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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.

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.