Smart Brains and Stupid Computers
In building business simulations, we are often called upon to create systems that mimic what humans do manually. Call them business rules, work processes, whatever you like – these are the minute-by-minute decisions and analyses that people perform, often without even thinking very hard about the complexity of their own solutions.

We have recently been working in two projects where the essence of our software simulation is the duplication of a basket of these human cognitive tasks. Our clients were surprised by our seemingly slow and clunky process for creating software code, just to crudely mirror its human counterpart. “Why does it take so long for you guys to write code to do X?” was our client’s frustrated plea.

“Making software that competes with human intellect is hard”, was our less-than-profound response. But its true – the human brain processes an amazing amount of information very fast, and also in parallel. If I showed you, for example, a box of red colored balls with one yellow, the human can spot the yellow in an instant. If I build some code to do the same thing, I effectively have to write a loop that makes sure that it examines each and every ball exactly once, up to the total number of balls. I have to create a logic statement to determine the difference between yellow and red and apply it inside the loop. I have to command it to stop when it finds a yellow…you get the picture.

Of course, once the software is in place, it runs very fast, possibly as fast as or faster than a human. Computers are “brawny” – they execute brute force, single-minded logic very fast once programmed to do so. It is the creation of the logic that is a slow and arduous process that even a child perceives to be primitive.

Sometimes the work that we do is viewed as “magic” by our clients. Our ability to quickly turn a business process into a working simulation using a sophisticated 3D visualization simply amazes people (even me, at times). However, simulation is really hard work, and not for the reasons most people think – most people assume the work is in the technical integration. The “mechanics” of putting software componentry together are actually fairly straightforward. No, the hard work is in compressing the thousands of simple rules that humans readily apply into a finite number of lines of code in software. And these days it seems that fewer and fewer people “write things down” anywhere, making our job even more difficult.

I hear you saying - so what? So computers are dumb? This isn’t exactly a groundbreaking finding, so what is the big deal for me and my job at at ACME Corp.?

The big deal is this: a corporation survives or dies on its ability to make decisions based upon data. Fundamentally, that’s strategy, my friend. And the difference between good strategy and very good strategy is as high as its ever been. There is nothing more important to competitive advantage.

Therefore if decision making is a function of collective institutional knowledge, it serves you well to preserve that knowledge to as high a degree as possible. If that knowledge is hoarded inside of human brains, you’ve got a big problem, because brains are fallible, inconsistent, and portable.

Here’s what to do about it:

1. Encourage people to think deeply about the top 5 key decisions they make every day and commit to writing down (in a picture is best) the structure of that decision and all of the influencing factors.

2. Create an environment where people role-play and game-play with analogs that are appropriate to your industry (if you are in the real estate industry, encourage the game-play of monopoly and then debrief afterward).

3. If you’ve never used business simulation, try it out on one particular business process. Be observant as to how human subject matter experts (SMEs) express how they do what they do.

Now I have to get back to work…it’s a human thing.

George Danner
- posted by Industrial Science @ 3:21 PM