Triarchy Press: Changing the organisation

Gerard Fairtlough and the Triarchy Group

2008-07-03T14:18:00.003+01:00

I was enormously moved by the memorial service for Gerard last Saturday. And, though I was initially disappointed at the relatively small attendance at the symposium on Sunday, I also realised that the group was just the right size to get the ball rolling for the future.

With people travelling from far and wide - LA, Washington, Brussels, Paris to name four - to be at the memorial weekend, there was also a palpable energy and enthusiasm to do something more, to take forward Gerard's thinking, to develop it and spread it widely, under the banner of something like The Triarchy Group.

While we wait for the dedicated e-mail group, blog and forum, or whatever, to be put in place so we can talk to each other - two things:

If you weren't able to be there on Sunday but would like to be part of planning what happens next, do get in touch. Post a comment to this blog or e-mail me.

I don't think we want to try and copy TED, but I do find some genuinely inspiring talks on there and this one from Benjamin Zander I like in particular, because it seems to be a classical musician's introduction to Systems Thinking and because classical (and not so classical) music was very close to Gerard's heart.

The model - distributing and circulating the presentations free of charge (which is how I'm allowed to reproduce the talk above) - but charging huge amounts to the people who attend, seems a wonderful one. I'm certain Gerard would have approved.

Interpreting Confucian ethics as a spiritual resource

2008-07-01T06:08:00.003+01:00

"A member of the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard, the chair of the Academica Sinica's advisory committee on the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Professor Tu Weiming is currently interpreting Confucian ethics as a spiritual resource for the emerging global community."

I'm indebted to Stephen Meng for introducing me to the work of Professor Tu. Here, for example, he writes about multiple possible modernities, the need for the US to stop teaching and start learning, the suggestion that liberty as an intrinsic value cannot generate a humane society without distributive justice, and much more.

In short, Professor Tu has identified two apparently contradictory diagnoses of the present state of human affairs: one the one hand, 'an optimistic assertion that fundamental ideological divides no longer exist' and, on the other, 'a cautionary note that cultural, especially religious, differences are the major sources of international conflict'.

This is precisely the dichotomy that Alain de Vulpian notes, though Vulpian is rather more inclined to see scenarios for the future of the world fitting into one or other of these two categories (peaceful and optimistic - violent and pessimistic). Tu, by contrast, suggests that different ways could easily develop in different regions (which seems hard to imagine in the face of current globalising tendencies, but who knows what Peak Oil may change in that respect?).

Anyway, I think they'd both agree that it might be a good idea for the individualistic West to stop deriding the collectivist East for their psycho-social backwardness, when the former got us into the present mess and the latter might help us out of it.

Lives devoted to pure pleasure

2008-07-01T05:21:00.006+01:00

I'll shut up about Gen Y shortly. As soon as I turn off the Google Alert, to be precise. But I couldn't resist the latest bit of drivel from Greer McDonald of New Zealand's Dominion Post. From yet another recently commissioned piece of research we learn:

Marriage, house and babies? No thanks. Generation Y 'party animals' would rather splurge money on five 'lifestyle pillars' in pursuit of the good life and in an attempt to dodge traditional commitments...
In case you're wondering, and I reckon you'll probably be all aquiver to know, the 5 Pillars are: 'the hedonistic pursuits of entertainment, fashion, sport, travel and music'. Well blow me, these Ys know how to have fun don't they? In my day we used to have to make do with hitching to India, Bob Dylan concerts, football, finding laughably fashionable clothes and going out on a Friday and Saturday night. Or all week if possible. Oh, but dang me, that's travel, music...

Anyway. It gets better. According to the report, Greer tells us:

[Gen Y] expressed their rebellious ways through spending more time outside work hours socialising...

Wow. Bet they could show Jimmy Dean a thing or two.

The thing is, it ends up sounding like I've got some sort of vendetta with Gen Y., when my only complaint is about the dismally thought-free journalism that produces stuff like this.

Collecting myths

2008-06-30T13:14:00.002+01:00

After meeting Graham Galer at the weekend at Gerard Fairtlough's memorial service and the ensuing symposium (which was much more fun than it sounds and of which much more anon) I was thinking about the connection between urban myths and the sort of national and organisational myths that Graham discusses in his book.

Then I read this article about the famous assertion that:

You remember 10% of what you read
You remember 20% of what you hear
You remember 30% of what you see
You remember 90% of what you do

The claim is made a lot by marketing people (I used to use in my previous existence as a consultant teaching publishers to write advertising and direct marketing copy) and by HR and training people. I was always uncomfortable with it and now I find (thanks to a nice piece on Training Zone) that it's totally spurious (though somebody went to a lot of trouble to pretend that it wasn't).

Thinking about it got me here: urban myths work because we want to believe them. We want to believe that Kennedy said he was a doughnut, although he didn't. We wanted to believe those stories that went round after September 11th claiming that Londoners had been given hints by random but considerate IC6s about the date and location of the next terrorist attack.

So there's an immediate connection we can make in organisational and political terms: powerful and charismatic leaders tell us what we want to believe (even if we didn't actually know that we wanted to believe it before). They touch a nerve. And they use myths (as Hitler did about the Jewish financiers, for example) to get their message across.

But, of course, it's also true that great leaders tell us what we don't want to believe (or hear, even) and require us to change in order to accommodate what they are telling us. So, in those cases, new myths have to be developed to bridge the gap between what we believe now and what we 'ought' to believe.

The mythical organisation

2008-06-25T12:42:00.005+01:00

Good PR is all about creating myths that advance a particular cause (which is what makes it propaganda). As part of the process of building a myth to surround the launch of his new book - The Mythical Organisation – we asked author Graham Galer to write a little about myth. Here’s his thought-provoking piece (with a little amplification of his point about Serbia, which I’ve added because the subject has fascinated me since I went on a trip to the country to try and start a business importing raspberries and pullovers).

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Myths have enormous practical importance in the modern world, but that they are often unrecognised. Myths are stories that we tell ourselves to explain who we are and where we came from. They may or may not be factually ‘true’, but they represent a kind of emotional or psychological truth, which underlies our perception of ‘reality’. If myths were more clearly recognised, we would understand better how we got to where we are, and consequently we would take better decisions about the future.

I stumbled into this subject through studying the myths that still haunt us from the memory of the First World War. There are many other myths of history, which, if we saw them clearly as ‘myths’, would allow us to challenge received opinion and perhaps perceive ourselves differently. To appreciate the power of national myths to affect the lives of millions of people, just ponder the recent history of Russia, Zimbabwe or, for that matter, the USA. A particularly telling example is that of Serbia (much of whose national identity is based on the Battle of Kosovo Field, fought on St Vitus’ Day 1389). In his 1989 speech, Slobodan Milosevic said as much:

"By the force of social circumstances this great 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo is taking place in a year in which Serbia, after many years, after many decades, has regained its state, national, and spiritual integrity… Through the play of history and life, it seems as if Serbia has, precisely in this year, in 1989, regained its state and its dignity and thus has celebrated an event of the distant past which has a great historical and symbolic significance for its future.

Today, it is difficult to say what is the historical truth about the Battle of Kosovo and what is legend. Today this is no longer important. Oppressed by pain and filled with hope, the people used to remember and to forget, as, after all, all people in the world do, and it was ashamed of treachery and glorified heroism. Therefore it is difficult to say today whether the Battle of Kosovo was a defeat or a victory for the Serbian people, whether thanks to it we fell into slavery or we survived in this slavery. The answers to those questions will be constantly sought by science and the people. What has been certain through all the centuries until our time today is that disharmony struck Kosovo 600 years ago."

We need myths if we are to take coherent action, and this applies to organisations of all kinds. It is the powerful and enduring myth of the British National Health Service that helps to keep it going. Companies need good myths, and they need to be able to distinguish between their own internal myths and the external myths that others tell of them.

One reason why concerted action on climate change is so difficult to achieve is because there is no myth, widely shared among the public as well as scientists, which accounts for how things came to be as they are. Indeed, there is a potent counter-myth, which goes like this -

The atmosphere isn’t warming; and if it is, then it’s due to natural variation; and even if it’s not due to natural variation, then the amount of warming is insignificant; and if it becomes significant, then the benefits will outweigh the problems; and even if they don’t, technology will come to the rescue; and even if it doesn’t, we shouldn’t wreck the economy to fix the problem when many parts of the science are uncertain.

The ‘emotional truth’ behind this story is clear enough: we all want to keep the life-style we have. Which raises the vital question: where do the myths come from, how are they perpetuated and how could they change? My hope is that my book will provoke some useful thought and debate on a topic that has practical consequences for us all.

Energy descent

2008-06-20T23:54:00.015+01:00

This entry in Rob Hopkin's blog consists of a video message from member of the European Parliament Caroline Lucas who gives a remarkably clear and comprehensive explanation of the coming impact of peak oil and the shocking denial of reality that pervades the corridors of the European Parliament. They have no plans relating to peak oil as "it is only a theory". So, officially, oil will never run out for the EU despite their own economic projections that predict the use of ever increasing quantities. And although we have used maybe a trillion barrels of it in the last 125 years. There is also the awkward fact that oil production in the EU peaked years ago and is not sufficient to meet current demand.

Caroline Lucas also gives a warm tribute to Rob Hopkins of the Transition Town movement, to his new book the Transition Handbook and to Green Books who published it (sorry Triarchy Press gang to promote a rival). Mind you I'm biaised: the first Transition Town in the UK was Totnes which is where I live.

It is getting clearer by the day that peak oil and global warming are vital considerations in any strategy or plan for organisational change. The Transition Town approach takes those two issues as central for the healthy survival of every community and follows their consequences for the neighbourhood to the point where it becomes clear what needs to be done. The principle of "think global, act local" is being put into practice in a coherent, creative and inspiring way. The model is catching on and as a result the network of Transition Towns is growing rapidly. Its success is an excellent example of a clumsy solution since it involves cooperation between different ways of organising. Local government (a way of life based on hierarchy), local businesses (a market-based way of life) and local action groups (a community-spirited way of life) all communicate, collaborate—and doubtless sometimes compete—in following a common direction.

Oil facts (factoils?):

Global total oil reserves are typically (over-?)stated at something like 1.2 trillion barrels (not including oil sands),
so the easily pumped stuff is about half gone.
By the way, the trillion is a million million or 1,000,000,000,000,
and one barrel of oil is (very nearly) 159 litres,
and there are about 7.33 barrels of oil in one metric tonne.
Global consumption of oil is nearly 5 cubic kilometers every year which is about 2,000,000 olympic sized swimming pools of the stuff per year or roughly five and a half thousand pools per day.

Earth not flat, report finds

2008-06-13T17:19:00.009+01:00

Oh look, the Chartered Management Institute has published a report:

‘Generation Y’ are not selfish, report finds

Dear God, what next?

I suggest you read the talentsmoothie report instead. It's here.

But actually, you've got to wonder about the CMI one. Why is it published in association with Ordnance Survey, the UK's national mapping agency? And then, if you read on, you learn this about the 892 CIM members (all under 35) who responded:

Personal experience of the ‘participatory Web’ (e.g. music, video, forums and blogs)
was very high. Thirty-one per cent had read a blog entry in the last few months.

Thirty-one percent. Read a blog. In the last few months. Wow.

Undaunted, I found another report from MrYouth. Unaccountably, my attention was drawn to it by a youth pastor mentor (which sounds good enough to eat) who said:

Here's a great link on Generation Y. If you're a youth pastor, this presentation will help you understand the students you're working with, understand what they like, and understand how to advertise to them. If you understand who they are, you're more apt to understand how to share Jesus with them most effectively.

Dear God 2.0. I suppose this isn't a joke?

PS send me your fatuous PR-based bogus journalism headlines. I want to start a collection.

Generation gape

2008-06-11T10:57:00.004+01:00

There should be a ban on articles and news reports that begin with a quote from some old buffer complaining about young people today - followed by "although it sounds like it could have been said yesterday, it was in fact said by Pliny The Elder in 216 BC". It's not even interesting any more.

Just like saying "eskimos have 50 words for snow".

But, talking of old buffers, I'm starting to have some trouble with young buffers.

I remember my daughter used to complain vigorously when her mum played the "you'll see it differently when you're older" card, and particularly disliked the "when you're older you'll see shades of grey rather than black and white" card. Of course, I had equally infuriating equivalent trump cards.

But now, I'm starting to feel ever so slightly patronised by some of the Gen Y speak. I get to read quite a lot of it because we're publishing talentsmoothie's fascinating report on what you need to know about Gen Y if you're going to be able to recruit, retain, motivate and reward Gen Y staff.

While the report is spot on, some of the Gen Y blogspeak elsewhere has a quite opposite effect on me. Take this recent SnapTalent blog, Hiring Generation Y: What Corporate needs to know.

It includes things like:

We like to figure things out ourselves, especially with a lovely friend called Google. It comes from our independent streak.

We are expert multi-taskers. It comes from doing-homework-chatting-online- listening-to-music-and-eating-nachos- with-super-runny-cheese, all at the same time. More simultaneous projects equals more productivity.

A confession: we’re not crazy about the whole 9-to-5-boring-cubicle part of working.

Students have unbelievably busy days.

I don't disagree with any of this and I think Nina Chai sounds great. I also have two wonderful Gen Y children and share an office with a Gen Y rising star. But I was pretty busy as a student and I'm not crazy about the 9-5 thing and I know women my age who can smoke, drink, talk, cook, dance and be funny all at the same time (though obviously I can't because I'm a monologophile man. But what's this Google thing? I guess I'll have to ask around.

So, playing the Gen Y card just pisses me off sometimes. And so the gap gets gappier.

Connective Leadership

2008-06-04T21:48:00.002+01:00

Thanks entirely to Victoria Axelrod at the excellent 21st Century Organization blog, I've just discovered Connective Leadership and Achieving Styles - a wonderfully liberating antidote to the Jungian shackles of Myers-Briggs and other psychometric profiling systems.

Splitting 'achieving styles' into direct, relational and instrumental seems to open up lots of new ways of thinking about a work team (or a family or any other group, come to that). I'm immediately interested in how it ties in with Cultural Theory (as discussed in Gerard Fairtlough's posthumous booklet on trust and openness) and with wondering how the sociosystems that form around Facebook and other chattering clusters (a term that Richard Lipscombe uses very productively) can accommodate the 'Direct Set' who "tend to confront their own tasks individually and directly... The three styles within the direct set emphasize deriving intrinsic satisfaction from mastering the task, outdoing others through competitive action, and using power to take charge and coordinate everyone and everything. These are the styles most closely linked to diversity and its various expressions of individualism."

We may now generally disapprove of such behaviour and of such mindsets, but we have to remember that we've bred a lot of these people (especially in the West) and we need to go on making best use of them, lest they retreat into what Alain de Vulpian calls 'isolates', where they can do little good and some harm.

The city as organisation

2008-05-23T15:06:00.002+01:00

We're used to talk of confusing the map and the territory, and the extract below reminded me of the parallels between a modern city and a modern (corporate) organisation - of course a city is an organisation too, though a city is more obviously a complex adaptive system - as in this discussion of Calvino's Invisible Cities.

For me, the point is that megalomaniac managers still think they can dominate the organisation just because they have the org chart and strategic plan and performance statistics in front of them, and paranoiac employees still think that they are powerless because of their place in the hierarchy and because their e-mails are being monitored.

Here's the piece from The Future of Cities blog which originates in Liz Carey-Libbrecht's translation of Paris: Ville Invisible.

"Megalomaniacs confuse the map and the territory and think they can dominate all of Paris just because they do, indeed, have all of Paris before their eyes. Paranoiacs confuse the territory and the map and think they are dominated, observed, watched, just because a blind person absent-mindedly looks at some obscure signs in a four-by-eight metre room in a secret place. Both take the cascade of transformations for information, and twice they miss that which is gained and that which is lost in the jump from trace to trace – the former on the way down, the latter on the way up. Rather imagine two triangles, one fitted into the other: the base of the first, very large, gets smaller as one moves up to the acute angle at the top: that's the loss; the second one, upside down in the first, gets progressively bigger from the point to the base: that's the gain. If we want to represent the social, we have to get used to replacing all the double-click information transfers by cascades of transformations. To be sure, we'll lose the perverted thrill of the megalomaniacs and the paranoiacs, but the gain will be worth the loss.
(...)
The more information spreads and the more we can track our attachments to others, since everywhere cables, forms, plugs, sensors, exchangers, translators, bridges, packets, modems, platforms and compilers become visible and expensive – with the price tag still attached to them. the reader will perhaps forgive us for our myopic obsession with the trails of traces."

Building the Unknown

2008-05-23T12:52:00.003+01:00

I just saw again this definition of the differences Andrew Jones sees between traditional management thinking and a design-centred approach (which is what his book is all about):

TRADITIONAL ENTERPRISE	HUMAN-CENTERED ENTERPRISE
Math/Economics/Psychology	Architecture/Design/Anthropology
Theory X	Theory Y
MBAs	MBDs
Decision Attitude	Design Attitude
Functional Careers	Integrative Careers
Sameness	Differentiation
Recipes	Solving Wicked Problems
‘Already Known Results’	Iterative Processes
Order-Giving	Form-Giving
Execution	Invention
MANAGING THE KNOWN	BUILDING THE UNKNOWN

Having just spent a month editing a book about how society and people have changed over the last 50 years, I'm particularly in the chicken and egg question in relation to Andrew's table (above).

The skills, interests and priorities of the Human-Centred Enterprise are, of course, skills, interests and priorities that we would tend to associate most strongly with the under-30s (Gen Y). They could also be seen as 'right-brain skills', or stereotypically female skills, or feeling/intuition (rather than thinking/sensating) skills.

Whichever of these labels you pick, it's pretty clear that society as a whole (across generations and across continents) is tending to move in that direction. So we're getting better at what we need to get better at. But we need to get better at it because that's what business calls for. And partly it calls for it because of the technological changes we're going through. Without globalisation and the Internet and so on, the 'Traditional Enterprise' would still be a viable model.

So, did the technological changes that have been occurring evoke the kind of psychosocial shift that is occurring towards right-brain, female, empathetic skills, or did the shift itself call into being the technological change. Of course, they're intimately interwoven - which is pretty much what Vulpian concludes about all our recent social history.

Seddon does Scotland

2008-05-20T22:21:00.003+01:00

There's a clever and informed review of John Seddon's Systems Thinking in the Public Sector by Bill Jamieson in The Scotsman of 18th May. Here are two nuggets:

"Seddon, of Vanguard Consulting, is a man with a messianic message. He believes Government has been investing in the wrong things. Belief in targets, incentives and inspection; belief in economies of scale and shared back office services: all the changes and promised improvements that have become the lingua franca of Government in recent years are, in his view, wrong-headed ideas. Yet they have underpinned the Government's attempts to reform the public sector."

And again:

"Clearly defining an operating programme for Seddon's alternative approach is not so clear cut. Much of it is counter-intuitive. At the core of his Systems Thinking concept is the Toyota system of continuous improvement. Service providers need to organise their delivery around end-purpose rather than organisation, and flow rather than system. It means constant adaptation and innovation and a workforce with the power and encouragement to take responsibility for managing and improving the flow.

One example he cites is the way the current system, by taking service away from local providers and grouping it into mass production factories, can not only break the link between service provider and citizen, but feed disappointment, frustration and complaints. Little wonder that to date Vanguard's work has shown that most public sector demand is failure demand, for example: "Why haven't you called yet?" and "It's been done wrong." The greatest leverage therefore is to reduce the 50–60% of demand that consumes most resource and money."

You can read the excellent review in full here.

Or buy the book here (if you're not afflicted with the same problem as one Dougie McGill who, commenting on the review, simply said:

"Title is too long. I was bored before I got to the end."

Modernity

2008-05-20T21:18:00.004+01:00

Two snippets from BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning:

Gloomy film director Terence Davies said about his home town of Liverpool, "These days ordinary people know what a good merlot is. In my day it was a rum and pep."

And an unnamed member of the workforce at the Bentley factory in Crewe, being interviewed about the 'toff' Conservative candidate at the forthcoming election, "I don't quite know how to say this... being more of a working class area... people don't like to use that phrase any more."

Alain de Vulpian would tell us that, in the Second Modernity that we are now enjoying, polysensuality is now rife (including the ability to appreciate a good merlot) and people are far more interested in the multiple, small, biodegradable groups and networks that they belong to than in the mass, monolithic social structures (including, in England, classes) that they adhered to in the 20th century's First Modernity.

More here.

The Innovation Acid Test

2008-05-20T20:27:00.004+01:00

Andrew Jones, author of the Innovation Acid Test (which talks persuasively about the need to introduce the disciplines of architecture, design and anthropology into business) recently posted this Q&A (edited, here, slightly by me) on his blog (which I urge you to visit if you're interested in the exploding popularity of co-working - if you're employed or an employer, you should be). But let's stick to innovation for now:

1. Why is innovation so important to companies today?
Because cheap capital is no longer freely available, companies’ ability to grow through acquisition has been significantly limited. Thus, for firms to grow in the current environment they need to grow internally, i.e. organically. Innovation (and new business creation) is the most reliable form of organic growth.

2. What is design thinking and why does it help companies become innovative?
Design thinking is the belief that there are usually multiple ways to solve a problem or generate useful solutions, and that to explore the largest range of possibilities, one should use a ‘design methodology’: Observational research, brainstorming, rapid prototyping, implementation, seek user feedback, iterate again. Design thinking helps inculcate design methodologies, which are the actual practices that lead to innovation.

3. Even when companies know that becoming people-focused helps innovation and pushes up profits they still seem very resistant to doing it. Why do you think this is?
Because the first step in building an innovative culture is to radically decentralise most decision-making opportunities. This immediately removes most power, and control, from those most used to possessing it. I think some firms would rather be slower, less responsive and less profitable than experience a re-shuffling of a sense of order, place, and control.

4. What do you say to managers who say ‘innovation is for the big boys with big budgets, we’re only small, we’re not Google and we can’t afford it’?
The world is full of excuse makers, and you can’t make anyone do anything without holding a gun in your hand. The question is rather simple: Do you trust your employees to generate new things, or do you simply want them to do what you tell them? If it is the latter…then look at your recruiting. It probably stinks.

5. Does every company really need to be innovative - what about the old adage ‘if it ain’t broke…’?
To my earlier point, no company has to do anything. It should not be lost that innovation, for those companies that engage in it, is also a great HR strategy in terms of providing a place that people want to be and that challenges them. Larry Page says of Google that their most innovative act yet is the culture they have built, and the HR policies that come from that.

6. Do you think the need for innovation is a global business imperative, or is it more relevant to companies in developed nations?
Because of the enormity of constraints that firms in developing nations face, the need for innovative solutions to existing problems and for strategic differentiation in developing markets is probably greater.

7. Can not-for profits and charities benefit from an innovative culture too?
Absolutely. At the end of the day, innovation is not about business and for-profit organizations, per se, it is just experimented more there. Innovative cultures are simply groups of people that are natural and adept at generating, prototyping, testing, and iterative with new things and new ways of doing things.

8. What three things can SMEs do to try and build an innovation culture?

Recruit industrial/graphic/communication designers who are used to building things rather than simply hiring all Business people, who tend to think alike.
Allow a couple of hours a week (within the work week) for employees to engage together in ‘blue-sky’ What If! Thinking, and allow some follow up to act on this. (The notion that your employees are too busy is an excuse, we all know that this is not the case)
Create some form of P2P voting/challenge for individuals or groups to compete the opportunity to launch something new.

9. What about the UK - do you think British business lags behind its American and European counterparts?
Not London, but probably the rest of the UK does lag a bit. The South of the UK is as dynamic an economic region as any in the world. The cultures of firms built up around design in London are awesome. Just look at Live/work, a service design firm. They are growing lights out, and part of this is due to the dynamism of London. Anything is possible in London, perhaps not so in Wigan. In the US, you also have great variability. Not much is happening in Iowa, for example, but San Francisco and Austin are on fire. The UK is limited in that there is only one London.

10. As an anthropologist do you think there are specific national cultures that naturally support innovative companies and others which impede it?
Yes. However, without some specific case to comment on I’d rather not trail off on wild generalizations.

11. What is the Innovation Acid Test?
As well as the book, it is an online, 20 question assessment that tests companies for the 5 axes of innovative effectiveness: 1. External Focus; 2. Up/Down Communication; 3. Constraint Management; 4. Collaboration; 5. Ideas-to-Action Mechanisms.

12. Of the FTSE 100 how many companies do you think would pass?
Maybe 5 or 6 if they were lucky.

13. How is the adoption of design thinking in traditionally ‘non-creative’ business affecting how design is taught?
This is a great question, and there is quite a discussion around it. There is now a growing emphasis on Design Thinking in design schools, to fuel the general corporate interest and appetite for design stuff, and less focus on the physical process of designing. Purist designers rather lament this, and complain loudly that D Schools are not cranking out the star designers they once did, but rather design generalists.

14. How does this affect the kind of services that design consultancies are offering?
This serves to broaden the range of services that design firms can offer. For example, IDEO now has practice areas in healthcare (redesigning not only usability scenarios for hospitals, but also patient experience design and architecture, in education, in culture transformation, as well as the traditional focus of the company to build new products for clients.

15. What is ethnography and how should companies put it into practice?
Ethnography is an anthropological field research method grounded in close observation and participation in the events of the field over a long period of time. As it relates to design and innovation, it is useful for companies to watch closely, and participate in, the actual usage of things in their naturally occurring contexts, rather than simply asking people what they think. What people say and what they do are often rather different, and ethnography can help ground companies’ knowledge of user needs by making this distinction clearly.

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For more on Andrew's book, go here.

One thought emerging from this blog and the book:

Business anthropology/ethnography is a fairly new science/art for most businesses - and still widely disapproved of in academia. (Andrew Jones is an exceptional business anthropologist, himself). But, of course, it isn't new really. Towards the Third Modernity (published next week by Triarchy) chronicles 60 years' of social and business anthropology across Western Europe and the USA. It's a research tool that's been largely overlooked for an awfully long time.

Pigeon-holing ordinary people

2008-05-16T10:01:00.005+01:00

I think it’s generally agreed that we all like to categorise, classify and pigeon-hole things, experiences and people – even though many of us disapprove of doing that kind of thing on principle.

We like it because we’ve spent thousands of years getting rather good at it: those of our ancestors who were less gifted at swiftly telling the difference between the sound of a mouse and the sound of a black mamba in the dark were liable to lose out. Equally, those who those who were liable to confuse the facial contortions of a drunken but happy stranger and a crazed psychopath were at a disadvantage.

So pigeon-holing and categorising was and is a handy way of making an informed judgement about a situation in a hurry. It’s also quicker and easier to look at someone and decide you don’t like them than to spend a weekend with them making sure that you haven’t jumped too quickly to the wrong conclusion.

At the same time, I think most of us have an ambivalent response to being classified and categorised ourselves. We tend to love deciding where we are on the ABCDE social-economic classification system, or what class we belong to (if we’re British), or which group we belong to according to a psychometric profiling system like Belbin, or what socio-demographic group our age and postal code puts us in.

But we resist it too. Many people enjoy beating the system:

‘I’m not a typical Pisces’

‘I’m supposed to own two Labradors and a Volvo but actually I own a 2CV and enjoy tombstoning and risky sex.’

In short, we like to know where we fit, and we like to think that we don’t fit because we’re special.

- - -

This ramble is by way of introducing Alain de Vulpian, whose fascinating book I’ve just finished editing. He and his colleagues have spent the last 60 years surveying, interviewing, polling, observing and listening to ‘ordinary people’. His reason for doing so was to see and understand how people were changing. His clients included politicians, multinationals, charities – anyone interested in understanding sociocultural trends as they were happening.

The data he bases the book on comes mainly from North America and Western Europe (his company partnered and shared information with similar organisations in other countries). The result is a short history of how we got from the Second World War to now and one of the many reasons it’s so intriguing is the way it classifies us. Alain can pinpoint to the year when people in any numbers began:

To think of having a bath and soaping yourself as a sensual rather than a purely practical activity
To be repelled by advertising as manipulative rather than excited by the products it offered
To consider ‘hand-made locally’ better than ‘mass-produced’
To want to copy the way their children spoke and dressed rather than expecting children to emulate their parents
To become disenchanted with the ideals of world peace, revolution, true love and happiness for ever, and to pursue instead smaller-scale goals (micro-bonheurs as he calls them)
And a hundred other changes of that ilk.

His observations cover changes in the way we think about, talk about, experience and practice politics, religion and spirituality, shopping, education, family life, sex and sexuality, work, friendship, recreational drugs, communication, travel…

If you read it, I guarantee you’ll have dozens of moments when you think, “Yes, my parents used to do that” or “I remember when that happened” or “Oh that explains why we stopped doing that”. I think they’re called ‘Aha moments’ but I wouldn’t want people to think I used a cliché like that because I’m much too special.

Towards the Third Modernity: How Ordinary People are Transforming the World is published later this month but you can order a copy at the pre-publication price here.

Margaret Wheatley and change through emergence

2008-03-11T16:32:00.003Z

Margaret Wheatley has recently written an article addressing the failure of the latest, huge, command-and-control initiative in education in the USA (the NCLB or "No Child Left Behind"). I think this is completely coherent with what John Seddon and Wellford Wilms are writing.

"Change Happens Through Emergence
In all living systems (which includes us humans), change always happens through emergence. Large-scale changes that have great impact do not originate in plans or strategies from on high. Instead, they begin as small, local actions. While they remain separate and apart, they have no influence beyond their locale. However, if they become connected, exchanging information and learning, their separate efforts can suddenly emerge as very powerful changes, able to influence a large system. This sudden appearance, known as an emergent phenomenon, always brings new levels of capacity. Three things are guaranteed with emergent phenomena. Their power and influence will far exceed any sum of the separate efforts. They will exhibit skills and capacities that were not present in the local efforts. And their appearance always surprises us.

A simple way to understand emergence is to look at the phenomenon of the “Perfect Storm.” Meteorologists can never predict the sudden appearance of these super-powerful storms. Their power is a result of a number of discrete and often invisible factors converging in perfect synchrony. If any one of the elements were not present at that very moment, the storm could not emerge. It is the “perfection” of their convergence that creates such overwhelming power. This power cannot be predicted by assessing the strength of individual forces or by summing their combined power. It is the simultaneity of their convergence, that they all come together in the moment, that creates their power.

NCLB activated unseen dynamics in the atmosphere of America to create education’s Perfect Storm. Many local changes that had little significance in isolation converged with other changes to create a force no one can ignore. No one could possibly have predicted what emerged: educators hanging on to life rafts, struggling to maintain a focus on achievement, learning, the whole student, the arts and so forth, as they react to the gale force demands of high stakes tests."

A healthier health care system for the NHS

2008-03-08T16:18:00.002Z

My interest piqued by John Seddon's new book on the wrong-headedness of public sector reform, I've been looking at what people are saying on the subject. Up pop the results of new McKinsey-LSE research into the running of the UK's National Health Service. here's a flavour of it:

Over the last five years, joint McKinsey–LSE research has explored the drivers of productivity in industrial settings. Our recent effort extending the inquiry into the field of health care delivery involved interviewing 170 general managers and heads of clinical departments about whether and how they have implemented a number of proven management practices in their hospitals. These interviews covered 27 dimensions of management practice across four categories: lean management (a hospital’s operational effectiveness), performance management (the creation and use of clinical-quality and productivity targets in managing operations), talent management (the recruitment, development, rewarding, and retention of high-performing staff), and clinical leadership (the way the roles, skills, and mind-sets of hospital doctors contribute to the management of clinical services such as cardiology and orthopedics). Our earlier work established correlations between the performance of industrial companies and the first three categories. For health care, we not only examined these categories but also decided to test a hypothesis: that the direct involvement of doctors in the management of a hospital helps to improve its performance.

The full article is here.

As ever, you'll see the focus on targets and performance management (the problems with which are set out in the introduction to John Seddon's book here). But most striking to me is the attention to '27 dimensions of management practice across four categories'. How, I wonder, can this sort of fragmented approach to management ever hope to offer the kind of unified (dare I say holistic?) approach that Systems Thinking offers?

"Government ministers are puzzled..."

2008-03-04T21:08:00.006Z

The Observer recently reported the scandal of ambulances ‘stacking’ outside hospitals to help meet government-imposed targets for the treatment of patients within 4 hours of admission to an Accident & Emergency department. (So long as you’re still in the ambulance, you haven’t been admitted).

Reporting the absurdities of the UK’s public sector reform regime is now a well-established tradition and this was just the latest in a long line of such reports.

Happy timing though. This week we’re sending to press John Seddon’s latest book on the subject. It explains, step by step, exactly why almost every attempt to reform the public sector over the last 20 years or so has only managed to deteriorating services, increased costs, low morale and even more calls for change. If you’ve ever wondered why it is that government spending increases are matched by mounting service failures, here’s your answer. John dissects our systems for providing housing benefit and social care, as well as policing, the health service, education and numerous other public services and explains the problem in language we can all understand.

But, it’s not just a pot-boiler for disaffected consumers, a whole host of public sector luminaries agree with him. I can’t wait to see which Labour minister is wheeled out to answer his blistering demolition of ‘deliverology’, targets, inspection, unified call centres, the back office/front office split, bungled IT investment, ‘Citizen Empowerment’, ‘Public Value’, David Varney and lots more besides.

In the end, I think his analysis of the waste associated with the current public service delivery regime is unassailable – it includes:

The costs associated with the 800,000 extra people employed in the public sector since 1997 to develop specifications, write guidelines and standards, report schedules and so on.
The cost of creating an ‘inspection industry’ to check against those specifications.
The costs of preparing for inspection (ask anyone who’s ever been involved in preparing a school for an OFSTED inspection, for example).
The costs associated with these specifications being wrong (i.e. the cost of trying to meet specifications which actually make things worse – which includes most of the investment in public sector IT provision in recent years).
The costs associated with a thoroughly demoralised public sector, where many of the best people leave, get ill or just give up.

Best of all, though, John Seddon doesn’t stop there. He dares to have an answer. And, being based in Systems Thinking, it happens to be one we love at Triarchy because a) it works, b) we’ve never read a serious challenge to the efficacy and all-round right-headedness of systems thinking and c) the lead author of our own Management f-Laws is none other than Russell Ackoff, the ‘father of systems thinking’.

Go here for more on John Seddon’s cracking new book.

Maslow, hierarchies and de Vulpian

2008-02-27T12:28:00.004Z

I've been tidying up a brand new translation of Alain de Vulpian's fascinating A l'Ecoute des Gens Ordinaires, which we hope to publish shortly and which documents the changing tastes, habits and desires of ordinary people in the West during the course of the last 100 years.

de Vulpian quotes, as well he might, the pioneering work of Abraham Maslow and his famous 'hierarchy of needs' as he shows how the easing of our most pressing concerns about survival, health and money allowed us to devote more time to thinking about our own 'self-development', quest for pleasure, relationships, need to acquire more white goods, etc.

Then into my e-chaos pops this from Chris Locke (co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and general all-round hero of mine):

"An excellent and sadly shattering example of the way the mind of a devoted humanistic psychologist can move along the same track of the fascist paradigm to a point where he calls for execution [sic] of the nonbelievers -- in this case, nonbelievers in humanism! -- is found in the posthumously published writings of no less than Abraham Maslow, recognized and beloved as the founder of modern humanistic psychology! The same Maslow who conceptualized the unfolding development of the mind and personality of a person as the highest state of human development, and who attributed to the "self-actualized" person an ethical and empathic orientation toward other human beings and the society in which he lives, was revealed after his death to be a highly self-involved, bitter loner filled with contempt and rage at the many people who did not appreciate him or his ideas, and who dared to conceive on a broader community level the identification and execution of those who opposed proposed humanistic policies for the betterment of society.

The following are shocking, almost unbelievable excerpts from Maslow's posthumously published writings:

Humanistic psychology absolutely needs a doctrine of an elite, degrees of humanness, health and sickness, winners and losers, aggridants (whether by heredity or by learning), good specimens, no equal votes, non-equal weighting. The taste or judgment of one superior can and should outweigh 1000 or a million blind ones.
The Third-Force philosophy is antideath-wish, anti-exploiting of others, antistunting or crippling, antivalue-destroying, antibaby-crippling and diminishing; anti-unrealism = antifake.... We keep alive many of the people whom nature left to itself would kill off. So we are hurting the human gene pool, which must be deteriorating. We can certainly continue to do this, to be compassionate with anyone living, but this right to reproduce might very well be limited. In the immediate future -- within the next century -- we must anyway cut hack the population of the world. The right to reproduce must surely become rather a privilege which is socially controlled and socially granted.... One could speculate that the worsening gene pool is partly responsible for the large number of naysayers, death-wishers and born losers and schlemiels.

I find myself secretly entertaining all sorts of "cold-blooded" possibilities... drug users are performing a kind of biologically unselfish act, a sort of noblesse oblige for the good of the species and voluntarily killing themselves "for the good of the gene pool." ... Sooner or later, after the catastrophes force us to pace the overpopulation, we'll stop with all the crap about more food, or better strains of rice {which just produce more people). How can we give up on humanitarianism? But how can we not permit voluntary (or maybe involuntary) euthanasia and suicide? One day we'll have to talk about the exposure or killing of monster-babies, or even of healthy surplus babies.

As with some, nothing will work ultimately but shooting."

Doesn't it just go to show? Next thing we'll be hearing that Freud slept with his patients or that Tony Blair was involved in corrupt political/financial deals. Sorry, I'm just being told something by my producer...

For more from Chris Locke, go here.

The Hedonistic Company

2008-02-26T14:46:00.004Z

I found this piece at Remarkk via a nice link from my new friends at notanmba (the place to go if you want to know more about co-working, amongst many other things). [By the way, there's so many people to credit these days, especially if you're going to be an honourable, copyleft networker, that a half-way decent blog gets more like an Oscars' acceptance speech by the minute.]

Anyway, the Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur has come up with this list of rules for the hedonistic company. Leaving aside the rather too obvious point about your average hedonist wanting to slough off rules faster than an itchy gecko shedding last season's little green number, I liked it because:

a) we're currently trying to do something similar in this little company of ours (and bumping up against all the usual old habits, prejudices and so on)
b) I'm tweaking the epic translation of a fascinating book by Alain de Vulpian which, amongst many other provocative assertions, claims that the Second Modernity of the 20th century was driven by, and led to, an upsurge in hedonistic thinking, both at work and in the wider world.

So here are those seven rules in full, Lord Gnome:

Rule 1, The 7 Nos - No office. No employees. No fixed costs. No pitches. No exclusivity (company doesn’t own your life). No working hours (results only). No bullshit.
Rule 2: Work-Work Balance - balance projects for clients with your passion projects, given equal priority and attention.

Rule 3: Instant Gratification - profit immediately with work; no salaries, billable time/project, always keep 10% of profit for the company for play money; pay bills immediately as well

Rule 4: Pluralism of Methods - tech solutions for social problems, use online tools for collaboration; Skype, Google calendar, Google Docs

Rule 5: Fixed Ideas - live up to your intellectual obsessions and dark desires at work; take them seriously; don’t be afraid to offend people;

Rule 6: Responsibilities Without Hierarchies - each project as to have one person in charge, but it can be anybody; beginning of year retreat in the country; rethink the business model; sift through projects and leaders take them on;

Rule 7: The Power of Procrastination - don’t try to be too efficient; good ideas will adapt and catch on, even if you neglect them for a while; they have to ripen; there is a natural Darwinism of ideas

Rule 7 is interesting for us because we all agreed to be efficient. It also reminds me of Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies (which get talked about a lot in the forthcoming book on The Economist's Project Red Stripe).

Rule 5 echoes our current interest in the organisation's shadow-side - subject of a company audit that we're hoping to publish shortly.

Rule 1 is looking really hard for us. Doing OK with No bullshit though.

Publishers nibble the dust

2008-02-11T14:21:00.000Z

Once upon a time, when Triarchy was being born, Rosie wrote a well-reasoned piece about the future of academic publishing. You can read it here. Now, I've just come across an even more compelling tirade, which surely ought to be read by every academic journal publisher (and anyone thinking of writing for one).

Read the full text here. But, for now, I offer you the following excerpts:

For those outside of the academy, here's a simplistic account of academic publishing. Academics publish articles in journals. Journals are valued by academic disciplines based on their perceived quality. To be successful (and achieve tenure), academics must publish in the journals that are valued in their discipline. Journals are published by academic publishers. Academics volunteer their time to peer review articles in these journals. Editors consider the reviews and decide which are to be published, which should be sent back to be revised and resubmitted, and which are to be rejected. For the most part, editors are unpaid volunteers (although some do get a stipend). Depending on the journal, the article is then sent to a professional copyeditor who is paid (but not all journals have copyeditors). Academic publishers then print the journal, sending it to all of its subscribers. Most subscribers are university libraries, but some individuals also subscribe. (To give you a sense of the economics, Convergence costs individuals $112 and institutions $515 for 4 issues a year.) Academic libraries also subscribe to the online version of the journals, but I don't know how much that costs. Those who don't have access to an academic library can pay to access these articles (a single article in Convergence can be purchased DRM-ified for one day at $15).

The economy around academic journals is crumbling. Libraries are running out of space to put the physical copies and money to subscribe to journals that are read by few so they make hard choices. Most academics cannot afford to buy the journal articles, either in print or as single copies so they rely on library access.

So that's the problem - and none of it will be news to you if you're involved in anyway in the academic journal merry-go-round. Now for Danah Boyd's (for apophenia is she) conclusions. Below are the headlines. Go here to read them in full. I thoroughly recommend the article and, yes, as book and pamphlet publishers, we know that the principles behind all this affect us too. We need a new business model. And we're working on it.

Tenured Faculty and Industry Scholars: Publish only in open-access journals.
Disciplinary associations: Help open-access journals gain traction.
Tenure committees: Recognize alternate venues and help the universities follow.
Young punk scholars: Publish only in open-access journals in protest, especially if you're in a new field.
More conservative young scholars: publish what you need to get tenure and then stop publishing in closed venues immediately upon acquiring tenure.
All scholars: Go out of your way to cite articles from open-access journals.

All scholars: Start reviewing for open-access journals.
Libraries: Begin subscribing to open-access journals and adding them to your catalogue.
Universities: Support your faculty in creating open-access journals on your domains.
Academic publishers: Wake up or get out.
Funding agencies: Require your grantees to publish in open-access journals or make a pre-print version available at a centralized source specific to their field.

Avatar Expressiveness - tenser said the tensor

2008-02-02T21:43:00.000Z

A rather understated, but wonderfully rich contribution to The HBR List by Judith Donath, called Giving Avatars Emote Control, just opened up a can of worms for me.

Judith's point is that avatars (as currently used on Second Life, for example), have limited expressiveness. Well, we knew that. They currently offer one or more representations of ourselves, which may be wildly different in age, gender and appearance from our First Life selves. That's already fun and interesting and raises questions about how we feel about other people, who know our First Life selves, seeing the types of persona that we choose for our Second Life selves. But, of course, our avatars can really only represent what's going on for us emotionally insofar as we choose to have them say things.

Current research is going in two directions. First, it's looking at ways of having our avatars represent our emotions visually, so that we can, for example, cue our avatar to look recognisably angry if we tell it to. There's lots of research on this and here's just one recent thesis on the subject. Actually, because we control it, this is called performative representation. We can pretend to be angry, or not to be.

The second direction is towards finding ways of having our 'interior-form' avatars automatically represent our emotions by measuring what's going on with our skin, with our bodies and in our minds (changes of temperature, heart rate, neurochemical and electrical activity, etc.).

As Judith says, this opens up all sorts of possibilities in situations like teamwork and negotiation. We could, of course, select different levels of self-disclosure, but it would be apparent to others which level we had chosen. She could have gone on to speculate about further applications. In a trial or criminal investigation, the judge or investigator might get more and better information from an interior-form avatar than from the human being. The same could be true in an interview or a performance review. Or in a late-night conversation between husband and wife. Parenting might be transformed if the avatar of the 'but Mum, she started it by pinching me' child could be interrogated. And so, a staple of science fiction writing - telepathy - as exemplified in Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man seems to become a possible reality.

At first sight, this possible reality seems to lead towards something like a tighter police state, a more rigid hierarchy and so on, where those in power can see what we're thinking as well as what we're doing. But research is already showing how it could lead to more productive phobia therapy and better help for people with autism. Might it generate more honesty and openness, to the point where relationships of all sorts were more fruitful when conducted between the participants' fully self-disclosing avatars than between their First Life selves?