Aplin Labs was created in 1994 to explore how the scientific method can be applied to complex problems in our daily lives, at every scale of influence, from interpersonal psychology to political economics.
An early influence on our thinking was the “
artificial manager” concept promoted in 1986 by Dr. Eliezer Geisler, who is the Distinguished Professor of Management at the Chicago Stuart School of Business. Our interpretation of the “artificial manager” was that we could combine the value of organizational-behavioral research, statistics, and visual aesthetics to create efficient and effective means of remote work management—in all sectors, missions, and operations.
Over our 25-year course of applied research and technology development, primarily in health and safety issues, the market made rapid progress in the use of analytic tools. However, tools do not solve complex problems. People with the right tools for unique circumstances and the evolution of their organized work solve complex problems.
Our early thinking about solving complex problems was molded into our Performance Architectural Science Systems (PASS) technology. The first goal of PASS was to test several formats and circumstances where the “artificial manager” made sense. We needed to demonstrate that we could use PASS to handle complex operations through two fundamental work requirements:
First, it must organize work: Easily facilitate complex, multi-operator, multi-data source work cases with efficient uses of (a) automated cost and time calculations and (b) question-response-based rendering of writings for both the case elements and its associated reports.
Second, it must anlayze work: Easily monitor and reinforce case-task management among disparate operators and supervisors through auto-generated specific emails, productivity dashboards and signals, time-cost analyses of work at the tasks and case level, and analyses of workflow risks and changes to tasks.
With these organizational and technological elements in place, tools like AI are much more useful and relevant to work management and strategy. And, leaders can minimize risk, integrate innovations, and manage changing capability and strategy.
From 2004 to 2013, we worked with a variety of research partners to test portions of the PASS technology. Our goal was to explore the PASS scope of relevance. We addressed energy management, workforce productivity, operational redesigns, customer satisfaction and response, and large healthcare workforce training and effects. We see no limitations on its scope.
In 2013, the inventor of PASS, received a kind
review
and the international Premier 100 Leader
Award
(for Aplin Labs) from COMPUTERWORLD magazine, which was followed by an
article
they wrote on the success and potential of PASS as an application to complex problems in business and government.
Since 2013, we have focused on substantive issues of risk within the broad scope of health and safety. Our work has explored schools, prisons, and hospitals, and in response to natural and man-made threats. We concentrated on homelessness, veteran integration, food safety, opioid abuse, and others.
In everything we do, we are combining niche innovations with the automation and accountability of remote work. We see this as the future of solving complex problems, at every scale of life.