Oops!

What happens when you break things you can't measure?

As the dust begins to settle and we can start to see what's been happening beneath the surface of the crisis, it becomes clear how much of our day to day business had become dependent on systems of some sort, and how fragile those systems are to disruption.

Beneath the more predictable issues with logistics companies, airlines, oil companies and anything that moves stuff and people about are far more subtle, but probably longer lasting challenges which money, not even the amounts that entitled corporations are demanding of somebody else's money, will solve.

Our love of and near addiction to data leads us to focus on things we can measure, whilst beneath that the things that really matter, those areas that are harder to measure, have broken.

It may be hard to put them back together, and even where we do, the cracks will show.

And can't see?

Apparently strong structures - from aircraft to bridges - fail unexpectedly. When we look for why, …