Shewhart, Shannon, and an Anesthesiologist
Over the past few years, industry leaders have complimented me as a boundary spanner—someone who finds connections between things. While researching Dr. Deming, I am always blown away by these little nooks and crannies of information related to his journey. In one of these nooks, I found Doris Quinn, a frequent travel companion of Dr. Deming.
I originally heard about Ms. Quinn years ago, but it was only recently that I tried to track her down. This was no easy task, as Doris Quinn had long been retired. After a fair amount of "internet spelunking", I found her nestled away in New Hampshire. She happily agreed to record a podcast with me where we discussed her travels with Dr. Deming
(https://www.buzzsprout.com/1758599/episodes/8411505).
When a friend and colleague suggested there could be a connection between Dr. Shewhart and Claude Shannon, it was time to put back on my spelunking hat and get to work. I searched everywhere to find this potential connection. It wasn't until I stumbled onto PubMed where I found a short reference to an article called "Synthesizing Shewhart and Shannon." My eyes immediately lit up. I thought I had struck gold. The only problem was that this particular paper wasn't online. That wouldn't stop me, though. I pinged my good friend Richard Cook; an anesthesiologist turned DevOps expert. There would be weeks where he would tell me how he was going into OR the next day and running a DevOps/Incident retrospective the following day, all while being in his 70's. He is by far the most extraordinary person that I know. Anyway, Richard searched for the paper for me, but the article wasn't in electronic format. Another dead end.
I'm not the type to give up quickly, so I once again put on my spelunking hat. I found some phone numbers for the paper, so I called and left messages. About a month later, I got a letter from the author, Dr. John Gage, a retired anesthesiologist and educator from Harvard University School of Medicine, MD. Looking through his research catalog, Dr. Gage wrote several papers on Java, Open Source, and Claude Shannon. I was excited to talk to another doctor who had an interest in IT. However, when we spoke, he didn't remember writing any of those papers. Instead, he started talking about many people with the last name Willis, asking me if I knew any of them. He followed that up by demanding to know my position on Donald Trump. Let's say he approved of my answer. At one point, I thought maybe this was a prank return call. The one thing that I struggled to get him to concentrate on was the paper that I was looking for. After about 30 or 40 minutes, he still couldn't remember writing the essay. However, before we hung up, he said he would go to the university library to look for it. Overall, he was a pleasant person to talk to, but it seemed as if he had some early (late) stage of confusion thing going on. I was almost sure that I would never hear from him again and never find this unique possible missing link (Shewhart and Shannon).
To my surprise, two weeks later, though, I opened my inbox to find xeroxed copies of the two papers he wrote about Shannon and Shewhart. At long last, I obtained the papers I wanted. Unfortunately, there was no direct connection between Shannon and Shewhart. I couldn't find anything talking about the two collaborating during their times at Bell Labs. However, it gave me an idea to create a "The Ghost in the Machine" presentation at the 2021 TOC Conference in June.
