Urban Legends and Management Myths
Wikipedia defines an "Urban Legend" as follows:
Urban legends are a kind of folklore consisting of stories often thought to be factual by those circulating them. The term is often used with a meaning similar to the expression "apocryphal story." Urban legends are not necessarily untrue, but they are often false, distorted, exaggerated, or sensationalized. Despite the name, urban legends do not necessarily take place in an urban setting. The name is designed to differentiate them from traditional folklore created in preindustrial times.
Over the years I have developed a fairly keen eye for recognizing urban legends. Today I received an email from a student that contained what was clearly just such a false story. What I found interesting about it (and thus worthy of writing about) was the subject matter and setting: the story concerned managerial decision making and problem-solving at NASA, an organization with an unparalled record of accomplishments and, to be fair, a few very high profile disasters. Here's how it read:
When NASA began the launch of astronauts into space, they found out that the pens wouldn't work at zero gravity (ink won't flow down to the writing surface). To solve this problem, it took them one decade and $12 million. They developed a pen that worked at zero gravity, upside down, underwater, in practically any surface including crystal and in a temperature range from below freezing to over 300 degrees C. And what did the Russians do...?? They used a pencil.
Several things immediately give this story away. The first is the idea that NASA could put a man on the moon in 8 years but needed 10 to design a pen for him to write with. To fail to recognize this is evidence of ignorance of an important principle- that in engineering problem solving the greater invariably subsumes the lesser. Problems can be classified as more or less complex. Putting an astronaut into space and bringing him back is several orders of magnitude more complex than designing a writing instrument, even one as overbuilt as the story described. It is highly improbable that a group of engineers and scientists that could do the former would struggle with the latter.
Secondly, there are cynical, political overtones to this urban legend that is worth noting. The legend begins with the words "When NASA began the launch of astronauts into space..." This places the timeframe in early 1960's, the height of the cold war. Recall that on May 25, 1961, just a few weeks after the Russian cosmnaut Yuri Gargarin became the first human to orbit the Earth, American president John F. Kennedy uttered these now famous words:
"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth."
Given that the US space program went on to achieve not only this goal but also, by almost every measure, outpaced its Russian and Soviet rivals, I am left to wonder why this urban legend isn't ordered in a reverse manner. Why does the space program of the country with the vastly superior record of inventiveness and ingenuity and technological innovation get cast as the one incapable of simple solutions? The answer may lie with the reasons for why legends and myths persists. According to Shanti Fader, the editor of Parabola magazine, a publication of the Society for the Study of Myth and Tradition, legends and myths
...speak to something inside us that wants to know how our world lives, that wants to make order of it and find some meaning. Myths fulfill that in a way that science and facts don't always do, because science and facts don't always give us meaning.
If it is so that myths fulfill a need for understanding in a way that science and facts often can not, then the moral of the NASA pen legend makes sense:
"Always look for simple solutions. Devise the simplest possible solution that solves the problems . Always focus on solutions and not on problems. So [at] the end of the day the thing that really matters is HOW ONE LOOK [sic] INTO THE PROBLEM, mere perceptions can solve the tough probs...."
What doesn't make sense, at least not to me, is whether and why inverting reality, in this case casting the characters against type, makes the myth more effective at conveying the moral.
Links: Planck's Constant | Mental Rhinorrhea
Comments
Very often, I think, the myths are simply metaphorical ways of getting at some deeper reality. For example, anyone who has worked inside a large government bureacracy knows how much time, energy and money are spent to accomplish even some of the most minor of goals. By the time you are looking at the time and expense of putting someone on the moon, it's surely no small thing. And the question is always whether or not such an undertaking could have been accomplished more quickly, with expenditures of many fewer dollars, with much greater efficiency and without sacrificing safety or reliability. NASA represents just another of the large government bureaucracies like the Defense Department who were so famous for their $600 dollar toilet seats and their $1,200 hammers even though they make the best fighters and submarines in the world.
Or, perhaps it's a metaphor for the quality of decision-making by committee and many-tiered, hieararchical organizations. Look at the slide of American automobile manufacturers over the past 25 years and what seems like their complete obduracy and incompetence in the face of the competitive onslaught. How are their continuous failings possible, still today, given that these companies have had 25 years to figure out how to compete with the Japanese? The kinds of myths your commentary explores point out cautionary perspectives that can be used for self-referential examination and feedback to ones own world.
Posted by: Bill Fulton | January 10, 2007 2:39 AM
Urban legends are called "bubba miesas" (old wives' tales) in Yiddish.
Posted by: Miriam Sawyer | May 24, 2006 2:33 AM