"Glad to have you with us, John," the O.R. analyst's friend responded. "Bonnie and I had the extra tickets, and we figured you'd enjoy it."

"We even got nice weather, and no terror alerts," the O.R. analyst's wife added. "I don't know about you, but I'm still feeling a little stressed out here."

"Jane, do you mean you're still paying all that much attention to the terror alerts?" Bonnie asked. "I think most of us have been tuning that stuff out, so we can get on with life and pay attention to what needs our attention. Isn't that what most healthy people do?"

"Interesting point," Jane mused. "I know, as a parent and school volunteer, that we try to encourage the kids to do that. But John's work involves homeland security, like a lot of O.R. people around town these days, so he's spending some time trying to figure out how to keep everyone paying attention." She turned to her husband, the O.R. analyst, with a sly grin. "That's not a secret, is it, dear?"

All of them laughed. Then Bonnie added, "Actually, there's an interesting question for you analytical types," she suggested. "Are you studying how much alertness-promoting activity is too much?"

John looked puzzled. "I'm not sure what you mean," he replied, "and I don't know of anyone who's studying anything like that. We do analyze, from time to time, whether a particular alert is likely to do more harm than good — like that announcement in California a couple of years ago about a general, vague threat to bridges. They decided afterward that the disruption of traffic was so costly it outweighed whatever benefit they got from everyone looking for unusual activity around bridges. But in general, I'm not sure what you're saying we should look at."

"Do you know who Louis Leakey was?" Bonnie asked.

"A famous British anthropologist, right?" John answered.

"Right," Bonnie confirmed. "Did you ever hear the story about hunting gazelles?"

John and Jane both shook their heads.

"He was trying to convince his colleagues that early people could have hunted game before they had much by way of organizational and communication skills. Many anthropologists were skeptical about how that could have happened. He wrote letters to several of them saying he had found proof of early hunters' ability to bring down game without much cooperation, and invited them to come visit him in Africa to see the evidence. Several of them took him up on it — I don't know, but I wouldn't be surprised if he offered to bet.

'So show us the evidence,' they demanded.

He replied, 'Come on out in the morning and you'll see it.'

"In the morning, he surprised them by greeting them in his shorts, boots and pith helmet, carrying a spear! 'Just stand over here and watch,' he instructed. He strode out into the field, making a fair amount of noise, and before long a gazelle jumped out of the bush and started running away from him. He didn't try to run with it — no man can outrun a gazelle, and he was over 40! But he did take a few noisy steps after it. The gazelle kept running, until suddenly it took a right-angle turn.

"It seems a gazelle has a territory it won't leave. This gazelle ran approximately in a circle, around and around and around, while Leakey stayed near the center of the territory and made just enough menacing moves to keep it running. After about three hours of this, the gazelle just dropped in its tracks from exhaustion. Leakey calmly walked over and speared it. End of argument!"

"That's quite a story," John acknowledged admiringly. "Are you saying we're in danger of diminishing security by issuing too many alerts and tiring people out?"

"We're certainly putting a drag on the economy by all the extra security procedures at airports and in some other forms of transportation," Charlie offered. "I'd like to think someone is making sure what we're doing is worth the trouble."

Bonnie added, "Remember, shortly after 9/11, Osama bin Laden said his real goal was to wreck the comfort and freedom we Americans enjoy. He didn't say he'd object to our helping him accomplish that, now did he? And have you noticed how he just releases another threatening taped message every so often, but doesn't seem to be doing much more?"

Jane added, "I've certainly seen tactics like that work in organizations. Keep somebody guessing about what threat is coming next, and before long they'll spend most of their time assessing threats and trying to respond, while their productivity drops to near zero. O.R. analysts, quality experts and organizational psychologists all talk about how people have to have a reasonable sense of security, and confidence that they know what to do, if they're to be effective. It's time we did the same sort of analysis at the national policy level, don't you think? And maybe you O.R. analysts could take the lead!"



Doug Samuelson is president of InfoLogix, Inc., a consulting firm in Annandale, Va., specializing in analysis of complex systems. He is also a former federal policy analyst and an adjunct faculty member at The George Washington University and the University of Pennsylvania.

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