The Fire Chief

The Fire Chief

Imagine an oil well on fire. Flames are shooting up, and in theory, you could put them out with one huge hose. But to do that, you'd need so much pressure that the hose would be impossible to control. It would be as dangerous as the fire.

A good fire chief wouldn't try. Instead, he'd put firefighters all around the blaze. Each one uses an ordinary hose at a safe pressure. Any one of them is too weak to matter.

Then he gives the signal. All the hoses aim at the same point in the center of the fire. The streams meet there. At that point, they behave like one huge hose, strong enough to knock the fire down—without any single hose ever being extreme or risky.

How do you design work so that many small, safe efforts line up and hit the problem at the same moment, instead of betting everything on one big, dangerous push?