Welcome to the new Probabilistic Publishing Web Site!

1) Here is an essay I wrote for Pat Leach's blog on the Decision Strategies website a long time ago. It is called The Smith System as an Allegory for Successful Living.

When I was in college, I had a summer job driving a truck. I drove a tanker, picked up milk at dairy farms, and hauled it to a processing plant. Our trucks were old, underpowered, and had marginal brakes, so I learned how to drive defensively. Many times a small car would pull out in front of me and then drive slowly (and receive a blast from my air horn)!

When I went to work for DuPont, they taught us the Smith System of defensive driving: Aim High, Get the Big Picture, Keep Your Eyes Moving, Leave Yourself an Out, and Make Sure They See You, which codified what I learned while driving the tanker truck. My current employer, Chevron, requires every employee to take the Smith System course (and with our traffic in Houston, we need it!).

One time I had to pick up a pallet of Probabilistic Publishing books with my pickup truck at the Yellow Freight terminal in Houston. As the 18-wheelers leave the Yellow Terminal, they see five large black and yellow signs: Aim High. Get the Big Picture. Keep Your Eyes Moving. Leave Yourself an Out. Make Sure They See You. Yellow Freight wants to keep their big rig drivers safe!

However, I want to talk about more than defensive driving. Life is a lot like navigating rush hour traffic in Houston. There are many obstacles, lots of people, great speed followed by slowdowns and stops, occasional detours, variable weather conditions, and no guarantee that you will reach your destination. Smith defensive driving principles can apply (with a little help from DA thinking) to life as well as to driving.

First, Aim High. In driving, monitor the horizon, not just right in front of you. In life, we need goals. As Zig Ziglar used to say, You have got to have goals. Goals are essential for productive living, and the higher the goal, the better. It is all too easy to get caught up in daily life and lose sight of our goals!

In DA, we help teams understand their objectives, beginning with their top objective. When I coach people on career decisions, we find out the primary objective... what does a person (or a family) really want? The Objectives Hierarchy is an excellent tool to help with this.

One pharmaceutical project team I facilitated noted that their top objective was to provide a new product that would really help the people who needed it. Profit was a lower level goal. David Skinner notes that if you focus your business on quality and usefulness, profits will be the result. Aim High! Do not let what is right in front of you make you lose sight of your goals.

Second, Get The Big Picture. In driving, this means staying aware of the entire panorama around you... what is happening way ahead, behind, and to the side. Rob Kleinbaum in Creating a Culture of Profitability noted that the first piece of cultural infrastructure is for a company to maintain an external (rather than internal) focus so that they are not surprised and left behind by technological and cultural changes.

As individuals, we are easily distracted by daily living and can lose sight of what is really important to us. Richard Carlson credits Dr. Wayne Dyer for the key quote that spawned a whole series of books: Do not Sweat the Small Stuff (and it is all small stuff)! It is difficult but very important for us to get and try to keep The Big Picture!

Third, Keep Your Eyes Moving. In driving, this is critical. Staring ahead at the road increases our chances of an accident and/or falling asleep. In life, we need to keep our eyes moving in order to see what is going on around us and things (including our own behavior) that can prevent us from reaching our goals. Kleinbaum notes many Forces of Entropy that degrade company culture. In similar fashion, forces of entropy in our lives can wear us down. It takes discipline and energy to keep our eyes moving.

Fourth, Leave Yourself an Out. In driving, as your eyes are moving, always be thinking, if something happened, where could I escape? This happened to me one time while I was driving the tanker truck. On a two-lane road, the cars ahead stopped suddenly for a car waiting to make a left hand turn (no signal). The other lane was full, and all the cars ahead of me quickly braked. My out was a front lawn, as there was no way I could stop. I squished a mailbox and had to replace it, but this was far and away the best out that I had.

In life, this is tied to keeping our eyes moving and seeing the big picture. If things do not work out the way we plan, what would we do? If the company we work for goes bankrupt, what is our back-up plan? My friend David Skinner expresses this well. One of his favorite sayings is, There are always alternatives. In DA, we frequently have to help teams to come up with creative alternatives and contingency plans that they otherwise would not have considered.

Fifth, Make Sure They See You. In defensive driving, this entails tapping the horn or using the emergency flashers. In life, this has two implications: being ready to state your thinking clearly and concisely, and maintaining your personal network.

A reporter once asked Winston Churchill a difficult question. Churchill answered with clarity and insight. The reporter expressed surprise at the response. Churchill replied, I’ve been thinking about this for twenty years. If you were to get onto the elevator unexpectedly with the CEO of your company, and he or she asked you what you were working on, would you be ready with a credible and coherent response? If a friend asks you what your goals in life are, can you concisely and clearly articulate them?

The second aspect of being seen is nurturing your personal network. My wife and I are friends with a couple we see infrequently, but we value the relationship and make sure that we do see them. We invited this couple to our son's wedding last year, and we were delighted that they were able to attend. Our second son, Michael, the best man at the wedding, gave the traditional toast at the reception. None of us had ever heard Michael speak before (he was studying engineering at UF at the time), and we were all amazed – his toast was delivered with the polish and aplomb of an experienced (and tasteful) comedian. Afterward, our friends told us that they were going to help him get an engineering internship for next summer, and sure enough, they did! This unexpected outcome was a result of both aspects of this principle.

Therefore, Aim High (you have got to have goals), Get The Big Picture (and do not get distracted by the mundane), Keep Your Eyes Moving (which takes discipline and energy), Leave Yourself An Out (there are always alternatives), and Make Sure They See You (be prepared and nurture your relationships). And, especially in Houston, may you always drive safely!

2) Here is a true story I wrote over 20 years ago called Of Angels and Demons. I hope to post all kinds of items on this page.

My wife, three children, and I were traveling from Gainesville to Philadelphia to go to a good friend's wedding on Saturday. At 4:20 PM on Wednesday, I checked Delta's web site for the final time and the web site said that both of our flights were "On Schedule." We were to find out later that this was the first interference caused by a demon, but at that point we believed the web site and drove to the airport. I stopped at Subway and we got two big subs to split between us to eat on the way to the Airport. This turned out to be a good decision.

When we checked in, what we thought was an angel behind the counter told us that our flight, scheduled to leave at 6:05 PM, was "late" but that we could all get on Flight 4050, which had been scheduled to leave at 3:40 PM but was really leaving about 6 PM. We were told that "all flights in Atlanta were about an hour late, so we would have no problem making our connection to Philadelphia." So we switched to the "earlier" flight (big mistake!), a turbo-prop that left for Atlanta at 6:47 PM. We discovered later that we were really receiving demonic advice. Our flight was cancelled, which would have been a better outcome for us.

At 8:10 PM we landed in Atlanta. The angels in the cockpit told us that we were going to have to wait on the ground for "45 minutes to an hour," as (the demons in) Operations had no gate for us. Being demons of the tormenting sort, they were apparently unwilling to push back another plane temporarily so we could deplane or send a bus to get us. We had two flight attendant angels, who tried to keep everybody comfortable by giving out the rest of the water and drinks that they had on the flight. The couple ahead of me had three children, the youngest was 18 months old and he expressed his unhappiness with the situation loudly and frequently, much to his father's dismay.

Forty five minutes went by. It had stopped snowing – there was about an inch of snow on the ground. An hour went by. The angels in the cockpit announced that they had no word from (demons in) Operations, but they had been talking with another ASA plane which had already sat on the runway for 2-1/2 hours. Somebody in the cabin called her brother, a Delta pilot, on her cell phone and found out that Atlanta could only de-ice 22 planes an hour, which was causing the problems. However, we saw only a few planes take off, nowhere near 22 planes per hour. Apparently demons were deicing the planes and were doing it very slowly. I called my friend in Pennsylvania (who was to pick us up at the Airport) and told him what was happening. He said the he thought the Gators (Go Gators!) were ahead in the Orange Bowl – 21 to 10, but he wasn't sure, as he'd mostly been watching the Weather Channel.

Two and a half hours went by. They put on the fasten seat belt sign, so everybody sat down. We taxied down the runway but then stopped again. About this time my four year old daughter, who had been mostly sleeping, had missed an opportunity to go to the thoroughly depleted rest room on our commuter plane. With a mama bear and hurt cub look on her normally calm face, my wife headed back (despite the lit sign) with my daughter. The angel flight attendant understood the problem. We eventually moved to sit between terminals C and D. Several times I tried calling Delta's 800 number, but the demons prevented a human from answering. At 11 PM I called my friend in Pennsylvania again. He said that the Gators were up forty-something to ten and wanted me to wake him up when we knew what was going on. I told him that I'd call him in the morning and let him know where we were.

Sometime after midnight, the angel in the cockpit announced that they had called numbers on their cell phone and had tried raising (demons in) Operations but had no explanation why we couldn't park and deplane. They too were frustrated, apologized, and asked for our patience. We did move about periodically to allow other planes to push back or go around us. Then at 12:48 AM, we pulled into the parking area, the tail stand was put under the airplane, the engines were shut off and we all stood up and waited in the aisle for another 10 minutes while the carry-on bags were unloaded. About 1 AM, we got off the airplane and proceeded inside Terminal C.

Inside, the queue lines to talk with an Agent were 50 yards long. I thought they might be shorter in the main Delta section, so we went to Terminal B. They were 200 yards long in Terminal B. So I found a wall for my family to crash beside and ran back to our arrival gate in Terminal B. There were two Agents who had apparently worked our flight's passengers, and I got in one line. While waiting in line, I called National's Emerald Club 800 number. An angel actually answered the phone and said that yes, I could reserve a full size car and drive it back to Gainesville. She must have thought me to be a bit strange, as I kept asking her if they really had a car available. I booked the car. My line defied the laws of physics and nature and moved faster than the other one. I talked with the angel behind the counter and she went through our situation. She said that the soonest we could depart for Philadelphia would be 3:45 PM that afternoon, but she wasn't sure whether we'd get out or not. She gave me a phone number to call to try to get the tickets refunded. I thanked her and told her we'd drive back to Gainesville. So I ran back to Terminal B.

We gathered up our stuff and rode the train to Baggage Claim. I was going to go get the car and pick everybody up, but we decided we wanted to stay together. We went outside ... it was cold and starting to snow again ... to wait for the bus. Now in normal circumstances, in order for a National bus to come by, three Hertz busses, two Avis busses, three Budgets, a Thrifty, and an Alamo must pass through first (this is a Federal Law). However, an angel in a Big Green Bus came (after only one Hertz, one Avis, and two Budgets) and we headed for the rental cars! As we stopped at the Emerald Isle, I noticed that there were several minivans in the Emerald Isle that night.

I got into another queue at the counter. The angel behind the counter looked at my Emerald Card and told me I could go to the Emerald Isle. I picked out a nice warm (the angels had left the engines running on a few vehicles for us) Astro and picked up the family. Katie (4) and Michael (8) had never seen snow before and were having a merry snowball fight. We loaded up the van. As we slid around the parking lot, I asked my wife whether Astros were front wheel or rear wheel drive. She said rear wheel, as she had researched this thoroughly before buying her Plymouth Voyager. So we drove around to the Emerald Isle and an angel had just pulled up a Dodge Caravan, which was to be our chariot home. It was 2:30 AM.

The roads were slick, it was lightly snowing, and I-75 had quite a bit of truck traffic. We proceeded southward, sometimes at 20 mph, sometimes at 30 or even 40. We stopped at a convenience store for drinks, potato chips, and a pit stop. But then we passed the Johnston Road exit, half way to Macon. I remarked to my wife that once before I had become stuck in a traffic jam and had exited at Johnston Road. This was a bad omen, as the demons of I-75 had already caused trucks to wreck a few miles ahead of us. At 3:30 AM all of the traffic stopped. We could see three lines of cars and trucks down our hill and up another hill – all were stopped. After a half hour, I got out of the car and talked with a semi-driver. He told me that there was a wreck involving trucks two miles ahead of us. So we sat and waited. About an inch of snow accumulated on the pavement. At 5:30 AM we saw brake lights. Then a few vehicles started to move slowly. We started up and moved south ... 5 mph to 10 mph. Eventually we got up to 25 mph. By the time we got past Macon, traffic thinned out.

We found a Burger King that had opened so we got some food. The roads gradually got better: the snow stopped somewhere north of Valdosta, GA. My wife was able to drive for about 45 minutes, but I drove the rest of the way. An angel must have kept me awake, as when we got home (there's no place like home) at 10 AM, I could barely walk upon exiting the Dodge. After an indeterminate time of sleep, I called the Delta 800 number. An angel answered (a real voice!). I told her our story, albeit more concisely narrated than here. She said that she thought she could get the 100,000 frequent flyer miles I had cashed in for my family's tickets put back into my account. She put me on hold while she wrestled demons on my behalf. After several intermediate reports, she told me that she had been successful. She said that for my ticket (which had been purchased) I would have to talk with the "Refund Desk" and that she would try and patch me through. I thanked her and she patched me through. However, a demon intercepted the call and announced that "all lines are busy." So I still have the "Refund Desk" to deal with, however, I am very relieved that we didn't lose the miles.

Then I took the Dodge Caravan to the Gainesville Airport to return it. On my way to the rental counter, I noticed that the demons had cancelled two of two inbound flights from Atlanta and one of two outbound flights. Upon trying to check the rental car back in to National, the demons in the National computer had detached my vehicle from its card, and the angel behind the counter made several calls trying to re-attach it. This time the demons won, and she told me that she'd have to mail me the receipt. I smiled, now knowing the ways of demons, and thanked her.

We went out to our favorite restaurant that night, the Millhopper Cafe, and upon saying grace we thanked God for helping us return home safely and we prayed for the thousands of our fellow travelers who were still trying to overcome the demons and get home. I've been flying for over 25 years now, and this was my worst experience ever. I don't understand why Atlanta couldn't designate a gate on the end of each terminal as a "contingency" unloading gate for planes to pull in, unload, and pull out again during times with no gates. Perhaps the demons of Operations won't let them do this – I don't know. As for the wedding, we will miss the main event and have to wait for the video.