[MUSIC] Physical constraints are these laws of nature that we're going to talk
about. This is the first set of constraints.
And so this is I mean, think of this as like why are some things hard.
Well some things are just hard and its because of the physics of it, maybe the
biology of it. So here we're going to talk about the
laws of physics biology and really not them in themselves that is talked about
like how matter behaves. We're talking about our understanding of
how matter behaves. And so in this class, we're really
interested from a managerial perspective, but we have to understand what we know
about the things. because if it, if it's a matter of
knowing it, you can find that out, but the problem that we have really is one of
knowing if we know it or not. We put into these, this sort of two by
two. Talk about these sort of, these four
perspectives on knowledge and our ability to know something.
So we're going to talk first about unconscious incompetence.
I'll go into these in a little more detail, but just so you[INAUDIBLE] from
the beginning. Unconscious incompetence, when we don't
know, we don't know something. Then what, generally we move to a state
of conscious incompetence, where we know what we don't know, but we still don't
know it. We move then to conscious competence,
where we know what we don't know, we know what we know, and we know how to do the
things we need to know. And then also conscious competence,
unconscious competence, as is where we're able to do things we're competent, but we
don't know why or how we do it. We do it in an unconscious state.
So each one of these represents sort of a, a constraint of sorts.
And we want to look at these in detail individually.
So let me start with unconscious incompetence.
Unconscious incompetence is when you don't know what you don't know.
Why is that a problem? Well sometimes, not knowing what you
don't know, can lead to really adverse outcomes.
So, for example, there was a big medical innovation in the 1950's, in Europe.
There was this wonder drug that was developed.
This drug was considered, you know? It was like aspirin, like a wonder drug.
It was prescribed for a headache, for pain killing.
it was a tranquilizer. A remedy for coughs and colds.
And then, at one point, they figured out that this would be a great thing for
morning sickness. In fact, it stopped morning sickness when
a women is pregnant it stopped them from this, this urge to throw up.
At the time medical science believed that there was no way this drug could trig,
could cross, could go across the placental barrier from the mother to the
child. But guess what, we were wrong.
And so this drug thalidomideuh, resulted, the wide use of this drug thalidomide ,
resulted over two years in the birth of tens of thousands of, of severely
deformed babies. Because in fact the drug did go across
the placental barrier and it was a problem.
Ironically, it's not ironic, but in fact, in the United States, did not experience
the problems with, thalidomide that other countries did.
Because in the US the FDA had disapproved the use of it.
The FDA said this thing requires further study.
And, in fact, at the time, that was a very controversial decision, because the
drug industry lobby said why do we have to do this.
Like, you guys don't know what you're talking about, this drug is safe.
We know everything about this drug, we know that it's safe because they had done
animal studies. And assumed that, that people were going
to behave the same way. And so this is the kind of decision we
talked about last time remember the FDA was talking about how it is that we do
these, these studies. And certain organizations had ideas about
how the FDA needed to speed up their approval process.
Well, this is one case where that societal barrier was actually a good
thing, at least in the United States. And so again we have this problem where
we don't know what we don't know. Next we're going to talk about conscious
incompetence. That's when we know something but we
don't know what to do about it, we're still incompetent.
We know that we don't know but we're not really sure how to do it.
And so, when the A12 development, for example, they had to develop a new kind
of fuel. The problem with the fuel was that you
know there was 11,000 gallons of this stuff on board.
And in some places you know, normal fuels would ex actually explode at these high
temperatures so as, I, they said, they'd fuel, they keep it in the wings.
the wings got anywhere between 350 degrees up to 700 degrees and
conventional fuels would explode at that, at that, high temperature.
And so they developed a new fuel that would not explode at those low
temperatures. And they developed a, you know, the
chemists got to work, and they innovated. And they[INAUDIBLE] thinking about it.
they were trying to figure out, how do we do this?
How do we make this happening. In the end, they couldn't f, they came up
with a formulation that only burned at a temperature of, you know.
I think it burned at a temperature of 3,400 degrees, something like that.
And what happened was it was so, such a high burning temperature, that you
couldn't even light it with a match, that the stuff would not light.
And so, then the problem was, how do we start the engine if we can't light this
stuff? And in fact, they had to use explosives
to start the engine to get this thing. to start burning this fuel.
And so that's the case where we, we know we need this fuel and we're trying to get
to it. And so we have to do all these steps in
order to get to the place we're actually competent.
The kinds of problems that are caused by not knowing, or knowing what we don't
know, are often solved by this kind of incremental development.
That we make this incremental advancement.
It's sort of where our understanding is is close.
And we just have to keep trying, and keep trying and keep trying in small ways to
get to the place where we need to be. unfortunately, the knowledge may still
not be accessible, we not be able to get to that place.
Because we may think we're at the edge of our knowing and we may not actually be
there. And so, conscious incompetence is a
better state than unconscious incompetence, but not fully ideal.
Next, we'll make it through this conscious competence state.
Conscious competence is when you understand the kind of problem that you
face and you actually have the tools to be able to solve it.
And so lots of problems in engineering and science take this form, especially in
engineering for that matter. We have analysis, we have models, we have
these tools that we can use to analyze the world.
And try to understand what it is we need to do in some situation.
You know if you were an architect and you're going to build a house you could
look up the tables for how thick the floor has to be.
How thick the the, the pillars have to be to hold this thing up.
bridge design, for example, is another place where we understand a great deal
about bridge design. And so we build an amazing structure like
this and, and do it fairly efficiently. using the knowledge that we have.
And so the conscious competence. One thing, though, that happens here with
conscious competence is, we don't know the edge of our competence.
And sometimes we may sort of fall off the edge.
There's a great book called To Err is Human, and what they talk about there is
how the development off, sometimes outpaces our knowledge.
And so what'll happen is we'll make a bridge longer and thinner, make a bridge
slightly longer and thinner, they'll make another bridge longer and thinner.
And they'll keep doing this until the bridge falls down.
And they'll say, okay, well that didn't work, and they'll back up a little bit
and then try to push out again, and push out again, and push out again.
And so with that kind of, you know, failing, being a process of moving
forward. Is how we sort of find the edge of what
our competence, our conscious competence is.
Another problem with conscious competence is that.
You may end up with solutions you may not end up with solutions that are not along
the path, the normal path of development. And so there's been a, a long standing
problem in the airline industry. So in the in airline industry, it's well
known that if a plane is in the air flying people somewhere, it's making
money. If an airplane is sitting on the ground,
it is not making money right, because it's just sort of sitting there.
And so, one of the problems is, how do I get the passengers into the seats as
quickly as possible? For a long time people try and solve the
problem using queuing theories, and queuing models.
Do we put them in the front, and, and, board from the back, and have the high
numbers come back. Or do we board from the front and have
the low numbers, or do we go from both ends, and all these different ways.
Well the solution, one of the better solutions that was come up with, was not
come up with this in a way, in this way. And that solution is by Southwest
Airlines. And what they do is they don't assign
seat numbers at all. And so think about it this way, if you
don't assign seat numbers, people think, wow if I don't show up early, I'm
going to get a really bad seat. So people show up early, and as soon as
the doors open, people run on board, find the seats as quickly as they can and sit
down to find the best seats. And that solves the problem in a way that
would never have been arrived at. Using our conscious competent model of
analysis and modeling that we would normally get there.
And so that's the one problem there, that's the constraint there, is that we
may not get to a different kind of solution.
Then we have the problem of unconscious competence, where we don't know what we
know. We know what to do, we seem to know what
we do, we're able to get stuff done, but we're not really maybe not really sure
why. There's a great book called Shop Class as
Soulcraft by Matt Crawford. where he talks about basically Matt
Crawford was a, was working a think tank, he was sort of your normal white collar
intellectual. He threw it all away and became a
motorcycle mechanic. Began to work on antique and, and vintage
motorcycles. And what he talks about in one part of
the book is really interesting. He says when someone brings him a bike
for repair, he doesn't know what's wrong with it.
He doesn't even know if he can repair it or not.
But still he takes the bike in. And so again, he's alway, he's
unconscious of what he knows. Because he he's pretty sure that, that he
can get there. because he's worked on similar bikes
before. Because he, cause only uses sim-
diagnostic process. Because he's got rules of thumbs, and
traditional understandings. and even a bunch of assumptions that he's
going to make. And he does, he finds his way through
there. So by working through the bike, and he
makes lots of for decisions as he goes through.
He's often and usually able to get the bike where he needs to.
And if he can't, he goes and finds another person who's also unconsciously
competent, who's able to work on the bike for him.
Unconscious competence can be a good thing in a case like this, where we're
around motorcycle repair. However, it can be a bad thing when we
don't understand that we don't know something.
In which case we've gone around the full circle and then we're once again at the
state of unconscious incompetence. And so these form kinds of constraints
for us and we really have to understand our understanding of what it is we know.
Again, unconscious incompetence, we don't know what we don't know.
Conscious incompetence, we know what we don't know.
Conscious competence, we know what we know and then unconscious competence
where we don't know what we know. And so this is the cycle that we want to
understand and be sure to address when we're stepping into a new kind of
problem.
