Author: Richard

Another gem of an article from Simon Caulkin and a great quote from Russell Ackoff. Here’s a short taster:
“Targets, claim their defenders, are simple, they provide focus, and they work. Yes, they do. Unfortunately, these are also their fatal flaws. The simplicity is a delusion. As Russ Ackoff put it: ‘The only problems that have simple solutions are simple problems. The only managers with simple problems are those with simple minds. Problems that arise in organisations are almost always the product of interactions of parts, never the action of a simple part.'”

Some of you may have read my ramblings about purposive drift that you can access through the sidebar. A few more of you may have read my manifesto, “Purposive Drift: making it up as we go along”, published on Changethis. But there is still a lot more I need to explore.
I touched on one aspect of this in something I posted in February, “Cultivating Kairos”. Kairos is a Greek word for “the right time” or “the appropriate time” – a qualitative sense of time as opposed to the more mechanical, relentless clock time, Kronos.
I discovered another Greek word Metis – “cunning intelligence”, the quality displayed by Ulysses – the other day. And again, like my discovery of Kairos, I have a strong sense that this concept is also going to be important in developing the ideas around purposive drift.
Curious, isn’t that that the ideas people were using a couple of thousand years ago seem so relevant to the world we face today.
(As a totally irrelevant, but perhaps amusing aside, I happen to be writing this with my favourite word-processor Ulysses.)

“… After studying twenty firms that were facing crises, Dunbar and Goldberg (1978) concluded that the chief executives in these troubled firms generally surrounded themselves with yes-sayers who voiced no criticisms. Worse yet, the yes-sayers deliberately filtered out warnings from middle managers who saw correctly that their firms were out of touch with market realities; many of these middle managers resigned while others were fired for disloyalty.
Top managers’ perceptual errors and self-deceptions are especially potent because top managers can block the actions proposed by their subordinates. Yet, top managers are also especially prone to perceive events erroneously and to resist changes: Their promotions and high statuses persuade them that they have more expertise than other people. Their expertise tends to be our-of-date because their personal experiences with clients, customers, technologies, and low-level personnel lie in the past…”
William H. Starbuck, “How Organizations Channel Creativity”
(Dunbar, R. L. M., and Goldberg, W. H. (1978). “Crisis development and strategic response in European corporations.” Journal of Business Administration, 9(2): 139-149)
N.B William H. Starbuck’s fascinating online autobiography is worth a post on its own. Is this yet another example of purposive drift?

“The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. It’s proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or “accessing” what we now call “information” – which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.”
Wendell Berry, “Thoughts in the Presence of Fear” XXVI

“We’re approaching a transition point in computing that most people don’t understand. It isn’t just the Internet or search or access to movies and music that matter, but all of those presented in a technological context that Just Plain Works. The importance of all our digital stuff along with our fear of losing it will shift us more and more toward central backup and storage. And once you have your life sitting on some company’s server, are you going to move it on a whim? No, and that means there will be a LOT of money to be made providing these services. Storage and automated backup and probably some form of netboot with a fresh OS image every time is the future of computing whether we’re talking about desktops or notebooks or mobile phones.”
Robert X. Cringely

I’ve been ill for almost exactly a week. I’ve been describing it as a cold. That may have been a mistake. A cold can be be miserable, uncomfortable and, maybe, even need a day or so in bed, but not the disabling assault that I have been experiencing, where half an hour to do something I absolutely have to do is paid for with a collapse into a mildly delirious state of immobility for several hours.
But, this is the bit I am curious about. While doing a simple task like writing a simple e-mail took on the attributes of a mission like climbing Everest or crossing the Sahara on foot, the periods of lying flat on my back, neither sleeping nor fully wakeful, seemed to release a flood of creative ideas that will probably keep me going for several months ahead as I work out their viability and their implications.
So here is the paradox: for most of this week I have been staggeringly unproductive in terms of actually producing stuff, with a mind like a bucket of sludge whenever I sat down at my computer, but in the drifty periods of collapse among a whole lot of misty weirdness there have been the moments of laser like clarity where some really sharp ideas appeared. So a time of both stagnation and fertility. What strange creatures we are.

“The inventor Buckminster Fuller was fond of holding up his hand and asking people. ‘What is this?’ Invariably, they would respond, ‘It’s a hand’. He would then point out that the cells that made up that hand were continually dying and regenerating themselves. What seems tangible is continually changing: in fact, a hand is completely re-created within a year or so. So when we see a hand – or an entire body or any living system – as a static “thing”, we are mistaken. ‘What you see is not a hand’, said Fuller. ‘It is a “pattern integrity”, the universe’s capability to create hands'”
(From Peter Senge et al, “Presence” pp6)

It’s John Chris Jones’s eightieth birthday today. A day worth celebrating.
I have many things to thank him for, because over the years he has influenced my thinking in many ways.
I owe him a particular debt of gratitude, because I got the “purposive” in purposive drift from him.
It is from one of my favourite books, one that I return to time after time, “Essays in Design” (page 162 John Wiley & Sons, 1984 if you want to look it up):
“When you go to process, you lose the goal, you lose the aim.
I’m beginning to see it now …..THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF PURPOSES……the purpose of having a result, something that exists after the process has stopped, and does not exist until it has stopped….. and there is the purpose of carrying on, of keeping the process going, just as one may breather so as to continue breathing?……the purpose is to carry on.”
So Happy Birthday, John Chris and may you carry on for many years to come.

I started reading John Berger in my teens in the much missed (by me) “New Society”. Over the years I read his books and article with a mixture of interest and ambivalence. In the last ten years or so my attitude has shifted and my feelings moved to a strong sense that he is a good man, who is worth listening to carefully. If you want to know what I mean buy a copy of his latest collection of thoughts and observations, “Hold Everything Dear”. His fundamental decency and humanity come shining through. But first a quote from one of his rare interviews:
“‘What seems to have been abandoned of late,’ he tells me at one point, sounding, for the first time, regretful, ‘and what is absolutely fundamental to all we have talked about, is the notion of solidarity. And it is not only to gain something that we should seek solidarity, because solidarity, in itself, is a meaningful quality, that is to say, a quality that gives meaning to life, which makes sense of life. So, I hope it’s there in my work.'”

“… If you wanted to go up or down a mountain, you had to look at it rather carefully. You wanted to reach the summit – but it would have been a mistake simply to look for an easy way up. As an experienced mountaineer, you first of all figure out where you must not go. You try to see possible avalanches, ice breaks, crevasses, and other fatal constraints. Only when you have, so to speak, blocked out the treacherous parts of the mountain, would you begin to plan your way up. At this point, you do make choices, but you make them within the space left between the mountains constraints. To “know” a mountain means to know where, on its slopes, you are relatively safe; it means to have learned the viable paths.”
Ernst von Glasersfeld, “Cybernetics and the Art of Living”