by Dwayne Phillips<\/p>\n
If a system fails at one boundary, it will probably fail at another boundary. Hence, if you find a boundary failure, start looking for other boundary failures while you still have a chance at prevention instead of correction.<\/strong><\/p>\n A few years back I had a problem with my van. I couldn’t reliably turn on the headlights. That was a bad situation, especially after dark. I found myself sitting in a parking lot flipping the headlight switch over and over until the lights finally illuminated.<\/p>\n Then one night, I found that I couldn’t turn the headlights off. Again, that was a bad situation as leaving the headlights on all night would drain the battery and so on.\u00a0Then it hit me:<\/p>\n boundary condition failures<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The headlight switch failed at one boundary – turn lights on – then it failed at another boundary – turn lights off.\u00a0My headlight switch was a classic example of a system that worked well in a “sweet spot” or “sweet range” of conditions, but had difficulties at the boundaries or edges.<\/p>\n Now consider a recent project I worked. Some weeks we had nothing to do – extremely light work. That was a boundary condition failure in planning the work for the project. Think about the other boundary condition. Well, I didn’t have to think about it much as the next week we had 80 hours worth of work. That was another boundary condition failure in planning the work for the project.<\/p>\n Hmm, a headlight switch and planning the work for a project. These two things had nothing in common except for boundary condition failures.<\/p>\n Time, and more keystrokes, would allow me to relate more examples of boundary condition failures. A lesson to draw from these examples is:<\/p>\n If your system has a boundary condition failure, start searching around the boundaries for other failures<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Boundary condition failures bring more pain than other kinds of failures – at least they have in my life. This is because the boundary conditions don’t happen often, but usually happen at critical points in time – like when you are sitting in a dark parking lot and you can’t turn on the headlights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Dwayne Phillips If a system fails at one boundary, it will probably fail at another boundary. Hence, if you find a boundary failure, start looking for other boundary failures while you still have a chance at prevention instead of correction. A few years back I had a problem with my van. I couldn’t reliably […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58,50],"tags":[170,178,172],"class_list":["post-1181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-systems","category-thinking","tag-general-systems-thinking","tag-systems","tag-thinking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1181"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1182,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1181\/revisions\/1182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}