David Lee

Researchers from the SENSEable lab have been working with informal waste-collecting co-operatives in São Paulo whose members sift the city’s rubbish for things to sell or recycle. By attaching tags to the trash, the researchers have been able to help the co-operatives work out the best routes through the city so they can raise more money and save time and expense.

As he sifted through the data related to a vast fleet of more than 16,000 taxicabs, a strange pattern emerged: it appeared that many taxis weren’t moving during rainstorms. In fact, the GPS records showed that when it rained (a frequent occurrence in this tropical island state), many drivers pulled over and didn’t pick up passengers at all.

For some reason, though, The Next Generation awakened in me a feeling of terrible and suffocating yearning — that hopeless childish escape wish that’s the wake of a certain kind of fantasy. That feeling that in a different world you’d be happy.

It’s possible to look at what has happened in New York and determine that, by and large, the city received many of the benefits of Olympic development without enduring many of the negatives such as cost overruns, security concerns, and an inconvenienced populace.

Instead, as Repenning acknowledges, the Beer Game’s supply chain is poorly designed in one sense: The time lag needed to correct mistakes means it can take weeks for a misjudgment to get flushed out the system. Given that point, what are the real lessons of the Beer Game, according to Repenning? He suggests three ideas to the assembled group. <br/> First, managers should study the workings of the whole system they supervise, rather than assuming employees failed. <br/> “We have a strong tendency toward blaming people for the performance of the system they are in,” Repenning says. In psychology, this is known as the “fundamental attribution error.” In business, the consequence of this is a tendency to fire people. However, Repenning says, “in any system of moderate complexity or beyond, [firing people] turns out to be a remarkably low-leverage intervention.” <br/> The second lesson, Repenning says, is that “our behavior turns out to be hugely influenced by the context of the system we find ourselves in.” In the Beer Game, almost everyone, from those CEOs to the high school students, gets frustrated by the time lag that accompanies an accumulation of backorders, and starts ordering more and more beer, although doing so only makes the problem worse. <br/> “They make orders as if the last order had disappeared,” Repenning says. “That’s the core reason the game is so unstable.” <br/> This, in turn, leads to Repenning’s third main lesson of the Beer Game: We all use mental models to simplify reality, but those models often fail us. So instead of blaming people first, or rushing to create plausible-sounding but unverified hypotheses about why problems occur in business, managers need some cool detachment about what is really happening.

With the political climate in many places remaining hostile to new taxes, and cities in need of infrastructure investment, many are considering whether the principles of crowdfunding can be applied to urban infrastructure investment. Two projects I have heard about are doing just that, and I suspect many more are waiting in the wings. An entrepreneur working in Boston is developing an idea to create a crowdfunding platform for “urban improvements.” Designed to be deployed at a small scale, the target could be small-scale neighborhood improvements or loans to local businesses. The entrepreneur is exploring connections with neighborhood groups and refining his business model before going public.

One thing you might not know is that Youkilis&#8217;s physique led to the greatest joke in Red Sox manager history: Terry Francona, responding to a reporter&#8217;s use of the phrase &#8220;Greek God of Walks&#8221; about Youkilis, replied, &#8220;I&#8217;ve seen him in the shower. He isn&#8217;t the Greek God of anything.