heaps in the way

the subtle art of not tripping over oneself

A short cut for a Friday – the idea for this ‘stack was always to be the business and economics equivalent of ambient music.  Not so much Great Debates with right and wrong answers, as funny little ideas that stick in the background while you’re thinking of something else.  Here’s one.

If you’re ever in my ancestral neck of the woods, one of the things you might visit when it’s raining (the words “when it’s raining” might be considered unnecessary in context) is the National Slate Museum.  One of the things I learned when I went there last was that the decline and demise of the Welsh slate industry was hastened in many cases by a somewhat curious industrial problem. 

Some of the quarries closed not because they were worked out, or because they couldn’t produce at the prevailing world price, but due to the placement of past spoil heaps. 

In general, the annoying tendency of physical objects to exclude other physical objects from occupying the same space at the same time is surprisingly difficult to plan for. (There’s a passage in my Brompton book where the company has to shut down operations in order to deal with the fact that some containers of parts have needed to be brought in from the yard because it was raining, and this is causing chaos on the factory floor).  But the spoil heaps of Dinorwic seem like such a special example to me.

At the very start of a quarry operation, it must seem like it hardly matters what you do with the waste material; the site is wide open and there isn’t enough spoil to interfere with anything.  As time goes on, the heaps get more noticeable and have to be worked around; they start becoming the objects of planning and thought.  Then a while after that, they have become bigger and more obtrusive, and they’re increasingly an important constraint on the business.  Finally, you reach the point at which you have to accept that you have huge mountains of unstable rock, which can collapse without warning if blasting work is carried out nearby and which can’t be moved; however much valuable slate remains to be extracted, the whole quarry is now too dangerous to operate.

The problem here is that optimal planning of the spoil heaps requires almost complete knowledge of how the quarry is going to operate from start to finish, which isn’t something that you can necessarily know at the beginning. (As the joke goes, “If I’d known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself”).  There might be better or worse ways to guess where you ought to put the spoil heaps, but once you’ve made the initial choice, you’ve closed down a lot of possible futures. 

And obviously, this generalises from the actual physical heaps of dangerous stone, to other ways in which the initial stages of a project can set up structures that are hard to remove or restructure when they get in the way later.  Stopping parts of a system from interfering with each other is highlighted as a vital task requiring a whole regulatory system in Stafford Beer’s Brain of the Firm, but it’s not always as simple as that.  Sometimes the theoretically optimal solution is basically practically unachievable; when that happens, the best you might be able to do is use it as a film location.