What looks from an adult perspective like radical technological change is just the background radiation of a young person’s life.

Martin Belam

• Top Ten Tips from Mobile Web Experts – Forbes Don’t just scale down your desktop site and try to squeeze as much as you can into the little screen. Use the mobile development process to prune your offerings to the most essential.
• The next step | Helpful Technology Gov.uk is a stake in the ground – a signpost to something better and some examples of what that looks like, as much in terms of process and culture as in terms of pixels. If it can manage the transition to the next stage, it’ll be onto a winner and we’ll all be the better for it.
• With GOV.UK, British government redefines the online government platform – O’Reilly Radar Unfortunately, far too often .gov websites cost millions and don’t deliver as needed. GOV.UK is open source, mobile-friendly, platform agnostic, uses HTML5, scalable, hosted in the cloud and open for feedback. Those criteria collectively embody the default for how government should approach their online efforts in the 21st century.
• The Five Stages of Hosting (Pinboard Blog) 5. The Stately Manor
  Your own datacenter.
  Good: No need to take hosting advice from blog posts.
  Bad: God help you.
• My 2 cents on sharing UX findings | Red Gate’s User Experience TeamWe decided, quite simply, to track usability issues on a whiteboard. On the completion of the first usability test we conducted, we made a list of the main issues that a user encountered and put this up on the whiteboard. As we conducted additional usability tests, we continued to add to our list and made note of recurring issues.At the end of a series of usability tests, we were left with a whiteboard filled with usability issues and the number of participants who encountered them. The UX representatives in the project team then rated the issues based on severity and came up with design recommendations for each issue.Each design recommendation was discussed with the entire project team in a very simple stand-up meeting around the whiteboard. Software developers had an opportunity to help us assess the feasibility of implementing our design recommendations and including development changes to the overall development plan.
• Sometimes solving life’s problems is better by design Seen in this way, design is a kind of counter-narrative to the gravitational pull of producers and service providers – the way they suit themselves without even knowing that that’s what they’re doing. Also, by being consciously and counter-culturally cross-disciplinary, design seeks a larger view than is dreamt of in the narrow philosophies of professional disciplines. Where the practitioners of economics, accountancy marketing, communications, HR and IT pursue their objectives with such single mindedness that it can unbalance and tyrannise our lives, ”design thinking” seeks a more holistic perspective built from an attempt to empathise with all involved.
• World building 404: The unknown unknowns – Charlie’s Diary We can expect the world of 2022 to look similar to the world of 2012, insofar as many of the same cars will still be on the roads, fashion continues to iterate around a bunch of attractor themes scattered over the past century, many of today’s large corporations will still exist (although some will have collapsed), and so on. There will be some surprises (maybe there’ll be a hotel in space, or a Chinese Moon base) but overall it will be recognizable. But by the time we push the boat out to 2032, the unknown-unknowns will be building up. Signs of climate stress and overpopulation will be more visible, we may have driverless cars, there may be major disruptive effects arising from the development of direct brain interfaces or something else that today is a research and development curiosity. And by 2052, the unknown unknowns will have driven the world to be a very different place from anything I can predict today.
• NESTA – Can government think long-term? Geoff Mulgan It seems to take new governments a few years to realise how much they need serious strategy. In the first year or two, they tend to rely on intuition, manifesto commitments, or the belief that political strategy is all that matters.
• Ben Terrett on designing GOV.UK | Government Digital Service The design challenge here seems to be – don’t avoid the obvious. Government websites are needs driven and what people want to do is get in, get what they want and then get out. Quickly.

Two elements of successful leadership: a willingness to be wrong and an eagerness to admit it.

Seth Godin
(via Tim Harford)

• Don’t forget who you are working for « We Love Local Government In both cases the assumptions I made, as a fairly IT literate individual was that a) people would share my belief that digital is better and that b) people’s spending habits would reflect this. In fact I was wrong.
• Stumbling and Mumbling: Child benefit, ideology & bias But cognitive biases aren’t something which ignorant citizens have and which wise governments are free of. Policy-makers are also prone to them – either because they are as irrational as everyone else or because they have to pander to an irrational electorate. One of my big complaints against Nudge is that it fails to appreciate this sufficiently, and so panders to the ideological fiction that policy-making is or can be entirely rational and evidence-based.
• “Digital memorials for mass graves” – Jim Kosem at London IA When thinking about designing a digital monument, Jim explained that your main competition was basically big lumps of concrete that tended to last for hundreds of years. That is quite some competition for software, he argued. We really don’t have a good track record of software ageing.
• It’s all about the words | Government Digital Service We will be ‘designing for the common case’. That means we will take information that affects most of our users and putting it up front. If you are an edge case or exception – perhaps affected by something that only affects 100 people in the whole of the UK – then your information will still be there – it just won’t be in the first paragraph.
• Why Facebook doesn’t have or need testers | ZDNet By paying less attention to quality, Facebook has been able to focus on other things, like making the company a fun place to work at that can attract and retain talented engineers. Facebook would probably be less fun if it cared more about quality. Facebook’s product is a website, so it can fix things quickly. It has a process which permits rapid deployment of new code, and rapid rollback of buggy changes. This reduces the cost of recovering from bugs.
• The discipline that dare not speak its name « Martin Howitt’s blog We started strongly and soon had a very elegant programme for exploiting the organisation’s resources to drive higher productivity, better outcomes and lower costs. But no-one was interested. I now believe this wasn’t because people disagreed with it, it was because people didn’t understand it. And I think that has more to do with demographics than anything: there are still a large number of people at or near the tops of big organisations that have a blind spot when it comes to anything new: they can’t cope with big paradigm shifts and clever methods changing the way business is done.
• What is ‘Information Architecture’? | Help | guardian.co.uk In the end, however you try and define it, information architecture boils down to consciously organising the content and flow of a website, based on some principles that can be articulated, that have been derived through evidence gathering.
• Customer Experience v User Experience | disambiguity Given the choice of having a Chief Experience Officer (CXO from a UX background) or a Chief Customer Office (CCO from a marketing/CX background), I’d probably choose the latter – for the more comprehensive, well rounded view of the organisation and all its working parts than the interface obsessed UXer is likely to be. And I’m more confused about where Service Design fits into all of this than ever.
• Leader vs. Loser – GovLoop – Social Network for Government Leaders may have different styles but one thing about them is always the same: They act as if they own the situation, whether they actually do nor not.
• Elegant Code » Agile’s Coming of Age We know good and well that we can’t predict the evolution of a software project beyond a few months in most thriving businesses. Change just happens. Why then do we persist in thinking Big Funding Up Front is any different than Big Design Up Front? Some are making inroads with models of T&M funding, fixed cost, adjustable scope, and other techniques like incremental funding. However, for the most part we remain stuck in annual funding models because business Agility, the real promise of Agile, remains elusive.
• Scroungers – honestlyrealThink of the coastline. Yes, another line. Isn’t it? It’s obvious where it lies. One side land, the other sea. Now look more closely. Still sure about that? Still confident that you can draw, with perfect accuracy, a boundary between the two? One that doesn’t shift faster than you can study it? One in which every crevice, nook, cell and grain can be defined as being on one side or the other. Of course you can’t. The coastline is a great theory, but a poor reality.
• Fixing Twitter (Robert Brook) Interestingly, it Twitter is fixed for me, it might not be great for the money people. And if it’s fixed for them – which seems to be the direction things are going in now – then it might be more completely broken for me.

Georges Perec is famous for writing a novel in French entirely without the letter e – a formidable technical achievement. But in some ways the more astonishing achievement came when Gilbert Adair translated it into English – also without the letter e, preserving a connection with the original at a level of detail which most translators don’t even have to think about, let alone strive to match.

This being a blog about public strategy, bravura literary translation is not really what this is about. But thinking about Perec and Adair, following the latter’s recent death, made me reflect that the job of a public strategist is also about translation (though that’s not all that it is about). The job is to take vision, intention and legislation, often expressed in relatively abstract terms, and create from them the wherewithal to deliver practical and effective implementation.

As with literary translation, original authors may not be fluent in – indeed may not have any knowledge of – the target language for the translation.  They thus may have no way of directly assuring themselves of the integrity of a translation.  But that does not invalidate the translation, or make it any less necessary for monoglot readers of the translated language.  So it is with the serial translation of vision into strategy, policy and legislation, of policy into delivery approach, of delivery approach into project objectives, of project objectives into IT specification, and so on down several forking sequences. At each stage there are unavoidably and necessarily small distortions. Done well, the translation errors are not cumulative. Done anything less than well, any final attempt to return to the original language, or to infer the original policy intent from the daily pattern of service delivery, is doomed by the triumph of noise over signal.

At the end of it all, there is a risk that what gets delivered is not the original intention, but the third level mistranslation of that intention. As a result, a project may be triumphantly completed to conclusion without anybody quite having noticed that though a problem might well have been solved (and even solved well), it has slid into being a different problem from the one originally posed.

As translations are rarely remarked, translators are rarely celebrated. To miss their contribution is to miss something rather important.

It is quite a long story: there are well over a thousand words here, describing a bit of activity which took no more than a few minutes to do. There are no heroes in this story, but no villains either. And since there is a lot of quite tedious detail in what follows, it’s probably worth starting with the conclusion.

I wanted to find what I thought would be a simple piece of local information. As with many apparently simple questions, it turned out to be remarkably hard to answer.  That’s partly because managing information and keeping it up to date across the three bits of government which I came across in the attempt is hard. But it’s also because of a set of minor usability glitches and inconsistencies, none of them individually catastrophic, but cumulatively making the experience harder than it needed to be. It is also an unexpected reinforcement of the argument I made a few weeks ago that you can’t tell how well a service or site might meet your needs by looking at it.  You can only tell by having needs and trying to meet them. My conclusion is that this is always harder than it looks. And that there is always something to be gained from being obsessive about the detail.

And so to the story.

My mother in law is less mobile than she used to be. She has recently got a blue badge, allowing her to park her car much closer to places she is trying to get to. Actually she doesn’t have a car, it is many years since she gave up driving. But the blue badge can be used in other people’s cars, so long as they are taking her somewhere she wants to go. My cousin is visiting from the States for Christmas. She wants to take my mother in law out to lunch. So is there convenient disabled parking sufficiently close to the intended restaurant?

My mother in law lives in Shrewsbury, which comes under Shropshire unitary authority. That’s an immediately encouraging start, because the Shropshire website is a thing of beauty, with clear minimalist design and simple straightforward navigation (and a project team who show their passion in making it so). What I want is a map of disabled parking bays in central Shrewsbury, so ‘Maps’ seems like a good place to start. The map tool is very well done. You  can drill down practically to the level of individual paving stones, and select from no fewer than 43 overlays, ranging from the precautionary salt network to mobile library stops. Sadly, though, disabled parking isn’t on the list of 43, so I need to look elsewhere.

It’s not hard to find the relevant page – though it’s primarily about applying for a blue badge, with using it seeming to be a bit of an afterthought well below the fold. ‘Where can I park if I have a Blue Badge?’ is a promising heading, but sadly tells me only about kinds of places, not actual places. But there is a promised link to ‘Parking Benefits’ which might do the trick. At this stage the link is only promised because Shropshire seems to have a consistent policy of not putting links in the body text, but adding them in a separate box at the end of each page. That creates two significant problems.

First, there is an impact on usability. The actual links are invisible without scrolling down, creating a sense of uncertainty which, as we will see, turns out to be entirely justified. More importantly, it breaks a fundamental part of how the web works. If there is anything more fundamental to the concept of a web page than hyperlinks, I don’t know what it is. And even if you don’t accept that in principle, there is Jakob Nielsen’s law of internet user experience to consider:

Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

I wanted to click on the phrase ‘Parking Benefits’, not to have to scroll down, find the phrase in a links section and click on it there. That leads to the second problem, because as it turns out the promised link is not there to be found, a mistake I suspect it is much easier to make if the link gets separated from the text which introduces it  – there is no way of looking quickly at the list of links on the page and detecting that one is missing.

As an alternative, I followed a link which did exist to ‘The Blue Badge scheme: rights and responsibilities in England’. That turned out to be a pdf version of a booklet produced by the Department for Transport.

I thought it was rather good. It told me everything one might want to know about how the scheme works, other than the answer to that elusive question of where disabled parking bays are to be found.  But buried deep in the booklet, on a page dedicated to the curious fact that four London boroughs have declared UDI from the scheme, was the line I was looking for:

You can find the location of parking bays in London and elsewhere at http://www.bluebadge.direct.gov.uk

My sense of triumph was short lived. The result of following the link was not what might be hoped for. Without even the dignity of a 404, that subdomain is stone cold dead:

This page is generated by Parallels Plesk Panel, the leading hosting automation software. You see this page because there is no Web site at this address.

There was something not quite right about that, beyond the obvious fact of the broken link.  I had assumed that the Shropshire site was linking to DfT to provide the booklet, but it turns out it has hosted its own copy. But the version they have is from 2007, now superseded by a new edition dated 2011, which has neither the link, nor any promise of the elusive map. Linkrot is a pernicious business, and not generally the fault of the linker.  I don’t know how Shropshire checks the validity of its links, but whatever method they use, I am not surprised that it fails to pick up non-clickable URLs buried in pdfs (and that fact is perhaps another argument against using pdfs for mainstream content). But since the booklet as a whole has been replaced, perhaps it should be taken as an instance of the more general principle that it is better to point to information which may change at times and in ways you don’t control. There is no excuse though for Directgov closing a previously publicised sub-domain without leaving so much as a redirection to where the current content is to be found.

I was also struck that the 2011 version on Directgov is much inferior as a web page than the old 2007 version on the Shropshire site. Shropshire has one page to a screen, giving proportions which are about right, so filling the screen with clear content.  Directgov has a double page to a screen view, completely out of proportion to any screen I have ever seen. To complete the oddity of it all, the new version also has a link to where copies can be downloaded from. Except that it is a DfT link, not a Directgov link, despite the content being very clearly addressed to a citizen audience.  And except that although the link has been made clickable, it runs over two lines, and only the first line is used, so taking anybody who tries to use to the DfT home page rather than the topic page. And while I am being pernickety, the DfT page which is, I assume, the canonical source describes the booklet as published on 23 March 2010, despite linking to the May 2011 version.

But back to Directgov, where it turns out that despite the demise of the sub-site, there is a blue badge page. It even gave me the extremely useful (but all too rarely provided) information that the thing I was looking for (even if I didn’t know that that was what I was looking for) doesn’t exist. Better still, it says it can tell me where to look instead.

If you live in England, see the link ‘Locate parking bays for registered disabled drivers’ to find Blue Badge parking bays

This is information held at local authority level, so it needs to know the area I am interested in and two screens later it successfully finds the right link – to the general blue badge page on the Shropshire site which I had been on half a dozen steps earlier. Beyond the general frustration of being sent round in a circle, it is also important to spot that this came of answering a question different from the one asked. The Directgov offer was to take me to a page where I could locate parking bays.  But it didn’t – and couldn’t – deliver on that offer because it has no control over whether local authorities provide it. Perhaps other local authorities do, but that doesn’t help me with knowing where one might park in Shrewsbury.

My cousin decided they would take a taxi to the restaurant.

• 24 ways: Extracting the Content The first question is, how are you going to design something to ensure users have the easiest access to the best Content, if you haven’t defined at the beginning what that Content is?
  
• Corporate hubris – and a bit of festive cheer | Flip Chart Fairy Tales Corporations are made up of people. People sometimes do bonkers stuff. Furthermore, large organisations are almost impossible to control. Therefore people continue to do bonkers stuff. Business leaders just have to do their best to minimise the effects of the bonkers stuff and hope that some of it leads to good stuff. And, of course, the business leaders sometimes do bonkers stuff as well.
• Can’t get no satisfaction: Why service companies can’t keep their promises « Dachis Group Collaboratory For example, consider the way that Amazon balances front stage and back stage operations. Amazon’s front stage is its customer-facing website. Amazon can expect that the level of change on the web is likely to remain volatile for some time. Constant innovation in online services will cause customer expectations to evolve accordingly. So it makes sense for Amazon’s web-development approach to be highly adaptive and flexible, with lots of room for creative experiments and innovation.But radical, disruptive innovations on the fulfillment side of Amazon’s business are less likely. It’s reasonable to predict that customers will continue to want fast, efficient delivery; and that warehousing, shipping and logistics, because they involve large investments and existing physical infrastructure (ships, trucks, planes, railroads and so on), won’t change anywhere near as rapidly as online services. So it makes sense for Amazon to focus on reducing variety through standards and controls in its back-stage operations, while maintaining maximum adaptability on its front stage with customers. And indeed, Amazon web developers have a very different work experience than workers in an Amazon distribution center, although the company’s cost-focused, thrifty culture is in evidence throughout.
• Disaster book club: What you need to read to understand the crash of Air France 447 – Boing Boing When there is inherent risk in using a technology, we try to build systems that take into account obvious, single-point failures and prevent them. The more single-point failures we try to prevent through system design, however, the more complex the systems become. Eventually, you have a system where the interactions between different fail-safes can, ironically, cause bigger failures that are harder to predict, and harder to spot as they’re happening. Because of this, we have to make our decisions about technology from the position that we can never, truly, make technology risk-free.
• Design strategy for the changing web :: Blog :: Headshift Accepting that we cannot always predict the next advancement in mobile or tablet technology, we can create solutions tailored to existing technology and devices that remains flexible enough to adapt to innovation ahead.
• Programming should take pride of place in our schools | Technology | The Observer What governments don’t seem to understand is that software is the nearest thing to magic that we’ve yet invented. It’s pure “thought stuff” – which means that it enables ingenious or gifted people to create wonderful things out of thin air.
• Schneier on Security: Walls as Security Theater What a wall satisfies is not so much a material need as a mental one. Walls protect people not from barbarians, but from anxieties and fears,which can often be more terrible than the worst vandals.
• Agile and UX are “an abusive relationship” – James O’Brien at UX People James recommended that UX lie, cheat and steal to cope with being in an agile environment. His examples included lying about what something was called – i.e. a paper prototyping session could be described as a “UX spike”. Or cheating by making sure that test data is specifically designed to stress the UI and reveal flaws that have to be fixed. Or stealing concepts from agile, like using the phrase “UX debt” to describe sub-optimal solutions that have been deployed as “good enough”, but which need to be re-addressed in later iterations.
• Mark Zuckerberg says the email’s end is nigh. LOL | John Naughton | Comment is free | The Observer Organisational addiction to email has long since passed the point of dysfunctionality and now borders on the pathological, with employees sending messages to colleagues in nearby cubicles, people covering their backs by cc-ing everyone else and managers carpet-bombing subordinates with attachments. The real problem, in other words, is not that email is dying but that it’s out of control.
• Public sector innovation must move from Strategy to action « MindBlog The question is not whether innovation is needed, but rather how we will choose to approach the task of innovation. So what key considerations must a public sector innovation strategy include if it is to make a difference?
• Why public services are built around the behaviour of our grandparents | Local government network | Guardian Professional The place to start is by increasing our understanding of how people in 2011 live their lives. It’s fair to say that, at the moment, we have a limited understanding of what our residents do at home – how they access their work, leisure, and recreational activities.In fact, we make a whole host of assumptions and broad generalisations based on historical patterns of understanding. The way we provide leisure services has changed very little from the way councils up and down the country would have provided such services to our grandparents, possibly even our great grandparents, despite the fact that the way we keep fit bears little resemblance to how people behaved in the early 20th century.
• Clear Reporting & Critical Thinking: Why User Experience Needs to Remember its Roots in Psychology You shouldn’t rely on soundbite articles to tell you why other soundbite articles are wrong.
• An Extensive Guide To Web Form Usability – Smashing UX Design A form is a conversation. And like a conversation, it represents two-way communication between two parties, in this case, the user and the organization. In fact, the user has filled out the form in order to initiate communication with the organization.
• Establishing trust in digital services | Government Digital Service But most of all we need to develop identity services around the needs of users – if we don’t then people will not trust or use them. Many people have described this subject as ‘identity management’. That is an organisation centric phrase: a notion that organisations hold data about people and have the responsibility for maintaining it. We have to reset the subject around the user and recognise that in the digital age people assert identity in many different ways and contexts.
• Seth’s Blog: There’s nothing wrong with having a plan Plans are great.But missions are better. Missions survive when plans fail, and plans almost always fail.
• The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog) You might almost think that the whole scheme had been cooked up by a bunch of hyperintelligent but hopelessly socially naive people, and you would not be wrong. Asking computer nerds to design social software is a little bit like hiring a Mormon bartender. Our industry abounds in people for whom social interaction has always been more of a puzzle to be reverse-engineered than a good time to be had, and the result is these vaguely Martian protocols.
• Knowing and Making: Does Nudge require regulators to be “more rational” than consumers? Somebody who spends their professional life thinking about decision-making and examining the extensive research in this field is likely to be able to help me make decisions that I’ll be happier with.
• Social For Internal Comms – Social Media Workplace | redcatco blog A strong theme through out the day was: Problem first. Technology second. It’s all too easy to say “social technology is the answer. What was the problem?” – be pragmatic, and start with a well defined problem was the wise advice.
• Bryan Clark » Blog Archive » Negotiate with your users A useful dialog would negotiate with your users. Give them actions and power to change their situation. Don’t ask users to acknowledge your troubles and stop the negotiation there. Reconnect! Try Again! Even simple actions can help people correct the situation.
• Piloting new ways of measuring digital success | Government Digital Service Because of the nature of the Jobseeker’s Allowance service, pages are delivered up to the user in a dynamic fashion. This means that there is essentially no concept of ‘a page’ and instead questions are presented to users based on their previous inputs and answers. This is fine from a user perspective but it causes problems when it comes to gathering and interpreting behavioural data.In essence, there is no ‘hook’ within the data for orientation. You cannot assess where people are within the journey or at what stages they drop out because all of the URLs are dynamically generated. Looking for patterns in behaviour is therefore meaningless because each user journey is completely unique.
• Haakon Halvorsen, Kjetil Hansen & Anna Dahlström at EuroIA 2011 Haakon and Kjetil went on to explain what a challenge it was to make banking “fun” visually. For most people, online banking is a necessary evil, not an exciting web destination. To impress the client, though, they showed lots of mock-ups of how the site could be, complete with plenty of polish and drop-shadow. Banking will be fun, the designs shouted.
• Nick Bradbury: Tiny Apps are Hard Regardless of whether I stick with mobile development, the lessons I’ve learned from it are ones I’ll apply to everything I create in the future. Keep it simple, keep it uncluttered, and keep it focused. That’s how you create great apps for any platform.
• If Steve Jobs did government… | Blog As we have argued in our policy making work, this is often the missing link in government – where we assume that policy concepts translate seamlessly into delivery – without putting in the effort to make sure that the policy is deliverable by the people who need to deliver it. That means prototyping, testing and insisting that things work before they are unleashed on a waiting public. It also meant an insistence on excellence with which people who run government feel naturally uncomfortable.
• In The Eye Of The Storm: AlphaBeta.gov … But transactions are where it’s at. We built the government gateway to support both single transactions and joined up transactions (that is, ones that would link more than one department and send each of them the relevant data. The vast bulk of those transactions come from sites other than direct.gov; the vast bulk of direct.gov’s transactions are for Car Tax. That all needs to change. We didn’t ever crack it. It needs cracking – integrated transactions, simple pan-device (and even pan-channel) authentication, pre-population of data that government already knows about you and so on.
• You shape your intranet. Thereafter, it shapes you. « Sharon O’Dea As on the Internet, so in the enterprise. In its infancy, it’s the organisation that shapes the intranet, designing it around the needs of internal users. Or at least, that’s the theory. In truth, organisations get the intranet they deserve, with flaws and compromises and sometimes just bad decisions.But thereafter, it’s the business that has to live with this, and it’s the people within it who have to suffer the consequences. The decisions you make at the design stage will affect the way employees work every single day, for years.
• NESTA – Designing beta public service Though it may seem like semantics, just think about it for a moment: what impact might a ‘beta ethic’ bring to how we currently design and develop public policy solutions and services? How might it help to overcome some of the challenges governments face when trying to innovate, such as an aversion to risk and public criticism? How different the engagement of public citizens and professionals, when a beta version is launched first?

But it’s always worth remembering that processes seemingly designed to frustrate the customer are not limited by sector or organisation. Here’s a tale of convoluted customer service with rather a surprising punchline. Though here is another, more seasonal, story which shows another approach altogether.

You can’t institutionalize innovation. If you could, everyone would do it.

Carl Bass, quoted by Brian Bergstein

The skill of a pilot is in bringing vertical speed to zero just at the landing point.

The skill of a bell ringer is in bringing rotational speed to zero just at the balance point.

The skill of managing change is in making the rate of change as close to zero as possible at the point of change.

Successful pilots, bell ringers and change managers do this apparently effortlessly by preparing their trajectory well ahead of time and being continually alert to changes in the environment which might require a correction – but those corrections will tend to be small in relation to the goal.

Unsuccessful pilots and bell ringers crash.

Picture by RTPeat licensed under creative commons