Kallokain

  …that the greatest prosperity can exist only as the result of the greatest possible productivity of the men and machines of the establishments— that is, when each man and each machine are turning out the largest possible output. — The Principles of Scientific Management , by Frederick Taylor, 1911. The 20th century was a century of economic growth and technological development never seen before in the history of humanity. A significant part of the credit for this has to go to Frederick Taylor, whose book The Principles of Scientific Management, was published in 1911. Taylor laid down the basic principles of mass production. The ideas worked well for many years, but there were hidden problems. One thing that happened, because the idea was that each worker and each machine should produce as much as possible as much of the time as possible, was that parts tended to pile up, everywhere. Different people, and different machines, doing different things, produce things at different rat...

This is a draft version of a section in Tempo 2.0. Please do comment. Even simple systems can be difficult to understand. It is not because systems are inherently difficult to wrap your head around. The problem is our brains are trained the wrong way. Fortunately, it is not all that difficult to re-learn. When we do that, many problems that have looked utterly incomprehensible before, are suddenly fairly easy to understand. Doing something about them may still be difficult, but at least we have got a start. For starters, we will define what a system is: A system is a set of connected parts, real or abstract, that form an integrated whole. Systems have some interesting properties. For example: Systems consists of parts, that are also systems. Systems always belong to larger systems. Systems have properties that do not exist when you examine the parts separately. You cannot understand a system just by studying the parts. When you do something with a part of a system, other parts will nea...