Sunday 9 November 2014

Fault Tree Analysis is the Teleology that Ontology Needs; Dr. Kent Stephens' Classic Paper

Gosh!  Here's one of the great papers of the 20th century that very few people have even heard of.  I'm serious.  I think this paper ranks higher than Akerloff's information asymmetry paper on a market for "lemons", and just a tad below Claude Shannon's masters thesis on information theory.

http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED095588.pdf

This is Kent G. Stephens paper on "Fault Tree Analysis."

Once I gave a 2 day seminar in London to a delegation of Russian academics from Moscow State University who were in the department of engineering and organisations.  The first day was a total disaster because they said they wanted something "on practical project management".  So, that evening I produced some slides about "and-logic" and "or-logic" and combined it with a flow diagram on "critical project analysis and implementation."  I said, "This work comes largely from Dr. Kent Stephens."  And before I could finish my sentence, the Head of the Department, a very sharp tongued professor, said, "Yes, we know all his work in our department, and we can see that you put much effort OVERNIGHT to bring to us today your original thoughts.  Thank you."  And I was dismissed!  The point of this story is that this was the only time in over 20 years of using Dr Kent G. Stephens ideas that anyone had ever said they knew him and his ideas.

The reason I think this paper is one of the most important papers in the 20th century is because it is the first and only paper I know of that successfully combines cultural value analysis to figuring out how organisations FAIL!  Back in the day, Dr. Stephens had assistants with questionnaires ask individuals in an organisation particular sorts of "valued questions" to determine what we now call the "critical path" within an organisation. He'd figure out the critical path of communications and were most of the errors occurred that jammed up the organisation.  if Aristotle were alive, he'd be very proud of Dr. Stephens' work because it's been used to fix a lot of otherwise "failing institutions".  And unlike the BS consulting you see 99.99% of the time, the good doctor and his team would come up with fantastically elegant solutions.  E.g., he took a failing elementary-to-high school that was in the bottom 5 of California to the top 10 in one year!

His paper is important to keep in mind if one embarking on building an "ontology of an organisation".  Too many times, I see ontologies being built without a fundamental understanding of the TELEOLOGY of the human actors.  A complete ontology needs to understand teleology deeply, and I think Dr. Stephens helps us a long way in this regard.      

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