coneblog

An organization that suffered a disaster around product safety, quality or security of the magnitude of 9/11 would create any number of study groups and panels to get to the bottom of the disaster. Let’s use a well-known quality control technique to get some perspective on 9/11 as a starting place for thinking about the war in Iraq from a Project Managers perspective.

A powerful technique, which originated in Japan in the quality control movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, is to keep asking Why? Let’s illustrate that technique around 9/11:

Radical Islamic elements hijacked four airliners and crashed them into targets in the northeast US, including the World Trade Center, causing huge loss of life, damage to property, and damage to our sense of security and control in our own country. Why?

Why Airliners? They used airliners because they cleverly exploited a risk in our air travel system in which a fully fueled airliner could be turned into a guided missile by a few trained martyrs to cause enormous damage to selected targets.

Why the World Trade Center and Pentagon? For the Radicals, these were the most potent symbols of their enemy. This tells us that they perceive that their enemy is the US “Military Industrial Complex” – the commercial, military and industrial interests that are the most visible representation of the US to the rest of the world. From their point of view, those are the aspects of the US that for them most symbolized Enemy. Interestingly, they didn’t attack Coca-Cola in Atlanta, or Hollywood, or Nike, or any of the cultural exports of the US.

Why did they attack the US? This one is a bit harder, as it goes to the motives of people that we clearly don’t understand very well. But here goes…

The radicals made the long journey to the US from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and especially Saudi Arabia. They didn’t attack Israel, closer and more strongly aligned against Islam in the crucible, Palestine. They attacked the US because… They saw us as the strength and funding behind Israel? They (mostly Saudis) had witnessed the impact and control of the US over the Saudi government and Society? They saw us as their main enemy in their goal to set up Fundamental Islamic governments in areas dominated by Islam?

Why did they attack? They knew that their attack would not substantially damage the strength of the US. Quite the contrary – they could expect a strong reaction to the attack. One can posit several possible reasons: They want to encourage and motivate their supporters, and stimulate recruitment of new troops; they want to embolden their followers to carry out similar attacks; They want to provoke a strong reaction by the US; and/or They see themselves as striking back in a conflict that we had initiated.

I’d like to hear comments or opinions about the “Five Whys” technique above. Any other Whys or Answers? I’m not trying to shed new insight on 9/11 – many others have done that much better. My goal is to illustrate the use of PM techniques on a “project” that we are all familiar with, and to share some insights that might be of interest around the water cooler.