Problem-Solving Archives - Page 12 of 29

The Mailbox

In April 1970 an oxygen tank exploded on Apollo 13, and the crew had to use the lunar module as a lifeboat. Carbon dioxide began to build up. The spare filters from the command module were square, and the lunar module needed round ones.

Engineers on the ground designed and tested an adapter made from plastic bags, cardboard from the flight plan cover, a spacesuit hose and duct tape. NASA calls it “the mailbox.” The engineer who led the work, Ed Smylie, explained it in a 2021 documentary: “If you’re a Southern boy, if it moves and it’s not supposed to, you use duct tape.”

In his NASA oral history he said: “It was pretty straightforward, even though we got a lot of publicity for it …” He added that “a mechanical engineering sophomore in college could have come up with it.”

The Little Shop of Horrors

In December 1959 Roger Corman shot the interiors of The Little Shop of Horrors in two days, on a standing set at the old Chaplin Studios. The actors were hired for one week, three days of rehearsal and two of shooting. Exterior scenes took four more evenings. The film cost less than $30,000 and earned back its cost.

Corman titled his memoir How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime. “I had never thought of myself as doing Great Art,” he said. “I felt I was working as a craftsman.” Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese worked for him early in their careers. In 2009 he received an honorary Academy Award.

Maximizers and Satisficers

In 2002 the Swarthmore psychologist Barry Schwartz and five colleagues published a study of “maximizers,” who look for the best option, and “satisficers,” who stop at good enough. Across seven samples they found “negative correlations between maximization and happiness” and “positive correlations between maximization and depression.” In one study, maximizers were “more sensitive to regret.”

In his book The Paradox of Choice, Schwartz wrote: “To satisfice is to settle for something that is good enough …” In a 2014 Reddit Q&A, he gave short advice: “‘Good enough’ is almost always good enough.” The Atlantic quoted it in 2015.

The Good Enough Revolution

In 2009 Wired magazine published “The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine.” It opened with the Flip Ultra video camera. The Flip was “stripped-down” and cost $150. A midpriced Sony camcorder cost $800. The Flip sold more than a million units in its first year. By 2009 it held 17 percent of the U.S. camcorder market.

The writer, Robert Capps, argued that buyers now valued three things: “ease of use, continuous availability, and low price.” To get them, “they’ll happily sacrifice power and features.”

Good Enough Quality

In 1997 the software tester James Bach published “Good Enough Quality: Beyond the Buzzword” in the magazine Computer. To call something good enough, he wrote, you must agree with four claims. The first three are “It has sufficient benefits,” “It has no critical problems,” and “The benefits sufficiently outweigh the problems.” The fourth is “In the present situation, and all things considered, further improvement would be more harmful than helpful.”

Bach rejected the idea of “the minimum quality that you can get away with.” He wrote: “Good Enough has nothing to do with mediocrity.” His example was Microsoft, which “knows how to ship with the right bugs.” Bach’s testing company is called Satisfice, Inc.

Worse Is Better

In a section of an essay first written in 1989, the software designer Richard P. Gabriel described two ways to design. One aims for “the right thing.” The other he called “worse is better,” and he used early Unix and the C language as examples. In that approach, “It is slightly better to be simple than correct.” Another rule is: “Completeness can be sacrificed in favor of any other quality.”

Gabriel argued that the simpler approach “has better survival characteristics.” He concluded: “It is better to get half of the right thing available so that it spreads like a virus.” The essay spread among programmers from 1991. In 2000 Gabriel answered himself under a pen name, in an essay called “Worse Is Better Is Worse.”

Close Enough

Close enough for government work. It is not worth spending more time to perfect this. The phrase appears in print in 1962, in NASA reports on the first American orbital flights.

Close enough for jazz. This is the musicians’ version. It has been in print since at least 1937. That year Billboard printed it as a stock musicians’ joke, said after the saxophones tune up.

Good enough for who it’s for. The job was not done perfectly, but it was done well enough for the people it was done for.

Wiktionary labels the government phrase “humorous” and “disparaging.” A popular story says it began in World War II as praise for exacting standards. Members of the American Dialect Society searched for evidence and found “nothing to support” it.

The Ugly Duckling

Between 1941 and 1945, eighteen American shipyards built 2,710 Liberty ships. The design was chosen for its “simple, low-cost construction.” The ships were made “assembly-line style, from prefabricated sections.” Joshua Smith of the American Merchant Marine Museum notes that they were throwaway ships with a five-year life expectancy. President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the ship “a dreadful looking object.” Time magazine called it the “Ugly Duckling.”

Early Liberty ships suffered cracks in the hull and deck. Three Liberty ships broke in half. Some ships sailed far longer than their five-year design life.

A New Way of Doing Business

On June 29, 1994, Secretary of Defense William Perry signed a memo titled “Specifications and Standards — A New Way of Doing Business.” It made performance specifications and commercial products the default. A performance specification says what an item must do, not how to make it. Detailed military specifications were allowed only “as a last resort, with an appropriate waiver.”

A 1997 Air War College paper gave examples of what the old system cost. The military had used its own specifications to buy “dog combs, tacos, fruitcakes.” A specification for white gloves “caused one manufacturer to set up a different assembly line.” The gloves cost $32 a pair. The same manufacturer sold “nearly identical gloves commercially for $20.”

Lowest Price Technically Acceptable

Federal agencies can buy goods and services by a method called “lowest price technically acceptable.” Each proposal is checked against the stated requirements and is either acceptable or not. The Federal Acquisition Regulation says that proposals are checked for acceptability but are “not ranked using the non-cost/price factors.” It also says: “Tradeoffs are not permitted.” The cheapest acceptable offer wins, even when another offer is better.

Outside the Department of Defense, a 2018 defense law limits the method. An agency may use it only when, among other conditions, it “would realize no, or minimal, value from a proposal that exceeds the minimum technical or performance requirements.” Buyers must avoid it, as far as practicable, for services such as cybersecurity and health care, and for personal protective equipment.