Malleability, and Tibetan-Buddhist engineering

I wandered further in my reading and connected another fragment to this idea.

In my travels, I got to thinking about malleability. Much of the world which we perceive as fixed is actually highly malleable, in the right circumstances, with the right heavy machinery or scalpel and bone saw, and with a little bit of know-how. Unless you are in a profession which directly causes a particular kind of change, you are unlikely to notice it and you are likely to assume that whatever-it-is is fixed.

When I was a wet-behind-the-ears new graduate engineer, and spending a lot of energy dealing on being one of about 3 women on a worksite of several hundred men, I had the good fortune to be supervised and mentored by a guy called Craig. He was just the right combination of expert on everything rail-related, patient and attentive teacher, and curious friendly human being.
There was a track machine running during the commissioning, it looked a bit like this. It was huge and floodlit and it trundled back and forth on track. Craig knew the driver. (Craig knew everybody.) We got to climb up in the cabin and have a ride.


The "business" end of the tamper machine is in the middle. It reminded me a little of the maw of the Alien Queen, with all those toothy bits and hanging cables.

This is what the tamping machine does:

• Two claws pick up the track like spaghetti strands.
•  The four-clawed maw then pokes coarse gravel (known as ballast) down between the sleepers - which are still attached to the rail, they've been hoisted up too.
• By doing this the machine can raise the track by up to 30cm in a single pass. 
• It moves 1.5m down the track and repeats the process. 
• It can move the track left and right too, to straighten out kinks. 
• It has laser levels and all kinds of straight line sensors to do this.

There are three men in the control box, one driver, one tamper, one supervisor. I thought it would be an interesting job. Craig replied: "No, it sucks. It's bloody boring. And really noisy. These guys are good because they're all a bit obsessive. They just really like getting the track absolutely straight and level. You need a particular kind of mind to work the tamper."

It took a couple of hours for my perception of the railway to readjust. I mean, I did realise that we were constructing a new rail junction. I could cope with a new building project. But once it was built, it had not occurred to me that a railway line was still malleable. That you could get a machine and hoik the whole thing two feet to the left and up a bit in a couple of passes. Craig then told me that heat expansion is a real problem, and that to prepare for summer, the civil team stretches out the rail and then cuts out a couple of metres every km, welding the ends back together. At the start of winter, they weld the cut sections back in again. So if you're ever looking out a train window in summer and you see a couple of metres of rail sitting out trackside, it's not thrown away or forgotten, it will get welded back in later. These days, I think of a railway as malleable, flexible, stretchy string-lines rather than fixed immutable permanent infrastructure.

People with limited experience of earthworks or building projects vaguely assume that the terrain is fixed, and that building structures are solid and immovable. When they see large-scale earthworks or even some renovating acquaintance knocking out an internal wall, it jars for a while until they readjust to the new landscape, and then it's 'how it always was'. The driver of the giant excavator has a surveyor to tell him where and how to dig, and measurement equipment to tell him when to stop. With the right tools, any quantity of earth can be dug, it's only a matter of planning it, persisting, and having the right mind to prevent the task being boring.

A friend's father had a hip replacement last year. He described the procedure and it sounded really quite creepy and a bit extreme. Bone saws and a modified eggbeater for the socket, and he was aware of the procedure because he had it done under spinal anaesthetic and heavy sedation. When I see him these days, my brain forgets very quickly that he ever had the surgery, that the socket and ball are now ceramic and are all set to give some archaeologist a hell of a shock in a thousand years time. But for the orthopedic surgeon, a bone hip joint is not fixed, it is quite malleable. I looked up "hip replacement surgery" on Youtube (despite my rant on Expertosis) and just like the tamping machine and the guy driving the big excavator, the surgeon has equipment which provides levels and reference points and straight lines to follow. I wondered if other medical specialists look sidelong at orthopedic surgeons and mutter "Bloody boring work. Twelve hips a day, it's like being a car mechanic. But clearly he's got the right mind for it."


So on to this matter of perception of malleability.

Kahneman (in Thinking Fast & Slow, still one of my favourite books) and Tversky identified the mental shortcut (heuristic) of "What You See Is All There Is". By default, our minds exclude anything outside the present, the recent past, and a future with very limited change from the present. This influences our decision making enormously - it's why it's so hard to stretch your paycheck for the end of the month, or buy only the groceries you need when you're shopping hungry. As to the world around us, individuals often have this silly idea of things being fixed, where there is so much more malleability in systems. And as a species, we are getting very good at coordinating to change just about anything, by developing specialists to deal with small areas of malleability and wrapping their brains around it, developing tools, following straight lines and laser levels, and turning the utterly revolutionary mind-blowing power of massive change into a relatively boring, routine job.

Another established mental heuristic is the distinction between "being" and "doing". What parts of what you do are intrinsic to your being, and what are just transitory behaviours? In general, we assume a lot more is fixed, where in reality our choices are so context-driven, we are fabulously malleable, and in particular self-malleable just by changing the context.
I have spent most of the last year experimenting on this at my work. The prevailing negative language in the office, especially when managers talk about people, was the "being", fixed, intrinsic language. "He's not smart enough for that problem." ... "The project leadership team is crap." ... "That department is incapable of meeting a deadline." ... "Whoever wrote this document is an idiot." ... etc. There was a perception that the culture was fixed, and a very strong "What You See Is All There Is" habit of persisting with technical and cultural approaches that had never ever worked.

I had come across the idea in my reading (which I would reference here if I could remember where) that fixed-language descriptors inhibit an individual's capacity to change.
I figured my team would be happier if they were not crap/incapable/idiot etc. I had to find a way to frame it as malleable.
So a year ago, I set about shielding them from the worst of this language, and constantly trying to reframe the "being" into "doing" ("... yeah, we did do a bit of a rubbish job on that site, didn't we... well we need to work out what to do about it now."). I maneuvered into a spot where my job was to focus persistently and deliberately on what we do, rather than what we are. In due course, I 'became the expert' on project process and continuous improvement. (I'm a bit stuck with intrinsic language there!)
And the language was malleable. While we are still struggling with deadlines and rework from projects where the contract finished years before, the big projects from the last year have unfolded so smoothly our head of engineering cannot believe the change. We have gone from 50 commissioning logs being a good result, to 5 logs being a substandard result. We have had to rework all our bidding metrics because the labour costs have shrunk - and shifted to earlier design phases. Staff turnover has reduced, staff mood has improved enormously.
The change has been noticed around the company. Maybe I am enjoying being a little bit smug.

I found a book about the Tibetan buddhist practice of Mahamudra, which requires rather a lot of reflection on the impermenance of your self and of the world, meditating on time and death and :

"In Buddhist logic it is said that all concepts are based on exclusion. As soon as we affirm something by saying, 'It is this', we automatically exclude so many other possible identifications, or things that might have been. By imposing a conceptual limitation, we create or fabricate an idea..."

"Wisdom will only arise if we realise that the things we take to be real and substantial are not real and substantial at all. All of our negative views and habits come from failing to understand how things really are and concentrating instead on how they appear... This fiction gives rise to the belief in our psychophysical constituents as a 'self' and to the misapprehension of objects... as real and substantial... If we want to put an end to the dissatisfaction of samsara [the suffering of being alive and unenlightened], we have to put an end to our delusions..." 

I like the thought of doing Tibetan-Buddhist engineering; teaching others about the misapprehension of self, and releasing them from suffering by helping them embrace the impermanent and malleable nature of the project environment and the corporate culture. I don't think the negative-language managers or some of my more literal, technically focused colleagues would take this kind of talk particularly well. If I run the experiment, I will post on it.....


There might be another post brewing about malleability - it is a potentially powerful idea which I need to roll around a bit more in my head- but it is not tonight. I need to be kind to my precious human body, and take it off to sleep.