stargeek
OUR STORYOUR
|
 It's funny how things
come together sometimes. Monday, after posting my advice column on blogging
time-savers,
and saying the most important thing is to get away from your computer
and your reading and get out into the real world and give yourself
time
to think creatively about what really matters to you personally, I
followed my own advice. Chelsea and I went for a long walk. And soon
my
head was filled with rage about all the things wrong with this world
and the ten things
that still keep me awake at
night. And I wanted to know why they go on, ignored, uncorrected. Things happen the way they do for a good
reason, I've always said. You
need to understand why all this stuff has happened and continues to
happen. Find the root cause, not the symptoms.People love to read editorials and blogs that rant cleverly, emotionally and articulately, and blame other people for what's wrong. Pointing the finger at others exonerates us, takes the heat off, makes us feel better about ourselves. What's the root cause, and who's to blame? And then I came back in and read some more of The Truth About Stories, the book I blogged about on Sunday so enthusiastically. And at the end of the book I found my story, perhaps our story, and all the rage I had focused outside was refocused inward, because this story is, at its root, a story of personal failure, cowardice and fear. Here is what I read: The truth about stories is that that's all we are.
The Nigerian story-teller Ben Okri says that "in a fractured age, when
cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we
also
live in them. One way or
another we are living the stories that are planted in us early or
along
the way, or we are also living the stories we planted -- knowingly or
unknowingly -- in ourselves. We live stories that either give our
lives
meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we
live by, quite possibly we change our lives."...
Our stories are lies. We know they are, but we keep telling them to
ourselves and to each other. We keep living them and living in them. Thomas King acknowledges
that this, The Truth about
Stories,
is in itself not a very satisfying story. "No plot. No neat ending. No
clever turns of phrase." (The remaining stories in this book have all
three, and are remarkable). In North America, we talk about our environmental [and business] ethic. [We get outraged about incidents like the Exxon Valdez spill and the Enron fraud and demand action]. To listen to the noise generated by these two events, you would have thought that we cared. But in fact, we don't. Not in any ethical way. Oil tankers are supposed to be safe. Financial institutions are supposed to be bastions of integrity. But we do nothing to prevent such disasters from happening again. And when they do, and they surely will, our reaction will be the same, because the story we tell about moments like this is that they shouldn't have happened, that they're someone else's fault,...that there's no way to avoid them completely, that the environment and investor confidence will recover eventually... The Canadian government closed down the East Coast cod fishery. The cod were already gone, had been going for years, and everyone knew it. The reason was simple. Overfishing. The fishers blamed the government. The government blamed the fishers, everyone blamed the large foreign offshore trawlers, seals, global warming, El Nino, Native people... Could such a thing have been prevented? Of course. So why didn't we prevent it? The oil industry and our oil-based economy depend for their existence on the ability of geologists to find new fields of oil and our willingness to ignore the obvious, that at some point we're going to run out of oil. This would suggest that reducing energy consumption, curbing the proliferation of cars and multilane highways, and converting to sustainable sources of energy would be our first priorities. But we have no such priorities. We only hope that the exhaustion of the oil supply won't happen in our lifetime. It's not that we don't care about ethical behaviour, the environment, society. It's just that we care more about our comfort and the things that make us comfortable -- property, prestige, power, appearance, security. And the things that insulate us from the vicissitudes of life. Money, for instance... The proof of what we truly believe lies in what we do and not what we say. We've created the stories that allow [the ethics of what we do and don't do] to exist and flourish. They didn't come out of nowhere, from another planet. Want a different ethic? Tell a different story... I weep for the world I've helped to create. A world in which I allow my intelligence and goodwill to be constantly subverted by my pursuit of comfort and pleasure. And because of knowing all of this, it is doubtful that given a second chance to make amends for my despicable behaviour, I would do anything different, for I find it easier to tell myself the story of my failure as a human being, than to have to live the story of making the sustained effort to help. We don't want to hear the other stories out there in the real world -- the stories of what goes on inside the walls of abusive homes, factory farms, prisons, workplaces, schools, laboratories and institutions, and which are overtly played out in inner city streets and throw-away third world countries, the endless litany of violence, physical and psychological, personal and institutional, that occurs millions of times per minute throughout our world. These other stories detract from our 'comfort and pleasure'. They threaten to crack open the lies in our own story. That we cannot bear. So the 'root cause' I was seeking during my walk with Chelsea is the subversion of our culture, this modern culture of negativism, acquisition, paternalism and scarcity whose ubiquitous, tyrannical story leaves everything in the hands of fate, or god, and absolves us of our responsibility and our sins, and fills us with the constant and consuming terror of not having enough. And we know who's to blame: The Man in the Mirror (that song was written, ironically, by a woman). Our story is unfinished. We could change the ending if we want. Create a better ending. It's all up to us. [My novel-in-progress will be an attempt to create a new ending, and perhaps a completely new story. I still hope to have it finished by the end of June.] |
 Dave
Snowden has a lot of nerve. The founder of the IBM Cynefin Centre
doesn't stop at saying that collecting 'best practices' and most other
accepted Knowledge Management activities are largely fruitless (he
makes an exception for standard practices in highly prescriptive jobs,
and proven, authorized practices in high-risk and high-security
situations). He is almost as disdainful of many of the idealistic
goals
of Personal Knowledge Management -- helping front-line workers to do
their jobs more simply and effectively and to find experts they can
draw on and network with. If the tools to do PKM aren't adequate, he
maintains, the answer is to create better tools, not show people how
to
use deficient ones (and creating tools is IT's job, not KM's). One of
the things he thinks KM should be doing is helping management
understand and lead their organizations more effectively. Management
is, after all, the group paying for organizations' KM activities, and
a
group that is, in most organizations, far from happy with what KM has
delivered. Snowden argues that the best way for KM to help management
is to be a kind of 'cultural anthropologist' in the organization you
are working in or advising. One of the ways anthropologists study and understand tribes is by listening to and gathering stories. Analogously, Snowden says, it's important that KM people get out and spend time on the front lines really understanding what the organization's real stories are -- not the ones that appear in the mission statement or the company newsletter, which say what management wishes the company culture was, but the peer-to-peer stories that truly define the organizational culture, drive what people really believe and do and how they act, and make the company, for better and for worse, what it truly is. To gather those stories, you must be as honest as an anthropologist, not try to do it surreptitiously, because people only tell the real stories to people who have gained and earned their trust. Snowden has developed very sophisticated and rigorous processes for doing so, which he details in his 'masterclass' called Using Narrative in Organisational Change,, which you can now buy on CD-ROM. In Thomas King's book The Truth About Stories, King argues that if you want to change a culture, you need to change its story, because that's all a culture is. I don't know that Snowden would disagree, but he would argue, I think, that changing an organization's real stories is not so easy. That's why mission statements don't work -- they're wishful thinking, myths that management would like to believe everyone buys and is motivated by, but really aren't. If you're in management, he says, you don't change the stories, he says, you understand them, then you act on them, and then you make them your own, retelling them in your own way so that you show the people in the front lines of the organization that you understand the real culture of the organization (and the real problems of front-line workers). In so doing you harness the astonishing power of 'true' stories. Snowden is acutely aware of the overt class distinctions in Britain that make trust, and hence collecting stories, hard to achieve. While some of us in Europe and North America might argue that our class distinctions are not as formidable barriers as they are in the UK, I think this would be a mistake. Americans, I have observed, make a great effort to pretend that class distinctions don't exist or are permeable, by allowing everyone to use first names, for example, when in fact the hierarchies are at least as strict as they are in the UK. The only real difference is that the determinants and clues of status are subtler -- a bit more tied to wealth and the circles you move in and a bit less pre-determined by heredity. But trust is still deepest peer-to-peer and extremely hard to earn and sustain between management (or their henchman consultants and head-office lackeys) and front-line people. That is perhaps why management is in a constant quandary over decentralizing -- it clearly improves productivity, innovativeness, morale and work effectiveness, but it allows people that management doesn't really trust more control and autonomy, and perhaps even allows them to develop -- heaven forbid -- their own organizational culture. The reality, as Snowden argues, is that management is never in charge of organizational culture, that people behave the way they do partly because they've learned it's the most effective way to do their unique job and partly in their own self-interest, and not because it's in the procedure manual or the role description or aligned with the mission statement or the strategic plan. Once you have collected the true stories in an unbiased manner (Snowden carefully explains how to remove bias, so you don't get 'fed' just what you want to hear or put your own personal 'spin' on the story), the next step is to act on them. Stories tell management important information about what works, and, more importantly, what doesn't work, in the organization. A lot of stories are about how people have solved problems that management hasn't addressed, or which management has in fact created. These are often very comical or very heroic stories that not only have important messages for management, but illustrate exemplary behaviour that management may not realize it's not rewarding, or actually inhibiting. It is critical, Snowden says, to make sure you understand the stories, and to collect and organize and ponder a lot of stories, before charging in and making changes that misconstrue the organizational culture, impede rather than help, and destroy forever the trust that the story-gatherer built up to capture this critical information. And finally, once management has acted carefully and conscientiously on the learnings from the stories, they can actually make these stories their own, not by retelling them in the same words and context as they heard them (that would be disingenuous, a form of intellectual property theft), and not by appropriating them and making models and heroes of their protagonists (that could make the poor protagonists look like head office plants), but by conveying the same messages and lessons with stories from their own personal work context. Crafting such stories is a complex, rigorous and skillful process, and explaining this process takes up much of Snowden's 'masterclass' time. There are different types of stories, like fables, myths and viruses, each with a different purpose and different construction (the course provides templates of each). Even more important is the testing of stories by telling and having others retell them until they are perfected. The impact of an executive telling employees a real story about the organization, credibly and powerfully, can be profound, even transformational. Just imagine -- instead of the boss telling his/her people what to do, and evaluating them on his/her perception of their 'performance' in doing so, picture the boss explaining that he/she understood exactly why his/her people were doing what they were doing, and offering constructive ideas on how management could make the employee's job easier and more effective. Management supporting the staff instead of the other way around. Hey, I know it's a 90s idea and is out of fashion again these days, but stories, properly collected and interpreted by trained KM practitioners, can make it possible. I hope Dave won't object to my sharing one of his stories to illustrate this -- it's hard to write about stories without at least one example. He describes a group of public service utility workers who are subjected to a consultant's efficiency review, which leads to them being given fewer work breaks and being given networked PCs to allow them to save time travelling into the office for paperwork between jobs. What the consultant didn't realize (and what the careful collection of stories finally revealed) was that these workers shared vital information about how to do their jobs properly during these work breaks and office visits, and this information either couldn't (because it's highly contextual and needs conversation to convey effectively) or wouldn't (because of the lack of trust of how stuff posted publicly might be used by management) be captured in databases or messages on their new PCs. So the workers found a surreptitious place for unofficial work breaks and a surreptitious place for 'offline' documentation of information they wanted to share with peers, 'working around' the consultant's well-meaning but wrong-headed and dysfunctional change proposals. [Dave makes this into a long and wonderful story with a brilliant punch line, a resolution in which management finally learns from this mistake and turns it to astonishing advantage, and since I'm not telling a story here, I won't spoil it -- get the CD-ROM to hear the story completely and properly.] But the point is that the organizational culture is what it is, and usually for a good reason, and it's vital to understand that culture by collecting the stories that reveal it, before you try to change processes or behaviour, or the change effort will inevitably fail, as almost every organizational change effort does. I got out of the KM business last December, and since then I've toyed with the idea of becoming a new-age KM or PKM consultant, but then decided I'd had enough of this well-intentioned but endlessly-struggling discipline. But I recognize that there's still important KM work that could and should be done. While I agree that PKM needs better tools much more than it needs process improvement consulting, I still think there is much promise in Personal Productivity Improvement as an offshoot of KM. And now Dave has convinced me that the exercise of capturing and interpreting and acting on an organization's real stories would be worthwhile, especially for large organizations. But I think calling it Cultural Anthropology or Story-Gathering is a non-starter -- try to sell CEOs something with that woolly a name these days and you'll starve. What could we call it that would be accurate and still compelling to CEOs who don't, yet, get what it's all about? |
 Add
AT&T to your Boycott
List.
This outfit has been running a nationwide phony billing scam, and are
now into Enron-and-Bush style denial, blame-passing and damage
control.
It seems this company sent out over
a million phony bills -- most of them non-customers, and then set up a
cumbersome, non-responsive and threatening telephone
response systems to wear down and intimidate irate victims of the
scheme into paying the bills. "A computer failure" has been blamed for
the "errors", which in total dwarf, both in size and criminality,
anything Martha Stewart did. Several states' Attorneys General have
filed suit against AT&T for fraud and deceptive practices, but
don't expect to see any AT&T executives in jail. Bottom line -- If you get a bill from AT&T, whether you're a customer or not -- check it carefully, and if it's part of this fraud, don't pay it, and complain to the BBB, to the state Public Service Commission, to the state Attorney General's Office, and to the FCC. Better still, play it safe -- find a reputable phone company, and then you'll know for sure any bill you get from AT&T is fraudulent. Why is it that legislators are so hot to stamp out spam and Internet porn, but aren't interested in protecting citizens from giant fraudulent predator corporations like AT&T (and criminal polluters like Koch Industries)? Do you think it might be because these corporations pour millions into the legislators' election campaigns? |
 It's 2015. Thirteen-year-old Kari Ross just got a PTV for her birthday, the much-anticipated PC/TV convergence product. PTV comes with the following hardware and software:
After lunch Kari starts working on her co-op project -- she's learning to custom-make clothes, using a cutting and sewing machine that is operated by her computer, one of a variety of programmable machines that her community centre, and even the local Starbucks, make available to their members and customers. This particular machine adjusts the pattern to the appropriate size, cuts and sews the material, and adds embroidery. She needs some material for this, so she uses her GPS and personal scheduling software to identify how to get it quickest. It turns out that Chris is just across the street from the fabric store, and he is scheduled to meet with girlfriend Sarah at her house in an hour. She programs her scheduler accordingly and immediately gets a request from Sarah's scheduler to bring over two folding chairs when she comes. She confirms the request and Sarah, getting the message, IM's a 'thank you'. She then places the order with the fabric store, pays for it, and notifies the store that Chris is authorized to pick it up for her, all online. She has a videoconference with the president of Dionysis Designs, her co-op project sponsor. They talk about how an entrepreneurial business like Dionysis is set up, and some of the challenges the business has faced. Kari has already sold some of her own custom-made clothes, and some of her own embroidery designs, through her personal website. MC2, which stands for Managing Content & Communications, is the only software package Kari ever learned to use. It has three 'modes', represented by a pencil cursor (for document/message writing and annotation), a hand cursor (for saving, sending, publishing and otherwise moving content from one place to another), and a telephone cursor (for connecting with other people and their content). She laughs in disbelief when her father tells her he had to use 26 different, and incompatible, software programs to do the things she does with MC2, which a friend taught her to use in 15 minutes. She dictates some information about the Gore-Tex jeans she made that afternoon (convertible into shorts, and with the scanned and computer-embroidered likeness of the owner on one 'cheek' and that of the owner's sweetheart or friend on the other). She takes a photo of the jeans with her webcam and uses MC2 to move the article and the photo to her personal website -- today's 'blog post' done (though Kari has never heard it called a blog -- it's just Kari's 'public' space). She also moves the pattern and specs for the jeans to her 'shareable files' folder (along with the demo tracks from Chris' band), and sends copies of the post and the file to her 'clothing designs' mail group (which, she notes proudly, has been subscribed to by over 1000 people around the world). Kari calls her generation 'Nomads'. To them, she says, home is just a place to sleep. There is no need to be in any particular place to do anything, and some of her friends are in her house (it has a nice-sized meeting/party room) more than she is. She can't remember the last time she actually sat in a classroom, and is astonished that some 'older' people still drive to personal 'offices' -- what for? Ironically, some of her best friends, and those with whom she spends the most time, she has never met face-to-face. But she rarely needs either a car ride or to take public transit -- her 'face-to-face' friends are within easy walking distance, as is the community centre, the doctor, the great organic vegetarian restaurant, Starbucks and the fitness centre. And who would go to a movie theatre with such a limited selection and no 3D vision? Anything you need to buy can be either downloaded, file-shared or ordered online and delivered to your door. And when you actually have to go to a store, your webcam lets others look over your shoulder and get you to pick up what they need. Evening comes, and Kari settles down with Chris ("we're just friends") and Sarah, and side by side on their PTVs they watch six hours of a much-discussed new comedy series, pausing for breaks, to chat with each other and with online friends, and for a one-hour workout. "Let me get this straight -- back in the '90s you had to wait a week to see each new episode, watch commercials, and if it wasn't on at a convenient time, you had to record it on tape?" (wild rolling of eyes) |
 I'm
currently working on several projects that each require a good story.
So I spent most of today researching, and thinking about, what makes a
story good. At first I had this chart with two branches, one for
'information value' and the other for 'entertainment value', but it is
now in the recycle bin, since while that may be a valid taxonomy of
'good' stories, it is so subjective that it is not a particularly
useful one. It doesn't inform
you how to go about crafting
a good story. During my brief tenure as moderator of the Association of KnowledgeWork forum last month, we spent some time discussing this issue, guided by Steve Denning, one of the world's justifiably respected authorities on (at least) effective business story-telling. There was, of course, the usual mention of the importance of knowing your audience, and Steve reminded us that in a business context the purpose of most stories is to persuade, to bring about a change of mind, and that most effective business stories have (a) a sympathetic protagonist, with whom the audience can relate, (b) a problem that clearly must be overcome, and (c) a satisfactory resolution to the problem that the story recounts in a brief and straightforward yet compelling way. Another issue we dealt with during the forum was the astonishing imprecision of language and communication, the myriad different ways that we think and learn and process information, and the fact that we always tend to wildly overestimate how much learning and communication has actually occurred during a presentation, a conference, or a conversation. In many cases the 'value' of such events is therefore intensely personal, and depends more on what each participant thinks was actually accomplished or communicated, than the undoubtedly more modest actual achievement. There is nothing more sobering than objectively debriefing with participants after such an event, and realizing how little was actually understood, and how much was misunderstood. At the same time there is great and earnest desire among audience members that the appropriate communication be received (preferably quickly and with some decent jokes thrown in) -- this is, after all, their investment of time. Just watch how one very enthusiastic audience member (unless obviously a plant or a wacko) can get the rest of the audience paying more attention, and how quickly one hostile audience member, walk-out, or nod-off, can sour the whole audience on the presenter's message. Audiences seem to virtually 'blow in the wind' until they collectively make their mind up about the quality, and essential message, of what they are hearing. I have been in movies that I absolutely loathed, but where the audience, by their laughter, applause or rapt attention, actually caused me to doubt or temper my own judgement. So a story can be effective, and hence a 'good story', to the teller, and/or, subject to the above-noted tendency for audience groupthink, to each member of the audience, and for very different reasons. It depends entirely on the expectations of each participant, and how each participant uniquely internalizes what they hear and/or say. Is there, then, any common denominator to good stories that the story-teller can draw upon? I re-read some of my favourite stories, and concluded that a story is like a gift. There is no perfect gift for everyone, but with some attention to the audience, what their expectations are likely to be, some thought on an appropriate choice, and some appropriate and attractive but not extravagant packaging, every gift-giving, and every story-telling, can be successful and effective, and for largely the same reasons. Good stories, like good gifts, seem to have one or more of five qualities:
The challenge, of course, is how to imbue these five qualities in a story. That is a challenge I'll have to leave to brighter minds than mine, or at least for another day until I can think about it more. But if you're interested, here's an exercise: Just think about the three or four stories that have affected you most profoundly in your life, and go back and re-read them. Ask yourself which of the above five attributes of these stories made them so valuable to you (and tell me if you think my list is incomplete)! And then see if you can find the magic in the words -- what it is, in the choice of words, the order, the situation, the unfolding of events, that could convert these clumsy and abstract syllables into something so remarkable, so enchanting. I think you'll find that most of the magic comes from inside you, and is the result of the work you do to build the story into something larger than life, something evocative and transporting and persuasive and memorable and even useful. Which only makes the accomplishment, the wizardy, and the 'gift' of the story-teller even more astonishing. |
 If Thomas King is right, and stories are all we are, then it seems to me we have two choices in life. We can either live the story that others have written for us, or we can write our own story. The story of our culture, the story others wrote for us, teaches us:
Economists Peter Jay and Marshall Sahlins have both told stories that have essentially rewritten 'pre-civilization' history, changing our conception of hunter-gatherer cultures from poor, dirty and brutish to affluent, comfortable and carefree. Regardless of their focus, good stories change the way we think and therefore change who we are. They can even show us a new way to live, and hence be transformational. As I've written often in these pages, I believe the only hope for our world is for some, then many, and finally most of us to walk away from the old culture, the old economy, the old politics, the old business models, the old religions, that are driving us headlong to ecocide, endless war, violence, psychosis, oppression, and physical and imaginative destitution. We can't fight them, change them. But we can create new ones that will undermine and replace them. But to walk away from the old, we need something to walk to. Through stories, we can invent a new world, a new culture, completely different from the one we live in now. Instead of teaching us the eight dreadful lessons bulleted in red above, these new stories could teach us some things almost unimaginatively positive and astonishing, things that we somehow forgot when the existing culture took hold 30 thousand years ago:
Imagine that the Nazis had 'won' WW2. Do you think today we would be, most of us, angry and ready to overthrow the Thousand Year Reich? We wouldn't. The opponents would have been exterminated and the rest of us brainwashed to believe that aryans are 'naturally' the master race, and that corporatism (that's what Mussolini called the complete integration of corporate and government power and the suppression of opposition to it via a ruthless police state, before the historians renamed it fascism) was necessary to the order and good government of society. The education system would have taught us, elite and masses alike, stories that reinforced the rightness of this status quo, and ensured our obedience, our subservience to the powerful, our fear of scarcity if we didn't conform, our inability to imagine any other way of living. Our situation today isn't all that different. Don't believe me? If my Ten Things To Keep You Awake list wasn't enough to convince you, consider this: The most successful story-teller of 2003 (his was the best selling CD of the year), entitled (and there is no irony in the title) Get Rich Or Die Tryin is a guy named 50 Cent. The number two best sellers were a band (can't remember their name) who have made their entire fortune around a new line of sneakers (they have a 20-foor Reebok sneaker that they dance around during their numbers). MTV and MuchMusic have entire programs devoted to which celebrities are currently endorsing which products, including customized six-figure limited edition 'gangsta' vehicles issued by the Big 3 US auto makers. These artists don't care if people download their songs free -- they make their big money on endorsements from Nike and the Gap, who in turn make their real money from third world sweatshops, offshoring American jobs and child and slave labour. Now, guess what the messages of the very powerful stories in these artists' very popular songs are (check out the lyri cs if you doubt me):
This is why we desperately need new stories. We are running out of time. The defenders of our bankrupt, reckless, out-of-control culture know what they're selling is counter-intuitive, irrational, unethical, but they have everything tied up in its continuance, everything to lose, and they're holding on, throwing all their money and influence at keeping it going, at subverting opposition and attacking other ways of thinking. Our only defence is three million years of instinctive knowledge, and the power of stories. The power to change everything. |
 I
deliberately waited a couple of weeks after my dreadful experience
trying to get my new Dell 5150 fixed, partly to calm down and partly
to
make sure the problem has in fact been fixed. This is a long and
convoluted story but because it's embarrassing, and not particularly
amusing, I'm not going to tell it in detail. Suffice it to say that it
involved:
Since I'm copying Dell on this (that is if I can actually find an address of someone in authority to send it to) rather than tell you all the things that they did wrong (and that, acting on their instruction, I did wrong), I'll describe instead how Dell could dramatically improve their customer service processes. But before I do, I want to be clear about something: The people working at the grassroots level at Dell and its outsourcers are all hard-working, polite people doing their best to do their job. All the fuck-ups (and they were legion) were directly caused by Dell management policies, and can only be rectified by Dell management. OK. Here's what Dell needs to do to change the 'customer experience' from ghastly, interminable nightmare to quick-and-bearable:
The big seven produce about 200,000,000 new computers each year, which on average end up in landfill sites in four to five years (the fastest growing and one of the most toxic components of our garbage problem). The vast majority are made from shoddy materials in third world countries like China, Malaysia and Singapore, by workers who get paid a few dollars a day, using components that wreak environmental havoc from slipshod and reckless mining and refining techniques. Why bother making a quality product when it will be garbage so soon anyway? And if you work with Microsoft et al, you can guarantee that even if it isn't technically obsolete by the time it falls apart, it will be unable to power the next bloated versions of the software by then anyway. I would have added a point 7 above -- "build a high quality product" -- but even I'm not that naive. My new AC adapter works fine, but still fits loosely in the slot at the back of the machine, and usually falls out when I lift up the machine to put it on my lap. If they built cars this sloppily we'd all be dead. This is what happens when a company gets big, and is rewarded for 'maximizing profit for shareholders' instead of producing a quality product and providing quality service. It's what happens when a company's management becomes removed, and then isolated, from its customers. It's what happens when an oligopoly of seven companies corners the market and offers essentially identical, mediocre, overpriced products. It's what we get when we fail to hold corporations accountable and responsible for what they do. It's what we get when we accept the corporatist propaganda that the unregulated 'market' will always produce the best possible solution and value for customers, and that government regulation is inherently bad. We should know better. We should expect better. We deserve better. |
 If
you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that I'm
opposed to unregulated 'free' trade, very worried about the
extraterritoriality of the WTO, NAFTA, Davos and other corporatist
captives, strongly opposed to domestic corporations 'offshoring' jobs,
using influence with the Bush regime and other right-wing governments
to circumvent social and environmental laws and responsibilities, and
a
great believer in taking the pledge to buy local, and in community
self-sufficiency.At the same time, I'm a strong supporter of the UN and other multi-lateral NGOs, and I believe that we each have a responsibility for the well-being of all the people and creatures of this world. Some readers have said this view is inconsistent, and I wasn't quite sure how to respond to such charges. Fortunately, Peter Singer, in his recent book on global ethics, I'll have more to say next week about Bush's fraudulent and despicable Earth Day media blitz, and the major media's shameless lack of critical evaluation of the utter nonsense that his propaganda machine has been churning out this week on the environment -- newspeak of Orwellian proportions. The first part of Singer's book deals with environmental responsibility, and his prescription for increasing it -- immediate ratification of Kyoto by the US and other holdout countries, and introduction of an emissions trading mechanism to make the realization of Kyoto feasible (subject to the need for some oversight on the disposition of the proceeds of such trading when it involves autocratic governments). The second part of the book deals with the global economy, and Singer adroitly tears apart the Economist's (and other neocons') naive assertion that economic globalization somehow benefits both rich and poor countries. He then goes on to prescribe a substantial reform of the WTO and the GATT, which could actually lead to more equitable distribution of wealth and more efficient production of economic goods, while safeguarding human rights, labour and the environment. Unfortunately, the multi-national corporations and corporatists who hold sway in the WTO would never tolerate Singer's prescription, since it would entirely divert the benefits of economic globalization from their pockets to those of the world's poor. The third part of the book deals with international law, and Singer lashes out at Bush for his unconscionable refusal to ratify the International Court of Justice, and for the UN's continued hesitancy to accept a duty (not a right) to intervene in situations of genocide and other humanitarian crises, even within a single nation. Singer is sanguine about the limitations and dangers of 'global government', but supports strengthening the UN to enable it to act as a 'protector of last resort', and including in its mandate the responsibility to supervise elections in all member nations. The fourth and final part goes back to ethical principles and proposes that countries must, in this world where national boundaries no longer have any logistic meaning, set aside national interest and embrace, once and for all, global interest, impartially. That does not mean cultural homogenization, but imposes a responsibility for the reduction of inequality, both of economic resources and personal rights and freedoms. Always the pragmatist, Singer concludes by worrying out loud about how the responsibility for a global ethic could be managed: It
is widely believed that a world government would be, at best, an
unchecked bureaucratic behemoth that would make the bureaucracy of the
EU look lean and efficient. At worst, it would become a global
tyranny,
unchecked and unchallengeable. These thoughts have to be taken
seriously. How to prevent global bodies becoming either dangerous
tyrannies or self-aggrandizing bureaucracies, and instead make them
effective and responsive to the people whose lives they affect? It is
a
challenge that should not be beyond the best minds in the fields of
political science and public administration.
I'd like to believe that this was possible, because if it isn't, we're in serious trouble. We cannot expect national governments to set aside parochial interests, especially when this entails accepting a responsibility that would, for the richer nations, inevitably lead to a drastic redistribution of wealth to poorer nations and hence a sudden and sharp reduction in, at least, economic living standards (if not necessarily well-being). But as John Ralston Saul has so eloquently argued, larger organizations and institutions, whether public or private, are almost always, and inherently, less efficient, less agile, more resistant to change, more hierarchic, and less transparent than smaller organizations. So the challenge is to achieve the best of both worlds, having organizations of global scope and authority and responsibility, but broken up into sufficiently small, autonomous and dynamic units that they are sensitive, resilient, responsible and responsive to the people and communities they serve. We can only hope that "the best minds in the fields of political science and public administration", wherever they are, are up to the task. |
 I have just updated the
full Dire
ctory of Active Salon Blogs.
You can download it in Excel format by clicking on the link at the top
of the right sidebar just below my e-mail link. It contains current
information on the owner and subject of each blog, plus current
sortable data on hits/month and inbound blog counts. Please send
me details of any missing and new Salon Blogs, and any errors in the
Directory. I promise to post any updates I receive to the Directory
spreadsheet regularly. Here are the summary statistics for the last
month:
Insights from Today's
Gospel (#3342)
Boomer Mom / Suburban Malaise (#3343) Tales of a Stone Pilgrim (#3346) Reading A1 (#3364) Fortinbras Radio Weblog (#3368) The Fix-It Chicks (#3378) What Would Dick Think (#3379) Reggie E. Scott's Radio Weblog (#3388) I Cover the Blackboard (#3398) The Irregulars Blog (#3403) Post-Coital with a Modern Primitive (#3409) The Adventures of Sophie's Dildo (#3411) If I've missed your Salon Blog, or if you know of any active (posted within the last month) active Salon Blogs not in the directory, please let me know. |
I have just updated
the full Dire
ctory
of Active Salon Blogs. You can download it in Excel format by
clicking on the link at the top of the right sidebar just below my
e-mail link. It contains current information on the owner and subject
of each blog, plus current sortable data on hits/month and
inbound blog counts. Please send
me details of any missing and new Salon Blogs, and any errors in the
Directory. I promise to post any updates I receive to the Directory
spreadsheet regularly. Here are the summary statistics for the last
month:
Schnauzer Logic
#3435
If I've missed your Salon Blog, or if you know of any active (posted
within the last month) active Salon Blogs not in the directory, please
let me know.
There's just one day left to find the missing Easter eggs (see post
below), and a few of them are hidden in the above newbie blogs.Connecting the Dots 3437 Vanitas Personae 3446 Cassandra Predicts 3456 Two Fawn's American Indian Movement Pages 3467 Mindboggling Adventure Tales 3488 Bartholomew's Notes on Religion 3494 Saunter & Repose 3517 Avon Calling 3522 Bill Penrose's Radio Weblog 3530 The Cassandra Frost Collection 3531 Lumberg Boinked Her 3552 Screwing the Pooch 3557 Poli Sigh 3566 The Outer Edge 3573 Matriarch 3577 Oh My Stars 3580 The Poche 3591 Bob Rich's Weblog 3592 Douglas Moran's Radio Weblog 3597 XXX Rated Realist 3602 Rich Whiteley's Radio Weblog 3605 Manhattan Waiter 3612 The Grace Pages 3622 Lucy 3627 Vietnam Moving Wall in Worland WY 3628 Ashent TwentyThree's Radio Weblog 3632 What's in Scott's Head 3635 Monkey Labs 3637 Carnival Knowledge 3641 Infidelia 3744 1.21 Giggawats 3746 Docta Puella 3751 Enough 3752 Steve Simard's Radio Weblog 3753 Heart Attack Diaries 3757 |
 In last week's post on
Assembling
the Team for Natural Enterprise* I promised that I would present
an Elevator
Pitch
for such enterprises. Although this post is too long to deliver in an
elevator ride, it does explain what Natural Enterprise is and why you
might want to set one up or join one.What is Natural Enterprise? A form of self-organized, self-managed, community-based business partnership in which two or more people agree to make a living together as collaborators and peers, to strive to attain what each member needs to achieve for his or her personal well-being, to accept substantial responsibility for each other, and to respect and help the community or communities in which the enterprise operates. It is 'natural' because this form of socio-economic activity occurs ubiquitously in hunter-gatherer cultures and in non-human animal cultures. Why is it different?
What's the catch? Natural Enterprise could be to the modern economy what the Internet has become to modern politics and society -- an anti-hierarchal mechanism that democratizes and liberates economic power and opportunity the same way the Internet has democratized and liberated social and political power and opportunity. Both innovations fundamentally threaten established power, authority, 'wisdom' and control, by undermining them and rendering their hierarchies vulnerable and potentially obsolete. Large corporate oligopolies will recognize Natural Enterprises as threats to their power and profitability, and, much as they have responded to labour unions, will attempt to ignore, circumvent, weaken or crush them. For at least a generation, pionering Natural Enterprises, much like the fledgling Internet of the 1980s, will have to be content to play a minor role. Charles Handy envisions this as being like the relationship of the flea to the elephant -- Natural Enterprise will contract mainly with large corporations as suppliers, and will be to some extent dependent on these large corporations' largesse and their increased proclivity for outsourcing, along with the Natural Enterprises' own innovativeness and agility. As Handy says, such uneven contracts will at least be an improvement on the wage-slave employer-employee contracts they supersede. And eventually Natural Enterprises will become so numerous, and specialized and adept in so many industries and aspects of business, that they will start networking and contracting and associating with each other, using the power of the Internet. And much as specialty stores undermined and largely replaced the large, cumbersome, general-purpose department store, Natural Enterprises could ultimately eliminate the need for and replace large, cumbersome corporations. Just as the Internet created a socio-political and information 'World of Ends', where central control and authority are not needed and all value is created at the 'ends', so, too could Natural Enterprise create an economic 'World of Ends' where corporatism, oligopoly and massive size are not needed in economic entities and where all value is created at the 'ends' -- face to face with customers. It's a revolutionary and powerful and liberating idea, but it will take time, patience and energy to bring it about. How do I set one up? The Handbook is now being written. The framework is illustrated above. You can learn more about them here.  * What's In a Name? I have used the terms New Collaborative Enterprise, Existential Enterprise (Charles Handy's term), and New Tribal Ventures (Daniel Quinn's term) to describe such enterprises. The 'new' in these terms suggests there are 'old' collaborative enterprises, the term 'existential' has been voted off the island by readers of this blog as too highfalutin' and intimidating a term, and terms like 'tribal' conjure up images of war paint and noble savages. Autopoietic Enterprise (it means self-creating and self-managing) is accurate but unpronounceable and would probably be perceived as pretentious. Readers have suggested the terms 'Natural Enterprise' (Harold Jarche) and 'Organic Enterprise' (Don Dwiggins), which I like because they're simple and descriptive. I like Natural better because its opposite (unnatural) is exactly what the modern corporation is, while the term 'organic' is a bit ambiguous (it means 'related to organs', 'related to organisms', 'carbon-based', and 'instrumental', of which only the second definition is a propos). I' almost decided to keep 'Collaborative' in the term for two reasons: To stress that these enterprises entail more than one person working together (a sole proprietor, to me, does not an enterprise make, even if s/he is a powerful networker -- enterprises are about people making a living together), and because it would allow me to continue using the acronym NCE, which has gained some common parlance over the past year. But in the end, simpler is better, Natural Enterprise is inherently collaborative, and I was taught 'when in doubt, leave it out'. So Natural Enterprise it is -- thanks to Harold for the inspiration. |
 Time
for another of life's imponderables. Both in Canada and the US, family
farmers and small business people have, in recent years, consistently
voted conservative, and show every intention of doing so again this
year. This makes absolutely no sense: Most farm states and provinces
are net recipients of government largesse (i.e. they receive in
equalization payments and services more than they pay for, subsidized
by the more urban and more liberal states and provinces). And even
though in the past 20 years conservative governments have spent more
than liberal governments, that money has largely gone to tax cuts for
the very rich and defense spending, creating huge deficits that small
farmers and small business people have to repay in taxes, and receive
almost no benefit from.I talked to a few local farmers and small business people to try to find out why they vote conservative. This small sample may not be representative, but what they told me was:
In Canada, which has five parties to choose from, the 'first past the post' electoral system undoes the benefits of party pluralism. With the three small parties all socially liberal, Canadian liberals are forced to 'vote strategically', which means voting for the Liberal Party instead of their real choice, the NDP or the Green Party, to prevent the 30% of Canadian conservatives, who have only one voting choice, from stealing the election. We'll find out in ten days whether they did so or not. Alas, both the US Republican and the Canadian Conservative parties are consistently and heavily propped up by small farmers and small businesspeople. Without that support, these parties would be history. It doesn't make any sense, but it's the reality that both right-wing parties are counting on for election success this year. It's a brilliant con. |
| Four
years ago I wrote a well-received paper entitled A Prescription for Business Innovation:
Creating
Technologies that Solve Basic Human Needs. I've updated it,
broken it into three manageable pieces, and present the first part
below. The remaining parts will follow on successive Tuesdays. Introduction: Why I'm Here My modest objective in this presentation is first, to tell you some new, interesting and useful things about innovation, and, second, to persuade you that innovation is the most important determinant of every business' success, and perhaps even the quality of our lives. I want to convince you that in your business, whether it employs one person or one million, innovation is probably the solution to whatever is currently keeping you awake at night -- whether that be sales growth, cost control, customer satisfaction, employee retention, or maximizing shareholder value. And if you, like me, spend some of your sleepless hours worrying about things more altruistic than your personal and business success, I want to convince you that innovation is probably also the solution to most of the problems that have befallen our suffering planet, in part because past innovations have created many of these problems. And finally, if I'm successful in this evangelical task, I want you to leave today not only with renewed hope about the future of your company and our world, but with some new tools to make innovation happen in your business. I would like to ask you to listen to these ideas with an open mind, suspend briefly your disbelief, and give this your full attention. If this was that easy to explain, someone much smarter than I would have done it years ago. One: Learning from our past: How Need Drives Innovation The advent of a new millennium has recently given many business, political and economic thinkers pause to consider what will be, as most put it, the 'Next Big Thing':
Technophiles who favour the Acceleration Model tend to be infatuated with artifacts of the last thirty years: more digital, faster, smaller, lighter. Advocates of the Chaos Model, on the other hand, believe there are no rules for our brave new world of the 21st century. Their advice for business and other leaders is to be opportunistic and think short-term. I lean towards the Evolutionary Model. I believe that using an understanding of the past, with the right perspective, can help businesses anticipate the future with exceptional clarity and probability of success. There are two reasons I hold this belief, and they form the basis for much of the rest of this presentation:
 Figure One: How Fundamental Needs spawn Innovations & Technologies (Adapted from Credit Suisse First Boston New Economy Forum 1999 Synthesis) According to this model, innovations like crop cultivation, the printing press, and the harnessing of solar energy, have always arisen in response to an urgent human need -- overcoming the sudden food scarcity after the Ice Age, bringing literacy to the masses, and solving the energy crisis respectively in these three examples. Technologies are applications of these innovations. The intriguing organic-looking ovals for each technology are also from the Credit Suisse Synthesis, which proposes are technologies are best developed using the following process:  Figure Two: Development Process for Technologies (from Credit Suisse First Boston New Economy Forum 1999 Synthesis) Let's now take a look at this synthesis model in more detail, to test whether it represents the way in which historical innovations have occurred, and then what this might tell us about innovations of the future. Two: Man's Earliest Innovations: A Brief History of Technology The first humans to walk on our planet, according to most anthropologists, were not the mighty hunters most of us might picture. In fact we were particularly disadvantaged, lacking both keen senses and a hide adapted to changing climates and weather. As a result, early humans were scavengers, ignominiously surviving off the leftovers of creatures with better innate hunting 'equipment'. In the first scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick & Clarke hypothesize that a carrion bone was the first human tool. Marshall McLuhan explained in his book Understanding Media that this early human was using the bone, this very first tool or technology, as an extension of his hand, giving it strength, reach and durability his hand alone did not have. McLuhan argued that all technologies are extensions of the human body and the human senses, and it is these technologies that have allowed the poor, badly-pelted, sensory-deprived human species to buck Darwin's odds and survive. So picture our poor shivering proto-human looking among the bones of a wolf's recent meal for new tools beside the greasy bone, and thinking, in true McLuhanesque and 20th century economics terms: 'If the bone as an extension of my hand helps me to compensate for my competitive disadvantage in the hunter-gatherer marketplace, why can I not use other tools similarly? Then, lacking the appropriate scientific training but still intoxicated over his first innovation, he or she comes across a dead wolf and considers the following applications of this technological insight:
Without animal domestication and crop cultivation, we as a species might well not have survived to come up with newer and more sophisticated innovations like the wheel, paper and the computer. Three: Six Principles about the Innovation Process The first humans used precisely the process shown in Figure Two to develop and 'commercialize' the technology applications of the innovations of animal domestication and crop cultivation. It is the same commercialization process taught in business schools today. However, the success of the process is only as good as the idea, the innovation, that lies at its front end. Business schools are actually very good at explaining the recipe, but they, and most educational and business institutions, are absolutely terrible at teaching people how to find the essential new ingredients -- the 'grey matter' at the left side of Figure Two, the ideas & innovations that make the recipe work. The problem isn't a scarcity of good ideas either -- it is the lack of rigour and investment in infrastructure to surface, capture, develop and qualify new ideas prior to commercialization. Figure Two also recognizes that many innovations and technologies are derived from other innovations and technologies, and often come from applying an idea or a technology from one application domain, or from nature, to an unrelated application domain. The BBC/Discovery program Connections made this point very powerfully, and its author James Burke continues to develop both examples of such non-obvious connections, and exercises to help us learn to discover more -- in essence, to become more innovative. Burke's latest book explains how a problem with the irrigation of Italian gardens led to the invention of the carburetor, for example. Furthermore, Figure Two acknowledges the importance of the story in the successful commercialization of innovations. It is hard to pick up a business book or attend a business conference these days without being lectured on the importance of story-telling, but the idea is neither new nor complicated: Stories convey the context for the application, they explain how it can be used in the user's or developer's day to day life. Knowledge transfer is an essential precondition to commercialization. The easiest way to transfer knowledge, i.e. to explain or persuade, is to do so in a way that lets the learner internalize what they are hearing i.e. to fit it into their own mental models of how things work. And the simplest way to enable internalization is by telling a story, be it a Utopia or Future State Vision, a parable with a built in lesson, or a simple recounting of processes and events that lets the learner relive the teacher's experience as if it were their own. From all this we can derive six basic principles about the Innovation Process (again, the names given to them are mine), to add to the two espoused earlier about cultural resistance to innovation:
|
 A
new Dutch government program called SeniorStart
"aims at stimulating successful entrepreneurship by older (45+) people
who have lost or left their jobs or are re-entering the workforce
after
an extended period, by
creating a dedicated (virtual) professionally-staffed National Service
Centre and supporting the
sharing of knowledge and experience between experienced senior
entrepreneurs and new startups through regional networks".The National Service Centre offers the following services.
The project is financed by the Taskforce on Older People and Employment, the GAK (Industrial Insurance Administration Office), the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the WISE (Working Network and Information Centre for Senior Entrepreneurs) Foundation. It was co-developed by WISE and MKB, an umbrella group of over 500 trade organizations and business associations. This is a wonderful initiative, one that deserves to be studied and emulated in other countries. Now, what I'd really like to see is a network that connects these older, experienced aspiring entrepreneurs with the other group that desperately needs advice on how to set up a new business -- young people just graduating from school and unwilling to enter into a lifelong contract of wage slavery as menial employees to pay off their student loans -- and then advises both groups on how to set up and operate a successful entrepreneurial business. |
 During
my ten years as a Chief Knowledge Officer, I spent a lot of time
trying
to figure out how people should use knowledge, and to some extent how
people learn, but it never occurred to me to develop an overarching
'theory of knowledge' until I decided to write a book called The Cost of Not Knowing. This
article summarizes that theory.This is not a new epistemology. I am disinterested in academic arguments that use language, a clumsy and artificial abstraction, to try to justify theories that to me are needlessly complex, counter-intuitive and of no practical use. For students of philosophy, and I'm sure this will come as no surprise to my regular readers, my theory is consistent with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological view of epistemology. For those interested in the philosophical basis for this theory, I would recommend David Abram's Spell of the Sensuous, much of which is devoted to explaining Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. I'm merely interested in its practical implications, in work and in life. My theory starts with learning. Learning is the process of direct and indirect experience and observation, and knowledge is simply the personal, collected, internalized result of learning. We learn in different ways (fig.1): The best way is through active participation, which engages all our senses in the learning experience. Next best is observation, where we see or hear but where some of our senses are not engaged. The least effective way is second-hand, through communication of reports from someone else. When a squirrel learns, by personal trial and error, how to defeat a baffle on a bird feeder, this is powerful knowledge, well retained and employed. When that squirrel instead watches another squirrel show how to do it, the knowledge is less valuable, less credible. The observing squirrel may not be able to replicate the other squirrel's moves, and the method may not be the best one for the observing squirrel, which may have a different body-weight or dexterity than the demonstrating squirrel's. And if one squirrel merely tells another, unfamiliar squirrel of the presence of food in a bird-feeder 'over there' that can be accessed by navigating around the baffle, that knowledge is even less valuable. The squirrel listening may doubt whether the baffle was or even can be overcome -- perhaps this second-hand report is merely bragging or a ruse on the part of the reporting squirrel. In human activities, we now get almost all of our knowledge second-hand, through books, newspapers, television and online, and its relative lack of credibility causes us to develop and assign a trust 'rating' to different sources, based on how often, in our experience and that of others we trust, that report has turned out to be accurate or useful. A blogroll is one manifestation of that need to rate the trust-worthiness of second-hand sources of knowledge. Schools, unfortunately, now provide almost all learning second-hand, and it is not surprising that 'field trips' are so loved by students -- an experience to learn something first-hand. It is also not surprising that the most effective and credible form of second-hand report is the story, which conveys knowledge in a way highly analogous to the way we might have experienced it personally. Why do we learn? The squirrel learns in order to survive -- by direct participation at first in play and then, often by observing its parents, in gathering food, building a nest etc. The squirrel draws as well on instinctive knowledge, which is coded in its DNA as an evolutionary advantage, which 'teaches' it the knowledge of its ancestors, for example to 'freeze' when it senses a predator species, which is often more effective than fleeing predators whose eyesight is attuned to motion, more than shape. That instinctive knowledge also tells it at what point, as the predator approaches, to flee, based on its ancestors' cumulative learnings of that point at which the probability of evasion through flight begins to exceed the probability of non-detection by the predator. Instinctive knowledge doesn't need to be learned, so it doesn't appear on fig.1 above. We're born with it. In natural systems, where the community, the physical area in which animals spend their entire lives, is small and almost completely 'knowable', we learn only to survive and make a living, and because nature has evolved us, as an adaptive mechanism, to find learning fun (fig.2). In such closed systems, we can get almost all the knowledge we need from direct experience and observation, and from our instincts -- there is little need to rely on second-hand reports as a source of learning. As that physical area that we need to know to survive increases, we can no longer get by with direct experience and observation, so we need to evolve languages to convey more and more knowledge second-hand. Our society becomes inevitably more interdependent, and in addition to survival there are now three more reasons to learn:
|