This week in Atlanta and
suburban areas we had a winter storm and although we only received 2 or 3
inches of snow, the city has been virtually shut down. If you’ve been watching the national news,
you probably have seen the massive traffic jams and hear stories about how many
children had to spend the night in their schools because the roads were
impassable with lots of ice. There was
one story about a father who was worried about his 5 year old daughter who actually
walked 6 miles to his daughters school to spend the night with her. There were stories of heroism and people
taking in complete strangers because they were stranded. Everything that you saw and heard about this “snow
event” were absolutely true! All of this
over 3 inches of snow!
In the aftermath of this
winter storm, the finger pointing and blame game erupted over the forecast being
wrong. On Monday the National Weather
Service had issued a winter weather advisory for areas mostly south of
Atlanta. On Tuesday the forecast had
changed to a winter weather warning, but still mostly South of Atlanta. But when this snow event actually hit
Atlanta, the location of the snow and ice suddenly changed as both North and
South Atlanta we hit with an accumulation of up to 3 inches.
Yesterday the Mayor of
Atlanta and the Governor of Georgia both held separate news conferences to
explain the obvious lack of preparation for this winter storm, trying to
explain their way out of criticism. When
asked why they hadn’t “pre-treated” the roads with salt to make sure the roads
around Atlanta were passable, both the Mayor and the Governor pointed the
finger at the weather forecasters! I
laughed to myself and continued listening as one-by-one both fielded questions
about the lack of preparation. Excuse
after excuse came from both the Mayor and Governor, but the central theme of
their rebuttals was that the forecast was wrong.
One of the things that I
have written about on this blog is how, if you rely on forecasts to plan what
happens in your company, there is a high probability that you will be wrong. Yet
companies continue to use software with sophisticated algorithms to plan their
production and order their raw materials. According to Hop and Spearman in their
breakthrough book, Factory Physics, the
first of forecasting, for those of you who don’t know, is that forecasts are always wrong! The second law of forecasting tells us that, detailed forecasts are worse than aggregate
forecasts. The third law of
forecasts is, the further into the
future, the less reliable the forecast. They also tell us that, “no matter how
qualified the expert or how sophisticated the model, perfect prediction of the
future is simply not possible; hence the first law.” And finally, Hopp and Spearman tell us that, “Since
our estimate is likely to be approximate at best, we should strive to make
decisions as robust as possible with respect to errors in the forecast.” So with all this in mind, is it any wonder that,
if the Mayor and Governor both followed a forecast to plan and execute their respective actions, then it should come as no
surprise that huge mistakes were made in preparing for this winter event.
My belief is that we should
always plan for the worst, but hope for the best. If both the Mayor and Governor had followed
this simple plan, then the state and local roads would have been pre-treated
and much of the chaos would not have occurred.
Both the Mayor and Governor found themselves in a reactive mode instead
of being proactive. There’s lessons for
all of us to learn from this “amazing” snow event!
Bob Sproull
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