Blog Odyssée

In a great article by the title "On the Nature of Digital Transformation: 10 Observations", Mike Arauz draws the set of operating values that defines "Responsive Organizations":

Current world is all about entrepreneurship, but we can notice that, in some anachronistic balancing movement, technocrats thrive.

This is remarkably noticeable in health where huge public initiatives from governments keep failing one after another, with little place left for the bottom-up projects that could deliver the personalized services people so badly need.

Two pictures flashed today on my Twitter List and it is amazing to realize that, combined, they perfectly explain the biology of Shadoks. The Shadoks being these (so French) stupid birds that (so well) impersonate technocrats.

Shadoks’ daily task is “to pump”, unfortunately with no visible effect. They keep pumping, however, for fear that the situation could become even worse if they didn’t.

The first sentence, from @gregyoung explains how Shadoks can multiply:

Wrong models cause massive accidental complexity.

This is something we actually know well in health. IMHO wrong models thrive there because they enable University Hospitals to publish and major companies to build a wall of costly stupid standards (namely HL7) to keep startups away.
The main "wrong model" currently – the seed of technocrats big projects – can be summed up as "a record of medical records is a continuity of care record".

The second sentence, called Bullshit Asymmetry Principle by his author, @ziobrando explains where Shadoks get their energy:

The amount of energy to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

It perfectly explains two things:

1. Wrong models can thrive for years and durably pollute their ecosystem,
2. People can fail while not being able to understand why they failed, giving birth to failures pilling up due to the Duning-Kruger syndrom, as explained by my Complexity Awareness Equation

Better know that, unless they are limited by severe budget cuts, technocrats will keep on trying and failing endlessly. When Shadoks are on the way, entrepreneurs should move to another ecosystem and not wait for them to starve!

Has there been a point when you’ve decided to take a big risk to move forward?

Oh, yeah. There are two frames to this idea of taking a risk. When you’re taking a risk, you can either be audacious or courageous—two different things. If you have audacity and take on a risk, it means you don’t know what you’re getting into; you’re walking through a door, into a dark room, with no idea what’s there. If you have courage, it means that you know exactly what’s behind that door; there’s something dangerous, hard, and it’s going to make you really uncomfortable. I think you get to be more audacious when you’re younger because you don’t have as many experiences to reference. When you’re older, you know a lot of patterns; you know exactly what’s behind that door, and you don’t risk as often. In that frame, I have to say that I have always chosen to be audacious, even though I shouldn’t be. I have the courage to be audacious.

John Maeda (@johnmaeda) in an interview by Tina Essmaker (@tinaessmaker) for The Great Discontent (TGD) (@greatdiscontent).