I used to work in Aerospace Engineering and the site that I worked at was going through one of its many significant transitions. This normally resulted in either a call for volunteers to take early redundancy or that we’d won a contract and the profits were dependant upon a workflow that we weren’t used to.
One of the key characteristics of all of these times was the increase in activity that employed extra people to understand the statistics and their relationship to each other. I could never understand why this was the case until someone pointed out to me that in order to understand how efficient (or inefficient) a system is you have to understand what is going on.
