Geomechanical Musings

Our friend Julio, back in 1998 or so, stated our business objective so concisely that we’ve adopted it as the unofficial motto of Atlas Geotechnical:

“Just don’t suck”

It seems like many of our peers, learned engineers of great experience, often don’t seem to understand the whole “efficiency and reliability” point of foundation engineering, sometimes so severely that their product could be fairly described as “sucking.” Clearly, confirmation bias causes us to notice the failures while the triumphs pass by unobserved. It seemed to us at the time, and has been bourne out over the past decade, that all we needed to do to assure success was just to not suck. And so an inside joke was born: “just don’t suck.”

A fascinating examination of that strategy appears in David Kadavy’s blog this week: http://www.kadavy.net/blog/posts/permission-to-suck/

I’d encourage you all to read it though and consider the implications to critical infrastructure design.

Clearly, it’s not acceptable to suck at designing hospital foundations or tunnel linings. On the other hand, professional growth is imperative so that our generation is prepared assume the mantle of industry leadership being passed on as an older generation, the Alyeska Pipeline and Nuclear Power Plant generation, retires from active consulting. I think the message here, a very valuable message, is that it’s acceptable, and even necessary, to suck at new work provided you secure senior review capable of correcting your shortcoming and literally turning your first-attempt sows ear into the silk purse that your customers are entitled to expect.

So give yourself permission to suck as a necessary aspect of professional growth. And then acknowledge that your initial attempts at anything new are likely to suck, back yourself up with senior review, and make sure that your finished product doesn’t suck no matter how feeble your own initial efforts may have been.

Our friends at Orion Marine Group won a fun little project improving the old Weyerhaeuser waterfront facility for the Port of Everett. The project includes rebuilding the tops of the two existing dolphins and adding a third dolphin close to the wharf. The photo below (from the Port of Everett website) shows the site, with the two dolphins visible between the two ships that are berthed parallel to shore.

Atlas’ role is pretty minor, just running wave equation analyses, but there’s some really great aspects to the work that I find really satisfying:

The existing dolphins had excellent pile monitoring back in 1994 (by Gary Henderson’s crew at GeoEngineers Tacoma) and so we know a lot about how the new piles are going to drive. I was able to calibrate the new WEAP model to the old driving records before switching hammers and pile types for the predictive runs.
It’s always a treat to work in new terrain. I have a rudimentary understanding of marine stratigraphy in Puget Sound, but I would not have guessed that the soils are as deep and as soft as I see on the logs. So I leave the project just a little bit smarter than I started it.
The guys at Orion are always coming up with innovative ideas, and Atlas does our best work for innovative contractors. They have an idea for avoiding a tide-related schedule impact that I’m not sure any other contractor would have suggested, and it’s requiring a very innovative analysis to confirm that it’s feasible. There’s real money on the line too, which makes the work more engaging.

We’ll wrap up our computations over this weekend and then, if all goes as expected, propose a change to the dolphin modification drawings that could be really beneficial to the Owner and Contractor both. Smart and diligent contractors should always be successful, and it’s a real pleasure to be a part of Orion Marine’s continuing growth.

From many of our project sites it’s not obvious which direction offers the better view. Often the non-technical view offers crystal-blue water and fluffy tropical clouds in the distance. Yesterday’s visit to the Port of Oakland Berth 55/56 was the same. Here’s the view that we were there to see:

Here’s the view looking exactly the opposite direction:

So despite my disinclination toward compromise, this seems like the best summary of an excellent day on the waterfront is a compromise photo:

Preface: This is a long post. And it lacks pretty pictures of tropical construction sites. Writing thoughts out long-form helps me examine and refine, which is one of our core values and a pillar of our success so far. I would be very interested in your comments.

The Law of Large Numbers has been the water cooler topic here at Atlas World Headquarters for the past couple of weeks, motivated by a couple of events:

NASA designed, built, launched, and landed the unmanned rover Curiosity on Mars, and
Chicago Bridge & Iron bought Shaw, and 27,000 engineering company employees got a new logo on their business cards.

The Law of Large Numbers (LLN) states that the probability of success in a series of Bernoulli trials will almost surely converge to the expected value. Any process that requires a large number of events is subject to the LLN and attendant probabilistic effects. Tossing a fair coin is the classic Bernoulli trial, a random event thats yields equal numbers of heads and tails when performed a large number of times. Turning left or right on a random walk is similar, and also a great way to get lost. Large numbers of engineering decisions are exposed to the LLN despite efforts to avoid making important decisions with a coin toss, and large groups of engineers are going to have, on average, just as many underperformers as there are stars.

Whether it’s a spacecraft, dam, refinery, or interstate highway system, the only way to avoid the averaging effect of the LLN is to make each design decision unlike a coin toss. Engineering success is earned by trained individuals striving to understand and control the design outcome. Each engineer’s skill, and his or her diligence in implementing effective quality control, affects the chance of failure. Large project teams are made up of numerous individual engineers whose competence, on average, converges on “average”. The problem in complex projects is the dependencies between design decisions and the disproportionate failure risk introduced by even a single below-average decision. Consider how few bad decisions or incompetent engineers were necessary to create circumstances that led to these failures:

Lockheed Martin’s decision to compute booster thrust in customary rather than standard units ruined NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999. The program cost $125 million, consumed thousands of engineering hours, and required innumerable individual decisions. It all went irredeemably bad because one of those decisions was regrettably poor.
The 1905 attempt to divert most of the Colorado River into the Imperial Valley in was abysmally ill-conceived, almost ruined a large part of southern California, re-filled the Salton Sea, and was finally remediated by building the Hoover Dam.
The management decision to allow local control over New Orleans levees led to a piecemeal flood protection system whose weak links failed when exposed to a significant, but not unexpected, Hurricane Katrina and rendered the entire system unserviceable.

Think of a failure or near-miss in your engineering career, and think of the bad decision, technical or managerial, that allowed random variables like weather such influence over how your finished design performed. Then think about how that decision could have been made differently if you, at the time, had more experience, more knowledge, or more direct control over the project. The Law of Large Numbers describes how these types of influence are harder to exert when projects are larger, more complex, and designed by a larger group.

Exceptional engineers identify and exterminate design and construction risks, sometimes overriding project schedules and seemingly insurmountable business constraints to avoid identified risks. Given a large enough group of engineers, though, the LLN states that the group’s competence converges on “average” despite diligent efforts from the competent engineers. The 27,000 Shaw employees now working on large energy projects for CB&I have, among their numbers, at least a few individuals whose engineering decisions behave more like Bernoulli trials than calculated intents. It is impossible that in such a large and diverse group each specialty would be of world-class ability. All else being equal, using the employee group that your board of directors just bought instead of collaborating with the best independent specialist engineers that you know of leaves your project exposed to increased risk of a bad decision. As NASA just demonstrated, it’s possible for a very large team to succeed at a very complex design, but the question remains: how many times in a row can they enjoy that outcome? And are there better organizational structures that would improve reliability and efficiency?

The point of all this, then: Does the Atlas business model, with its emphasis on flexible teams of highly qualified specialists, protect our designs from the unforgiving Law of Large Numbers? Or do we expose ourselves to organizational and communication risk when we assemble a specialty team for a challenging project in a remote location?

Atlas’ in-house staff is small enough to be a known, non-random, factor. We’ve got strengths and weaknesses, like all engineers, but it’s been awhile since we were surprised by an unexpected weakness. Our in-house engineering process is as unlike a Bernoulli trial as it’s possible to be. For larger projects that exceed our in-house capacity, Atlas teams with specialist groups who share a similar commitment to eradicating chance from design. For each project we build a reliable organization block by block and then implement the systems and controls that we all agree are necessary for good engineering. Sometimes a provisional team members turns out to be of average or lesser competence. Those parts of the organization are easy to spot, because interactions with them are so different, and easy to correct because of our inherently independent nature. We take immediate action to replace the weak link and restore our immunity to the averaging effect of the Law of Large Numbers.

I believe that the “collaborating specialists” business model is the future of infrastructure engineering. Exceptional engineers will move up and on to our team, leaving behind the engineers unable or uninterested in working at the highest level or rigor, and further reducing the average competence of large semi-anonymous groups who, alarmingly, are increasingly responsible for safety and reliability of critical infrastructure. I’m very interested to see how this trend develops over the next decade or so, and am looking forward to further expanding Atlas as more and more exceptional engineers recognize the advantages of collaborative teams.

I had an excellent day yesterday in Oakland catching up with old friends and attending the SFGI dinner meeting. The highlight, though, was a visit to Tinkering Monkey to have the cool new Atlas GT logo etched onto my long-suffering briefcase. You guys who need promotional swag should definitely know about Mike and Paula, who do excellent work for reasonable, and fast too. Thanks to Eric at Cosmic for making the introduction.