Image by StartupStockPhotos from Pixabay
Algorithms, known in laymen’s terms as “directions,” are the underlying structures of our world. The digital universe with which most of us engage is built from them. Not to mention the plain old physical world we’ve created for ourselves. After all, no building, road, or machine is produced without an algorithm of some kind, be it an artist’s rendering, an architect’s drawing, or an engineer’s schematic. No highway, skyscraper, or rocket launch happened by the seat of someone’s pants.
Of course, there are plenty of people who live by the seats of their pants and do quite well. Or they seem to live haphazardly, planning and forethought be damned. It can be hard to tell; sometimes folks aren’t honest. For me, however, planning is something I often have to force myself to do. And even then, it’s usually a softly structured thought cloud like: write a blog post one day this week, take the dogs to the park before the end of the month, clean out the junk room. Eventually.
I read an article years ago (so long that I can’t even find it anymore) about hospitals and doctors’ offices that started using algorithms to treat patients who presented with chest pains (see an example here.) Some doctors resisted it, of course, because they felt their own skills and intuition were superior to a set of static directions. With time and gentle persistence from their administrations, however, more physicians complied and when the first results came in, they were significant. Regardless of how experienced or brilliant a doctor felt herself to be, she simply couldn’t argue with the facts: clinicians missed fewer red flags and ordered better diagnostics and pharmacological interventions when they followed the algorithm. In other words, when they simply followed directions.
This doesn’t mean that the doctors’ skills and knowledge were irrelevant in any way. What it does mean, however, is that we all forget little details from time to time, especially under stress. Certainly facing a breathless, anxious patient claiming to have chest pains is stressful. Who wouldn’t want a well vetted, thorough checklist to guide them through the diagnostic and therapeutic processes? The article linked above describes the creation and updating of the algorithms. Guess who makes them? The physicians and their health teams. So in effect, they are making the decisions themselves; they’re just doing it ahead of time.
Pilots have pre-flight checklists, teachers have syllabi, Olive Garden has meal prep directions: those are all algorithms. And they work, because they force all the decision making to happen first. No one has to wonder, how much salt to add or what psi to inflate the tires to or what chapters they will cover as they go along. An algorithm, by definition, tells you what to do and when. Following them requires little thought, which is exactly the way they’re designed to work.
Think of the decisions required to run a busy kitchen or to get a commercial jet full of passengers ready to fly. An algorithm takes the decision making almost entirely out of the process, thus allowing the specialists (the pilots, cooks, teachers, et. al.) to pay attention to what’s happening right in front of them. That way if something does go wrong, their attention is on it. Immediately.
Algorithms, also known as plans, simply work. Anything done well relies on them; anything that doesn’t is a cluster-you-know-what. It’s not an accident that most successful people are good at planning. In fact, what so many of us see as talent and expertise might mostly be just a good algorithm in action.
I’ve usually resisted planning because I’ve always rationalized that it reduces creativity, spontaneity, and it takes too much time. In other words, I viewed planning as restrictive. In reality, it’s the other way around: I jump in by the seat of my pants and end up spending hours chasing down details or redoing things I screwed up the first time. I often waste much more time that way than if I had just taken a few minutes and drawn up a plan to begin with.
That made me wonder about the value of creating algorithms for my own life (something I toyed with here.) Directions I could follow by default so I can be sure I’ll do important things well. Or just at all. Plenty of people have them, although they probably don’t call them such. Anyone with a chore list is essentially using an algorithm. Monday is laundry; Tuesday is bathrooms; etc. Writers who create an outline, then a rough draft, then a series of revisions are using an algorithm. So why not have “make dinner” and “order the groceries” plans? Why not put these types of tasks on auto-pilot by planning them ahead of time and putting them on the calendar? I know: many people do! I’m late to the party. But at least I’ve arrived…
They say that recognizing you have a problem is the first step to solving it. So I’m off and running to find some algorithms that will simplify and optimize my every day chores, as well as my creative pursuits. What have I got to lose—besides a lot of wasted time?
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