Author: Richard

Simon Caulkin’s management column in the Observer is usually worth a read. This week he is talking about a new book by John Seddon, “Freedom from Command and Control” – I talked about some of Seddon’s work in an earlier post, “Failure demand”.
In his assault on the command and control style of management Seddon is particularly scornful of what top management chooses to measure as a means of control. As Caulkin says, “Instead of being controlled by measures, people need measures and methods that allow them to control and improve the work. In this way people, and only people, can absorb variety. And the results can be spectacular: capacity rises as waste is removed. Cost falls. Better service is cheaper; not dearer.”
Seddon suggests that:
“There are three tests of whether the measuring stick you are using to assess performance is a good one:
? Does it help in understanding and improving performance?
? Does it relate to its purpose, as established by the customer?
? Is it integrated with work (that is, in the hands of those who do it)?”
He goes on to argue that most managerial targets, standards, service levels, activity measures and budgets failure to meet these criteria. Certainly I have seen some excellent organisation have all the quality, in the commonly accepted, as opposed to managerial, use of the term, sucked out them by the imposition by senior management of “quality” standards and processes.

I have been playing around with some ideas for a book for a while. It’s based on the concept that we can understand much of what is happening in our changing world in terms of the effects of what I am calling three “action ideas” that gained momentum in the Sixties. The thesis is that these “action ideas” are still working their way through the system and contributing to “the death of routine” and the sense of unease that many people feel now. I should point out that what I am talking about here is the erosion of the shared routines that characterised much of the early post-war period, not the individual “got up, had a cup of coffee,..” routines that make up much of our lives. Anyway what follows is a draft of the Introduction. I would be interested know what you think.

Continue reading The Death of Routine

Well, it looks as if Michael Wolff was right all along, the Dean campaign did carry the seeds of its own destruction. A short entry on John Naughton’s blog, led me to a long thoughtful piece by Clay Shirky analysing the failure of the campaign and why so many people got it wrong. It’s a good read, but I’m not sure that it adds that much to what Michael Wolff said some months ago.
The danger in all this is that just as the significance of Dean’s campaign became over inflated, it may now be too easily dismissed. My sense is that its real significance was its role in changing the agenda, rather than its role in garnering support for one candidate. I suspect that as time goes on we will see an increasingly sophisticated adoption of the methods Dean’s people used not only to change agendas but to create and define them.

Rifling through some books on my shelves I came across a quote from Brecht’s “Life of Galileo”, which looked like a good aphorism for today:
“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 have been meaning to say something about Jane Jacobs for some time. She has long been a big influence on my thinking. Reading through some of my recent entries, I realised that I didn’t mention her by name when I quoted her remarks on “an esthetics of drift” in “Echoes of Purposive Drift” – an important omission since this is the origin of the “Drift” in “Purposive Drift”.
Doing a bit of research this morning I found a long interview with her on the World Bank site. Lots of provocative stuff and some obvious links with “Creativity, the economy and politics”. The interview is well worth a careful read. (Warning, it?s a big PDF file) Here is a taster:
“…is also destructive to try to make all the cities of a nation alike by putting them into a comprehensive development framework. This ignores the particularity of cities. The minute you begin to prescribe for cities? infrastructure or programs comprehensively, you try to make one size fit all. Actually, different cities, if they’re working properly, are not behaving the same way at the same time. Some may be doing well on exporting but aren’t replacing imports much. Others are doing just the opposite. Some, at a given time, may be receiving many immigrants. Others are not. If they’re behaving properly, each has its own kinds of work emerging. Creative cities have even more individuality than nations. Cities are much older economic entities than nations. ”

Brian Hutton has done us a great service. His decision that the bulk of the evidence presented to him should be place on the web is a very important precedent, which will be difficult for future inquiries to ignore. This makes it particularly sad that his name is likely to pass in to the language as a joke.

Continue reading Another Dr Kelly?

Some months ago I wrote a short piece touching on innumeracy and promised to return to the theme later. By one of those strange, but probably predictable, coincidences, I was thinking about this again and low and behold there was an article in the Independent about a Government commissioned report into the state of mathematics in the UK. Again, quite predictably, the article began, “Next month a Government-commissioned inquiry into the state of mathematics in Britain will report that radical measures are needed to save the subject from slipping into terminal decline in schools and universities.” And, as you might expect, Professor Adrian Smith, the author of the report, said, “We need to make the material much more inspirational so that people want to study maths for longer than they do now.”
I would agree that we need to make the material more inspirational, but fear that, in practice, this would mean using more practical examples like changing money into foreign currencies. What might actually be inspirational would be to communicate the fact that mathematics gives us a different way of understanding the world. And, perhaps, as a kicker, that it can offer a means of uncovering some of the dirty little secrets that others use numbers to conceal from us.

Continue reading Innumeracy revisited

A post on Karen Mahony’s blog alerted me to an important article by Richard Florida, “Creative Class War” – there?s also a slightly different version, with a diagram, on one of his sites CreativeClass.org. It gives you a whole different take on what is stake in the current US elections and has lessons for the rest of us where ever we are. Essentially the argument is that creative people are the key to economic prosperity and that the places and countries who can attract the mobile creatives are those that will do well. But as Karen points out the argument for individual creatives maybe different from that of cities and countries. As she points out, “If we really are moving more towards a “do it yourself” kind of cultural collage, then things are going to come out of the places that support small, free and inexpensive. Like Berlin. Like Prague. Like Yalta even?”

John Kay begins a long article in the FT Magazine by saying:
“If you want to go in one direction, the best route may involve going in the other. Paradoxical as it sounds, goals are more likely to be achieved when pursued indirectly. So the most profitable companies are not the most profit-oriented, and the happiest people are not those who make happiness their main aim. The name of this idea? Obliquity.”
He goes on to show how a narrowly goal orientated approach in areas as diverse as business, town planning and forest management is often less succesful than a broader, value based approach. He explains:
“Obliquity is relevant whenever complex systems evolve in an uncertain environment, and whenever the effect of our actions depends on the ways in which others respond to them. There is a role for carrots and sticks, but to rely on carrots and sticks alone is effective only when we employ donkeys and when goals are simple. Directness is appropriate. When the environment is stable, objectives are one dimensional and transparent, and it is possible to determine when and whether goals have been achieved. Obliquity is inevitable when the environment is complex and changing, purposes are multiple and conflicting, and when we cannot tell, even with hindsight, whether they have been fulfilled.”
It reminds me of one the original inspirations for Purposive Drift:
“The Japanese anthropologist, Tado Umesao, observes that historically the Japanese have always done better when they drifted in an empirical, practical fashion (‘ Even during the Meiji revolution, there were no clear goals; no one knew what was going to happen next’) than when they attempted to operate by ‘resolute purpose’ and ‘determined will’. This is true of other peoples, too, although Umesao believes what he calls ‘an esthetics of drift’ is distinctively Japanese and one of the major differences between Japanese and Western cultures. Had he been looking at Europe and America in the past rather than the present, he would have seen, I think, that ‘an esthetics of drift’ was distinctively Western too, and worked better for western cultures than ‘resolute purpose’ and ‘determined will’.
And a more recent node of support:
“But the business culture typically worships drive — setting a goal, single-mindedly pursuing it, and plowing past obstacles. Are you arguing that, to be more lucky, we need to be less focused?
This is one of the most counterintuitive ideas. We are traditionally taught to be really focused, to be really driven, to try really hard at tasks. But in the real world, you’ve got opportunities all around you. And if you’re driven in one direction, you’re not going to spot the others. It’s about getting people to have various game plans running in their heads. Unlucky people, if they go to a party wanting to meet the love of their life, end up not meeting people who might become close friends or people who might help them in their careers. Being relaxed and open allows lucky people to see what’s around them and to maximize what’s around them.”
“Busy, busy, busy” as a Bokonist might say.

For years I have been telling students and any one else who would listen that they should explore the potential for the use of sound in interaction design or as I preferred to call it hypermedia. So I was pleased to see that at IVREA, this was becoming a focus of concern. As Molly Wright Steenson reported in a post on 9 December last year:
“I was talking to a group of second-year students here today about their thesis projects and realized that sound is becoming a major focus for interaction designers. Currently, several thesis projects are focusing on it and three from last year explored it to varying degrees: Dianna Miller?s Wrapt, Ryan Genz?s Embedded Theater and Line Ulrika Christiansen?s Re-Lounge.”
Back in 1996, when Bob Cotton, Malcolm Garrett, Cara Mannion, Christine Davis and I were working on “Understanding Hypermedia 2.000” I wrote:
“Every media element within hypermedia presents intriguing possibilities for development. But the issue of how we use sound maybe one of the most important factors in making hypermedia a truly distinctive medium, with unique characteristics and qualities. From Vannevar Bush onwards, one of hypermedia primary metaphors up until now has been print. As we learn to use sound more intelligently and more effectively this metaphor may breakdown. Already many of the other metaphors we use to describe the experience of using hypermedia are spatial. The increasing use of sound to create a sense of inclusive space, where we are within the experience rather than simply observing, may be a crucial element in establishing the new, more fruitful spatial metaphors that the medium demands.”
Maybe at last we are beginning to get there.