A Party to the World

Why are manhole covers round?

I was reading an interesting piece recently about survivor bias. It was a book (I’ll try to find it again in the library) talking about building strong companies and they presented a criticism of other such books: that they only tell you what strong companies do. It’s equally important to understand the reason for failure among companies that flounder. They gave a very tangible and compelling example:

During World War II, the Royal Air Force would send planes out on missions and some would return home and some would not. They noticed that of those that made it back, bullet holes were concentrated on certain regions (like the wings and rear gunner positions). Seeing as reinforcing against bullets was costly and also added a lot of weight to the planes, they came up with a perfectly-reasonable-sounding idea – let’s just reinforce the areas that seem to get hit most. They followed through with this inspired idea but found that they did not see any improvement in the rate of planes that returned home.

What they should have done, as this book points out, is to reinforce the places that didn’t seem to get hit on the planes that return. That’s because that’s precisely where the planes that didn’t make it back were hit, and they were seeing a sort of negative filter of the weakest points on the aircraft. Survivor bias – a systematic skewing of data based on patterns in groups from which you gather your data. In some sense, talking about what’s great about successful companies is committing the same mistake.

I am a big believe in `lessons-learned.’ After a project, it’s good to reflect on it, and think about what you’d change. What worked well, and equally importantly, what did not. Similarly, I encourage people to report negative results in their work, as they are sometimes just as useful.

In terms of ensuring failure, I’ve been taking note of a lot of things in the management of this project (the instantiation of this school) that I would change. If you want to make your life more difficult, here are some things you might try:

1. Keep No Real Records – What we see when we go to the housing office is a couple of guys sitting at a solitary computer and a man with a cell phone and sticky notes sitting at a table. We tell this guy what’s wrong with our apartments, or what we’d like to know, and so forth, and he writes this down on a sticky note. I’ve been asked over a dozen time for my email address by the housing office alone, and I’ve had to explain to them as many times that I don’t have a cell phone. And yet, when developments occur, they try to contact me by phone.

   It’s an endless game of “telephone” where over successive conveyances of information, the message becomes utter garbage. My friend Ben has had his dishwasher checked 4 times by housing maintenance, but it’s his washing machine that’s broken. At the point of collection, make widely-accessible notes of the issues. Better yet would be to allow students to describe in writing their problems directly. (This is especially important when accents are often so thick as to be unintelligible.) It’s almost as if there were dozens of commercial and free tools out there.

2. Don’t Use Your Products – I swear that our toilet paper dispensers were designed by people who don’t use toilet paper, and our faucets by people who don’t use water faucets. With respect to the faucets, the area of activation for the soap dispenser is a superset of the area of activation for the water, meaning you can’t get access to water to rinse your hands without having more soap applied. There are more examples, I’m sure.
3. Foster Resentment – Treat your clients like incompetents and infantilize them at every step. When they ask for assistance, give it to them in the most inconvenient way possible.
   I’ve been moved twice since on campus, and each time they’ve given me a 30-minute window from the time I bring up the problem. I have since learned to pack all my belongings in about 15 minutes, but it’s not how I’d like to be treated. Our campus recently hosted 60+ leaders of various nations as part of the inauguration and other VIPs totaling 3,500. There was no room made for the student body one tenth that size. I was sure that the reason for this was the security concerns, until the night of the event they realized they wouldn’t fill the space and sent out buses to campus to round up random people to stand in for the event. It sends a clear message about who this event was for. Even now, some of us have been moved into the maid’s quarters of houses on campus; these serve as a bedroom – 30 square feet all to yourself.

I didn’t mean for this to turn into a rant, but I meant rather to illustrate some organizational observations. Tying this back to the picture at the top, it’s a question commonly asked at interviews (from PhD programs to Microsoft) – why are manhole covers round? It’s because otherwise hard hats would have to be a lot harder. If it’s square (like this one on KAUST campus), the 100+ pound plate can fall down the manhole itself.