I have a semi-allergic reaction to sounds bites that appear to lack thought before propagation. Its a part of my general complaint about modern politics. It used to be the case the politicians had to be able to hold an audience for a substantial period of time and deal with hecklers. Now they carefully craft the soundbite, avoid exposure and questioning. So as in politics so in the world of consultancy and I afraid the allergy clicked in when I picked up this tweet from Jurgen Appelo. He said Nobody _is_ a professional. But any person at any time can choose to behave like one. I responded The implication being that one should choose one's Doctor on behaviour rather than qualification. I'm afraid that upset Jurgen a little and I was accused of unsubstantiated criticism.

Continue reading "For those in peril ..." »

Luke 5:36-39

Its been a busy week in Washington with a packed agenda and an overdue article occupying any free time so posting here has taken second place. However today saw a lunch with old friends Alicia Juarrero and Mike Lissack along with a new friend Stuart Umpleby of GWU. Mike, at a meeting in Bedfont Lakes many years ago told me I had to read Alicia's Dynamics in Action, and that book along with conversations and work with Alicia (one memorable project in Singapore) have contributed a lot to Cognitive Edge. The constraint based definition of complexity and safe-fail to give just two examples. Conversation ranged from plagiarism to politics but we also focused on a common concern: the growth of acceptance of complexity thinking is to be welcomed but far too many people are now leaping to use the language without really thinking through or understanding the implications.

Continue reading "agreeth not ..." »

I've always argued that that Margaret Attwood's The Handmaid's Tale should be added to the cannon of key dystopian novels. Traditionally there are three: Brave New World, 1984 and Darkness at Noon. Of which I think the Koestler is the most powerful , although the least known. All of them really require knowledge of the period in which they were written to really understand them but they retain relevance with that knowledge.

In contrast Attwood's dark tale remains ever present in its topicality. It tells the story of a right wing evangelical takeover of the US. The parallel reduction in fertility arising from chemical pollution produces a perverted need to handmaids to bear the children of the powerful. I won't spoil the story for those who have not read it, but the ritualisation of the execution scene and the hypocrisy of the night club for the elite with their Jezebels, together with the need for near permanent war were for me some of the most memorable and relevant aspects of this story. It was published in 1985 (a year earlier would have had more irony) and over a quarter of a century later it remains a prophecy with a sense of immanence.

I was prompted to write this by a link in the Guardian to a new edition of the book by the Folio Society with some truly wonderful illustrations. The film is pretty good as well. I'd make it compulsory reading in all US schools but of course Elizabeth Kantor, author of The politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature has condemned it, surprise surprise.

Today I met up with our current guest blogger Iwan Jenkins at the Anchor Inn and following a good lunch we both went to the final pool game of Heineken Cup in Cardiff. Multiple conversations took place and one came back to an old theme of mine, namely the importance of working in the present, rather than trying to map out a route to some ideal future. The context in which this came up was a recent gathering in Stoos, which attempted to replicate the famous Snowbird event that created Agile, but this time for management. I had an invitation, but refused it when I was told that who was being invited was secret. Transparency to my mind is key in these sort of things and if I am being asked to donate time and pay my own expenses the least I expect is to know who else is going to be there.

Continue reading "Rose tinting" »

We passed the half way mark today on our journey from the source to the mouth of the Thames. We won't know the exact half way point until we complete as there are northern and southerly options within London itself that effect the overall length. However somewhere between Pangbourne and Shiplake we reached that milestone - I set it at Tilehurst to give us a notional transition point. I must admit to some annoyance with the intransigence of local landowners which have resulted in several on-road diversions from the River itself. The first of these before Lechlade is the most irritating in part because it is a dangerous and lengthy road diversion but in the main because it misses that point where the Thames moves from a stream to a river. We had another today on the approach to Tilehurst where a glorious bend in the river has to be missed for want of a bridge over a Marina exit.

Continue reading "Half way down the Thames" »

It's not often that I agree with Richard Dawkins, but his article in today's New Statesman on "reasonable doubt" is interesting. He speculates that in a two jury system you would not get a coincidence of verdict and that in consequence the assumption of "beyond reasonable doubt" cannot be sustained in consequence. Now running a two jury experiment over a series of trials and seeing what happens would be an interesting experiment. He suggests that running a parallel experiment with two judges might produce a better correlation. The experiment would be interesting and there is good reason to apply scientific method in social systems when we can.   

Of course, if we take the basic principles of distributed cognition (I remain uncomfortable with the more popular but inaccurate Wisdom of Crowds) then it would be better if the twelve good men and true (apologies for sexism but I am quoting) were say five pods of three each optimised for diversity making decisions independently of each other. Pods would allow for some discussion, but not the entrained patterns of discussion so well portrayed in many a film. Of course we could go with Sid James in Hancock's Half Hour and cut the cards: anything under 7 and he's guilty.

Continue reading "Beyond reasonable doubt" »

Around two decades ago I was arguing that object orientation was not just a way of creating reusable code, but was a more profound shift to enabling architectures that could combine people and technology in evolving systems. The first part was generally accepted, the second more controversial. I then seemed, in the words of Mark 1:3 to be The voice of one crying in the wilderness. Mind you I have been there a few times before and plan frequent visits in the future. Around a decade later having left IBM I sketched out a text based object description of what was to become our contribution to the Singapore RAHS system and which in turn gave birth to SenseMaker®. Basically we build a demo system post IBM, created v2.0 around the RAHS system and then sat down and decided to start again from scratch and build SenseMaker® 3.0 as an architecture, based on how we thought things should be, rather than as constrained by the expediencies of a client delivery.

Not that it hasn't been tempting to revert to a more expedient approach over the years, but we have resisted it despite multiple slipped timescales. We are now more or less there and its time to open up some aspects of what we are doing for wider participation. So we are today announcing the first training event for programmers who want to know how to develop within the SenseMaker® 3.0 ecology. The bad news is that it is short notice (8-10 February in Amsterdam), the good news is that for suitably qualified people it's free, you just cover your costs and there is a good chance of work to follow.

Continue reading "Architecture not application: an opportunity" »

I have always rated Yiannis Gabriel's writing and the various conversations I have had with him over the years. Of the major academics involving in narrative I think he has the surest touch in understanding the essential subtleties of the field. His post today on conspiracy theories came up in the RSS feed as I was dealing with one of the periodic political attacks on the Swiftboating article on Wikipedia (hence today's picture. The term has become a neologism to describe the deliberate telling of a lie to damage someone, arising from the smear campaign against Kerry in the 2004 Presidential elections. Its well covered in Farhad Manjoo's excellent little book True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. The periodic political attack by the way comes from the right, seeking to argue that Wikipedia should be balanced between political perspectives, i.e. it should reflect the perverted belief that the claim was true. Wikipedia does not (thank God) work like that and instead reflects the balance of reliable sources, all of which clearly establish that the tale told was a lie.

Continue reading "Meaning and truth" »

I've spent most of the day sat at a computer, aside from a bath, brunch and the final episode of Sherlock on BB1. I've handled multiple tweets including some fairly childish allegations (see tweets from me to @tetradian if interested) which involved publishing a censored comment on the chaotic domain of Cynefin. That was an interesting task and it will lead to a more elaborate blog later in the week. I've handled my daily emails from a pro-Rand, NLP loving author, who was permanently banned from editing wikipedia (by a member of ArbCom no less) for personal attacks and harassment, but with who I have struck up a conversation. Unlike @terradian he can cope with disagreement, but his arguments have a very similar nature: make an unsupportable assertion then defend it as logical/rational. The virtual world is a strange one and I've found it useful to think about some extremist challenges to my thinking. They are a bit strange - its OK apparently for the Israelis to do want they want to the Arabs, as the latter are not a US style democracy (although I think these days with the money involved its more a market than a democracy). But listening to extremes is useful. I hadn't thought of  @tetradian as a sort of fluffy bunny un-Randian before but its an interesting perspective.

Continue reading "Muddling through Sunday" »

After sitting in front of a computer for the best part of twelve hours a day for over a week it was a real pleasure to get out for the latest section of the Thames walk today. We had made it to Benson Lock on the last section and were prevented from making our target of Wallingford by the closure of the lock. Given a long road diversion was in place we had decided to start from Wallingford next time and fill in the gap. Over the week before my obsessive nature got to me and I ended up getting up very early, leaving the car at Tilehurst station and then using a combination of train and bus to get me to Wallingford bef sunrise. A torch assisted walk got me out to Benson Lock as the sun came up and I met the rest of the party in Wallingford some time later. I simply couldn't cope with leaving a gap in what is meant to be a continuous walk, and I even walked upstream of the lock to the old ferry landing point to compensate for not being able to walk across the lock itself. The full set of photographs for this section are up on flickr.

For anyone interested, next Saturday we plan the section from Pangbourne to Shiplake which takes us past the half way mark on the trip. Others are already planning to join that section so if anyone fancies it let me know let me know. It will probably involve lunch at a Thameside pub. The section is around 13 miles and there is an easy train route that returns us to the origin via Reading.

Continue reading "Benson Lock to Pangbourne" »

I realised today that an awful lot of the best (or at least the classic) literature (which is not the same thing as stories) comes from the Edwardian period. Winnie the Pooh, Wind in the Willows, Just William, The Jungle Book, The Hobbit and many others. Of course this may just be my age but I think they win out on the quality of the English and the degree to which they depend in imagination. None of the books I have mentioned compromises on vocabulary, and certainly as I child I remember learning the meaning of words such as sinuous from their context use in Wind in the Willows.

Imagination is also a key part of this period, Even in the 50s and 60s we did more with two cardboard boxes, the dressing up box (discarded parental clothes), a step ladder and a mob than modern children do with the most sophisticated and elaborate games. The difference was that we used our imagination to create wonderful constructs on simple objects and commonly understood contexts. My sister and I along with three friends from the same street conducted the entire Viking Invasion of Britain over a week from that construct. For myself and my sister probably the supreme example of this type of story was Swallows and Amazons.

Continue reading "Every child is an artist. The problem …." »

A few days ago I posted on the meeting that five of us organised to talk about the links between Cynefin, Agile and Lean. We ended up calling it CALM, which adds Mashup to the three elements, although you can replace Cynefin with Complexity if you want. We had concerns about the use of complexity language to rebrand old practice, but we also wanted to respect that practice as well as creating the new. We were also very concerned to make this open as possible, so a lot of our time was spent in discussing the first event (hence the alpha) which would be open to all. Either way bookings are now open and we have a lot of flexibility on numbers, we can keep it small or allow it to grow. We do need to firm up on numbers by the end of January so you will see there is a heavy penalty for late booking. If you have a look at the faculty you will see we all come from different backgrounds and different organisations. When we started talking about this many months ago that diversity was key, but we also wanted people who were talking and working around a reasonably common understanding of complexity, and a deep understanding not just a quick pick up on the language.

Continue reading "CALMalpha (2)" »

It's not often a month goes by without one Gaping Void's cartoons providing cause for thought. This one came in before Christmas and i have been meaning to use it in a post for some time. Like all good cartoons it takes a bit of time to unpick but I think there are some key lessons and questions that come out of it.

Continue reading "Teaching" »

In between my own backlog of work and dispatching son back to the University of Warwick I have been listening and occasionally contributed to discussion around my daughter's two final year essays for her Anthropology Course. One of those is on the power of the container that is the Coca-Cola bottle. I'm learning through the process - for the first year and a half my own reading over decades kept me ahead of her but I am now falling behind! The subject is all about how objects mediate messages across space and time between people who are not co-present.

I hadn't known that Coca-Cola was marketed in Hitler's Germany and that prisoners of war were surprised that Americans had the drink. I knew that bottling operations around the world were key to Coca-Cola's strategy, but I had realised that anthropologists see this as displacing responsibility to local suppliers for all sorts of ethical and other issues. The form of the "mediating object" and the functional possibilities it incorporates determine attention and the wider role within material cultures (a lot of Dant 1999:154 here). That gives me some new insights to work I am doing on brand.

I now have to read up on material cultures (most of my anthropology has been pure cultural anthropology and the intersection of anthropology and biology. That will be interesting, but its far more interesting to talk with your own offspring and sense their joy of discovery around words, concepts and ideas. Paradoxically talking about containment is uncontained.   

The title of this post is drawn from the tenth novel, and the first of the fourth movement of Anthony Powell masterpiece A Dance to the Music of Time. Its the one with Erridge's funeral and Pamela Widerpool's disposal of Trapnel's manuscript in the canal. It's use by Powell references a quote from Lindsay Bagshaw and was a satire on various journalists of the time.

I was reminded of it when this wonderful collection of bookshelf porn popped up on a idle stroll through Facebook. Hat tip to Paulette Paterson via Alex Tewes for that. My children have oft mocked my inability to pass my a bookshop without emerging with a purchase, a sin or virtue that I shared with my mother while she was alive. I have only ever thrown away one book in my life, although several have been "borrowed" and may not return to the fold. Such losses have not stemmed the flow and just over a year ago I resorted to building book corridors to accommodate the volume.

Continue reading "Books do furnish a room" »

I frequently reference messy coherence as a key aspect of living with complexity and I've blogged about it from time to time, especially in the context of the state of my study. Of recent years I have also used the example of a spider's web, not in the fearsome symmetry of its first creation, but if it has been around the block a bit; caught a few flies, being rained on or in the case of this one frozen. Thanks to Anna Biskit's Flickr stream for the picture by the way.

The point is that you can the structure which was there, depending on the degree of disintegration it may or may not still fulfil its original purpose Its sticky, you can be woven into its pattern or you can fly through the gaps. It has beauty even as it disintegrates, it cannot be rebuilt but has to be replaced with something that will in its turn fade.

The metaphor carries with it the concepts of transience, but is also of purpose and for a time solidity. Depending on the context they can last for days, months or even years before they have to be rebuilt. Its not the best metaphor for an organisation, but it is a good metaphor for thinking about degrees of coherence.

For over a year now I have been playing with differ ways of representing the complex domain of Cynefin. As a result of that process I have been growing in my conviction that we framework for complexity and its three boundaries (to chaos, to complicated and to disorder) is key to working through intervention models beyond the generic safe-to-fail probe approach. I've got a whole moleskin notebook full of sketches on this and its still got a long way to go.

However over the last couple of days I started to play with one of the approaches around requirements capture and it seemed to work. Given that i am sharing it for comment with the very important qualification that this is, as the title says, a work in progress. That means it is unlikely to survive in its current form for long. This is also the two dimensional version, there is a three dimension one as well but I am still drawing that.

Continue reading "A work in progress" »