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“Goodbye, Anecdotes”, says @Butterworthy, “The Age Of Big Data Demands Real Criticism” (AWL, January 2013). Thanks to @milouness, who comments “Important concepts here about what is knowable!”. The article tries to link Big Data with Big Question…
What do the great innovators have in common? Looking at examples from Picasso to Kepler, Art Markman calls these men expert generalists. They seem to know a lot about a wide variety of topics, and their wide knowledge base supports their creativity.
Markman identifies two personality traits that are key for expert generalists: Openness to Experience and Need for Cognition. Can we also expect to find these traits in innovative organizations?
Openness to Experience entails a willingness to explore new ideas and opportunities. Obviously many organizations prefer to stick with familiar ideas and activities, and have built-in ways of maintaining the status quo.
Need for Cognition entails a joy of learning, and a willingness to devote the time and effort necessary to master new things.
In his post on the origins of modern science, Tim Johnson compares the rival claims of magic and commerce. He points out that good science is open whereas magic is hidden and secretive; he traces the foundations of modern science to European financial practice, on the grounds that markets are social, collaborative, open, forums. But perhaps it makes more sense to see modern science as having two parents: from magic it inherits its Need for Cognition, a deep and passionate interest in explaining how things work; while from commerce it inherits its Openness to Experience, a broad fascination with the unknown. Obviously there have been individual scientists who have had more of one than the other, and some outstanding individual scientists who have excelled at both, but the collective project of science has relied on an effective combination of these two qualities.
The challenge of pricing – for an IT service provider While an end-to-end management approach provides a competitive service advantage, it can carry a substantial additional – and often unforeseen – cost and risk. The challenge is that it’s difficult … Continue reading →
@timrayner01 points out that so-called information-sharing is never neutral, disengaged – it is a positive act of communication.
“Don’t think of what you share as information. Even if what you share is information, by sharing it, you are telling the world that it is information that you affirm in some way. It is the affirmation that counts. We share what we love. Even when we share details about things we despise, they are things we love to hate. Love is the key to understanding how we contribute to social media commons. We populate the commons with expressions of love.”
So even scorn is a form of affirmation. The comedian who devotes his spleen to the latest reality show is thereby contributing (in a complex post-modern fashion) to the show’s success. Daniel Smith describes this as alternative consumption, and sees Charlie Brooker as a modern version of Baudelaire.
The Royal Television Society may pretend that Charlie Brooker represents the high-brow alternative to Simon Cowell. But Brooker’s material is basically the same as Cowell’s, it just has a different sentiment. They obviously need each other.
The Enterprise is a complex system. I have accepted that fact. I think many of us in the enterprise architecture profession have also accepted this fact as well, or at least I hope we have. But then again there is natural response to things in which we do in order to address “complexity.” There is a tendancy to…
Our relationship to technology isn’t only utilitarian.
It is also emotional.
Technology empowers us, it amplifies us in the world, and gives us super powers.
Maybe productivity is a not just a function of the design, but also of our attachment to it.
A…
Michael Mainelli and Ian Harris have written a wide-ranging survey of economics, choice theory (game theory, psychology and ethics), systems theory, chaos theory, global warming and evolution. So what’s all that got to do with the price of fish?
One of the themes running through the book is that the price of fish bears no relation to the value of fish, especially if we are concerned about long-term value and the sustainability of fish stocks.
Oscar Wilde famously defined a cynic as one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. This definition has also been applied to accountants and economists. Michael and Ian are leaders of the Long Finance initiative, a movement within the City of London that aims to overcome this kind of short-term financial cynicism.
Michael and Ian describe the price of fish as a wicked problem – a problem that lacks easy definition as well as easy answers. “Sustaining the supply of edible fish is a wicked problem that presents global risks.” (p 301) And yet they suggest that the system might possibly sort itself out. “As fish run out and have to be sustainably fished, the historic underpricing of fish ceases.” (293)
But this is no time for naive optimism, and the system will undoubtedly need some intervention. “When the price is the same as the value, there are opportunities for sustainable financing. So far, price has not equaled value for fish. This is the biggest, wicked decision-making problem of all: knowing how to set a price that equals the value.” (p 295)
In other words, the problem is not just the alarming dwindling of fish stocks but the collective cynicism that not only led to this problem but also amplifies it and resists dealing with it effectively. The key word in the problem statement is the word “set” – even if a few clever people can agree what the right price of fish should be, the real challenge is to set this price into global trading and consumption systems.
@hjarche via @Cybersal says “I’ll show the same thing many times and people have various interpretations of it. Sharing knowledge artifacts is not transferring knowledge.” In other words, we don’t actually share knowledge, what we share are documents …
In his presentation on Enterprise Agility at the SCiO meeting yesterday, Patrick Hoverstadt introduced the concept of Yarak.
In falconry, the word Yarak describes a trained hawk that is fit and in a proper condition for hunting. According to the Oxford Dictionary, the word entered the English language in the 19th century, perhaps from Persian yārakī ‘strength, ability’ or from Turkish yaraǧ ‘readiness’.
Patrick explained that Yarak involves a balance between two forces – motivation and strength. The falcon has to be hungry enough to want to hunt, and strong enough to hunt effectively. So the falconer has to get the balance right: too little food and the creature cannot hunt, too much food and it can’t be bothered.
When I talk to people about building organizational intelligence in their own organizations, I hear two forms of resistance. One is that the organization has so little inherent intelligence at present that the task is daunting; the other is that the bosses wouldn’t want it.
When I take examples from glamorous high-tech companies like Microsoft and Google, this can provoke a somewhat fatalist reaction. People say: This kind of intelligence may be all very well for these hi-tech birds of prey, but ordinary companies like us simply don’t have the resources or capability to do any of this stuff.
So it’s important to see examples from ordinary companies as well as from the glamorous ones. Every company has some intelligence, although it may be patchy, fragmented and inconsistent. So we need to find ways of linking and leveraging this intelligence to create a positive spiral of improvement.
As for the question of motivation, there will still be many organizations where the senior management team, perhaps lacking confidence in its own intelligence, will lack enthusiasm for developing intelligence across the rest of the organization. This may be a generation thing – the younger generation of management may be much more comfortable with new styles of management (such as “Theory Y”) as well as with social networking and other technologies.
Does this mean we have to wait for a generation, until the current bosses have shuffled off to the golf course or the Caribbean cruise? Not if the organization can start to develop intelligence in a bottom-up piecemeal fashion. In which case, what matters is the motivation and strength of the people and groups across the organization, and not just the motivation and strength of the bosses. Can we achieve some useful results without top-down support?
Steve Hilton, David Cameron’s one-time policy adviser currently on mid-term sabbatical in California, has given Stanford students some frank insights into the workings of Government.
I just wanted to make a few comments about collective intelligence and the role of the policy adviser.
Some Prime Ministers and Presidents have had an extraordinary ability to get through large quantities of paperwork and master the critical points. Cameron has many strengths as a leader, but this doesn’t seem to be one of them. As a consequence of this, he is effectively leaving journalists to perform a filtering function – thus he pays attention to an issue only when it is drawn to his attention by the media, and of course, this delayed attention may cause some irritation or embarrassment sometimes. Perhaps a more diligent policy adviser should have picked up some of these issues earlier?
In the system we may infer from Hilton’s description, journalists are not only performing a filtering function but also a sensemaking function. There is clearly a difference between the way a policy looks in some bundle of government papers and how it looks when it appears in the media. Again, we might have expected a diligent policy adviser to have anticipated how policies would appear to the public.
But it seems that the politicians and their advisers don’t control the volume of paperwork they are given to wade through. In his seminar, Hilton dramatically produced a pile of paper one foot high (representing four days committee output), prompting gasps from students. “The idea that a couple of political advisers read through all this and spot things that are bad, things that are contradictory, is just inconceivable”, pleads Hilton.
Of course it is, say members of the previous government including Damian McBride, Gordon Brown’s former political press secretary. Which is why the previous government had a greater number of political advisers, and a coordination process (known as the “grid”) allocating a manageable number of pages to each. McBride acknowledges that the grid sometimes resulted in leaks to journalists, and suggests that Hilton may have downgraded the grid in order to reduce these leaks, but argues that the grid was a key mechanism for effective government and that the problems Hilton complains about are an inevitable consequence of abandoning this mechanism.
It may also be a consequence of regarding the civil service as a malignant force, trying to pull the wool over the politicians’ eyes. (This was a great theme in the original “Yes Minister” series, but has turned into a tired joke in the 2013 series.) Edward Pearce stands up for the independence of the civil service, and complains that it is Hilton who is unrepresentative and unelected.
When Hilton talks about “delivering what we are supposed to be doing”, this presumably refers to some kind of top-down strategic plan, formulated before the election and presented in the manifesto. But this raises some important questions about the relationship between strategy and execution, and the possibility for strategies to emerge and evolve during execution.
Which in turn raises some questions about government as a learning system. Recent governments (including Blair’s New Labour) have had a focus on delivery, which emphasizes single-loop learning – getting better at achieving a fixed set of goals. However, this has to be balanced against double-loop learning – changing the goals to fit changing circumstances.
In an earlier analysis of New Labour and Delivery, two MORI analysts argued that delivery and achievement was at least partially subjective and rhetorical.
Hilton clearly agrees about the importance of external communication. He encourages his students to think about how policies can be “branded”, and suggests that policies often fail not because they weren’t very good policies in the first place but because they are poorly presented. That might be true, but it is also a common excuse: politicians genererally find it easier to admit to errors in presentation than to errors in policy.
Which part of this ecosytem has the longest memory? Presumably the civil servants. And which part has the shortest memory? With some honourable exceptions, probably the media. According to one theory of change, when there are several subsystems operating on different timescales, it is the slowest system that controls the whole. And the Purpose Of the System Is What It Does.
Roger Mortimore and Mark Gill, New Labour and Delivery (IPSOS MORI May 2004)
PM’s aide exposes No 10’s lack of control (Sunday Times, 13 January 2013) (subscription)
John Harlow and Eric Kiefer, Shoes off, feet up, the dude lifts lid on No 10 (Sunday Times, 13 January 2013)
Patrick Hennessy, David Cameron finds out about policies from the newspapers, reveals Steve Hilton (The Telegraph 13 January 2013)
Damien McBride, Whither the Grid? (13 January 2013) Why did the Grid Wither? (14 January 2013)
Edward Pearce, The Unelected (LRB 25 January 2013)
James Tapsfield, Prime Minister often finds out about policies from the radio or newspapers, says former advisor Hilton (The Independent 13 January 2013)
Richard Veryard (ed), Fragile Strategy or Fragile Execution (Storify, December 2012)
Nicholas Watt, David Cameron’s ex-policy guru Steve Hilton criticised over policy remarks (Guardian, 13 January 2013)
updated 25 January 2013
TOGAF study help?!?! There is an app for that!There is a app out on the iTunes store that seems like a possible study guide. Have not used it and don’t have a review of it yet, but thought it is intersting enough to point out.https://itunes.apple…