Something You Should Know - Real Truth Vs Fake Truth: How to Tell the Difference & The Science of Failure: Why Things Go Wrong

Episode Date: April 2, 2018

We have a lot of devices – cellphones, tablets, laptops – and they all need to be charged up constantly. How much does that cost? And how much does it cost to run a television, light bulb or a Tesla every year? Listen to discover the answers. (http://www.forbes.com/pictures/ekhf45ellkj/ipad-1-50-per-year/)  It seems as if the truth has taken a beating in recent years. Your truth may not be my truth and then, of course, there is alternative truth. Huh? It’s time we take a closer look at what the truth is and isn’t. So joining me is Hector MacDonald, he is strategic communications consultant who has advised the leaders of some of the world’s top corporations as well as the British government. Hector is the author of a new book called TRUTH: How the Many Sides to Every Story Shape Our Reality (https://amzn.to/2pVUYs6) and I think you will find what he has to say very enlightening.  Everyone has been worried about their breath on occasion. We all know what a huge turn-off bad breath can be. So I will let you in on some proven strategies to fight bad breath when you aren’t able to brush your teeth. I’ll also tell you a few myths about bad breath that may surprise you. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/03/cure-bad-breath_n_1126196.html)  You’ve heard of Murphy’s Law… Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. But why is that so? Why do things go wrong? Whether it is your morning routine to get the kids off to school (which in my house OFTEN goes wrong) to how you do your job or cook Thanksgiving dinner to disastrous space shuttle launches – things can and do go wrong. Listen to Chris Clearfield, co-author of the book Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It (https://amzn.to/2pZgPy3) as he delves into the science of failure. You'll discover how failure works and more importantly how you can learn from failure to prevent it from happening again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on Something You Should Know, ever wonder when you charge your cell phone at your friend's house, what does that cost them on their electric bill? Then, with fake news and alternative facts, how do you tell if the truth is really the truth? We should respect people's statements as true if they are true, but we should also notice what they're not talking about, what they're leaving out, what they're selectively highlighting at the expense of other perhaps just as relevant information that might go against their agenda.

Then, ever worry your breath is not as minty fresh as it should be? I'll have some bad breath first aid. And why do things go wrong? Why do systems fail? And how do you prevent things from going wrong? The more pieces we have in the system, the more moving parts, whether you're talking about the space shuttle or our cars or our companies or our personal lives, the more moving parts we have in these systems, the more likely we are to have these failures. All this today on Something You Should Know. As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things

and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know is all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday

in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu. She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know,

I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Something You should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Have you ever been over someone's house and said,

do you mind if I charge up my cell phone? And then wondered, I wonder what that does to their electric bill. I mean, what does it cost them to let you charge up your phone? Well, Forbes.com did the research on that and what it costs in electricity to charge up or use other devices.

And here's what they found. For your iPad, if you fully drain and charge your iPad every other day, it will use about 12 kilowatts of electricity per year, and that means it'll cost you about $1.50 all year. If you've ever felt guilty about charging your phone up at your friend's house, you can stop feeling guilty about it. Typically, your smartphone will use about 25 cents worth of electricity per year, and a laptop will use about $8 per year.

If you watch an average of five hours of TV on a plasma TV, that'll run about $45 a year in electricity. An LCD TV will be about $20 a year for that same five hours of television per night. A 60-watt incandescent light bulb, if you run it for 10 hours a day, will cost about $26 a year in electricity. An equivalent LED bulb, if you run it for 10 hours a day for one year, will cost about $4.40 a year. Clothes washers and dryers, now there's a big variation in this category, but on average, they cost the typical family about $300 per year in electricity. A Tesla, which is not an inexpensive car, will at least save you money in fuel. A Tesla will use about $450 a year in electricity,

while a car with a gas engine costs you typically about $2,200 a year in fuel. And a microwave oven, if you run it for 15 minutes on high, will cost you about 4 cents. And that is something you should know. I know my mama brought me up to tell the truth. And the truth was the truth, the facts. But today there are alternative facts, fake news. Truth has become something to argue about. But how can that be?

How can the truth be the truth and also something to argue about? This is really interesting, and Hector MacDonald has studied this very carefully. Hector is a strategic communications consultant. He has advised the leaders of some of the world's top corporations, as well as the British government. And he is the author of a new book called Truth, How the Many Sides to Every Story Shape Our Reality. Welcome, Hector.

Thanks, Mike. It's great to be here. So it does seem that lately, anyway, that the truth has taken a bit of a beating, that there are more versions of the truth maybe than before. Is that true? Or is this becoming more of an issue because the conversations about the truth are just getting nastier? Well, I agree, it has taken a beating. And unfortunately, what we're seeing recently is a real disregard and blatant disinterest in the truth to the extent that lies and falsehoods are being propagated on a scale never seen before. However, what I think that masks is the longer term trend, which is that we've always been capable of misrepresenting the truth without

outright lies, without needing to use falsehoods. Clever communicators, but also all of us in our different ways, find it convenient at times to use different versions of the truth to forward our agendas, to make ourselves look good, to win arguments, whatever it may be. So this is not a new story. It's just that everything is being blinded a little bit at the moment by the extraordinary levels of falsehoods and alternative facts that have been flying around. And so what are we to do with this all? How do we make sense of this when, you know, we used to think anyway, maybe in a simpler time, that there was the truth, and then there was other stuff.

But now there isn't just the truth. That's right. And I think we have to start by getting a grounding in what's going on. So I took a sort of almost scientific approach to this to try and understand if we could categorize truth into different forms and see that it's more than just factual truth, which is what perhaps most listeners will be familiar with. But actually, many of the statements we make are not factual at all. They're value judgments, things like, you know, it's wrong to kill is a truth that most of us would subscribe to, but it's not a fact as such. It's a morality statement. We make statements which are based on what I call artificial truths, things like the definitions that we give to words or

the social constructs we create, you know, the companies and government organizations that we create. These things are very malleable because they're artificial, because we've created them. And finally, I also look at what I call unknown truths, which is things like predictions and beliefs, whether that's religious beliefs or ideologies. And here we're dealing with things that really mean a lot to us, and we act on the basis of these things as if they're true.

But of course, we can never establish as a clear fact something that is an ideological belief or perhaps a religious belief. But that doesn't stop us from taking them as gospel truth. So talk about some of the greatest moments in truth's history, if you will, and some examples of what you're talking about here to get people to whet their appetite. Absolutely. So perhaps you're thinking particularly of where truth has been misused or abused, and I think that there are some, you know, some real classics. One from the U.S., a very interesting one, when George W. Bush was making the case for war against Iraq in actually 2002, it was originally. in which he talked at some length about both al-Qaeda,

which of course had recently committed the atrocity of 9-11, and Iraq. So interweaved them in the same speech, talked about them in the same breath, but didn't actually say they were working together, merely implied it by continuously associating them in every sentence. Now that's a very clever bit of rhetoric to give the whole nation, the world, the impression that Iraq and al-Qaeda were collaborating on some terrible weapon of mass destruction

to attack America. But of course he never actually said that in his speech. I think if you look at some of the interesting things that have been done with language, also in the States, by people like Frank Luntz, who is the well-known Republican pollster, he very cleverly changed the way people named things that were politically sensitive, like, for example, grilling for oil. He rebranded it as energy exploration, which sounds kind of braver and more patriotic and perhaps a bit cleaner, too.

You know, he was the one who pointed out that global warming might sound scary, but climate change, that sounds kind of manageable. So let's talk about climate change rather than global warming. Again, another infamous one from the history, the annals of truth, is Bill Clinton in his claim that he had not had sexual relations with that woman, which we all remember very well. By his definition of sex, it's perhaps true, possibly true, that he hadn't had sexual relations with that woman. But his definition of sex was not one that you or I or most of your listeners would ascribe to. So the definition that appeared in legal testimony in the original court case

that sparked the whole thing off was very specific and excluded all kinds of acts that most normal people would consider part of sex. So those are just some of the kind of the classic stories that we're all very familiar with. So how do we typically misunderstand? How do we typically fall for stuff that, if there's a simple explanation for this, where someone will say something as fact, and we believe it, even though, you know, on closer inspection, maybe it's not?

Well, if it's a true statement that they're putting forward, and that's what my book is all about. You know, truth is about truth, not lies. If it's a true statement they're putting forward, then, of course, we should believe it, but we should understand what it means and the limits of that statement. So if someone makes a statement about, for example, in the book I use the example of driverless cars, which is likely to become a big political issue in the next couple of years. If someone wants to advocate for driverless cars, they will talk to you about things like the fact that fewer people will die on the roads.

They're much safer than cars driven by humans. They're also much more environmentally friendly. But they probably won't talk to you about things like the huge cyber vulnerability of driverless cars, the potential that, you know, we will have driverless cars in our driveways. They could be hacked by a foreign power and used against us. We don't talk, they wouldn't talk about the many, many millions of jobs that would be lost in America and across the world by truck drivers and taxi drivers when driverless cars take over and, you know, the Uber fleet is entirely made up of driverless cars. A lot of people are going to lose their jobs. So, you know, we should respect people's statements as true if they are true, but we should also notice what they're not talking

about, what they're leaving out, what they're selectively highlighting, what they're focusing on, and you know, at the expense of other perhaps just as relevant information that might, you know, go against their agenda. Well, but they may not know. I mean, I remember the conversation about driverless cars, and I read a thing, and it had never even occurred to me that one of the unintended consequences of driverless cars will be that cities, governments will lose so much money because there won't be tickets. And it's not that the person necessarily was omitting that to kind of hide it. It's just, who would have thought?

That's right. And there won't be parking revenues for municipal authorities. So, you know, if your driverless car can just go home or go out of the town once it's taking you to work, you don't need to park it and pay for parking anymore. So that's a good thing because it means that, you know, we can turn all those parking lots into amenities, real parks, you know, all kinds of things. But it's bad in the sense that it means that city governments, and many of them, as you know, in the States, as in Britain, are pretty close to bankruptcy at the moment. You know, they're going to have even less revenue coming in

to pay for essential social services. But going back to your earlier point, you said they may not know. That may be true for you or me, but you can be sure that, for example, a Washington lobbyist who's been employed by the auto industry to lobby on behalf of, you know, getting permission for private citizens to buy driverless cars, they will know all the facts. They just won't use the ones that are inconvenient to their arguments. We're talking about the truth today, what the truth is and what it isn't.

And my guest is Hector McDonald. His book is Truth, How the Many Sides to Every Story Shape Our Reality. You know, a great website can say so much. It can be the focal point of your business or organization or your passion or your hobby. But you're likely under the impression that building a great website is hard. You've got to find somebody who knows how to do it and all kinds of things can go wrong and it takes forever. But none of that is true anymore. Not with Squarespace. And this comes from my experience. My company has used Squarespace and we have a few more projects

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Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy,

it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back. And in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed, critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network.

At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Hector, tell the story about Coca-Cola. Well, it's not exactly about Coca-Cola, but it's about their brand, Fanta.

I came across this story when I was having a look at corporate history that Coca-Cola put out in 2011, which was called something like 125 Years of Happiness. It was a very beautifully presented corporate brochure, but it didn't mention Fanta being invented, which seemed strange. And I realized that the reason for this was that Fanta was invented in 1940 in wartime Germany. In other words, it was invented in a country that was under the control of the Nazis. Now, it wasn't invented by the Nazis. It was created by the German branch of Coca-Cola because they were unable to, during the wartime blockade, source the essential materials they needed to make Coca-Cola.

They couldn't get the magic formula, basically. So they came up with a new product. And, you know, it was a very impressive story of innovation and making do in tough times. But it's not something that Coca-Cola wants you to know about

because it doesn't want either the Coca-Cola or the Fanta brand to be in any way associated with Nazi Germany, for understandable reasons. And I would do the same thing if I was in that position. Well, sure. Yeah, who wouldn't? I mean, why would you highlight, put a spotlight on that?

I mean, that wouldn't be good marketing. So that's a perfectly reasonable historical omission to make. But then when you start to look at some of the other historical omissions that people make, they become less reasonable. And I would perhaps cite the example that you may have seen in the book of the Texas Education Board putting out guidelines in 2015 for what should go into the history curricula for public schools. And leaving out the Ku Klux Klan, leaving out Jim Crow laws, really downplaying slavery,

the role of slavery in the Civil War, to the extent that, you know, they're giving, by those omissions, quite a distorted picture of what many people would consider to be, you know, a really important, informative part of American history, and particularly where it pertains to racial, you know, inequality and all the concerns of race that have emerged in recent years. But you're not saying, are you, that if you're going to make a case that you need to tell everybody everything about it, or otherwise you're not telling the truth? I'm certainly not saying that. I'm saying that you are telling the truth,

but you're not telling the whole truth. Now, that may be the right thing to do in certain circumstances, but as in the case of the Texas history curriculum, that's a situation where I think, you know, public officials with a responsibility to the whole population need to be a little bit more objective and fair in their portrayal of the history of their country and state. Now, you know, I'm a foreigner, so what do I know? But you tell me whether it's fair to portray the Civil War as primarily about states' rights, with slavery just as a side issue. That seems a distortion of the facts, at the least.

Sure. But, you know, throughout history, the whole purpose of debate is to present your side, which by definition is going to omit the other side, because that's the other guy's job, is to tell me his side. That's quite right, and that's fair game, I would say, in debating societies and in political debating chambers. But is it necessarily fair if you're dealing with members of the public who aren't trained in debating, aren't kind of ready to sniff out every possible, you know, point of weakness in your argument.

Because the truth is that most of us don't go through life as if we're in a debating chamber. We read a story in a newspaper. We hear a report on the news. We see some quote on Facebook. We see some tweet. And we take that as the truth. We don't look to see, ah, but what's the other side of the story? And I guess part of my reason for writing the book is

that I think we should, unfortunately. We increasingly need to, because we cannot rely any longer on the old geek keepers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, for us, the BBC, to do it for us. I mean, I still get most of my news from the BBC, but I'm very conscious that most of the world gets their news from Facebook, which means they get their news from whatever random sources their friends happen to have decided to click on and follow or share, whether it be Breitbart, whether it be some random blog, whether it be a bit of Russian disinformation, whatever it may be. So I think because of that, because of the move to social media news and the increasing

fragmentation of the media landscape, we unfortunately each have much more of a responsibility to try and get a handle on what is true and ways in which we might be being misled by the messages that we hear. Yeah. Well, so how do you do that? How do you become persuasive? How do you convince people of your argument and still be ethical according to your standards? Well, so I think that what you're asking is how the communicators put forward their argument

while not misrepresenting too badly the overall truth. And I think that you have to be, each person needs to make their own ethical call on that. When I'm working with businesses, for example, I will highlight issues that might be ethical concerns and say, look, this is our main message that we want to get across, but if we only say that and don't mention this other issue, then, you know, some of your staff might feel hard done by if they later find out that we didn't mention it. So, you know, would it be okay if we include this as a, you know, for your information, you know, bullet point? And I think that's, you know, you have to be transparent with the people that you're

working with, with your political associates, with your shareholders, with whoever it is who's involved, as to the agenda you're pursuing and the reasons why you're making messaging choices. But ultimately, it comes down to personal ethical choices. Right. And those are decisions you have to make for yourself. And I can't think of a real example right now, but you could have an organization, for example, that does wonderful things for the world, but the founder's great-grandfather's uncle was a Nazi, and you could make that an issue.

You could message that. Yes, exactly. Well, is that really necessary to bring up? It has nothing to do with anything, but an opponent could say, Aha, gotcha. Well, exactly. And we are becoming increasingly like that. So, you know, the small part I hope I can play in stimulating that conversation

and perhaps getting some kind of movement going is to lay out what some of these practices are. And that's exactly what I've done in Truth, is to give countless examples and stories of how truth is used for good and for ill by, you know, well-meaning people and, you know, total villains. But a person's truth is still always going to be tainted by their beliefs. I mean, you can be as honest as the day is long about what you're saying and believe it to be true, but your beliefs still enter into it. It's impossible, unless you're doing math and saying two and two is four, there are gray areas and your beliefs

fill in the blanks. Well, that's true to a certain extent, but I think you can try and be responsible about these things. So, for example, I've written about two very controversial subjects in truth. One of them is Brexit, which is very controversial over here, and the other is climate change, which is controversial everywhere. And I would challenge you to tell me which side I stand on both those arguments. I don't think I make it clear in the book. So, you know, I've written at length about some of the arguments around them without, I hope, giving away where I stand. So I think it is possible to be, you know, to try and be objective and present the arguments from both sides and think through the arguments, because actually that's what makes us better as a society, if more of us can try and see these different issues from multiple points of view. It also is more likely to produce solutions, by the way, because the more that we can see issues from different points of view,

the more likely we are to combine different ideas into potential solutions, work with each other to come up with creative, imaginative ideas that no one side in the debate would otherwise have come up with. Well, the truth is certainly not as simple as my mama told me, but maybe discussions like this can help everybody get a better handle on what the truth is and isn't. My guest has been Hector MacDonald. He is a strategic communications consultant, and the book is Truth, How the Many Sides to Every Story Shape Our Reality. There's a link to his book in the show notes, and I appreciate you being here. Thanks,

Hector. My pleasure. Thanks very much for your time. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars.

Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong,

which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong. And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday.

When you think about it, you have a system for everything you do, whether it's your system for getting the kids up and off to school in the morning, or the system you have for doing your job or managing your business, or cooking Thanksgiving dinner. NASA has systems that enable rocket ships to blast off into outer space. There are systems that allow a car company to put a car together so it doesn't fall apart. Everything has a system to it, big or small, simple or complicated, and sometimes those systems fail. You know Murphy's Law, whatever can go wrong will go wrong. But why do things go wrong? Why do systems fail? How can you prevent failure or learn from it when it does happen?

Here to discuss that is Chris Clearfield. He has studied systems and why they fail, and he's co-author of a new book called Meltdown, Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It. Hi, Chris. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I think a good example to launch this discussion is the one that you give about Three Mile Island, the nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. And in 1979, something went wrong with one of their reactors. And despite all the safety systems in place, there was a meltdown. And it was the most significant nuclear accident in U.S. history. So start there, if you don't mind.

After Three Mile Island, you know, there was an official investigation, and what the official investigation determined was that the operators were at fault, that they had made mistakes about how they responded to the problems in the plant, and that that led to the meltdown. But there was a sociologist who looked at the accident, and what he realized is that the only way that the operators were – well, let me take a step back. What he realized basically was that the logic of the accident couldn't be understood until you had a panel of, you know, engineers looking at it for nine months.

And so there was no way that the operators themselves could have understood what was going on, let alone responded in the correct way. And for this sociologist, whose name was Chick Perot, this was kind of a terrifying conclusion. You know, there were no huge failures, there were no huge external shocks, and yet this series of small failures came together and led to this big meltdown. But isn't it part of building any system to make mistakes and then learn from the mistakes? And people make mistakes. They're the thing in the system that screws things up.

But every system requires people to make mistakes. When people make mistakes, the most important thing is that we have built an organization which enables them to talk about those mistakes and that we don't turn around and blame them for those mistakes. Because in a complex system, from your armchair or your conference room, you can't just write down all the things that are going to go wrong. There's too many things we don't understand. There's this potential for these unexpected connections in the system. And so what we have to do is we have to learn from the system as it's running. And in order to learn from it, we need people to talk

about the problems that they see. We need people to talk about the mistakes that they make. There's a story in the book where there is a sailor on an aircraft carrier who drops a tool on the deck during a big exercise, and he can't find it until he reports it. They have to call off the exercise, send planes to divert to other places, and they conduct this extensive search. They eventually find the tool. The next day, there's a big ceremony held for this sailor to celebrate his bravery in coming forward and saying, I've messed up, I've lost this tool. That's the kind of thing that we really need to see

if we're going to start to get a handle on these big systems where we can't think through all the failures ahead of time. What are some of the big system failures that, if you mentioned them, I might know? The Target expansion into Canada is a good one, right? So, you know, Target, the big American retail company, wanted to open stores in Canada. They tried to open about 130 stores in a very short time frame. They declared bankruptcy and lost a couple of billion dollars. The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill is another good example where, you know, really a series of small mistakes led to this massive consequence,

you know, billions of dollars for the company and obviously loss of life and untold environmental damage. And I think another thing that's interesting, you know, we were researching how effective teams manage crises. So how SWAT teams and emergency room doctors, you know, respond to unexpected events. And I have a five-year-old and what I started to see was that our morning routine, you know, my trying to get him off to preschool every day, that actually looked a lot like a crisis. That actually looked a lot like what these researchers were seeing when they studied these really effective teams. We weren't so effective, but we were able to take some of the lessons that we were really writing in the book and transform our morning routines. It's much, much better now. So, you know, that's kind of two big

failures and I think one crisis at home that many people might recognize. So just because I don't remember that, what did Target do wrong that caused them to fail in Canada? What Target saw was that they had to set up a whole new supply chain for Canada. And that supply chain was very, very complex. And it didn't have a lot of slack in it. You know, they were very much trying to move goods from their warehouses to the shelves in the stores, you know, just in time, just when they needed it. And so in that case, you had a couple of issues with the supply chain software. You had people who had entered data incorrectly into the software. So, you know, a case of paper towels was recorded as one paper towel and not 24 paper towels.

And these kind of small errors, there were a lot of them, but they really combined to mean that the warehouses were overflowing, the supply chain had basically broken down, and store shelves were empty. So it was a series of blunders rather than some big thing that went wrong. Exactly. That's exactly right. And is that the typical way systems fail? I mean, I remember when the Challenger blew up, that the problem was the O-rings, and that everyone pretty much agreed that there was a problem that caused the Challenger explosion.

Is that more typical, or is it more typical that it's a lot of little things that combine and snowball into disaster? It's a great question. I would actually, you're right in the sense that the O-ring is what caused the problem in the Challenger. Actually, a lot of great research looking at the Challenger accident. And even though there's this one proximate cause that we can look at and we can put our fingers on, you know, there had been O-ring failures for several

missions beforehand. And it was actually something that NASA was looking at pretty seriously, but decided ultimately wasn't a risk to the flight. And so you had this whole culture at NASA that was kind of perpetuating these small errors that in many ways could have been caught and fixed before Challenger was launched and tragically lost. Well, I guess a part of any system is to take into account Murphy's Law, that if you have enough parts of a system, something's going to go wrong, and so part of the system is to catch those things, right? Yes, that's exactly the right way to put it. The more pieces we have in the system, the more moving parts, whether you're talking about the space shuttle or our cars or our companies or our personal lives, the more moving

parts we have in these systems, the more likely we are to have these failures. And so the way we need to shift our perspective a little bit is by thinking about how we can learn from our systems, how we can encourage people to speak up, and how we can catch these sort of small failures so that they don't spiral out of control into these big ones. There's one story we talk about in the book about a nurse who almost gives the wrong medication. She has two patients with similar last names in the same room, and they're taking similar sounding medications, and she almost mixes them up. But she catches her error. She doesn't just fix that problem. She doesn't just catch her own mistake. She talks about it with her colleagues. And so now all the nurses know to be aware of this. But then they go even a step further. They separate the patients. So now they're not in the same room. So the confusion is less

likely to happen. And then the hospital actually builds a system to flag up when patients with similar last names are in the same room and to prevent that from happening. So I think that's a great example of really seeing that learning going from the nurse recognizing the problem all the way up to making the system better. But in that case, and in so many other cases, it does seem that the mistakes have to happen first, and someone, you know, pays a price, that it's impossible or somehow not easy to anticipate what might go wrong. We have to let it go wrong first and then go, oh, well, I guess we need to fix that. Well, yeah, you're onto something there. And it's, but in this case, it actually wasn't even a mistake. It was an almost mistake. You

know, the nurse didn't give the wrong indication, the wrong medication, but she used that and the whole hospital used that as information about the system. And I think that is, you know, that is what we see successful organizations doing. We see them treating these small issues not as one-offs and saying, oh, well, you know, glad that happened. Our system worked well. But we see them treating these small issues as ways to learn about the bigger system. But usually, what really motivates change is disaster. Because when there's a near miss, it's never quite as big a deal as when two planes collide. So the two planes colliding seems to generate more change than the almost colliding. Yeah, I love that perspective. And I think it's a great example.

It turns out in aviation, that's, broadly speaking, not the case. So aviation is one of the real success stories where we see over the last four decades, even though airplanes have gotten more complex, even though the whole aviation system has become more interconnected and there's less slack in it, aviation safety has improved tremendously. And it's not because of technology. It's because of the way that aviation approaches these questions. So I think you're right. In most industries, people don't learn from near misses. I think in aviation, they tended to kind of focus on this stuff really obsessively.

And that's part of why commercial flying is so much safer today than it's ever been before. But there's another element too, which is as people in the world, as people who are making decisions, who are running companies, or even thinking about things in our personal lives, one of the things we can do is we can learn from other people's mistakes. We can learn from other people's failures. So this is even a level removed from the near-miss element of things. It's like, well, what happened to other industries, and how can we learn to manage the kind of failures that we see emerging in lots of different places?

Well, I remember talking to somebody who made the point that, you know, one of the reasons aviation does so well versus, say, mistakes in hospitals is if a doctor, you know, cuts off the wrong leg or whatever, you know, he's okay. But if the pilot screws up, he's dead. So when you've got that much skin in the game, things get better. Yeah, it's a really interesting thought. The counterexample to that would be aviation four decades ago, the pilots were still up front, and they were still the first ones to arrive at the crash site, as the saying goes. But they didn't have all of the tools that they needed to make aviation safer. And I think what we've seen in that industry is not only this focus on near misses, but we've also seen these relatively

small interventions that just help flight crews communicate and share information that they're concerned about much, much more effectively. And that's a really amazing thing. I mean, the bigger lesson for that, I think, is that we can learn as an organization, we can train people to speak up and to listen to these voices of concern, and we can use that to make our systems much, much safer. I want to try to bring this down into a little more of a personal thing, and you use the example, which I like because I had the same example, of the morning routine. And we have a morning routine with my boys getting up, and often it's crisis and it's,

you know, come on, we're going to be late. And, you know, it occurred to me, you know, if we just started this five minutes earlier, all of this would go away. And yet people don't think that way often. They just think he's just got to hurry up. But if you give him more time, so I guess what I'm asking is, what are the takeaways here? I mean, I would imagine that in general, systems that are simpler are better. Yes?

Yes and no. I mean, it turns out the antidote to these kind of problems isn't necessarily simplicity, but it's transparency. And with your example with the morning routine, I mean, I think there's two lessons. Adding more time, getting up five minutes earlier, starting five minutes earlier, that's kind of creating more slack in your system, right? So these small problems like, oh, I can't find my jacket, you know, now you have more time to absorb them. And that's, broadly speaking, a good thing. But the other thing that we learned when we studied these crises is that your idea, start five minutes earlier, that's a great idea, but we can't necessarily predict that may, you know, that may just mean that your boys move slower in the morning. And so I think the real key and what really successful organizations do

when dealing with these kinds of complex systems, which the morning routine is, weirdly, is they try something and then they see how it goes, they circle back, and then they try something else. And so what we started doing in our family is every weekend having a five-minute meeting that's like, okay, how did stuff go last week? What worked and what should we try differently next week? And so you may find that this five-minute buffer works and that's great. Then you incorporate it. You may find it doesn't work.

Then you have this opportunity in your family meeting to try something new and to figure out something else. And that's just what emergency room doctors, pilots, and SWAT teams, that's exactly how they approach these kind of things. And it was kind of fascinating for me that that's something we could use in our day-to-day. But those guys keep training and training. If you're trying to get your morning routine down, good enough is good enough. And I would imagine at some point you stop examining how we can shave off three quarters of a second on the morning routine. But that three quarters of a second may mean something to the SWAT team. It doesn't mean much to get to school.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. But, you know, you know that these kids, when they're young, they're different every week, right? So something that works one week may not work the next week. And I think that's one of the things, too, whether you're talking about competition in the workplace, you know, between companies, or you're talking about the family routine, every day is a different day, every week is a different week. So, you know, one of the, we've seen this where some of the solutions that we've tried, they work for two weeks, three weeks, and then they stop working. And so we're back to the drawing board, not because we're trying to save an extra minute, but because what we've got doesn't work and we have to be more adaptive, both in our morning routines and more broadly in these big systems that we have to take care of. Last question, and that is, but when you have systems, when you have lots of systems with lots of parts, doesn't randomness play a role that things will go wrong

because that's just the way the universe works? Things happen. Yes, exactly. And we make an analogy to chaos theory. I think chaos theory is in many ways a very good description of what we're seeing. You know, you can't specify. These systems get so complex that you can't specify all the failures. You can't even specify, you know, what the exact state of the system is in many times.

And so you're exactly right. We're going to have, we have these systems, we have all these connections. We should expect some base level of, you know, random failures. And, and, you know, and you know, what comes to mind, simple example that comes to mind of what you're talking about right there is, is your car. You can't predict what's going to go wrong with your car, but if you have a car for long enough, something's going to go wrong because there are so many things in that car that can go wrong. Chances are something's going to go wrong.

You can't predict what it is, but you hopefully, you know, when the brakes go or the transmission goes, you're prepared. You've got the money to get it fixed because something will go wrong. And that is what's so interesting about this. My guest has been Chris Clearfield. His book is Meltdown, Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It. You'll find a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Chris. Appreciate your time.

Yeah, thank you, Mike. This was a great conversation. I appreciate it. It's estimated that about 65% of all Americans have bad breath, and I bet about 100% of all Americans have worried about it at some time or another. There's a lot about the problem of bad breath that you probably don't know. Bad breath is, first of all, all in your mouth. There's a common myth that the stomach causes bad breath, but there actually isn't a constant airflow between your stomach and your mouth. A stuffy nose can cause bad breath.

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And that is something you should know. We have great advertisers on this program. I hope you will support them. By supporting them, you support this podcast, and I am sure you'll be happy with anything you buy from any of them. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run

deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law,

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