The Rug that Ties the Room Together
I keep on finding metaphors and analogies between movies and Systems Engineering. Weird? Maybe, but let’s convene there are weirder interests out there, so, just let me be. The interesting part of this is that I am not a solid movie watcher at all. But I am a metaphor prospector, so I search for them in whatever thing I read or see. Metaphors tend to illustrate the boring world we live in in a more vivid and colorful way.
Big Lebowski (1998) is the much adored and glorious story of this slacker who gets his favorite rug “soiled” by two thugs who storm his house confusing him for someone else called exactly the same. This rug is a centerpiece of the story, mainly because -in The Dude’s own words1- it tied the room together. You gotta love the surreal significance someone who does not seem to care about anything else than bowling gives to such a mundane object.
Many things around us tend to be a delicate interconnect of other things; a network, or a graph. Although the overall performance of such a graph is the result of the contribution of each and every element, not all components—nodes—have the same role nor relevance. In any network, there are elements which are very well connected (have high degree centrality), others that might not be as well connected but are critical to integrate distant parts of it (have high betweenness centrality), some others which might be influential (have high eigenvector centrality) and some more which are rather irrelevant and peripheral because they lack all the former. Now, when any of these networks develop a member with the combo (it has high “broadcasting” powers, it’s in the path of multiple sub-networks and it is influential) that’s a Lebowski’s rug right there. These rugs can be inconspicuous as hell and their existence may be noticed only by the catastrophic consequences of their sudden ruin. Technical artifacts may have these. Organizations as well. And of course, living rooms. Sometimes we may choose intentionally to add such a thing—as The Dude did—sometimes they may grow under the radar.
Either or, think carefully before “soiling” it. For it ties the whole thing together.
Or El Duderino if you're not into the whole brevity thing.