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Transportation Theory and Algorithmitizing Mission Assignments

Stephen C

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In mathematics transportation theory is the framework used for “determining the optimal transportation and allocation of resources.” If you need to plan how many seats to overbook on an airline, or how to distribute a certain number of teachers across a state, backhoes across construction projects, or fertilizer across the world, there’s a whole branch of mathematics dealing with the complexities involved in coming up with an optimal assignment schema where you get the biggest bang for your buck.  

Missionary assignments are, in a way, a big matching and allocation problem. Off the top of my head I can think of several variables that help produce a weighted function for determining the optimal fit for each missionary candidate. There would be a demand side and a supply-wide of the equation, with missionary fit feeding into mission-specific demands. 

On the missionary side:

  • Prior foreign language experience, both for the actual language, and perhaps as a signal that they are capable of learning Hungarian, Japanese, or some of the more difficult languages. 
  • Whether they are native to that country: Natives are probably more culturally and linguistically effective.
  • Health issues: Presumably these would constrain how poor their assigned field of labor is.

On the mission field side:

  • Effectiveness per missionary in that area: they may decide to allocate more missionaries to higher baptizing countries while still keeping at least a certain minimum operating force in every country according to some threshold.  
  • Needs in those specific missions as missionaries ebb and flow. While much of this is stochastic, even some of the unknowns might be predictable. For example if 20% of missionaries assigned to Japan return home early, but only 10% of missionaries to the US do, then they need to systematically call more to Japan than they otherwise would. However, this would also include a stochastic term for unpredictables. Presumably this “error term” would be random across missions, but who knows. 
  • Visa and geopolitical problems provide another big, unpredictable variable. If visas all the sudden become available after a dearth then a lot of missionaries need to be ready to go at the drop of a hat. Conversely, if visas become restricted or geopolitical situations shut down certain areas (often for reasons that were probabilistic but somewhat predictable), then those missionaries need to be reassigned, ideally to areas that are fits for their language skills (I had a sister missionary in my ward that never made it to Taiwan for geopolitical reasons and ended up in California, and in my visa-waiting mission in Spanish-speaking Las Vegas we had a lot of called-to-Venezuela missionaries, it happens.) Supply chain capacity buffer concepts could be useful here. It’s worth noting that with these and, for example, unknown health issues, the fit score may undergo an updating process after the initial inputs are processed. 

Like your credit or life insurance premiums, this could be something rather automated like everything else is becoming in life, with a mission-by-mission specific “fit” score calculated for each prospective missionary, and then an algorithm that maximizes the best fit between mission and missionary variables. 

Missionary companionship assignments are another case that could be treated as a math problem. In this case with a little bit of graph theory thrown in. Two nodes (or three for a trio) are optimally matched given basic parameters like seniority, need for supervision, nativity, language skills, etc.

Of course, this process is utterly uninspiring and insipid on its own. We believe in the role of the spirit for decisions like this. Case in point: BYU professor Van Gessel is one of the most prominent Japanese-to-English translators in the world. He was the translator for Endo Shusaku, consulted on the Martin Scorsese movie version of Silence, and received a prize from the Emperor of Japan for his translations. And he was called as a mission president–to Oregon. The people involved in his calling were clearly open minded enough to see him as more than a generically righteous Japanese speaker. Some times His ways are not our ways. But I wonder if there is or will ever be some kind of formal quantification and recommendation system to help general authorities to “study it out in [their, or the AI’s] mind” before going to the Lord in prayer about it, since there’s a whole mathematical subfield dedicated to this problem. (Not saying there should be, I’m just having fun thinking through the possibilities). 

Comments

13 responses to “Transportation Theory and Algorithmitizing Mission Assignments”

  1. MoPo

    There must be some algorithm or heuristics in place for broad sorting. But, if so, anyone who’s watched the system for any length of time will see enough baffling outcomes to suggest that there’s a strong need for optimization.

  2. REC911

    Fun stuff to think about! You left out the GA assigning that day being “off” (not feeling it)…maybe they dont assign when they are off??

    I would hope every question on the mission request form is there for a reason. I think the most telling one is…:did your parents serve a mission and where? (not sure what questions are on the forms these days)

    I also think most who served felt they were sent to where God wanted them to go but is that God or that we were willing to go wherever we were sent to? Or both?

    In my case I prayed “mightily” to be sent to where I would predominantly teach Black people. This was the early 80’s and I felt a need to teach the people that we recently were rejecting.

    I was upset that I was called to Raleigh NC. =) When I boarded the Trailways bus to go to my first area from Raleigh to Fayetteville, I was thrilled and nervous, that I was the only white person on the bus! I actually thought there might be a black only bus and I was on the wrong bus! Then a white girl about my age got on and set next to me and it was all good.

    I prayed mightily for thanks on the way to Fayetteville.

    Trivia note: Back in the late 60s (not sure when it stopped) you were given a language aptitude test that you had to score good enough to serve in a foreign language mission.

  3. Raymond Winn

    FWIW: I served a Spanish-language mission in the Paleolithic Age (1960s), and I didn’t have any kind of pre-call testing to determine whether I could potentially speak another language.

  4. DaveW

    At every level of the church, from Apostle down to missionary, we hear stories of the unintuitive missionary assignment that proved miraculous in the end. The young missionary that speaks fluent Norwegian and is sent to Peru, but 22 months into his mission stumbles across a street in Peru that has 11 Norwegian families and they all join the church.

    I’m curious (I know I’m not going to find out from a few comments here) how many missionaries feel that they were sent to a specific mission, or mission president, or companion, or area for a specific purpose.

    I served for two years and never found that for myself. My mission president is a good man, and ran a more sane mission that many I’ve heard tale of, but we formed no special connection. I had a number of companions and we generally got along pretty well. A couple were harder, but we did our best to get along without huge issues. A couple were a lot more fun. And of course I met a ton of people, and a few of them I really got on well with. Statistically that is to be expected. Some of the people I loved the most were investigators that never joined the church, or inactive people that never set foot in the chapel one time while I was there. But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t wonderful to know them. (Of course, they could be stake presidents down there telling stories about how I changed their life for all I know. But if they are, no one has told me about it. [And I am very findable online even if you only know my last name.])

    I am willing to accept that there are missionary assignments that are divinely inspired. I am also willing to accept that many (most) are not, at least not in a specific “only this missionary in this place at this time” sort of way. I am content that with tens of thousands of missionaries being assigned every year, many of them are just people that need to fill open slots to keep the system going, and that I was one of them.

    If any miracle about my missionary assignment is to be found it is that I was given 4.5 months from when my call was issued until I reported to the MTC. This abnormally long period gave me time to start dating the girl that I would eventually marry. If I’d only had 8 weeks, I’m sure things would have been too busy to have time for any romance.

  5. Jonathan Green

    Assigning missionaries to missions seems like it would be algorithmically optimizable, but I’m more skeptical of in-mission assignments, since a successful outcome is much more difficult to quantify. Some surprising combinations can be highly successful, while others you’d expect to be a natural fit turn into disasters. You might have enough training data if you had all the records from all missionary companionships in history for AI to handle it, but then you’d need a long time to figure out how to set the temperature for inference. Probably a case for leaving human and divine beings in charge of the decision-making.

  6. Stephen C

    MoPo:

    I assume something is in place (else why would they ask those questions?), but I don’t know how systematically quantitative is, or whether it’s just another thing taken int account qualitatively on an individual basis.

    REC911:

    “I would hope every question on the mission request form is there for a reason.” I would assume so.

    DaveW:

    I definitely think my mission call, marriage, and career paths were inspired, but outside of that there have been a lot of parts of my life where I feel like God took the approach in D&C 80:3, it doesn’t matter where you go, it’s all the same. But I’m sure which life elements require more fine-tuning varies a lot from person to person.

    Jonathan Green:

    Good point, plus at the mission president level they have more of a handle on the personalities involved, so it makes more sense to be more qualitative and less quantitative.

  7. Tom

    Although we do believe in inspiration for mission calls, there are real-world parameters that undoubtedly come into play, just as there are in ward callings. Not everyone who would make a great Gospel Doctrine or Relief Society teacher can be in those callings. Someone has to serve in the nursery or be a finance clerk. So need dictates a good percentage of the equation for all callings, even missionary assignments. Not everyone can serve in Hawaii.

  8. bhbardo

    DaveW, I’d probably describe my mission a little higher on the inspiration spectrum, but never “only me, at this time and place, for this unique purpose”. A few interactions or situations felt cosmic, but I could have not gone, or gone elsewhere, or worked in some other way and still had such experiences.

    In my view, something can be utterly mundane and utterly miraculous/inspired at the same time. (Of course not all mundane things… many are just mundane, and many are destructive).

    So many times the meaningful impact doesn’t come from the predicted source (the talk, the formal lesson, etc.), but the brief conversation, the unplanned interaction, etc.

    And I don’t think those miraculous/inspired interactions are usually or necessarily the result of divine engineering, though they can be.

    Sometimes the difference can be *choosing* to see something as miraculous or inspired, and I don’t think this makes it any less authentic or powerful. The meaning that we make may be just as true as the meaning we receive. There’s a place for both.

    Maybe, upon further consideration, I would still not say “only me”, though I might say “specifically me, in this specific place, for this specific purpose”, but mostly as a description of experience, rather than a prescription of destiny.

    The power of a mission, or of service in general, is that it fosters one-to-one interactions where these “unanticipated” miracles can take place, all the more so because you are specifically talking to people about the big questions. I work in public education now, so I have a perhaps higher-than-average number of interactions with hundreds of youth and staff each day, in many instances thinking about big ideas. (Though again, the meaningful interactions are often not in the expected moments).

    I don’t presume what my impact may be (via mission or work or any service or any community), though I hope I have some, but I can think of lots of interactions that impact me. Sometimes as simple as a word choice or a double meaning in a casual conversation. As far as a journey or path of spiritual progress, they often boil down to a nudge or a point in the right direction.

    So I wouldn’t lament an algorithmic mission assignment for the mere fact of being algorithmic, but I would mourn the loss of the human-to-human interactions, even if many are mundane.

  9. RL

    I assume there has to be some administrative model used for staffing missions with some sort of optimization goal. ROI is likely coverts or activity in the field. I would guess the Church sociology department and the many leaders with business backgrounds have tried to look at the system and set something up. We are in a big data era, I’ve heard the Church has improved and adapted to online finding with drastic improvements in the past 5 years. Fun to think of business elders or APs assigned analytics support roles.

  10. Left Field

    I took a language aptitude test before my mission in 1978. It mostly involved following instructions and answering questions from a cassette tape. The inexperienced high councilman who administered the test messed up the starting and stopping of the tape, so that probably affected my score. Independent of that, I misunderstood some of the instructions. They gave me nonsense syllables representing a number system, and then asked me to write down numbers that were given to me orally. However, I didn’t realize I would be expected to remember the numbers because I thought it was just an explanation of the structure of the test, and they would give me other number names that I would need to remember.

    Now that I think about it, maybe it was part of the language-learning test to see if I could remember words without being specifically advised to learn them. After a little search on the web, I’m thinking it might have been the “Modern Language Aptitude Test.”

    I’m sure I scored very poorly, which may have been part of why I was called to an English-speaking mission. I didn’t have any particular wish to go on a foreign language mission anyway, but I was a bit irritated with both myself and the test administrator for having fumbled the ball.

  11. Last Lemming

    I took a language test in the mid-70s. It was administered at an Institute building and I recall it being entirely on paper. Rumor had it that it was based on Kurdish.

    The results of the test probably had little to do with my call to Germany. I already had enough German credits to qualify for a BA (but I identified German as my least favorite subject in school). Or maybe it was the fact that I was called to my Branch President’s mission (where five of us from the branch served at the same time) and the Branch President’s father was on the missionary committee.

  12. Charles Cranney

    Having processed a few hundred missionaries through the ward or mission system, I noticed a pattern with some of them. They felt a compelling urge to study (and then did study) certain languages. They were often intrigued not just with the language but with the people and culture. A large percentage of the time, they were called to go there. I have counseled with young people to listen carefully and early to such promptings and then to act on them. I think the inspiration for a calling can truly involve not just the one issuing the calling but can come much earlier to the one who will be called.

    FWIW, I bombed the language test in 1975, I’m sure. I was so disappointed that I went to an English-speaking mission, even though it was in Australia. (I wanted to go to Russia, but that wasn’t an option then.) When I was set apart, I was told I was being sent there to bring a (singular) person into the gospel. That happened the last few weeks, and I’ve been connected with him in a great brotherhood ever since. (FWIW, I did end up serving in Russia many years later, to my astonishment and joy.)

    All that being said, I can for sure see AI producing a preliminary draft for mission appointments, like when I write a memo. ;-)

  13. Val Larsen

    There was a language test in 1974 when I received my call. I wanted to serve in an English-speaking mission. I found the language-test questions easy to understand. I was called to learn Navaho.

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