In 1978, I was responsible for planning the construction of a billion dollar desalination and power plant in Saudi Arabia. I started my work at the construction company’s head office in London. The engineering, drawing, purchasing and manufacturing scope of work was taking place not only in the UK but also at major suppliers and partners in Germany, Italy, Japan and the USA. When the project moved into the construction phase I moved to Jeddah where the plant was being built.
We set up a “war room” on site with schedules and charts pinned around the walls, artist’s impressions of the finished buildings and even a scale model of the whole plant showing the mechanical equipment, pipe bridges and cable runs.
Every week we held a planning meeting in the war room. This lasted most of the day and systematically reviewed progress in each area and on each system. This was the opportunity for civil, mechanical, electrical, instrument and commissioning teams to resolve the sequence and priority of work at critical interfaces: where the big cooling water pipes went under the road, how the pipe bridge cut off crane access to the transformer bays, when the continuously-cast chimneys would get precedence on the concrete batching plant.
Dramas of goods lost in transit, failed machinery, even sudden death from heatstroke unfolded, were discussed and consequent problems resolved in this theatre. The meeting was structured so that people need only attend the part that affected them.
The Project Manager chaired the planning meeting. I took the minutes, aiming to have them typed and circulated the same day. On the rare occasions when we couldn’t be there, the meeting went ahead without us. It wasn’t the Project Manger’s meeting or my meeting. It was everybody’s meeting; they needed it to do their job. If they couldn’t talk about their problems, they wouldn’t be able to solve them.
Check and display
Civil construction (and especially the marine work) was a challenge on this project. Situated on the Red Sea coast, the porous ground consisted of compacted rock and coral. The construction of a quay was a particular concern. We were building this to offload the big roll-on roll-off (RO-RO) vessels that were bringing our three-hundred-ton evaporators from Japan.
A desalination plant is basically a huge kettle to distil fresh water from seawater or rather a series of such kettles. On our project, there were sixty evaporators, fabricated in a Japanese shipyard and shipped to us twelve at a time. These would to be brought ashore by a massive flat-bed trailer.
When the first shipment was already on its way it became clear that the quay was not going to be ready on time. The quay was built of pre-cast slabs resting on forty piles drilled into a shore that sloped rapidly to depths of a hundred feet. Drilling the piles was immensely difficult because the drills could easily be deflected by the granite boulders that were embedded in the coral.
We drew up a bar chart to monitor progress and posted it on the war-room wall. This detailed each step of the process: drilling the hole, inserting the steel liner, fitting reinforcement, pouring the concrete and moving the piling rig to the next position. The piles were all numbered but it was hard to relate the bars on this chart to the piles on the shore, so we put up a plan of the ship-offloading quay and colored-in the circles as each pile was completed.
It was easy to see that we were slipping behind but unclear what we could do to retrieve the delay. So we drew another chart that plotted the number of piles completed cumulatively against a time scale and showed the target: forty piles before the ship arrived.
It was obvious that we would have to double our drilling rate to get the quay ready in time. This was impossible. The existing crew was already working twenty-four hours a day in shifts, and we could not hire another piling contractor as the work demanded specialized equipment which would never get to Jeddah in time.
When we hit real problems on site our Lebanese owners would don their traditional Arab costumes (“thawb”, “ghutra” and “igaal”: the ankle length cotton shirt; red diagonally-folded headdress; and double-coiled cord circlet that holds it in place), and request a meeting with the Saudi client in the war room.
We were quite open, we told the client that we were having a problem with the ship-offloading quay and that we did not know what to do about it. What did they think?
By now, we had pinned up a photograph of the roll-on roll-off vessel and, to complete the picture, a diagram of the stowage of the evaporators on its deck. Someone noticed that the evaporators were arranged in two rows of six along the length of the ship and asked the question “couldn’t we focus on completing a quay of just half the width, moor the ship to roll the evaporators off on one side, re-anchor the ship and roll the evaporators off on the other side?” So this is what we did. By the time the second shipment arrived the whole quay was complete.
Our Saudi clients were delighted to have been invited to discuss the problem and thrilled to feel that they had contributed to its solution.
Summarizing and confirming your understanding of a situation are vital steps in creating understanding. Displaying this understanding in a graphical form is a further stride in helping people spot patterns and find solutions.
Look for patterns
Weather is the classic example of a complex system that is totally beyond our control. Yet for centuries sailors have gained some mastery over the weather by studying it and recognizing its patterns. They have discovered how to exploit its global cycles, harness the trade winds and avoid the hurricane seasons.
Many of these winds are so well known that we have given them names: the Roaring Forties, which blow almost continuously in the southern hemisphere; the Mistral, the cold, north-westerly wind that blows down the Rhone valley in France; the Harmattan, which blows south from the Sahara and brings dust storms and very dry air; the Levante, the easterly Mediterranean wind that brings mild, moist air to Gibraltar and the mainland of Spain and Africa; and, the Pampero, the bitterly cold south-westerly wind formed in the heart of South America that blows across the pampas grasslands of Argentina.
Nowadays we recognize even longer cycles in the weather, like the El Niño Southern Oscillation which happens every three to seven years. This see-saw has a profound impact on weather far away, reversing surface air pressure between eastern and western tropical Pacific, raising temperatures in western Canada, lowering temperatures in the southern United States, and creating drought conditions in South America, Africa and Australia. Next to the seasons, El Niño is the most powerful pattern affecting global weather.
We cannot control the weather but if we recognize its patterns we can manage around them. And we can do the same in complex relationships.
But presenting some truth about our complex, dynamic, multidimensional world on flat, static paper is not a trivial task.
Create visual confections
Edward Tufte, a Yale Professor who has written seven books on the subject, notes that chart makers, like magicians, reveal what they choose to reveal. That selection of data–whether partisan, hurried, haphazard, uninformed, thoughtful, wise–can make all the difference, determining the scope of the evidence and thereby setting the analytical agenda that leads to a particular decision. Visual representations of evidence, he argues, should therefore be governed by principles of reasoning about quantitative evidence. For information displays, design reasoning must correspond to scientific reasoning. Clear and precise seeing then becomes as one with clear and precise thinking.
Tufte supports his point by tracing the evolution of visual display through human history from the first maps for travelers to the latest computerized graphical interfaces that summarize clinical information for doctors. He describes the triumphs and disasters en route.
Among the triumphs, Tufte includes John Snow’s 1854 map of deaths from cholera in Central London–a graphical representation that revealed a strong association between incidences of cholera and proximity to the Broad Street water supply. The pump handle was immediately removed and the epidemic soon ended. Such clear, lucid reasoning may seem commonsensical, obvious and insufficiently technical.
Tufte contrasts Snow’s success with the disastrous decision in 1986 to launch the space shuttle Challenger, where incompetent data display failed to reveal the deadly relationship between the O-ring damage (that lead to its explosion on launch) and the abnormally low temperature that day.
Tufte makes the case for “visual confections” or, more poetically, “juxtapositions from the oceans of the streams of story”. That was exactly what we created by pinning bar charts, histograms, plans, photographs and diagrams on the walls of the war room in Jeddah–though we had no vocabulary for what we were doing. The answer to our problem was there all along in a diagram of the stowage of evaporators on the RO-RO vessel’s deck.
“What collage is for art, confections are for the design of information” according to Tufte. “Like perspective, confections give the mind an eye. Confections place selected, diverse images into the narrative context of coherent argument. And, by virtue of their arguments, confections make reading and seeing and thinking identical”. In Tufte’s words, by putting a picture of the RO-RO vessel beside a plan of the quay we were “combining assorted images of real objects into concocted universes, showing all at once what never has been together”.
Tufte argues for good method. That is “a shrewd intelligence about evidence, a clear logic of display and analysis, placing data in the appropriate context for assessing cause and effect”. In short, he talks about the need for “a coherent architecture for organizing and learning from images”.
A complex relationship outlasts its components, just as the ant colony outlives the individual ant, and in so doing develops a purpose of its own greater than the free will of its parts. While individuals may only be involved for a matter of months or just a few years, a complex relationship can learn, change, grow and adapt over five, ten, fifteen or more years. Nevertheless, because our lives take place at lower levels, we frequently don't know the contribution we make to complex relationships. But we can help its intelligence to emerge.
To look beyond our blind spot, we therefore need to think about complex relationship as a whole. Helping a relationship recognize and respond to changing patterns will make it more successful at achieving whatever goal it seeks.
The good news is that – through spelling out the hierarchy of interfaces, aims, issues and views – we can build just such “a coherent architecture for organizing and learning”.
Incorporating that structure into a web-based private network and revealing patterns of thought, while by no means the whole solution, can further help to set the stage for better dialogue.
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