External Events and Human Error

I guess you can tell that time really does fly by as you get older when you look back at the last time you posted to your blog and see that it was 2 years ago!  That is absolutely crazy but true!

The title of this blog has always been "Mike's Random Thoughts" because it gives me the room to post any variety of thoughts or comments.  Those thoughts probably seem to come from left field at times and here comes another.

I am a big fan of Formula One racing.  This past weekend I was watching the race at Silverstone in England and a couple of things struck me.  First is the randomness of external events and second is how easily a multimillion dollar investment can fall victim to human error.

The pole sitter for the race, Valtteri Bottas, was sitting in first place and defending his position against his teammate, Lewis Hamilton.  His race seemed completely under control and a decision was made by team management to bring Valtteri into the pits for a routine tire change.  On a well run team this takes less than 3.5 seconds so little risk to his lead was imagined.  Bottas rejoined the race in perfect position to continue on for the win while his teammate continued to circle around on tires that were getting worse and worse.  And then...an external event intervened and took that win away.  One of the Alfa Romeo cars locked its brakes and slid off the track forcing a "safety car" event.  Cars that had not changed tires yet basically got a "free" pit stop.  Lewis Hamilton took his "free" pit stop and never looked back.

So the observation from this first random thought is that you can have the best strategy for winning and the smartest management team in your race and watch it all evaporate because of something outside of your control.  In our business of providing natural gas powered cooling systems to indoor agriculture facilities we often run across customers who have a great growth strategy and strong management but who run into external issues that derail their plans.  If the local electric utility limits the available power to the site you have selected (or charges huge dollars to provide the service) then the whole plan could blow up.  Sometimes it is not possible to have a backup plan...like in the case of Bottas….but your management team needs to be ready to minimize the damage quickly by considering and implementing alternative ideas.  Bottas ended up finishing second because of quick thinking on the part of management that minimized the number of places he lost in the race...your team needs to be ready to do the same thing.

The second observation from the race involves Ferrari...one of the most famous names in motor racing.  Ferrari, like Mercedes and other top Formula One teams, has a racing budget that is measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars.  Hundreds of engineers are employed to design the cars and then monitor and diagnose hundreds of sensors on the cars in real time during a race.  It is a little like launching the Space Shuttle every two weeks.  In spite of this massive investment in machinery and engineering talent sometimes things go very wrong.  At Silverstone that something was simply human error.  Ferrari's number one driver had just been past by a key rival as they were entering a tight turn on the track.  A split second loss of concentration and the Ferrari crashed into the rear of the rival's car sending them both flying off the track.  In milliseconds a multimillion dollar investment was lost to human error.

One of our other key market areas is providing cooling to data centers.  At a recent event I heard that building a data center costs about 7 million dollars per megawatt of processing power.  This is a huge investment and our cooling systems are a relatively small part of that investment.  But....human error can bring that entire investment grinding to a halt.  Changing a single line of code in the controls for the HVAC equipment can cause the essential cooling systems to fail to perform.  As a company we have been writing our own code for the critical operation sequences of our equipment based on our years of experience manufacturing such systems.  However, we are frequently asked to provide control sequences that are defined by the data center owner.  In a fairly recent case we were told to change a line of code in a control sequence by a less experienced customer engineer.  As a result a changeover from one cooling mode to another did not occur as that person anticipated and the data center temperatures spiked.  While not as overt or obvious as running into another car at 100 mph the result of both human errors was extremely expensive.

Unforeseen events or human error....either can upset the best laid plans but making quick and experienced decisions...guided by people or companies with years in the business can mitigate the impact of those problems.