Dr. Arum and Dr. Roksa point to sheer time on task.
In terms of sheer difficulty, the task probably lies somewhere between building a ship in a bottle and stuffing a Steinway up a stovepipe.
But for sheer scale, his task remains daunting: Continental is swallowing a company that had 10 billion euros, or $13.6 billion, in sales last year, two-thirds of what Continental itself had.
"These significant limitations coupled with the sheer scale of task around the flow of information, communication and coordination of resources posed an immense challenge for those within SOR, particularly on Monday 8th August," the document says.
It has never been easy for executives to break the news to employees that they are out of a job, but the sheer repetitiveness of the task in the current economic climate is making the task harder, experts say.
Even when people know what they need to do, the sheer volume of tasks filling up countless sticky notes, smartphone memos, and good old-fashioned "to do" lists adds up to one big serving of complexity.
Automation is not sheer displacement of tasks from men to machines but a stage in the process toward integrated systems of processes, technology, organization, roles, and values, where technology performs a large variety of existing and new tasks and where interaction is designed among human beings and technical systems.
This undertaking – and the sheer enormity of the task – was something that no government agency has done, despite the disturbing number of fatal encounters with police, and the protest movement that has followed black teenager Michael Brown's death at the hands of a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.
Helyn Clack, cabinet member for community services and the 2012 Games, said: "We'll be creating the largest venues of the Olympic Games from scratch which is a big job and these statistics hammer home the sheer scale of the task.
Commission members acknowledge that the sheer magnitude of the task might limit what they learn.
Some of this arises from the sheer complexity of the task at hand.
