Author: Richard

Web Thinking

A piece in the New Yorker got me thinking about Jane Jacobs again. (I’ve written about her here before in relation to the concept of Purposive Drift) So exploring the web I found this link, which took me to this interview from about two years ago, where she puts forward this cheerful thought:
“…we are living, I am convinced, in one of the most intellectually exciting times the human race has ever gone through. We are emerging from this linear cause-and-effect way of seeing the world into a way that has really been led by the ecologists, into a Web world, beginning to understand relationships in quite a different way. And it is affecting everything. And no end of people have grasped this and are seeing the world differently and analyzing things differently and seeing possibilities differently–basically in a very hopeful way. And I think this is awfully exciting. People who are younger than I am, you are lucky. You can play a part in what I think can be an extremely hopeful stage.”

To go faster, slow down

If you enter the phrase, “To go faster, slow down” into Google, you won’t find the name “John Brunner” in your returns. The closest you will get is,“To go faster, slow down. Everybody who knows about orbital mechanics understands that.? attributed to Scott Cherf of Cisco.
This is kind of sad since that bit of advice, I culled from Brunner’s “Shockwave Rider”, is one that really works if you can do it.
All though Brunner’s best books were written some thirty years or so ago, they largely seem as relevant today as when they were first published. Thankfully, after a long period of neglect, the good ones, “Shockwave Rider”, “The Jagged Orbit”, “Stand on Zanzibar” and “The Sheep Look Up”, seem to be going through something of a revival.

The Safety of the Street

I’ve been telling my son, Ben, whose just turned eighteen, that if he wants economic security the best way to do it is to build up a portfolio of tradable skills. By tradable skills I mean a set of skills that are clearly identifiable by people who will pay for them. (I should add this is something I have manifestly failed to do myself. Most frequently asked question, “What exactly is it that you do?) I’ve also pointed out that he already has some such skills, but I’m not sure he really believes me.
Thankfully, I can now point him to an entry in Douglas Rushkoff’s blog, which he is likely to take seriously since he devoured Rushkoff’s “Children of Chaos” at a relatively early age.
This extract, gives a taster, but read the whole thing, it could, as they say in the ads, change your life:
“What I’ve come to realize is that the street is the safest place to be. There’s no fear, here, because you’re already here. (It’s where you are, anyway, even if some company has given you cubicle space – but that’s a bit existential for spring.) Your employment is as diversified as your ability to multitask. And the more different kinds of work you take on, the more media in which you can play. It’s not a jack-of-all-trades problem, at all, since the more different arenas in which you work, the more clear it gets what you bring to each one of them.”

Mostly luck

As regular readers will know I like John Brockman‘s the Edge . Invariably, I find something that gets me thinking. On my visit this morning, I found this little gem in an interview with Nassim Taleb, a thought that deserves some deep reflection:
“There is a silly book called A Millionaire Next Door, and one of the authors wrote an even sillier book called The Millionaire’s Mind. They interviewed a bunch of millionaires to figure out how these people got rich. Visibly they came up with bunch of traits. You need a little bit of intelligence, a lot of hard work, and a lot of risk-taking. And they derived that, hey, taking risk is good for you if you want to become a millionaire. What these people forgot to do is to go take a look at the less visible cemetery ? in other words, bankrupt people, failures, people who went out of business ? and look at their traits. They would have discovered that some of the same traits are shared by these people, like hard work and risk taking. This tells me that the unique trait that the millionaires had in common was mostly luck.”

The Manager as a Designer

Back in 1974 I was a research assistant at North East London Polytechnic (now East London University). I was attached to a working party developing a multidisciplinary design degree, under the direction of Richard Fletcher. Richard had written a paper, “The Manager as a Designer”, which argued, among other things, that many key design decisions were taken by managers rather than designers.
So, some thirty years later, I was intrigued to read this on the Fast Company site, “It rare that I find something of interest in a business school alumni magazine. But there’s a remarkably thoughtful essay on design in the latest issue of the University of Toronto’s 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 don’t just need to understand designers better — they need to become designers.”
And then to download the PDF of the original article and read this:
“I would argue that to be successful in the future, businesspeople will have to become more like designers – more ‘masters of heuristics’ than ‘managers of algorithms’. For much of the 20th century, they moved ahead by demonstrating the latter capability. This shift creates a huge challenge, as it will require entirely new kinds of education and training, since until now, design skills have not been explicitly valued in business. The truth is, highly-skilled designers are currently heading-up many of the world’s top organizations – they just don’t know they are designers, because they were never trained as such.”

Network Logic

Last year, I wrote a longish piece, ?It?s hard to predict?. In it I wrote, ?…the strongest advice I could give to any individual or business is to become sensitive to where you fit in your networks, learn to think in terms of nodes and connections and the complex interactions and feedback between them, and be conscious of the dynamics of your patterns of connection. Whether you are aware of it or not, your success or failure is going to bound up in how well or not you identify, create and navigate your networks.?
One organisation that has embraced this truth (no thanks to me) is Demos. They have made all their publications freely available on-line and have clearly taken on board the notion of network thinking in a serious way.
One output from this is their book “Network Logic”, edited by Helen McCarthy, Paul Miller and Paul Skidmore with contributions from Perri 6, Mark Buchanan, Fritjof Capra, Manuel Castells, Diane Coyle, Alison Gilchrist David Hargreaves, Ann Lieberman, Geoff Mulgan, Howard Rheingold, Robert Sampson, Karen Stephenson, John Taylor. You can download the whole book or individual chapters in PDF format from their catalogue or buy it from here and, I guess soon, from Amazon.co.uk.

A bit of housekeeping

Today’s entries are all a bit of housekeeping. When Ben Copsey set up this site for me a year or so ago, one of my motives was to put up a work in progress, “Purposive Drift”. I did put up the “Prologue”, but wanted to keep the rest of it separate from the blog entries. My attempts to find an elegant solution, that I could implement, failed, so for a long time there has been a kind of hole at the heart of this site.
The other night I had an epiphany, “When in doubt, bodge”. So this is my bodge to get what has been done on “Purposive Drift” so far up on to this site. It’s not elegant, but it seems to work.