Smart guys

From Chapter 3: The Surgical Team

Excerpt

The success of the scaling-up process depends upon the fact that the conceptual integrity of each piece has been radically improved — that the number of minds determining the design has been divided by seven. So it is possible to put 200 people on a problem and face the problem of coordinating only 20 minds, those of the surgeons...Let it suffice here to say that the entire system also must have conceptual integrity, and that requires a system architect to design it all, from the top down. (Ch 3. p. 36-7)

...Conceptual integrity in turn dictates that the design must proceed from one mind, or from a very small number of agreeing resonant minds.(Ch 4. p. 44)

From The Republic¹

Excerpt
...neither cities nor States nor individuals will ever attain perfection until the small class of philosophers..are providentially compelled, whether they will or not, to take care of the State, and until a like necessity be laid on the State to obey them...
— Plato, around 380 BC, Book VI. (499b)²

Building a large-scale-software system, like a spacecraft, requires a lot of people. That's a problem. According to Brooks' Law the number of communication paths grows exponentially with the number of programmers. Hence the project manager's grand challenge: ensure that hundreds of engineers from different disciplines are all working with the same principal goals in mind. Good luck. Nothing is more dismaying than another-vague-management-mandate while the clocking is ticking and the schedule is evaporating. Fact is, most engineers don't grok the deep concerns outside of their domain and don't care so long as they have sufficient guidance and schedule to meet their deadlines.

Brooks has a plan to remedy the imminent communication ills prescribed by Brooks' Law. Put a smart guy in charge. (See Surgical Team.) Why? Because a smart guy becomes the sole decision maker and the system becomes the "product of one mind." Except for the odd case of a multiple personality, this simple reduction declaws the exponent.

There's a long standing precedent for putting a smart guy in charge. Ancient Greece has it's Archons³ and the Roman Republic had it's Dictators⁴. Consolidation of power has its place; it also had its risks.

Plato witnessed consolidation of power at its worst. He was a student of Socrates during the rule of the 30. The 30 were a group of aristocrats installed by the Spartan general Lysander after he defeated of the Athenian Navy (404 BC); a defeat the finally ended the Peloponnesian wars. The 30 were charged with dismantling the Athenian democracy and replacing it with an oligarchy. They were brutal, merciless and corrupt. They confiscated property, they exiled opponents and executed others. By some accounts the 30 executed 5% of the Athenian population.

The 30 lasted but a year. Democracy was restored to Athens (403 BC) , but there were scores to settle. No one was immune. Socrates, who had quarreled with nearly everyone, had his enemies⁵. Every Athenian citizen had the right to initiate criminal proceedings. A poet named Meletus brought the charge of 'corrupting youth' against Socrates. Socrates would be tried by a jury of 500 farmers and receive a death sentence.

Title page from oldest
manuscript of The Republic

These tragic events would stick with Plato. 20 years later, he would write The Republic, his sweeping treatise describing a just and virtuous utopian state ruled by a philosopher-king who "loved truth above all things."

Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils, nor the human race, as I believe, and then only will this our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day.Plato, The Republic, Book V. (473c)

Plato saw these philosopher kings as the product of new, improved society. They would be the offspring of carefully selected parents. They would be sent away from their families at an early age to be rigorously educated in all the arts and sciences. They would learn to resist temptation and stand firm. They would hold military office. They would serve out of duty, not glory, and distinguish themselves in all things. They would be fully dedicated to the well-being of the state and the public good. Above all, they would be guided by philosophy. If they should survive to 50, they would be ready to govern.

The idea of the philosopher king has animated the thinking of political theorists from Cicero to Nietzsche. For good reason. Concentrated authority tends to be efficient, effective, focused. Dispersed authority tends to vacillate and respond to crises without conviction.

That's the theory. In practice the utopian-minded governments tend to be the cruelest of the cruel. A line up of 20th century tyrants could man a parade of evils. Back in the days before political correctness, when I studied the Republic, philosopher kings were out of favor. Oh yea, there was the amazing Marcus Aurelius, but his accomplishments pale in comparison with idealist tyrrants like Franco, Lennin and Mao. I was coached in the admonitions of Karl Popper.

Consider this passage:

Karl Popper, Viennese Philosopher (1902-1994)

From The Open Society and Its Enemies

Excerpt
What a monument of human smallness is this idea of the philosopher king. What a contrast between it and the simplicity of humaneness of Socrates, who warned the statesmen against the danger of being dazzled by his own power, excellence, and wisdom, and who tried to teach him what matters most — that we are all frail human beings. What a decline from ...Plato's kingdom of the sage whose magical powers raise him high above ordinary men; although not quite high enough to forgo the use of lies, or to neglect the sorry trade of every shaman — the selling of spells, of breeding spells, in exchange for power over his fellow-men.—Karl Popper, Chapter 8, "The Philosopher King."

So why all this high minded Plato and Popper? They point to a signal failure in Brooks' remedy. He grossly underestimates the challenge of preparing and selecting the right sort of person in a position of leadership. Of the dozen of engineering leaders I met and worked for in NASA, I can count on one hand, with a couple fingers left over, those who had the wisdom and maturity for the positions they held. But that will always be the case when the politics of "selling spells" governs the allocation of authority.

So what then might we hope for in chiefs equipped with the magical powers of enlightened leadership and worthy of the surgeon's scrub? Here's my short list:

• They are versed in history and philosophy. They've internalized the biographies of famous leaders. (OK, this is a strong personal bias.)
• They trust their team.
• They operate from a deeply understood set of first principles. They do not have to look in the book to decide what they think.
• They have an intuition about the implication of a decision without requiring a detailed understanding.
• They are not constrained by convention
• They selectively muck around in the details. i.e. they are highly selective, preferring to a small set of key concepts to the scrutiny of minutiae.
• They inspire the best talent.
• They create an atmosphere of the possible, not the impossible.

It's a tall order, but people of this caliber exist. I've met them. They worked for DOD-related projects. But the DOD culture has an element of candor—lives depend on it. On the other hand NASA is an underfunded bureaucracy with a 'failure is not an option' ethos. Risk takers and free thinkers are dangerous to a fragile status quo and they don't thrive in NASA. Over the years I saw the most talented engineers pushed to the sidelines while the competent-but-unimaginative and politically-focused soared to positions of technical leadership. Plato's suggestion that "commoner natures...stand aside" is long lost to history.

I prefer to think of it this way... It's NASA! Isn't NASA the very emblem of of what's good and forward thinking of the US? Is it out of line to have aspirations for the US space agency that run contrary to those of a conventional bureaucracy?

While there is no utopias, there are times, accidents really, when talented and right minded people are elevated to positions of authority. Perhaps we should take a page from Plato and contemplate how would we train leaders of this stature. DoD trains soldiers to be leaders. NASA trains engineers to be bureaucrats. Universities train business management skills don't bother with technical leadership. Perhaps it time.

Before heading off to the next chapter (after a lengthy interlude traipsing in the Sierras), I've got a final knock on Brooks' assertion that the Surgical team enables scaling: it doesn't. It merely pushes the scaling problem up a level. For if you have 20 tasks, each lead by a Surgeon, these Surgeons will ultimately have to coordinate and the communication paths will, according to Brooks' Law, proliferate.

The way I see it, you won't succeed on a large project by attempting to reduce the number of communication paths. They come and go as the nature of the work demands. A system that limits communication is worse than no system at all. A different concept is needed.

For my nickel, the solution lies in an architectural approach (or style as Garlan⁶ puts it) that provides a common language that facilitates genuine communication and provides a set of constraints that gives each member of the team the direction they need without constant, direct consultation. It's a high order, but not without precedent.⁷

Perhaps the real challenge is to find a means of raising standards in an organization that prizes the status quo.

---

^1. Lectio Divina provides four links for the entire text of the Republic: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
^2. For over a century, the Loeb Library has provided English translations of the original text for amateur readers. Plato, The Republic. Loeb Classical Library, Books 1-5 (#237) and Books 6-10 (#276). 1935.
^3. The word anarchy meaning 'no ruler' is derived from archon.
^4. In dire time, like the Hannibal lurking on the outskirts of Rome, the Senate appointed a Dictator to a 1 year term. In peace time, Rome was ruled by two Consuls in a power sharing arrangement that required consensus. This power sharing arrangement lead to the one of Rome's worst military disasters at the battle of Cannae where Hannibal crushed a vastly superior Roman army.
^5. Critias, a key leader of the 30, had once been a student of Socrates.
^6. See An Introduction to Software Architecture
^7. I worked once on a architecture and software framework that established a viable multi-discipline taxonomy and architecture. See Mission Data System.