"And this was the sort of place where that sort of thing was the norm — the building process and the pipeline was inefficient to the extreme, yet no one who dir

"And this was the sort of place where that sort of thing was the norm — the building process and the pipeline was inefficient to the extreme, yet no one who directly managed such things seemed to care — or was competent enough to recognize it." Well, I think the last part is universal - nobody could easily diagnose or evaluate that situation. It took W. Edwards Deming years to create a method to first convince himself that it could be done, and then more years to convince others. This is made worse by intellectual work, where standards of quality are less obvious than "length at 100mm +/- 0.01mm". I'm not saying that standards do not exist, that is a trope that must disappear, they're just less obvious.