Best Laid Plans are not Guarantees

     I found this article about collective intelligence and planning which illustrates an example from NASA’s mission control of the International Space Station, by a so-called ADCO (Attitude Determination and Control) controller group. Among the planning items, it included the planning for Mars Rover scientific activity and scheduling activities in a bed rest facility (McCurdy, M. et al, 2009). According to the authors of this article, planning is often a collective intelligence activity especially needed for complex sociotechnology systems (Billman, D. and Feary, M., n.d.). The concept of three temporal profiles for planning is introduced. They are future-focused profile, present-focused profile and past-focused profile. For complex sociotechnology planning, explicit collaboration in the execution of plan activities must have all the actors within the plan to be tightly coupled. The challenge is distributing the plan to different groups of people who needs different pieces of information and the process can be error prone and difficult to keep up-to-date. If the problems are deemed to be part of collective intelligence, it warrants a deeper thinking about the larger organization context. McCurdy, M. et al (2009) argued that many planning approaches supporting collective intelligence “…do not support execution of highly contingent actions, distributed across many players and hence provide incomplete support for planning…”.

     In the case of the Mars Rover scientific activity and schedule planning by ADCO, many parties were involved and it was a typically complex sociotechnical planning. The plan was good and tight. Failure scenarios and possible problematic situations were well thought out and solutions were provided to deal with each of them. Nevertheless in 2010, something went wrong and it was found to be a programming problem. It was an obscure one at that but it was not caught by all the testing that was done to the software repeatedly before its operation. 

     With this in mind and thinking back to my sociotechnical plans made for my fictional company Mimi Enterprise in the last individual project, if similar problems occurred, the impact may not totally destroy all the planning but will have considerable negative effect on its success.

     My sociotechnical planning was about Cloud Computing, Telecommuting and Watson-type expert system/machine. Let’s assume that the policy of Telecommuting applies to most of the employees whose role can accommodate working from home and still be productive. This was carefully investigated to be advantageous to the company and the collective intelligence seems to be in-sync with the findings. After six months, the evaluation of this program tells a story of failure. The element that is out of the control of the planners’ hands is the morale of the telecommuting employees. It turned out that those employees felt isolated and got a sense of loss of cohesiveness that they enjoy when they all come to the office. The relevancy of this outcome to sociotechnical planning is yet another example of how things can go wrong especially in complex environments where lots of parties are involved. Work morale is generally measured on a group level if not all employees. If only one person has low work morale, it is a far simpler picture and often times, no action is required to deal with it.

     The two main forces that may affect my idea of getting into Cloud Computing, allowing Telecommuting for employees and the building of this Watson-type expert system/machine are company’s bottom line and the opinion of the board members. The three items planned can only be carried out if the company can afford to do so and have the approval of the board members. Absence of either one will not indicate a green light to proceed.

I have no access to the recommended “Best Laid Plan” book. I referenced this article by Billman, D. and Feery, M. (n.d.) titled Collective Intelligence and Three Aspects of Planning in Organizations: A NSAS Example and think that it is quite an appropriate piece of material to read for this topic.

References

Billman, D. and Feary, M. (n.d.). Collective Intelligence and Three Aspects of Planning in Organizations: A NASA Example. Retrieved from https://www.parc.com/content/events/attachments/Billman-CIplanningTemporal.pdf.

McCurdy, M., et al (2009). 
Space
Human
Factors
Engineering
Report:
Crew
Scheduling
Lessons
Learned.
NASA
Ames
internal
report.