Organized Uncertainty

The aboveground portion of the Green Line was shut down for days recently as a series of snowstorms crippled the MBTA. SMG’s Michelle Barton says there are lessons to learn from the T’s handling of the crisis. Photo by Cydney Scott

If the MBTA wants to avoid another meltdown, it might want to take a cue from people who run nuclear power plants and other “high reliability organizations,” says Michelle Barton, a School of Management assistant professor of organizational behavior.

Operators of nuclear plants, aircraft carriers, and other highly complex systems are “very focused on noticing small discrepancies” before they become big problems, Barton says. “They treat their near misses as incredibly valuable information, as indicators of the health of their system. They say, ‘Yeah, OK, we did something right, because we avoided a disaster, but let’s look at what happened to begin with, what went wrong, how could we have caught that even earlier?’”

Amid a record-setting series of back-to-back snowstorms and frigid temperatures that have paralyzed the Boston metropolitan area at times this winter, the MBTA has been forced to shut down service entirely, truncate routes, substitute buses for trolleys, and cancel many commuter rail trips. Among the reasons the T cites are an aging fleet of cars, equipment breakdowns, and snow-covered tracks.

Barton emphasizes that she’s not a transportation expert and that her knowledge of Boston’s recent snow-driven crisis on the roads and rails comes primarily from the media and her own regular 30-minute commute, which quadrupled recently. But she studies how groups such as wilderness firefighters, military units, and high-tech entrepreneurs respond to uncertain, fast-moving events, so she does see some commonalities.

Recent events have been so disastrous for the MBTA in part because the system is both highly complex and “tightly coupled,” she says.

Barton uses this analogy: “You’re on a highway with a whole lot of cars. When there’s not a lot of traffic, they’re not tightly coupled, so if one driver slams on the brakes, it doesn’t really affect the car a quarter-mile behind him. But when those cars are tightly bunched together, if one driver just taps the brakes, it immediately affects the car behind him, which immediately affects the car behind him,” and so on.

The transit system is like those tightly packed cars, she says. “If one car is disabled, then the car behind it has a problem. Or if one signal is disabled, the car trying to use that line can’t move through. The interdependencies are so close to all the other components of the system that you just don’t have a lot of time or slack to do anything about it. So if one thing goes wrong, the effects are just really rapid. And then of course it feeds on itself, because now you have another problem, which causes another problem, which causes another problem.”

The complexity of the current problem—combining snow removal, traffic, and the MBTA’s issues, along with many different governments and boards—suggests that it may be hard to focus people’s understandable anger about it in a way that contributes to a solution, Barton says.

“People are frustrated. They can’t get to work, they can’t get to school, they can’t get their kids where they need to be, and so people look for somebody to blame,” she says, “but the reality is, it’s a systemic problem. It’s not something where you can say, these people did something wrong, boom, and if they’d done it right, none of this would have happened.”

So what does an organizational perspective suggest going forward? Close study and remedy of those everyday problems and near misses, like the nuclear plants and carriers, for starters. Barton relates a well-known story in her field, about a mechanic on an aircraft carrier who reported to his superiors that he had left a small tool on deck, and all flight operations were suspended until it was found. Instead of being punished for his mistake, the mechanic was rewarded for reporting it, thus clearing up a small problem that could have caused a big one later.

The media have been reporting that the MBTA has major plans for updating its fleet and for other expensive projects, Barton notes, “but what do you do in the meantime? How do you deal with the day-to-day glitches? Do you invest in continuing to maintain the system, or do you keep saying, it’s a small glitch, we got past it, so it’s fine, and we’ll fix it when we get to our next big cycle? High-reliability organizations and entrepreneurs and wildland firefighters don’t ignore those things and don’t wait for the natural stopping points.”

Barton says that she doesn’t know enough about the situation to say that the MBTA is not doing this, “but the signal goes out, how important is this, how much do we care, what are we going to do about it? So I think maybe the reason why in this case our transit system is experiencing so many problems is not because people weren’t aware of them or didn’t care; it’s because we made choices as to where to put our money, time, and effort. Whether they were good or bad choices I can’t say.”

Any ideas for what to do mid-crisis? Barton recommends looking for what’s working, like a particular system for plowing streets in one suburb, and spreading it around. Previous, routine solutions tend not to work in crises. Take note of solutions that are out there, even from new sources and people close to the problem: frontline workers, commuters, the private sector. “Put the emphasis not just on putting out fires,” she says, “but on a rapid cycle of learning. Find out what’s working and flood that through the system.”

And given the scope of the challenges nature presented, she says, even the best efforts might not have prevented the crisis: “Even if we had flawless equipment and signals and so forth, we’d still be dealing with unprecedented problems. You just have to make sure you’re learning really fast.”

Joel Brown can be reached at jbnbpt@bu.edu.