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August 26, 1998
Domino Physics and Y2K
By David Eddy
If my seven-year-old son can grasp the delicate nature and inherent frailties of complex systems, why is it so difficult for adults to see the light regarding possible Y2K risks?
For my son's last birthday we hired a "domino physicist," who actually teaches this esoteric pursuit at the Boston Museum of Science, and rented the school gym. You guessed it; my kid is into cause and effect in a big way.
There's something about the huge expanse of a school gym; 2,000 hardwood dominos; several crates of seemingly unrelated props--long boards, tin cans, soda bottles, toy cars, balls, paper tubes, musical chimes, balls, and a green frog who says "bribet" whenever something moves in front of him, and 12 charged-up first graders who are more interested in beginning than in listening to instructions to give me a whole new view of systems' complexity.
Laugh if you must, this physicist is very good at what he does. He is an inventive teacher, and, more significantly, he understands the predispositions of his work force.
He begins by giving the kids a variety of small-scale paper templates to chose from and sets them to work in widely separated areas of the gym. The physicist then tutors them individually on the immutable laws of building with dominoes:
•ANYTHING and EVERYTHING will trigger a chain reaction (including that untied shoelace).
•To minimize the damage of unwonted chain reactions and large scale collapses, especially in the more complex domino runs, build in frequent "firebreaks" to contain damage. (Know that mistakes are a part of all systems. It's best if you plan for them.)
•To join one worker's domino chain with that of another, both chains must be designed to FALL IN THE SAME DIRECTION. (Although this point was constantly reiterated, the kids could only understand it ONCE THEY HAD MADE THE MISTAKE--does this remind anyone of the nature of Y2K?
•Estimate the number of "restarts" the final domino rally will require. (You will get to see how well wildly different building practices fit together--or don't--in real life.)
•The big challenge is to have all the parts of the final domino rally be WHAT YOU EXPECT, WHEN YOU EXPECT THEM. (This is a rarity.)
As the kids got the hang of their materials, the complexity of their design blossomed. Individual builders were replaced by teams, and the mother of all domino rallies was underway.
As I watched this chaotic adventure unfold in front of me during the next two hours, I couldn't help but think that using large-scale domino layouts would be a superb mechanism to communicate systems complexity to top management.
The kids clearly didn't have expectations of everything working perfectly, and they were just as interested in the failures as the successes for their value "next time."
I just wish the potential problems of cascading Y2K snafus were as risk free and harmless as dominos scattered around the gym floor...