| William Blake (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) |
This black drawing accurately sums up the reason why I decided several years ago to always vote blank. The first step toward a new paradigm has always been to stop playing by the rules of a system that no longer makes sense. It is now time to invent the Meshed Society that should come next.
Years of misleading ads & empty persuasion have distorted perceptions of benefit beyond reality: Consider Mammograms pic.twitter.com/s6MADmpAd7
— V Prasad (@VinayPrasad82) August 16, 2016
1/ Some findings from our recent study: “Substitutes for Hierarchy"
— Esko Kilpi (@EskoKilpi) August 9, 2016
2/ Potential cost savings from reducing hierarchy are substantial
3/ Simply eliminating hierarchy is not a guarantee of improved performance
4/ instead of just talking about hierarchy we should look at the functions of hierarchy and ask what substitutes are available for them
5/ When jobs are simple, repeating and specialized, the need for coordination, control and hierarchically driven motivation is increased
6/ Hierarchy is needed when people don’t know what others are doing and lack the links and ability to communicate and coordinate
@EskoKilpi The amount of 'others' might matter as well? More and more communication > communication overload? #complexity
— Katja Lindroos (@KatjaLindroos) August 9, 2016
7/ Work is interaction between interdependent people. Not all people 
8/ The degree of interdependence is determined by how much people need to coordinate, cooperate and relate to others
9/ The industrial organization was based on the idea of low / controlled interdependence -> hierarchy
10/ The post-industrial org is based on high, emergent and complex interdependence -> symmetric organization
11/ Without a thorough redesign of the org it is very unlikely that a significant part of the hierarchy can be made unnecessary
In a recent post, Clark Quinn (@Quinnovator) enumerates some of the tensions in organizational learning engineering:
Organizational learning processes – across L&D, Executive Development, Leadership Development, and more of the roles in HR and talent management – are largely still rooted in both industrial era models and myths. We see practices that don’t make sense, and we’re not aligned with what we now know about how we think, work, and learn. And this is a problem for organizational success. So what are some of the old practices compared with what we now know? No surprise, I created a diagram (a table in this case) representing just some of the tensions:
| Old | New |
| Are we not wasting any more money than anyone else? | Are we impacting business metrics? |
| All the information has to be in the head | As much as possible, information has to be in the world |
| We are formal logical thinkers | Our thinking is very much situated and emergent |
| One person must do the thinking for many | The room is smarter than the smartest person in the room* |
| Learning is recitation | Learning is doing |
| Learning is an event | Learning is a process |
| We must accommodate learning styles, generations, and more | Use the best learning design |
| We can get people to perform tasks flawlessly | Automate the rote and leave people to important decisions |
| Mistakes are a loss | Mistakes are part of innovation, just don’t lose the lesson |
| The workplace must be controlled | Workers must be empowered |
* if you manage the process right
A comic that pretty well sums up the way I feel about it.
The headlines make it clear Americans’ distaste for both Trump And Clinton is record-breaking and general election could be anti-Clintons vs. anti-Trumps.
As pointed by TTSO, there is currently a true singularity in unfavorability.
I foresee that the French election to come next year will offer even worse figures. It is high time our societies reinvent their democracies.
Picture by Jimmy Kastner
Poe's law: the quickest way to get an answer on the Internet is not to ask the question, but to post the wrong answer as a fact.
— Tanay Jaipuria (@tanayj) April 21, 2016
@tanayj the number of people quote tweeting this with "It's called Cunningham's law" is amusing me greatly
— Tanay Jaipuria (@tanayj) May 22, 2016
Terrible felling to discover that what he said more than thirty years ago remains mainly unknown – or at least misunderstood – by most people in charge here.
From The Decolonial Atlas. So ingenuous and inspiring.
In Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), the Inuit people are known for carving portable maps out of driftwood to be used while navigating coastal waters. These pieces, which are small enough to be carried in a mitten, represent coastlines in a continuous line, up one side of the wood and down the other. The maps are compact, buoyant, and can be read in the dark.
These three wooden maps show the journey from Sermiligaaq to Kangertittivatsiaq, on Greenland’s East Coast. The map to the right shows the islands along the coast, while the map in the middle shows the mainland and is read from one side of the block around to the other. The map to the left shows the peninsula between the Sermiligaaq and Kangertivartikajik fjords.
Something changed.
It used to be, money was the only metric you needed to pay attention to. If you made ‘x thousand’, you were happy. If you made ’10x thousand’, you were even happier.
But then you find out that money can only buy you so much. Like Bill Gates says, "It’s the same hamburger".
Stuff doesn’t make you happy. Making a difference makes you happy. Love and being loved makes you happy. Being invited to the dance that is humanity, that is what we’re here for.
Image and text by @gapingvoid
How to stop time: kiss.
How to travel in time: read.
How to escape time: music.
How to feel time: write.
How to release time: breathe.
A page from Reasons To Stay Alive by Matt Haig (@matthaig1)
In the world most of my clients live in, size is not an issue, innovation is an issue.
The companies that can innovate faster than the other guys win, the ones that can’t, lose. And that’s the pretty much how it works, big or small.
As a result, there are many execs in our world, currently losing a lot of sleep over how to innovate more-better-faster.
BUT…
The thing about innovation is, it doesn’t happen in a vacuum, nor can you just order it like a sandwich in a diner.
Forget "The Lone Genius" model. Like great conversation, innovation is something that happens IN THE SPACES BETWEEN PEOPLE – i.e. it’s a cultural issue.
And like everything else cultural, it’s not a physics equation, it’s a chemical equation.
Innovation happens because of the cultural chemistry. And no top-down, sternly-worded corporate memo, however lucid, is ever going to change that.
So if you want to raise your innovation batting average, that’s great, but to do that your culture, your company chemistry, is going to have to change first, not the other way around.
Image and text by @gapingvoid
Practice ill informed by theory: the it worked for me error
Aggregation, deconstruction and linear approaches to complexity
Certification and accreditation pyramid selling schemes
Use of manufacturing metaphors and techniques in a service culture
Waiting for requirements rather than articulating needs
Focus on qualities in people rather than on linkages
Idealised models: simplistic not simple
A slide by Dave Snowden (@snowded) at Scaling Agile for the Enterprise 2016 in Brussels (#Scabru16).
A diagram drawn by Jason Eisner in his paper The Three Cultures of Machine Learning
According to Eisner, there are currently three cultures of machine learning. Different people or projects will fall in different places on this "ML simplex" depending on what they care about most. They start with something in green and attempt to get blue as a way of achieving red.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. H. L. Mencken
Once again, Wiley Miller gets it perfectly right.
In a just published BMJ Blog’s journal review, Richard Lehman (@RichardLehman1) provides a really interesting take about recent controversies in BP lowering targets:
A meta-analysis of blood pressuring lowering for the prevention of cardiovascular disease and death appeared just before Christmas. It attracted a day’s worth of comment before we all went off to do seasonal things and then recover from them. I guess the debate will start to build up again now, and when the article appears in print. It is certainly worth a careful read: it’s a model for this type of systematic review and it is very clearly written, covering a vast range of trials using blood pressure lowering drugs both for high blood pressure and for other indications. It confirms that BP lowering, like the use of statins, should be governed by total risk and not by a specific level of systolic BP. Remember the Fifth Commandment: Thou shalt treat according to level of risk and not to level of risk factor. The study also identifies clear class differences for different drugs in relation to different outcomes, e.g. thiazide-like agents are better at reducing the incidence of heart failure, whereas the logic of using RAAS inhibiting drugs to prevent renal failure looks very shaky. The authors conclude: "Our results provide strong support for lowering blood pressure to systolic blood pressures less than 130 mm Hg and providing blood pressure lowering treatment to individuals with a history of cardiovascular disease, coronary heart disease, stroke, diabetes, heart failure, and chronic kidney disease."
I think this may mark a watershed moment in the use of BP lowering agents. But contrary to most commentators, I think it will lead to a large and welcome decline in their use. A clue comes in the sentence, “Rather than a decision based on an arbitrary threshold for a single risk factor, this approach needs individualised assessment of the balance of absolute risks and benefits when physicians decide on the blood pressure level at which to start blood pressure lowering and the target blood pressure.” So this is a decision for the physician, is it? Why isn’t it a decision for the person who is expected to take the drugs for the rest of their life? And it’s at this point that the whole stack of cards begins to fall apart. For a start, our cardiovascular risk prediction instruments fail to predict most of the absolute risk and have poor overlap with each other. There is no way that we can produce more than a vague ball-park guess about the likely contribution of various treatment possibilities—non-pharmacological as well as pharmacological—to the outcomes of particular individuals. And most of these outcomes are binary—you either have a stroke or you don’t. They cannot be expressed as days of life gained, but only in terms that are borrowed from gambling and so have no objective meaning for individuals. The trials lumped together here were on subsets of people for relatively short periods of time, so even if you make them into a smiley face chart, you will be giving out a false message about their predictive value. And when you do make them into such a chart, many sensible people will look at it and say, "You mean to say that I’d have to be one of 231 people to take these pills for ten years just so that one of us wouldn’t have a heart attack? Sod that." Public health physicians will hold up their hands in horror. Oxford professors will rage at GPs (and The BMJ) for not imposing the supposed good of the herd on individuals. But why? It is for each of us to play the odds of our lives as we choose. Many will choose to take the pills—myself included. Many will not. The only right choice is informed patient choice.
When you wake up in the morning and think about what you’re going to fight like hell for, it’s probably not going to sound like a typical corporate mission statement.
We’re humans. We need to feel inspired. Every. Frickin’. Day.
The companies who understand the humanity of business – those are the ones you’ll fight like hell for.
It’s pretty simple. If you want a team dedicated to making incredible things happen, give them a reason.
[Note to most CEO’s] If it’s only money, it’s probably not going to sustain the business… and you won’t meet targets for very long.
The solution here is often this misguided trend towards social entrepreneurism.
That businesses have to be about ‘doing good’ as the outcome. The truth is, businesses need to make money to survive. We all get that. Let’s not lie.
And we can be so much more. Read “He Who Cares Wins”, by our good friend David Jones (@davidjonesOYW).
The point is, usual corporate core values — “Integrity, passion, community, customers, etc.” are meaningless to most of your employees and customers. And if your mission statement is corporate speak as well, you’ve lost us. And you need us. Your employees, customers and prospects. Win us over for God’s sake.
Be driven by your core. And a real, deep connection to your people. That’s how mission and core values should be: the values, at our core, that drive our mission.
In many ways the role of business has changed, and it requires a re-think.
How’s your mission statement feeling right about now?
Image and text by @gapingvoid
