Leadership Lessons and Highlights
Leadership Challenges: Murphy’s Laws of Combat
By Steve Leonard
“Friendly fire isn’t” – Murphy’s Laws of Combat
A c ouple of weeks ago, I was participating in a student learning symposium led by our Center for Teaching Excellence. An annual event intended to sharpen our skills for assessing learning across the university, it strikes a familiar enough cord that I never miss it. As someone who was long ago baptized in the fires of measures of performance (MOPs) and measures of effectiveness (MOEs), assessment is in the blood. Today, I spend more time with objectives and key results (OKRs) and key performance indicators (KPIs); I may be measuring student learning instead of long-range fires, but the song remains the same. During our most recent symposium, we were wargaming (my term, not theirs) the processes that support assessments, accreditation, and even faculty performance. All of that seemed straightforward enough. Then the facilitators introduced The Book of Mortimer. In this game, Mortimer was someone who always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, wreaking havoc on our brilliant plans. Mortimer was a familiar character. He was Murphy.
MURPHY’s Law Murphy – or what we know today as “Murphy’s Law” – was the brainchild of Edward Murphy, an American aerospace engineer, Air Force captain, and West Point graduate whose frustrating experiences during rocket sled tests as part of the MX981 project at Edwards Air Force Base between 1948 and 1949 led him to observe, “If there are two or more ways to do something and one of those results in a catastrophe, then someone will do it that way.” The anecdotes that survive from the members of the MX981 team cast a portrait of a unique character in Edward Murphy. Following a failed trial run of the sled in June 1949, during which sensors had been installed incorrectly and some wired backwards, Murphy grumbled about his assistant, “If that guy has any way of making a mistake, he will.” According to Murphy’s son, Robert, his father had later commented, “If there’s more than one way to do a job, and one of those ways will result in disaster, then he will do it that way.”
“Anything that can go wrong will go wrong” The common form we know today as Murphy’s Law – “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong” – was in common use by the time Arthur Bloch published his 1977 book, Murphy’s Law, and Other Reasons Why Things Go Wrong.
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