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Arthur Waley -- who was Arthur Schloss until the outbreak of World War I led him to adopt his maternal grandfather's "non-alien" surname -- was the son of David F. Schloss, author of Methods of Industrial Remuneration, who, in 1891 coined the whimsical expression, the "Theory of the Lump of Labour."The Way that can be told of is not an Unvarying Way;
Arthur David [Schloss] Waley
The names that can be named are not unvarying names.
It was from the Nameless that Heaven and Earth sprang;
The named is but the mother that rears the ten thousand creatures, each after its kind.
Truly, "Only he that rids himself forever of desire can see the Secret Essences";
He that has never rid himself of desire can see only the Outcomes.
These two things issued from the same mould, but nevertheless are different in name.
This "same mould" we can but call the Mystery,
Or rather the "Darker than any Mystery,"
The Doorway whence issued all Secret Essences. -- Tao Te Ching, Chapter One, translated by Arthur Waley
Waley was a prolific translator of classical and historical Chinese and Japanese texts, including the Tao Te Ching and The Analects of Confucius. He translated the third saying of Book II of the Analects as:
Govern the people by regulations, keep order among them by chastisements, and they will flee from you, and lose all self-respect. Govern them by moral force, keep order by ritual and they will keep their self-respect and come to you of their own accord.As Peter K. Yu explained, "Under the Confucian tradition, the Chinese lived by the concept of li (rites), rather than the concept of fa (law). While li covered a whole range of political, social, and familial relationships that encompassed a harmonious Confucian society, fa represented penal laws that were associated with punishment and the maintenance of public order." Waling discussed the meaning and role of ritual at length in his introduction to the Analects, observing:
Anthropologists are or were in the habit of trying to discover the 'real reasons' why particular injunctions or prohibitions were imposed among primitives. If the reason given by the people themselves seemed to them trivial or unintelligible they set it down as a rationalization or, alternatively, attributed it to secretiveness regarding the "real reason."I like that. No 'real reason' for ritual acts. They are just something that people keep doing. There is no doubt some intrinsic pleasure, satisfaction or relief that comes from the ritual acts' tautological appropriateness. One feels one has done the "right" thing when one has done the rite thing!
The truth, however, is that there is no 'real reason' for ritual acts. In any community where the performance of such acts is linked to a general system of thought, they will be explained in terms of that system. If the system changes, as frequently happen, without disturbing the ritual acts, they will be reinterpreted in terms of the new system.
Waling's paraphrase of the first chapter of the Tao indicates a similar concern to Confucius with the inability of codified law -- accompanied by appropriate rewards and punishments assigned to deeds beneficial or harmful to the State -- to fully grasp the essences of things. "The Realist," he explained, "...sees only the 'ultimate results'... never the essences themselves."
In his 1891 article, "Why Working Men Dislike Piece Work," Arthur Waling's father, David F. Schloss, reported a conversation with a laborer making washers on piece work. "I know I am doing wrong," Schloss quotes him. "I am taking away the work of another man. But I have permission from the Society." It was to those italicized passages that Schloss assigned the name, "the Theory of the Lump of Labour."
But recall the Tao Te Ching admonition about "names that can be named are not unvarying names." The remarkable thing about the laborer referred to by Schloss is that he was working in violation of, not in conformity to, the dictates of his supposed theory and, furthermore, he had permission from his union to do so. This unnamed washer-boring workman has the distinction of being one of the very few individuals whose spoken words (whether authentic or apocryphal) have been cited in evidence of a belief in the alleged lump-of-labour theory. By contrast, Tom Mann, a prominent agitator for the eight-hour day, "looked for the absorption of the unemployed by the distribution of work; while disclaiming the fallacy that there is only a fixed amount of work to be done."
In fact, disclaiming the alleged fallacy had been honed to a fine edge decades before Schloss coined the quaint 'lump-of-labour' sobriquet. The transactions of a miners' conference held at Leeds in 1863 contained an introductory report that astutely mocked the hypocrisy of political economists and employers who, on the one hand, decried the "ignorance and folly" of those who would attempt to regulate grievously long hours, which were supposedly the "infallible and inevitable result of demand and supply" while "constantly telling the men that wages must be reduced in consequence of over-supply [of labor]." Meanwhile, the coal-owners themselves maintained restrictions on the production of coal -- known as "the limitation of the vend" -- from 1771 to 1845.
"Unvarying" is the supposed quantity of labor to be performed, allegedly assumed by the typically anonymous offender against the fallacy taboo.
At the bottom of these contrivances for artificially increasing the amount of employment, there seems to lurk the fallacy of supposing that the labour required to be done in any department of trade, or in the country generally, is a fixed quantity; therefore, in order to secure an aliquot portion of it to the greatest number, the labour must be spread out thin. The teaching of sound Political Economy is directly the reverse of this.wrote the author of an article on Trades Unions in the Edinburgh Review of 1867.
The League is only an offshoot of the Unions... Their theory is that the amount of work to be done is a fixed quantity, and that in the interest of the operatives, it is necessary to spread it thin in order to make it go far.wrote the London correspondent to the New York Times in 1871.
The root of the mania which has had such a disastrous effect on the material prosperity of the country, and, above all, of the working classes, is the idea that the amount of work to be done is a fixed quantity, quite independent of any efforts which may be made to encourage and stimulate demand, and that, therefore, the best course is to spread it thin in order to make it go as far as possible.is how the author of an article in The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art put it in 1876.
"These people think that the amount of work to be done is a fixed quantity." "If we are to proceed on the assumption that the amount of work to be done is a fixed quantity..." "The theory of the Lump of Labour will be seen to rest upon the utterly untenable supposition that a fixed amount of work exists." "But there is not, as this argument assumes, a fixed Work-Fund, a certain amount of work which has to be done, whatever the price of labour." "The Leaders of the Federation said that there was a certain amount of work to be done in Atlantis..." "The notion is that there is exactly so much labor predetermined to be done; therefore, if machines are introduced, there is that much less for men to do..." "This means, roughly speaking, that there is a certain total number of hours of work to be done each week." "This view -- that the amount of work to be done is fixed -- is called the lump-of-labor fallacy." "Very similar to the general overproduction fallacy is the erroneous belief that there is only a certain amount of work in the community to be done..."
"At the bottom of these contrivances..."
"We have touched the fallacy which lies at the bottom of this whole system..."
"The real question which lies at the bottom of the dispute..."
"The root of the mania..."
Getting to the bottom of the fallacy claim took 15 years of patient, persistent inquiry. The economists who pedantically recite the fallacy claim and insist upon its authority know nothing of its origins (or, for that matter, its subsequent career)! The lump-of-labour label was a late Victorian addendum that alluded impishly to the colloquial term for a kind of labor sub-contracting, "lump work," which explicitly specified the amount of work to be done as a fixed quantity. Henry Mayhew chronicled the practice in his mid-century reportage on "London Labour and the London Poor":
It is this contract or lump work which constitutes the great evil of the carpenter's, as well as of many other trades; and as in those crafts, so in this, we find that the lower the wages are reduced the greater becomes the number of trading operatives or middlemen...So, if lump work was by definition "a fixed amount of work to be done" from whence does the "fallacy" arise? The lump-of-labour and its antecedent, lump work, turn out to be blind alleys. The origin of the fallacy claim had to do with the introduction of machinery rather than with piece-work or working time (not to mention immigration or early retirement). Dorning Rasbotham, a magistrate in the county of Lancashire, England, published a pamphlet, "Thoughts on the Use of Machines in the Cotton Manufacture," in 1780 in response to rioting that had occurred the previous year near Blackburn. In it, on page 18, occurs what appears to be the seminal instance of the fallacy claim, expressed in words unmistakably paraphrased by the now standard "fixed amount of work to be done":
"Lump" work, "piece" work, work by "the job," are all portions of the contract system. The principle is the same. "Here is this work to be done, what will you undertake to do it for?"
Although virtually forgotten today, Rasbotham's pamphlet was well-enough known in the early 19th century for his views to have been cited with admiration by John R. M'Culloch in an 1827 Edinburgh Review article on the cotton industry:"There is, say they, a certain quantity of labour to be performed. This used to be performed by hands, without machines, or with very little help from them. But if now machines perform a larger share than before, suppose one fourth part, so many hands as are necessary to work that fourth part, will be thrown out of work, or suffer in their wages. The principle itself is false. There is not a precise limited quantity of labour, beyond which there is no demand. Trade is not hemmed in by great walls, beyond which it cannot go. By bringing our goods cheaper and better to market, we open new markets, we get new customers, we encrease the quantity of labour necessary to supply these, and thus we are encouraged to push on, in hope of still new advantages. A cheap market will always be full of customers. Men will cross land and sea to go thither."
Dorning Rasbotham, Esq.
Dorning Rasbotham, Esq., a magistrate near Bolton, printed some time about the period referred to, a sensible address to the weavers and spinners, in which he endeavoured to convince them that it was for their interest to encourage inventions for abridging labour. The result has shown the soundness of Mr Rasbotham's opinion.... There is, in fact, no idea so groundless and absurd, as that which supposes that an increased facility of production can under any circumstances be injurious to the labourers.Unlike David Schloss's account, more than a century later, of a conversation with a workman who subscribed to the Theory of the Lump of Labour, Rasbotham's pamphlet presented no indication of who "they" were who allegedly said there was "a certain quantity of labour to be performed." But it would be rash to judge his argument solely on this singular lack of evidence. Indeed, a careful reading of the pamphlet reveals this supposedly "sensible address to the weavers and spinners" to be a smug, patronizing exercise in diminishing the actual grievances of the working population while extolling the abstract virtues of trade and technology detached from the circumstances of their employment by the rich. The author who on the first page styles himself "from the bottom of my heart, a Friend to the Poor," concludes his peroration berating his erstwhile "friends" for their improvidence and their propensity to "carry their money to the Alehouse" rather than seize the burgeoning opportunities for self improvement. The real core of Squire Rasbotham's argument, though, occurs in the fourth of seven enumerated principles:
It is the use of Machines, which chiefly distinguishes men in society from men in a savage state. Some have thought it no bad description of a human being, that he is a tool-making, or a machine-making animal. What are the most common instruments or furniture of our houses, but machines to shorten labour? What is an ax, a hammer, a saw, a pair of bellows, but machines for this end? [...] If we must go upon the principle of having no machines, we must pull them all down, and bruise our corn in Mortars. -- What do I say? The Mortar and Pestle are machines for shortening labour. We mull crush our corn between two stones, or beat out the flour with sticks.It is just such a disquisition as this Marx had in mind in the section in volume one of Capital titled, "The Theory of Compensation as Regards the Workpeople Displaced by Machinery," where he presented his parody of Bill Sikes, the villain from Oliver Twist, addressing the jury:
Gentlemen of the jury, no doubt the throat of this commercial traveler has been cut. But that is not my fault; it is the fault of the knife! Must we, for such a temporary inconvenience, abolish the use of the knife? Only consider! Where would agriculture and trade be without the knife? Is it not as beneficial in surgery as it is in anatomy? And in addition a willing help at the festive table? If you abolish the knife — you hurl us back into the depths of barbarism.Marx's point, of course, was that it was not the machines that threw people out of work, any more than it was the knife that cut the throat of the traveling salesman. It was how the machines were used by those who owned them that threw people out of work. Similarly, the argument advanced by M'Culloch, James Mill, Robert Torrens, Nassau Senior and John Stuart Mill -- that "all machinery that displaces workmen, simultaneously and necessarily sets free an amount of capital adequate to employ the same identical workmen" -- was groundless. Instead,
The labourers that are thrown out of work in any branch of industry, can no doubt seek for employment in some other branch. If they find it, and thus renew the bond between them and the means of subsistence, this takes place only by the intermediary of a new and additional capital that is seeking investment; not at all by the intermediary of the capital that formerly employed them and was afterwards converted into machinery.Note that Marx's specification of the necessity of "new and additional capital" is not at all the same thing as assuming that there is a fixed amount of work to be done. There is more work to be done; but whether or not it is done depends on additional investment. As Keynes phrased it some 60 years later, the economic system is not "self-adjusting" as assumed by "almost the whole body of organized economic thinking and doctrine of the last hundred years."
This self-adjusting, automatically-compensating for displacement doctrine made a notable appearance in William Stanley Jevons's speculations regarding The Coal Question and thus has implications for contemporary debates about energy consumption, conservation and climate change. Jevons maintained that, "It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth [emphasis in original]." He went on to explain:
If we are to subscribe to Marx's and Keynes's refutation of the self-adjusting, compensation principle, the 'good news' is that increasing energy efficiency doesn't necessarily lead to increased consumption, as the Jevons Paradox or 'rebound effect' implies. The bad news, though, is that it also doesn't apply to employment and whatever we might do to expand overall employment may increase the consumption of energy. This new dilemma may seem thornier than the Jevons Paradox itself unless we realize that it only applies to a conventionally codified conception of employment.As a rule, new modes of economy will lead to an increase of consumption according to a principle recognised in many parallel instances. The economy of labour effected by the introduction of new machinery throws labourers out of employment for the moment. But such is the increased demand for the cheapened products, that eventually the sphere of employment is greatly widened. Often the very labourers whose labour is saved find their more efficient labour more demanded than before.
William Stanley Jevons


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PITTSBURGH, Pa., August 25, 2014 – The St. Louis Cardinals announced prior to tonight's series opener in Pittsburgh that they have recalled left-handed pitcher Tyler Lyons from Memphis (AAA) and optioned infielder Greg Garcia to Springfield (AA).
Lyons, 26, is making his third appearance with the Cardinals this season. He is 0-3 with a 5.46 ERA in seven games (four starts) for St. Louis this season. Lyons has compiled an 8-2 mark with a 4.43 ERA in 14 starts for Memphis, including a six-game win streak from July 18 to August 14.
Lyons walked just 18 batters in his 81.1 innings pitched for the Memphis Redbirds and struck out 75. His last appearance came in a start on Aug. 19 at El Paso when he worked 6.0 IP.
Garcia has appeared in nine games for the Cardinals this season, collecting a pair of hits in 12 at-bats.
Lyons wears uniform # 70.

subset: commoncrawl


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With Pre-Order, you can purchase the latest items added to our store in advance of them arriving with us.
Your Pre-Order is prioritised (at no additional charge); meaning that as soon as the product arrives with us, we can wrap it straight back up; ready for collection via Click & Collect or despatch to you — it often never even hits the stock room shelves!
With Pre-Launch, the date when we expect to receive the product ourselves is still a little too hazy to be confident in accepting Pre-Orders.
So, instead, you can submit your email address against the item you are interested in and we will email you as soon as stock arrives on the system.
Estimated Delivery & Collection Dates are given on Pre-Order and Pre-Launch products. They are for indication purposes only and can change at any time without notice.
The dates we provide are based on indications given by our suppliers. Whenever we get updated information from our suppliers we will endeavour to update the Estimated Delivery & Collection Dates provided on product pages.
Hassle free returns
RETURNS----Our policy lasts 30 days.If 30 days have gone by since your purchase, unfortunately we can't offer you a refund or exchange.To be eligible for a return, your item must be unused and in the same condition that you received it. It must also be in the original packaging.To complete your return, we require a receipt or proof of purchase.Please do not send your purchase back to the manufacturer.There are certain situations where only partial refunds are granted: (if applicable)Book with obvious signs of useAny item not in its original condition, is damaged or missing parts for reasons not due to our error.Any item that is returned more than 30 days after deliveryRefunds (if applicable)Once your return is received and inspected, we will send you an email to notify you that we have received your returned item. We will also notify you of the approval or rejection of your refund.If you are approved, then your refund will be processed, and a credit will automatically be applied to your credit card or original method of payment, within a certain amount of days.Late or missing refunds (if applicable)If you haven't received a refund yet, first check your bank account again. Then contact your credit card company, it may take some time before your refund is officially posted. Next contact your bank. There is often some processing time before a refund is posted.If you've done all of this and you still have not received your refund yet, please contact us at firstname.lastname@example.com items (if applicable)Sale price items will be refunded at the price paid.Exchanges (if applicable)We only replace items if they are defective or damaged. If you need to exchange it for the same item, send us an email at firstname.lastname@example.com, and send your item to: Spokes Online, 55 High Street, Bagshot, GU19 5AH, United Kingdom.GiftsIf the item was marked as a gift when purchased and shipped directly to you, you'll receive a gift credit for the value of your return. Once the returned item is received, a gift certificate will be mailed to you.If the item wasn't marked as a gift when purchased, or the gift giver had the order shipped to themselves to give to you later, we will send a refund to the gift giver and he will find out about your return.ShippingTo return your product, you should mail your product to: Spokes Online, 55 High Street, Bagshot, GU19 5AH, United Kingdom.You will be responsible for paying for your own shipping costs for returning your item. Shipping costs are non-refundable. If you receive a refund, the cost of return shipping will be deducted from your refund.Depending on where you live, the time it may take for your exchanged product to reach you, may vary.


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Eight years ago, Dan Dickerson, who owns Control & Instrument Services in Worthington, Ohio, decided it was time to break from his job at a civil engineering firm, strike out on his own and start his own business. It paid off. Today, Dickerson's firm is one of Ohio's paramount field testing companies.
The bulk of Control & Instrumentation Services business involves water and wastewater treatment plants, servicing all the appropriate instrumentation at each customer, including flow meters, chart recorders, level transmitters, PH transmitters and telemetering devices.
Dickerson has insisted on high-quality work and the use of high-quality tools. "It takes quality tools to produce quality work," Dickerson said.
One of the "reliables" in Dickerson's tool bin is a unique new process calibrator that offers, not only flexibility, but versatility as well, providing automated features. The multifunctional unit calibrates temperature, pressure, voltage, current, resistance and frequency. Since it both measures and sources, Dickerson's crews can troubleshoot and calibrate with one tool.
"In our case, many times out in the field we need to simulate a flow meter to calibrate a chart recorder or to set levels. When we go out to calibrate a flow meter or chart recorder, we'll check the calibrations on the flow meter and read the milliamps coming out of the flow meter. Once we've calibrated that and it's all set, then we'll take it and reverse it and use the simulate mode to simulate full flow through that flow meter to calibrate the chart recorder and totalizer. So, we'll do a ten-minute time test on the unit simulating full flow, and that's how I check the calibration on the totalizer. It's tough, exacting work."
"We needed a calibrator that we could take into the field, accurately do our calibrations, and not have to worry if the readings were right. We found it in Fluke," Dickerson said.
"Until we got Fluke 743B calibrators, we had to lug two separate pieces of equipment with us into the field."
Most of these devices they are calibrating are out in the field and nowhere close to the service van. Therefore, two separate devices for calibration had to be carried to wherever the instruments were. It was time-consuming and cumbersome. A regular digital multimeter was used to read the milliamps coming out and a calibrator was used to generate a flow signal.
"Now we do it all with one instrument. It's a lot easier to handle. We even use it on frequency sound, too," Dickerson said.
The Fluke 743B contains menu-driven display guides that follow the technician through any task. Programmable calibration routines enable them to create and run automated as-found/as-left procedures to provide fast, consistent calibrations. In addition, the instrument allows technicians to transfer the results to a PC that saves the time of having to manually transcribe them when they return to the shop. Soft keys provide one-touch access to other functions such as task lists, scaling, min/max, stepping and ramping, and review memory.
AutoStep allows technicians to set the calibrator for a delayed start and a specific sequence of steps, so it can run unattended as a continuously varying test source. Differential pressure (DP) flow routines use a square root function to directly calibrate DP flow instruments. A built-in algebraic calculator with four functions and square root stores, recalls and performs calculations required for setting up instruments or evaluating data in the field. Dickerson's technicians can use the unit to set the source function to a calculated value with no need to carry a pencil and paper or a separate calculator.
"The Fluke 743B is a god-send for us," Dickerson said. "Not only have we eased our work flow. We've eased the effort with which we can calibrate. High-quality work with high-quality tools - they both lead to better business, and better calibrations."


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It's no surprise, of course, that Barack Obama was named Time's Person of the Year. In presidential election years, the winner of the election has been named POY in 12 out of 22 times, including 9 of the last 13 and 4 of the last 4. (That's original research; I counted them up myself. You're welcome.)
But I was surprised when I read the magazine's POY essay. I was expecting a glowing hagiography, reminiscent of when the just-elected Obama was sanctified by the Nobel Peace Prize committee. Instead I found a clear-eyed assessment of the re-election effort and why it was successful.
The passage I found most persuasive is set up by a statement from the head of the campaign's research team that "undecided voters… were making a very trust-based assessment between Obama and Romney.â€
This became the through line of the brutal and at times unfair Obama attacks on Romney — the cracks about car elevators, the specious mention of his potentially felonious Securities and Exchange Commission filings, the false claim that he supported an abortion ban without a rape exception, the endless harping on a Swiss bank account once held in his wife's name. It all spoke to a central message built around trust: One man, despite his failures, had voters like you in mind. The other man, by contrast, knew how to make a lot of money for people you will never meet.
Of course, Romney turned out to be Obama's biggest ally in that narrative.
Indeed he did. Romney's "47 percent" blatherings probably ended whatever chance he might have had at victory. As the left gleefully pointed out, he ended up with 47 percent of the popular vote.
One final thought: Is anyone else puzzled by Time's decision to dramatically darken the Obama "Person of the Year" cover photo? Didn't they learn their lesson in 1994?


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12 Incredibly Stunning Nature Macro Photography Wallpapers
Macro photography is an art form that gives us an unusually close look at a subject, and good macro shots can also make absolutely stunning wallpapers. That's exactly what we're sharing here, with twelve incredible macro shots of nature subjects generously shared from YJ Chua, a talented hobbyist photographer whose Mac setup we recently featured.
Important Licensing Restriction: Each of these images is offered to OSXDaily readers for personal use as wallpapers only. Any commercial usage of these images must be licensed from YJ directly here at 500px.
Click on any thumb nailed image to launch into larger sizes on Flickr. Once on flickr you'll want to select the resolution most appropriate for your device, then simply save it and make it your wallpaper. The maximum resolution size for each wallpaper ranges from 2422 x 1615 to 5184 x 3456, making them perfect for any Mac or Windows PC desktop background, or iPhone and iPad wallpaper, regardless of your display. Enjoy!
Are you a photographer and want to share some of your high resolution images as wallpapers with our readers? If so, send us an email!


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Discovery from Day One
A Discovery, and its activities, allows an organisation the chance to explore a problem space in more detail. Typically, this is to identify new product or market opportunities that may deliver customer value and rapidly test these opportunities for their effectiveness. For those new to the process, particularly those of us who don't come from an Experience Design background, Discovery can appear as an amorphous beast, with no easy connection between the activities and the broader process. Participants are often drawn from across an organisation, and most will have limited, if any, experience of the process. Being a developer, my first experience in Discoveries was as a prototyper, brought in to build and test promising ideas. However, I quickly learned that there is no one-size-fits-all pattern; what, when, or even if, I would be prototyping was also to be discovered, and as such, I would need to participate in unfamiliar activities to support an unfamiliar process.
The short time periods in which Discoveries are conducted mean that there is limited time to familiarise everybody with the process before we hit the ground running. This article aims to help those diving into Discovery by delving into its purpose and its process. It considers who comprises a Discovery project team, draws a broad overview of the process and key stages, and offers some advice for success, as well as highlighting some warning signs for when things may veer off course.
Why Discover?
Organisations conduct Discoveries to understand customer needs and to reduce uncertainty and risk. Ideally, these should be regular events in a product life-cycle to allow organisations to rapidly recognise and adapt to changing needs.
Understand Customer Needs
Organisations may not know much about their customers' needs. They may wrongly assume that they know many things about their customers' needs. They may understand their customers' needs, but not how they compare to each other. Or they may know all of this, but still be working off out of date knowledge.
By emphasising customer-centred activities, e.g. user research, collaborative design and user feedback, Discoveries ensure that we learn directly from customers. This enables a rich understanding of the problems customers face, what their priorities are, and a vision of product ideas that may solve their most important issues.
Reduce Uncertainty and Risk
An organisation may see an immediate business problem to solve with many potential solutions and implementations. Choosing one solution from the field without understanding its value to customers is likely to result in a long journey in the wrong direction before the mistake is realised.
Discovery activities seek to reduce uncertainty through research, synthesis and high-value, low-cost experiments. Experiments reveal not only the viability of solutions, but also provide further insights and opportunities for experimentation. By conducting Discoveries and testing ideas early with those people who primarily determine success or failure (i.e. customers), organisations help to mitigate the impact of failure.
All Together Now
A Discovery project team is a mix of people, with some members managing the process and coordinating activities, some from the organisation, and others brought in for specific skills such as research.
From the organisation, a diverse set of people from the front-line, those who directly engage with customers - or customers themselves - and those with experience in the domain are highly desirable. They bring a wealth of knowledge, direct experience and ideas. Business sponsors in the team provide very fast feedback loops and help to ensure that the project follows the stated goals. They often advocate for the work, drawing on customer insights learned through their participation in research and activities. Additionally, because Discoveries are conducted in very short time periods, securing somebody who can get the right people in the right places at short notice is essential.
Generally, being in a project team, you are expected to park your job at the door. This has two meanings: firstly, in the team you should be engaged in planning and execution of activities (day to day work while sitting next to the team is not really being part of the team), and secondly, you need to recognise and put aside preconceptions which constrain your thinking and limit your ability to empathise with customers. Be critical, but avoid being opinionated, and be open to a different perspective. For developers, Discoveries also serve to remind us that the systems we design and build are human-centred; what we consider as logical approaches don't necessarily align with the changing expectations of complex, varied, lovely, human behaviour. We get the opportunity to test our assumptions and modify our patterns to meet customer needs.
The Process
The Discovery process aims to transition from a business or customer problem through to one or more potential solutions.
Through research and cycles of design and testing, Discoveries transition from problems to potential solutions.
- We cannot determine potential solutions without having created ideas and measured their effectiveness through testing. Ideas form potential solutions.
- We cannot create ideas without understanding the customers who will make use of the solution. Customer insights drive ideas.
- An understanding of customers doesn't emerge from a void. We can make assumptions, but until we have conducted research, it's guesswork. Research findings lead to customer insights.
- Research needs boundaries and context from the business so that we know we are asking the right questions. Project goals guide research and determine findings.
- Without having clear, measurable goals supported by the business, we have no way of knowing what success for the project looks like. The business or customer problem determines the project goals.
I have called out the set of stages in this process as Define, Research, Analyse, Design and Test, each stage having different activities and outputs. Stages can often run in parallel, as new discoveries feed back into the process; it is very likely that some parts of the team will continue research while experiments are being conducted.
At the beginning of the Discovery, the project team should take the opportunity to clearly define the problem, the project goals and measures of project success.
It is likely that a problem will have been decided beforehand, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the right problem to solve. Early stages of a Discovery provide the chance to identify any concerns and possibly redefine the problem and scope.
Defining the scope directs our customer research, our design and our experiments. If the project goals aren't understood early on, it is difficult to structure research properly and to decide which insights are valuable. Ultimately the team may waste people's time with the wrong questions and struggle to deliver a good outcome.
The project team conducts research to understand the problem space in more depth. They draw information from multiple sources such as customer and subject matter expert interviews, call centre data and survey data, with the goal of understanding how customers engage with existing services, and where they supplement or replace with their own systems and workarounds.
Research findings drive customer insights and are the foundation for the rest of the Discovery. Without research, the team is working off gut feel, with no evidence to support them. It should be noted however, that having research data doesn't mean that stakeholders will agree with it. If they do not, recognise the experience that they bring; start with an assumption that they are correct and question how the data can be explained given their understanding. It may be that the research was not broad enough, or they may have access to information you don't, which will provide new avenues for research and opportunities for greater insights.
Having stakeholders involved in research, particularly interviews, keeps them engaged and gives them personal insights regarding their customers. This will make them stronger advocates for the work, enabling them to draw from their own experiences when they talk about it.
Having conducted research, the team needs to share their research findings with each other in order to make sense of it. Generally this involves a large space and plenty of post-it notes. The data is synthesised with common themes drawn out and opportunities for further research highlighted.
Identifying the patterns in the research allows the team to see common trends and gives a sense of the significance of issues; for example, where multiple customers are being blocked from achieving their goals. Business stakeholders and customers should be used to validate any patterns that emerge, explore them in more depth and to identify further opportunities for research.
Armed with an understanding of the key problems customers face, the set of customer insights are prioritised with the project team, business stakeholders and ideally, customers. Activities such as impact versus value mapping and group voting can be effective techniques and help to direct the team towards solving those problems which have the most cost.
Starting from the highest priority problems, the team conducts workshops to generate and explore potential ideas. Participants for these workshops should be drawn from a varied set of backgrounds in order to produce a breadth of ideas. It's critical that participants are aware that their role is purely to be part of a mass of idea generation. Framing the problems as 'how might we?' statements can help participants to focus on solutions. A candidate set of ideas will be selected as potential for experimentation based upon those which target the highest priority problem, offer high value insights and are low cost to test.
Until ideas are tested, their effectiveness is only theoretical. The project team would not want to offer solutions that turn out to be useless once delivered. To test ideas, the team designs experiments and a set of measures. Usually this will involve generating a hypothesis and determining the smallest experiment possible to prove or disprove it. As a result, experiments may vary from as simple as a drawing on a card to a functioning prototype. After testing, ideas may be thrown out and new ideas or changes to existing ideas generated. Additionally, further research insights and avenues to pursue may emerge and should be followed.
The results of successful experiments will potentially form part of the solution.
Advice For Success
Prepare in Advance
Read any provided documentation and agree upon a candidate set of activities for the project. The activities may change, but a general idea before entering the project will help. When the project begins, the full team should run through the process, activities, and role expectations.
Engage Stakeholders Early and Often
Stakeholders help define the project goals, provide business context and prioritise which insights to target first. Senior stakeholders should be identified up front and engaged early. Ideally, they should be present throughout the project, but in particular at regular showcases to ensure that they are engaged with the work and able to champion the project.
Clearly Define Goals
Project goals set the bounds of the project work and define what success is. They should be driven by the business and measurable. A single-sentence mission statement, summarising the goals, displayed at a highly visible space is an effective tool to remind everybody what the team is working towards.
Get Everybody Researching
Customer insights carry more weight and stories are more compelling when told by somebody who was actually there. Push for the whole team and stakeholders to be there, particularly for qualitative research. This will strengthen stakeholder engagement and advocacy.
Align Ideas and Experiments to Goals
Customer insights lead to great ideas, but when prioritising and selecting for experimentation, the team should make sure that the idea maps to one of the project goals. If not, then the experiment or the goals need to be reviewed.
Make Sure the Right People are Designing
Get as many people designing as you can. Idea generation is most effective with a large number of people from a broad set of backgrounds. Engage subject matter experts, business stakeholders, the full project team and customers in the design process.
Review, Document and Display all the Things
The team will regularly refer to previous research and insights during discussions, showcases and when communicating with stakeholders, so outcomes and insights from activities should be shared, documented and made visible to everybody as soon as possible. Ensure that everything is preserved so that it can be easily found after the project has finished.
Warning signs
No Clearly Defined Leader
The team may get a sense that something is wrong in the project, but not have a clear idea how to manage it. Without a defined leader, these problems may remain unresolved and given the limited amount of time, if not dealt with early, they may significantly impact upon the project. If there isn't a clear leader in the project the team should stop and choose one immediately.
Inexperienced Subject Matter Experts
Subject matter experts may be assigned to the project team who have limited experience in the organisation. The insights they provide may be poor and you will likely need to validate some of them with additional sources.
Absent Senior Stakeholders
Project success is contingent on senior stakeholder engagement. Minimal engagement, such as only at showcases, will likely cause course corrections and wasted work. Sending people as fill-ins is of limited value, particularly if they have no clout and no context.
If you are well into a project and you haven't met the senior stakeholders, you should assume that the project is in trouble. Push for them to be there more frequently, make sure they understand the risk to the project, but be accommodating: keep them in the loop, and if they can't make it to showcases, offer to walk them through it.
Project Goals are Wrong or not Clearly Defined
If people in the team have different opinions of scope, it may be because the goals are wrong or not defined enough. Good stakeholder representation in a project should help to identify this, as stakeholders are likely to call out when the goals don't match their expectations.
If the goals seem to be wrong, validate with a senior stakeholder and, if needed, get the right people in the room to redefine them.
Too Few, or Limited Variety of, Ideas
Ideas need to come from a variety of backgrounds. When there isn't enough diversity in the room, or there are too few people in sessions, the ideas will be similar or scarce, respectively. This should be raised as a project risk, as the result may be very few potential solutions at the end of the project.
The problem being considered may also be difficult to solve in the current scope of the project. In this case it may be worth re-prioritising the problems and selecting a new one.
No, or Limited, Access to Customers
Discovery requires research drawn from both quantitative and qualitative sources. Without direct access to customers, the team may be limited to analysing existing quantitative data and subject matter expert opinions.
Discoveries cannot be run without talking to customers. If there is no access available, it should be raised as a major project risk, as there will be no way to know if insights are real and if ideas are valuable to customers. If there is limited access, bringing stakeholders along to customer interviews is critical in order to highlight how valuable these insights are, and motivate them to find ways to get the team more access.
Disclaimer: The statements and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Thoughtworks.


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West Angelas Power Station
West Angelas Mine is part of a network of mines, ports and railway line set around 150km west of Newman in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. It comprises 15 iron ore mines, four independent port terminals, a 1700km rail network and related infrastructure. An integral part of this is West Angelas Power Station (WAPS), which supplies this network with reliable power.
Pilbara RegionStatus
Hamersley Iron Pty LtdThe WAPS comprises part of Rio Tinto Iron Ore's Power System Upgrade 330 Project, which has been developed to support a potential increase in iron ore production capacity to 353 Million Tonnes per annum.
WAPS has the capacity to export 80MW of power based upon the installation of two 40MW GE LM6000 PF Sprint Gas Turbine Generator (GTG) packages and all associated balance of plant. Additionally, the GTGs are dual fuel machines, fired on natural gas as the primary fuel, with the capability to run on diesel fuel as a back-up.
Project details
Our solution
UGL completed WAPS for Hamersley Iron Pty Ltd after the incumbent engineering, procurement and construction contractor went into receivership. Hamersley Iron Pty Ltd is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Robe Joint Venture, comprising Rio Tinto and Robe River Iron Associates.
With around 70% of the construction reported as completed by the other contractor, UGL's role was to undertake all construction completion and verification works, as well as all commissioning. Construction completion included the requirement to re-test 100% of the electrical installation that was done by the previous contractor, as well as completing all remaining:
- electrical
- instrumentation
- controls
- mechanical
- structural and
- civil works,
Scope of work
UGL's scope of works included:
- overall project management including procurement, construction management and commissioning services, safety, quality, environment and industrial relations
- construction completions
- commissioning
- completion of manufacturing data record documentation
- operations training
- design management
- health and safety management
- environmental management
- incident management.
Key plant and equipment:
- two 40 Mw GE LM6000 PF sprint gas turbine generators (GTGs)
- consumer gas system
- liquid fuel (diesel) storage and distribution
- water treatment plant
- fire detection and suppression
- workshop
- central control building.
Key successes
- developed strong client relationship based on solid performance
- fostered a strong 'One Team' approach with the client and stakeholder
- developed and implemented effective and transparent tools for managing communication and information transfer
- utilised a Completions Management System for clear, unambiguous progress measurement and reporting
- improved the quality of the end product


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Our eco-friendly reusable snack bags feature a lightweight cotton exterior and a food safe waterproof lining. These bags can replace plastic zip top bags to help reduce your use of single use plastics! The lining is rated for hundreds of washes, allowing lots of use for each bag. They're great for keeping sandwiches and snacks secure in a lunch box, or non-food items secure in a bag or purse. Just pop them in the washing machine when they get dirty OR turn them inside out and wipe clean!
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Foldover: The original Beego snack bag! This closure style is the most low-profile. To open, tuck your thumbs under the top flap and into the corners. Holding the top corners of the bag between your thumbs and pointer fingers, invert the top flap, turning it inside-out so that the flap now rests over your pointer fingers, using them to press the corners out so the bag fully opens. This method may take some practice at first. This closure style allows for a bag with simpler production and no extra plastic, if that's your jam. This style is also great for young kids to get into on their own. Snaps: A more accessible closure method for anyone who may find the foldover bags complex to maneuver. We use professional quality plastic snaps that are durable enough to last the life of the bag. Plastic snaps are lightweight, hypoallergenic, and won't rust when washed!
Mini: 5.5 x 4 inchesSnack: 7 x 5 inchesSandwich: 7 x 7.25 inches
Outer fabric: 100% lightweight quilting cottonLining: Waterproof, food-safe ProCareCare: Wash before first use. Machine wash cold, tumble dry low or medium. Iron cotton side on low heat if desired. Do not expose waterproof lining to high heat (iron or food).


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Course excellent, adjustment postponed: Mars Science Laboratory mission status report
- Date:
- December 2, 2011
- Source:
- NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory
- Summary:
- Excellent launch precision for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission has forestalled the need for an early trajectory correction maneuver, now not required for a month or more.
- Share:
Excellent launch precision for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission has forestalled the need for an early trajectory correction maneuver, now not required for a month or more.
That first of six planned course adjustments during the 254-day journey from Earth to Mars had originally been scheduled for 15 days after the mission's Nov. 26 launch on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. Now, the correction maneuver will not be performed until later in December or possibly January.
"This was among the most accurate interplanetary injections ever," said Louis D'Amario of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. He is the mission design and navigation manager for the Mars Science Laboratory.
Engineers deliberately planned the spacecraft's initial trajectory to miss Mars by about 35,000 miles (56,400 kilometers). This precaution protects Mars from Earth's microbes, because the Centaur upper stage of the launch vehicle, which is not thoroughly cleaned the way the spacecraft is, leaves Earth on the same trajectory as the spacecraft. The planned trajectory ensures that the Centaur will not hit Mars.
The launch put the spacecraft on an actual trajectory missing Mars by about 38,000 miles (61,200 kilometers). Planned trajectory correction maneuvers will put the spacecraft on course and on timing to land at Mars' Gale Crater on Aug. 6, 2012, Universal Time (evening of Aug. 5, Pacific Daylight Time).
The spacecraft experienced a computer reset on Tuesday apparently related to star-identifying software in the attitude control system. The reset put the spacecraft briefly into a precautionary safe mode. Engineers restored it to normal operational status for functions other than attitude control while planning resumption of star-guided attitude control.
Also on Tuesday, thrusters were used as planned to slow the spacecraft's rotation rate from 2.5 rotations per minute to 2.05 rotations per minute. Telecommunications are active at a downlink rate of 25 kilobits per second. Electrical output from the cruise stage solar array is 800 watts. Thrusters warmed by catalytic bed heaters were originally warmer than expected, but use of the heaters has been reduced to keep the thrusters at intended temperatures.
As of 9 a.m. PST (noon EST) on Friday, Dec. 2, the spacecraft will have traveled 10.8 million miles (17.3 million kilometers) of its 352-million-mile (567-million-kilometer) flight to Mars, and will be moving at 7,500 mph (12,000 kilometers per hour) relative to Earth and at 73,800 mph (118,700 kilometers per hour) relative to the sun.
The Mars Science Laboratory mission will use its car-size rover, Curiosity, to investigate whether the selected region on Mars has offered environmental conditions favorable for supporting microbial life and favorable for preserving clues about whether life existed.
JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Science Laboratory mission for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington.
More information about Curiosity is online at: http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ .
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Materials provided by NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
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