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Entries For: April 2008

Betz's Law

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Albert Betz was a German physicist who first determined that the maximum amount of energy you can extract from the wind is far less than 100% - its 59.3%. If you were to try and take more energy out of the wind with a wind turbine, you would slow down the wind, creating a wall of wind in front of the turbine which would divert high energy wind around it. In the end, any energy beyond 59.3% is fool's gold - you just can't capture it.

One of my jobs is to set the guidelines and tone for how much we bog people down with documenting and reporting verses letting them immerse themselves fully in the experience of the moment.  Left to their own vices people gravitate towards the latter.  But from an organizational perspective, that is like letting 100% of the wind flow through your wind turbine without extracting any of its energy, which of course doesn't make any sense.  The organization needs to do work and it needs to tap into the wind to drive its generator.

If the wind is individuals' experience and knowledge, then we must develop a documenting and reporting system to extract as much as we can - but we must also accept that, like with Betz's limit, we can't capture all of it.

If we try to capture too much we stifle individuals' abilities to experience their experiences and even make them forgo some experiences all together.  So even if their reporting improves, the content they're reporting on becomes less rich.  I realize now that as a "data guy", I was living with the assumption that we should be collecting as much data as possible.  Now I can see that the upper limit of the value of information - itself a function of both quality and quantity - that can be captured by a a reporting system is much less than 100%.  The key is extracting just the right amount such that the blades and generator spin but the wind moves through unimpeded.

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