Author: Richard

Do I hear echoes of Bruce Chatwin‘s Songlines in this extract from an interview with Michael Bull about how people use Apple’s iPod:
“… lot of people use it to go to work, for commuting. I found that they use the same music on a regular basis. They will often play the same half-dozen tunes for three months, and each part of the journey has its own tune….”

“We need to have a fundamental shift in our understanding of the nature of value. Think about it on an individual level. The reason you want to make money is to be secure to live a certain way. Simply having wealth doesn’t produce that end. It doesn’t matter if you have a six-figure salary if you can’t breathe the air or drink the water. A better question to ask would be, What are the elements of a life worth living, and how can I assemble them? Not, How much do I earn? Likewise, in our approach to value, we need to think more about the end rather than the means. The larger question is, As a civilization, what do we need to thrive?”
and
“…social relationships are a powerful predictor of happiness?much more so than money is. Happy people have extensive social networks and good relationships with the people in those networks. What’s interesting to me is that while money is weakly and complexly correlated with happiness, and social relationships are strongly and simply correlated with happiness, most of us spend most of our time trying to be happy by pursuing wealth. Why?”
and finally a thought for anyone who makes interventions in the world that may change it:
“We should be careful to make a world we actually want to live in.”

I have long felt that Ray and Charles Eames’s metaphor of the Designer as a Good Host was a good one and noticed that I hadn’t written about here. So I will make up for that now with this quote from the Power of Ten website:
“Since the Eameses felt the guest/host relationship was one of the most powerful relationships in the world, it is fitting that their most famous film, Powers of Ten, should center on a picnic. Charles and Ray argued that the guest/host relationship existed everywhere: in the tent of a nomadic herdsman, in the layout of a railroad station, in the way you are greeted by the circus. It also exists in design: how you make a chair or begin a film, and in all the subtle equations and gestures of welcoming in every day human existence.”
And this from an interview with Rolf Fehlbaum, CEO of Vitra in Fast Company:
“When I was a teenager, I served as an interpreter between Charles Eames and my father. Charles used to talk about the “guest-host relationship.” You, as a designer or a salesperson, are the host, and your customer is your guest. You have to think about how your guest will perceive whatever you’re offering him. You don’t try to please your guest because you want to sell him something. You try to please him because he’s your guest. You serve him because you respect him.”

“The problem with CRM, for example, is people assume that a company knows what to do to create value for customers. But I say no, this decision cannot be unilateral; it has to be collaborative. Consumers will not be seen as targets any longer, which is what CRM is about?how to target a single consumer with a database. Key now is how to engage them as equal problem-solvers so that we get value that is unique. And once you’ve come to this conclusion, the amazing thing is the opportunity for value creation to expand exponentially because now we have more people telling us what they want. We don’t have to second-guess and we don’t have to do shock demand forecasting by SKU. If you deliver experiences, you’re going to be producing on demand. That’s the idea.”
When I first read this passage from an interview with C.K. Prahalad & Venkat Ramaswamy promoting their new book, “The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers”, I found myself muttering in agreement. A few days later I find myself more sceptical.

Continue reading Hidden value

Thank heavens for the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. They are islands of civilization in a sea of instant opinion and soundbites. In the current issue of NYRB there is a review of Richard Perle’s phantasies about the Middle East by Thomas Powers, another by Frederick Crews about the nonsense of repressed memories of sexual abuse, and one by Richard Horton about the dangers of the privatisation of science. And, of course, much, much more.
The LRB has a long, long article by Neal Ascherson about Georgia – and if you think Georgia is a long way away and of little consequence think again, if you worry about nuclear material falling into the wrong hands look no further. Off-line there is Adam Philips on Dylan Thomas, Jenny Diski on Erving Goffman, and an intriguing piece by Bernard Porter on attitudes to cannabis in the Nineteenth Century and early Twentieth Century.
The LRB and NYRB are treasures that need our support, so by all means read what you can on-line for free, but subscribe or buy them too, we’d be poorer without them.

I mentioned in passing Amazon’s “search inside the book facility” in an earlier entry. At the time I was so caught up in what I was thinking about that I failed to register how significant Amazon’s innovation is. I remember some years ago the way that Altavista’s full text search capabilities transformed the usefulness of the Web. Amazon’s initiative promises to be still more significant in terms of making visible Gregory Bateson‘s “patterns that connect” in published books. This is big stuff.
What is disturbing is the obstacles that are going to be put in the way of the full promise of this technology being realised, because of a dog in the manager attitude to intellectual property. Amazon’s solution of showing pictures of pages seems like a sensible compromise, but there are still people advocating stopping them doing it on the grounds of infringement of copyright. This seems dumb on several grounds, not least that copies of books might bought that otherwise the buyer might not have known existed.
There is a good account of the technology and its significance in a piece Gary Wolf wrote in Wired and an example of copyright stupidity here. But if you haven’t done so already go to Amazon.com yourself and try it out – it is amazing.

I love the phrase, “the adjacent possible”. It captures in a very vivid way my sense that we are surrounded by more possibilities and opportunities than we can see – the theme of “Purposive Drift”. Hence my excitement when I first saw the term. It seems to say something I have been trying to say for along time in a very compressed, succinct way. That’s what the “drift” in “Purposive Drift” is about, trying to finding ways to counter our blindness to the richness of the world and to create the circumstances where one can become aware of the adjacent possibilities that too strong a focus on goals or plans could make you miss.
I found the phrase on Edge, where I haven’t been for a while. When I did last week there it was, “The Adjacent Possible – a talk with Stuart Kauffman”. My excitement was somewhat tempered by the fact that I couldn’t pull out much of what he meant from the talk nor with my search of the web following it. This was not dissimilar to my experience of reading his “At Home in the Universe” where I felt he was saying something very important, but found it difficult, if not impossible, to follow his argument in detail. This is due to my inadequacies not his. But, never mind, I shall shamelessly appropriate the phrase and use it in a way that makes sense to me.
What added to my sense of glee was the interesting stuff I came across trying to track down what others meant by the adjacent possible. (Among other things, in an indirect way, that’s where I alighted upon Geoffrey Vickers, my current, growing obsession – all the snippets I have managed to pick up reinforce my sense that he has some really important stuff to say.) Among the new stuff I found there was an interview with Michael Lissack, who is someone else who seems to have a good take on the world. As this extract from the interview shows his use of “the adjacent possible” is close to how I think about it.
“Q: How can companies become more adaptive?
A: You need to be able to recognise your adjacent possibilities. A lot of people can’t. They are at A, they want to go to X. And X is maybe twenty steps away. And they can?t visualise what the next step is that gets them towards X. They can work their way backwards to like N. But they have no idea how to get from A to N. They do know if they can get to N, they can get to X. But they need to know what B and C are. I find that a lot of people at a lot of companies are so focused on being able to articulate X, and then they hire consultants who work them backwards to N, that they never figure out B and C.”

Thanks to Amazon’s amazing “Search inside this book” I confirmed my earlier sense that Sir Geoffrey Vickers thinking was worth pursuing. Amazon now enables you to search the entire text of a number of books and view the pages where your search term occurs. Entering “Vickers? in their entry to Peter Checkland’s “Systems Thinking, Systems Practice” pulled up a lot of references. There on page 262 there was a passage from “Freedom in a Rocking Boat” and a comment from Checkland, which suggested that Vickers had resolved some of the ideas I am still struggling with in “Purposive Drift”.
The passage from Vickers begins “The meaning of stability is likely to remain obscured in Western cultures until they rediscover the fact that life consists of experiencing relationships, rather than seeking goals or ‘ends’.” Checkland comments that, ?Vickers suggests replacing the goal-seeking and goal-seeking-with-feedback (cybernetic) models by one in which personal, institutional or cultural activity consists in maintaining desired relationships and eluding undesired ones.”
So now I am faced with the quest of tracking down Vicker’s writings most of which seem to be out-of-print. But as a taster I did find one paper on line, where he was writing about what Health Services were for, that says to me that here is a mind that still has much to contribute to our thinking today.

Sir Geoffrey Vickers is a figure that I have known about for years, but the extent of my knowledge was that he was seen as an important figure in systems thinking and had written a book called “Freedom in a Rocking Boat”. I had tried getting hold of that book a number of times, but without success. By one of those curious roundabout routes I stumbled across an Open University site that had a video and transcript of a short talk he gave in 1978. The snippets there have whetted my appetite to find out more about his thinking, because he strikes me as being one of those nearly lost thinkers who has much to say to us today.
What I find slightly mysterious is that there seems to be a cluster of people working, thinking and writing in the immediate post-war period, whose work is largely out of print and whose thinking is mainly represented by a few a few strong quotes, but little else. Why, I wonder have they almost disappeared when what they had to say is, perhaps, even more pertinent today than it was when they were more well known? I suspect that a little intellectual archaeology would yield results that would seem startlingly modern. Meanwhile here is a snippet from Geoffrey Vickers harvested from the web:
?Learning what to want is the most radical, the most painful and the most creative act of life.?

I had started writing something about the wider context of the Hutton report, when I just felt weary. The thought of ploughing through all the junk that led up to the invasion of Iraq again suddenly seemed as attractive as wading through a sewer. Fortunately I found three links which I think says anything I wanted to say much better than I could manage plus a whole lot more. The first is an article in Mother Jones that details the lead up to the invasion. The second is a piece in the London Review of Books by Conor Gearty that neatly sums up the report itself. The third is a blog by a young Iraqi woman, Riverbend, that I have been following for some time. This, as well providing some wider insights into what is happening in Iraq, gives a vivid account of the daily life of a Baghdad family as the war the continues – a definite must read.
But one snippet from my original intention remained. In the months before the invasion I found a piece in the New Yorker, which contained one paragraph that I felt caught the mood of the whole thing:
“In September (2001, my addition), Bush rejected Paul Wolfowitz’s recommendation of immediate moves against Iraq. That the President seems to have changed his mind is an indication, in part, of the bureaucratic skill of the Administration’s conservatives. “These guys are relentless,” one former official, who is close to the high command at the State Department, told me. “Resistance is futile.”
As I found myself resisting what I had thought I wanted write, I realised that the “relentless guys” phenomenon had a much wider relevance. The sense that “Resistance is futile” is something that many people in many organisations, both public and private, have felt as some bright new idea tramples its way through the system. Sometimes the idea is simply a utopian phantasy, more often the idea contains a kernel of good sense, but in either case any reservations or qualifications about its implementation are brushed aside. Its proponents know it is the right thing to do. People with more knowledge and experience on the ground or those who hold more nuanced views are dismissed as being old fashioned or feeble.
So how does this phenomenon work? At the beginning there is almost always some bright people who develop a nice, simple clear idea that seems to offer certainty. This gets picked up by a bunch of careerists and other special interests, who can see personal benefit from what is proposed. Then you need a crisis of some kind. The response to that crisis produces the momentum that enables the idea to be pushed through. The key to whole thing is the lack of doubt in its advocates, the rewards in terms of career or status that they accrue, their ability to brush aside any evidence that runs counter to their project and most importantly their ability to move upwards out of the organisation before the debris from their enterprise becomes too apparent.
Sounds familiar to you?