orgintelligence

The Art of the New Deal – Trump and Intelligence

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In his 1967 book on Organizational Intelligence, Harold Wilensky praised President Roosevelt for maintaining a state of creative tension in the US administration. Wilensky reckoned that this enabled FDR to get a more accurate and rounded account of what was going on, and gave him some protection against the self-delusion of each department.

(In FDR’s time, of course, it was considered entirely normal for an administration to be staffed by a bunch of white men with similar education. And yet even they managed to achieve some diversity of perspective.)

Early reports of Donald Trump’s administration suggest an unconscious echo of the FDR style. Or perhaps a much earlier pattern.

At the center of it all has been a cast of characters jockeying for Trump’s ear, creating a struggle for power that has manifested in a mix of chaos, leaks and uncertainty. The Trump White House already bears more resemblance to the court of a Renaissance king than to most prior administrations as favorites come and go, counselors quarrel over favor and policy decisions are often made by whim or without consultation. (Guardian, 4 Feb 2017)

But it is difficult to see this as “creative tension” resulting in an “accurate and rounded” view.

“Trump thinks he’s invincible,” says Hemmings, who doubts whether his advisors will ever question or criticise him. “Usually leaders choose the people around them to keep them in check, and Trump needs people to temper his hotheadedness and aggression. Instead, he’s picked advisors who worship him.” (Independent, 2 Feb 2017)

Wilensky’s book also discusses the dangers of a doctrine of secrecy.

Secrets belong to a small assortment of individuals, and inevitably become hostage to private agendas. As Harold Wilensky wrote “The more secrecy, the smaller the intelligent audience, the less systematic the distribution and indexing of research, the greater the anonymity of authorship, and the more intolerant the attitude toward deviant views.” (Gladwell 2010)

And secrecy seems to a key element of the Trump-Bannon modus operandi.

“These executive orders were very rushed and drafted by a very tight-knit group of individuals who did not run it by the people who have to execute the policy. And because that’s the case, they probably didn’t think of or care about how this would be executed in the real world,” said another congressional source familiar with the situation. “No one was given a heads-up and no one had a chance to weigh in on it.” (Politico 30 Jan 2017)

But perhaps in reaction to the Bannonite doctrine of secrecy, there has been a flood of leaks from inside the administration. Chris Cillizza suggests two possible explanations – either these leaks are intended to influence Trump himself (because he doesn’t take anything seriously unless he hears it from his favourite media channels) or conversely they are intended as a kind of whistle-blowing.

Marx thought that history repeated itself. (Alarmingly, Trump’s Counselor Steve Bannon adheres to the same view.) So are we into tragedy or farce here?

Rachael Bade, Jake Sherman and Josh Dawsey, Hill staffers secretly worked on Trump’s immigration order (Politico, 30 Jan 2017)

Chris Cillizza, The leaks coming out of the Trump White House cast the president as a clueless child (Washington Post, 26 January 2017), The leaks coming out of the Trump White House right now are totally bananas (Washington Post, 2 Feb 2017)

Malcolm Gladwell, Pandora’s Briefcase (New Yorker, 10 May 2010)

Rachel Hosie, The deeper reason we should be worried Donald Trump hung up on Australia PM Malcolm Turnbull (Independent, 2 Feb 2017)

Linette Lopez, Steve Bannon’s obsession with a dark theory of history should be worrisome (Business Insider, 2 Feb 2017) HT @BryanAppleyard

Carmen Medina, What is your Stupification Point? (6 May 2010)

Joseph Rago, History Repeats as Farce, Then as 2016 (Wall Street Journal, 4 November 2016) paywall

Sabrina Siddiqui and Ben Jacobs, Trump’s courtiers bring chaotic and capricious style to White House (Guardian, 4 February 2017)

Related posts

Puzzles and Mysteries (January 2010)
Enemies of Intelligence (May 2010)
Delusion and Diversity (October 2012)

Learning at the Speed of Learning

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According to a recent survey by McKinsey,  “the great majority of our respondents expect corporate learning to change significantly within the next three years”.

It seems that whatever the topic of the survey, middle managers and management consultants always expect significant change within the next three years, because this is what justifies their existence.

In this case, the topic is corporate learning, which McKinsey recommends should be done “at the speed of business”, whatever that means. (I am not a fan of the “at the speed of” cliche.)

But what kind of change is McKinsey talking about here? The article concentrates on digital delivery of learning material – disseminating existing “best practice” knowledge to a broader base. It doesn’t really say anything about organizational learning, let alone a more radical transformation of the nature of learning in organizations. I have long argued that the real disruption is not in replacing classrooms with cheaper and faster equivalents, useful though that might be, but in digital organizational intelligence — using increasing quantities of data to develop and test new hypotheses about customer behaviour, market opportunities, environmental constraints, and so on — developing not “best practice” but “next practice”.

Richard Benson-Armer, Arne Gast, and Nick van Dam, Learning at the speed of business (McKinsey Quarterly, May 2016). HT @annherrmann

Chris Argyris and Donald Schön, Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective. Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley, 1978.

Single Point of Failure (Airlines)

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Large business-critical systems can be brought down by power failure. Who knew?

In July 2016, Southwest Airlines suffered a major disruption to service, which lasted several days. It blamed the failure on “lingering disruptions following performance issues across multiple technology systems”, apparently triggered by a power outage.

Click below for the latest update on our system and operation: https://t.co/bqV1qwahmz

— Southwest Airlines (@SouthwestAir) July 21, 2016

In August 2016 it was Delta’s turn.

New statement from Delta – power outage caused IT failure pic.twitter.com/trkQbpym05

— Rory Cellan-Jones (@ruskin147) August 8, 2016

@ruskin147 A power outage *triggered* this issue, but poor planning and no HA *caused* it. Why can Netflix get this right but airlines cant?

— Richard Price (@RichardPrice) August 8, 2016

I am no computer expert but it seems like a whole system crashing (3 separate airlines) points to bad design (single point of failure)? 3/

— Dan DePodwin (@WxDepo) August 8, 2016

Then there were major problems at British Airways (Sept 2016) and United (Oct 2016).

@razankhabour We apologize to our customers for the delay and we appreciate their patience as our IT teams work to resolve this issue.

— British Airways (@British_Airways) September 6, 2016

We’re aware of an issue with our system and are working to resolve it. We’ll update as we learn more. We apologize for the inconvenience.

— United (@united) October 14, 2016

So every @united flight is grounded because they can’t run a decent IT shop. What year is this??

— Randy Bias (@randybias) October 14, 2016

The concept of “single point of failure” is widely known and understood. And the airline industry is rightly obsessed by safety. They wouldn’t fly a plane without backup power for all systems. So what idiot runs a whole company without backup power?

We might speculate what degree of complacency or technical debt can account for this pattern of adverse incidents. I haven’t worked with any of these organizations myself. However, my guess is that some people within the organization were aware of the vulnerability, but this awareness didn’t somehow didn’t penetrate the management hierarchy. (In terms of orgintelligence, a short-sighted board of directors becomes the single point of failure!) I’m also guessing it’s not quite as simple and straightforward as the press reports and public statements imply, but that’s no excuse. Management is paid (among other things) to manage complexity. (Hopefully with the help of system architects.)

If you are the boss of one of the many airlines not mentioned in this post, you might want to schedule a conversation with a system architect. Just a suggestion.

American Airlines Gradually Restores Service After Yesterday’s Power Outage (PR Newswire, 15 August 2003)

British Airways computer outage causes flight delays (Guardian, 6 Sept 2016)

Delta: ‘Large-scale cancellations’ after crippling power outage (CNN Wire, 8 August 2016)

Gatwick Airport Christmas Eve chaos a ‘wake-up call’ (BBC News, 11 April 2014)

Simon Calder, Dozens of flights worldwide delayed by computer systems meltdown (Independent, 14 October 2016)

Jon Cox, Ask the Captain: Do vital functions on planes have backup power? (USA Today, 6 May 2013)

Jad Mouawad, American Airlines Resumes Flights After a Computer Problem (New York Times, 16 April 2013)

 Marni Pyke, Southwest Airlines apologizes for delays as it rebounds from outage (Daily Herald, 20 July 2016)

Alexandra Zaslow, Outdated Technology Likely Culprit in Southwest Airlines Outage (NBC News, Oct 12 2015)

Updated 14 October 2016.

Political parties and organizational intelligence 3

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According to Wikipedia, a party leader is the most powerful official within a political party. I think this statement is debatable. Party leaders in recent history have had varying degrees of power and influence over their own party members, let alone the wider political system.

Writing in The Atlantic during the election campaign, @jon_rauch expressed strong opposition to the conventional view of party leadership.

The very term party leaders has become an anachronism. … There no longer is any such thing as a party leader. There are only individual actors, pursuing their own political interests and ideological missions willy-nilly, like excited gas molecules in an overheated balloon. …

This is not only a problem of leadership and individual agency, but also a question of the nature of the political party as a viable system with collective agency and intelligence. Rauch continues

The political parties no longer have either intelligible boundaries or enforceable norms.

The relationship between the politician and the party has always been problematic – consider Winston Churchill who changed party allegiance twice before becoming party leader. But the root cause of this problem is unclear.

Political parties are what things look like when you put politicians in charge.

— David Allen Green (@DavidAllenGreen) August 3, 2016

@DavidAllenGreen or they are machines for turning people into politicians

— Sean Owen-Moylan (@SeanOwenMoylan) August 3, 2016

Jonathan Rauch, How American Politics Went Insane (The Atlantic, July 2016)

Wikipedia: Party Leader (retrieved 4 Feb 2017)

Related posts

Political parties and organizational intelligence 1 (May 2012)
Political parties and organizational intelligence 2 (June 2015)

Political parties and organizational intelligence 2

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#orgintelligence #politics @rafaelbehr contrasts the behaviour of the Conservative and Labour parties.

Before the 2015 election, the Labour party practised collective denial (“misplaced confidence”, “kidded themselves”), believing that “organization could compensate for uninspiring leadership”. Following the election, “a danger now is oversteering the other way”.

Denial and oscillation are two of the principal symptoms I have identified of Organizational Stupidity (May 2010).

Contrast this with the Conservative willingness to invest in ‘blue collar conservatism’. Behr attributes this initiative to George Osborne, one of whose political gifts “is the self-knowledge to identify gaps in his own experience and to plug them with astute appointments”. Cameron, he suggests, is much less intellectually curious than Osborne. And yet it is Cameron who carries through Osborne’s plan to appoint Robert Halfon in order to recalibrate the Conservative’s relationship with the working classes.

What reveals itself here is a form of intelligence and leadership that is collective rather than individual, a form of collaboration and teamwork that has not been strongly evident in the Labour Party recently.

Steve Richards goes further …

“During Cameron’s leadership the Conservatives have become more alive as a party, impressively animated by ideas and debate. Cameron appears to be an orthodox Tory but likes having daring thinkers around him, even if they do not last that long. … In recent years Conservative party conferences have been far livelier than Labour ones, which have been deadened by fearful control freakery.”

… and insists that “the next Labour leader must not be frightened by internal debate”.

One of the essential duties of leadership in any organization must be to boost the collective intelligence of the organization. Not just debate, but debate linked with action.

Patrick Wintour reports that there was plenty of (apparently) healthy argument in Labour’s inner circle.

“Meetings were quite discursive, because there were a large number of views in the room. … [Miliband] enjoyed that. He used the disagreement as a means to get his own way. It is a very interesting case study in power, in that he would not be described typically as a strong leader, but very consensual. The caricature of him is as weak, but internally he had great control.”

But that’s not enough.

“The team that Miliband had assembled around him consisted of highly intelligent individuals, but the whole was less than the sum of its parts – it was, according to many of those advisers, like a court in which opposing voices cancelled one another out.”

Furthermore, an important requirement for organizational intelligence is that it is just not enough to have an inner circle of bright and well-educated ‘spads’, and to appoint either the cleverest or the most photogenic of them as “leader”. Perhaps the Labour inner circle deeply understood the political situation facing the party, but they neglected to communicate (forgot to mention) this insight to others. The vanguard is not the party. Any party that aspires to be a movement rather than a machine must distribute its intelligence to the grass roots, and thence to the population as a whole.

Exercise for the reader: count the ironies in the above paragraph.

Finally, intelligent organizations have a flexible approach to learning from the past. @freedland argues that Miliband was single-minded about the future, and refused to tackle the prevailing narrative about the Labour government’s role in the 2008 economic crisis.

“The management gurus and political consultants may tell us always to face forward, never to look over our shoulder, to focus only on the future. But sometimes it cannot be done. In politics as in life, the past lingers.”

Sources:

Rafael Behr, The age of machine politics is over. But still it thrives in the Labour party (Guardian 4 June 2015)

Jonathan Freedland, ‘Moving on’: the mantra that traps Labour in the past (Guardian 5 June 2015)

Tim Glencross, Attack of the clones: how spads took over British politics (Guardian 19 April 2015)

Brian Matthews, The Labour Party and the Need for Change: values, education and emotional literacy/intelligence (Forum, Volume 54 Number 1, 2012)

Steve Richards, Labour’s next leader should look to David Cameron, not Tony Blair (Guardian 1 June 2015)

Patrick Wintour, The undoing of Ed Miliband – and how Labour lost the election (Guardian 3 June 2015)

Chris York, The Rise Of The Spad: How Many Ministers Or Shadow Ministers Have Had Proper Jobs? (Huffington Post, 13 November 2013)

Related Posts:

Symptoms of Organizational Stupidity (May 2010)
Political Parties and Organizational Intelligence (May 2012)
Dark Politics (May 2015)

Updated 6 June 2015

Political parties and organizational intelligence 2

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#orgintelligence #politics @rafaelbehr contrasts the behaviour of the Conservative and Labour parties.

Before the 2015 election, the Labour party practised collective denial (“misplaced confidence”, “kidded themselves”), believing that “organization could compensate for uninspiring leadership”. Following the election, “a danger now is oversteering the other way”.

Denial and oscillation are two of the principal symptoms I have identified of Organizational Stupidity (May 2010).

Contrast this with the Conservative willingness to invest in ‘blue collar conservatism’. Behr attributes this initiative to George Osborne, one of whose political gifts “is the self-knowledge to identify gaps in his own experience and to plug them with astute appointments”. Cameron, he suggests, is much less intellectually curious than Osborne. And yet it is Cameron who carries through Osborne’s plan to appoint Robert Halfon in order to recalibrate the Conservative’s relationship with the working classes.

What reveals itself here is a form of intelligence and leadership that is collective rather than individual, a form of collaboration and teamwork that has not been strongly evident in the Labour Party recently.

Steve Richards goes further …

“During Cameron’s leadership the Conservatives have become more alive as a party, impressively animated by ideas and debate. Cameron appears to be an orthodox Tory but likes having daring thinkers around him, even if they do not last that long. … In recent years Conservative party conferences have been far livelier than Labour ones, which have been deadened by fearful control freakery.”

… and insists that “the next Labour leader must not be frightened by internal debate”.

One of the essential duties of leadership in any organization must be to boost the collective intelligence of the organization. Not just debate, but debate linked with action.

Patrick Wintour reports that there was plenty of (apparently) healthy argument in Labour’s inner circle.

“Meetings were quite discursive, because there were a large number of views in the room. … [Miliband] enjoyed that. He used the disagreement as a means to get his own way. It is a very interesting case study in power, in that he would not be described typically as a strong leader, but very consensual. The caricature of him is as weak, but internally he had great control.”

But that’s not enough.

“The team that Miliband had assembled around him consisted of highly intelligent individuals, but the whole was less than the sum of its parts – it was, according to many of those advisers, like a court in which opposing voices cancelled one another out.”

Furthermore, an important requirement for organizational intelligence is that it is just not enough to have an inner circle of bright and well-educated ‘spads’, and to appoint either the cleverest or the most photogenic of them as “leader”. Perhaps the Labour inner circle deeply understood the political situation facing the party, but they neglected to communicate (forgot to mention) this insight to others. The vanguard is not the party. Any party that aspires to be a movement rather than a machine must distribute its intelligence to the grass roots, and thence to the population as a whole.

Exercise for the reader: count the ironies in the above paragraph.

Finally, intelligent organizations have a flexible approach to learning from the past. @freedland argues that Miliband was single-minded about the future, and refused to tackle the prevailing narrative about the Labour government’s role in the 2008 economic crisis.

“The management gurus and political consultants may tell us always to face forward, never to look over our shoulder, to focus only on the future. But sometimes it cannot be done. In politics as in life, the past lingers.”

Sources:

Rafael Behr, The age of machine politics is over. But still it thrives in the Labour party (Guardian 4 June 2015)

Jonathan Freedland, ‘Moving on’: the mantra that traps Labour in the past (Guardian 5 June 2015)

Tim Glencross, Attack of the clones: how spads took over British politics (Guardian 19 April 2015)

Brian Matthews, The Labour Party and the Need for Change: values, education and emotional literacy/intelligence (Forum, Volume 54 Number 1, 2012)

Steve Richards, Labour’s next leader should look to David Cameron, not Tony Blair (Guardian 1 June 2015)

Patrick Wintour, The undoing of Ed Miliband – and how Labour lost the election (Guardian 3 June 2015)

Chris York, The Rise Of The Spad: How Many Ministers Or Shadow Ministers Have Had Proper Jobs? (Huffington Post, 13 November 2013)

Related Posts:

Symptoms of Organizational Stupidity (May 2010)
Political Parties and Organizational Intelligence (May 2012)
Dark Politics (May 2015)

Updated 6 June 2015

Corporate Grind

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#QTWTAIN @lucykellaway asks if those workers who stay for years with the same companies (are) unambitious and mediocre, or does the corporate grind make them so?Her article addresses the perception that people seemed to get dimmer the higher they went …

Corporate Grind

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#QTWTAIN @lucykellaway asks if those workers who stay for years with the same companies (are) unambitious and mediocre, or does the corporate grind make them so?Her article addresses the perception that people seemed to get dimmer the higher they went …