Demanding Change

Organizational Intelligence in the Roman Catholic Church II

2012-05-27T02:04:00.000+01:00

In my piece on Organizational Intelligence in the Roman Catholic Church (April 2010), I discussed the crisis the Church is currently facing in relation to its handling of child abuse cases, and explored some of the implications of this crisis for organizational intelligence within the Catholic hierarchy.

In his piece on Crisis in the Catholic Church (May 2012), Professor Tony Coady, himself a Catholic, argues that the handling of child abuse cases is only one of several major issues currently facing the Church hierarchy. Coady produces statistics indicating that the Vatican is increasingly out of step with the beliefs of lay catholics around the world, on a range of issues from the biological (artificial contraception, abortion and stem cell research) to the social (married priests, female clergy and gay relationships). The Vatican's response is to become increasingly strident and doctrinaire, and to discipline any clergy who step out of line.

But this discipline contrasts uncomfortably with the gross lack of discipline in child abuse cases, and leads many catholics to worry whether the Vatican has its priorities right.

The Victorian historian Thomas Macaulay wrote admiringly of the Church of Rome and the Papacy commending their ancient lineage and current vitality. Professor Coady thinks Macauley’s assessment now seems unduly optimistic.

"Scandals about clerical sexual abuse of children and the associated official evasion of responsibility as well as inflexible attitudes to so many of the values and dilemmas of the contemporary world have combined to undermine to a large extent the confident self-image and apparent cohesion that helped sustain the durability and vigour that enchanted Macaulay. ... The Catholic Church may well prove as vigorous and durable as Macaulay anticipated, but that is likely only if the edifice is subject to extensive repair."

Coady sees a growing clash between authority and sincerity, which makes this repair seem increasingly difficult.

"There are more and more voices within the Church urging the revisiting of the total ban on abortion but they are not being listened to by the authorities. In this they face the same wall of disapproval and potential sanction that confronts many other serious dissenting voices on other rigorist bans, such as those on contraception, divorce, clerical marriage, homosexuality, women priests, and most matters involving human sexuality. The fact is that the Catholic Church’s authorities do not want their arguments and rulings on these issues contested because they have been backed into a corner."

It is difficult to see how organizational intelligence can be maintained in this climate. But doubtless the Church has survived crises like this before, and may survive this crisis as well.

Declaration of interest: I am not a Catholic. My analysis is based largely on pro-Catholic sources, and I presume these are people who want the Church to survive and thrive.

Tony Coady, Crisis in the Catholic Church (Practical Ethics, May 2012)
#orgintelligence @ethicsinthenews

Political parties and organizational intelligence

2012-05-27T00:16:00.000+01:00

Political parties are very unusual kinds of organizations, whose collective intelligence could be very interesting to look at. They consist of professional politicians, paid party workers and volunteer members, together with an ecosystem of think tanks and other hangers-on.

The question of organizational intelligence is about the power of an organization to think powerfully and coherently, and the power to learn and solve problems quickly. How does a political party become aware of new opportunities and threats in the socioeconomic environment, or new situations that call for a coordinated political response? How does a party develop and evolve stories and narratives, to make sense of new situations? How are policies developed, tested and agreed? How do new ideas (including new problems and new solutions) travel through a political organization, and is this different from the way ideas travel through other kinds of organization? How do different communication mechanisms and technologies (e.g. meetings, internet forums, social networking) affect the development of a coherent political consensus?

We are more accustomed to looking at these questions in relation to large commercial organizations or government bodies. Enron is a fascinating example, because it was packed with talented people, but the business was incoherent. Microsoft is another fascinating example, because everyone imagines (wrongly) that the decisions are all taken at the top. Perhaps party organizations would like to be like Microsoft, but end up more like Enron. So how can parties get better at thinking?

I am keen to make contact with anyone who would be interested in exploring this question - either from within one of the political parties, or as an outside observer.

Leadership and Organizational Intelligence

2012-05-10T18:55:00.000+01:00

Chief Knowledge Officer

Joseph Goedert, Expert says it's time for Health Care to create ‘Chief Knowledge Officer’ position. Health Data Management, Oct 2011

Chief Learning Officer

CLO Magazine

Josh Bersin, Today's Chief Learning Officer (November 2010)

"A few years ago I wrote an article about how the CLO is really three people: A Chief Culture Officer (driving engagement, learning, and collaboration), A Chief Performance Officer (driving employee performance, alignment, and skills); and a Chief Change Officer (vigilantly driving change, seeing the future, and helping the CEO and other leaders transform the workforce as the business and workforce changes). Today, more than ever, the CLO must be all three."

Chief Sensemaking Officer

Peter Flemming Teunissen Sjoelin, Making Sense: One of the Components of Achieving Holistic Management (Jan 2011); Holistic Management in a Context of Enterprise IT Management and Organizational Leadership (May 2011)

Chief Collaboration Officer

Morten T. Hansen, Scott Tapp, Who Should be Your Chief Collaboration Officer? HBR Oct 2010

Lydia Dishman, Why Your Company Needs A Chief Collaboration Officer. Fast Company, May 2012

Is this several different (but overlapping) positions, or several labels for the same position? I believe these are all aspects of Organizational Intelligence, and call for coordinated leadership. That doesn't necessarily mean a single position, but certainly not a set of disconnected or rival initiatives.

And who will take such positions? Hansen and Tapp suggest that the responsibilities should be added to one of the existing C-level roles - probably one of the following five.

The current CIO.
The current HR head.
The current COO.
The current CFO.
The current head of strategy.

I agree that organizational intelligence might reasonably be added to any of these disciplines, but it would undoubtedly represent a radical shift for the traditional disciplines that dominate these functions. Leadership indeed.

Dangling Conversation

2012-05-10T15:33:00.000+01:00

@markhillary asks "When you follow company Twitter accounts, do you like being able to see who runs the account, like a named person on the profile?"

I think that depends how gullible you are. When I get a letter signed by an Important Person, I generally assume it was written by his staff and signed in his absence. And when I get a mass-produced "personal letter" from an Important Person, I assume it was generated by a computer and signed by a programmer.

I got an email recently, which claimed to be a "A Personal Message from Dr. Richard Soley, Chairman and CEO, OMG and Keith Steele, CEO, PrismTech and OMG Board Member". I wrote back and thanked Richard personally - not to the address on the email (which was omg_marketing@omg.org) but to his real email address. For some reason, he ignored this. I hope he's not ill or anything.

And corporate communications sometimes use a fictional identity. Gerald Kaufman MP once tried to phone a person in the Prime Minister's office who had responded to a letter, only to discover that "Mrs E Adams" didn't actually exist. [Source: John Walsh: Beware letters from fictional civil servants (Independent May 2011)] This kind of thing is convenient for bureaucracies, because it allows incoming communications to be sorted by topic and redirected to whoever happens to be on duty that day. I'm sure the same thing often happens with Twitter, to prevent a corporate spokesperson ever being confused with a private individual.

As for company bosses, politicians and other celebrities, it would be naive to imagine that they always write their own tweets. "Of course they don't", tweets @markhillary, "but allowing helpers to do broadcast stuff is surely OK if the conversational is genuine?" Well, that depends on your idea of a genuine conversation.

It seems to me that there are some serious sociological and ethical problems here - of public/private identity, authenticity and trust - and we are only just learning how to operate in this new world.

@markhillary goes on to ask another question. "If you were interacting with a brand like Virgin Media, are you happy conversing with the brand?"

My answer to that question invokes Freud's concept of transference. Our psychological state (happiness, frustration) may depend on what we project onto a given brand or persona that we are conversing with. I generally try to separate my feelings about the company/brand from my feelings about the human being who is standing between me and the company/brand - but I don't always succeed. When we are really angry about something, it is difficult to avoid being rude or sarcastic to the junior employee that picks up the phone, even when we know it's not really their fault. Conversely, if the sales assistant is charming enough, it is tempting to buy something we don't really need.

Of course the CEO never picks up the phone herself. Funny that. When I'm conversing with the Virgin brand, I may fondly imagine that I'm getting Richard Branson's personal attention, but there is a little voice inside my head saying that's unlikely.

There is of course one thing that is likely to make me very unhappy indeed. Suppose I am naive enough to imagine I am having a personal conversation with Richard Branson or Richard Soley. Then the screen falls over and I see it is just some little functionary and not the Wizard of Oz at all. Isn't that just going to annoy me? Isn't it Richard, isn't it? #OMG.

OrgIntelligence in Iran

2012-05-08T09:54:00.002+01:00

In my previous post, I reviewed Karl Albrecht's model of Organizational Intelligence. For some reason, this model is popular in Iran, and I have found numerous academic studies using Albrecht's assessment questionnaire as a research tool. Here are some of the findings.

A positive correlation between organizational intelligence and knowledge management (Marjani and Arabi, Mooghali and Azizi, Yaghoubi et al 2011, Yaghoubi et al 2012)

A positive correlation between organizational intelligence and staff performance (Marjani and Soheilipour)

A positive correlation between organizational intelligence and creativity (Mehrara et al)

A positive correlation between organizational intelligence and organizational excellence (Ahadinezhad et al)

Zarbakhsh et al raise doubts about the robustness of the Albrecht questionnaire as a research tool. Using a self-assessment questionnaire to investigate differences between organizations requires careful interpretation, so that we don't simply measure the self-delusion of the organizations in question.

This is of course particularly problematic with organizational intelligence, because intelligence is often associated with a degree of self-criticism. An organization that perceives its own intelligence shortcomings may well be more intelligent than an organization that believes its intelligence is perfectly fit-for-purpose thank-you-very-much.

But there is a larger question. Albrecht's questionnaire is based on a list of characteristics that he thinks to be associated with organizational intelligence. Most of these researchers have merely run statistical tests to compare Albrecht's lists of characteristics with each other, and with lists of characteristics from other sources, supposed to be associated with things like knowledge management and creativity. What we are mostly missing is a critical investigation of whether Albrecht's model offers a reasonable measure of the strategic value that we might expect to follow from organizational intelligence.

I have also developed a self-assessment questionnaire for organizational intelligence, which I have used in consulting exercises but which has not yet been comprehensively tested. I should be most interested in any research that would help me callibrate this questionnaire against objective outcomes, and I invite these and any other researchers to contact me for a copy of the questionnaire.

Massoumeh Ahadinezhad, Rokhsareh Badami, Mina Mostahfezian, Organizational Intelligence and Excellence Based on EFQM Model Among the Isfahan Boards are Related (pdf) World Journal of Sports Science 6(4): 328-330 (2012) ISSN 2078-4724

Amir Babak Marjani, Parvin Arabi, The Role of Organizational Intelligence in Organizational Knowledge Management (The Case of The Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran) (pdf). European Journal of Social Sciences (EJSS) Vol.25 No.3 (2011), pp.49-58 ISSN 1450-2267

Amir Babak Marjani, Mojdeh Soheilipour, The Relationship between Organizational Intelligence and Staff Performance Based on the Model of Karl Albrecht (pdf) (The case of Iran Branch, China National Petroleum Company) International Journal of Business and Social Science Vol. 3 No. 4 (February 2012) [Abstract]

Hassan Zarei Matin, Golamreza Jandaghi, Ali Hamidizadeh, Fateme Haj Karimi, Studying Status of Organizational Intelligence in Selected Public Offices of Qom (pdf) European Journal of Social Sciences – Volume 14, Number 4 (2010)

Asadollah Mehrara, Sonbollah Azami Saroklaei, Mojtaba Sadeghi, Afsaneh Fatthi, Relation between Organizational Intelligence and Creativity of Managers in Public Junior High Schools of East of Gilan Province (pdf) J. Basic. Appl. Sci. Res., 2(4)3311-3315, (2012) ISSN 2090-4304

A.R Mooghali, A.R. Azizi, Relation between Organizational Intelligence and Organizational Knowledge Management Development (pdf) World Applied Sciences Journal, Volume 4 Number 1, (2008)

Narjes Al-Sadat Nasabi, Ali Reza Safarpour, Key Factors in Achieving to an Intelligent Organization in the View of Employee in Shiraz University of Medical Science in 2008 (pdf) Australian Journal of Basic and Applied Sciences, 3(4): 3492-3499 (2009) ISSN 1991-8178 [Abstract]

Nour-Mohammad Yaghoubi, Elham Behtarinejad, Saeed Gholami, Hamed Armesh, The relationship between strategic processes of knowledge management and organizational intelligence (pdf) African Journal of Business Management Vol. 6 (7), pp. 2626-2633, 22 February, 2012 DOI: 10.5897/AJBM11.1398 ISSN 1993-8233

Nour-Mohammad Yaghoubi, Mahdi Salehi, Elham Behtari Nezhad, A Relationship Between Tactical Processes of Knowledge Management and Organizational Intelligence: Iranian Evidence (pdf) World Applied Sciences Journal 12 (9): 1413-1421 (2011) ISSN 1818-4952.

Mohammadreza Zarbakhsh, Hamidreza Alipour, Karim Dawabin Zahra, Mahrabi Taleghani, Standardization of Albrecht's Organizational Intelligence of the Personnel and Principals of the Junior High Schools of the West of Mazandaran Province (pdf). Australian Journal of Basic and Applied Sciences, 5(10): 990-995, (2011) ISSN 1991-8178

Karl Albrecht on Organizational Intelligence

2012-05-08T02:32:00.001+01:00

Karl Albrecht has defined seven characteristic features of an intelligent organization, and has designed a self-assessment questionnaire for creating a profile of the intelligence of an organization.

1. Strategic Vision: do we know where we’re going?
2. Shared Fate: are we all in the same boat?
3. Appetite for Change: can we face the unexpected challenges?
4. Heart: do we have the spirit and energy to succeed?
5. Alignment and Congruence: do the organization’s “rules and tools” help us succeed?
6. Knowledge Deployment: do we share our information, knowledge, and wisdom?
7. Performance Pressure: are we serious about getting things done?

Some of his questions are useful, but I don't think they provide a rounded view of the intelligence of an organization.

1. By strategic vision, Albrecht is referring to the capacity to create, evolve, and express the purpose of the enterprise. This is certainly an important aspect of sense-making, but overlooks an equally important aspect of sense-making, which is to understand the evolving demands of the environment and to align vision and purpose to these demands. In Albrecht's model of organizational intelligence, there is no explicit connection between vision and reality, and no mention of the extent to which organizations (and their leaders) understand and anticipate the present and future.

2. A stupid organization can still have a sense of community, and a strong collective affiliation to an outdated or unrealistic vision, leading to a collective refusal to face facts.

3. An appetite for change is important, but profound change also requires a degree of patience and a willingness to tolerate uncertainty and inconsistency. Albrecht talks about discomfort, but many organizations try to avoid discomfort by rushing through changes as quickly as possible, often resulting in a series of failed initiatives.

4. Heart. This may well be a consequence of organizational intelligence - an organization that values and engages the intelligence and creativity of its employees should end up with more satisfied and engaged and committed employees. But this is also strongly connected to trust.

5. Alignment and congruence. This is to do with the architecture of collaboration, which is perhaps the most difficult aspect of organizational intelligence. The most intelligent organizations typically don't display complete congruence, but manage with a degree of creative tension and conflict between different functions or positions.

6. Knowledge deployment. Albrecht concentrates on generating and sharing knowledge (flow of knowledge, conservation of sensitive information, the availability of information at key points of need) but I see the key capability for organizational intelligence in terms of linking knowledge to action. How has this knowledge helped us do things better, or to do better things?

7. Performance pressure - a preoccupation with the performance of the enterprise, in terms of the achievement of identified strategic objectives and tactical outcomes. This preoccupation is found in many bureaucratic organizations, especially those dominated by the so-called target culture which often militates against organizational intelligence. I therefore cannot see any necessary correlation between performance pressure and organizational intelligence.

A company like Enron would probably have scored fairly high on Albrecht's questionnaire, but it also provided a spectacular illustration of Albrecht's Law, namely that "intelligent people, when assembled into an organization, will tend toward collective stupidity".

Albrecht identifies two kinds of stupidity, which he calls the learned kind and the designed-in kind.

The learned kind prevails when people are not authorized to think, or don't believe they are.
The designed-in kind prevails when the rules and systems make it difficult or impossible for people to think creatively, constructively, or independently.

I believe there is a third kind of stupidity, which I call the disconnected kind. This is where there are many talented people, but they don't talk to each other; where the feedback and learning loops are broken; and where management fails to connect the dots. This is the Enron model of organizational stupidity, and in my view it is the most powerful explanation for the kind of organizational stupidity that Albrecht identifies in his eponymous law. But Albrecht's questionnaire is not designed to detect this kind of stupidity.

Karl Albrecht, The Power of Minds at Work: Organizational Intelligence in Action (2002)

Karl Albrecht, Organizational Intelligence & Knowledge Management: Thinking Outside the Silos. The Executive Perspective (pdf)

Karl Albrecht, Organizational Intelligence Profile: Preliminary Assessment Questionnaire (pdf 2002)

See also OrgIntelligence in Iran

Daoism and Rocket Science

2012-05-05T11:06:00.000+01:00

Who is to say whether a scientific or technical discovery is accidental or planned? Historians of science often point out that there was some luck involved in Fleming's "accidental" discovery of penicillin. But Fleming and his assistants were already actively searching for anti-bacterial agents, and the discovery of penicillin followed a similar path to his earlier discovery of the anti-bacterial properties of egg-white (lysozyme), so it is misleading to describe the discovery of penicillin as a complete accident.

Some historians of science now suggest that the Chinese invention of rockets was an accident. They argue that Daoist thinkers would have understood explosion as a violent response to the combination of Yin and Yang, and that they would therefore have been unable to think systematically about a reaction involving three ingredients instead of two. In other words, a given mental model or frame constrains investigation. (Unlike the Fleming example.)

Of course we must be cautious about interpreting historical Daoist thought against either a modern understanding of the chemistry of gunpowder, or even against a modern interpretation of Daoist thought. Perhaps the ancient Chinese did not see any contradiction between a three-way chemical reaction and Daoism, and that this apparent contradiction is merely a modern projection. (In other words, the modern historians perceive the past using their own mental models or frames. None of us can escape this.)

However, it is still true that mental models can constrain what we perceive, as well as how we make sense of our perceptions and act upon them, and this has important implications for innovation and organizational intelligence.

Frank H. Winter, Michael J. Neufeld, Kerrie Dougherty, Was the rocket invented or accidentally discovered? Some new observations on its origins (Acta Astronautica, Volume 77, August–September 2012, Pages 131–137) http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2012.03.014

Corrinne Burns, Oops, I invented the rocket! The explosive history of serendipity (Guardian, 4 May 2012)

Questions on OrgIntelligence

2012-05-04T10:27:00.000+01:00

A student from the Middle East emailed me as part of his research into organizational intelligence in universities, and I sent him some brief answers.

1)   Is organizational intelligent a mental ability in the organization?

I would avoid the word "mental" because it raises too many philosophical distractions. I prefer the word "cognitive". Yes, it is a cognitive ability, or perhaps a set of cognitive abilities.

In my book I describe organizational intelligence in terms of six cognitive capabilities: Perception (Information Gathering), Sense-Making, Decision-Making, Memory, Learning and Communication. (We could argue whether Communication counts as a cognitive capability, but it is clearly related.)

See Does Organizational Cognition Make Sense?

2)   Whether organizational intelligent is a mechanism?

Organizational intelligence relies on a number of cognitive and cultural mechanisms and instruments (tools), but I don't think it makes sense to to regard organizational intelligence itself as a mechanism or instrument.

However, like human intelligence, organizational intelligence is one of those qualities that only exists if it is exercised, and disappears (atrophies) if it is not exercised. (Power is another one of those qualities.) But I don't regard the exercise of organizational intelligence as quite the same as using it purely as a means to an end.

3)   Is organizational intelligent connected to organization functions?

In my framework, organizational intelligence depends on six critical organizational capabilities - see above. All other organizational activity is dependent on organizational intelligence, in the sense that they should perform better if there is greater org intelligence, and perform worse if there is a lack of org intelligence. (This is what I call a soft dependency - obviously an organization can perform all sorts of functions unintelligently, but it may achieve better results if it can perform these functions intelligently.)

4)   Is organizational intelligent a planning method?

No. All planning activity may benefit from org intelligence. Conversely, improvements to org intelligence can be planned methodically.

A planning method typically involves a perceived gap between an existing state or problem state (AS-IS) and a desired future state or solution state (TO-BE), and a series of interdependent actions to get from AS-IS to TO-BE.

For organizational intelligence, we might wish to assess the current level of organizational intelligence, as well as identify various inhibitors to organizational intelligence in a specific organization, and then plan a series of improvements that would remove these inhibitors and improve the overall level of intelligence. (I have a self-assessment checklist, designed for assessing current level and identifying problems.)

5)   Is it logical to examine organizational intelligent according to the context of every organization?

Yes. Different organizations need different levels of org intelligence, depending on their strategy and environment.

6)   According to these topics and dimensions what would be a definition for organizational intelligent in universities?

The formal definition of organizational intelligence would be the same for universities as for other organizations. The specific forms and mechanisms would be different, because universities have a specific environment, specific time dimensions, and specific outcomes.

The Science of Retail

2012-04-18T16:09:00.004+01:00

#orgintelligence Liz McShane of @PortlandDesign tells @pollycurtis why Tesco's star has waned.

"Tesco has taken its eye off the ball for some time now, focusing more on the science of retail rather than the emotion of it. By that we mean the prioritisation of the loyalty card programme and harvesting customer data, which has lead to the fundamentals of good service being neglected, for example the first thing you are asked at the check-out is for your loyalty card, rather than a simple (but appreciated) hello. ... Reliance on discounts as a point of differentiation has in turn neglected the in-store experience."

Polly Curtis, Why are we falling out of love with Tesco? Guardian, 18 April 2012

In the past, I have praised Tesco for its mastery of the science of retail, and this is certainly one aspect of its organizational intelligence. This included the following elements.

The Loyalty Card innovation led to the creation of a new data class called Customer. (Retailers previously had no way of recognizing a customer as "the same again" - which is a fundamental requirement for a data class).
The collection and analysis of very large quantities of customer purchasing behaviour.
The planning and execution of very large numbers of pricing and marketing experiments, such as special offers.
Optimizing prices and promotions based on feedback.

In the old days, retailers ran special offers for a number of reasons.

To shift surplus inventory (either their own or further up the supply chain)
As loss leaders, to get customers into the store.
To attack other retailers.

All of these reasons are still valid, but we can now add a further reason.

To differentiate customer behaviour - e.g. testing the elasticity of demand for different products for different customer segments.

Many companies collect large quantities of data, but few companies seemed to be able to use the data as effectively and profitably as Tesco. Clearly this is not just about the IT systems but about integrating sophisticated management information and analytics into the business process. This is a big part of my Organizational Intelligence story.

And as Alan Mitchell explains, Tesco's Clubcard has benefited from a unique combination of favourable attributes, which other retailers cannot duplicate. Luck or intelligence?

But this must now be balanced against Tesco's neglect of other success factors, which several of Polly Curtis's correspondents have identified. It now becomes clear that Tesco was failing to respond to a number of other weak signals, and has fallen behind its competitors in some areas. Responding appropriately to weak signals is another key part of the Organizational Intelligence story.

Liz McShane seems to imply that Tesco's success in one area (loyalty card programme, data harvesting and differentiation) was a cause of its neglect of other success factors. There are two distinct reasons why this might have happened. Perhaps Tesco only has a finite amount of organizational intelligence, and deploying it in one area means that it is not available in other areas. Or perhaps Tesco's success in one area made it complacent in other areas.

Another hypothesis is that customers might be starting to become aware/wary of Tesco's cleverness - thanks in part to media coverage, as well as such anecdotes as pregnant women receiving targeted marketing before anyone else knew. This would either mean that this form of intelligence has diminishing returns, or that it requires continual leaps in intelligence to keep one step ahead of customer resistance.

Some commentators have seen the recent change of CEO as a proximate cause for Tesco's latest results, but I doubt that it will have made much difference, not yet at least. For many years, Sir Terry Leahy was one of the most respected CEOs in the UK; but then so (for a time) was Sir Fred Goodwin. We shouldn't confuse public reputation with real effectiveness, and we shouldn't be in any haste to assess the true contribution of any individual to a large company. In any case, the personality of the CEO may only have a marginal effect on organizational intelligence of the whole enterprise.

Nevertheless, in his Wikipedia entry, Sir Terry Leahy is credited with devising and implementing the Tesco Clubcard loyalty program "and also successfully monitoring the shopping habits, movements, and political opinions of Clubcard holders". Leahy only stood down as CEO in March 2011, so it is a bit unfair to blame his successor if it turns out that the overwhelming success of Clubcard programme has masked under-investment in other areas.

Some commentators have also noted that Leahy's successor, Philip Clarke, had been CIO of Tesco, although he did not have an IT background.

After graduating from Liverpool University with a degree in economics he joined the Tesco Management Training Programme which provided him with a perfect platform to work his way to the top. In 1998 he was appointed to the board with responsibility for the supply chain and a year later information technology was added to his brief. ... Six years into the role, Mr Clarke then became responsible for the businesses outside the UK, leading Tesco's entry into the huge markets of India and China.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13114113

My interpretation of this series of appointments is that the Tesco board (including Leahy and Clarke) saw supply chain, IT and international as the strategic capabilities for Tesco, and this may be a good indicator of Tesco's present strengths and weaknesses.

It is however worth pointing out that Tesco's profits have only fallen by 1%. Although this may be an unwelcome surprise for Tesco shareholders and senior management (especially as the stock market generally overreacts to this kind of news), it hardly signals the end of the road for Tesco just yet.

Rachel Shabi, The card up their sleeve (Guardian, 19 July 2003)

Glynn Davies, How Tesco became Britain's top supermarket (MoneyWeek, 9 May 2007)

Alan Mitchell, Why Tesco Clubcard is a dead end (Marketing Magazine, 16 April 2010)

Philip Clarke, Retail is detail: Tesco boss Philip Clarke explains new retail strategy (BBC Today, 18 April 2012)

Two Dimensions of Trust

2012-04-17T18:34:00.000+01:00

In my post Magic Quadrant or Sorting Hat, I compared Gartner's Magic Quadrant (used to classify software vendors and products) with the Hogwarts Sorting Hat (used to classify young witches and wizards).

Leaders: Gryffindor
Challengers: Slytherin
Visionaries: Ravenclaw
Niche Players: Hufflepuff

Gartner's Magic Quadrant is a 2x2 matrix, whose two dimensions are Vision and Ability-to-Execute.

Following my previous post on Sharing Trust, I was thinking about a contrast between two key Hogwarts characters - Hagrid and Snape - based on the two dimensions of Trustworthiness and Ability-to-Execute.

Hagrid is regarded as extremely trustworthy. In the very first chapter of the first Harry Potter book, Dumbledore says he would trust Hagrid with his life. Professor McGonagall agrees, but points out that Hagrid can be a little unreliable. Later in the book, he is tricked by Voldemort into revealing a key vulnerability in the security arrangements protecting the Philosopher's Stone - security experts would call this "social engineering". So he doesn't score so well on ability-to-execute.

Snape, on the other hand, is a very accomplished and creative wizard, who scores extremely high on ability-to-execute. As we progress through the series, it becomes clear that he is successfully deceiving either Dumbledore or Voldemort - or possibly both. But this of course raises serious questions about his trustworthiness.

Trustworthiness - but for whom? Dumbledore trusts both Hagrid and Snape absolutely; other characters trust them with reservations, and only because Dumbledore does. And J.K. Rowling is careful not to present Dumbledore as omniscient - he is hoodwinked on several occasions, most notably by a clever impersonation in the Goblet of Fire.

So there are two ways of trusting people. We can regard them as trustworthy but fallible. Like Hagrid, or for that matter Dumbledore himself. Or we can regard them as reliable but remain suspicious of their true motivation and allegiance. Like Snape, or for that matter Voldemort. Ultimately, this is a question of authenticity.

Sharing Trust

2012-04-17T18:01:00.001+01:00

@CoCreatr (Bernd Nurnberger) via @VenessaMiemis blogs about #trust.

"Being in business is basically about trust. Establishing and verifying trust, documenting it, so it can be shared, swiftly, without every business partner having to redo what led to the trust."

What I am slightly wary about here is the implication that trust can be passed around, like a parcel. I often find myself questioning the related notion that knowledge (content) can be passed around like a parcel, and I am wondering whether the same fallacy can be found in each of the five dimensions of VPEC-T.

Bernd also repeats some trust-builders and trust-destroyers that appear to originate in A Survey of Trust in the Workplace (pdf), carried out by Paul Bernthal of DDI.

Trust building behaviours:

Communicates with me openly and honestly, without distorting any information.
Shows confidence in my abilities by treating me as a skilled, competent associate.
Keeps promises and commitments.
Listens to and values what I say, even though he or she might not agree.
Cooperates with me and looks for ways in which we can help each other.

Trust reducing behaviours:

Acts more concerned about his or her own welfare than anything else.
Sends mixed messages so that I never know where he or she stands.
Avoids taking responsibility for action (“passes the buck” or “drops the ball”).
Jumps to conclusions without checking the facts first.
Makes excuses or blames others when things don’t work out (“finger-pointing”).

A commentary on this survey on the Challenge Network Forum (presumably by Oliver Sparrow) observes that fear appears to be a common factor of the trust destroyers.

"When you look over the trust-destroyers, that list sounds like the actions of people who are scared - scared of what might happen to them if they make mistakes in a company where mistakes are punished, rather than regarded as the occasional result of encouraging employees to take some initiative."

Again, I am wondering whether the same pattern of xxx-building and xxx-reducing behaviours applies to the other dimensions of VPEC-T.

There is another set of popular theories about trust, involving certain social activities (such as team-building exercises) that are supposed to promote trust. A quick internet search for "trust-building" will yield a large number of these exercises, together with companies that will happily take your money for running these exercises with you and your colleagues. Alternatively, why not just drip oxytocin into the air-conditioning?

See also Two Dimensions of Trust

Paul Bernthal, A Survey of Trust in the Workplace (pdf) (DDI, 1998)

Randy Borum, The Science of Interpersonal Trust (Mitre, 2010). Also available via Scribd.

Bernd Nurnberger, Community of practice and trust building (Feb 2012) - reposted by Venessa Miemis, 5 Trust Builders and 5 Trust Destroyers (March 2012)

Oliver Sparrow (?), Whom do we trust? (Challenge Network Forum, undated)

Does Organizational Cognition Make Sense?

2012-04-11T11:24:00.000+01:00

#orgintelligence @carlhaggerty argues that ‘Social’ is Key to Improving Performance, discussing my presentation on Modelling Intelligence in Complex Organizations.

Carl quotes the statement that "Cognition only makes sense for individuals" (Slide 5). This is a reductionist view that I don't myself share. I prefer the holistic view presented in my following slide: that cognition makes sense for socially-embedded systems - not just people but also communities. I personally don't have any problem talking about how an organization perceives and decides and remembers and learns - not just as a metaphor but as a literal account of what is going on. However, I have had many arguments about this with people who are uncomfortable with applying any notion of cognition to artificial or social entities.

In practice, reductionists are usually willing to talk about non-human cognition, but they think this is only properly meaningful if it can ultimately be defined in terms of human cognition. Now there may well be a mapping between non-human cognition and human cognition, but it is probably very complicated and it's not something I'm particularly interested to work out.

Interestingly, some people who object to the notion of an organization having a collective memory don't seem bothered by the notion of an organization making a collective decision. Perhaps that has to do with the fact that collective decisions can often be understood as the result of a semi-democratic process in which individuals have a weighted voice/vote depending on their status in the organization. (Although in practice, collective decisions never quite work like that, and it is perfectly possible for an organization to arrive at a collective decision that nobody is happy with.)

This then links to the point Carl picks up from my slide 7 - the illusion of individual performance. In my book on Organizational Intelligence (now available on LeanPub, thanks for asking), I talk about the Talent Myth that was one of the things that did for Enron - the idea that all you have to do to build a brilliant company is recruit a bunch of brilliant individuals. Thinking about organizational intelligence doesn't diminish the talents and efforts of individuals, but we have to understand how these individuals can collaborate intelligently and learn collectively, using a wide range of sociotechnical mechanisms, to achieve greater results.

Carl thinks this is highly relevant in a public sector context. "An individual local government officer has a complex system environment, which could include Peers, Press and Media, local demographic, local political influence, national political influence, training, policy framework etc. Essentially an individual's performance is the result of the ‘systems’ own restrictions and ability to achieve and facilitate outcomes."

As I understand it, Carl's own work focused on building social knowledge systems to support local government intelligence. As local government (like everyone else these days) is constrained to do more with less, good organizational intelligence is surely a critical success factor.

http://leanpub.com/orgintelligence

Enterprise OODA

2012-04-02T14:35:00.004+01:00

#OODA #orgintelligence In response to @Griff0Jones, I promised to beef up the coverage of OODA in my book on Organizational Intelligence (draft now available via LeanPub). I should welcome any comments and suggestions on the following, as well as pointers to any practical examples.

The choices we make at the personal level are influenced by our experiences and our environment. We are not always fully aware of these influences, and may need someone else to point them out to us. The same is true of the strategic and operational choices made by organizations.

In a rapidly changing environment, we need a feedback loop that continuously aligns our behaviour to these changes. This is an important aspect of agility. And in a competitive situation, competitive success depends on our being more agile than our competitors - in other words, having a faster and more accurate loop.

A good model for this is the OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) loop created by John Boyd. Some people confuse this with the PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) loop popularized by Shewhart and Deming. However, the key difference between PDCA and OODA is the explicit inclusion of sense-making, which Boyd calls Orientation. Boyd himself produced a second model, IOHAI, which is largely an expansion on the sense-making area.

In order for the OODA loop to produce real agility, there needs to be agility in each of its parts.

Agile Observation. One criticism that has been levelled at simplified versions of the OODA loop (for example Benson and Rotkoff) is the tendency for what you observe to be narrowed to just those things that seem to help with decision making. (David Murphy describes this tendency as "inevitable".)

Simon Thornington raises a related issue in a comment to David Murphy's blog. "So much of what is observed is via instrumentation (or alternatively the output of models). Without the observer having prior knowledge of the construction and assumptions of the models, he or she cannot orient effectively based on the observations." Simon suggests that this was a factor in the recent Airbus crash, various space program mishaps and throughout finance.

But Boyd understood these points perfectly well, as do those who use OODA properly. In his reply to Benson and Rotkoff, David Lyle acknowledges this tendency. "Studies by cognitive neuroscientists have demonstrated that as a basic human trait, we are stressed more by uncertainty than unpleasant certainties. But in our efforts to achieve parsimony and the false cognitive ease often associated with it, we sometimes cut out too much detail and end up building expensive empires on theoretical foundations of sand." (via Cameron Shaefer)

Agile Orientation. David Murphy points out that "really big risks are often not acted upon because we are oriented so that we cannot decide", and reminds us what happened to those people who tried to act against the firm’s orientation at MF Global, or Enron or HBOS.

Discussing strategic planning through the OODA lens, Henrik Mårtensson points out the importance of orientation. "If we only know one strategic paradigm, and choose a strategic method from within the range of options provided by the paradigm, we loose (sic) the ability to improve beyond what the paradigm allows. ... Boyd believed it is absolutely necessary to be able to switch paradigms at will."

Agile Decision, Agile Action. Henrik argues that "operating with a crippled OODA loop and a strategic model that separates strategy and action may not kill you, but the faster the environment changes, the more hampered your organization will be by its own strategic model". Henrik recommends William Dettmer's Strategic Navigation, which in his opinion combines the principles of Maneuver Warfare with the analysis and planning tools of The Logical Thinking Process. "The result is fast high quality strategic planning, and seamless integration between planning and execution."

The limitations of the OODA model appear when there is too much emphasis on speed (especially response speed) and not enough appreciation of complexity. For example, in I've Got the OODA Blues, Adam Elkis argues as follows.

"Taking the OODA Loop literally can be misleading for cyber defenders because a “faster, faster” model implies that speed of response is the most crucial aspect of network defense. There’s a lot more to it than that. Alex Olesker’s post on Dronegate, for example, is really about a failure of Orientation and an overemphasis on speed of action. The Air Force claimed that it detected the virus instantly and isolated it, in effect placing a premium on the ability of automated processes to improve their ability to instantly observe, orient, decide, and act to contain a virus. This is a response rooted in the “faster, faster” OODA Loop interpretation."

and Adam concludes

"strategic learning within the organization enables, upon the next cycle, a better ability to Observe, a sounder Orientation, and a corresponding ability to make sounder decisions under fire. This response, however, is not something that can be automated–it depends on organizational policy decisions made by CIOs as well as the soundness of network defense systems and processes."

Sources and further reading

Kevin Benson and Steven Rotoff, Goodbye OODA Loop (Armed Forces Journal, October 2011)
David Lyle, Perspectives: Looped Back In (Armed Forces Journal, December 2012)

Blogs by Sean Lawson, Henrik Mårtensson, David Murphy, Chet Richards, and Spartan Cops.

The Group of Six

2011-12-31T03:32:00.002Z

According to Buddhist tradition, there was a group of six monks who constantly behaved in ways that exasperated the Buddha, causing him to produce a series of monastic rules to regulate their conduct.

Khuddaka Nikaya. The Dhammapada Stories. Translated by Daw Mya Tin, M.A., Burma Pitaka Association (1986)

The Bhikkhus' Rules. A Guide for Laypeople compiled and explained by Bhikkhu Ariyesako

Thanissaro Bhikkhu, Buddhist Monastic Code I, Chapter 6 Aniyata

See also "Six Monks, Group Of" in The Soka Gakkai Dictionary of Buddhism.

What puzzles me in this tradition is the apparent repetition of the Buddha's behaviour. Why does he keep defining more rules to guide the behaviour of the six errant monks (bhikkhus), when it is surely apparent that a more profound intervention ("enlightenment" perhaps) is required. Or is this tradition intended to demonstrate exactly that - the inadequacy of rules?

There is always another story 3

2011-11-01T15:08:00.001Z

@alantlwilson the Anglican Bishop of Buckingham once went on telly suggesting Apple was "in some sociological respects" a religion. Following Steve Jobs' death, he praises Jobs for having resurrected a corporation and for what he calls "genuine moral leadership". By quoting Hebrews 11 ("He Being Dead Yet Speaketh"), Bishop Alan is clearly inviting us to compare Jobs with the moral leaders of the Old Testament.

Bishop Alan rightly warns against the idolisation of business leadership, but regards Steve Jobs as an honourable exception.

"What passes for business leadership often turns out to be no more than grumpy old men sounding off about their control fantasies, or low grade Pelagian boasting about their deservings, or saying nice things about a religion that is no more than top dressing for their own greed and prejudices. ... Not so Mr Jobs."

Alan Wilson, He Being Dead Yet Speaketh (Oct 2011)

The Reverend Michael Johnson begs to differ, wishes Apple's "moral leadership" had extended to its suppliers and those who build iPhones and iPads in very stressful sweatshops in China, and continues with a wry comment about the Jobs myth: "It says something about the way we perceive our world that many shocking truths are obscured by slick promotion of stylish desirables."

By the way, there is a brilliant and very rude rant about right-wing Christians on the Fake Steve Jobs blog: Hate-spewing “Christians” need to listen up. And even though I know it was written by Dan Lyons, I really really want to believe that it was actually based on Jobs' own words. You know, He Being Dead Yet Speaketh.

There is always another story
There is always another story 2

The Centralization-Decentralization Dialectic

2011-10-25T01:00:00.002+01:00

Why is it that attempts to decentralize often seem to result in an accumulation of power at the centre? There are several possible explanations.

1. In some instances, the decentralization agenda may be completely fraudulent. Popular leaders may spout the rhetoric of decentralization as a means of permanently gathering more power for themselves.

2 Alternatively, the leadership may believe that a temporary centralization is a necessary step towards what Lenin called The Withering Away Of The State. "Although leaders such as Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher may have been inspired by liberal mentors - Thatcher being directly inspired by Hayek - they nonetheless were decision makers who benefited from power." (Marciano and Josselin p xvi)

3. As a third possibility, the leadership may genuinely believe in the desirability of decentralization, both short-term and longer-term, but find themselves frustrated by larger system forces. Emerging system behaviour somehow manages to nullify any planned intervention that challenges the essential purpose and identity of the larger systems: Stafford Beer coined the term POSIWID to refer to this phenomenon.

4. We may note that there is always a paradox in imposing a decentralization agenda from the centre. Mark Bray observes that "the terms centralization and decentralization usually refer to deliberate processes initiated at the apex of hierarchies. However, sometimes patterns change by default rather than by deliberate action. Also power may be removed from the centre either with the acquiescence of or in the face of resistance by the centre."

5. There are various trade-offs involved. For example, Jan Zábojník discusses the trade-off between the distribution of information and the distribution of motivation.

6. Centralization and decentralization often take place alternately, creating a kind of oscillation, or even simultaneously. For example, Paul Corrigan talks about Centralising and decentralising the NHS simultaneously (October 2011), and asks how to work with that?

7. Or perhaps we need to stop thinking about centralization-decentralization as a simple polar choice. Writing on IT centralization and decentralization (HBR July 2008), Susan Cramm says it's time to kill off this centralized versus decentralized IT debate. No longer should we ask, "Should we centralize or decentralize IT?", but rather, "How do we decentralize IT in a centralized manner?"

Bob Avakian, Centralization, Decentralization and the Withering Away of the State (2004)

Mark Bray (2003), Control of Education: Issues and tensions in Centralization and Decentralization, in Arnove, Robert F. and Torres, Carlos A. (eds) Comparative Education: The Dialectic of the Global and the Local, second edition. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, pp.204-228.

N McGinn and T Welsh, Decentralization of Education UNESCO 1999

Alain Marciano, Jean-Michel Josselin (eds), Democracy, freedom and coercion: a law and economics approach Edward Elgar Publishing, 2007

Richard Saltman, Vaida Bankauskaite, Karsten Vrangbaek (eds) Decentralization in Health Care: Strategies and Outcomes. Open University Press 2007.

Jan Zábojník Centralized and Decentralized Decision-Making in Organizations (pdf), Journal of Labor Economics, January 2002

There is always another story 2

2011-10-24T19:29:00.003+01:00

@jamesallworth and @claychristensen believe that Steve Jobs solved the innovator's dilemma (HBR October 2011).

Allworth's simplified version of the Innovator's Dilemma (as explained with greater precision in Christensen's book) is that successful innovators are led astray by the pursuit of profit. Jobs supposedly disdained profit, along with any number of other business school best practices, and produced "a company that looks entirely different to almost any other modern Fortune 500 company". In an unrelated article on Steve Jobs and the purpose of the corporation (HBR October 2011), Ben Heineman has asserted that "Apple existed to delight customers first — benefits to other stakeholders, including shareholders, followed".

Jobs' original expulsion from Apple may well have been partly caused by his failure to respect the traditional gods of management. On his return, he characterized the difference between Sculley and himself in terms of profitability versus passion. Jobs later told Walter Isaacson, his official biographer: "My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. The products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It's a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything." [via Huffington Post October 2011]

But as I indicated in my previous blogpost (There is always another story), Jobs was outstandingly good at constructing simple either-or narratives of this kind, and persuading everyone to believe them. His former colleague Bud Tribble called this a Reality Distortion Field. We sometimes have to work hard to avoid taking such narratives at face value. Like many wealthy rock stars or religious gurus, Jobs may have enjoyed creating the impression that he didn't care about wealth. But we don't have to believe it.

Note: Professor Christensen tweeted James Allworth's HBR article without further comment, so I take that as indicating broad agreement with the article's main premise. See also Evgeny Morozov, Form and Fortune - Steve Jobs’s pursuit of perfection and the consequences (The New Republic, February 22, 2012).

There is always another story

2011-10-15T15:36:00.008+01:00

Steve Jobs talks about death

"About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. ... It turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now." [Stanford University, June 2005]

But according to some sources, there is a critical omission from the story. The diagnosis was in October 2003. Jobs spent several months trying alternative medicine before agreeing to the surgery, which took place in July 2004. Some cancer experts believe this delay may have shortened his life.

Polarity

Jobs himself judges the world in binary terms. Products, in his view, are "insanely great" or "shit." One is facing death from cancer or "cured." Subordinates are geniuses or "bozos," indispensable or no longer relevant. People in his orbit regularly flip, at a second's notice, from one category to another, in what early Apple colleagues came to call his "hero-shithead roller coaster." (Fortune Magazine 2008)

Some might think that this was at odds with his Buddhist beliefs: Polarity is an Illusion, Oneness is a Reality.

Risk

It is important to understand the ways in which Jobs' attempts to manipulate his world pose risks for Apple - and thus its investors. They are evident in his difficult partnerships with music and television companies, which chafe at his insistence on setting uniform prices for their songs and videos on iTunes; in the real story of his battle with cancer; and in his deployment of stock options at Apple and Pixar, which exposed both companies to backdating scandals. (Fortune Magazine 2008)

The risks here come not only from the attempts to control everything, but from the polarity, delay and denial, which emerges from the way he tackled his cancer as well as in the way he ran Apple.

Storytelling

Writing in the Guardian, in the week Jobs died, Charlie Kaufman reveals something important about story-telling. He wasn't talking explicitly about Jobs, but as Matthew Creamer points out, he might as well have been.

Storytelling is inherently dangerous. Consider a traumatic event in your life. Think about how you experienced it. Now think about how you told it to someone a year later. Now think about how you told it for the hundredth time. It's not the same thing. Most people think perspective is a good thing: you can figure out characters arcs, you can apply a moral, you can tell it with understanding and context. But this perspective is a misrepresentation: it's a reconstruction with meaning, and as such bears little resemblance to the event.

The other thing that happens is adjustment. You find out which part of the story works, which part to embellish, which to jettison. You fashion it. Your goal is to be entertaining. This is true for a story told at a dinner party, and it's true for stories told through movies. Don't let anyone tell you what a story is, what it needs to include. As an experiment, write a non-story. It will have a chance of being different.

Meanwhile, some reviewers of Walter Isaacson's authorised biography of Steve Jobs are questioning whether it is a true representation of the man - see revew roundup by Clare Spencer.

Is a single true representation possible - of anyone, let alone Jobs? Brent Shlender writes

"Most of us who wrote in depth about the brilliant career of Steve Jobs sooner or later came to realize that we were complicit in the making of a modern myth. ... Nevertheless, Steve was merely mortal. And his storied life was one of dissonances and contradictions."

For more, see There is always another story - part 2
Steve Jobs wasn't a visionary

Sources

Matthew Creamer, Walking with Steve Jobs (AdAge 7 October 2011)

Peter Elkind, The Trouble with Steve Jobs (Fortune March 2008)

David Gorski, Steve Jobs’ cancer and pushing the limits of science-based medicine, Steve Jobs’ medical reality distortion field (Science-Based Medicine, October 2011) (via Jason Yip)

Sue Halpern, Who was Steve Jobs? (New York Review, Jan 2012)

Charlie Kaufman, Why I wrote Being John Malkovich (Guardian 3 October 2011)

Moses Ma, The Apple-Theosis of Steve Jobs (Psychology Today 15 November 2011)

Evgeny Morozov, Form and Fortune - Steve Jobs’s pursuit of perfection and the consequences (The New Republic, February 22, 2012)

Brent Schlender, Steve Jobs and Me: A journalist reminisces (Fortune, October 25, 2011)

Clare Spencer, Is Steve Jobs biography accurate? (BBC News 25 October 2011)

Ryan Tate, Steve Jobs Probably Doomed Himself With Alternative Medicine (Gawker, October 2011)

Steve Jobs wasn't a visionary

2011-10-09T10:58:00.006+01:00

I'm afraid I disagree with my friend @markhillary and countless others who have described Steve Jobs as a visionary. See for example Mark's piece Steve Jobs Succeeded Against all the Odds (Huffington Post, 6 October 2011).

If you want a visionary from the billionaire college-drop-out class of 1955, Bill Gates is your man. A computer in every home? A chip in every household device? Computers in schools? Business @ the Speed of Thought? Wiping out polio? Those are the kinds of goal we regard as visionary.

Jobs himself credited Gates' vision. "Bill was really focused on software before almost anybody else had a clue that it was really the software." (WSJ May 2007)

As Horace Dediu (@asymco) points out, Steve Jobs was not a visionary or a futurist. He just built the future, one piece at a time.

On his own account, he didn't even "put the dots together and saw where they led", as Horace (I think mistakenly) claims. The point of the calligraphy story in his Stanford Commencement address [Stanford University, June 2005] is that "you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."

Lucy Suchman talks about plans and situated actions. Situated action is "living in the moment", which Buddhism calls mindfulness, and Jobs himself called following your heart. (See PresentationZen). There is no grand plan, simply enormous attention to detail.

What he did connect was people and knowledge. @jonahlehrer says his secret sauce was Consilience. See my post From Convenience to Consilience.

That's not exactly vision. But it has a lot to do with what Gartner calls "ability to execute". After Steve's death, Dan Lyons (responsible for the brilliant and funny FakeSteveJobs blog) asked Woz what he thought was Steve's greatest strength. "Everyone else will say vision, and gosh darn that’s important but that doesn’t go anywhere without operational discipline. ... He organized the company to have good tight controls. Watching everything he could — that is operational excellence." (RealDanLyons, 11 October 2011)

Malcolm Gladwell agrees. "Philanthropy on the scale that Gates practices it represents imagination at its grandest. In contrast, Jobs’s vision, brilliant and perfect as it was, was narrow. He was a tweaker to the last, endlessly refining the same territory he had claimed as a young man." (Steve Jobs Real Genius New Yorker, November 2011) via @ironick

But of course you may disagree. There is always another story.

The politics of "top-down"

2011-09-22T11:22:00.000+01:00

Top-down is very unfashionable these days. David Cameron, the British Prime Minster, talks about "ending the old big-government, top-down way of running public services, releasing the grip of state control and putting power in people's hands" (Cameron promises 'people power' in public services plan BBC News 11 July 2011).

"Top-down" is associated with centralized (Whitehall) control, which is assumed to be driven by dogma and ideology. Whereas "bottom-up" is liberated and local - the new citizen-led democracy. (Mark Easton calls this Upside-Down Accountability - see his piece Introducing Cameronism BBC News 11 July 2011.)

"Top-down is also associated with a mismatch between supply and demand. In Scotland, a Commission on the Future Delivery of Public Services, chaired by Campbell Christie, sets out a mid-term vision of an entirely different culture in public provision: prevention rather than cure, community-based rather than top-down, acknowledging that the objective is to reduce demand, lest the twin pressures of budgetary restraint and demographic changes would "overwhelm" the entire system. (Brian Taylor, Sympathetic ear for 'flawed' social report BBC News 29 June 2011.)

In Britain, most of the topical examples come from the health service, but it is not difficult to find examples in other domains. Here is a small selection.

NHS Reorganization

In opposition David Cameron had promised to protect Chase Farm hospital from what he said was an "unjustified" top-down reorganisation. But there is a growing consensus within the health service and among independent experts that the NHS has too many hospitals (Ministers agree to controversial hospital shake-up, BBC News, 12 September 2011). And is it ever possible for a prime minister to intervene in such a dispute without acting top-down?

Andrew Lansley has said he wanted to put an end to "top-down reconfigurations of NHS services, imposed from Whitehall rather than led by the local NHS". Now he will have to decide whether to back the local NHS even when it wants to make controversial changes. Chase Farm is the first high-profile case. (Why Chase Farm matters BBC News 12 September 2011)

Whenever possible, Andrew Lansley blames the Labour government. "Labour's IT programme ... wasted taxpayers' money by imposing a top-down IT system … " (NHS to overhaul £11bn IT project, BBC News 22 September 2011). Not surprisingly Labour disagrees: for Andy Burnham, it is the present government that is "subjecting the NHS to a reckless top-down reorganisation". (Archbishop of Canterbury criticises coalition policies BBC News 9 June 2011)

Dr Hamish Meldrum, Head of the BMA, also associates "top-down" with ideology. "There is a huge difference between adapt and change and slash and burn, between carefully planned reorganisations and knee-jerk closures and redundancies, between partnership working among health professionals, managers and patients and imposed top-down, politically-motivated diktat." (NHS told to avoid 'slash and burn cuts' BBC News 27 June 2011)

Education Reforms

Scottish Liberal Democrat education spokesman Liam McArthur said: "It is hard to see how this top-down restructuring will improve the experience and opportunities for students, or morale amongst college staff." Scots universities could merge in education reform (BBC News, 14 September 2011).

Law and Order

Profesor Lorraine Gamman, director of the Design Against Crime research centre, argues that "top-down" initiatives generally fail when it comes to encouraging people to preserve and treasure works of art. Instead, she says, community-led initiatives are usually far more effective at ensuring that public art is protected by self-policing. (How do you graffiti-proof public art? BBC News 4 July 2011)

Arab Spring

In Yemen, the momentum behind the revolution quickly grew beyond the top-down control of the established opposition. (Ginny Hill, Yemen unrest: Saleh's rivals enter elite power struggle BBC News 27 May 2011)

Big Picture Again

2011-06-05T12:53:00.002+01:00

In my post Getting the Big Picture, I included a pair of pictures from the Daily Mail showing a house from two perspectives - one bigger than the other. The Daily Mail labelled them as Advert and Reality, but as I pointed out at the time, but of course it is only one reality, and there are many other big pictures.

The Daily Mail has now published another example.

"Impressive: Tindale Towers as it is featured in the estate agent's brochure. It's the home with everything... except a room with a view."

"Reality: What the brochure fails to show is that the mansion (the white building in the middle of this industrial landscape) is nestled between a scrapyard and a gas works"

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1393109/Art-Deco-mansion-Bishop-Auckland-County-Durham-views-scrap-yard.html (2 June 2011).

By juxtaposing these two pictures, the Daily Mail implicitly contrasts the devious wiles of estate agents with the campaigning integrity of journalists. But don't just read the Daily Mail's version, read the comments below the article. Some of these comments suggest that the Daily Mail's version of "reality" is also misleading, and the picture has been taken with a very long lens to create a false impression of proximity. (One comment recommends using Google Earth to check the distances between the buildings.) In other words, the Daily Mail's picture has been chosen for the sake of a good story. (Google Earth provides a different "big picture".)

Furthermore, the gasworks is possibly scheduled for demolition, so a long view might see the ugly buildings replaced by "leisure and retail facilities" and Tindale Towers becoming "a highlight of a new residential area". Which may be okay for those who don't regard "leisure and retail facilities" as a new kind of wasteland. Beauty in the eye of the beholder.

The backstory seems to be that Tindale Towers only got planning permission in the first place because of its inauspicious location. It was relatively cheap to build, and its value increases as the area is dragged upmarket. An internet search for Tindale Towers reveals lots of previous newspaper and TV coverage (e.g. Northern Echo Jan 2008, Independent March 2008), as well as a book by Chris Foote Wood.

Lots of different big pictures.

Constitutional Change

2011-04-29T12:40:00.001+01:00

This post is about the proposed change to the British electoral system, from "First Past The Post" (FPTP) to "Alternative Vote". British electors will have the opportunity to make a choice between these two (and no other) options in next week's referendum. Most of the public arguments both for and against AV have been pretty fatous and feeble, with plenty of ad hominem.

John Kay is a welcome exception. In his latest article A voting system fit to bar Le Pen from power (FT April 27 2011), Kay offers a lucid argument in favor of AV, and makes the following observation.

Britain has an informal system of alternative voting already, whose operation depends on voters making good guesses as to the likely result. This strengthens the case for the formal adoption of AV, but also explains why it would not make very much difference in practice. ... Even if the alternative vote is not the official system, voters will tend to behave as if it were.

John Kay's analysis therefore distinguishes the formal system of voting in the UK (currently first past the post) from the defacto system in use. He suggests that UK voting behaviour already partially reflects an informal conceptual model based on AV, and the proposed change would merely help the formal system to capture the emergent voting behaviour more accurately.

This is one of the reasons why it is difficult to predict the likely consequences of the change, because nobody knows exactly how British electors will adapt their (emergent) voting behaviour to the new formal voting system. Kay is probably correct in predicting that the first order effects of the change will be much less significant than either the pro-AV or anti-AV campaigners have claimed.

One of the arguments put by the anti-AV campaign is that AV is more complicated than FPTP. But FPTP already provokes some people to adopt complicated voting behaviours, and it is not evident that the behaviours associated with AV would be any more complicated than the behaviours associated with FPTP. The point here is that we should look at the total sociopolitical complexity of a given voting scheme, not merely the counting procedure.

There is also a second-order question - whether any given outcome from this referendum makes further constitutional change (e.g. full proportional representation) more or less likely. I have seen some divided opinion about this, but it seems pretty speculative. Some of the campaigners acknowledge that the first-order effects will be pretty small, and they see the current campaign as merely a preliminary battle in a longer-term and more fundamental reform.

The Wisdom of the Iron Age

2011-03-24T13:07:00.001Z

Interesting BBC programme In Our Time this morning about The Dawn of the Iron Age. Why and how did people start making ornaments and tools and weapons from copper and tin and lead? Because the ores were shiny, and it was easy to see how they could be melted and purified and worked. Gradually, people discovered that certain combinations of these materials (what we now call alloys) were stronger, or more malleable - hence the development of bronze.

Although iron ore was much more abundant than any of the others, it was much less attractive, and primitive people were unaware of its potential value. Even when melted, it didn't look much. Producing useful iron from this stuff was a more complicated procedure, and those tribes that first discovered the secret wisely kept it to themselves. Egyptian tombs had a few iron items, but these were probably obtained by trade or capture - the evidence suggests that Egyptians themselves did not know how to produce iron.

Could people ever have worked out how to produce iron if they didn't already have the experience of working with other metals. Would people ever have thought it worth the extra hassle of producing iron if they weren't aware of the limitations of using other metals? Is it conceivable that we could ever have had an Iron Age without having a Bronze Age first?

There is an important lesson here for innovation. Nobody should ever be satisfied with the "low hanging fruit". The only purpose of the low-hanging fruit is to get us started, to feed us and motivate us as we build ladders, so we can reach the high-hanging fruit.

See also

Venkatesh Rao, The Disruption of Bronze

Paula Hay, Cognitive Archeology of the West

The Wisdom of the Tomato

2011-03-24T12:43:00.000Z

@davidnasser @mingk @leebryant @kaldajani and many others have tweeted the following aphorism.

'Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad."

Please permit me to quibble with this aphorism. Classifying tomatoes as fruit is merely information. This classification is supported by data, such as the observation that the tomato contains its own seeds. Knowing not to put it into a fruit salad is a culinary "best practice", based on a series of social conventions about the proper constitution of fruit salad and its place within a meal. So this is knowledge, or what is sometimes called "received wisdom". However, innovation often involves disobeying social conventions and surprising those who rely excessively upon received wisdom. For example, how did chefs discover that it was okay to put flower petals into salads ("next practice")? So courage is knowing that you are not "supposed" to put tomatoes into fruit salad, but doing it anyway. And real wisdom is not inflicting such gross culinary experiments on the wrong people at the wrong time in the wrong way.

To lead people on a journey ...

2011-03-16T09:10:00.000Z

#PROMSG @PG_Rule tweeted

1. We have to start from where they are (not from where we are).

and I added three corollaries

2. We have to start from where they really are (not from where they think they are).

3. We have to make our way to where they are (not expect to lead them from a distance).

4. We have to head towards where they want to be (not where we want them to be).