Things Unknown

It’s amazing how an difference so small that we can’t even predict it can very noticeably change the outcome of a standardized process. I saw this in action today while baking cookies.

Laura and discovered that the cookies cooked differently on the two cookie sheets we have. We could put the dough on one cookie sheet and place it in the oven and then fill the second cookie sheet and place it in the oven. We could then take the second cookie sheet out when its cookies were done and
remove the cookies before the cookies on the first sheet finished cooking. Same oven, same batch of dough, different cookie sheets (though they were both the same size – there were no differences to make us think they would cook differently).

As I thought about that it struck me how often  there are small differences that we can’t account for in advance.I suspect this is one of the reasons that standardized programs run by large bureaucracies are so universally inefficient.

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