Purposive Drift

Cats, Bohemia and Networks

In July I wrote a longish piece,"It's hard to predict". In it I wrote, "...the strongest advice I could give to any individual or business is to become sensitive to where you fit in your networks, learn to think in terms of nodes and connections and the complex interactions and feedback between them, and be conscious of the dynamics of your patterns of connection. Whether you are aware of it or not, your success or failure is going to bound up in how well or not you identify, create and navigate your networks."

One of the people I know who does this best is Karen Mahony. I wrote a bit about her in the intro to "Managing Creativity", which I wrote as a think piece for her company Mahony Associates. Karen moved to Prague about two years ago. Since then she has set up a studio, baba, a publishing operation, The Magic Realist Press, and published "The Tarot of Prague", which looks as if it is becoming a Tarot classic.

Karen has now started a blog, "On the Wild Coast of Bohemia", which should be worth keeping an eye on. At the moment it's mostly about cats and Christmas in Prague - she and her partner Alex are currently working on a Tarot pack based on cats and of course like in many places Christmas is looming in Prague - but watch out there is likely to be some important stuff on it. Karen is a master at identifying, creating and navigating networks. If you are hoping to create a space to do good work and make a comfortable living in the new economy - and yes there is a new economy, despite the bubble and bust - this may be the place to learn how to do it.

Failure Demand

I haven't been posting for a while. I've had plenty of stuff to say, but felt I didn't have the time to write it. Now this is not because my life has been filled with exciting projects, foreign travel or a demanding social life. No, my sense of being time poor has largely been because of "failure demand".

I came across this concept in an article in the Guardian discussing the fashion of outsourcing to India. It focused on the criticisms of this practise by John Seddon, a management consultant and occupational psychologist. Seddon is quoted as making an interesting distinction between what he calls, "value demand, which is demands for service from customers" and "failure demand or the demand caused by a failure to do something right for the customer."

In an article on his site he explains that he has found failure demand to account for between 20% and 50% of the demand in financial services call centres. He goes on to say: "It is from a cost view that managers find out-sourcing an attractive idea. To hand over calls to an agency, whether in the same country or, more lately, in other countries is to out-source waste. These organisations are paying someone else to work on their 'muda' (a Japanese expression for waste). Moving calls to another country just makes the understanding of what is going on all the more difficult. Should we praise these leaders for operating in a global economy or embarrass them for missing the obvious?"

In my recent experience I would say these figures might be unduly optimistic. Over the past few weeks, dealing with a variety of organisations, I would estimate that only between 5% and 10% of my time has been value demand. The rest has been time spent trying to get them to do the right thing in a timely and efficient manner. If what I had been asking for was unusual or complicated this might have been understandable, but mostly it has been to do with simple, routine transactions.

So failure demand is double edged. It costs the companies offering services. It also adds to the sense of time pressure and frustration that so many people feel today. The question is why is failure demand so prevalent? The answer, I suspect, may lie in the phenomenon I touched on in an earlier entry, "The Delusions of Design", the management myth that "the idea that successful companies are or even can be the product of a mind that can foresee all eventualities and deliberately plan for them." Until this myth is dispelled, I fear, failure demand will continue to figure in all our lives stealing value from both us and the organisations that are supposed to serve us.