In 1909, a man named Agner Krarup Erlang walked into the Copenhagen Telephone Company. He wanted to measure the wait. He watched the women at the switchboards and he watched the wires. He saw that people called and they waited and sometimes they hung up.

He wrote down the math for the delay. He created the first equations for the queue. He thought the queue was a tool for efficiency but he did not see how it could become a coffin for an emergency. The math was clean and the lines were straight. The world took his math and they built every modern service desk upon it. They built a system where the first person in the line is the first person served and they called it fair.

The Smell of Ozone at 3 AM

There was a guard in a building last year. The building was large and the guard was observant. He walked the halls at three in the morning and he felt a draft of heat. The heat did not come from a vent and it did not come from a heater. It came from a grey metal panel on the wall of the third floor.

The guard touched the panel and the metal was hot. He did not have the key to the panel and he did not have a radio that reached the lead engineer at that hour. He opened his digital reporting tool and he typed a note. He described the heat and he described the smell of ozone. He hit the button to submit the report and the report entered the company queue.

The queue was a shared space for all maintenance. It was a digital list and it was long. At the top of the list was a request for a new desk chair. Below that was a note about a flickering light in the cafeteria. Below that was a ticket for a printer that jammed every Tuesday.

The guard’s note about the hot panel entered at the bottom. It was the forty-seventh item in the list. It placed the life of the building behind a request for office supplies because the queue was blind.

I spent three hours yesterday reading about the history of the telegraph and the way messages were sorted in the old hubs. A clerk would take a stack of papers and he would move them from one pile to another. If a message was marked urgent it might move to the top but if the clerk was tired he might miss the marking.

We have replaced the tired clerk with an algorithm but the algorithm is often more rigid than the man. We call this the commons of priority. It is a space where everyone shares the same path and no one has the authority to move aside.

Risk as a Predator

The problem with a flat queue is that it treats time as a constant. It assumes that a request for a lightbulb will be the same request two hours from now. It assumes that a hot panel will wait for its turn. But risk is not a constant and it is a predator.

Risk grows while it waits. The lightbulb stays dark and the chair stays broken but the panel continues to heat. The insulation on the wires begins to melt and the molecules begin to change. The concern of the guard ages at the speed of bureaucracy while the physical threat matures at the speed of physics.

Elena Z. is a planner for wildlife corridors and she understands the movement of herds across dangerous roads. She says that a 4% decrease in the width of a crossing path leads to a 32% increase in the mortality of the animals.

It is not about the average speed of the animals and it is not about the total area of the forest. It is about the bottleneck. When the path is too narrow the animals stop and they bunch together and they become targets for the wolves. A shared queue is a bottleneck for safety. When the urgent message is bunched together with the routine request it becomes a target for the disaster.

We think that digital tools solve the problem of distance and they do. The guard’s note traveled across the building in a second. But the digital tool did not solve the problem of importance. It created a world where everything looks the same.

They use the same font and they use the same colors. The manager arrives at eight in the morning and he sees forty-seven tasks. He starts at the top because he wants to be organized and he wants to be efficient. He orders the desk chair and he calls the printer technician. He is doing his job but the building is preparing to burn.

A property owner needs Fire watch when the water stops flowing to the sprinklers. They need it because the automated systems are dead and the building is naked.

In those moments the gap between a guard’s observation and a human’s response must be zero. If the report of a smoking motor sits in a queue for ten minutes it might as well have never been written. The value of the information decays. It is like a piece of fruit that rots the moment you pick it. You must eat it now or you must throw it away.

Managing by Exception

The internal process that lets urgency expire is a silent killer of companies. We build these queues because they are easy to manage and they are easy to audit. We can look at a spreadsheet and see that the average response time was four hours. We feel good about the four hours.

But an average is a lie that hides the outliers. If you have ten lightbulbs that take ten minutes each and one fire that takes ten hours you have a good average and a pile of ash. You cannot manage a high-risk environment with an average. You must manage it with an exception.

The guard at the building waited for the engineer. He finished his shift and he went home. He had done his duty and he had filed his report. He believed in the system and he believed in the queue.

He did not know that his report was sitting behind a request for a new carpet in the lobby. He did not know that the manager was reading about a leaky faucet while the wires in the panel were turning to liquid. The heat eventually found the air and the air found the sparks and the building found its end.

Building Systems that Scream

We must build systems that allow for the jump. We must have a path that is not a queue. In the old hospitals they had a red phone and the red phone did not ring like the other phones. It had a bell that was loud and it had a light that was bright.

When the red phone rang the doctors stopped talking and they moved. They did not put the caller on hold and they did not ask for a ticket number. They responded because the sound of the bell was the sound of an emergency.

A digital queue should be a living thing and it should have a pulse. It should know that some things are more important than others and it should move those things to the front. If a guard reports a fire risk the system should scream. It should send a text and it should call a phone and it should wake a man from his sleep. It should not wait for the manager to finish his coffee and it should not wait for the morning meeting.

The panel grows hot while the printer stays cold and the queue makes them equals.

The failure of the queue is a failure of governance. It is the belief that order is the same as safety. It is the belief that we can treat every event as a data point. But a fire is not a data point and a life is not a data point. They are singular events and they require singular responses.

We must give our guards the tools to break the queue and we must give our managers the wisdom to listen when the queue is broken.

When the sprinklers are off and the alarms are silent the guard is the only system left. He is the sensor and he is the logic and he is the action. If we force him into a flat queue we have taken his eyes and we have taken his voice. We have turned a professional protector into a clerk. We have invited the disaster to wait its turn and the disaster is happy to wait because it knows it will win.

I look back at Erlang and his telephone wires. He was a good man and his math was correct for the phones. If you wait a minute to talk to your mother the world does not end. If you wait a minute to hear about a fire the world changes forever.

We must choose which lines we walk and we must choose which messages we hear first. The queue is a choice and we must choose better.