Every so often someone creates something really useful that is so different from anything else around that it is hard to describe in words. Something that has to be used to be understood. That is when you know you’ve found something original.
I remember back in 1987 reading some of the early reviews of Bill Atkinson‘s HyperCard where many of them dwelt on the things that HyperCard did less well than other applications – so, for example, some talked about how it was not a very good database or that it was not a very good drawing programme or that the programming language was not very powerful. What most of these early critics missed was that it was a great software applications kit, which enable non-technical people like myself to build useful things that they couldn’t get any other way.
Or as Atkinson put it in an interview in 1987:
“HyperCard, acting like a software erector set, really opens up Macintosh software architecture to where individual people can make their own customized information environment, and interactive information and applications without having to know any programming language. It takes the creation of software down to the level of MacPaint images that you like, then pasting buttons on top of them to make them do what you want. HyperCard puts this power into the hands of any Macintosh user.”
In so far as HyperCard is remembered at all these days it is largely remembered as the authoring kit used to build some of the early interactive media applications (or hypermedia applications, as we called them in those days), which laid the foundations for the interactive media industry we see today.
Some of those applications, such as some of the things published by Bob Stein‘s Voyager, while they may look a bit crude today, in my view were conceptually more sophisticated than anything that has been produced since. (Here I will avoid mounting one of my hobby horses and just touch on my view that the history of interactive media, or as I still prefer to call it hypermedia, is rich in ideas, which while limited by the technology of the time, could usefully be re-discovered by people working in the field today to produce richer and more satisfying media experiences.)
The other significance of HyperCard was, of course, that it was one of the inspirations that led Tim Berners-Lee to creating the World Wide Web – the reason that you are able to read this today. As he puts it in his original proposal to CERN, his precursor to the World Wide Web, “Enquire”, was similar to HyperCard, but “…although lacking the fancy graphics, ran on a multiuser system, and allowed many people to access the same data.”
Now, while I wouldn’t claim that the project that Ben Copsey and I have been working on for over a year now is as significant as HyperCard, it does share two of the same characteristics. The most obvious one is that it is hard to describe, because it is unlike anything else I have come across. The second, is that like HyperCard, though considerably more limited in scope, it is a kind of “software erector set” enabling people to invent and construct “their own customized information environment”.
This week we launched it in Beta, so if you’d like to take a look and have a play you can download it at:
http://trails-network.net/
It is the first bit of software I’ve ever found that allows me to organise my time and activities in tune with my general philosophy of purposive drift. Ben, who has a slightly different approach to life has also found that he can use it to fit in with the way he lives and works rather than following the demands of a bit of software designed around the way someone else thinks he should proceed.
At present it is Mac only, so if you’re a Mac owner, who needs to have some organisation in your life or work, but don’t like programmes that dictate to you how you should behave, why not visit our site (http://trails-network.net/) and see for yourself. The desktop application Memex Trails is free and yours to use for as long as you like. The full Trails Network will be a subscription based service, but for the beta is again free to use for a couple of months.
We like it, we hope you do too.
Author: Richard
Management by measure can kill
I make no apologies for once again urging you to read Simon Caulkin’s column in last Sunday’s Observer. As so often he highlights a significant piece of research which casts doubt on some of the crude management clichés that get spouted as if they represent deep wisdom. I have include a long chunk of his piece, because I believe it contains a lesson we need to absorb and act with some speed. So, please read the extract and then go to the source:
“… All too often in a kind of Gresham’s law (which said bad money drives out good), the easy-to-measure drives out the hard, even when the latter is more important. Strategy writer Igor Ansoff said: ‘Corporate managers start off trying to manage what they want, and finish up wanting what they can measure.
‘
What happens when bad measures drive out good is strikingly described in an article in the current Economic Journal. Investigating the effects of competition in the NHS, Carol Propper and her colleagues made an extraordinary discovery. Under competition, hospitals improved their patient waiting times. At the same time, the death-rate following emergency heart-attack admissions substantially increased. Why? As targets, waiting times were and are measured (and what gets measured gets managed, right?). Emergency heart-attack deaths were not tracked and therefore not managed. Even though no one would argue that the trade-off – shorter waiting times but more deaths – was anything but a travesty of NHS purpose, that’s what the choice of measure produced.
As the paper observes: ‘It seems unlikely that hospitals deliberately set out to decrease survival rates. What is more likely is that in response to competitive pressures on costs, hospitals cut services that affected [heart-attack] mortality rates, which were unobserved, in order to increase other activities which buyers could better observe.’
In other words, what gets measured, matters. Measures set up incentives that drive people’s behaviour. And woe to the organisation when that behaviour is at odds with its purpose. Imagine the cost to NHS morale (one of Deming’s unknown and unknowable figures) of the knowledge that managing to the measure resulted in more deaths – the grotesque opposite of its aims. Hospitals are the extreme example of a general case. As such, they allow us a definitive rephrasing of our least favourite management mantra. What gets measured gets managed – so be sure you have the right measures, because the wrong ones kill.”
So very purposive drift
Snotty, moi?
I used to be a bit snotty about Marc Andreessen, but over the years my respect for him has grown and his blog is now on my must read list. As an example of my misplaced snottiness read this from “Understanding Hypermedia 2.000”, 1997, page 31:
“Marc Andreesen (sic) may not be as much of a visionary as the other hypermedia innovators, but his importance in the development of hypermedia should not be underestimated. The success of Mosaic in attracting both users and providers of information to the Web would have been sufficient to guarantee him an important role in its history. In the long term, his role in founding Netscape may be even more significant. Its rapid appearance as a multi-billion corporation marks a point when hypermedia moved from being an interesting curiosity to a medium whose implications were being taken very seriously by decision makers at the highest level in government, industry and business.”
So apologies to Marc – in the unlikely event of a new, revised publication of “Understanding Hypermedia”, your entry will be very different. Anyone who can write the following lies very high in my admiration:
“One of my favorite TATWTESBTISBAs — Truths About The World That Everyone Should Be Taught In School But Aren’t — is that the real world is a wildly unpredictable place, and that most interesting or important things that happen aren’t predictable, because there are simply too many moving parts and unknown factors at play.”
The bells, the bells
It is as I feared. While, if I look back, I can see a considerable improvement in my condition, the sense of wellness I thought I detected as the New Year turned has proved to be something of an illusion. My face has got much better, I can almost see a hint of smile where there was once just a droop, but I am still subject to sudden burst of intense weariness and a general weakness leaving me with a strange sense of vulnerability. On top of that there are a variety of mysterious pains in various parts of my body, which come and go with great unpredictability. Above all, it is the going onness that is the hardest thing to deal with. It feels as if it will never end.
The sense of endlessness coincides with my awareness that my time in Chile is coming to an end. Tomorrow we leave our apartment and move to Mimi’s mother’s house in Vina Del Mar. A few days later we will be on our way back to London. The thought of being in London feeling as I do now is not inspiring. At least here I have the sights and sounds of summer to lift my spirits when things begin to feel to grey.
London, in contrast, will be grey and dark and the tasks that await my return are largely dreary too. However, and here is the touch of brightness I must cling to, while the dreary tasks must be done, lying beyond them are opportunities to shift into a new context. A drift away from the dreary into something more demanding and satisfactory. Yet another lurch in what I could laughingly call my career.
So how will I look back at my experience of Bell’s Palsy and all the peculiar symptoms that accompanied it? I suspect that viewed from the perspective of the next New Year it will look like a punctuation mark in my life marking one phase of my life to the next. A kind of limbo allowing my brain to reset and preparing me to move on. It may, unlikely as it seems at this moment, even to turn out to be something that I see as having been a positive experience, a kind of winter before a spring.
Strange Days in Chile
A British Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan, was once asked what was the most important thing in politics, “Events, dear boy, events”, he replied. Over the years I have come to believe that the same is true of life in general. We can make all the plans we like, but it is how we respond to events that becomes key.
My event of the moment is called Bell’s Palsy. Before we flew to Chile I had anticipated a mix of holiday in the sun, some time spent getting a feel of whether I would actually like to live and work here and some time to think through some more ideas about purposive drift. Instead, the day before we were due to fly I found the right hand side of my face paralysed – just like a visit to the dentist, only I hadn’t been to the dentist.
Perhaps foolishly, I decided to fly anyway.
And so I find myself having a very different time in Chile from that I had anticipated. The focus of my concerns has shifted to coming to terms with having Bell’s Palsy and how best to deal with it.
Bell’s Palsy is a curious condition. It is diagnosed by exclusion – in other words nobody knows its cause – though the key suspect is a viral infection. Its most obvious symptom is paralysis of one side of the face, because an important nerve is damaged or impaired. Essentially there is no treatment other than rest.
Most of the medical information focuses on the paralysis of the face and the need to take care of the eye on the affected side because it doesn’t close properly and because of that can become infected. What seems to be less mentioned is how appallingly ill you can feel – well at least this is how it has affected me.
So my best days have been spent sleeping and dozing, with occasional trips to the balcony of our apartment to look out at the waves rolling in from the Pacific and breaking on the rocks of our bay and watching the little dramas and stories of life on the sea front.
Since New Year’s Eve I have felt dramatically better, the sense of continually fatigue seems, for the moment, to have lifted and I have more movement in the right hand side of my face. But, while I am enjoying this sense of improvement, I am not counting on it continuing without set back – my experience so far is that while a general trend of getting better can seen, its progress is very up and down, two steps forward, one step back.
So are there any lessons to be learnt from this experience. Probably not, other than the one I began with, the need to account of and deal with – “Events, dear boy, events.”
Two, Oh, Oh, Eight
I like the sound of 2008. It looks like being an interesting year. For me, it is likely to be a time of a number endings and, I hope, some new beginnings. This, I expect, may be echoed more widely. So for all of you who some times wander here, my best wishes and may the coming year offer you new opportunities to move from places where you don’t want be and towards the places where you do.
Mind the gap
Regular readers will have noticed gaps of various lengths between entries here. Some times this is because I have nothing to say or to point to. Some times it is because I have too much to say and haven’t articulated my thoughts enough to put down anything but a deranged ramble. Very occasionally it will be because my computer or internet connection isn’t working. And, finally, there are the odd occasions when I am away from easy internet access.
As I write this I am anticipating a large gap through much of December and the the first half of January. During this time I hope to be enjoying a summer in Chile and working on some ideas to extend the the idea of purposive drift. So any of the reasons for not posting may apply.
In the meantime there may be a few posts over the next week and then probably silence.
So to all of you who take the time to dip in here, have a good winter/summer break and let’s look forward to the coming year, which, if we can successfully navigate the alarms and scares it looks certain to bring, promises to be very interesting.
No talent for filling in forms
Perhaps someone could whisper in the ears of some of the apparatchiks and wunderkids, who are now innocently leaving a trail of destruction in their wake, that there are other ways of doing things. Listen quietly to this from Max Perutz, who, as well as being a distinguished scientist in his own right, ran a research lab, which nurtured a number of other Nobel Prize winners (possibly a measure of success?):
“The laboratory owes much of its success to the enlightened policies of the Medical Research Council, especially to Harold Himsworth, its secretary from 1949 to 1968, whose foresight and courage led him to support our early work for many lean years when we had little to show for it yet, and when there was only the faintest hope of it ever benefiting medicine.
Himsworth’s staff did not burden us with bureaucratic rules and futile floods of paper, but saw it as their prime responsibility to help us carry out our research. I reported directly to Himsworth, rather than a Committee; he negotiated the annual grant to the Medical Research Council with the Treasury directly, rather than being allotted the Council’s slice of the overall science budget by a ministerial committee, and he had the authority to take decisions within the broad lines of policy laid down by the Council. This system ensured smooth and efficient running, but Thatcherism has now destroyed much of it. Under her all-pervasive rule and in the name of “accountability”, bureaucracy has multiplied and directors are burdened with mountains of paperwork that leaves them less time to devote themselves to scientific work, the talent for which (and not for filling in forms) earned them their positions in the first place.”
P.S The link to “Max Perutz” is to a set of video interviews that are a sheer delight.
Improv Wisdom Works
My friend, Michael Renouf, read my short entry, “Improv Wisdom”, at the end of March and then bought the book by Patricia Ryan Madison. A few days later, following her advice, “Be average” he began a project to post one drawing a day on his new blog. Here we are a few months on and he has well over two hundred drawings up on his site.
Patricia Ryan Madison’s book is well worth a read and packs a lot of useful advice into a short volume. For those of you who would like to supplement her punchy practical guide to effective action in the world with a more academic justification of the crucial role of improvisation in organisations and human life, take a look at the late Claudio Ciborra’s paper, “Notes on improvisation and time in organizations” – it may change the way you look at the world.