Rational Project Management
There’s a lot of discussion on the site about akrasia (failure of willpower), but most of it focuses on the individual. Obviously, though, organizations also can be said to suffer from akrasia. Even when there is clear agreement among the leaders or members of a business, charity, political party, etc. about what the organization should try to accomplish, it’s often the case that the daily tasks performed by the people who work there bear only the loosest of resemblance to the tasks that would be picked by an ideal decision-maker.
There are lots of different issues here—what should be done, when it should be done, who should do it, how much of a budget in money, office space, website space, etc. a project should receive, when and how to evaluate the success of a project...
I’ve come across several good books on how to cope with office politics, how to build a financially successful company, and how to motivate people to perform at a high level, but none on how to manage an organization so that it can fulfill its mission most efficiently.
Does anyone know of a standard (or cutting-edge) text (or program!) in this area? Books, articles, videos, and other media are all welcome, even if they’re behind a paywall. Sometime in the next 20 years, I hope to revolutionize the efficiency of America’s legal system by developing project management software, automatic litigation tools, machine-readable law libraries, consulting, and/or teaching. Basically I think there is no good reason why the current system, which involves otherwise smart people solving the same problems over and over again for different clients for decades on end, should not give way to an entrepreneurial system where problems get solved once or twice and then the solutions get propagated across the society. Since this is an impossible problem, I will have plenty of wheels to invent, and see no need to reinvent any wheels that already exist. So...know any wheels? Even if it seems obvious to you, I might have missed it.
Thank you oodles & kaboodles in advance,
Mass_Driver
Of all of the fields to revolutionize first, you want to start with law? It strikes me as a very difficult place to start for a large number of reasons. (I am not quite yet a lawyer.)
If you are compelled, though, you might figure out how to add your talents to existing efforts—there are several existing projects that are attempting to make all public statute and case law available online and machine-searchable (outside of proprietary databases, and yes the proprietary databases are a huge part of the problem with this effort). If you’re feeling really ambitious, you could even go for good annotation.
(I consider it absurd and immoral that “ignorance of the law is no excuse” and yet laws are mostly inaccessible to most of the population. I’m unusually intelligent and have training in law and in research, and I still frequently have problems finding the information that will answer my questions, in part because it’s usually not financially worth it to pay for the hugely expensive databases just to satisfy my desire to know.)
Most legal problems do get solved once or twice in court and then the solutions propagate—but you don’t see the cases that don’t make it to court. (Some of the cases that appear over and over are the ones where the standard is “what would a reasonable person do?” or where the trial is mainly to arrive at the facts.) Litigation is really expensive and people will try pretty hard to avoid it. On the other hand, if the settled law is not in your favor, it might be worth it to you to try to convince the judge that your particular situation is different enough that it’s worth making the distinction.
(My own desire to improve the system is directed toward opening up legal materials, and in reforming laws that I think repeatedly produce absurd, unjust, or inefficient results. Note that I speak as someone who’s read reams and reams of books and journal articles but has little practical experience—my practical experience is mainly in convincing angry people that litigating over the issue they are upset about is not going to be in anyone’s interest, and also in writing very precise text that people won’t have to sue over; I’m waiting to get smacked down and told I’m talking out of my ass by a real lawyer. Also, I really like arranging for people not to sue; maybe I’m in the wrong business.)
Yes, law interests me, and I am passionate about law, and I seem to be relatively good at understanding it, and I have a license to practice law, so that seems like a good place to start. Obviously there are easier fields to rationalize in the abstract, but they are not necessarily easier for me.
I only know of findlaw, and would be interested to hear about others. Basically, though, I’m not content to make law machine searchable: I want law to be machine readable. I want a computer to be able to not only pull up law that seems to relate to a search query, but also to be able to arbitrarily calculate and manipulate the elements of laws.
I don’t know what you mean. Can you please explain?
I do as well. What is terrifying is that even when people have access to what appear to be the relevant texts, these texts rarely produce a clear understanding of what one must and may do, for several reasons: the texts are written in a nonstandard dialect of English, the texts are written by judges and legislators who do not themselves have a clear idea of what they mean, and the texts are written by people who wish to conceal part or all of their agenda. The rule of law is a noble ideal, but we are very, very far from having a system that roughly approaches it.
I’m not sure I agree. People continue to litigate divorce, breach of construction contracts, slip-trip-and-fall accidents, trademark disputes, and other situations that occur hundreds of thousands of times each decade. There is only so much factual variation in these scenarios; you have kids or you don’t; you put up a “Caution: Slippery When Wet” sign or you didn’t, and so on. If we really propagated solutions, you would think that by now we would have a flowchart that explained what happens in these situations.
Note that the law can be ‘settled’ and yet the courts can still be churning with thousands of clones of the same case. My current work involves getting refunds for lemon cars. The law is pretty clear: if your car is a piece of crap, you should get a refund. Many dealers nevertheless decline to give refunds for obviously broken cars because they gamble that the odds of getting caught and getting fined are low enough to justify the cost savings of refusing to pay. In the process, they come up with a lot of lies and spin and litigation to make it look like they aren’t being rampant jerks. Thus, I have to waste everybody’s time by suing them over and over again, convincing the court each time that the lies are lies and the car really is a lemon. In this sense, the legal problem of lemon cars is “unsolved,” even though the ‘solution’ of an anti-lemon law was adopted by almost all 50 states over 25 years ago.
I would consider this particular problem “solved” if, upon noticing that she had a lemon car, a customer could download a program like TurboTax, enter some basic information, sign an affidavit, pay a filing fee, and then sit back and relax while the legal system got a refund for her at little or no cost to society.
I would consider this solution “propagated” if, upon noticing that, e.g., Sacramento County had such a system, the rest of the country also adopted it, so that all Americans could sit back and relax while the system got them refunds at little or no cost to society.
Well, look, that’s moderately useful and very kind. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Not necessarily. They say that only Nixon could go to China; a lawyer who advises not suing is taken very seriously. Part of why I’m a plaintiff’s lawyer is that a plaintiff’s lawyer who says that there’s too much work for plaintiff’s lawyers might get taken more seriously.
I like to do that do! It’s really fun. Let me know if you want to talk about it sometime.
Lemon cars seem to me like an example where there is some hope. The problem there is that it is a conflict between individuals who only do this once and dealers who have a good statistical sense of the system. If you can streamline the process for the owners, then they are better off; if you advertise well, you might increase volume and not lose billable hours; if enough people sue, it may change the dealers’ strategies.
Divorce seems hopeless. You can encourage your client to negotiate a settlement, but it takes two to settle. The spouse’s lawyer will do what divorce lawyers have always done and encourage a fight. Unlike the lemon car case, where you might increase litigation to make up for the lost work per case, the number of divorces is fixed and is not going to be increased by being easy to file.
Coming back to the lemons, much good has come in the past from standardizing contracts. I don’t know about suit templates, but it seems hopeful. But your stated goal is to defect on your cartel! Don’t say that in public. I discussed how to camouflage this in the lemon case. And when you talk about machine-readable law, you are attempting to replace not yourself, but judges.
Yeah, like what? Most of the standardization I see is designed to strip the consumer of her rights so far as the legislature will allow. I have a very narrow, non-random sample, though—what sort of already existing standardization do you think has produced good results?
If you think of society as a business, the entire legal profession is a cost center, not a profit center. Litigation per se, as opposed to the consequences of litigation, makes no one happier, wiser, or more fulfilled. The more judges, lawyers, paralegals, and legislators we can put out of business, holding the equity and efficiency of society constant, the more personnel we free up for art, science, parenting, and play.
The comments on a discussion page on a rationality blog are “public”? If anyone cares enough to find this comment, they will either (a) be at least vaguely sympathetic by dint of their interest in rationality, or (b) be concerned enough about my activities to invest the time and energy to deduce my true goals the old-fashioned way, i.e., by noticing that I’m a bad liar. But thank you for trying to save my from myself. It’s sweet.
Do you mean like the ones in Accelerando?
I’m not setting foot in a country that allows autonomous, replicating software bots to sue me.
Atul Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto seems to be relevant to your pursuit. As Eric Drexler wrote:
(Disclaimer: I haven’t read it yet—Amazon refuses to sell me the Kindle edition because “it’s not available in your country”.)
Thank you! I was on the fence on whether to read it, but I’ll go check it out.
The jump from project management to law was rather jarring. Why have you chosen the legal system as the focus of your attention? What do you think is its purpose? What would a more efficient system look like? I suspect that you have confused the inputs and outputs.
Well, I apologize for jarring you. I meant law merely as an example of one place where I think better project management would be useful. I wrote the article quickly and without much editing; that’s why it’s not a Top-Level Post.
See my answer to mindspillage, above, on why I chose law as my example and what a more efficient system might look like.
I think the purpose of law is to (a) help people develop settled expectations about the likely consequences of various kinds of unusually important human social interaction, and (b) optimize those expectations so that they incentivize people to be, e.g., cooperative, fair, and nonviolent. Obviously a person with different ideas about how society should be ordered might have different ideas about what sort of incentives law should provide, but the basic trope of settling expectations and incentivizing good behavior should hold.
I am not sure which inputs and outputs you are referring to, but I would love to hear more about how you think my mind is going wrong—it often does, and sometimes readers here can help me fix it.
Very late to the comment party, but eager to know any recommendations around these
I’d recommend Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody which has an interesting take on Coase’s The nature of the Firm.
Maybe the Lean Startup stuff is relevant.
By what standards does it currently strike you as inefficient?
Cost.
An obvious suggestion: Getting Things Done
The GTD system is designed for helping individuals decide what to do next, and isn’t really designed for organizations.
So GTD would help with:
what should be done
when it should be done
who should do it
but might not help much with:
how much of a budget in money, office space, website space, etc. a project should receive
when and how to evaluate the success of a project...
Though it might only take some relatively minor adjustments to make the GTD system able to handle these points as well.
I should also mention that most of the details of actually implementing the GTD system are left as an exercise to the reader.
My best advice management-wise is that you come up with the problems first, talk about (no need to finalize) metrics which can determine success to the problem, and then only after that actually start talking about solutions.
Then you test by metrics, and if arguments come up reduce them to their basic forms/disagreement, then just test those too.
Granted, a lot of that is mostly about protecting people from anchoring bias, and decreasing politicization.