An Ontology of Systemic Failures: Dragons, Bullshit Mountain, and the Cloud of Doom

This would have been more readable if you gave concrete examples of each kind of problem. It seems like your claim might be a useful dichotomy, but in its current state it's likely not going to cause me to analyse problems differently or take different actions.

I don't know how well the things I've been thinking about lately fit into this model, so I'm going to attempt to apply these to my own field (Youth Emergency Services for suicide/homicide/psychosis):

1) Bug is when a clinician gets a call about a crisis and fails to triage whether it's an issue of sufficient severity. Mom calling because she took her kid's phone away and now they're yelling and won't go to bed can probably be de-escalated over the phone, even if they said the magic words of "I'm going to kill myself," as long as they don't have a history of depression or suicidal ideation or self-harm. Simple fix is to train people to better triage and how to respond/deescalate remotely.

2) Dragon is kind of what the job was designed to deal with. Before mobile response teams existed for mental health workers, and in counties that don't have them, people just call the police. The police will either sit the person down to give them a stern talking to, or arrest them, or take them to the nearest hospital's psych ward, depending on what's happening. Someone decided "Hey what if we sent therapists instead, who could de-escalate the problem instead and reserve the involuntary commitment for the cases that really warrant it?" Problem is it's not really a "solvable" problem, which means...

3) Bullshit Mountain is sort of the job itself? There's no Win Condition, it's just an ongoing series of getting crisis calls and helping those involved as best we can, whether that's teaching coping skills, creating safety plans, connecting them to services, or sometimes initiating a Baker Act (Florida protocol for involuntary 1-3 day stay at psych ward). Some people only call us once and everything's fine in follow-up calls. Others call multiple times per month, sometimes even per week, and have been Baker Acted by us or police over a dozen times. But stats say the county is overall doing better for youth suicides/homicides and hospital psych wards have fewer kids being brought in, all this even with things like the Parkland shooting, so we keep plugging at it.

4) Cloud of Doom seems like it could be at least a couple things. The first that no one wants to be left holding the Liability Hot Potato for a suicide, let alone the next mass school shooter, so we have police departments and schools calling us if any kid says anything even remotely like "I want to kill my geometry teacher," even if it was two weeks ago in a text message to their girlfriend, and then getting mad at us when we won't Baker Act them.

Which leads to some Molochian bullshit, where organizations start to *set protocols* to call us for anything that seems remotely worrisome, and then *our protocols* say that we can't be the ones to define a crisis for the caller, and so we get the occasional hilariously-frustrating call where a juvenile probation officer or school administrator calls us and says "They did/said X Y and Z, so do you need to make an assessment?" to which we have to reply "Well, if you say you want an assessment we'll be right over," to which they reply "Well they did X Y and Z," to which we will reply "Yes, I understand, does that mean you want us to come assess?" to which they reply "Do you feel they need an assessment?" Either we decide what's worth a crisis and liability falls on us, or the caller decides and liability falls on them.

You know where this is going: we're getting a steadily increasing amount of calls, and our ability to triage them is being slowly but surely hemmed in by expectations from on-high.

The result being a second Cloud of Doom, where the YES team (and I imagine other mobile crisis teams in other counties) have tons of communal responsibility but no actual institutional power. Which is often demoralizing and makes it hard to retain staff. Which means we're more often in situations where all our clinicians are busy out on calls, some of which we didn't really need to go on, but more keep coming in and we have to tell them to either take their kids to the hospital themselves or call the police if they believe it's an immediate crisis. Which was kind of what the job was originally designed to prevent from happening.

Does this seem to fit, or am I missing the essence of some of these?

This is an interesting classification.

Questions:

1. What exactly does “injecting Slack” mean? (Both in theory, and in practice?)
2. The “Harnessing the Cloud of Doom” section is rather cryptic; could you expand on it?
3. What are some examples of each kind of problem? (Three examples per category would be ideal. But any at all would be a well-appreciated start!)

Interesting and elegant model!

I'm having trouble parsing what the Cloud of Doom is. It sounds similar to a wicked problem. Wicked problems come with the issue that there's no clear best solution, which perhaps is true of Clouds of Doom as well. On the other hand, you make two claims about wicked problems:

• Every organization doing real work has them
• There's one way to solve them, by adding lots of slack

I'm not sure where those are coming from, or what those imply. Examples or explanations would help.

Another thought: after the creation of vaccines, smallpox was arguably a "bug". There's a clear problem (people infected with a specific organism) and a clear solution (vaccinate a bunch of people and then check if it's gone). It still took a long time and lots of effort. Perhaps I'm drawing the analogy farther than you meant it to imply. (Or perhaps "a bunch of people" is doing the heavy lifting here and in fact counts as many little problems.)

One aside:

I mention in 'Shovelers are Hufflepuff' that the credit for solving a Bullshit Mountain doesn't go to the Hufflepuffs who actually solve it.

What DOES happen is, it goes to the Gryffindors who rush in to slay the biggest Dragon that the shovelers uncover. Since the Dragon-slaying is the biggest salient change, all progress gets attributed to it, including the progress made by the shovelers clearing out Bullshit Mountain in the first place.

If you want to poach Hufflepuff virtue, the best way to do it is to be the kind of Gryffindor that knows how to get along with Hufflepuffs, and then slay all the dragons as they uncover them. You probably won't even be resented by them for it!

You'll still be a bit of a dick, though.

In this framework, Bullshit Mountain and Cloud of Doom have two distinguishing factors:

1. Bullshit Mountain is multi-cause, single symptom, vs Cloud of Doom being multi-cause, multi-symptom

2. Bullshit Mountain is recoverable, Cloud of Doom is unrecoverable. (Or at least, Cloud of Doom as framed here is stronger evidence that you either need drastic changes or to give up)

Both distinctions seem worth being aware of, but I'm not sure how natural it is to cluster them together. It seems like a sufficiently big Bullshit Mountain could make the situation unrecoverable, or a sufficiently small cluster of problems/symptoms could require "everyone picks up a shovel and digs and probably doesn't really get proper credit but the organization is still pretty functional."

I like the basic idea of the classification. I suggest “Hydra” instead of “Dragon”, since you specifically mention multiple seemingly independent heads/symptoms. If I were to only read the comments, I would think a Dragon was just a particularly large or difficult Bug; I don't know if that means people are letting the definition slip in that direction.

I think I need to chew on this more and think about how much usefully breaks down along these lines. As I read this, you're describing a correlation between a 2×2 matrix of bimodal levels of multiplicity of causes and effects, and good strategies for dealing with problems with those traits. Is that accurate? But there's also a very distinct feeling that each of these categories evokes (especially given the names), and I'm not as sure that the feeling is correlated with the purported criteria; I have an intuitive guess that it's more correlated with perceptions of agency over problems, which may have only a skewed relation to the “number” of causes and effects (insofar as that's meaningful in the first place).

This seems like an example of trying to harness the cloud of doom. (In that case the attempt was transparent enough not to work; examples that actually did work would of course be hard to establish shared beliefs about.) The cloud of doom is the breakdown of shared discourse due to collapse of trust in common definers of canonical reality. It's harnessed by an organization directly trying to claim credit for being canonical with officialness theater like verification numbers, in a way that's couldn't even plausibly slightly alleviate the underlying problem.

I'm going to steal this, I'll probably try to use a continuous relaxation of it and try to break it into causal parts and such

Bullshit Mountain sounds a bit like a situation where there's a convergent focus for costs to be externalized onto. It's hard to fix because local incentives are always towards not just ignoring the problem, but actively making it worse. This can on very rare occasions be "fixed" with massive investments of energy (with an opportunity cost that may or may not be worth it). Sometimes, though, an organization should have a finite lifespan, and the correct response to Bullshit Mountain is to manage the decline with harm-reduction.

More generally, it seems to me that this post subtly frames things as though the only organization is the one being focused on. Spinoffs and emigrés can often have perfectly good lives elsewhere.

Overall, I expect that as I reflect on this schema I'll want to start using it, and I notice myself feeling the lack of a corresponding ontology of system capacity levels.