleased at the patriotic response, as he led his staff toward the barracks. Twice, staff officers offered to carry Stauffenberg's briefcase, be each time he refused the help. The seconds crept slowly by as they approached the Speer Barracks. This was one of the old wooden structures, built before fortifications at the Wolf's Lair were deemed necessary. The building looked like a long, one-story lodge in the woods, not at all like a sophisticated field headquarters for the mighty military machine that was the Third Reich.

To von Stauffenberg, the change raised a pragmatic concern. He worried that his bomb might not be sufficient for the job, that the open windows would diffuse the blast and reduce the damage it would cause. He suppressed a grimace. Why had Keitel interrupted him before he could get the second bomb from Haeften? But there was nothing to be done about that now.

Inside the conference room more than a dozen uniformed officers stood about in various states of unease, while an equal number of stenographers scribbled their notes at writing tables placed haphazardly around the perimeter of the conference bunker. A broad map table filled the center of the room, and the short, dark-haired figure of the Führer bent over those sheets, his shoulders and arms tight with barely-concealed tension. He looked up, piercing eyes flashing angrily, as Keitel and Stauffenberg entered.

General Adolf Heusinger was clearly trying to complete his briefing without provoking another Hitler outburst. “The attempts to reform Army Group Center are being met with some--er, limited success. Zhukov's armies continue to advance, however. Three days ago some elements of the First Guards Tank Army crossed the Bug River into Poland - although the defenders of Lvov stand heroically firm. In the north, I regret to report, there is a real possibility that Stalin's horde will reach the Baltic. In that case, our armies in Latvia and Estonia will be lost—unless - or rather, if - they were to make a strategic movement toward the Fatherland -”

“The German army will never withdraw! It will fight and be victorious - or it will die! But it will never retreat.” Hitler's voice rose He was sweating for reasons other than the oppressive heat. Nearly to a shriek, his eyes fastened on the quivering lieutenant general. “How is it that you cowards in the Wehrmacht can't get that fact through your thick heads? Proceed - but do not mention withdrawal!”

“Jawohl, mein Führer!” Heusinger gulped and mopped his brow, then continued with the dolorous report, trying unsuccessfully to highlight the rare bits of positive news.

Stauffenberg felt some sympathy for the man, knowing that the task of sugarcoating the news was virtually impossible. In truth, Army Group Center - the greatest concentration of men and material ever gathered under German command - had been virtually obliterated by the massive Soviet spring offensive. About the best the hapless Heusinger could do was dangle the hope that the sweeping Soviet advance must surely be carrying the Russian tanks far beyond their bases of supply. Also, he emphasized, the bridgehead across the Bug was still small. Of course, none of the unspoken realities would escape any of the experienced army officers here, but these professional soldiers knew to a man that it was nothing short of suicide to confront the Führer with truths he did not wish to hear.

Stauffenberg stepped up to the table as Field Marshal Keitel moved to Hitler's side. The colonel had asked Major von Freyend to find him a place close to Hitler to compensate for his poor hearing, and von Freyend was happy to oblige. Stauffenberg's one good eye never blinked as it appeared to consider every detail on the wide map, with its huge expanse of flags and colored lines, the sweeping horde beneath the hammer and sickle closing onto the heart of the Reich. His heart pounded, and anger and despair writhed together as he observed this graphic depiction of national catastrophe. So this is the end to which the Führer would lead us. Well, today, right here, the madness stops.

The colonel carefully set his heavy briefcase down underneath the plywood table. Months of stealth, of plotting, of careful recruiting, had led to this moment. The explosion would kill most of the people in the barracks, he knew, and not all of them deserved to die, but then so many people had not deserved to die. These deaths, at least, would bring the insanity to an end.

“Herr Oberst - there is a call for you, from Berlin.” Stauffenberg turned to see a messenger whispering at his side. “General Fellgiebel said it was urgent.” Nodding silently, the crippled officer took one last look at Adolf Hitler, Führer of the Third Reich, and smiled his tight smile before following the messenger from the conference hut, moving quickly across the compound toward the communications building, following the cue of his co-conspirator. He completely forgot his cap and gunbelt.

He didn't forget his briefcase. It remained exactly where he wanted it, under the table, a few feet from the Führer's legs.

Colonel Heinz Brandt moved into the space at the table vacated by Stauffenberg. Brandt, an aide to General Heusinger, was an operations officer on the general staff. He was pondering a disturbing bit of news. Unconfirmed reports from the Balkans had been coming into the OKW headquarters, indicating the possibility of defection by Rumania and Bulgaria. The two nations had never been enthusiastic participants in the epic war against the USSR, and now that the eastern hordes rolled toward them Brandt's sources indicated that either or both countries might be preparing to change sides.

Yet how could he bring this up to the Führer? Brandt's idealism and patriotism had been sorely tried these past months. He still revered his Führer, but those bursts of temper were coming more and more frequently. And too often they meant disgrace or disaster to the recipient.

His position at the table was awkward, and he realized that his foot was blocked by Stauffenberg's briefcase. He reached down to move the leather satchel to his right, finding that it was surprisingly heavy. As he started to shove it behind the thick stanchion supporting the table, however, he was possessed by the sudden urge to sneeze. He froze, embarrassed by his awkward stance, tense because of his proximity to Hitler. Struggling to suppress the tickle in his nose - a distraction such as a sneeze, however involuntary, always irritated the Fuhrer - Brandt decided that the briefcase could remain where it was. He straightened with careful dignity, ignoring the damnably heavy satchel, relieved that he managed to keep from attracting unwanted attention to himself.

More ominous facts and figures mounted up: the Americans and British continued to reinforce their beachhead in Normandy, which was now six weeks old. The German defenders held their positions with heroic courage, but the Wehrmacht commander in the west, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, had just been critically injured by an Allied air attack. The report sent by his replacement, von Kluge, indicated that his troops were stretched to the breaking point, that the defensive shell must soon crack.

Meanwhile the heavy bombers kept coming, day and night, raining death on Germany's cities and destruction upon the Third Reich's industrial capabilities. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring's representative reluctantly admitted that the Luftwaffe was horribly depleted, critically short of spare parts, barely able to scrape together enough fighters to harass the thundering fleets of enemy bombers.

Hitler's eyes again flashed. “And the rigging of the jet bombers? How fares that?”

The unfortunate Luftwaffe officer paused awkwardly. Like every other former combat pilot, he undoubtedly realized the potential of the rocket-fast plane designed by Willy Messerschmidt - the Me-262. Certainly it was glaringly obvious to him, and to everyone else in the Luftwaffe, that the short-ranged aircraft would make a magnificent fighter. Still, Hitler felt a passionate need to strike back at the enemy homeland in revenge for the bombing of Germany, and to that end he had insisted that the aircraft be rigged to carry bombs - a task for which the plane was patently unfit. Thus, the development of a premier weapon had been placed indefinitely on hold. Brandt, an army man more familiar with diplomacy than air power, nevertheless felt sympathy for the flying officer who was now forced to confront his ruler's irrationality.

The man would never formulate his reply.

The explosion ripped through the confined space with the deafening power of thunder, a blaze of fiery light and a shockwave that twisted the ground itself. An eruption of smoke and debris choked Brandt, who suddenly found himself lying on his back, staring up at the tattered remnants of the ceiling's crude wooden paneling. Patches of sky showed through the lumber, a fact that struck him as bizarre.

What had happened? The colonel couldn't fully grasp the situation. Looking around, blinking the dust of the explosion from his eyes, he saw Field Marshal Keitel stagger past. The tall man's hair stood on end and his face was plastered with soot as he knelt beside a shapeless form to Brandt's left. Other officers groaned or cried for help, while two stenographers stumbled toward the door, which hung limply by a single hinge.

Idly, with a sense of curious detachment, Colonel Brandt dropped a hand below his own waist, noticing that his legs were gone. He was dying, he realized, though it was a distant thought. The horrific wound didn't seem to hurt, a fact that surprised him. He noticed a leather shred, the same color as the heavy briefcase, fluttering in the ruins of the smoke filled room.

Then he saw Keitel lurch to his feet, the field marshal's face distorted with a grief so strong that it penetrated even Brandt's mortal haze. Rubbing a hand across the blasted skin of his face, the chief of staff tried unsuccessfully to conceal his profound distress. His jaw stretched tight by emotion, the field marshal's words caught in his throat. He looked down again, as if to deny some madness that afflicted his mind. Finally, haltingly, he spoke.

“Der Führer ist tot,” Keitel declared, his voice as dull as the echoes of the assassin's bomb.

General Erich Fellgiebel, standing outside the Speer Barracks, spun around in alarm as the sound of the explosion echoed through the Wolf's Lair. For a moment his mind froze in awful, incomprehensible fear. What have we done? The question resounded through his mind until he roughly pushed it aside. We have taken back the Fatherland!

The older general's mind still churned with the conflict between his military oath and his duty to his country as he saw it. It was a difficult choice, a bitter draught from a cup he'd wished would have passed him by. History might brand him a traitor, an oath-breaker, and the thought of his reputation forever stained by betrayal was almost too much to bear. He admired the younger Stauffenberg's stoicism, his aristocratic certainty that his choice was correct, honorable.

He watched the dust cloud trailing Stauffenberg's staff car as the colonel and his driver drove away from the Wolf's Lair without apparent urgency. His co-conspirator would board an aircraft for Berlin within a few minutes. Not so long ago he'd thought of the young officer as almost a son. Now, in the end, it seemed as if their roles had reversed. May God be with him...and with the Fatherland.

Fellgiebel knew that he had his own mission to carry out, but now that the time had come the general's will strangely deserted him. He knew he had only minutes to live.

“Treachery! Murder! Help - bring the surgeon!” The cries came from the destroyed staff building, and several officers stumbled into the sunlight, caked with dust and debris. Was Hitler among them?

Fellgeibel gawked, frozen in place, feeling the pulse pounding in his temples. Had they succeeded? What should he do?

“The Führer is slain!” gasped one general, falling to his knees in shock or despair.

In that admission Fellgiebel found his strength, and darted through the door of the communications center. Idle couriers stared in surprise as the general pulled open a large case, withdrawing several long hand grenades. Holding the fragmentation bombs in one hand, he drew his pistol with the other. The wide-eyed radio operator lurched to his feet, staring at the general in disbelief, while the two operators spun around at the telephone switchboard.

“Back!” snarled the general, gesturing the men away from the signals equipment. Gun in one hand, grenade in the other, he made a formidable picture of persuasion. Stumbling over chairs, the communications staff scrambled toward the doors.

The general ran to the switchboard and picked up the telephone speaker, barking a series of numbers into the phone. In another moment, the line was answered with a curt “Was?”

“Die Brucke ist verbrennt!” barked the panting Fellgiebel, before quickly breaking the connection.

The signal for success -”The bridge is burned!” - would be spread by the conspirators across the Reich, though Fellgiebel now felt a piercing regret at the knowledge that he wouldn't be alive to see the effect of those momentous words. Arming the grenade, he dropped it behind the bank of the telephone switchboard.

Next the general fired four shots from his Walther into the cabinet sized radio, each slug splintering tubes and wiring. Fellgiebel reached out and pitched the huge radio onto its side before firing more shots from his handgun.

He was still shooting as an SS guard burst through the door. Fellgiebel did not look up as the man's Schmeisser erupted, stitching a line of bloody holes up the general's back, knocking him onto the switchboard that would never be used again.

A second later, the grenade behind the telephone switchboard exploded, shredding the panel into lethal shrapnel, simultaneously ripping into the SS guard and tearing away at Fellgiebel's unfeeling corpse.

(Copyright © 2000 by Douglas Niles and Michael Dobson)

The Fine Art of Managing UP!

2011-04-26T12:28:00.001-04:00

Is it “managing up” or is it just brown-nosing?

Everybody manages his or her boss to some extent: there’s no way around it. Bosses are human beings too: imperfect and in need of help. At the same time, bosses have power over us, and their feelings and perceptions of us can influence pay, promotion, and even basic job security. Managing our relationships with our bosses is fraught with temptation and danger. At the same time, it’s one of the most important skills you need.

You can find any number of books on working for crummy or difficult bosses (it’s not for nothing that “B-O-S-S” spelled backward is “Double S-O-B”). Bad behavior on the part of people in authority can be hugely damaging. But the truth is that even the best boss can be a challenge at least on occasion. Even the best boss needs managing.

People often think that managing up is something you do to your boss, to get power over him and her, but that’s not the case. “Managing up” is something you do for your boss, and if you’re the boss, it’s something you wish more of your employees knew how to do. Managing, after all, is the art of getting work done through the agency of other people. If you need your boss’ help to succeed, you’re a manager. You need to act like one.

The difference between managing up and brown-nosing is simply this: managers get work done; brown-nosers manipulate people to get what they want. The key difference is in the goals you choose. Are you there to help your boss and your organization succeed, or are you just looking out for Number One?

The two categories aren’t mutually exclusive, of course, nor should they be. But they aren’t necessarily at odds, either. Doing what’s right for your boss and for the organization is very often the best way to get ahead. People who look out only for themselves and don’t care about the organizational consequences sometimes get short-term advantage, but more often suffer long-term consequences.

In our book Managing UP! (AMACOM, 2000), we identified 59 different skills and techniques you can use to build a career-advancing relationship with your boss. They break down into a few categories: self-improvement, working with different styles and temperaments, managing organizational systems and procedures, building teams, and solving problems.

Self-improvement. Do good work, manage your time effectively, and build your skills. Take your job seriously, but take yourself lightly.

Working with styles and temperaments. Pay attention to the styles, preferences and pet peeves of your boss and others. Tolerate some bad moods and imperfect behavior — we’re all guilty. Learn how and when to fight, and when to leave well enough alone.

Managing organizational systems and procedures. Learn the paperwork. Prepare for meetings. Build relationships throughout the organization. Give solid feedback, both positive and negative. Pay attention to the politics of the organization, but avoid getting “political.” Pay attention to the hidden keys of status and the symbolic language of the organization.

Build teams. Teams are all the people you need — regardless of whether they work for you. Think of your boss as a customer. Learn to train others. Improve your skills at delegation. Build your skills in win-win negotiation. Build connections in other departments. Be a “goodmouther.”

Solve problems. Give negative feedback well. Be supportive, not competitive. Accept responsibility. Stand up for what you believe and need. Get organized. Sharpen your decision skills. Work on better communication. Develop a personal intelligence network in your organization.

These skills not only improve your relationship with your boss and higher ups, they also help the group and the organization succeed. Managing up isn’t just the smart thing to do — it’s also the right thing.

— Michael and Deborah Singer Dobson

(This was originally written as a guest post for the AMACOM Books blog.)

Project Owner, Project Manager

2011-04-19T06:51:00.001-04:00

Books on project management talk about the role of the project manager and sometimes the project team. The project owner — the customer — is merely a “stakeholder,” one more thing to be managed.

But project owner is a job, too. And it’s a vital one.

A PMP certification is a project manager qualification, but there's no equivalent for being a project owner. All you need is a desire to something done and the money to pay for it. This inevitably means that project owners find themselves in a quandary. The overarching question they face is: “How much of this can I, and should I, do myself?” In other words, they are fuzzy about how to manage the project manager.

The danger of micromanagement looms large if they feel competent enough to do much of the project themselves ⎯ if only they had the time.

But when the project falls outside of their area of expertise, they are like Blanche DuBois, the Tennessee Williams character who famously said, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Project owners are all too often at the mercy of project managers and other technical experts. Their temptation is either to delegate everything, or to insert themselves randomly into the project, that is, to wedge whatever expertise they have into it.

I’ve managed projects for nearly 40 years and written nine books on project management. I’ve been in every role: manager, consultant, subject matter expert, technical specialist, worker, and even gopher. Well, every role except one. I’d never been the project owner, not until last summer.

Over a period of six months, I oversaw a $150,000 renovation and decorating project to fix decades of deferred maintenance on my house. You see, I don’t have any of the necessary skills to do it myself, or even the knowledge and understanding to oversee it. I am the textbook example of a clueless customer.

A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client, and so it often is with project owners. The project management job for this project was significant. My risk analysis (interviews with other people who’d done major renovations) had led me to the conclusion that the key trigger of difficulties was poor management of the ordering process. If the necessary supplies and materials aren’t ready when the contractor is, delay results, and sooner or later, your project overlaps with the contractor’s next one. As soon as you move from first place to second priority, look out.

Our decorator (and my sister-in-law) Elisa Dobson took over the job, and that made it possible for our contractor Jack Hymiller to do his. If I’d tried to do it myself, we would have been in a world of hurt almost immediately.

But that didn't mean I didn't have a role on the project.

Six Responsibilities of Project Owners

Even though I didn’t do the project management job, that didn’t mean I didn’t have duties on the project. Like all project owners, I had six fundamental responsibilities:

Balancing the interplay of time/cost/performance: How much do we need; how much can we afford; and how much time do we have?
Managing stakeholder relations: Agreement among stakeholders, aligning disparate interests toward a common goal.
Managing people and organizations that don’t report to you: The bank, the neighborhood architectural committee, neighbors.
Managing technology and processes you don’t understand: When the contractor tells us the back of the house (a do-it-yourself initiative of the previous owner) is falling off, how do we evaluate the proposed solution and associated cost?
Managing project managers and the project management process: I’m color-blind and thumb-fingered. How do I get my project manager and general contractor to do the right thing when I can’t always say what it is?
Managing the project envelope: Financial management, real estate analysis, the logistics of being temporarily homeless.

If you are a project owner, you need to understand the realities of the project-management world. Your job is to figure out how to hire a good project manager, give that person what he or she needs, and make sure the project manager gives you what you need. You need to provide direction without over-steering.

Projects are team efforts. Project leadership is seldom concentrated in any single role — not the project manager, not the contractor, and not the owner. It’s vital for you to figure out what role you play and focus on that, and to help other people play their roles as well.

PS - The house looks beautiful.

Project Disasters and Career Management

2011-04-12T10:00:00.010-04:00

“My project’s going down the tubes. How do I keep them from making me the scapegoat?”

- RN, Washington, DC

There’s an old joke about the stages in a project life cycle. First comes enthusiasm, then disillusionment, followed quickly by panic. Then comes the search for the guilty, resulting in punishment for the innocent, praise for non-participants, and when everyone sees what a disaster it’s been comes the final stage: figuring out what we should have been doing in the first place.

By the time the project’s in trouble, it’s usually too late to do much about it. That’s why project managers know the real secret is to keep your project out of trouble in the first place. It doesn’t matter whether the problems are actually your fault; it matters whether you could possibly have prevented it, fixed it, or managed it. That’s called risk management, a forward-looking approach to project uncertainties. What could go wrong? Why could it go wrong? And what can you do to prevent the problem or deal with it if it occurs?

A risk management plan can be a huge, formal document or it can be comparatively casual, but either way, you need one. Start with risk identification, a list of potential issues. You can brainstorm with your team, you can ask people who’ve done similar projects, and you can review the documentation (requirements, contracts, statements of work). Prioritize the risks by how serious they are, and take some time to dig into the bigger ones.

There are basically five things you can do about a risk, and your job is to pick the best choice. For example, if you’re the owner or captain of RMS Titanic, and you know there are icebergs in the North Atlantic, you can do the following:

Avoid the risk. Change the course far enough to the south, and there are no icebergs. Of course, the trip will take longer.
Transfer the risk. Buy insurance so that someone else will pick up the bill in the event of sinking.
Mitigate the risk. Mitigation reduces a risk without getting rid of it altogether. For example, the British inquiry into the sinking concluded that the Titanic was going too fast. It might have hit an iceberg anyway, but a slower collision might have reduced the damage.
Have a contingency plan. More lifeboats (the Titanic only had enough for about a third of its passengers and crew) wouldn’t have prevented the sinking, but would have reduced loss of life.
Accept the risk. Some risks you just have to deal with. If you’ve done everything that seems practical and appropriate, risk isn’t exactly zero. The remaining risk is something you simply accept. Save the rich and leave the poor in steerage.

Risk management is something you do in advance. Once the Titanic hits the iceberg, the game changes from risk management to problem solving. There, unfortunately, the options tend to be dramatically reduced.

What if the project appears to be impossible? People say “nothing’s impossible,” but that’s if you have unlimited time, unlimited resources, and really flexible standards. Are the constraints on the project (time, cost, expected performance) too tight? Is that because of a management decision, or are the constraints imposed by external circumstances? Management decisions may change, but if the money isn’t there or the deadline is unstoppable, management may have no more power than you do.

If a project is impossible as contemplated, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible period. Maybe you can do something different, or do it in a different way. Look for flexibility and opportunity wherever it may be found. If you can’t do everything they’re asking for, perhaps there’s a “good enough” level that meets the objective.

In the aftermath of a big project disaster, there may be some kind of investigation, and if you’re in charge, it’s perfectly reasonable that people will look at you. That doesn’t automatically mean that scapegoating is taking place. Yes, there’s usually blame to go around, and it may be appropriate and fair for you to own a piece of it. Sometimes it’s good strategy to accept your share of any blame early. And, to be perfectly fair, if you’re in charge of the project, you normally deserve at least some share of both credit and blame.

When scapegoating actually occurs, it’s normally an attempt to deflect responsibility from someone higher in the management food chain onto a more vulnerable target: you, for example. And again, you normally have ample warning if you’re paying attention. That person’s goal, remember, isn’t to scapegoat you, it’s to avoid getting himself or herself in hot water. If you can keep that person out of trouble without getting yourself hurt, that may be a win/win. (Don’t yield to the temptation to deflect the trouble onto someone still lower on the food chain, unless that’s the person who’s actually responsible. It’s not only immoral, but other people will notice and your reputation will suffer.)

If everything else fails, advance notice gives you one more opportunity. There’s an old management joke about an outgoing project manager who had some words of wisdom for the incoming one. “I’ve left you three envelopes in my desk drawer, and they have the answers to the first three crises you hit,” the outgoing PM said.

The answer to the first problem was “Blame your predecessor.” To the second, it was “Reorganize the team.” And to the third, it was “Prepare three envelopes.”

Sometimes you have to know how to get while the getting is still good.

How Do I Fire Someone?

2011-04-05T10:00:00.014-04:00

“Everybody tells me that it’s impossible to fire someone at this company, no matter what they do. How do I fire someone who really, really needs to be fired?”

- MK, Estes Park, Colorado

By the time you decide you need to fire someone, it’s probably too late to do it right. A proper termination takes time and effort. You need to start the process long before the employee situation reaches the point of no return.

First, it’s almost never the case that you get to fire people. They don’t work for you; they work for the company. It’s up to the company to decide to let them go. You may be the agent of the termination or the bearer of the bad news, but to make a firing happen, you normally need the cooperation, support, and approval of your own management chain, which normally includes human resources and may include the legal department as well. If they haven’t been brought on board early, they may be reluctant to back you up when trouble starts. If you even think there’s a real possibility that someone may need to go, talk to your boss and to human resources as soon as possible.

There are two basic reasons to fire someone: performance and discipline. Performance issues are about the amount, quality, and appropriateness of the work the employee does. Discipline issues involve failure to obey rules and policies or behavior that undermines authority and cohesion of the workforce. In both cases, good practice (and in some cases laws and contracts) argues that employees have the right to know that there’s a problem, what the problem is, and reasonable support from the organization to fix it short of termination.

So, what exactly is the problem? What is the difference between the behavior you expect or require, and the behavior you’re getting? Don’t expect to get away with generalities like a “bad attitude.” Describe the issue in behavioral terms: what you can actually see, hear, or otherwise measure.

If the firing offense is blatant and obvious, like stealing or violent behavior, it’s usually pretty straightforward. But if the offenses are more subtle — and especially if it involves personality issues — you need to prepare the ground carefully.

What are you doing and what can you do to improve the situation without firing? To answer that, you need to determine the root cause. There are three basic causes: the employee doesn’t know what the proper standard is, the employee can’t meet the standard, or the employee won’t meet the standard.

If you have a “don’t know” problem, the answer is simple and it’s your fault: you need to provide clear and specific guidance. If that’s enough to fix the problem, clearly you don’t need to fire someone.

“Can’t do” problems may respond to training or coaching, to additional tools or resources, or to a modification in the job environment. Even under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), you can fire someone who can’t perform a job, as long as you’ve made “reasonable accommodations.” Of course, what you think is reasonable and what a court thinks is reasonable may vary, so interpret “reasonable” broadly.

“Won’t do” problems are when an employee knows what is proper, has the ability to do what is proper, and still chooses to do something different. It’s worth the effort to find out why someone won’t perform, but the bottom line is that it’s still a choice.

Don’t assume you know what the problem is until you do your homework. Talk to the person involved. And listen to what he or she says in response. There may be a way to solve the problem to everyone’s satisfaction short of termination.

Find out if there are other issues involved. Is the employee politically connected, or does the employee have skills or access that may be more important than the performance problems? Are there union contracts, regulations, or legal protections that apply? Considerations such as these don’t make an employee invulnerable to firing, but they often require careful management on your part.

Make sure you learn your company’s process for firing, and follow the rules to the letter. Get coaching from human resources. Have everything ready before you call the person in. Get to the point, and get it over with.

If the person you terminate is surprised, you did something wrong. By providing feedback, support, and coaching throughout, it should always be clear to the employee what the current gap is between actions and expectations. If there’s no surprise, the emotions are often not as strong as you might expect.

Above all, don’t drag it out, and don’t let your own fear stand in the way of doing what needs to be done. A lot of firings are botched because of the cowardice of the manager. If you’re not willing to follow through, don’t bluff.

Finally, be prepared to negotiate the terms of separation. What kind of reference will you provide? How much severance pay? Are there timing issues? Because of the ever-present risk of lawsuits, it’s often cheaper to sweeten the pot for the departing employee in exchange for a release of liability.

What Is Six Sigma (and Why Should I Care)?

2011-03-29T11:06:00.000-04:00

I'm an indirect casualty of the Borders bankruptcy. I did a proposal for something called The Manager's Answer Book, done at a publisher's request based on their idea, but by the time the publisher was ready to offer a contract, the standard advance had been cut by 60%, so I declined. I did three samples, and here's the first:

“There’s this guy in the office who keeps going on about Six Sigma and claims to be a green belt. What is Six Sigma and why should I care?”

- MD, Bethesda, Maryland

When quality is poor, you can lose money two ways. It costs money to do it wrong, it costs more money to find out that you did it wrong and have to fix it, and it costs still more money to do it over again. And that’s not to mention the risk of losing a customer in the process. The answer, for most companies, was inspection: catch the mistakes before they get out the door. That kept customers from getting bad products, but it didn’t do anything about the cost of making the bad products in the first place.

Enter Walter Shewhart, a quality control engineer who went to work for Western Electric, the manufacturing arm of the telephone monopoly, in 1918. In 1924, he wrote a revolutionary one-page memo outlining a new approach: using statistical tools to observe the process of manufacturing, with the goal of finding and correcting the causes of potential defects before they occurred. This was known as Statistical Process Control (SPC) or Statistical Quality Control (SQC), and it’s at the root of modern thinking about quality.

Shewhart was a major influence on physicist W. Edwards Deming, who adopted and promoted many of his ideas. After World War II, Deming worked for General Douglas MacArthur in Japan, where he famously trained Japanese engineers, managers, and executives (including Sony co-founder Akio Morita) in these techniques.

One of his students, Kaoru Ishikawa, took the teachings of Deming and another quality guru, J. M. Juran, and added customer satisfaction to the mix, calling the new hybrid Total Quality Management, or TQM. (Ishikawa developed one of the basic tools of TQM, the cause-and-effect analysis diagram, also called a fishbone diagram because it looks like the skeleton of a fish, and an Ishikawa diagram for obvious reasons.

In 1980, NBC aired a documentary on Deming and his influence on the Japanese, called “If Japan Can… Why Can’t We?” and TQM fever took off in the United States. But as you can tell, quality philosophies don’t stand still. There’s the zero defects approach, total quality leadership (TQL), kaizen, kansei, business process reengineering (BPR), and more. Because any company could claim they had implemented TQM, along came ISO-9000, a standards-based way to certify internationally that you really had a workable quality program.

Enter Six Sigma, developed by Motorola in 1986. It’s been a highly successful and widely adopted strategy — and, of course, it has its detractors and critics.

The goals of Six Sigma are in line with other quality strategies: it uses statistics, it aims to reduce the causes of defects or errors, and it tries to minimize variability. “Six sigma” itself is a statistical term, representing fewer than 3.4 defects per million opportunities.

Six Sigma advocates claim that their approach does a better job of measuring financial return, promotes more passionate leadership, provides a trained cadre of champions (the “green belt” is an example), and makes decisions based on data instead of guesswork. Critics claim there’s nothing new to see here, that Six Sigma is just TQM with karate belts.

In terms of results, Motorola claims to have saved over $17 billion from Six Sigma. Jack Welch at General Electric was another successful champion. However, a 2006 Fortune magazine article reported that 91 percent of companies that announced Six Sigma programs ended up trailing the S&P 500.

From your point of view, however, the controversy doesn’t matter. Six Sigma critics argue that it’s derivative, not that it’s wrong. If your company’s made an investment in the program, it’s good sense for you to get on board.

You need Six Sigma certification if you’re going to be doing Six Sigma related projects. If those projects are alongside your regular duties, a green belt is sufficient. If you’re going full-time on Six Sigma projects, shoot for a black belt. If, on the other hand, Six Sigma activities are going on around you, but not in your area of the business, it may be enough for you to pick up the basic vocabulary and concepts — in other words, what you’re doing right now.

Of course, things don’t sit still. Cutting edge companies now practice “lean six sigma,” combining Six Sigma with ideas of lean manufacturing, a technique to eliminate waste. New iterations are surely on management consulting drawing boards. When in doubt, cite tradition. “It’s all just warmed-over Shewhart, you know.”

The Square of Risk

2011-03-22T09:54:00.001-04:00

In researching a chapter on risk triage for my book Creative Project Management, I came across a concept known as the PIVOT score. The elements of PIVOT are:

Probability — the likelihood a particular risk event will happen
Impact — the consequence of the risk event if it happens
Vulnerability — the relationship of the threat to core mission, values, and business objectives
Outrage — the expectation (E) of how things should be minus the degree of satisfaction (S) with the way things are.
Tolerance — the degree of enthusiasm or anger in response to the risk event impact if it happens.

Probability (P), impact (I), vulnerability (V), expectation (E), and satisfaction (S) each get a rating of between 0 and 3. The formula for outrage (O) is:

O = E – S

And the formula for tolerance (T) is:

T = (P x (I + V))^O

Outrage, as you can see, is hyperbolic. It has a disproportionate impact of outrage on the final PIVOT score. Let’s imagine the following:

An event is moderately unlikely (P = 1), has a very high impact (I = 3), the event relates to our core business objectives (V = 3), but it’s unlikely to get much publicity because people aren’t too surprised when it happens, so E – S is only 1. The PIVOT score is (1 x (3 + 3)¹, or 6.

Now imagine that the impact is actually low, but it’s the sort of thing that will be smeared all over the headlines and every commentator will talk about it (O = 3). The PIVOT score is (1 x (1+3))³, or 64! Even though the actual impact in the first instance is three times that of the second case, the PIVOT score of the less serious impact is more than ten times as high as that of the more serious case.

The impact of outrage on risk decisions tends to be disproportionate, especially when the outrage itself is the result of misinformation. Low impact risks take on catastrophic urgency and objectively more serious risks barely ripple the waters.

The confirmed death toll in Japan as I write is approaching 10,000, with the likely death toll predicted to top 18,000. Serious by any measure, but not outrageous because — hey, it was a huge tsunami and earthquake. Do you really expect all the safety procedures to be sufficient? Low outrage means not only less obsessive coverage, but also less pressure to improve safety.

The latest IAEA report I can find (March 17) lists a total of 44 injuries and no deaths. The UK Telegraph reports five workers dead, but I can’t confirm that, or whether they are part of or in addition to the 44. The level of relative outrage — expectation minus satisfaction — is off the wall.

Using outrage as the square (or higher power) of risk dramatically distorts decision-making. Do 9,000+ real deaths truly mean less than some uncounted but low number of potential deaths? In risk management practice, it often does.

Where the outrage is, so goes the money and the effort. This is not always in our best interest.

From http://xkcd.com/radiation/.

Fukushima Number One

2011-03-15T10:44:00.001-04:00

As reported in my article "Homer Simpson: Man of the Atom" in Trap Door magazine, I once got to run a nuclear reactor — admittedly, a low-power one used only for training students. This hardly makes me an authority on nuclear power, but I do know something about risk management.

Like many of you, I'm following the evolving Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station story with great interest. I'm a pro-nuclear safety conscious environmentalist, if that makes any sense. I think a lot of anti-nuclear sentiment is rooted in emotion rather than analysis, and contains the same anti-science bias that I object to so strongly when practiced by the right wing.

That doesn't make the case for nuclear power a slam dunk by any means. The downsides are obvious and substantial, and the tendency to rely on nuclear power generation to supply plutonium for other purposes has led to what seem to me to be false choices. I'm following with interest the discussion of thorium reactors, and I think the investment we're making in fusion is ridiculously low. That doesn't mean I don't like wind and solar as well. But all forms of power impose risks and costs.

The question in risk management isn't whether a proposed solution has drawbacks (technically known as secondary risks). Most proposed solutions, regardless of the problem under discussion, tend to have secondary risks and consequences.

The three questions about secondary risk that matter are:

How acceptable is the secondary risk? The impact and likelihood of secondary risks can vary greatly. Some secondary risks are no big deal. We accept them and move on. Others are far more serious. A secondary risk can indeed turn out to be much greater than the primary risk would have been.
How manageable is the secondary risk? A secondary risk, like a primary one, may be quite terrible if you don't do anything about it. The key word, of course, is "if." What can be done to manage or reduce the secondary risk?
How does the secondary risk compare to other options? As I've argued elsewhere, the management difference between "bad" and "worse" is often more important than the difference between good and bad. If the secondary risk of this solution is high, and if you can't do anything meaningful to reduce it, you still have to compare it to your other options, whatever they are.

In the case of nuclear power, the unmitigated secondary risk is unacceptably high. But all that does is demonstrate that the risk needs to be mitigated — reduced to some acceptable level. Ideally, that level is zero, but that may not be possible, and it may not be cost-effective to reduce it beyond a certain point. The leftover risk, whatever it is, is known as residual risk. Residual risk is what we need to worry about. Like with secondary risk, the three questions of acceptability, manageability, and comparison help us judge the importance of the residual risk.

We make one set of risk decisions at the outset of the project. We decide which projects we want to do; we decide what overall direction and strategy we will follow; and we decide what resources to supply. All the decision are informed by how people perceive the risk choices.

As the project evolves, the risk profile changes. Some things we worry about turn out to be non-issues, and other times we are blindsided with nasty surprises. Our initial risk decisions are seldom completely on target, so they must evolve over time.

When disaster strikes, suspicion automatically and naturally falls on the risk planning process. Were project owners and leaders prudent? Armed with the howitzer of 20-20 hindsight, the fact of what did happen carries a presumption of incompetent planning for those who failed to anticipate it. Sometimes it's a fair judgment. Other times not so much.

I'm still working out what I think about the Fukushima case, but some initial indications strike me as positive when it comes to evaluating the quality of the risk planning. The basic water-cooled design of Fukushima made a Chernobyl outcome impossible. The partial meltdown didn't rupture the containment vessel, and although the cleanup will be messy and expensive, it's not likely to spread outside the immediate area.

The effects of radiation may not be known for some time, but even those have to be put into perspective. Non-nuclear power plants, however, cost lives too, even though you don't hear about these disasters as often. A quick Google search turned up the following:

September 2010: Burnsville, Minnesota, explosion, no deaths.
February 2010: Connecticut, 5 dead
February 2009: Milwaukee, 6 burned
June 2009: Mississauga, Ontario

And, of course, several thousand people a year die mining coal.

Schrödinger's Cat Walked Into a Bar — And Didn't

2011-03-08T11:38:00.001-05:00

The famous story of the boxed cat who is simultaneously dead and alive was first proposed as a thought experiment by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. The cat came to quasi-life as part of an argument between Schrödinger and Albert Einstein concerning elements of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.

No cats, of course, were actually injured in the making of this theory.

In his 1935 article, Schrödinger wrote:

"One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter, there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small that perhaps in the course of the hour, one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges, and through a relay releases a hammer that shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts."

“Ridiculous” is the tip-off. Schrödinger didn’t want us to take the cat — or the argument — seriously. But if you move from the realm of quantum mechanics to the realm of our macro reality, Schrödinger's Cat is far from ridiculous: it’s our everyday experience.

Imagine a call comes in from Cat Rescue HQ. That Schrödinger boy is at it again, locking yet another innocent kitty inside that infernal device. As you load up the van, what do you bring? Well, that depends on the state of the cat. So you bring some food and medicine, or a cat carrier — but just in case, you need to pack a pet-size body bag and some disposable gloves.

Operationally, you treat the cat as alive and dead up until the moment the sad (or happy) truth is revealed.

That’s risk management. You have to plan and prepare for a range of outcomes, treating each as in some sense real until the state collapses and time’s final verdict is rendered. It’s seldom wise to believe in a single deterministic future.

Four Dimensions of Risk

2011-03-01T06:00:00.009-05:00

As a science fiction reader and alternate history writer, I’ve always lived in the future to some extent. From our time-bound perspective, the future is a wave front of uncertainty. Many things are possible, but ultimately only some things will happen.

Today, we have to make decisions about the future, and those decisions necessarily have to be made under conditions uncertainty. That’s the domain of risk, the place where philosophy and statistics meet. Yesterday, I sent in the manuscript for my 24th book, Project Risk and Cost Analysis, for AMACOM’s self-study sourcebook line. It’s been a fascinating project.

Risk is future tense, as opposed to problem, which is present tense. Risks are events that have not yet happened. The events can be good for us, or bad for us. They can have great impact, or little impact. They are more likely or less likely.

The risk environment changes over time. For example, there’s a lot of noise on the issue of climate change. Opponents argue that the science cannot say with certainty that the feared effects of climate change will happen. From a risk management perspective, that’s true, but it’s also completely irrelevant. Hardly anything in the future is really 100 percent (or, for that matter, zero percent) sure to happen. The measurement of a risk today is our estimate of its probability times our estimate of its impact if it happens (usually written R = P x I).

As time moves forward, our knowledge will change. Our estimate of the probability will increase or decrease. Our estimate of the potential impact will be refined. (Estimates of impact, by the way, tend to be more precise and have more agreement than estimates of probability. In the case of climate change, both sides agree on the claimed impact; what they disagree on is the likelihood of that impact occurring.)

And, by somewhere around the year 2050, the argument will eventually go away completely. By then, it will be incontrovertibly clear what has happened. One or both sides will be proved wrong. Uncertainty will collapse; Schrödinger’s cat will be out of the box, alive or dead.

As we move through the life cycle of a project, our vision changes. All risks on a project eventually go away, either by becoming true (problem or good fortune), or by becoming false (no harm, no foul). At the same time, new risks swim into view as we navigate forward through the rocky stream of time.

The uncertainty of the future inevitably becomes the fact of the present.

Risk can be thought of in four dimensions:

Goodness/Badness. In practice, risk is often used a synonym of threat. But events can be beneficial or harmful, or a mixture. Sometimes you can choose.
Impact. You can find a dollar bill on the sidewalk, or you can find a hundred dollar bill. Both qualify as opportunity. You can lose a dollar, or you can lose a hundred dollars. Both qualify as threats. The difference, in both cases, is impact.
Probability. Most people carry a lot more ones than hundreds, and are more likely to miss and search for a lost hundred. There’s a greater chance of finding (or losing) the smaller amount.
Time. What we knew yesterday is different from what we know today or will know tomorrow. The risks that should concern us, and the choices we can make, do not remain static.
Remediation. What, if anything, can you do about it? What will it cost? The value of a risk all by itself doesn’t tell us much. Only when you compare the value of the risk with the cost of the risk response do you know the shape of the decision space

In thinking about risk, put the risk into context — what’s it’s effect on you and others, and what’s the relative cost of the solution compared to the (risk-based) cost of the problem?

Why Bother? (Some Thoughts on Goal-Setting)

2011-02-22T10:00:00.001-05:00

When people find out I’ve written a number of books, the first response is often, “Gee, I’ve always wanted to write a book.”

My first question is always the same, “Why?”

People are often puzzled at the question, but it’s the most important question of all in setting and achieving your goals. You aren’t chasing this goal for the fun of it, but because you believe achieving the goal will satisfy some need, solve some problem, or provide some benefit. If you can’t clearly explain why you want to achieve the goal, there’s a good chance you may head off in the wrong direction.

Let’s apply the question to this particular goal: Why would someone want to write a book? Well, there are many possible reasons. Here are some of the more common.

a) You want to make as much money as J. K. (Harry Potter) Rowling
b) You want to appear on Oprah and be famous
c) You want to impress people with your talent
d) You have something really important you want to share with the world
e) It’s your art
f) It’s your therapy

If your real goal is money, there are lots more reliable ways of getting it than by writing books. Yes, a few writers make an awful lot of money, but the vast majority of published authors make little or nothing. One writer I know devoted several years to writing a novel he knew would make a lot of money. He did well: the Book of the Month Club, foreign translations, and even sold the movie rights. But he wasn’t satisfied. He expected to make millions. So he gave up. If you want to succeed at a goal, you need to understand why you want it. This is critical.

You have to do this process for any goal you set for yourself. Why do you want it? How does this goal relate to your other goals? What will be different for you when you succeed? Are there better ways to get there? What elements of the goal are most valuable and most important to you?

What you have to supply is the quality of your self-understanding. If you understand “why,” maybe you’ll pursue the same goal, or maybe you’ll change to a goal that actually relates more closely to what you hope to gain.

Knowing “why” gives you strength and power. If your goals are challenging (and they should be), achieving them takes hard work and risk. If the goal isn’t really important to you, or if you’ve picked a goal that won’t really satisfy the “why,” it’s awfully difficult to maintain the self-discipline to get the job done.

A case in point: My best friend in college used to publish an amateur mimeographed magazine. One of his (unpaid) columnists was this Pennsylvania schoolteacher who later sold a novel, quit his job, and let his wife support him. He was a good example of what not to do, or so I thought. For years, every time my friend and I got together and talked about old times, sooner or later one of us would ask, “What do you suppose ever happened to Dean Koontz?”

You probably already know how this story turns out. Dean Koontz has managed the rare feat of having ten New York Times #1 bestsellers, and is still going strong. (His wife, I’ve read, still works: she manages their business.) He knew what he wanted and why he wanted it, and so he was able to persist in the face of skepticism and rejection.

My friend Humayun Mirza is probably the most successful author I know, though it's unlikely you've heard of him. He wrote From Plassey to Pakistan. It's a history of his father, Iskander Mirza, first president of Pakistan, and his ancestors, the Mughal rulers of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. He didn't make a lot of money from his book, but through impeccable research managed to set the historical record straight on several important points. He was successful because he succeeded in doing what he set out to do. Different goals = different success metrics.

Always ask “Why?” The more reasons you have to pursue a goal, the better you’ll likely do in terms of achieving it. I write because I have a perspective on people and organizations I want to share. But writing’s not the only way to do that; I also teach seminars. I like the act of writing; I like seeing my books in bookstores.

Why do you want to achieve your goals? The answer to that question has power. It’s what motivates you. It’s what shows you the right path to take. And it’s what opens the doors that lead to your success.

Adapted from Goal Setting: How to Create an Action Plan and Achieve Your Goals (WorkSmart series, second edition), by Susan B. Wilson and Michael S. Dobson. Copyright © 2008 AMACOM. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

The POWER Model

2011-02-15T10:00:00.002-05:00

When I first became a supervisor, I was so naïve I actually thought that meant people would do what I said. It's even worse when you're a project manager, and the people you need don't even work for you.

The discipline of influence management, which is a practical and completely legitimate form of office politics, is another of the core competencies of good project managers.

Influence management is, as the name suggests, the art and craft of gaining influence over others, which requires power. There are six sources of organizational power that reinforce one another to give you expanded influence to get the work done:

ROLE Power

Your official role in the organization, along with special delegated assignments, committee and staff positions, etc., gives you certain influence. Even those who do not report to you in a formal sense normally have to show at least a minimum respect for your organizational role. Notice that this power is given to you by others, and is capable of being countermanded.

RESPECT Power

A powerful source of influence management is the respect others have for you, because of your track record, your special knowledge, your insight and intelligence, and your personal integrity and honesty. While respect power takes time to build, it’s often much more powerful than organizational role in influencing the behavior of others.

RHETORIC Power

Skill in the arts of communication is a source of influence and power. A clearly written memo setting forth goals, roles, expectations, and time requirements for a specific task is harder to ignore than a badly written and confusing one. Your personal ability to negotiate, to sell, and sometimes even to plead are ways to influence others to get the work done.

RESOURCES Power

You often have control of certain resources—your own time and priority list, if nothing else—that others require to get their work done. While it’s in the long run ineffective to try to deny others to blackmail them into cooperating with you, it’s legitimate to go the extra mile for those who are willing to go the extra mile for you in return.

RELATIONSHIP Power

Who you know and what kind of relationship you have with them is another traditional source of power. Some people interpret this too narrowly, and only suck up. But notice the power held by someone who has a staff-level friend in every department. Good manners and a friendly smile are effective influence management tools available to anyone.

REASON Power

Depending on the priority of your project, you may get additional power from it. Reason power comes from the “Why?” of your project. Under normal circumstances, you couldn’t evict a vice president from his or her office, but if you’re the acting fire marshal and there’s a fire, your reason for giving orders is so high that everyone will tend to obey you. Faking a higher level of priority for your project is normally a bad idea, but when your project has significant priority and legitimacy, it’s completely appropriate to use that power in support of accomplishing your ends.

Triage for Project Managers (Part Two)

2011-02-08T10:00:00.015-05:00

Our triage process has identified the most difficult and challenging projects, and now it’s time to perform a “deep dive” analysis of project difficulty — the final step in our preliminary analysis. The goal is to make sure we have a deeper understanding of the issues. Our earlier question, “What is the minimum decision and minimum action I must take right now?” is one that we must repeat as we move forward in the project.

Unless you’re staring at an Apollo 13-style deadline, with the clock ticking as CO2 levels rise, the right thing, as innumerable after-school specials have taught us, is to Learn More About It.

Difficulty comes in three dimensions: more complexity, tighter constraints, and less certainty. Of course, a project can have difficulty in more than one dimension, and their various combinations produce even more issues.

Complexity

Complexity can exist in both product and project. Project complexity is measured by such factors as the number of work packages, the number of resources, and the number of interactions and linkages. Product complexity is measured by such factors as the number of components, the number of processes, and the number of production steps. The key word here is numbers. Complexity can be counted.

Tools for managing complexity abound. They’re found in classical project management, systems engineering, logistics management, and financial risk management. A good background in probability is useful.

Constraints

Constraints come in many flavors, not merely the Neapolitan mélange of time, cost, and performance. You must obey applicable legislation, ethical codes, regulations, internal policies and procedures, and the laws of physics. They aren’t all created equal, especially in terms of their impact on an individual project.

A constraint is only a constraint if it limits your project performance choices. If a regulation, for example, keeps you from doing something you’d otherwise do, it’s a constraint. If breaking the regulation would not help you achieve your project goal, it’s not a constraint, but merely a fact. (We’re not advocating breaking the regulation, of course, but merely classifying it in terms of your project universe.)

Constraints, as we noted, can be tight or loose, flexible or inflexible. A tight, inflexible constraint can make a project extremely difficult or even impossible. A constraint that is equally tight, but has flexibility, is much less serious. Equally, a loose constraint, even if in flexible, still gives you room to maneuver.

There are three fundamental strategies for managing constraints: change them, check assumptions, and come up with creative workarounds.

Uncertainty

How firm is the ground on which your project sits? Some of the factors that govern project uncertainty include the stability and likelihood of identified assumptions, the stability of your stakeholder community, the state of competition, the extent of newness, and the level of risk.

The difficulty in measuring uncertainty is the extent of the “unknown unknown” universe, the extent to which we don’t even know what it is we don’t know. In the managing assumptions, an equal problem comes in the form of “unknown knowns,” things that we don’t know that we actually do know.

Complex and Tightly Constrained

When complexity meets tight constraints, the value of the formal tools (project management, systems engineering, logistics management) tends to increase, because driving waste out of the system and driving structural efficiency into the system reduces constraint pressure. Formal systems also provide the necessary data structure to back up negotiations to modify constraints as well as to support creative efforts to move past them.

Complex and Uncertain

Uncertainty, on the other hand, undercuts and weakens the tools needed to manage complexity. Formal systems naturally work less well when the necessary data is unavailable or unreliable. The two main tools to manage complexity and uncertainty are risk management to prepare for known possible risks, and contingency reserves (extra time, extra money, optional requirements) to prepare for unknowns.

Watch out as well for uncertainty caused by complex stakeholder interactions and political maneuvering. The trouble-plagued Denver International Airport (DIA) construction project, delivered in 1994 after a $2 billion cost overrun and a year’s delay, was victimized by a constant tug-of-war among stakeholders ranging from city officials to airlines to various business interests.

Cognitive biases interfere here as well. Not only does weak data increase the role of bias in decision-making, uncertainty can also manifest itself in the form of various biases, especially denial.

Tightly Constrained and Uncertain

While tightly constrained and highly uncertain projects may not be impossible, they are often problematic. It may be legitimate to review whether the project should be attempted in the first place. If you go ahead with the project, failure is a significant risk, so plan for damage control in case of catastrophe.

Negotiating changes in the constraints is usually a worthwhile strategy, but the real problem is that projects in this category are often crisis responses. There were plenty of CO2 filters available for the Apollo 13 lunar module; the problem is that they were on Earth. Management freely gave project teams every resource possible — the problem is, that the range of the possible was very narrow indeed.

Complex, Tightly Constrained, Highly Uncertain

The trifecta of project management comes when a project scores high in each of the three dimensions. In 1991, as the Iraqi military retreated from Kuwait, they set fire to 737 oil wells after placing land mines to keep out firefighting crews. The resultant project to put out those fires fit all of our criteria. While money was available in ample amounts, professionals with the unique skills to handle a problem such as this are in short supply.

The time constraint didn’t have a specific date attached to it, but the environmental damage was such that time pressure was enormous. Risk and uncertainty were extremely high. Commentators at the time speculated that it might not even be possible to extinguish the fires in anything less than years. The dimensions of the problem were not clear at the outset.

Maintain an extreme vigil over your risk portfolio. Spend resources on information. Move forward in small steps, and watch for indications that your assumptions need to be modified.

[Part 1 appeared last week.]

Adapted from Creative Project Management: Innovative Project Options to Solve Problems On Time and Under Budget, by Michael Dobson and Ted Leemann; published by McGraw-Hill and copyright © 2010 by The McGraw-Hill Companies; all rights reserved. Used with permission.

Triage for Project Managers

2011-02-01T11:08:00.002-05:00

The Very Model of a Modern Surgeon-General

In the opening credits for the TV series M*A*S*H, helicopters swoop in low over the hills carrying their precious cargo of gravely wounded soldiers. Hawkeye Pierce, surgeon-saint in a Hawaiian shirt, leans over one soldier, a serious expression on his face. He quickly assesses the soldier’s condition, signals a waiting nurse, and soon a line of stretchers is carrying the wounded down Helicopter Hill and into surgery.

If you’ve ever waited in a hospital emergency room, you know what triage is. As its pronunciation suggests, triage is a French word, deriving from trier, to sort or select. It’s a formal way to prioritize medical patients based on the severity of their condition.

Both M*A*S*H and triage have their origin in the work of the same man: Baron Dominique-Jean Larrey, MD, surgeon-in-chief to Napoleon’s armies. Napoleon described Larrey as “the worthiest man I ever met,” and there’s some justice to the categorization. He invented the ambulance (inspired by watching Napoleon’s famous “flying artillery” maneuver around the battlefield), and was a pioneer in the enormously complex logistics for providing care in mass-casualty settings.

Along with other pioneers such as Florence Nightingale and Major Jonathon Letterman, medical director of the Army of the Potomac under General McClellan, Larrey helped transform the face of military medicine, and as a side note changed the way people think about how to utilize limited resources effectively.

Modern medicine is of surprisingly recent vintage. Even the basic idea of the germ theory of disease (see Semmelweis in the cloud tag to your right) only originated in the first half of the 19th century. Medical care for soldiers was appallingly primitive, and throughout all the wars of history far more soldiers died from disease than from combat. It was not until World War II that a combination of more terrible weapons and greatly improved medical care tipped the balance in the other direction.

Military medicine doesn’t just involve the treatment of wounds. To handle mass battlefield casualties requires an enormously complex logistical and administrative apparatus. It’s not enough to be a good doctor; you also have to be a good project manager.

That’s why the concept of triage is so powerful. There is nothing new about the concept of prioritizing, of course. People have sorted, selected, and chosen for as long as there have been choices to make. But priorities are frequently established by a “best guess” method, rather than through a real and meaningful assessment process. An assessment methodology distinguishes real triage from simple prioritizing.

The Hierarchy of Triage

You don’t need to do triage of any sort if you have a single patient (or project), or if there are plenty of resources to go around to accomplish all the work. But that’s seldom the case. You need to perform triage from two different perspectives: not only for the project or projects for which you are responsible, but also so that you understand your relationship to the projects that may potentially compete for the same resources. Both relative and absolute importance have implications for what you do and how you do it Sometimes, your job is to assert the right of way for your projects; other times the right organizational choice is to yield to others.

Initially, you want to make the minimum necessary decision so you can take the minimum necessary action required right now. (You can always do more later.)

Degree of triage required ranges from basic to advanced depending on what’s at stake and what the issues are. Start with the basic process level, and continue as far along the journey as necessary until not only the current project, but also all the projects in your environment, have been accounted for.

Basic Triage

The first stage of medical triage for mass casualties is to separate the victims into three categories:

1. Those who are likely to live, regardless of what care they receive

2. Those who are likely to die, regardless of what care they receive

3. Those for whom immediate care might make a positive difference in outcome.

In project management, Category 1 projects can be identified by large degrees of freedom in the triple constraints of time, performance, and cost. If the schedule is very flexible, performance requirements are modest, and the budget not at issue, there’s not a lot of project management challenge. We often describe smaller Category 1 projects as “tasks. The difference between a task and a project is, after all, merely perspective. Both have the same fundamental characteristics of “temporary and unique.”

Category 2 projects fall are "operationally impossible," meaning they can't be done under the current conditions and constraints. That's not the same thing as saying they're absolutely impossible, of course. Sometimes, current conditions and constraints can change.

Placing a project in Category 2 isn’t something to take lightly. Signs that a project may be in this category include: over-constrained in terms of budget or time, sky-high performance requirements, and high levels of uncontrollable risk. In such cases, you may abandon the project altogether, or perhaps do the very minimum exploratory activities to confirm your analysis. Of course, you may not be the only person whose opinion counts. If you think it’s a Category 2 project but the boss disagrees, you may have to do it anyway — but it's wise to think about self-protection when things go south.

Each triage determination requires an assessment of the specific current situation. Advances in medicine mean that injuries that once were solidly in Category 2 now enjoy remarkable recovery rates. Similarly, projects once thought impossible also must be reviewed in light of new technologies and circumstances. Relying on outdated paradigms will result in misclassification with corresponding catastrophic results. While miracles are possible, the best doctors and project managers can do is make an informed situational decision using the most current information and technology to achieve the best result.

Category 3 projects need additional analysis, but they also need action. It is in this category that most projects fall.

[Continued next week]

Adapted from Creative Project Management: Innovative Project Options to Solve Problems On Time and Under Budget, by Michael Dobson and Ted Leemann; published by McGraw-Hill and copyright © 2010 by The McGraw-Hill Companies; all rights reserved. Used with permission.

An Index of Cognitive Biases

2011-01-25T07:34:00.034-05:00

Here's an index to all the installments of Cognitive Biases. Click on any "Part" name to go directly to that installment. You can also find the bias you’re interested in by clicking in the tag cloud on the right. To find all posts concerning cognitive biases, click the very big phrase.

Part 1 — Bias blind spot, confirmation bias, déformation professionnelle, denomination effect, moral credential effect.

Part 2 — Base rate fallacy, congruence bias, experimenter’s bias

Part 3 — Ambiguity aversion effect (Ellsberg paradox), choice-supportive bias, distinction bias, contrast effect

Part 4 — Actor-observer bias, anchoring effect, attentional bias, availability cascade, belief bias

Part 5 — Clustering illusion, conjunction fallacy, cryptomnesia

Part 6 — Disposition effect, egocentric bias, endowment effect, extraordinarity bias

Part 7 — False consensus effect, false memory, Forer effect, framing, fundamental attribution error

Part 8 — Gambler’s fallacy, halo effect

Part 9 — Hawthorne effect, herd instinct, hindsight bias, hyperbolic discounting

Part 10 — Illusion of asymmetric insight, illusion of control, illusory superiority, impact bias, information bias, ingroup bias, irrational escalation

Part 11 — Just-world phenomenon, loss aversion, ludic fallacy, mere exposure effect, money illusion

Part 12 — Need for closure, neglect of probability, “not-invented-here” (NIH) syndrome, notational bias

Part 13 — Observer-expectancy effect, omission bias, optimism bias, ostrich effect, outgroup homogeneity bias, overconfidence effect

Part 14 — Pareidolia, planning fallacy, post-purchase rationalization

Part 15 — Projection bias, pseudocertainty effect, publication bias

Part 16 — Reactance, reminiscence bump, restraint bias, rosy retrospection

Part 17 — Selection bias, selective perception, self-fulfilling prophecy

Part 18 — Self-serving bias, Semmelweis reflex, serial position effect

Part 19 — Status quo bias, stereotyping, subadditivity effect

Part 20 — Subjective validation, suggestibility, system justification theory

Part 21 — Telescoping effect, Texas sharpshooter fallacy, trait ascription bias

Part 22 — Ultimate attribution error, valence effect, von Restorff effect, wishful thinking, zero-risk bias

A Credit To His Race (The final installment of Cognitive Biases)

2011-01-18T10:00:00.011-05:00

At long last, we reach the end of our series on Cognitive Biases. In this installment, we'll study the ultimate attribution error, the valence effect, the von Restorff effect, wishful thinking, and the zero-risk bias.

Ultimate Attribution Error

A phrase I used to hear from time to time in my Alabama days was, “He’s a credit to his race.” It was never used to refer to a white person, of course, but only to blacks. On the surface, it appears to be a compliment, but it’s an example of the ultimate attribution error.

In the ultimate attribution error, people view negative behaviors on the part of members of an outgroup as a normal trait, and positive behavior as exceptions to the norm. It relates to the fundamental attribution error, in which we explain our own behavior as reactions to situations and other peoples’ behavior as a matter of basic character, and clearly relates to stereotyping. Ultimate attribution error is one of the basic mechanisms of prejudice.

Valence Effect

In psychology, valence refers to the positive or negative emotional charge of a given event or circumstance. The valence effect is a probability bias in which people overestimate the likelihood of something good rather than something bad: it’s the basic mechanism that stimulates the sale of lottery tickets.

There are numerous studies that demonstrate the valence effect. In one study, people assigned a higher probability of picking a card with a smiling face than one with a frowning face in a random deck.

The valence effect can be considered as wishful thinking, but it’s been shown in some case that belief in a positive outcome can increase the odds of achieving it — you may work harder or refuse to give up as early.

Von Restorff Effect

First identified by Dr. Hedwig von Restorff in 1933, this bias (also called the isolation effect) predicts that an item that "stands out like a sore thumb" (called distinctive encoding) is more likely to be remembered than other items. For instance, if a person examines a shopping list with one item highlighted in bright green, he or she will be more likely to remember the highlighted item than any of the others.

Wishful Thinking

This popular cognitive bias involves forming beliefs and making decisions based on your imagination rather than evidence, rationality, or reality. All else being equal, the valence effect holds: people predict positive outcomes are more likely than negative ones.

There is also reverse wishful thinking, in which someone assumes that because it’s bad it’s more likely to happen: Murphy’s Law as cognitive bias.

Wishful thinking isn’t just a cognitive bias, but a logical fallacy: I wish that P would be true/false; therefore, P is true/false. It’s related to two other fallacies that are reciprocals of one another: negative proof and argument from ignorance.

In negative proof, the absence of certainty on one end of the argument is taken as proof of the opposite end: climate scientists cannot say with 100% certainty that their claims about global warming are true, therefore, they must be false. The reciprocal fallacy is known as the argument from ignorance: no one can be sure that there is no God; therefore, there is a God.

Zero-Risk Bias

Since 2000, terrorists attacks against the United States or Americans abroad have killed about 3,250 people, the vast majority of them on 9/11. Your odds of being a victim are about one in ten million.

The Transportation Security Administration consumes $5.6 billion a year. Its job is to reduce the chance of terrorist attacks on transportation infrastructure, primarily air, to zero. Let’s assume that they are completely effective in their mission. If so, the cost per life saved is $1.7 million.

Perhaps that’s a completely reasonable price to pay to save a human life. However, from a logical point of view, you have to consider what else $5.6 billion might accomplish. Over a ten-year period, about 420,000 people die in car accidents. If $5.6 billion would eliminate 100% of the risk of aviation terrorist deaths, or 10% of the risk of car accident deaths, which risk would you chose to attack?

Common sense argues for a 10% reduction in car accidents, but the zero-risk bias argues the opposite: it’s the preference for completely eliminating a risk (even if small) to reducing a larger risk. It values certainty over residual risk.

There are other arguments that can be made in support of anti-terrorist activities, but the zero-risk bias is also operational here, and it leads to faulty decisions.

______________________________________________

With this installment, our long march through the wilds of cognitive bias comes to an end. I deeply appreciate the many insightful comments you’ve provided.

And now for something completely different…

Did You Hear the One About the Texas Sharpshooter? (Part 21 of Cognitive Biases)

2011-01-11T10:00:00.043-05:00

In this installment of Cognitive Biases, we'll learn why your memories get unstuck in time, why establishing hypotheses backward is a fallacy, and why we think other people always behave the same way.

Telescoping Effect

The telescoping effect is a memory bias, first documented in a 1964 article in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. People tend to perceive recent events as being more remote in time than they are (backward telescoping) and more remote events as being more recent than they are. The Galton-Crovitz test measures the effect; you can take the test here.

Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy

A sales manager I once knew had an infallible sense of what was going to sell. Because he didn’t want to waste his time, he put all his emphasis on selling what he knew would sell, and didn’t bother pushing the stuff that wouldn’t sell anyway.

This is an example of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. The Texas sharpshooter, you see, fired a bunch of shots at the side of the barn, went over and found a cluster of hits, and drew a bullseye over them. When you don’t establish your hypothesis first and test it second, your conclusion is suspect.

This was first described in the field of epidemiology. For example, the number of cases of disease D in city C is greater than would be expected by chance. City C has a factory that has released amounts of chemical agent A into the environment. Therefore, agent A causes disease D.

Not so fast.

The cluster may be the result of chance, or there may be another cause. Now, if you conclude that agent A should be tested as a possible trigger of disease D, that’s a reasonable inference.

Finding a Nostradamus prophecy that could arguably relate to a big event in history is another example. Here’s a famous prophecy that appears to predict Hitler:

Beasts wild with hunger will cross the rivers, 
The greater part of the battle will be against Hister. 
He will cause great men to be dragged in a cage of iron,
When the son of Germany obeys no law.

But out of a thousand prophecies, what are the odds that none of them will relate to a real event?

Trait Ascription Bias

Trait ascription bias is the tendency for people to view themselves as relatively variable in terms of personality, behavior and mood while viewing others as much more predictable in their personal traits across different situations. This may be because our own internal states are much more observable and available to us than those of others. A similar bias on the group level is called the outgroup homogeneity bias.

The degree to which we fall into this bias often depends on how well we know the other person, but not entirely. “You always behave like that” is an accusation most of us have leveled at a loved one at some time in our lives.

More next week.

Previous Installments

You can find the bias you’re interested in by clicking in the tag cloud on the right. To find all posts concerning cognitive biases, click the very big phrase.

Part 1 — Bias blind spot, confirmation bias, déformation professionnelle, denomination effect, moral credential effect.

Part 2 — Base rate fallacy, congruence bias, experimenter’s bias

Part 3 — Ambiguity aversion effect (Ellsberg paradox), choice-supportive bias, distinction bias, contrast effect

Part 4 — Actor-observer bias, anchoring effect, attentional bias, availability cascade, belief bias

Part 5 — Clustering illusion, conjunction fallacy, cryptomnesia

Part 6 — Disposition effect, egocentric bias, endowment effect, extraordinarity bias

Part 7 — False consensus effect, false memory, Forer effect, framing, fundamental attribution error

Part 8 — Gambler’s fallacy, halo effect

Part 9 — Hawthorne effect, herd instinct, hindsight bias, hyperbolic discounting

Part 10 — Illusion of asymmetric insight, illusion of control, illusory superiority, impact bias, information bias, ingroup bias, irrational escalation

Part 11 — Just-world phenomenon, loss aversion, ludic fallacy, mere exposure effect, money illusion

Part 12 — Need for closure, neglect of probability, “not-invented-here” (NIH) syndrome, notational bias

Part 13 — Observer-expectancy effect, omission bias, optimism bias, ostrich effect, outgroup homogeneity bias, overconfidence effect

Part 14 — Pareidolia, planning fallacy, post-purchase rationalization

Part 15 — Projection bias, pseudocertainty effect, publication bias

Part 16 — Reactance, reminiscence bump, restraint bias, rosy retrospection

Part 17 — Selection bias, selective perception, self-fulfilling prophecy

Part 18 — Self-serving bias, Semmelweis reflex, serial position effect

Part 19 — Status quo bias, stereotyping, subadditivity effect

Part 20 — Subjective validation, suggestibility, system justification theory

That Psychic Was So Accurate! (Part 20 of Cognitive Biases)

2011-01-04T10:00:00.030-05:00

In our 20th installment of Cognitive Biases, we cover subjective validation, the tendency to think a statement is true if it means something to us; suggestibility, the extent to which we accept or act on the suggestions of others; and system justification theory, the cognitive bias of patriotism.

Subjective Validation

Subjective validation, also known as the personal validation effect, is the tendency to consider a statement correct if it’s meaningful to the listener. It’s related to the Forer effect and validated by confirmation bias, and it’s the basic technique that reinforces belief in paranormal phenomena. The listener focuses on and remembers the accurate statements and forgets or ignores the inaccurate ones, forming an impression of the psychic’s success that is wildly inflated.

Say anything, and it’s possible to find meaning in it. “I sense a father figure trying to contact you from the spirit world,” becomes validated if there’s anyone in the subject’s life that can be made to qualify. “I hear the phrase ‘broken wheel,’” the psychic says, and of all the thousands of possible associations, the subject finds one with personal meaning, and the psychic is validated.

What if the phrase ‘broken wheel’ evokes no associations? Then the psychic says, “I hear the name ‘Charles,’” and so forth until there’s a winner. Selective memory comes into play as well, so the subject doesn’t remember the ‘broken wheel’ figure, but remembers the ‘Charles’ association vividly.

The strength of the effect depends less on the skill of the psychic, of course, and much more on the level of desire of the subject. If we want to believe, we’ll find the evidence we need.

Suggestibility

You are suggestible to the extent you are inclined to accept or act on the suggestions of others. Some people are naturally more suggestible than others, of course, but suggestibility in individuals is varied. Intense emotions, current level of self-esteem or assertiveness, and age play a role.
The nature of suggestibility plays a big role in hypnosis. There are three different types of suggestibility, according to Dr. John Kappas.

Emotional Suggestibility. A suggestible behavior characterized by a high degree of responsiveness to inferred suggestions that affect emotions and restrict physical body responses; usually associated with hypnoidal depth. Thus the emotional suggestible learns more by inference than by direct, literal suggestions.
Physical Suggestibility. A suggestible behavior characterized by a high degree of responsiveness to literal suggestions affecting the body, and restriction of emotional responses; usually associated with cataleptic stages or deeper.
Intellectual Suggestibility. The type of hypnotic suggestibility in which a subject fears being controlled by the operator and is constantly trying to analyze, reject or rationalize everything the operator says. With this type of subject the operator must give logical explanations for every suggestion and must allow the subject to feel that he is doing the hypnotizing himself.

With all of that, there’s surprisingly little consensus on what suggestibility is and how it works. Is it a function of character, a learned habit, a function of language acquisition and empathy, a biased term used to provoke people to greater resistance, or something else?

Common examples of suggestible behavior in everyday life include "contagious yawning" (multiple people begin to yawn after observing a person yawning) and the medical student syndrome (a person begins to experience symptoms of an illness after reading or hearing about it).

Placebo response may also be based on individual differences in suggestibility, at least in part. Suggestible persons may be more responsive to various forms of alternative health practices that seem to rely upon patient belief in the intervention. People who are highly suggestible may be prone to making poor judgments because they did not process suggestions critically and falling pray to emotion-based advertising.

System Justification Theory

System justification theory (SJT) is a scientific theory within social psychology that proposes people have a motivation to defend and bolster the status quo, that is, to see it as good, legitimate, and desirable.

According to system justification theory, people not only want to hold favorable attitudes about themselves (ego-justification) and their own groups (group-justification), but they also want to hold favorable attitudes about the overarching social order (system-justification). A consequence of this tendency is that existing social, economic, and political arrangements tend to be preferred, and alternatives to the status quo are disparaged.

Early SJT research focused on compensatory stereotypes. Experiments suggested that the widespread endorsement of stereotypes such as "poor but happy" or "rich but miserable" exist to balance out the gap between those of low and high socioeconomic status.,Later work suggested that these compensatory stereotypes are preferred by those on the left while people on the right prefer non-complimentary stereotypes such as "poor and dishonest" or "rich and honest", which rationalize inequality rather than compensate for it.

According to system justification theory, this motive is not unique to members of dominant groups, who benefit the most from the current regime; it also affects the thoughts and behaviors of members of groups who are seemingly incurring disadvantages by it (e.g., poor people, racial/ethnic minorities). System justification theory therefore accounts for counter-intuitive evidence that members of disadvantaged groups often support the societal status quo (at least to some degree), often at considerable cost to themselves and to fellow group members.

System justification theory differs from the status quo bias in that it is predominately motivational rather than cognitive. Generally, the status quo bias refers to a tendency to prefer the default or established option when making choices. In contrast, system justification posits that people need and want to see prevailing social systems as fair and just. The motivational component of system justification means that its effects are exacerbated when people are under psychological threat or when they feel their outcomes are especially dependent on the system that is being justified.

More next week.

To read the whole series, click "Cognitive bias" in the tag cloud to your right, or search for any individual bias the same way.

When 1+1=3 (Part 19 of Cognitive Biases)

2010-12-28T10:00:00.040-05:00

Our 19th installment of Cognitive Biases covers the status quo bias, stereotyping, and the subadditivity effect.

Status Quo Bias

Sigmund Freud suggested that there were only two reasons people changed: pain and pressure. Evidence for the status quo bias, a preference not to change established behavior (even if negative) unless the incentive to change is overwhelming, comes from many fields, including political science and economics.

Another way to look at the status quo bias is inertia: the tendency of objects at rest to remain at rest until acted upon by an outside force. The corollary, that objects once in motion tend to stay in motion until acted upon by an outside force, gives hope for change. Unfortunately, one of those outside forces is friction, which is as easy to see in human affairs as it is in the rest of the material universe.

Daniel Kahneman (this time without Amos Tversky) has created experiments that can produce status quo bias effects reliably. It seems to be a combination of loss aversion and the endowment effect, both described elsewhere.

The status quo bias should be distinguished from a rational preference for the status quo in any particular incident. Change is not in itself always good.

Stereotyping

A stereotype, strictly speaking, is a commonly held popular belief about a specific social group or type of individual. It’s not identical to prejudice:

Prejudices are abstract-general preconceptions or abstract-general attitudes towards any type of situation, object, or person.
Stereotypes are generalizations of existing characteristics that reduce complexity.

The word stereotype originally comes from printing: a duplicate impression of an original typographic element used for printing instead of the original. (A cliché, interestingly, is the technical term for the printing surface of a stereotype.) It was journalist Walter Lippmann who first used the word in its modern interpersonal sense. A stereotype is a “picture in our heads,“ he wrote, “whether right or wrong.“

Mental categorizing and labeling is both necessary and inescapable. Automatic stereotyping is natural; the necessary (but often omitted) follow-up is to make a conscious check to adjust the impression.

A number of theories have been derived from sociological studies of stereotyping and prejudicial thinking. In early studies it was believed that stereotypes were only used by rigid, repressed, and authoritarian people. Sociologists concluded that this was a result of conflict, poor parenting, and inadequate mental and emotional development. This idea has been overturned; more recent studies have concluded that stereotypes are commonplace.

One theory as to why people stereotype is that it is too difficult to take in all of the complexities of other people as individuals. Even though stereotyping is inexact, it is an efficient way to mentally organize large blocks of information. Categorization is an essential human capability because it enables us to simplify, predict, and organize our world. Once one has sorted and organized everyone into tidy categories, there is a human tendency to avoid processing new or unexpected information about each individual. Assigning general group characteristics to members of that group saves time and satisfies the need to predict the social world in a general sense.

Another theory is that people stereotype because of the need to feel good about oneself. Stereotypes protect one from anxiety and enhance self-esteem. By designating one's own group as the standard or normal group and assigning others to groups considered inferior or abnormal, it provides one with a sense of worth, and in that sense, stereotyping is related to the ingroup bias.

Subadditivity Effect

The subadditivity effect is the tendency to judge probability of the whole to be less than the probabilities of the parts.

For instance, subjects in one experiment judged the probability of death from cancer in the United States was 18%, the probability from heart attack was 22%, and the probability of death from "other natural causes" was 33%. Other participants judged the probability of death from a natural cause was 58%. Natural causes are made up of precisely cancer, heart attack, and "other natural causes," however, the sum of the latter three probabilities is 73%. According to Tversky and Koehler in a 1994 study, this kind of result is observed consistently.

The subadditivity effect is related to other math-oriented cognitive biases, including the denomination effect, the base rate fallacy, and especially the conjunction fallacy.

More next week.

To read the whole series, click "Cognitive bias" in the tag cloud to your right, or search for any individual bias the same way.

Rashomon Reality (Part 18 of Cognitive Biases)

2010-12-21T10:00:00.051-05:00

Our 18th installment of Cognitive Biases covers the self-serving bias, offers a new interpretation of the Semmelweis reflex, and looks at the two sides of the serial position effect.

Self-Serving Bias

A self-serving bias occurs when people attribute their successes to internal or personal factors but attribute their failures to situational factors beyond their control: to take credit for success but to shift the blame for failure. It also occurs when we are presented with ambiguous information and evaluate it in the way that best suits our own interest.

Several reasons have been proposed to explain the occurrence of self-serving bias: maintaining self-esteem, making a good impression, or sometimes that we’re aware of factors outsiders might miss.

The bias has been demonstrated in many areas. For example, victims of serious occupational accidents tend to attribute their accidents to external factors, whereas their coworkers and management tend to attribute the accidents to the victims' own actions.

When the self-serving bias causes people to see Rashomon reality, the ability to negotiate can be dramatically impaired. One of the parties may see the other side as bluffing or completely unwilling to be reasonable, based on the self-serving interpretation of the ambiguous evidence.

In one experiment, subjects played the role of either the plaintiff or defendant in a hypothetical car accident case with a maximum potential damages payment of $100,000. The experiment used real money at the rate of $1 real = $10,000 experiment.

They then tried to settle in a fixed amount of time, and if they failed, the settlement amount would be charged a hefty legal bill. On average, plaintiffs thought the likely award would be $14,500 higher than the defendants. The further away the perceived “fair” figures were from each other strongly correlated with whether they could reach an agreement in time.

The self-serving bias, interestingly, seems not to exist in our struggles with personal computers. When we can’t get them to work, we blame ourselves rather than the technology. The reason is that people are so used to bad functionality, counterintuitive features, bugs, and sudden crashes of most contemporary software applications that they tend not to complain about them. Instead, they believe it is their personal responsibility to predict possible issues and to find solutions to computer problems. This unique phenomenon has been recently observed in several human-computer interaction investigations.

Semmelweis Reflex

Dr. Ignatz Semmelweis, assistant to the head of obstetrics at the Vienna General Hospital in the 1840s, discovered that his clinic, where doctors were trained, had a maternal mortality rate from puerperal fever (childbed fever) that averaged 10 percent. A second clinic, which trained midwives, had a mortality rate of only four percent.

This was well known outside the hospital. Semmelweis described women begging on their knees to go to the midwives clinic rather than risk the care of doctors. This, Semmelweis said, “made me so miserable that life seemed worthless.” Semmelweis started a systematic analysis to find out the cause, ruling out overcrowding, climate, and other factors before the death of an old friend from a condition similar to puerperal fever after being accidentally cut with a student’s scalpel during an autopsy.

Semmelweis imagined that some sort of “cadaverous particles” might be responsible, germs being at that time unknown. Midwives, after all, didn’t perform autopsies. Accordingly, Semmelweis required doctors to wash their hands in a mild bleach solution after performing autopsies. Following the change in procedures, death rates in the doctors clinic dropped almost immediately to the levels of the midwives clinic.

This theory contradicted medical belief of the time, and Semmelweis eventually was disgraced, lost his job, began accusing his fellow physicians of murder, and eventually died in a mental institution, possibly after being beaten by a guard.

Hence the Semmelweis effect: normally described as a reflex-like rejection of new knowledge because it contradicts entrenched norms, beliefs or paradigms: the “automatic rejection of the obvious, without thought, inspection, or experiment.”

Some credit Robert Anton Wilson for the phrase. Timothy Leary defined it as, “Mob behavior found among primates and larval hominids on undeveloped planets, in which a discovery of important scientific fact is punished.”

I don’t agree. I think there’s something else going on here.

The Semmelweis effect, I think, relates more to the implied threat and criticism the new knowledge has for old behavior. Let’s go back to Semmelweis’ original discovery. If his hypothesis about hand washing is correct, it means that physicians have contributed to the deaths of thousands of patients. Who wants to think of himself or herself as a killer, however inadvertent?

The Semmelweis reflex is, I think, better stated as the human tendency to reject or challenge scientific or other factual information that portrays us in a negative light. In that sense, it’s related to the phenomenon of reactance, discussed earlier.

In this case, Semmelweis’s own reaction to discovering the mortality rate of his clinic might have been a tip-off. He was “so miserable that life seemed worthless.” In his own case, this drove him to perform research, but these other doctors can only accept or deny the results. It’s not unreasonable to expect a certain amount of hostile response, and calling people “murderers,” as Semmelweis did, is hardly likely to win friends and influence people.

You don’t have to look far to find contemporary illustrations, from tobacco executives aghast someone dared accuse them of making a faulty product to the notorious Ford Motor Company indifference to safety in designing the Ford Pinto. The people involved weren’t trying to be unethical or immoral; they were in the grips of denial triggered by the Semmelweis reflex. This denial was strong enough to make them ignore or trivialize evidence that in retrospect appears conclusive.

When you’re accused of fault, watch for the Semmelweis reflex in yourself. The natural first impulse is to deny or deflect, but the right practice is to examine and explore. Depending on what you find, you can select a more reasoned strategy.

Serial Position Effect

The serial position effect, coined by Hermann Ebbinghaus, refers to the finding that recall accuracy varies as a function of an item's position within a study list. When asked to recall a list of items in any order (free recall), people tend to begin recall with the end of the list, recalling those items best (the recency effect). Among earlier list items, the first few items are recalled more frequently than the middle items (the primacy effect).

One suggested reason for the primacy effect is that the initial items presented are most effectively stored in long-term memory because of the greater amount of processing devoted to them. (The first list item can be rehearsed by itself; the second must be rehearsed along with the first, the third along with the first and second, and so on.) One suggested reason for the recency effect is that these items are still present in working memory when recall is solicited. Items that benefit from neither (the middle items) are recalled most poorly.

There is experimental support for these explanations. For example:

The primacy effect (but not the recency effect) is reduced when items are presented quickly and is enhanced when presented slowly (factors that reduce and enhance processing of each item and thus permanent storage).
The recency effect (but not the primacy effect) is reduced when an interfering task is given; for example, subjects may be asked to compute a math problem in their heads prior to recalling list items; this task requires working memory and interferes with any list items being attended to.
Amnesiacs with poor ability to form permanent long-term memories do not show a primacy effect, but do show a recency effect.

More next week.

To read the whole series, click "Cognitive bias" in the tag cloud to your right, or search for any individual bias the same way.

See No Evil (Part 17 of Cognitive Biases)

2010-12-14T10:00:00.012-05:00

Our 17th installment features the selection bias, selective perception in general, and the self-fulfilling prophecy.

Selection Bias

There’s a growing argument that telephone polls, once the gold standard of scientific opinion surveys, are becoming less reliable. More and more people are refusing to participate, meaning that the actual sample becomes to some extent self-selected: a random sample of people who like to take polls. People who don’t like to take polls are underrepresented in the results, and there’s no guarantee that class feels the same as the class answering.

Selection bias can happen in any scientific study requiring a statistical sample that is representative of some larger population: if the selection is flawed, and if other statistical analysis does not correct for the skew, the conclusions are not reliable.

There are several types of selection bias:

Sampling bias. Systemic error resulting from a non-random population sample. Examples include self-selection, pre-screening, and discounting test subjects that don’t finish.
Time interval bias. Error resulting from a flawed selection of the time interval. Examples include starting on an unusually low year and ending on an unusually high one, terminating a trial early when its results support your desired conclusion or favoring larger or shorter intervals in measuring change.
Exposure bias. Error resulting from amplifying trends. When one disease predisposes someone for a second disease, the treatment for the first disease can appear correlated with the appearance of the second disease. An effective but not perfect treatment given to people at high risk of getting a particular disease could potentially result in the appearance of the treatment causing the disease, since the high-risk population would naturally include a higher number of people who got the treatment and the disease.
Data bias. Rejection of “bad” data on arbitrary grounds, ignoring or discounting outliers, partitioning data with knowledge of the partitions, then analyzing them with tests designed for blindly chosen ones.
Studies bias. Earlier, we looked at publication bias, the tendency to publish studies with positive results and ignore ones with negative results. If you put together a meta-analysis without correcting for publication bias, you’ve got a studies bias. Or you can perform repeated experiments and report only the favorable results, classifying the others as calibration tests or preliminary studies.
Attrition bias. A selection bias resulting from people dropping out of a study over time. If you study the effectiveness of a weight loss program only by measuring outcomes for people who complete the whole program, it’ll often look very effective indeed — but it ignores the potentially vast number of people who tried and gave up.

In general, you can’t overcome a selection biases with statistical analysis of existing data alone. Informal workarounds examine correlations between background variables and a treatment indicator, but what’s missing is the correlation between unobserved determinants of the outcome and unobserved determinants of selection into the sample that create the bias. What you don’t see doesn’t have to be identical to what you do see.

Selective Perception

Expectations affect perception.

We know people are suggestible: several studies have shown that students who were told they were consuming alcohol when they weren’t still got drunk enough their driving was affected.

In one classic study, viewers watched a filmstrip of a particularly violent Princeton-Dartmouth football game. Princeton viewers reported seeing nearly twice as many rule infractions committed by the Dartmouth team than did Dartmouth viewers. One Dartmouth alumnus did not see any infractions committed by the Dartmouth side and sent a message that he’d only seen part of the film and wanted the rest.

Selective perception is also an issue for advertisers, as consumers may engage with some ads and not others based on their pre-existing beliefs about the brand. Seymour Smith, a prominent advertising researcher, found evidence for selective perception in advertising research in the early 1960s. People who like, buy, or are considering buying a brand are more likely to notice advertising than are those who are neutral toward the brand. It’s hard to measure the quality of the advertising if the only people who notice it are already predisposed to like the brand.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

A self-fulfilling prophecy is a prediction that directly or indirectly causes itself to become true, by the very terms of the prophecy itself, due to positive feedback between belief and behavior. The term was coined by sociologist Robert K. Merton, who formalized its structure and consequences in his 1949 book Social Theory and Social Structure.

A self-fulfilling prophecy is initially false: it becomes true by evoking the behavior that makes it come true. The actual course of events is offered as proof that the prophecy was originally true.

Self-fulfilling prophecies have been used in education as a type of placebo effect.

The effects of teacher attitudes, beliefs and values, affecting their expectations have been tested repeatedly. A famous example includes a study where teachers were told arbitrarily that random students were "going to blossom". The prophecy indeed self-fulfilled: those random students actually ended the year with significantly greater improvements.

For previous installments, click on "Cognitive Bias" in the tag cloud to your right.

SideWise Thinking

Hume’s Guillotine (Red Herrings Part 23)

All-Natural (Red Herrings Part 22)

I Am Curious (Yellow) (Red Herrings Part 21)

Thank God It's Friday! (Red Herrings, Part 20)

A Cute Angle (Fallacies/Red Herrings Part 19)

We Stand on the Shoulders of Pygmies (Fallacies/Red Herrings Part 18)

Anything You *Don’t* Say May Be Held Against You! (Red Herrings, Part 17)

Impure Motives (Part 16 of Fallacies/Red Herrings)

Repugnicans and Libtards (Fallacies, Part 15)

Wikipedia Mon Amour

The Ol' Yeller Maneuver (Managing Impossible Projects, Part 6 of 6)

Getting Around the Constraints (Managing Impossible Projects, Part 5)

Orange Ropes (Managing Impossible Projects, Part 4)

The CHAOS Report (Managing Impossible Projects, Part 3)

Potentially Impossible (Managing Impossible Projects, Part 2)

If I Had a Lever (Managing Impossible Projects, Part 1)

Riddikulus! (Part 14 of Fallacies)

Making the Kessel Run in Under 12 Parsecs

Dives and Lazarus (Part 13 of Fallacies)

Known by the Company We Keep (Part 12 of Fallacies)

Hunt/Liddy Special Project 1 (Watergate Part 3)

Queen for a Day (Part 11 of Fallacies)

Ego Up Ego Down (Part 10 of Fallacies)

The Enemies List (Watergate, Part 2)

Little. Yellow. Different. (Fallacies, Part 9)

Tension, Apprehension, and Dissension Have Begun (Fallacies, Part 8)

Won't Someone Think of the Children? (Fallacies, Part 7)

50 Million Elvis Fans *Can* Be Wrong! (Fallacies, Part 6)

Have Spacesuit, Will Travel

Watergate and Me

Agree — Or Else! (Fallacies Part 5)

Decisions, Decisions

And Brutus is an Honorable Man (Fallacies Part 4)

Pot, Meet Kettle (Fallacies, Part 3)

Red Herrings and Other Fishy Arguments (Fallacies Part 2)

Fallacies (a New Series in the Manner of Cognitive Biases) - Part 1

MacArthur's War

Fox at the Front

Fox on the Rhine

The Fine Art of Managing UP!

Project Owner, Project Manager

Project Disasters and Career Management

How Do I Fire Someone?

What Is Six Sigma (and Why Should I Care)?

The Square of Risk

Fukushima Number One

Schrödinger's Cat Walked Into a Bar — And Didn't

Four Dimensions of Risk

Why Bother? (Some Thoughts on Goal-Setting)

The POWER Model

Triage for Project Managers (Part Two)

Triage for Project Managers

An Index of Cognitive Biases

A Credit To His Race (The final installment of Cognitive Biases)

Did You Hear the One About the Texas Sharpshooter? (Part 21 of Cognitive Biases)

That Psychic Was So *Accurate*! (Part 20 of Cognitive Biases)

When 1+1=3 (Part 19 of Cognitive Biases)

Rashomon Reality (Part 18 of Cognitive Biases)

See No Evil (Part 17 of Cognitive Biases)

Anything You Don’t Say May Be Held Against You! (Red Herrings, Part 17)

50 Million Elvis Fans Can Be Wrong! (Fallacies, Part 6)

That Psychic Was So Accurate! (Part 20 of Cognitive Biases)