Further on my discussion with Joe MacPherson at SRI

I asked Joe what his (SRI) management did with the information he gave them. He said that they had a quiet word with the project managers (to stop black-balling "bridges"). I asked, is that all? He said yes, that was all.

I got very excited and perturbed by what Joe said. In my view, SRI was faced with a circumstance where someone (the "bridge") whose time was worth $4o/hour (remember, this was the early '80s) 95% of the time when they were behaving themselves, and ten times that (because what they were doing was somehow ensuring project success) during the 5% of their time they weren't behaving themselves, and their reaction to this circumstance was, "I guess that's OK"? Why weren't they trying to leverage that 5%.

Just think, if a person, a respected PhD-level professional, is "misbehaving" 5% of the time against both management and peer pressure, this person is pretty motivated (I'd call it "driven") to do what he or she is doing. If you simply limited the management pressure alone, you'd likely get 10% or more of this "misbehavior" - which means you could address some of that excess time and energy to other projects without a "bridge". And, remember, any benefits you get are purely serendipitous at this point. What if you tackled whatever was happening with "bridges" as an art and science, not just a happy accident?

It was at this point that I decided to somehow, sometime, personally work to move whatever this was to be both an art and a science, and maybe do this type of work myself.

More tomorrow on what happened next.