Author: Richard

There is a good interview with Bill Joy in last month’s Wired. I latched on to it because one of his answers related to some of the stuff I was talking about in “Conversations and creativity”:
“I’ve always said that all successful systems were small systems initially. Great, world-changing things – Java, for instance – always start small. The ideal project is one where people don’t have meetings, they have lunch. The size of the team should be the size of the lunch table.”
I also liked some of the things he had to say about the possibilities for innovation, which relate to some of the things I discussed in “It’s hard to predict”
All in all, an interview worth reading and a man to keep an eye on.

Sometimes I think I’m really slow on the uptake. Despite a number of signals I should have noted, I didn’t take much notice of Howard Dean’s run to be the Democrats’ Presidential Candidate. Maybe it was because I was looking for a winner and he looked like just another political maverick. Whatever the reason, the Dean campaign looks significant, even if he doesn’t get much further. What is significant about the campaign is that it looks as if it represents a shift away from the idea of politics as a subset of marketing to the idea of politics as if people matter. My sense is that this is a phenomenon that won?t go away. My evidence is in the links below:
The web’s candidate for President
Dean for America
Peer-to-Peer Politics
Why I’m for Dean
Voters Have Come Alive
Unelectable, My Ass!
A simple, poetic indictment
The Doctor Is In
The Great American Restoration
On the other hand maybe Michael Wolff is right and the very success of the campaign so far carries the seeds of its own destruction.
Candidate.com
Whatever the outcome, this one is worth watching.

I think I may have found a new role for myself as an “On-Line Vicarious Expediter and Responder”, an OLIVER – though I’m not sure I want to be a bit of software. The concept of the “Oliver” was developed by J.C.R.Licklider, who as well as being one of the early instigators of the internet, also “..foresaw knowbots and intelligent agents as he describe each network user having what he called an “Oliver.” The Oliver would be a set of programs that learns about its user, finds information on the networks for the user, and does various on-line chores.”
I came across this idea by accident in a vanity search – who would have thought there are so many Richard Olivers in the world – in a piece that had nothing to do with me or any other Richard Oliver. What made me read it was because I have long been interested Licklider, who is one of those people who have had an immense influence on our world, but is little known outside a small circle of people who are interested in such things.
The bit about “Olivers” amused me for obvious reasons. What I found still more interesting was an idea earlier in the essay where the author, Dr. Kenneth L. Hacker describes how Licklider, “… provided an early sociocognitive view of human communication which describes how each communicator in social interaction has mental models of conversation topics. Licklider noted that communication works best when the models become more similar. More importantly, he articulated a definition of communication as “cooperative modeling,” meaning that communication involves coordination and coactive building of a model that is shared and exists simultaneously with the individual communicators’ mental models.”

Continue reading Conversations and creativity

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.

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.”

Continue reading Failure Demand

In an earlier piece I was lamenting that current political and economic thinking doesn’t seem to be getting us very far and went on to say “Conventional wisdom seems to be heading us in a downward spiral, maybe some unconventional wisdom will help us move in an upward direction.”
The question, of course, is where is that unconventional wisdom going to come from?
As so often happens, the other day, I was following another, quite unconnected, thread on the web, when I bumped into a reference to Roberto Unger, a Brazilian law professor who teaches at Havard. He seems to have some interesting political and economic ideas, which can be found on his web site in PDF format. I still haven?t had time to digest what he has to say and make my own mind up as to their value, but my intuition tells me that he is someone worthwhile engaging with. The following sample from an interview gives something of the flavour of his thinking:
?The market economy has no inherent form. Contrary to what the conservatives think, the market does not have a natural and necessary form. The market can be reinvented, it can be redesigned — it can be either more concentrated or more participatory. We cannot solve the crucial problems of the informal economy by imitating the forms that the market now takes in the rich countries. We must have a different kind of market economy — one based on a decentralised alliance between the little guy and the government. Today, the world over the progressives generally have no programme — their programme is the programme of their conservative adversaries with a ten per cent discount. My main effort in debates throughout the world has been to demonstrate that there is a sequence of institutional changes that allow us to do something more than put a human face on the globalised market — that allow us to actually reorganise our societies.?

I’ve been meaning to write something about Zygmunt Bauman for some time. Partly, because he is the first person I’ve come across who uses the term “post-modern” in a way I actually find useful in understanding what is going on now. But more, because being well into middle age myself, I find the idea of a man in his late seventies, tucked away in a suburb of Leeds, having a much better idea of what is happening in the world than many much younger commentators and publishing his thoughts about it prolifically, very encouraging. For me, Zygmunt Bauman stands as a beacon of hope, representing the possibility that aging doesn’t have to be a process of decline, but can be a period of active, intelligent engagement with a changing world.

In the past I have often used Alford Korzybski’s much quoted “A map is not the territory” when I have hit situations where our perceptions or models don’t seem to accurately reflect what is going on or what a situation is.
It was only very recently I came across a fuller version of this quote that seems much more interesting; “A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness”
If we think of the world of finance as a kind of map of the world of people creating, making, building, buying, selling, exchanging goods and services I am beginning to wonder how well the map represents the structure of what is going on. I have a growing sense of a disjunction between the two. And, if there is, may be we have to question how we think about finance, economics and the real world of productive human activity.

Continue reading A map is not the territory

One of the things that irritates me is when we lose useful concepts when words are misused. Now, despite being a closet pedant, I am quite happy to accept that language evolves and that words do change their meaning. Attempts to freeze language are pointless and futile. More than that, the changing nature of language is a resource for thought. Often tracing the changing meanings of words like “education” or “jobs” is a means of generating new insights or innovations. But, there are words we can ill afford to lose. I am thinking, in particular, of words like “disinterest” and “disinterested”, which have come to mean in common usage the same thing as “uninterested”.
I was pleased to come across a piece by Terry Eagleton making a similar point. “Disinterestedness, a notion almost universally scorned by the cultural left nowadays, grew up in the 18th century as the opposite not of interests, but of self-interest. It was a weapon to wield against the Hobbesians and possessive individualists. Disinterestedness means not viewing the world from some sublime Olympian height, but a kind of compassion or fellow-feeling. It means trying to feel your way imaginatively into the experience of another, sharing their delight and sorrow without thinking of oneself.”

Continue reading The Importance of Disinterest

In July I wrote a longish entry, “It’s hard to predict”, where among others things I stressed the importance of what I call ‘network thinking’. I concluded that section by saying “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.”
I was pleased to find the other day a piece by Philip Agre, whose work I have long admired, making a similar point:
“Successful people, in my experience, engage in a great deal of issue entrepreneurship, repeatedly evolving their issues and expanding their networks as they go along. A well-chosen issue will identify what sociologists call a structural hole: a bunch of people, preferably already well-connected in other ways, who ought to know one another but don’t. By identifying such an issue, the issue entrepreneur spots an opportunity to become centrally located in newly emerging social networks — a position that can generally be converted to some kind of advantage, even if the details of that advantage are not necessarily clear at the outset. There is nothing wrong with this. It is a powerful way of understanding the world, and I wish that everyone knew how to do it. Yet this central skill of social life is a mystery to almost everyone, with the result that society is filled with misguided theories, e.g., that power is completely seamless and static, or that success is simply a matter of hard work or else entirely arbitrary.”