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Marshall McLuhan: Operations Research Mentality

The following is typed out from “Understanding Me,”a compilation of Marshall McLuhan’s speeches and TV material.  The first 2 paragraphs are from pages 29-30, and the rest is from page 238.

“In his Landmarks of Tomorrow, Peter F. Drucker has pointed to Operations Reserach as “organized ignorance.” It is a procedure in tackling problems which resembles the “negative capability” of Keats — a sort of intellectual judo. Instead of straining all available effort on a visible goal or problem, let the solution come from the problem itself. If you can’t keep the cow out of the garden, keep the garden out of the cow. Albert North Whitehead was fond of saying that the greatest discovery of the nineteenth century was not this or that invention, but the discovery of the technique of invention itself. It is very simple, and was loudly proclaimed by Poe, Baudelaire, and Valery, namely, begin with the solution to the problem, and then find out what steps lead to the solution. In other words, work backwards.

Such is Operations Research, in which metallurgic problems are tackled by psychologists and historians but not metallurgists. For the expert knows too much about a problem in advance. He sees why it is impossible. But teams of intelligent non-experts, not seeing the difficulties in advance, have time and again won through, and at high speed. The new pattern in management is small teams of men of varied competencies, not the pyramid of job hierarchies.

…I’ve often been puzzled by the fact that the greatest discoveries in the world, when you look back, are perfectly easy.  They can be put in a textbook. But the same discovery when you were looking forward at a problem is impossible.  Why is knowledge so easy backwards and so hard forwards? Why is it so hard to discover?

At first I though, suppose the cancer experts come to the studio with their problem, set up a model of their experiments and their procedures in studying cancer, and said “We have gotten to this point and we cannot get any further.”  They broadcast that to a million people at once.  It is obvious that there’d be one person in a million who would see that there was no problem at all.  In any problem whatever, one in a million would see no problem.

The real problem is: how do you reach this guy who sees the absence of the problem?

No let’s ask another question. Why is it that the man, one in a million, sees no problem? This person in inevitably and naturally untaught, ignorant of all scientific procedures and all science.  The scientist has great trouble looking forward past his problem because his knowledge gets in the way. When you’re looking for new answers to new questions, it is knowledge itself that blocks progress. Every time a new discovery is made, enormous new areas of ignorance are opened up.

One of the greatest human discoveries, the automatic cybernetic governor on the steam engine, was made by an eight year old boy who had the job of pulling the steam. Every time the big wheel went around, he pulled the steam valve to let the steam out.  He wanted to play marbles.  He tied a string to the wheel, and made one of the greatest inventions of all human history.  Now, the engineers who made the steam engine had not thought of this simple gimmick. Only an ignorant kid who wanted to play marbles could see such things.