Why this volume exists
Operations rarely fails the way anyone warns you about. It fails while every step is defensible, every person is working hard, and every process is running as designed. There is no incident to review and nobody to manage out. There is just a company that is extremely busy and has not moved in three years. I wrote this volume because I kept meeting operators in exactly that position who could not point to a single thing that had gone wrong.
The case it opens with
In 1921 a naturalist measured a column of army ants that had walked into a closed circle. Twelve hundred feet around. Two and a half hours a lap. They carried their eggs the whole way, because as far as any individual ant could tell, the colony was moving house.
Where the evidence went against me
Every retelling of that story I had encountered, including the version I had used myself, treats it as a parable about blind followership. When I went back to the 1921 source, it does not say what the retellings say. Correcting it changed the argument rather than decorating it. The ants were not being stupid. They were following a rule that works everywhere except in the one situation they were actually in. That is a far harder problem than stupidity, and it is the problem competent operators actually have.
What was cut
The volume ends with a page listing what was checked, what was cut, and why. Several frameworks I had used for years did not survive being traced to a source and are not in the book. Four tests that detect a closed loop from the inside did survive, and they are the practical core of it.
Where to read it
Principles of Practice, Volume I: Mind. Twelve Hundred Feet, and the Loops That Look Like Progress Published by the National Board of Operations Professionals. The publisher page for this volume carries the full description and how it maps to the standard.
Operating notes and
standards drafts
No cadence promises, only when there is something worth sending.