In 2024 I went diving in Burrows Pass in the Puget Sound with my brother and another friend. The location has a stunning wall and a lot of life, and we were excited and eager to dive it. Burrows Pass is a fairly narrow channel and experiences high currents at tide changes. Diving these types of channels safely not only requires a good technical knowledge of currents and tides, but thorough planning and execution born out of experience conducting these kinds of dives. All three of us are certified and fairly experienced divers, two of us with the bulk of our dives in cold water, and all of us having dove in high current areas. But there were some blind spots. None of us have dove this spot before, none of us had planned a dive in an area as sensitive to currents as this, and one of us (my brother) had never dove cold water before. My friend and I looked at the tide and current predictions, read up on other divers reports and recommendations, and planned a dive with fairly tight timetables. Almost immediately the dive started to go wrong.
Dive location. The goal was to get to the wall to the left near Fidalgo Head following the route in red, starting at the beach off Cabana Park.
My brother, who is a capable diver, had not dove in a cold-water environment before and the different buoyancy profile from 7-14 mm thick wetsuit and increased lead weights resulted in him struggling to maintain neutral buoyancy and control underwater. This delayed us pretty severely on our timetable. We lingered around the beginning portion of the dive trying to get a good look at a giant pacific octopus (under Washington park overview in the image above), while he adjusted and got used to the new buoyancy profile, my friend and I changed plans and decided that we would cut down time at the wall to compensate and keep us within our timetable. After we felt comfortable to continue on, something changed. We noticed we were beginning to move very quickly. Realizing that the current was picking up before we anticipated, we dropped to the rocks below, braced and began to head back to shore. The high current killed any visibility making movement akin to driving through a blizzard. Realizing how easy it would be to get separated, and my friend having already lost visual contact with me and my brother, we surfaced. What followed was an hour-long slog to fight the current 100 feet to the shore where we started. We made it back exhausted and apprehensive that we had just narrowly dodged getting swept out into the open sound.
The ones who planned the dive, me and my friend, had a surface level understanding of the currents and tides in the Puget Sound, but not a practical or technical knowledge of how they behave in environments like Burrows Pass. We could have consulted our dive plan with people we know who had either the expertise and/or experience with the site on our plan, but we didn't. We could have planned a dive at a spot known to us for my brother to get used to the new buoyancy profile before diving the pass, but we didn't. In short, we assumed our experience in one thing was good enough and thought we could impose that experience on a new environment without the intellectual humility to accept we would have to learn and change to accomplish the goal of diving that wall safely. We were fortunate that one mistake saved us from the worst consequences of the other, as without the delay we would have been significantly farther out when the current picked up, potentially in water too deep to brace at the bottom and too far out to swim against the current that would only build in strength. We were lucky, plain and simple.
This personal experience of overcalculating my abilities and skills to complete a task I understood poorly is something I have been thinking about a lot lately. There seems to be an epidemic of assuming one's skillset is "good enough" and applicable to areas outside where it was developed. The federal government is rank with it, many private industries are, to their detriment, infested with it, and online spaces are so subsumed by it that it makes my head spin. This is not a new problem. This tendency of humans to apply what they know to what they don't know probably goes back to our earliest development as a species and is not inherently a bad thing. Sometimes it can be a necessary part of learning, but if you do not have the intellectual humility to recognize that your own deficiency has resulted in a bad outcome you cannot reform it, and you will only prolong and/or exacerbate it.
This systemic problem has recently come to a head in my professional life. I am a fluids analyst (well now they renamed everyone to propulsion engineer) working in rocket propulsion. The company I work for has had a long history of mismanagement and there has undoubtedly been a need to reorganize things here. We have long had issues of poor communication, slow and poor decision making, and a poor utilization of the manpower available. No one I know would agree that the way things were structured before were good. But now new leadership is trying to implement agile/scrum across all programs, and it has been paralyzing. As a disclaimer I am not anti-agile/scrum. I think the software industry evolved an organizational structure that has worked phenomenally well for a lot of companies. It is an emergent system from a low capital investment and astronomically high margin industry. But going back to the theme of the story I gave in the beginning, sometimes processes and mechanics are too dissimilar for practices to remain the same. And that is definitely the issue we are running into on the engine program I am assigned to. A rocket engine is an extremely complex coupled system. You change one thing; it affects everything else. It makes it a very tedious process to develop and change things. When the production, design, and analysis teams are all on different spirit schedules, all dependent on each other and all have reduced communication with each other, it leaves us all confused, less coherent and less likely to change course. Everything about rocket engines is at odds with software. Software is generally cheap to test; a rocket engine is horribly expensive to test. Software development (usually) requires a relatively smaller skillset from the people developing it, a rocket engine requires a wide diversity of disciplines ranging from production engineers to thermal analysts to systems analysts and much more. This isn't to denigrate software as "easy", that is a demonstrably false sentiment, it is just a fundamentally different process.
High level engine diagram of a Raptor 3 engine. While other engines
use different engine cycles, they generally share the complexity and are
all coupled systems. For example the fuel used in the preburner that
powers the pump that pressurizes the fuel needs to be heated by running it
through channels in the nozzle and combustion chamber walls. This also
keeps the engine from exploding.
Right now we are trying to define stories for 2-week sprints and the problems we are running into is that all our work runs at drastically different timescales. A fluids analysis can vary drastically in the time it takes to conduct it, which makes it difficult to work in the same time frames as other forms of analysis, it’s also difficult to break up an analysis into multiple stories as there is complex and coupled interplay into prepossessing, running, analyzing and documenting an analysis on fluid system. This problem is only exacerbated as different types of analysis are dependent on each other, or as test data is needed before continuing, or as when rubber hits the road in manufacturing, things change. This creates a highly dynamic coupled environment where everything is dependent on each other, and everything runs on different timescales. Now as some have pointed out, the principles of agile are not contrary to the environment I am describing, but the organization that is being imposed on us is. We are spending almost as much time trying to figure out how many story points a task is as we are doing it. Maybe I'm just a pessimistic hater, but in our attempts to be more efficient, we are instead creating a system to distill our progress into a single number devoid of context or meaning to the upper leadership it is meant for. There is a new organizational orthodoxy in town, and it cracked immediately under pressure.
This story is a common one. It happened at Boeing with its slow death spiral after its merger with McDonnell Douglas. Leadership from McDonnell Douglas implemented policies that forced them into a financial situation where Boeing could acquire them, spawning the saying that McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with Boeing's money [1]. This is the same story happening in the federal government. Everyone can agree that it needs reform and more effective organizations, but those tasked with implementing that are showing the same signs of imposing their idea of what something is rather than learning what it is. You can see it at DOGE, where decisions are made before information is looked at [2]. You can see it in our foreign policy as people with a juvenile or non-existent understanding of the countries they are dealing with and their past history with the United States fumbles and bumble trade agreements to peace deals [3]. You can see it in HHS as a brain damaged RFK jr. enacts into policy whatever schizophrenic conspiracy theory bounces off the void in his brain [4]. There is an entirely new slate of people, some successful and capable in their own fields previously, imposing their own particular orthodoxy onto the federal government.
In the DoD it seems anything not fitting what Hegseth's view of a "warfighter" is considered counterproductive, regardless of what its function actually is. A great example of this is the recent slashing of the staff colleges and the office of net assessment [5]. The staff officer college system has been one of the great success stories of the American alliance network. It facilitates cross training between allied militaries and helps integration and understanding of the nation’s we have fought with in the past and may fight with in the future. It expands the officer core’s skill sets so that they have a more nuanced understanding of the world they will deal with. While its reduction in scope and scale is expected from their ideological outlook, the loss of the office of net assessment was shocking. Their objective was to study and analyze current weapon systems, foreign and domestic, to predict and plan the development of current and future weapons systems. Things like how to develop and use the emerging drone and information warfare systems, like what we have seen in the Ukraine war, were its mission. It is baffling that an administration whose goal is to implement more drone technology would dismantle an organization in line with its goals. It leads me to believe that Hegseth had no idea what it was when he axed the organization. His approach is eerily reminiscent of many in leadership of the militaries going into the first world war, of imposing a romantic past on a fundamentally different present that they did not understand. And millions paid the price for it.
A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation of the combustion chamber of a rotating detonation engine conducted by Converge CFD Software
Now does this mean that outsiders coming into new fields is bad? Of course not. There is as long a list of outsiders being a net positive to a field as a detriment. In a recent conversation I had with a coworker he communicated that one of the best program managers he has ever had was someone with no experience with the program he was managing. He was an Airforce major with some background in electrical engineering, but no experience with rotating detonation engines. But he knew what he knew and more importantly, what he didn't. He learned and adapted his management to the new environment. Now he did not become a subject matter expert in rotating detonation engines, it would be unreasonable to expect that but learning to trust the subject matter experts he managed and the engineers learning to trust him were imperative to his ability to manage them. That trust allowed him to learn and adapt himself so that he could manage and direct the engineers under his management and keep the program on track. Outsiders and new ideas are not bad; it's the delusion of "pre-understanding" and imposition of orthodoxy that is so damaging. An orthodoxy of process constrains novelty and ingenuity in solving problems and carrying out tasks.
There are ominous clouds on the horizon of the United States and the rest of the world. There is a growing need for people who are willing to modify their own practices to the new environments and are not constrained by the orthodoxy of “but it worked before here”. That is the danger of orthodoxy of all types, orthodoxy is brittle, it is unable to bend to shift to increased pressure. The embrittling of seemingly everything in our government and corporate sectors is a real trend and as global and domestic pressure mounts, expect things to crack.
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