<
https://timharford.com/2023/02/what-lego-can-teach-us-about-saving-the-planet/>
"Can Lego save the world? That’s one idea that stuck with me reading
How Big
Things Get Done, a new book by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. Flyvbjerg is
perhaps the world’s leading authority on the failure of megaprojects — or how
big things get done, but woefully late and at woeful cost — and so he makes an
unlikely optimist.
Over the decades, Flyvbjerg, a management professor at Oxford university, has
assembled a database of large projects from high-speed rail lines to hosting
the Olympics. His findings are so dismal that he has proposed the “Iron Law of
Megaprojects”: they are over time and over budget, over and over again. Even
worse, there is a long tail to these disappointments. A significant minority of
megaprojects are not just late and expensive, but catastrophically so.
Despite this gloomy evidence, he and Gardner make the case that we could work
wonders if instead we used a principle most familiar from Lego sets. That
principle is modularity: a complex Lego model is assembled from a limited range
of bricks, each of which is precision-manufactured and interchangeable with
other bricks.
Modularity has a number of advantages. The first is that the individual
components can be manufactured at scale, which rapidly reduces costs. In the
1930s, an American aeronautical engineer named TP Wright made a careful study
of aeroplane factories. He concluded that the more often a particular model of
aeroplane was assembled, the quicker and cheaper the next plane became. The
workers learnt the best ways of working, and special tools would be developed
to assist with particular tasks. Wright found that the second plane would
typically be 15 per cent cheaper than the first. The fourth would be 15 per
cent cheaper than the second, and the eighth plane 15 per cent cheaper again.
Every time accumulated production doubled, unit costs would fall by 15 per
cent. Wright called this phenomenon “the learning curve”.
Later researchers have found learning curves in more than 50 products from
transistors to beer. Sometimes the learning curve is shallow and sometimes it
is steep, but it always seems to be there. And because modular projects
repeatedly use the same plans and structures, they harness the efficiency of
the learning curve.
There are other advantages to modular projects. They are more likely to be able
to use factory-made components, and when you make complex things in factories,
you are less at the whim of the unexpected than when you make them on a
building site — especially if that building site is deep underground or
offshore."
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-maternal-mortality-high-seas-atlantic-forest/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
