Author: Richard

Yesterday I was having a phone conversation with my brother when he asked me if I had read John Naughton’s article, which discussed, among other things, how Carly Fiorina had taken “an innovative and much-admired technology company and eviscerated it with a kindergarten-MBA strategy that alienated thousands of the most dedicated staff in the technology business – not to mention leading many more to take early retirement or pursue exciting new careers in the fast-food industry.”
I had and was reminded of a quote by William Hewlett I had fallen on with delight many years ago. So I told him what I could remember of the quote, which was something to the effect that when they started the company they didn’t have any plans and just did what came along. And we both had a good chuckle.
I also told him that somewhere on one of the hard discs of one of my obsolete computers, I’ve got that quote, but getting to it would be really hard and how I have searched the web for it on a number of occasions and always come up with a blank.
So imagine my surprise when this morning I picked up a copy of “Digital Aboriginal” by Mikela Tarlow and found a quote by William Hewlett that read:
“… the Professor of Management is devastated when I say that we really didn’t have any plans when we started – we were just opportunistic. We did anything that would bring in a nickel. We had a bowling foul-line indicator, a clock drive for a telescope, a thing to make a urinal flush automatically and an electric shock machine to make people lose weight. Here we were with about $500 in capital, trying to make whatever someone thought we might be able to do.”
What made this find even more surprising is that I had almost given up on “Digital Aboriginal”. I had borrowed it from my College library because flicking through it I had found some ideas very similar to my thinking on Purposive Drift. It also has other some insights I had never thought of. But, the gems all seemed to buried in that somewhat breathless American business book style, which seems to shriek ‘every things changed and youve got to catch up’. And, unusually for me, that style so irritated me that I was about to return it unfinished.
Quite what made me pick it up this morning I don’t know, but it was very strange finding that quote on the bottom of the second page I looked at. And perhaps equally strange, a few pages later, finding this from Mikela Tarlow, “Paying attention is not a glamorous leadership skill. We tend to focus on the more flashy traits like courage, boldness, risk, vision and charisma. Just looking around rarely makes it to the top-ten list of how to get ahead. Few spend time nurturing their talent to really observe, although it may be the most important tool we have.”
All of which leaves me to say just like a Bokonist:
“Busy, busy, busy”
Which, in turn, gives me an excuse to link to two earlier post “Attention and Identity” and “Echos of Purposive Drift”.
Read them and you might see what I mean.

The problem with blogging, like e-mail, is that sometimes it’s too spontaneous. My recent post, “The Design of Possibilities”, fell into this trap. If I heard someone say, “I design possibilities.” I would think, “What a wanker.”
So, while I stand by its sentiments, expressing what I was trying to say will take more thought and probably some more time to do it.
More on the theme of design, situations and possibilities later.

About this time last year I posted a very short entry, “On being less stupid”, quoting from Brechts Galieo:
“Truth is the child of time, not authority. Our ignorance is infinite, lets whittle away just one cubic millimetre. Why should we want to be so clever when at long last we have a chance of being a little less stupid.”
I was reminded of this reading a piece by Carne Ross about the processes leading up to the Iraq war in the FT a few weeks ago (subscription only Im afraid, though there are accessible versions of this floating around on the web). Carne Ross was, as he says, “… from 1998 to 2002, the British expert on Iraq for the UK delegation to the UN Security Council, responsible for policy on both weapons inspections and sanctions against Iraq. He goes on to say,“My experience in those years and what happened subsequently is in part why I recently resigned from the Foreign Office.”
What concerned him about the work he was doing and what he observed in others was the way that:
“Evidence is selected from the available mass, contradictions are excised, and the selected data are repeated, rephrased, polished (spun, if you prefer), until it seems neat, coherent and convincing, to the extent that those presenting it may believe it fully themselves.”
He gives as an example how the argument between the opponents of sanctions and those who supported a more aggressive stance against the Iraqi regime in the UN:
“… illustrates how governments and their officials can compose convincing versions of the truth, filled with more or less verifiable facts, and yet be entirely wrong. I did not make up lies about Husseins smuggling or obstruction of the UNs humanitarian programme. The speeches I drafted for the Security Council and my telegrams back to London were composed of facts filtered from the stacks of reports and intelligence that daily hit my desk. As I read these reports, facts and judgements that contradicted our version of events would almost literally fade into nothingness. Facts that reinforced our narrative would stand out to me almost as if highlighted, to be later deployed by me, my ambassador and my ministers like hand grenades in the diplomatic trench warfare. Details in otherwise complex reports would be extracted to be telegraphed back to London, where they would be inserted into ministerial briefings or press articles. A complicated picture was reduced to a selection of facts that became factoids, such as the suggestion that Hussein imported huge quantities of whisky or built a dozen palaces, validated by constant repetition: true, but not the whole truth.”
Contrast this with a quote by Natalie Angier from an earlier post of mine:
“…’One of the first things you learn in science’, one Caltech biologist told me, ‘is that how you want it to be doesnt make any difference’. This is a powerful principle, and a very good thing, even a beautiful thing. This is something we should embrace as the best part of ourselves, our willingness to see the world as it is, not as were told it is, nor as our confectionary fantasies might wish it to be.”
Of course, even those engaged in the scientific enterprise are as prone to filter out unwelcome news as the rest of us, but at least there is some awareness within the scientific tradition to recognise this tendency and to build in steps to counter it.
What I fear is that in many other human organisations and enterprises we have failed to build in such steps and are, in effect, designing in stupidity. By stupidity I mean, in the words of Dudley Lynch and Paul L.Kordis, “the inability of the brain or any other part of nature to accept useful information, learn from it, and act intelligently on it.”
In other words, what I am suggesting is that in many of our organisations, both public and private, we have created situations which make intelligent action more difficult. This is not because the people within them lack ability, it is because the system they are operating within pulls against appropriate action.
Now, of course, you could argue against this and point out that on the whole things seem to work and you would be right. We can do much that is stupid and still seem to be all right.
But thinking about my earlier post about Jared Diamonds “Collapse”, where he talks about those earlier civilisations where everything seemed to be all right until they went into fatal collapse, I wonder whether it might not be smarter to try and design intelligence into our organisations and institutions, rather than hoping everything will OK and continuing to design stupidity in.

Last November I described my delight at discovering that Ralph Caplan’s “By Design” had been revised and was being re-published. If anything, my excitement was even greater when a few days ago I discovered one of the original copies in the library of a College, where I do a bit of teaching.
Reading it again I was pleased to find that my recollections of the book were confirmed. If anything it is even better than I remembered. What also struck me was how much of my thinking about design had been influenced by it, even though, in a number of cases, I had forgotten where the ideas had come from.
In one of the bits I had forgotten, he talks about ‘situation design’ or has he prefers to call it, ‘the design of possibilities’. I suspect it was this chapter that made me like the book so much when I first read it, because it named something I had been doing for most of my professional life.
The problem with being a designer of possibilities is that few people, other than Caplan, recognise what you are doing – so as a profession it is a bit of a no no. For some of the time when I was designing courses it was OK, because I could talk about myself as a ‘curriculum designer’ or ‘course developer’. Other times I use other descriptors, such as ‘writer’ or even, heaven forbid, ‘consultant’. But generally speaking, being a designer of possibilities is a lonely, unnamed business, where you have to pretend to be doing something else.
Still you never know, maybe with the birth of things like ‘service design’ and designers that do it, like Live/Work or Plot, a space will develop where we can come out proud and be understood when we say, “I design possibilities”.

John Seely Brown likes bricolage. In fact he likes it so much that he sees it “as a new way of being” that is going to become increasingly important as we move into the 21st Century. Bricolage, he says:
“…has to do with tinkering. Tinkering with a piece of concrete code, seeing whether you can make it better. Engaging in that bricolage until you have something that you think is better and then ship it back into the debate, and then if it is accepted, you increase the social capital for yourself. So this whole phenomenon is pretty interesting.”
I am inclined to agree with him about its growing importance. Digital technology makes many kinds of bricolage easier and more explicit. Where, perhaps, I disagree is that I believe bricolage has always been an important part of human creativity. This is the basis of my objections to proponents of strong IP.
Malcolm Gladwell writes interestingly about this in a piece about plagiarism, where he describes sitting with a friend in the music business, who was playing him examples of musical borrowings:
“My friend had hundreds of these examples. We could have sat in his living room playing at musical genealogy for hours. Did the examples upset him? Of course not, because he knew enough about music to know that these patterns of influence–cribbing, tweaking, transforming–were at the very heart of the creative process. True, copying could go too far. There were times when one artist was simply replicating the work of another, and to let that pass inhibited true creativity. But it was equally dangerous to be overly vigilant in policing creative expression, because if Led Zeppelin hadnt been free to mine the blues for inspiration we wouldn’t have got Whole Lotta Love, and if Kurt Cobain couldnt listen to More Than a Feeling and pick out and transform the part he really liked we wouldn’t have Smells Like Teen Spirit–and, in the evolution of rock, Smells Like Teen Spirit was a real step forward from More Than a Feeling. A successful music executive has to understand the distinction between borrowing that is transformative and borrowing that is merely derivative, …”
James Cambell, writing in the Guardian recently, describes the difficulties he had writing a biography of James Baldwin, because he was denied permission to use extracts from his letters. He contrasts how things are now with a more rigourous enforcement of copyright laws with earlier more relaxed times:
“Among my favourite biographies is Francis Steegmuller’s book on Guillaume Apollinaire, published in 1963, 45 years after Apollinaires death, when his work was still under copyright. Steegmuller draws on a wide range of written material, including entire poems and facsimiles of handwritten notes, all in the interests of creating a lifelike portrait. Little in Apollinaire: Poet Among the Painters, in which the biographer himself plays a graceful, self-effacing role, suggests that he was troubled by questions of intellectual property. The same may be said of many biographies of the time.”
So far as I can see Apollinaire and his heirs can only have benefited from Francis Steegmuller’s use of his work. Indeed, this could be seen as a model of the way creativity works as a social and cultural phenomenon. What is new is the way that the combination of digital technology and the internet can be seen as opening up the potential for a massive expansion of tinkering with human artefacts for the benefit of all of us.
Some years ago I wrote:
“With a digital medium such as hypermedia, not only is copying very easy, but once it has been copied, material can be very easily adapted, modified, changed or merged with other copied material. In 20 years time, one definition of literacy may be the ability to put together an interactive communication (using sound, images, animation and live action video as well as text). If this is the case, it will be largely because hypermedia is the supreme medium for bricolage.”
and
“… bricolage can be seen as a fundamental aspect of human creativity. Nothing that any of us creates is totally new. Everyone, including the most brilliant and original, draws on existing elements of the culture. What makes something new and original is the organization of those existing elements into new and original relationships, combined with the detail of their expression.”
Nothing since has made me change my mind.

A fascinating snippet from a review of two books about the race to split the atom by Freeman Dyson in the New York Review of Books. Regular readers of Purposive Drift will recognise why this quote appeals to me:
“The culture of the Cavendish was strongly paternalistic. Rutherford took fatherly care of his students and imposed strict limits on their hours of work. Every evening at six oclock the laboratory was closed and all work had to stop. Four times every year, the laboratory was closed for two weeks of vacation. Rutherford believed that scientists were more creative if they spent evenings relaxing with their families and enjoyed frequent holidays. He was probably right. Working under his rules, an astonishingly high proportion of his students, including Cockcroft and Walton, won Nobel Prizes.”

Simon Caulkin has a cheerful article in the Observer about how Swale Borough Council in Kent transformed a disaster in their Housing Benefits department into a triumph. All this as Simon Caulkin says, “…in the space of a few months, with no extra resources and never a CRM system, shared service or call centre in sight.”
Read the article to find out how they did it, but these were the principles that guided them:
“*Understand what customers want and only do work that improves their experience of the service
* Ensure work goes out 100 per cent perfect, taking whatever time is needed and drawing on all necessary resources
* Manage the customer through to the end of the process, keeping them informed of progress and the service levels they can expect
* Organise work so that it is as error-proof as possible
* In meeting demand, work on the principle of first in, first out; seek to improve the end-to-end flow of work through the system every day
* Use measures that tell staff how well they are achieving things that matter to customers, not official specifications.”

I’m not that often moved by something I read on the web, but Natalie Angier‘s account of why she is raising her child as an atheist did. (Thanks to 3quarks daily for the link). The whole thing is a heartening read, but the bit I particularly liked was this:
“…’One of the first things you learn in science’, one Caltech biologist told me, ‘is that how you want it to be doesn’t make any difference’. This is a powerful principle, and a very good thing, even a beautiful thing. This is something we should embrace as the best part of ourselves, our willingness to see the world as it is, not as were told it is, nor as our confectionary fantasies might wish it to be.”

Some of my favourite blogs – Matt Jones, Pat Kane and Paul Miller – have already used this quote from Philip Pullman, but it so Purposive Drift that I can’t resist posting it here:
“…It’s when we do this foolish, time-consuming, romantic, quixotic, childlike thing called play that we are most practical, most useful, and most firmly grounded in reality, because the world itself is the most unlikely of places, and it works in the oddest of ways, and we wont make any sense of it by doing what everybody else has done before us. Its when we fool about with the stuff the world is made of that we make the most valuable discoveries, we create the most lasting beauty, we discover the most profound truths. The youngest children can do it, and the greatest artists, the greatest scientists do it all the time. Everything else is proofreading.”

Early last year I posted a short piece, “Mostly Luck”, where I drew attention to an interview in Edge with Nassim Taleb and his view that the key factor in whether someone became a millionaire or not was luck. I was reminded of that post by another interview in Edge with the social pyschologist, Philip Zimbardo where he says:
“When you grow up in a privileged environment you want to take credit for the success you see all around, so you become a dispositionalist. You look for character, genes, or family legacy to explain things, because you want to say your father did good things, you did good things, and your kid will do good things. Curiously, if you grow up poor you tend to emphasize external situational factors when trying to understand unusual behavior. When you look around and you see that your father’s not working, and you have friends who are selling drugs or their sisters in prostitution, you dont want to say its because theres something inside them that makes them do it, because then theres a sense in which its in your line. Psychologists and social scientists that focus on situations more often than not come from relatively poor, immigrant backgrounds. That’s where I came from.”
I was going to leave it at that, but writing on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, what he has to say in the rest of the interview seemed too important to neglect. To crudely summarise what he has to say, yes bad people do bad things, but more importantly good people put into bad situations also do bad things. I urge you to read the full interview, where he puts forward a more nuanced argument.
For myself I take away three thoughts from the interview.
The first, is that talk of ‘evil’ and ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people is largely an obstacle to doing anything to create a more decent human world. It simply puts any reasoned explanations and hence any preventive action beyond anything we can do much about.
The second is that if we want people to behave well we should give more attention to designing in civility into our institutions, organisations and built environments. If you like, an extension of Oscar Newman’s ideas about defensible space.
The third is that we should do more to celebrate those people who ‘do the right thing’ even in situations where everything conspires against it. The sad fact is that those extraordinary people are more often punished than acknowledged, despite the lip service we pay to their moral courage. Perhaps, we should create something like a Nobel prize to celebrate those people who display human decency in intolerable situations.