Unwrapped: Scaling of actions and things

     I used to love watching a program called “Unwrapped” (the fact that it was hosted by a Marc Summers (no relation that I know of) didn’t hurt). The program (available via some streaming services) took the viewer into the factory to see how some everyday household, or food, item was produced to be able to sell it, and distribute it, nationwide or even globally. (There was also an Unwrapped 2.0 which I never saw.)

     I have a favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe — it comes from a Mennonite cookbook “More-With-Less Cookbook”. It requires a number of ingredients (surprise!). A cup of this, a teaspoon of that, 2 eggs, and so forth all get blended into the dough before it gets put into the oven. It takes a while to put together and doing it well takes practice. But, anyone can do it in their kitchen with the right tools and ingredients.

     Let’s ramp up “one level”. Now I would be cooking for 200 people at a food kitchen for the homeless. My recipe makes about four dozen. Saying two cookies a person, I would want to make about 400 cookies or about 8 times the recipe. Every cup becomes a half gallon. Two eggs increases to 16, and a teaspoon becomes about 2 2/3 tablespoons. This is a lot of material to work with but the biggest adjustment is with the tools. larger bowls are necessary and it is no longer possible to do all the mixing by hand (my sons still can’t understand why I mix by hand — but I like the tactile feedback of doing it by hand). Larger pans are also needed and a second oven would be very useful.

     The program “Unwrapped” takes this scaling a huge number of an increase. A cookie factory may make 40,000 cookies a day. If they used my recipe (unlikely, but not impossible) each cup would increase to 50 gallons. They would be using 1600 eggs (around 17 gallons), and the teaspoon would increase to 800 teaspoons (about 17 cups or a bit more than 2 gallons). European recipes use weights for much of a recipe and, perhaps, that might make more sense to many of you — but I am used to the US measurement system (though it does make scaling numbers harder).

     At any rate, for 40,000 cookies a day the standard mixing and baking processes are no longer adequate. Huge industrial mixers are needed along with pipelines filled with powders and liquids. Ovens turn into line ovens where a continuous stream of unbaked cookies are deposited on a conveyer belt and pop out of the other end of the very long (perhaps 50 feet or more) oven baked. Decorations require special mass tools. Of course, for this scale, one is also dealing with packaging and distribution — but I’m not going to tackle that here. (I think logistics — making everything occur as it needs to happen — is fascinating, and we all make use of it every day — but that is still not today’s topic).

     So far, we have only worked with the process of expansion. We have not looked at all the ramifications — or consequences — of this ramping up. We have to have herds of dairy cows and daily deliveries. Trucks of sugar are needed to put into the storage bins and pipelines. Acres of fields are needed to grow the spices, wheat, cocoa, and the various other ingredients.

     Say that we shift from cookies to loaves of bread. Recipes vary but 4 cups of flour in a loaf of bread is not unreasonable. The population of the US is presently about 335 million. Let’s just say (for estimates sake) that each person eats the equivalent of 1/4 loaf of bread per day (it may be in the form of pita, or tortillas, or whatever). That becomes 84 million loaves of bread per day. 84 million loaves boosts the number of cups of flour back to that 335 million cup level. That ends up at about 92 million pounds of flour. Each bushel of wheat produces around 50 pounds of flour. There are about 37 bushels of wheat produced per acre (on average). 92 million pounds of flour becomes 1,840,000 bushels which are produced from 49,730 acres of wheat. Almost 50,000 acres of wheat are needed per day to meet US needs for that 1/4 loaf per person.

     In the US, 55.9 million acres (approximately) of land are devoted to wheat farming. In a year, about 18 million (50,000 times 365.25) of those acres translates to 1/4 loaf of bread for each person for each day of the year. We use wheat for other than just bread and we also feed grain (more likely corn but wheat is not impossible) to animals. Some of the statistics I have read indicate that we use about 4/5 of the wheat grown internally and export the remaining 1/5.

     Is your mind overwhelmed by the effects of scaling? Mine certainly is.

     I have used an innocuous, everyday, item to illustrate the effects of scaling. However, scaling applies to everything. With 335 million people in the US and about 8 billion on the planet. Everything we do becomes part of something much, much, larger. 25 pounds of trash per week per household becomes around 2,500,000,000 pounds of trash per week for the US. One vote expands into part of a block of millions of people. One new pair of shoes per person per year gives us 335 million new pairs of shoes per year in the US.

     There is a saying that is attributed to a First Nation that one should always “tread lightly upon the earth”. This is maintaining an awareness of what we do and how it scales if everyone does it. (There is another saying that says we should “look at the effects to the seventh generation” — saying that our decisions affect the future and we should keep that in mind.) We may say, “oh my part of this is so small it doesn’t make a difference”. But, with scaling, it does.

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Walking the Shadow Line: Make a strength of your weakness

 

     I have always had fun with personality tests. Do I believe in them? Maybe. They can give you a doorway into examining yourself. Just don't let them persuade you to put yourself into a tidy box. None of us are that tidy. If a test says you are A or B -- it really means that, on that day and in that environment and with known others evaluating the results, you have answered in a way such that the result is A or B. The people who administer the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI) say specifically that your results may vary depending on when you take the test and your environment. If you are doing the test for the office, you should take the test in the office.

     At any rate, whether you think the MBTI (or Enneagram or HEXACO or Berkman or ...) is valid or not, at best it can only give you the DOMINANT aspect at that time and in that environment.

     For example, I am INF/TJ in the MBTI. Each of the four attributes (Introversion/Extroverstion, iNtuitive/Sensing, Thinking/Feeling, and Judicial/Perceiving (some say Judging -- I think that word carries too much implied baggage)) are the labels on the ends of four sliding scales. Sometimes, along with the acronym that you end up with, they will give you a percentage score as to just how strongly you tend towards that attribute. For myself, I usually test right in the center between Feeling and Thinking, so I usually put INFJ down if it is asked for but the descriptions for an INTJ sometimes match me.

     Not only does your environment make a difference in your results, but the people you are with will affect the way an attribute (assuming you believe in the validity of such -- not all do) manifests. For example, I am moderately Judicial. I aim for the goal, the result, the destination. My wife tests out as a moderate to heavy Perceiving personality. For her, it is the journey that matters, learn and enjoy on the trip and arrive, or not, depending on whatever. When we are together, the urge is for me to move farther towards the Judicial endpoint to "balance" her Perceiving nature. I move in to "take care of the details" while she looks out the window and says "stop here, I want to look at those flowers".

     But, a large part of being in a relationship is to value what the other brings with them. Perceiving brings along with it an ability to be flexible. So, over the years, I have deliberately worked on myself to appreciate the value of being flexible. Is that my inherent, comfortable, state -- no. But, I can work with it much better than I could 25 years ago.

     And that is true for each of the sliding scales or whatever personality inventory you might be taking. All values are a strength within a certain situation. An Introvert might find it much easier to sit in an office and focus on a bunch of data to come up with useful results while an Extrovert may find it so easy to present the results to a bunch of people and bring energy to the group and the project.

     Without conscious work on being able to incorporate the "other side" of the personality scale -- each is weaker than they could be. That introvert may not be able to even consider the idea of presenting results within a group of strangers while the extrovert finds the idea of sitting down, by themself, with a bunch of data, and no external interactions, to be boring to exhaustion. But an introvert who has trained themselves to TEMPORARILY (within that limited time and situation) make use of the extrovert's characteristics will be a much more balanced, and strong individual (and, afterward, probably will need hours in a room by themselves with a good book). Someone who can work through the data, find the results, AND present them to a group in a comfortable manner? I know -- hire them!