Author: Richard

There’s a great interview with Joan Bakewell in the Idler. In it she talks about how, after having a number of proper jobs in Broadcasting, Teaching and Advertising, she began to work out what she really wanted to do. Sounds like good advice to me and well worth reading in full:
“By now I was beginning to formulate what exactly I wanted from life. Not from a job or even a career. But from life itself. And I discovered that the ingredients actually lay all around. They just needed to be combined in the right formula to meet my own temperament and abilities. They are not obscure and elusive. They are the very things most of us want: a happy family life focused around good relationships; congenial surroundings both at home and at work, that make life pleasant. I am not talking some ambitious make-over nonsense here. Think instead of being able to watch a particular tree round the seasons, coming into bud, flowering, turning to golden leaf and then fronting the winter with stark, dramatic branches. That seems to be a good ambition to have. Then there are friendships; bosom pals for intimacies and advice; working colleagues for sustaining each other with laughter and encouragement; acquaintances met at odd moments, introduced by others, casual encountered at the school gate. All these friendships settle and regroup over the years, some coming to the fore, others lapsing with time. Yes, the encouragement of friendship seems a worthwhile way of spending time. Finally there is the work itself. My own needs are for variety of tasks within and possibly at the limit of my capabilities, periods of heavy effort interspersed with more reflective times; intellectual engagement with ideas, and a sense of something worthwhile being achieved.”

Another quote from Gregory Bateson, which, put into the context of design, captures the curious process, by which the best design practice proceeds:
“…we shall know a little more by dint of rigour and imagination, the two great contraries of mental process, either of which by itself is lethal. Rigour alone is paralytic death, but imagination alone is insanity.”
Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature (Appendix: Time Is Out of Joint)

“A sort of freedom comes from recognizing what is necessarily so. After that is recognized, comes a knowledge of how to act. You can ride a bicycle only after your partly unconscious reflexes acknowledge the laws of its moving equilibrium.”
Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature, (Appendix, Time Is Out of Joint)

If you had told me some years ago that I would feel some affection for Harold Macmillan, Conservative Prime Minister 1957-63, I would have found it hard to believe. But over the years I have found myself warming to him, mostly because the man had a sense of humour.
Simon Schama gives a nice example in a recent Guardian article:
“Tripping over a rug in the Christs College senior common room, I rose to find myself face to face with Harold Macmillan’s whiskers. ‘There there’, Supermac drawled, not missing a beat, ‘gratitude understandable; prostration quite unnecessary.'”

Last year, shortly after the Madrid bombings, I wrote a short piece, in which I said:
“…as we have seen over and over again there is a kind of symbiosis between the people who plant bombs and the people in authority whose instincts are essential anti-democratic. The number of voices arguing that the rights won by our ancestors at a cost to their liberties and lives must be sacrificed to guard against the possibility of exceptional events occurring is rising. Moves in that direction are dangerous and, as history has shown us, ineffective. And those seductive voices that promise security should make us afraid – our freedoms are more fragile and more easily eroded than we sometimes imagine.”
What has followed since has, if anything increased my fears. So it was encouraging to see that many people are picking up on a talk by security expert, Bruce Schneier, on itconversations , which is becoming one of my favourite sites. Among many interesting points he makes, the one I hope will gain wider circulation and will be remember the next time we a hear a politician proposing some repressive measure on the grounds that it will protect us from some terrorist threat is this one:
“Another thing we have to remember, which is very hard to remember in sort of our fear-laden society, is terrorism hardly ever happens. Very often I hear people from administration saying, Our policies are working because in the two-and-a-half years since 9/11, nothing else has happened, and I think about it and say, Well, nothing happened two-and-a-half years before 9/11 either. You did not have any policies. What does that prove??
What it proves is that terrorist attacks are very, very rare and that were spending a lot of money on something that hardly ever happens. Now, we can decide to do that. We as a nation tend to worry about spectacular and rare events rather than common events, like spouse abuse, automobile crashes, things that kill lots and lots of people every year, and we tend to focus on the spectacular and rare, but we should realize were doing that.”

I’m back. In fact, we’ve been back for several days, but a combination of fatigue (could it be jet lag?), catching up with stuff that needs doing, teaching and digesting the Chile experience has meant that I haven’t felt like posting anything here. In the meantime a lack of new posts over the last month or so seems to have had little effect on the number of visits to this site – quite what this means I’m not sure.
Anyway, back to business.
One of the unexpected pleasures of my return to teaching is access to a decent library. My latest exciting find is “Bringing Design to Software” edited by Terry Winograd, a book I have been meaning to read for years.
One chapter that grabbed my attention was an interview with Donald Schon – a long term hero of mine. In it he was talking about the invention of Scotch tape at 3Ms and how it was conceived as a material to repair books, but how users found all sorts of different applications for it, which 3M smartly used to create new product lines. In response to the question whether this was a feedback cycle, Schon responds:
“I would say it was a backtalk cycle, because they were not just being told, “You’re steering slightly to the left when you should be moving to the right”. They were being told, “This product is not what you think it is”. Consumers were projecting onto the product meanings different from the intentions of the product designers. As a result, 3M came out with a hair-setting Scotch Tape, a medical Scotch Tape used for binding splints, a reflective Scotch Tape for roads, and so on. I forget how many new uses there were, but they built on the order of 20 or 30 businesses through the differentiation and specialization of the basic product idea. They learned what the meaning of the product was by listening to what people said and by observing what people did.
So, if you were asked the question, How was the invention made? you would have to answer, Through a conversation with the users. In this phrase, the term conversation does not denote a literal verbal dialog. Rather, it refers to an interactive communication between designer and users in which the messages sent, received, and interpreted may take the form of words, actions, or objects. In the 3M example, Scotch Tape-both the product and its name-conveyed a message to users about the products intended function. Consumers received that message and transformed it. The designers, in turn, picked up the new messages that users were sending to them through consumer behavior, reframed the meanings of the product that they had designed, and incorporated those meanings in new variations of the product.”
I suspect if many companies really listened they would also find that their product or service was not what they thought it was. Information that could spell new opportunities, but equally could forecast future disaster.

I shall be away in Chile for a while and expect to be posting infrequently if at all. In the mean time feel free to explore this site. There are many interesting links buried here and, since most posts are not very newsy, the links remains as relevant today as when I made them. Some suggested starting points:
“Echoes of Purposive Drift”
“Hidden value”
“It’s hard to predict”
“Why Do Dancers Smoke? “
“Too much drift, not enough purpose?”

I have long felt that real managers, as opposed to the multitude of rule-bound, formula-following appartchiks, who claim this title, have a lot in common with designers. About a year ago I post a piece, “The Manager as Designer”, where I linked to a post on Fast Companys blog, which read, “…theres a remarkably thoughtful essay on design in the latest issue of the University of Torontos School of Management alumni mag. It’s written, no less, by the dean of the Rotman School of Management, Roger Martin. He convincingly argues that business people dont just need to understand designers better — they need to become designers.”
On a recent visit to his website I found an earlier article, where he and Hilary Austen outline a model of what they call, “The Art of Integrative Thinking”, which sounds an awful lot like what designers do to me. Read the article yourself (PDF format) to see what I mean. Meanwhile here is their conclusion.
“Integrative thinking is an art a heuristic process, not an algorithm. The integrative thinker develops a stance that embraces not fears the essential qualities of enigmatic choices.The integrative thinker is a relentless learner who seeks to develop the repertoire of skills that enables him or her to engage the tensions between opposites long enough to transcend duality and seek out novel solutions. Integrative thinkers understand that they are engaged in a creative process that avoids easy, pat,or formulaic answers. In short, integrative thinking is the management style we need if we are to solve the enigmatic problems that face our organizations in the new millennium.”

Another great quote from Thomas Johnson:
“Scania is a company owned by the Wallenberg family, a wealthy family that owns much of Swedish industry. The parent company, which goes by the name Investor, has held all kinds of companies, like Scania, for many years. Investor has always been run by a member of the Wallenberg family, up until this past year.
One of the great leaders of the family in the post-World War II period, Marcus Wallenberg, was very close to his companies. He regularly would go visit all the companies. He was not a person who sat above the clouds and studied his companies by looking at spreadsheets. He went down to the companies, like Scania, and when he did he invariably visited the shop floor. You can imagine, this is not the chairman of a board, this is the chairman of the chairmen of many boards. He would go down in the shop, where he would talk with workers and engineers. I believe he was trained as an engineer, so he understood what he was looking at. Someone asked him once, ‘How do you know, when you go into a shop, what to look for? What is it that tells you when things are right?’ And he said, ‘I go into the shop, because thats where what matters takes place. And when I go there I listen for the music.’ That was his expression. ‘I listen for the music. And if I hear the music I know everythings all right. But if I don’t hear it, then we go to work.'”

I am currently doing some work for a college that is going through convulsions as it attempts to make itself more bureaucratic in order to deal with external quality assurance exercises. Seeing very competent, experienced colleagues, who have been doing good work for many years, struggling with the gobbledygook they are expected to learn to deal with stuff is both frustrating and sad, particularly since I’ve been here before and seen real quality work destroyed by similar processes.
So I’ve been a bit cheered by being alerted to the work of Thomas Johnson (courtesy of Paul Skidmore at Demos Greenhouse). A taster:
“Ed Deming used say that 97% of what matters in an organization can’t be measured. Only maybe 3% can be measured. But when you go into most organizations and look at what people are doing, theyre spending all their time focusing on what they can measure and none of their time on what really matters–what they can’t measure. Why would we do this? Were spending all of our time measuring what doesn’t matter. In fact, its part of avoiding a lot of the really difficult and important issues, like virtue, as Bill OBrien has pointed out … We spend almost none of our time on what really matters.”
Intellectually, I know that the regime of targets and mindless measurement will eventually collapse under its own weight, but what saddens me is the people it continues to harm and the organisations and companies unnecessarily undermined as this process continues. What is encouraging is that I am finding more and more voices, like Thomas Johnson, questioning this nonsense.