Looking askance 6
Looking askance 6
June 2005
Petri versus pi… or is it plus?
The meeting I mentioned in the last Askance successfully took place earlier this month. Nearly 30 people gathered at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven to examine through examples the value of Petri nets and the pi calculus as ways to model processes.
One immediate result of the meeting was to form The Process Modelling Group, to promote study and experimentation in business processes. Its aims are to ease human understanding of processes, aid their implementation on machines and develop their underlying science.
The group already has over 60 members, who mainly work in academia, for software companies or as part of standards bodies. Robin Milner, originator of the pi calculus, instigated the group's creation in May 2004. The running of the group is in the hands of Wil van der Aalst, Rob van Glabbeek, Keith Harrison-Broninski, Robin Milner and one Roger Whitehead.
Those interested in joining should contact Keith Harrison-Broninski (khb@rolemodellers.com) or me (rgw@office-futures.com). Membership is open to individuals with proven interest and expertise in process modelling, regardless of their professional affiliation. Organizations or committees cannot join.
A full report of the Eindhoven meeting is in preparation, based on the papers given and on participants' observations. We are also writing a manifesto for the group, which expands on our aims to provide a long-term basis for the work.
Solid for fluidity
The psychologist and philosopher Liam Hudson died in March this year. His was a name little known to the world at large and his reputation among his peers was mixed. Some treasured his breadth and iconoclasm; others seemed disdainful of his methods and conclusions.
Although what he said necessarily made sense to me at an intellectual level, my overriding reaction to his writings was immediate and instinctive. He simply spoke to me, as one's favourite composers and poets do, in a way that matched my experiences, my outlook and my beliefs about the world. His words also unlocked doors in my mind, opening vistas to new ways of seeing and thinking. And, as you know yourself, once opened, such doors seldom shut again.
Hudson's most widely read book was Contrary Imaginations: A Psychological Study of the English Schoolboy, first published in 1966. This and some of its successors, such as Frames of Mind and The Cult of the Fact, examined the way we accept imposed restraints on the way we think and feel and behave.
Much of this was familiar territory, previously and popularly explored in Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), for example. Hudson's contribution was to show by how much these restraints were self-imposed. People elected to behave like libidinous, undisciplined artistic types, emotionally stilted, lexically impoverished engineers or some other stereotype. This was neither nature nor nurture but choice - choice reinforced by habit and social convention, perhaps, but nevertheless willed. Convergent thinkers can become divergers if they wish, and vice versa.
Partly through reading Hudson, I place great importance on the role of words in modelling. The way we describe the world, the analogies we draw and the metaphors we employ all mould the way we see things. An apt analogy or a subtle metaphor can liberate our thinking, offering a stepping stone to a higher understanding. Conversely, an attractive but spurious analogy or a wrong-headed metaphor can trap us in a lower and confining vision.
One has only to look at the way people describe the working of the brain to see the power of metaphor, for good or ill. The prevailing popular model sees the brain as a kind of computer. Fifty or more years ago, the model was based upon gears and electric motors. Before that, it was based on the steam engine. Earlier still, the brain was compared to a loom. None of these analogies is especially accurate and they can lead to some alarming misunderstandings of how to treat the unwell mind. Further, it is unlikely that a single model or metaphor is adequate.
A similar problem afflicts the way people think of organizations. Consciously or not, anyone working in process management subscribes to the cybernetic view of organizations. This is based on the idea of control mechanisms using feedback (positive and negative), as propounded by Norbert Wiener in his 1948 book, Cybernetics: or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. It was Wiener who invented the modern meaning of the word, cybernetics.[1]
This was later applied to thinking about organisms and natural systems, leading to important work such as Ludwig von Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory, Stafford Beer's Viable Systems Model, and Maturana and Varela's ideas on autopoiesis. These ideas should be in every systems analyst's knapsack. Any university or college course that does not cover them is sending its students into the world of work ill-prepared to understand it.
All of which rambling leads me to the notion that we make rods for our own backs by using inappropriate visual and verbal metaphors in describing the computer architectures that support business processes. We mainly use static and, often, rigid stereotypes, such as 'buses' (in the electrical, not transportative, sense), 'pipelines', 'silos' and so on. At best these are crude but once they are lodged in people's minds they are obdurately hard to remove or replace.
We could try instead to use fluid, multidimensional models more akin to the reality they represent. Systems thinkers like von Bertalanffy, Maturana and Varela had groundings in biology (Wiener did, too, but not professionally). They would not have used such fixed similes but would have - and did - turned to nature for examples. The natural world provides us with plenty of models and mental images that are familiar, and easy to portray and describe, while possessing the necessary mutability. We could, perhaps, liken our computing arrangements to swarms of bees, river systems, sand dunes or trees and forests. What price “food-chain oriented computing”, the “enterprise service river” or even the “SAP sap system”?
I'd like a pound… 
…for every time I read this quotation, which is a favourite among industrial engineers, systems analysts and management consultants:
"When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of science."
It is, as you probably recognize, by William Thomson (1824-1907). He said these words in a lecture in 1891, when he was President of the Royal Society and by which time he had been ennobled as Baron Kelvin of Largs.
People produce this quotation like a trump card, and with the same smug air, as though it expressed a profound universal truth and as though they were engaged in some form of science.
When, however, you look at the complete quotation, you can see how the popular version distorts Thompson's original intent. Here it is, with italics showing the extra wording.
"In physical science the first essential step in the direction of learning any subject is to find principles of numerical reckoning and practicable methods for measuring some quality connected with it. I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of Science, whatever the matter may be.”
The key is in the first three words - “In physical science”. Thompson was not intending his words to apply to business processes or performance, to human productivity or any of the other activities to which some people attach it willy-nilly. He was talking about physics (which he held in high regard, reputedly once saying, “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.”)
The difficulty is that the partial quotation holds sway. In a verbal equivalent to Gresham's Law, the debased version has supplanted the full one. A search on Google, for example, found over 900 references in Web pages to the incomplete quotation and just 12 to the whole thing. The disparity within newsgroups was even greater.
Another possibility, which these spiritual sons and daughters of Frederick Winslow Taylor[2] possibly fail to consider, is that Thompson might simply be wrong. He was over several things. Consider this triple gem from 1895, just four years after his pronouncement on measuring: “Radio has no future. Heavier than air flying machines are impossible. X-rays will prove to be a hoax.”
People also overlook, if they ever knew, that in 1862 Kelvin calculated the age of the Earth at a hundred million years. By 1899 he had revised that to between 20 and 40 million years. Modern calculations show it to be 4.6 billion years old. He was out by a factor of over a hundred.
Much good his measurements did then to correct “meagre and unsatisfactory” knowledge. Why? Because he had made a false assumption, that the Earth is inert. In fact, radioactive elements produce heat at its core.
The moral here is that unless your assumptions and basic propositions are sound, all the measurement in the world will do no good. It's what my physics master used to call the fallacy of spurious accuracy.
Despite his later errors, Thompson was a brilliant scientist, especially in his youth, such as in his work on the mathematical relationship between electricity and heat. His achievements in this have been memorialised in the adoption of the “Kelvin” as a measure of absolute temperature. There is also a link to computing. In 1873, Kelvin built himself an analogue computer. It was a tide predictor, which he needed to help him in his work of laying submarine telephone cables (out of which he sensibly made a great deal of money).
Thompson was, though, a Victorian scientist, with all that means in terms of mental outlook and moral and social grounding. Also, even intellectual giants age. At the time of his pronouncements about flight, radio and X-rays he was 70 years old.
These now laughable opinions are illustrative of a 19th century approach to science, of which he had been so conspicuous a representative. Science, in those days, was deterministic, rationalist and reductionist, and was based on a belief in closed systems. Even before he died, Thompson's statement about the supremacy of measurement was being shown as flawed. The mathematician Henry Poincaré demonstrated in 1889 that we cannot accurately analyze the relative motion of three solid bodies, such as billiard balls, no matter how much we know about their size, mass, positions and velocity.
Within a decade of Thompson's death, the Victorian view of science - essentially the Newtonian view - was torn asunder by Albert Einstein's work on relativity. The final shredding of its fabric was administered two decades later by Werner Heisenberg's work on uncertainty.
Yet, over a century after he uttered them, and despite their invalidity, Thompson's words are still a mantra for thousands of people. This demonstrates, among other things, that old ideas are hard to expel, especially if they fit closely with an individual's worldview.
It also shows that with every expert comes an attitude, which might not be appropriate to the demands of today, let alone tomorrow. So, be careful in your choice of quotations. They may tell the world more about you than you expect.
It's easy
There's nothing you can know that isn't known.
Nothing you can see that isn't shown.
Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be.

From All You Need is Love, Lennon & McCartney, 1967.


Roger Whitehead
27 June 2005
[1]  The French physicist and mathematician André-Marie Ampère coined the word in 1854 (as cybernétique), to mean the science of civil government.
[2]  Who seemingly include consultants from Mckinsey & Company. Its motto is, supposedly, “Everything can be measured and what gets measured gets managed.” (The company's Web site carries no mention of these words, by the way.)