Yesterday I saw a video lecture and participated in some management exercises addressing "The Knowing-Doing Gap." The author and lecturer was Robert Sutton, Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford University Department of Management, Service and Behavior.
Much of discussion was on the difference between theoretical ideals and what actually happens in the real world. While it was primarily on management issues, I was constantly reminded of discussions this group has had, such as the recent e-altercation between Wizard and me regarding NIST's recommendation that dimensions be written "10 mm x 20 mm x 30 mm." To summarize much of the day's conversation vis-�-vis the metric system, let me quote the Philosophy of IDEO, a very successful product development firm: "Enlightened trial and error outperforms the planning of flawless intellects." In the book, this is called The First Principle: "If you know by doing, there is no gap between what you know and what you do." To give an example: Imagine someone who has never flown a plane trying to write a specification on how to fly an airplane, down to the minutest detail. The result may look good, may look rational, may look complete, but would you want to be in the plane piloted by someone who only had the instructions and no experience? In fact, most non-trivial tasks require a certain amount of fundamental "book learning," and a huge amount of practical experience and practice. In my field (electrical engineering), any EE graduate can give you the general equations for how a capacitor works, but not one in a hundred can tell you practical issues like the difference between dielectric absorption and dissipation factor or why they matter (if they have even heard of them), or which dielectrics work best under different environmental conditions. Then we get to some of you guys: some of you seem to think that a bunch of laboratory scientists and academics, bright and learned in their own right, can write documents describing in minute detail how measurement systems should work, and that if any of us deviate from their recommendations, we are heretics and apostates. I am the first to agree that we need common fundamental definitions of units of measure: my meter and your meter must be the same length. But beyond that, particularly with such minutia as how to write dimensions, let alone whether "hectare" should be phased out or "cubic meters" are preferable to "liters," I just have to part company. These MAY be good things in some fields, but it is nothing short of arrogance for one person to think that he knows what is best for fields of endeavor in which they have no experience. My conviction in this is furthered by the constant stream of foreign products I see that are labeled in metric, but not labeled "properly" (e.g., "20ml" without a space). Clearly there is no substantive harm from such "mislabeling" so I don't see the justification for codifying every detail of how to use a measurement system. I am not suggesting we substantially reduce what is already in the most fundamental documents (IEEE/ASTM SI 10-1997 or BIPM's The International System of Units," but am more convinced than ever that demanding exacting compliance with less than truly fundamental aspects of measurement is not just ineffective, it can be counterproductive. Sorry for the length of this, but I doubt many of you will wade through it anyway. Jim Elwell, CAMS Electrical Engineer Industrial manufacturing manager Salt Lake City, Utah, USA www.qsicorp.com
