r-lab marvels and catastrophes

By Corinne PurtillMarch 16, 2018

link to article also here.

Let’s say the situation at work is not good. The project (or product, or re-org, or whatever) has launched, and the best you can say is that things aren’t going as planned. At all. It’s a disaster, though the best word for it is the one you drop over drinks with your team and when venting at home: it’s a clusterfuck.

Clusterfucks hold a special place in public life, one distinct from the complications, crises, and catastrophes that mar our personal and professional existences. The F-Word, former Oxford English Dictionary editor Jesse Sheidlower’s comprehensive history of the term, defines a clusterfuck as “a bungled or confused undertaking or situation.” Stanford business professor Bob Sutton goes further, describing clusterfucks as “those debacles and disasters caused by a deadly brew of illusion, impatience, and incompetence that afflicts too many decision-makers, especially those in powerful, confident, and prestigious groups.”

The term dates at least as far back as the Vietnam War, as military slang for doomed decisions resulting from the toxic combination of too many high-ranking officers and too little on-the-ground information. (The “cluster” part of the word allegedly refers to officers’ oak leaf cluster insignia.)

“I have a weird obsession with clusterfucks,” Sutton tells Quartz At Work. He and Stanford Graduate School of Business colleague Huggy Rao took on the topic directly in their 2014 book Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less, though publishers demanded that the softer substitute “clusterfug” appear in the final text. (This was not Sutton’s choice: His other books include The No Asshole Rule and The Asshole Survival Guide.)

To appreciate what a clusterfuck is—and to understand how to avoid one—it is first helpful to clarify some of the things a clusterfuck is not:

A fuck-up. “A fuck-up is just something all of us do every day,” Sutton says. “I broke the egg I made for breakfast this morning. That was kind of a fuck-up.” Whereas clusterfucks are perfectly preventable, fuck-ups are an unavoidable feature of the human condition.

A SNAFU. While sometimes used as a synonym for minor malfunctions and hiccups, this slang military acronym—“Situation Normal, All Fucked Up”—actually refers to the functionally messy state that describes many otherwise healthy companies (and many of our personal lives). A SNAFU work environment is usually manageable; one that is FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Repair, another military legacy) probably isn’t. “When my students with little experience go to work at a famous company and it isn’t quite as they dreamed, I do ask them if it is FUBAR or SNAFU, and tell them SNAFU will describe most places they work,” Sutton said.

 A shitshow. No less an authority than the Oxford English Dictionary describes a shitshow as a “situation or state of affairs characterized by chaos, confusion, or incompetence.” A clusterfuck may come to possess all those characteristics, but is more properly identified by the decisions that produced it than its outcome.

The three main contributors to clusterfucks

Sutton and Rao analyzed countless cases of scaling and expansion, both successful ones and those that ended in disaster. In reviewing the most spectacular failures, they identified three key factors that resulted in the kind of expensive, embarrassing, late-stage collapse that is the hallmark of a clusterfuck. They were:

Illusion. A clusterfuck starts with the decision maker’s belief that a goal is much easier to attain than it actually is. The expectation that two car companies with different languages and different cultures would merge together flawlessly, as the architects of the doomed Daimler-Chrysler merger apparently believed? Clusterfuck. The Bush Administration’s estimate that the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq would take no more than a few months and $60 billion? A clusterfuck prelude of tragic proportions.

Impatience. A misguided idea alone does not produce a clusterfuck. The idea also needs a champion determined to shove it along, usually over the objections of more-knowledgeable underlings. Sergey Brin’s reported insistence (paywall) on introducing Google Glass to the public against its engineers’ wishes turned a potentially groundbreaking piece of technology into a stupid-looking joke.

Incompetence. When errors of information and timing meet blatantly stupid decisions by people who should know better, disaster tends to ensue. Bear Stearns wasn’t the sole cause of the global financial crisis, of course, but former CEO Jimmy Cayne’s decision to spend 10 days of the 2007 subprime mortgage loan meltdown playing at a bridge tournament without phone or email access contributed to the firm’s collapse—and to the worldwide disaster that followed.

All three of these failings share a common root: people in power who don’t (or won’t) acknowledge the realities of their environment, and who don’t push themselves to confront what they don’t know. Nobody likes to spoil the heady euphoria of an exciting new project by discussing the possibility of failure. The problem is, if potentially bad outcomes aren’t addressed pre-launch, they are more likely to surface afterward, when the reckoning is public and expensive.

The antidote to clusterfuckery, Sutton argues, is a willingness to confront the possibility of failure and disappointment built into every new venture, and to plan accordingly.

He cites a favored decision-making tactic of the Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman (who in turn credits it to psychologist Gary Klein). Before a big decision, teams should undertake what Kahneman calls a “premortem.” Split the group in two. One is assigned to imagine a future in which the project is an unmitigated success. The other is to envision its worst-case scenario. Each group then writes a detailed story of the project’s success or failure, outlining the steps and decisions that led to each outcome. Imagining failure and thinking backwards to its causes helps groups identify the strengths and weaknesses of their current plans, and adjust accordingly.

“People make better decisions when they look into the future and they imagine that they already failed, and they tell a story about what happened,” Sutton says. With better planning, it won’t be a story that has to be bleeped out.

Anna Bergstrom had a dilemma. She loved the glitzy world of high fashion, but had also come to feel that it was unsustainable and bad for the planet. She’s now found peace of mind by running a stylish shopping mall in Sweden, where everything is second-hand.

“Do you notice the smell?” Anna Bergstrom says, as she surveys her mall from the mezzanine level. “It smells nice here, doesn’t it?”

It’s very important to Anna that this place is enticing, because she feels it is making a statement. Everything for sale here, in 14 specialist shops covering everything from clothes to DIY tools, is recycled.

She is usually turned off by the smell of second-hand stores, she explains, even though she adores vintage fashion.

For most people flea-markets and charity shops carry a stigma, she thinks – a mark left by countless bad experiences. Too often they are worthy but depressing, Anna says. Her mission is to bring second-hand shopping into the mainstream.

The mall itself is spacious and appealing, almost Ikea-like. An art installation – a tree and circular bench all fashioned from recycled materials – greets customers at the entrance.

There is even a coffee shop and gift-wrapping service.

The mall is called ReTuna. “Tuna” because that’s the nickname for the city where it is based – Eskilstuna, an hour’s train journey west of Stockholm – and “Re” because the goods on sale have been recycled or repurposed.

It was set up by Eskilstuna’s local government in 2015, in a warehouse which used to house trucks for a logistics company.

The shops inside it are run as businesses rather than charities, and each pays a combined charge of rent and business rates.

Anna Bergstrom’s business mantra which she repeats to each shopkeeper is, “Do it like Hugo Boss.” She wants the mall to stand toe-to-toe with a regular, commercial, glitzy mall.

There is a sports shop stuffed with skis and (slightly scuffed) sledges, a kids’ shop bursting with toys (a little faded), a bookshop, a DIY store, a homeware specialist, even a pet accessory shop.

As well as “pre-loved” items for sale, there are also many that have been upcycled. These are unwanted items that have been taken apart and turned into new objects.

In a store that specialises in handmade household ornaments, Bergstrom is keen to show off a nice example of this, from one of her star tenants.

Shopkeeper Maria Larsson proudly shows off her best-selling product – a container that resembles the body of a pine cone. Each segment of its skin has been cut from leather jackets – upcycling in action.

However, Maria confesses to being a little worried. She is struggling to keep up with customer demand for this design because she can’t get enough jackets.

This makes more sense once you understand ReTuna’s location.

It’s right next to Eskilstuna’s recycling centre, which is also run by the municipality.

A steady stream of cars passes through it, bringing cardboard, mattresses and other typical unwanted household items.

But many of these cars go past the metal skips and then head down a ramp to a road that runs right next to the mall.

Here locals drop off their unwanted household things if there is a possibility they can be resold or upcycled.

In a vast area beneath the mall, a small army of workers in fluorescent jackets sifts through the donations, carrying them to designated zones.

Every day the shopkeepers can come down and inspect what has arrived: kids’ toys, household appliances, gardening equipment… perhaps even a leather jacket. This is what they call their “treasure”, says Anna. Their business rent gives them privileged access to it.

Shopkeepers sometimes hang around the basement to look at what is coming in to their zones. Anna calls these people “peekers” and gives them a telling-off, because they are meant to wait for set times to inspect their assigned stock.

Many of the shopkeepers will come to informal arrangements with one another. So if the clothes shop knows that Larsson wants leather jackets for upcycling, they will pass on any that are too damaged to be re-sold.

Any items that are unwanted by all the shopkeepers go to the recycling centre next door.

“You see,” says Anna, “this is why I sometimes joke that this is the ‘high fashion trash shopping mall’.”

She thinks her passion for ethical, sustainable shopping goes back to her upbringing with her hippie parents.

She was born in a commune, though her family moved out to the countryside to pursue a simple life when she was three years old.

Her parents rejected consumerism in all its forms and tried to protect her from it.

She wasn’t allowed Barbie dolls or any toys at all at Christmas, she recalls.

But as she grew up she reacted against this.

“Everyone has to be their own punk revolution,” she says cryptically.

In fact she ended up forging a career in the temples of modern consumerism: shopping centres. She began by setting up retail shops, then ran two commercial malls in the Stockholm area.

It was only when she had children – four daughters – that she began to have doubts. She took about a year’s maternity leave for each child, which gave her time to reflect. Perhaps maternal instinct revived in her some of the values instilled by her parents, she thinks.

As her daughters grew, so too did her doubts about the world she’d brought them into, and its throwaway culture.

She watched them become seduced, as teenagers, by a modern kind of consumerism – their lives became shaped by big brands, promoted by influencers on social media, says Anna. They became governed by whatever the Kardashians were doing on reality TV or Instagram, she says in a tone of dismay – before breaking into a smile.

In desperation she tried cutting her daughters’ pocket money so they couldn’t buy the latest clothes, but offered to pay for second-hand ones instead – with limited success.

She realised she had to do something more, so the opportunity for a job at the ReTuna mall three years ago, as its first manager, came at the perfect time for her.

---

Find out more

• Learn more about the ReTuna mall in the latest People Fixing the World podcast from the BBC World Service

---

“I realised that I needed to become a role model for my children, doing something good for the planet,” says Anna.

She calls the mall “my baby”, and wants it to be a place her teenage children are proud to visit.

And they do visit. Though she hasn’t persuaded them to tag it as a location on an Instagram post yet – she’s working on that.

Anna’s bigger hope is that what works for her family can work for Swedish society as a whole.

Swedes love the concept of living sustainably and doing things for the planet, but there is a “gap” when it comes to action, she says.

Anna thinks her mall can bridge this gap.

And there is evidence this may be happening. Sales are slowly rising year-on-year. Since opening, the mall has sold £2.8m worth of products and last year it attracted 700 visitors per day.

“If you can have a trendy, fashionable way to do sustainable living,” says Anna, “I think mainstream customers can follow that – in high heels.”

You can follow writer Dougal Shaw on Twitter: @dougalshawbbc

at the bottom of the article you can find a short film on the shopping mall for more information.

Still from Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick, 1964

Global warming has heated the oceans by the equivalent of one atomic bomb explosion per second for the past 150 years, according to analysis of new research.

More than 90% of the heat trapped by humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions has been absorbed by the seas, with just a few per cent heating the air, land and ice caps respectively. The vast amount of energy being added to the oceans drives sea-level rise and enables hurricanes and typhoons to become more intense.

Global warming has heated the oceans by the equivalent of one atomic bomb explosion per second for the past 150 years, according to analysis of new research.

More than 90% of the heat trapped by humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions has been absorbed by the seas, with just a few per cent heating the air, land and ice caps respectively. The vast amount of energy being added to the oceans drives sea-level rise and enables hurricanes and typhoons to become more intense.

for the full article: Global warming of oceans equivalent to an atomic bomb per second

Image: PTL, inside the diorama of the Biologiska Museet, Stockholm.

For all news on the upcoming Nordic Hazardlands workshop and talkshop at Färgfabriken see this tab.

By Brooke Jarvis

The crack appeared a few years ago, and has been creeping towards the town of Kiruna ever since.

“The mines are underneath us,” says Göran Cars. It’s early afternoon but the sun is already setting behind the mountain, colouring the clouds and outlining the town’s most prominent feature: two huge smokestacks. “And you can see the direction of the cracks – coming from the mine, and going straight up to the city centre.”

The mine, Kiirunavaara, is the reason this Swedish town of roughly 20,000 people deep in northern Lapland exists at all. It is the world’s largest iron ore mine, and it dominates both economically and visually, the smokestacks sending up twin plumes of black smoke from the denuded mountain like a kind of Arctic Mordor.

Over a century, the miners have tunnelled so deep into the earth – 2km at some points – that they have now literally undermined the town. The caverns are causing subsidence, weakening the structure of the buildings, and opening a great crack in the earth itself, which grows wider and several metres closer to the city every year. Kiruna is about to be swallowed by the very mine that gave it life.

So, in 2004, a plan was hatched. Luossavaara-Kiirunavaara AB (LKAB), the gigantic state-owned company that operates the mine, would simply move the city – houses and all.

It identified a condemned zone threatened by the growing sinkhole, and gave everyone living there three choices: LKAB would move you to a new apartment, buy you out at market rate plus 25%, or, if feasible, load your house on to a flatbed lorry and move it to the new city.

It was Cars who was given the responsibility to plan that new city.

“The basic idea here was to have a town square, because the present town doesn’t have a town square,” Cars said last week at the ribbon-cutting for City Hall, the first building in the new Kiruna. A very modern and very gold building designed by the Danish architects Henning Larsen, its most notable feature is that it has an art gallery built into it – the new Konstmuseet i Norr – a rectangular structure that squats inside the atrium like a cube of potato wrapped in smoked salmon.

Currently, City Hall sits more or less alone in what feels like the middle of nowhere. In fact the site was the former city dump, and then a succession of factories and junkyards known locally as Death Valley. But if Cars is to be believed, by no later than 1 September 2020 there will be an entire town on this spot.

The plans show mixed-use commercial and residential buildings, cinemas, libraries and hotels, radiating in broad avenues from City Hall – and all of it built at the kind of super-dense scale you expect in a capital city, not a sprawling town 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

The scale of the project is unprecedented. Several dozen buildings will be moved by a specially assembled team of experts who have become so good at their jobs that Cars claims it’s now usually cheaper to move a home than to demolish and rebuild. The huge wooden church will be hoisted and moved; other buildings, such as the current city hall and the railway station, will be stripped of aesthetic elements, including lampposts and iron railings, to be incorporated into new structures.

And all of it will be paid for by LKAB. It’s not exactly generosity that is motivating the company. “The law is crystal clear,” Cars says. “The mine is required by Swedish national law to compensate for the structural damage it has caused.”

It’s also about survival. “Part of Kiruna’s absolute problem is that women have been moving away from the town while men have been staying on,” Cars says. He tells of efforts to attract foreign women to marry mineworkers. “Russians were popular. You had ads: ‘Wealthy miners looking for female company’, he says, adding: “This was some time ago.”

The deeper the mine, the more expensive it becomes to remove the iron – and the number of jobs is dropping, too, due to automation. In a globalised age it is increasingly hard to convince young people with university degrees to live deep inside the Arctic Circle.

“Our employees live here,” says Johan Mäkitaavola, project manager of LKAB. “I live in Kiruna. I want to have a nice city to live in. I hope my children will stay here or at least come back when they have studied. We need educated people to move to Kiruna and work.”

To survive, the city needs to diversify. It is already home to a budding space industry, and in the winter there are direct flights from Tokyo and Shanghai for sightseers eager to glimpse the northern lights. It remains impossible, however, to imagine Kiruna without LKAB, and vice versa.

FacebookTwitterPinterest

“It’s a big deal,” says Alice Bah Kuhnke, the Swedish minister for culture and democracy, who attended the opening ceremony along with the king of Sweden. “Big. For Swedes, LKAB has almost been part of our DNA – they are so important to the finances of the Swedish state. So for us that’s a really challenging thought, because since it’s such a big deal it’s hard as a politician and as a Swede to really be critical enough.”

Part of that means acknowledging an inconvenient truth – the fact that the new town sits on the territory of the Sami, the indigenous people of Lapland, whose reindeer herding is frequently disrupted by mining. The Sami convene their Swedish parliament in Kiruna – though you wouldn’t know it from the opening ceremony.