de rebus diversis

The three characteristics of a professional?

2009-07-14T11:45:00.002+10:00

Listening to Margaret Throsby this morning on ABC Classic FM - she interviewed a guy who spoke about the three characteristics of doctors:

Authoritative.
Sapiential.
Charismatic.

Does this apply equally to all other "professions"?

"Path based" approach for IT development

2009-05-11T13:35:00.001+10:00

Interesting piece here at HBR from Staats and Upton about what they call a "path based" approach to IT system development:

Through our work, we have identified an approach that not only reduces a company’s costs but supports the growth of existing businesses and the launch of new ones. We call it a “path based” approach, because rather than attempting to define all of the specifications for a system before the project is launched, companies focus on providing a path for the system to be developed over time. The approach’s premises are that it is difficult and costly to map out all requirements before a project starts because people often cannot specify everything they’ll need beforehand. Also, unanticipated needs almost always arise once a system is in operation. And persuading people to use and “own” the system after it is up and running is much easier said than done.

The risk of neuroscience degenrating into phrenology

2009-05-04T13:58:00.002+10:00

Interesting article here from Perspectives on Psychological Science, by Edward Vul, Christine Harris, Piotr Winkielman, & Harold Pashler (h/t New Scientist).

Basically, a lot of the very strong correlations that fMRI scans are showing between parts of the brain "lighting up" and emotions felt by subjects, are likely to be spurious. This article claims that the experimenters are making some basic statistical mistakes and are over-stating the links they see. To quote the abstract:

We show how this nonindependent analysis inflates correlations while yielding reassuring-looking scattergrams.

Credit crisis until 2010?

2008-09-01T11:54:00.001+10:00

Sobering piece from The Economist here, which concludes as follows:

So the markets (and the developed economies) are waiting for a catalyst for recovery. Lower commodity prices helped for a while, and may help further if they encourage central banks to cut rates. Evidence of a bottom in the American housing market may also do the trick. But the crisis seems certain to linger into 2009, and could even make it into the following year.

The secret of creativity

2008-08-25T20:17:00.003+10:00

(Reflections on "Strategic Intuition", by William Duggan, Columbia University Press, 2007).

What gives you that "game changing" idea in your strategy? This is the question Duggan sets out to answer in this book. And in so doing he lifts the lid on the secret of creativity.

So what goes on when you have a "game changing" idea? Basically, according to Duggan, you are combining pre-existing ideas and memories you already have, in new and interesting ways. Duggan calls this process "strategic intuition". Strategic intuition relies on a peculiar ability of the brain to see connections between different ideas and memories in a flash, in new ways. This ability to make connections in interesting ways is called "intelligent memory".

Duggan gives a lot of good examples in his book of "intelligent memory" in action. The first is Napoleon at the siege of Toulon in 1793. There Napoleon (who was not in command at the time, but advised the General who was) combined two pre-existing elements from his memory, along with some technological innovations, to come up with a new strategy that drove the British out of Toulon. At Toulon he remembered reading about how the British, in the American war of independence, got scared of being cut off from their main fleet when their harbour came under the range of cannon from a nearby hill. He combined this with Joan of Arc's strategy of relieving Orleans by attacking smaller fortresses around it.

So, he took these two ideas (from his reading of military history), noticed a small fort (l'Aiguiellette) on his new contour map, overlooking Toulon, and decided to take it. He put light cannon in l'Aiguiellette, aimed at Toulon, and the British felt cut off. They left Toulon without the French having to attack it.

So, on this reading, what makes Napoleon a good general? Simply his wide reading of military history, combined with his ability to make good connections between all those ideas in his head, and the present situation he is facing.

The Google story in 1996 is the same. Larry Page and Sergey Brin combine three existing elements in a new way. Firstly, the idea, from academia, that the more time a paper is cited, the more important it is. Larry Page took this analogy and applied it to links that connect back to a web page: the more links back to it, the more important the page. Brin and Page combined this with Alta Vista's idea to copy the whole web onto its computers to allow a full text search of the web. And, finally, they added the data mining expertise of their Professor at Stanford, Rajeev Motwani. The result of these three pre-existing elements, brought together in a new way, was the Google search engine (although at the time they thought they had invented a page ranking engine, but that's another story).

So what does all this mean? Well, if you want to think creatively, if you want to have strategic insights, you need to combine two important factors. First, you need a lot of good memories in your head as "raw material". Second, you need to be able to make useful connections between those memories, and see applications to your present situation.

The first, getting the "raw material" is easy enough. Just read a lot. Read what interests you. Read for enjoyment. And don't worry if it's not useful. The second - making connections between these ideas - might be a bit harder. What you need are tools and methods that help these connections to emerge. Duggan seems silent on this. But, it strikes me, at 2nd Road we have the "thinking tools" and approaches that can help people to make those useful connections.

When it’s best to try to convince, rather than prove

2008-08-03T10:34:00.002+10:00

(Reflections on Carroll C Arnold’s Introduction to Chaim Perelman’s “The Realm of Rhetoric”, University of Notre Dame Press, 1982).

When is it better to try for a convincing argument, rather than a conclusive one? And how would you go about that?

You should aim to convince, rather than prove, when your premises are disputable. That is, when you are dealing in the realm of “values” (as Perelman would say). I take it that this realm is bigger than it first appears: and would include decisions about most human social systems.

Argumentation that aims to convince can be termed “rhetoric”. Argumentation that aims at a proof, at a conclusion, can be termed “logic”. Logic can only be applied when your premises are indisputable. Beware of trying to apply logic into situations where your premises are open to opinion. You will end up with disparate and conflicting conclusions.

Rhetorical argument must have as its goal the “adherence” of an audience. Rhetorical argument, by the nature of the matters it deals with, will always have an audience. Even if that audience is just yourself. And its aim cannot be to get the audience totally signed-up to a claim. Rather, its goal can only be to increase the adherence of that audience to the claim. In the domains where rhetoric applies, we cannot hope for 100% acceptance of a claim. Only degrees of allegiance or adherence.

So, how do you argue in a good way, in the domains where your premises are disputable? That is, how do you argue rhetorically? One way to answer this is to draw analogies from the realm of logic: a realm we are more familiar with.

In logic, you build your argument from self evident premises. Premises that are universally true. In rhetoric, you need to build your argument from your audience’s knowledge and experience. You need to appeal to what they know. To what they value. To what they have gone through. You also need to take into account your audience’s current situation.

In logic, you rely on definitions of terms. Once a term is defined to mean a certain thing – its meaning is clear to everyone dealing in that formal system. For example, in the Tax Act, the term “assessable income” is defined in the “definitions” section of the Act. That term, “assessable income” will retain that defined meaning throughout the Act. Its meaning is not open to dispute by any accountant or judge.

In rhetoric, where you are dealing with language in an informal system (not the formal systems of logic), your language will always be ambiguous. You can’t pin a single definition down to a term. So, what can the rhetorician do? Her only option is to make her particular meaning of a word compelling to an audience. She must give her meaning of the word “presence” to that audience.

Finally, logic reaches its conclusions by following deductive steps in a formal proof. The logical rules, which allow you to advance from one step to the next, are well understood and universally agreed. No such formal rules exist for rhetoric. Instead, you need to make “liaisons” between ideas. You progress as you see and build the links between ideas. The rhetorician will use metaphor, examples and models to create these liaisons. She will also resort to argument by analogy, or by an appeal to the way things are (as viewed by the audience) to make these links.

Perelman’s contention, in the end, is that it's possible, in fact it's more intellectually honest, to aim for arguments that are “inconclusive” (in the logical, positivist sense) and yet still “convincing”.

Search engines to help technological innovation?

2008-03-02T14:29:00.005+11:00

Interesting piece here from The Economist on using search engines to help with technological innovation.

The article's key idea is to turn innovation on its head. Instead of starting with a problem and looking for a solution: start with your collection of known solutions and see if you can find problems that they solve. Or, better still, if you see a "problem", search amongst all the known solutions out there and see if one will "fit".

That's, of course, where search engines come into play. The article looks at the latest "natural language" search engines - that make this type of searching a whole lot easier. And of course, someone's already got the "innovation search engine" idea in production. Accelovation recently went live with their "market discovery software".

"It's stories all the way down"

2008-02-25T21:46:00.006+11:00

Great post over here at Ben Myer's "Faith and Theology" about the role narratives play in determining the way we view reality. At it's strongest, narratives become our reality. As Ben says:

"There is nothing “more real” than the stories we tell ourselves; it’s stories all the way down."

(Image: Wikipedia - Space Turtles)

Social complexity and wicked problems

2008-02-20T09:56:00.004+11:00

I'm more and more nervous about what I think Conklin is doing in his book "Dialogue Mapping" (refer my initial post). I don't think it's helpful to pull social complexity out from wicked problems. As if wicked problems can exist in the absence of social complexity. Or, at least, in the absence of social factors.

Conklin wants to say that wickedness is a property of the "problem/solution space" and social complexity "is a property of the social network that is engaging with the problem".

However, I don't think you can have "wickedness" in a problem unless you have social factors. They are a necessary condition for wickedness. (However, they are not a sufficient condition - you need other things as well to get "wickedness").

"Dialogue Mapping"

2008-02-19T20:22:00.004+11:00

"Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems" is a relatively recent book (2005) on dialogue and wicked problems by Jeff Conklin. You can read the first chapter of the book here. Jeff is part of the CogNexus Instititute.

I'm not sure I agree with Conklin's take on wicked problems. He seems to want to strip the social complexity out of them. He says: "... while wickedness is a property of the problem/solution space ... social complexity is a property of the social network that is engaging with the problem". I'm not sure these things are so easily teased apart. Expecially since Rittel's original paper (as Conklin acknowledges elsewhere) sees one of the contributors to "wickedness" being the various views of the "publics" and "sub-publics" affected. I can see why Conklin might want to separate out social complexity - to get some clarity - but I'm not sure if it is helpful.

quaestio

2008-02-09T21:53:00.000+11:00

More from de partitione oratoria.

Cicero sees questions falling into two types (Id, at 4):

One type of question is "unlimited" ("infinita") and is called a "discussion" ("consultatio").
The other type is "limited" ("definita") and is called a "cause" ("causa").

oratio

2008-02-09T21:42:00.000+11:00

More from de partitione oratoria.

The speech "oratio" has four parts (Id, at 4). Two establish the case: "the statement of facts" ("narratio"); and "the proof" ("confirmatio"). Two serve "to influence the mind of the audience": "the exordium" ("principium"); and "the peroration" ("peroratio").

vis oratoris

2008-02-09T21:31:00.000+11:00

More from de partitione oratoria.

The first part of the broad theory of rhetoric is the "speaker's personal resources" ("vis oratoris"). A speaker's personal resources consist "in matter and in language" ("in rebus et verbis") (Id, at 3).

The term "invention" ("invenire", lit, "to invent") applies to matter: "delivery" ("eloqui", lit, "to utter") applies to language. "Arrangement" ("collocare", "to arrange") applies to invention. Delivery includes voice, gestures etc.

Into how many parts do you divide the theory of rhetoric?

2008-02-09T21:22:00.000+11:00

I'm dipping into Cicero's "de partitione oratoria" ("The Classification of Oratory") at the moment (Rackham's translation in the Loeb Classical Library).

He says that the theory of rhetoric ("doctrina dicendi", lit. "the teaching of speaking") should be divided into three parts (de partione oratoria 3):

The speaker's personal resources (lit. "strength") ("vis oratoris").
The speech ("oratio").
The question ("quaestio").

Chess - sitting on the boundary between "wicked" and "tame"

2008-02-04T13:14:00.001+11:00

Interesting piece here from John Kay on how winning at chess is both like and unlike winning in business.

You can succeed in chess through "brute force and ignorance", if you can process possible moves as fast as IBM's Big Blue. That may be why chess responded so well to a 5 year planning approach under the former Soviet Union.

Nonetheless, as Kay points out, a game of chess is best won through innovation and experimentation. The same skills you need in business. And the same skills that the former Soviet Union seemed incapable of displaying.

I wonder if chess responds both to an "innovation" approach and to an "algorithmic" approach because it sits on the boundary between "wicked" and "tame" problems?

Google.org

2008-01-19T07:55:00.000+11:00

Interesting piece here from The Economist about Dr Larry Brilliant, head of Google.org. Google.org is the philanthropic division of Google. According to the article, when it was conceived in 2004 Google hoped that this division would one day “eclipse Google itself in overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world's problems”.

What's interesting about this article is its description of how Google.org has developed its strategy. It's taken Larry Brilliant two years to work out what Google.org is going to do. They started with 1,000 ideas, narrowed them down to 11 (dealing with the "biggest, most imminent, least well resourced problems”). Each of the 11 got one member of the team to act as its advocate. These have now been reduced to the 5 final initiatives. These 5 were chosen in part by thinking about how much impact Google itself could have on them.

Interestingly, the final 5 initiatives span 3 areas: fighting global climate change; economic development; and early warning for global pandemics.

I'd love to know more about the process they used to cull their ideas from 1,000 to 5.

Excellence

2008-01-15T20:32:00.000+11:00

I've just listened to a great episode of ABC Radio's Background Briefing programme. The episode was devoted to a speech by Atul Gawande, given at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. You can read a transcript of the edited speech here.

Gawande has a distinquished bio. He is both a surgeon and a writer, and as a speaker he is compelling. His topic for this speech was effectively about excellence. In particular, in his field of medicine.

On the surface, Gawande is claiming that excellence in his field comes from attention to detail. Of course, he's right. Medicine is, after all, a science, dealing with the realm of things that "cannot be other than they are". And so, if you are conscientious and look after the detail, you will get results. Gawande cites a number of examples of doctors and hospitals who are truly excellent: at the right end of the "Bell Curve". Getting results significantly better than the average. (With in vitro fertilisation, for example, the chance of a couple getting pregnant can vary from 5% to 75%, depending on what institution they choose).

However, it's interesting as to how the doctors and hospitals that Gawande cites do this. Yes they show attention to detail. Yes they are conscientious. And yes they study their results, and the results of their peers, and learn from their mistakes. They are constantly looking for ways to improve.

But I suspect, it's the social systems that support and generate this conscientiousness, that are really interesting. In a sense, it's the way the people in these organisations interact with each other, and with the cold hard physical facts of a person needing care, that makes all the difference. Gawande touches on this, but I would like to find out more. If nothing else, he's convinced me to read his books ("Better" and "Complications").

Roger Martin and Strategic Choice Structuring

2007-12-04T20:49:00.000+11:00

I've just re-read a great 1997 paper by Roger Martin, "Strategic Choice Structuring". There's a lot in this, but it's worth reading just to be reminded that strategy is all about choice. And good strategy is all about good choices.

And, as Martin says in this paper, you need to make "genuine" choices for your strategy to be sound. A genuine choice entails not just what you will be doing, but also what you won't be doing. For example, a strategy that will "focus on the customer" is no strategy at all - because it is no choice at all. As Martin says "could the company really have decided otherwise? Could it ever truly choose to ignore the customer?"

Organisational design as the heart of strategy

2007-12-04T20:32:00.000+11:00

I've just been reading a McKinsey Quarterly article ("Better strategy through organisational design", Lowell L Bryan and Claudia I Joyce, No. 2, 2007). Bryan and Joyce claim that a "golden opportunity" to generate competitive advantage can be gained by "making organisational design the heart of strategy".

The authors claim that we need to move away from the organisational structures of the 20th Century. These structures were designed to cope with the scarcity of capital. We need to move to new designs, designs aimed at "maximising the returns on people, not capital". (Amongst other things, this argues for new measures, including "profit per employee").

In the 21st Century the design of an organisation needs to reduce unproductive complexity, and maximise the opportunities for productive interactions amongst talented workers. How do we do this? The authors argue that you need both hierarchy and collaboration.

You still need hierarchy, because you need to be able to set aspirations and make decsions etc. But you also now need collaboration. The rest of the article starts to canvass how you might induce collaboration in a large scale organisation (while at the same time still getting the best out of hierarchy, without undue complexity). One of the great ideas for promoting collaboration is to borrow from basketball - where players are rewarded on their number of "assists" and not just on goals scored.

The problem with most organisations' strategies

2007-11-20T11:03:00.000+11:00

Our principal at 2nd Road, Tony Golsby-Smith, recently wrote an interesting article for the Journal of Business Strategy: "The second road of thought: how design offers strategy a new toolkit" (Vol 28, No. 4, 2007).

He claims that the only way you can do strategy well is to reconceive it as an exercise in "design". I'll get to this later. But what's clearly prompted him to make this claim is the state of strategy in most organisations we see. There is a clear disconnect between what strategy could, and should, do in most organisations, and what it actually ends up doing.

As Tony says, "strategy should be the process that enables organisations to create new futures and engage their people in that exciting task". But too often "it weighs an organisation down with more data and inputs". Too often, organisations' strategies miss the vital elements of "coherence", "energy" and excitement.

The solution? See strategy as a design exercise. Not an analytics exercise. But how do we start to get our heads around "design"? By looking at the first principles of design thinking. And they can be found in the realm of rhetoric. So to start this journey, we'd better talk about rhetoric and the "two roads" story.

Monkey envy

2007-11-14T08:30:00.000+11:00

Great piece in New Scientist about Capuchin monkeys and their sense of fairness (or of envy - depends which way you frame it).

Researchers trained some monkeys to pick up a rock and hand it over to the experimenter for a reward. They then sat two monkeys side by side and repeated the experiment. When each monkey received the same reward - a cucumber each - for handing over their rock - they performed the task within 5 second 90% of the time. But when one monkey got a much better reward (a grape instead of a cucumber - you've got to understand monkey economics here and not be put off by the comparative size of the grape - but rather look at its sweetness) the "ripped off" cucumber-receiving monkey started to slack off. That monkey only delivered the rock within 5 second 80% of the time.

A sense of fairness? Or monkey envy?

"Expectancy bias" in the USS Vincennes shootdown

2007-11-13T21:05:00.000+11:00

I've just started dipping into what looks like a great book: "Sources of Power - How people make decisions" (Gary Klein, MIT Press, 1999). It has a fascinating chapter on the shooting down of an Iranian commercial jetliner in 1988 by the USS Vincennes.

Klein says that some decision making experts see this terrible incident as an example of "expectancy bias" (pp 84ff). Specifically, the crew in the Vincennes' Combat Information Centre reported seeing the unidentified aircraft descending towards the ship - in a pattern they saw as being aggressive. In fact - the data shows that the aircraft was always ascending through all stages of its short flight (it was shot down only 7 minutes after take-off).

What explains this mis-reading of the flight of the airliner? The decision making experts mentioned by Klein think the Vincennes crew were already convinced that this was an enemy jet. Why? Just after take-off there had been a (later shown to be false) IFF reading that the airliner was an enemy jet - and not a civilian plane (the full account of the whole incident in this chapter is worth reading). Because of this belief, the experts claim, the crew then started to see the data they expected to see: the data that supported the scenario they had already decided was occurring. A classic case of "expectancy bias".

Klein is not so sure. He asks the question - what would have happened if the Vincennes had not shot down the unidentified aircraft and it turned out to be an enemy jet that then successfully attacked them? Well - over the preceding month there had been 150 challenges issued by US ships in the Gulf to presumed enemy aircraft. In over 80% of those cases the aircraft involved turned out to be Iranian military (and only 1.3% turned out to be commercial airliners). In other words, if the Vincennes had not acted, and it did turn out to be the wrong call (that is - the aircraft attacked them) - then this decision could also be explained by "expectancy bias". It's just that in this case the bias would have been different - a bias against the available data that these unidentified jets turn out to be Iranian 80% of the time.

This is a great insight from Klein. "Expectancy bias" explains why the Vincennes shot down the airliner. But "expectancy bias" would also have explained the opposite scenario - the failure to shoot down an enemy jet that then successfully attacked. In Klein's words expectancy bias "explains too much" (p85). A theory that explains too much is no theory at all.

So why did the Vincennes make such a tragically wrong decision? Well, it seems that after a terrible chain of events, it was at the end a simple failure of information design. On the Vincennes' computers, the altitude data for nearby aircraft was contained in a small display off to the side. And critically, it did not display a trend: crew-members had to remember the previous altitudes of the jet so as to see if it was going up or coming down. In a pressured situation - over a short period of time - this turned out to be too hard.

Emptiness

2007-11-09T12:41:00.000+11:00

(The fifth in a series of posts on "Is your strategy a duck?". Starting post is here.)

Benedikt's fourth component of realism in architecture is that of "emptiness". The quality of a building that allows the user to make it their own: to "complete" it. To give it some of their own meaning.

A strategy should also allow this. Employees should be able to be involved in the "emergence" of the strategy. Liedtka points out that one of the critical roles of senior executives is to set the "boundaries" of the conversations that will allow employees to put meaning into the strategy that's relevant to them and their work.

Materiality

2007-11-09T12:36:00.000+11:00

(The fourth in a series of posts on "Is your strategy a duck?". Starting post is here.)

Benedikt's third component of realism in architecture is that of "materiality". That is, for a building to be real "it ought to be made of stuff". A building needs to be made of materials that "look like what they are".

For a strategy to be material, Liedtka argues, it needs to clearly link to the reality of the system on the ground. It needs to take into account the details of what will be involved in implementing it. And it needs to do that credibly.

Significance

2007-11-09T12:23:00.000+11:00

(The third in a series of posts on "Is your strategy a duck?". Starting post is here.)

Benedikt's second component of realism in architecture is that of "significance". And what's important here is significance of the building to an individual - not the building being "symbolic of something".

Here Liedtka unpacks the idea that a strategy needs to engage at "the level of individual action". It needs to engage everyone in the organisation - including those on the shop floor.

According to Liedtka, strategies become significant when they help employees answer two questions:

"What does this mean to me in my role in the organisation?"
"Why should I care?"

Presence

2007-11-09T12:08:00.000+11:00

(The second in a series of posts on "Is your strategy a duck?". Starting post is here.)

Benedikt's first component of realism in architecture is that of "presence". There is something about the building that commands attention.

How does a strategy command attention? Liedtka makes clear that to grab attention a strategy must be interesting. How so? To be interesting a strategy must:

Combine the familiar and the novel. Too familiar and we will ignore it as nothing new. Too novel and it will seem too way out to be credible.
Be unified and simple. Avoiding needless complexity and jargon: and easily suggesting action.
Be delivered by someone "we know and take seriously". Usually our line manager - which of course requires that our line manager is also engaged with this strategy. (This reminds me of Aristotle's ethos of the speaker - more on this another time).

"Is your strategy a duck?"

2007-11-09T11:01:00.001+11:00

Jeanne Liedtka asks this question in a recent article in the Journal of Business Strategy (Vol 27, No. 5, 2006). Her presenting problem is the "Knowing-Doing Gap" - why is it that so many organisations fail to turn their strategies into outcomes? Liedtka's hypothesis: too many corporate strategies are "ducks".

Liedtka takes this idea of a "duck" from the architecture book "Learning from Las Vegas" (Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, 1977, MIT Press). Here Venturi et al define a "duck" as a "building-becoming-sculpture". A building that has sacrificed so much for symbolism that it fails to be useful as a building. (You can read a good discussion of Venturi et al's book, as well as a picture of the original offending duck, at John Lumea's blog, here).

So, the question to ask, and Liedtka asks it well, is - can strategies be ducks too? The answer is clearly yes. As Liedtka shows, there are "strategies that function as symbols, not roadmaps." Strategies that are "high level abstractions" that leave most people in the organisation "clueless" as to what they mean.

The solution is to make strategies "real". And it's here that Liedtka returns to architecture for inspiration. Michael Benedikt's book "For an Architecture of Reality" (Lumen Books, NY, 1987) sets forth four components of a building "that contribute ... to a sense of realism":

Liedtka goes on to apply these ideas to strategy - in an attempt to answer the question: what can make a strategy real?

"The Magic of Dialogue" (2)

2007-11-08T20:59:00.002+11:00

The first chapter of Yankelovich's book offers a definition of dialogue - straight from Webster's dictionary: "seeking mutual understanding and harmony". Although Yankelovich then goes on to downplay the harmony bit and says he'd be happy to settle just for understanding. Interestingly, he quotes Martin Buber ("I and Thou") who draws a distinction between "ordinary conversation" and dialogue. It seems the key thing with dialogue is the willingness to suspend judgement and just to listen to the other person. You don't have to agree - but you do have to listen so as to understand (pp14 - 15).

The chapter gets really interesting when Yankelovich quotes physicist David Bohm as saying that "world class" physicists get their best ideas in dialogue with other physicists and not sitting at their desks. He then extends this link between dialogue and thought by talking about how the American public does democracy. The American public doesn't reach decisions based on expert analysis - rather it reaches decisions using dialogue. And in so doing it is "harking back to prescientific ways of knowing" (p26).

To drive home this point - that dialogue is a "way of knowing" - a way of arriving at decisions - Yankelovich gives the example of ETS (p28). This is a non-profit organisation that administers the SAT and other college tests. Yankelovich's summary is worth quoting here:

"Plenty of information exists about the strengths and limitations of standardised tests. ETS's board takes these facts into account. But the facts do not reveal to the Board what its vision for the future should be or the best strategy for achieving it. Only high quality dialogue among its diverse members and professional staff can yield this kind of understanding and judgement." (p28)

Of course this reminds me of Aristotle's two roads to truth - logic and rhetoric. Both of which are strictly "prescientific". And of course, Cicero's observation that governing Carthage isn't going to be successful if all we do is take the "facts into account". How we decide to govern Carthage will only be worked out in "high quality dialogue".

"The Magic of Dialogue" (1)

2007-11-08T20:49:00.000+11:00

I've just started reading Daniel Yankelovich's "The Magic of Dialogue" (Simon and Schuster, New York, 2001). This book was recommended by a friend of mine with a keen interest in reconciliation and the uses of dialogue in those very difficult situations. However, this book aims to give "special attention" (p14) to the use of dialogue in businesses and organisations with similar structures to businesses.

Like Gaul, the book is divided into three parts:

Why dialogue's necessary.
How to do it.
Where else to do it (including an intriguingly named final chapter about the "struggle for the soul of America").

Watch this space.

Leveraging design

2007-11-08T17:24:00.000+11:00

Maureen Thurston, in a soon to be published article, attempts a definition of what it means for an organisation to "leverage design". The key idea is to lift design out of one particular product silo - where it typically plays a tactical, down-stream role, and position it as a peer of Marketing, Strategy, Finance and Operations. This allows design to play a broader role as well as to be held accountable and to be involved early on in key initiatives.

Deconstructive criticism

2007-10-18T20:43:00.000+10:00

Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey coin the term "Deconstructive Criticism" in their 2001 book "Seven Languages for Transformation" (Josey Bass, Wiley, San Francisco).

They contrast the traditional modes of criticism of employees ("constructive" and "destructive") with this new mode of "deconstructive" by saying that traditional forms of criticism have an in-built assumption of holding the only true view of the situation (pp121ff). That is, the traditional forms of criticism, whether intended to tear down or build up, come from the perspective that there is one right view and that the supervisor holds it. They call this the "super-vision" assumption.

Deconstructive criticism allows that the supervisor's perspective may be legitimate, but also might not be. It allows for the possibility that the employee's view may also be valid (after all, she is closer to the situation).

Obliquity - a definition

2007-10-18T20:39:00.000+10:00

This 1998 Financial Times article by John Kay is the first time I think the principle of "Obliquity" gets explicitly defined.

Obliquity is the idea that if you aim for something (usually self-interested like profit or happiness) you'll miss. But if you aim for something else, more "nobler", outside yourself, you'll get the first thing thrown in too. So, aim to be happy, and you'll likely end up dissatisfied. But aim to love others and seek their good - and you'll find happiness too. This article quotes John Stuart Mill:

“Those only are happy who have their minds tried on some object other than their own happiness – on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.”

The principle also applies to profits. The article quotes "Built to Last" by Collins and Porras, where the most successful companies in their paired study were not the ones who pursued profit solely. Rather: “They have tended to pursue a cluster of objectives, of which making money is only one – and not necessarily the primary one”. (page 55)

Lessons from 9/11: How conversations can galvanize others to act

2007-10-18T20:32:00.000+10:00

This is an interesting piece from Knowledge@Emory about an article submitted to the journal Organisational Science , by Monica Worline and Ryan Quinn. The article describes how conversations can create a space for people to take courageous action - and even overcome the "Kitty Genovese effect". The key conclusion is: "people do things in conversations with others that create psychological resources that allow them to act in difficult situations".

The article looks at the behaviour of passengers aboard Flight 93, and what spurred them to take action. The authors point out that it was in fact unusual for the passengers to take any action at all - because up until then passengers in a hijacked aircraft were just seen as passive "pawns". The critical factor in the passengers taking action was their engagement in conversation beforehand. The article contends that one of the main ways conversation helped the passengers was to make the uncertainty of the situation manageable:

"In the end, it is not entirely clear that everyone knew or believed the plane was going down. There was debate aboard the plane about whether it was a suicide hijacking or not. The passengers ultimately decided that it was worth an attempt to take control of the plane and try to land it, despite the uncertainty, notes Worline. “In the Kitty Genovese case there also was uncertainty about what exactly was happening, which tended to paralyze people and stop them from taking action to address the situation. In our paper, we show that interpersonal dynamics and conversational resources made the uncertainty manageable enough so that the passengers could act.""