The danger of hidden functional roles

There’s a collection of friends that I have a standing videochat with every couple of weeks. We had been meeting at 8am, but several people developed conflicts at that time, including me. I have a teenager that starts school at 8am, and I’m responsible for getting them to school in the morning (I like to leave the house around 7:40am), which prevented me from participating.

As a group, we decided to reschedule the chat to 7am. This works well for me, because I get up at 6. Today was the first day meeting at the new scheduled time. I got up as I normally do, and was sure to be quiet so as not to wake my wife, Stacy; she sleeps later than I do, but she gets up early enough to rouse our kids for school. I even closed the bedroom door so that any noise I made from the videochat wouldn’t disturb her.

I was on the videochat, taking part in the conversation in hushed tones, when I looked over at the time. I saw it was 7:25am, which is about fifteen minutes before I start getting ready to leave the house. Usually, the rest of the household is up, showering, eating breakfast. But I hadn’t heard a peep from anyone. I went upstairs to discover that nobody else had gotten up yet.

It turns out that my typical morning routine was acting as a natural alarm clock for Stacy. My alarm goes off at 6am every weekday, and I get up, but Stacy stays in bed. However, the noises from my normal morning routine are the thing that rouse her, which is typically around 7am. Today, I was careful to be very quiet, and so she didn’t wake up. I didn’t know that I was functioning as an alarm clock for her! That’s why I was careful to be quiet, and why I didn’t even think to mention to her about the new videochat time.

I suspect this is failure mode is more common than we realize: there is a process inside a system, and over time the process comes to fulfill some unintended, ancillary functional role, and there are people who participate in this process that aren’t even aware of this function.

As an example, consider Chaos Monkey. Chaos Monkey’s intended function is to ensure that engineers design their services to withstand a virtual machine instance failing unexpectedly, by increasing their exposure to this failure mode. But Chaos Monkey also has the unintended effect of recycling instances. For teams that deploy very infrequently, their service might exhibit problems with long-lived instances that they never notice because Chaos Monkey tends to terminate instances before they hit those problems. Now imagine declaring an extended period of time where, in the interest of reducing risk(!), no new code is deployed, and Chaos Monkey is disabled.

When you turn something off, you never know what might break. In some cases, nobody in the system knows.

Plus c’est la même chose, plus ça change

I’m re-reading a David Woods’s paper titled the theory of graceful extensibility: basic rules that govern adaptive systems. The paper proposes a theory to explain how certain types of systems are able to adapt over and over again to changes in their environment. He calls this phenomenon sustained adaptability, which we contrasts with systems that can initially adapt to an environment but later collapse when some feature of the environment changes and they fail to adapt to the new change.

Woods outlines six requirements that any explanatory theory of sustained adaptability must have. Here’s the fourth one (emphasis in the original):

Fourth, a candidate theory needs to provide a positive means for a unit at any scale to adjust how it adapts in the pursuit of improved fitness (how it is well matched to its environment), as changes and challenges continue apace. And this capability must be centered on the limits and perspective of that unit at that scale.

The phrase “adjust how it adapts” really struck me. Since adaptation is a type of change, this is referring to a second-order change process: these adaptive units have the ability to change the mechanism by which they change themselves! This notion reminded me of Chris Argyris’s idea of double-loop learning.

Woods’s goal is to determine what properties a system must have, what type of architecture it needs, in order to achieve this second-order change process. He outlines in the paper that any such system must be a layered architecture of units that can adapt themselves and coordinate with each other, which he calls a tangled, layered network.

Woods believes there are properties that are fundamental to systems that exhibit sustained adaptability, which implies that these fundamental properties don’t change! A tangled, layered network may reconfigure itself in all sorts of different ways over time, but it must still be tangled and layered (and maintain other properties as well).

The more such systems stay the same, the more they change.

Adapting to a crunch: the Mask Match story

I just got back from Strange Loop, and my favorite talk was Tech When the Sky is Falling: Tools for Crisis Response by Emma Ferguson and Colin Schimmelfing. I’m going to use this talk to illustrate one of the ideas in David Woods theory of graceful extensibility. The idea is that a system needs to deploy, mobilize, or generate capacity when it is at risk of saturation.

Back in March 2020, frontline hospital workers dealing with COVID-19 patients were running short on N95 face masks. Hospitals simply didn’t have enough masks to supply their workers. This shortage of masks is a great example of what Woods calls a crunch, where a system runs short on some resource that it needs. When a system is crunched like this, it needs to adapt. It has to make some sort of change in order to get more of that resource so that it can function properly.

Woods lists three methods for getting more of a resource. If you’ve prepared in advance by stockpiling resources, you can deploy those stockpiles. If you don’t have those extra resources on hand, but your larger network has resources to spare, you can mobilize your network to access those resources. Finally, if you can’t tap into your network to get those resources, your only option is to generate the resources you need. In order to generate resources, you need access to raw materials, and then you need to do work to transform those raw materials into the right resources.

In the case of the mask shortages, the hospitals did not have sufficient stockpiles of N95 masks on hand, so deploying wasn’t an option. It turns out that there were many American households that happened to have N95 masks sitting in storage, and many of those households were willing to donate these unused masks to healthcare workers. In theory, hospitals could mobilize this network of volunteers in order to get these masks to the frontline workers.

There was a problem, though: hospital administrators refused to accept donated N95 masks because of liability concerns. So, this wasn’t something the hospitals were going to do.

Workers wanted masks, and people wanted to donate, but hospital admins wouldn’t let them

Fortunately, there was a loophole: frontline workers could bring in their own masks. Now, the problem to be solved was: how do you get masks from donors who had masks to the workers who wanted them?

Emma and Colin needed to generate a new capability: a mechanism for matching up the donors with the healthcare workers. The raw materials that they initially used to generate this capability were Google Sheets and Gmail for coordinating among the volunteers.

And it worked! However, they quickly ran into a new risk of saturation. Google Sheets has a limit of 50 concurrent editors, and Gmail limits an email account to a maximum of 500 emails per day. And so, once again, the team had to generate a new capability that would scale beyond what Google Sheets and Gmail were capable of. They ended up building a system called Mask Match, by writing a Flask app that they deployed on Heroku, and using Mailgun for sending the emails.

My favorite part of this talk was when Emma Ferguson mentioned that they originally just wanted to pay Google in order to get the Google Sheets and Gmail limits increased (their GoFundMe campaign was quite successful, so getting access to money wasn’t a problem for them). However, they couldn’t figure out how to actually pay Google for a limit increase! This is a wonderful example of what Woods calls brittleness, where a system is unable to extend itself when it reaches its limits. Google is great at building robust systems, but their ethos of removing humans from the loop means that it’s more difficult for consumers of Google services to adapt them to unexpected, emergency scenarios.