Tom, a management consultant with a Ph.D., examines the 2006 decision to reclassify Pluto as a Kuiper Belt object. He argues the change wasn't purely technical but a social and political process, citing emotional classroom reactions and media coverage. He uses Pluto to show how scientific authorities, corporations, and military planners must persuade stakeholders, not just decree solutions.
Well, hi, it's Tom. I've made a lot of probably videos that you might describe as some of them as strange, a little odd, but maybe this is going to be one of the oddest ones because this is a video about Pluto. Now, let's see, back in August, Pluto was, I guess, the The word is demoted from being a planet to being another kind of object. A Kuiper Belt object, I think, is the proper scientific term for what happened to Pluto. It was renamed a Kuiper Belt object. Well, why do I care about what happened to Pluto and whether or not Pluto is a planet? Well, here's why I care. I'm always intrigued when I see solutions to problems that people believe are simple to solve that in fact turn out not to be so simple. So Pluto, I'm sure that the International Planetary Association or whatever the body was that redefined Pluto, actually the International Astronomical Union. You know, I'm sure when they met to reconsider Pluto's planetary designation, that, you know, they thought that that was that. I mean, they're the International Astronomical Union. They're the authorities, right? They're the ones who know what a planet is and what isn't a planet. Well, guess what? People are going crazy over Pluto's demotion from planetary status. The other night on my favorite news show, the Jim Lehrer NewsHour here in the United States on public broadcasting, Those of you outside the United States, you can find it on the web, although this, this clip is only audio for this segment as I found it. I'll put it over here. Um, people are going crazy. There are kids who are in science classes all over the United States. I don't know about the rest of the world, but I know here in the United States there are kids in science classes all over One class that was shown in this news segment was making videos. They were making movies. I saw them using iMovie to make movies to discuss why they think it was unfair for Pluto to have been demoted from planetary status. Now, I think that's all fine and it's funny, but the thing that I find to be most intriguing is that This happens often. That is, people believe that what they're dealing with is a simple technical problem. It's the definition of a planet. We're the people who define planets. They defined it in a way that, you know, it had to be spherical, it had to do something else, and it had to, as they put it, clear out its neighborhood in its orbit. And that was, by the way, it's the first time that there's been a definition of a planet. So the definition of a planet was kind of made sort of look like to get rid of Pluto. What people were saying, well, you know, guess what? Jupiter doesn't clear out its orbit. There are a lot of other objects. And the, the, the, the point that I found most intriguing is that here are people who believe that the solutions to problems are technical, when in fact the designation of a planet turns out to be a social phenomenon. People care about whether there are 9 planets or 8 planets. There was a guy on this segment who said, "They shouldn't have demoted Pluto." And this woman who was running this seminar said, at a planetarium, said, "Why?" And he said, "Well, because back in the '50s they taught us it was a planet and they can't just change it now." a wonderful statement of the way human society works. Solutions might be technically elegant, they might be perfect in every aspect, but we must convince one another of solutions that have impact on us. I know that that makes engineering Engineers crazy. I know it makes people who would love for the world to be simply fact-based, it makes those kind of people crazy. But for me, it's exactly the way society has worked forever and will always work. That is, we influence each other. We don't just get to tell each other things, even about whether or not something is a planet. Now, I see this in corporations all the time in, in my work. I work as a management consultant. I see people who say, "Well, look, the facts simply are blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and therefore we're going to do this." And I sit there and I think, "Well, yeah, those might be the facts, but this isn't a decision about facts." And so we start having a conversation about who's going to care about this decision. What is it going to matter to them? Who do you have to be sure you talk to before you go announcing this decision? And try to get them enrolled into your thinking. Because we don't like to think like that. We don't want to have to go through that trouble. We want to just be able to put out a decree that says Pluto is no longer a planet. In particular, this is not the way things work in the 21st century. It might have been the way things worked in the 17th, 18th, 19th, part of the 20th, but not in the 21st century. Why? What have we done? We have redefined the notion of authority, for good or ill. I, I'm not suggesting that this is all a great populist movement and it's wonderful that people get to question the nature of planets. It's the reality of what we have to deal with. So here we are, we see it once again with the surge You know, in Iraq, the idea that what we have here is a technical military solution, we have to go in and do these things— it's not a technical military solution. It's a social and thereby, by definition, political kind of problem that has to be solved. So anyway, I just wanted to point out that even trying to decide whether or not something like Pluto is a planet is not purely a technical issue. And if you think you're going to be able to just sort of make decrees and make things happen? Not in this century, you're not. So take care and, uh, good luck trying to figure out what planet we're on or whether or not there are 9 or 8 of them. So take it easy. Bye-bye.
