Today’s Countermeasure is Tomorrow’s Standard

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Jon Wetzel
Jon Wetzel
11/02/2011

The calendar is a global countermeasure.

There are 365 days in a year except every 4 years there are 366 days.  The leap year was a countermeasure developed in 45 BC as part of the Julian calendar. It was created to help compensate for the reality that there are approximately 365 days + 6 hours in the rotation of the earth around the sun. 

To be more specific, a solar year is 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes and 12 seconds which is about 11 minutes shorter than what the Julian calendar uses.  So in the 16thcentury the Gregorian calendar was developed to help compensate for the discrepancy.  By dropping 3 leap years every 4 centuries everything gets back in balance.  This is the same calendar we use today and it is another example of a countermeasure.

What does this have to do with your business?

The standards that are used to operate your processes everyday are really just a set of current day countermeasures strung together to create a “standard” process.

This standard remains in effect until it can be improved.  Usually a problem surfaces that the current system cannot compensate for and a new countermeasure is then developed.  This in turn becomes the new standard.

R&D, new departments and startups cycle faster

Areas of rapid growth and change cycle their “standard” processes quickly.  Those that do manufacturing are much slower at developing countermeasures because of the checks and balances that need to be taken into consideration during implementation. 

Example:

The apps on my iPhone get updated on a weekly basis however my iPhone itself is more complex and gets its software updated every few months.

Less complexity = fewer barriers to change = faster improvements = new countermeasures

I’ve created many systems in startups and am always amazed at how they become adopted as the “standard” by others.  There appears to be 2 criteria:

  1. The systems are documented on paper.
  2. Others follow the process and cite the document as a fact.

What I enjoy most is when someone challenges the process and comes up with a new countermeasure that improves the system.  Then we just repeat steps 1 and 2 from above.

Daylight Savings Time (DST) is a countermeasure

Soon some of us will be setting our clocks back by 1 hour in observance of DST.  The fact is that not every country or state observes DST and there is disagreement as to whether doing so is actually beneficial or not.

Some propose that the extra hour of daylight for 7 weeks helps the economy for outdoor activities like golf, fairs and other events.

However the economy is also adversely affected by requiring compliance with DST in the way of computer software for meetings and other important electronic devices.

For example, you wouldn’t want DST to cause an error on a machine pumping oxygen into a patient’s lungs!

DST – creating a new countermeasure

In 2007 the US decided to change it’s observance of DST and extend it by 3 weeks in hopes of saving energy.  More daylight = less lights on in the house.  Considering the increasing cost of oil this made sense.

The price tag to make the change was estimated to be between 300 million to 1 billion dollars (methods vary on how the calculation was done).

Was implementing the DST countermeasure worth the cost?  I don’t know.  What I do know is that today’s countermeasure is tomorrow’s standard and because of that I’ll be resetting my clocks on Nov 6thlike everyone else in Michigan.

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