tag:www.cognitive-edge.com,2008:/blogs/guest//3 2008-04-05T19:23:53Z Movable Type 3.33 tag:www.cognitive-edge.com,2008:/blogs/guest//3.910 2008-04-05T14:54:59Z 2008-04-05T19:23:53Z

Gaussianitis: compulsive disorder characterised by a subject’s compulsive use of ‘Normal’ statistics in order to get away with the complexity and ambiguity of life How does Gaussianitis work? Let me give you a couple of examples The interview with Nick...

Pierpaolo Andriani flurry of articles on sexual partner number. Is 30 normal for a 40 year old man? Should I worry if my Casanova index is stuck at 5? Is my Don Giovanni parameter abnormal if I am at 100? Well, what does it mean to be normal in sexual life anyway? Now, this is an interesting question! ]]> famous paper published in Nature in 2001, the Swedish sociologist Liljeros discovered that the distribution of sexual contacts is power law distributed, that is, it shows a long and fat tail with most individuals having only a few contacts and a few of them having lots. A power law distribution shows no significant mean or variance because the extreme events in the tail of the distribution (the Casanovas, Don Giovannis or Patient Zero Gaëtan Dugas) shift the mean and variance. And as the extreme events in the tail are much more common than one would expect, mean and variance never converge. Or, more simply, mean and variance don’t exist. What does it all mean? Simply that the variability of the phenomenon is so large that there is no convergence toward any representative value. The representative value doesn’t exist. As my friend Jack Cohen points out: “it’s like taking an average between a man and woman. What do you get? A person with one breast, one testicle, one ovary, half a penis”. What is that representative of? Let me give you another example. Robert Axtell is an economist at the George Mason’s Center for Social Complexity. He gave a fascinating talk this year at the Organization Science Winter Conference. He asked the ‘simple’ question: what is a representative US firm in terms of employees? How do you find out? Well, you get a good database, you add all the employees of US firms and then divide by the number of firms. You get something like, say, 20 (I don’t exactly remember the number). Now this number is important if you are in charge of setting the regulatory frameworks for businesses and you want to make life better for the majority of firms. You assume that 20 is the best number to start from. Well it turns out that the distribution of firm sizes in the US (and in most countries all over the world) decreases in a power law fashion. No mean, no variance, no representative firm. The most common firm, the mode in fact, has zero employees. Yes zero, only the owner manager, no employees. And then, where do you start to set your regulatory frameworks for say SMEs? Jack Cohen, again, says that we humans (but it extends to firms and planets) are like hand-made pieces, made by a artisan, not standardised mass manufactured items. If this is true, and if you talk to him (or read his books) he can show you some quite convincing evidence, then the idea of simplifying the true complexity of life by assuming representative averages when none exist is a dangerous illusion. So next time you revert to an average to make a point, ask yourself if it is Gaussianitis! ]]> tag:www.cognitive-edge.com,2008:/blogs/guest//3.907 2008-04-03T16:26:05Z 2008-04-03T16:27:20Z

In a nice article on the pitfalls of statistics published today on KnowledgeWharton (The Use -- and Misuse -- of Statistics: How and Why Numbers Are So Easily Manipulated - http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1928) there is an interesting discussion on statistics and how...

Pierpaolo Andriani In a nice article on the pitfalls of statistics published today on KnowledgeWharton (The Use -- and Misuse -- of Statistics: How and Why Numbers Are So Easily Manipulated - http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1928) there is an interesting discussion on statistics and how tricky it actually is. Nice, but it doesn’t go far enough. How do we usually proceed to study a field or phenomena where there is lots of apparent or real heterogeneity? Well, we are trained to look for simple explanations, to infer from patterns and regularities the existence of laws (when in doubt apply Occam’s razor) and expect our units of analysis (whether they are cities, people, firms, ecologies or economic transactions - let’s call them agents) to conform to those laws with some individual variations. Assuming the existence of a representative agent, we also expect that it is possible to rank our agents according to how distant they are from the representative agent. Now imagine what the world looked before this type of reasoning was introduced. Unbounded variability, endless forms, capricious behaviours, permanent amazement at the diversity of the natural and social phenomena. No surprise that Plato introduced the myth of the cavern to try to establish some order in the messiness of reality (for Plato all earthly forms were flawed reflections of the ideal type, which didn’t exist on earth). Then arrived Quetelet, Demoivre, Gauss, Pearson, etc. and it must have been intellectual nirvana. By using simple concepts such as averages and variances, they could explain the amazing diversity of reality. It worked everywhere, from atoms to voters, from societies to natural systems. The promise of statistics must have seemed unbound. Quetelet thought, in a typical Platonian or pre-communist fashion, that the mean was the embodiment of the ideal form. Variance was evil and extreme variances indicated pathological behaviours. Order was in homogeneity and the mean represent the signature of the ‘right’ value. Perfection rested with the average person and consequently the role of politics was to create the average society. Many sciences followed. Substitute mean with equilibrium, throw in the invisible hand and you get today’s market fundamentalism. In today’s FT George Soros writes: “for the past 25 years or so the financial authorities and institutions they regulate have been guided by market fundamentalism: the belief that markets tend toward equilibrium and that deviations from it occur in random manner. All the innovations – risk management, trading techniques, the alphabet soup of derivatives and synthetic financial instruments were based on that belief. The innovations remained unregulated because authorities believe markets are self-correcting” As often in the history of ideas we forget the assumptions on which theories are built. For Gaussian statistics (and linear science at large), they are basically 2: independence and randomness. Now, how many instances do you know in the social sciences in which phenomena, or datapoints, are truly independent from each other and random? But try to take any sample of articles in the social sciences and especially in economics and management, and you will see that Gaussian statistics rules uncontested. Even worse, alternative methods and the underlying weltanschaung (vision of the world) are actively resisted. As Mandelbrot (the inventor of fractal geometry) puts it: “The most diverse attempts continue to be made, to discredit in advance all evidence based on the use of doubly logarithmic graphs. But I think this method would have remained uncontroversial, were it not for the nature of the conclusion to which it leads. Unfortunately, a straight doubly logarithmic graph indicates a distribution that flies in the face of the Gaussian dogma, which long ruled uncontested. The failure of applied statisticians and social scientists to heed Zipf helps account for the striking backwardness of their fields. (Mandelbrot, 1983, 404)” With a colleague from UCLA, Bill McKelvey, I have been studying the misuse of Gaussian statistics and exploring the potential of what is known as Paretian (from Pareto, the Italian economist/sociologist) science. We find that almost anywhere you look at you find distributions that carry the unmistakable sign of Pareto distributions (also known as Zipf, or power law, these are long-tailed distributions where both mean and variance are unstable or don’t exist.), which scream for a non Gaussian interpretation. More on this in my next blog tag:www.cognitive-edge.com,2008:/blogs/guest//3.901 2008-03-30T23:13:59Z 2008-03-30T23:20:15Z

On the New York Times (March 30) there is an interesting article on micro-projectors “The (micro)projectors may be particularly useful for business presentations — for example, when road warriors need to show a product video to small groups. No coordination...

Pierpaolo Andriani On the New York Times (March 30) there is an interesting article on micro-projectors “The (micro)projectors may be particularly useful for business presentations — for example, when road warriors need to show a product video to small groups. No coordination would be needed to arrange for a screen. Instead, a patch of wall within a cubicle or restaurant could serve for an impromptu presentation. Carolina Milanesi, a research director in London for Gartner, the research firm, says she thinks the microprojectors are most likely to appeal to business travellers who, for example, could use them to beam PowerPoint shows from their smartphones” And: “Insight Media forecasts a substantial and fast-growing market. “We anticipate total sales of more than $2.5 billion by 2012 for the companion models,” Mr. Brennesholtz said, and $1 billion in revenue for projector modules that are integrated into cellphones and other devices”. What is the problem with this prediction? Simple, it ignores exaptation and more generally how new applications emerge. Behind any forecast there is a hidden set of assumptions. In this case the assumption is: a micro-projector is just a tiny projector! Ergo, it will be used in the same way! The newly acquired portability will extend the current applications, not change them. Linear thinking! The disruptive innovation model is a good example of exaptation. Imagine a new technology which underperforms (in Christensen’s language, ‘is not good enough’) the incumbent technology under a set of attributes that current customers value. The new technology cannot compete with the incumbent and will survive only and only if it can find or create a new emerging niche, where its different ‘package of attributes’ turn out to be advantageous. Usually this happens by trial & error. In this way, the disruptive innovation escapes competition by becoming something else. It may eventually become ‘good enough’ to attack the incumbent’s market position from below, that is, from the least demanding customers segment. The incumbent suddenly sees a new player coming out of nowhere. In fact, what was until a moment before a product living in a different non-competitive world, enters into the incumbent’s competitive space. The problem for the incumbent is that the pre-adaptation that makes possible the disruption is usually discovered when the disruption starts, not before! An exaptation! The take-home message is that disruptions are often preceded by a process of application discovery: underperforming technologies survive by creating new niches based on new non-competitive applications. How are the new applications discovered? Well, once prototypes are set free in the market, they will link with the nearly infinite universe of idiosyncratic needs, contexts, wants and combinatorial imagination of users out there. The co-evolutionary process between prototypes and users creates the new application space, it makes the rules of the game as it goes along. So what’s likely to happen with the micro-projectors? That depends on another set of questions? Is the microprojector an underperforming technology? Is it disruptive? Is it going to be exapted into something else? If scaling down causes a change in the way projectors are used, then a microprojector might become something very different from a conventional projector. If this happens, then the last to know (what may happen) will be the experts! If I were in charge of the development and commercialisation of microprojectors, I’d rather give a number of them to a group of highly diverse (cognitively diverse, á la Scott Page) group of people and invite them to play with the microprojectors, link with existing technologies, invent new behaviours (that the MP enables), form communities around the new behaviours, etc. In other words ‘exapt’ the microprojector! tag:www.cognitive-edge.com,2008:/blogs/guest//3.895 2008-03-27T20:48:42Z 2008-03-27T20:58:32Z

Nearly all biological traits and many products for particular markets and functions, began life as something different. Feathers were selected for thermal insulation, microwave ovens started life as radar magnetrons and gin&tonic was a concoction to mask the unacceptable quinine...

Pierpaolo Andriani Nearly all biological traits and many products for particular markets and functions, began life as something different. Feathers were selected for thermal insulation, microwave ovens started life as radar magnetrons and gin&tonic was a concoction to mask the unacceptable quinine taste to British troups in India. The analysis of history of technology and biological evolutions shows that at the root of any adaptive trajectory it is usual for a structure to have been subverted – perverted –from a different function (Gould and Vrba called it “exaptation”). I did a quick review of 19th century innovations and found that about 30% (the real number is likely to be higher) of innovations have an exaptational origin. Generally exaptation has been regarded as contingent, serendipitous. But, if, as we think, there are regularities, if not rules, then the question becomes: can we exploit these regularities to improve innovation? At the heart of the innovative potential of exaptation is the indefinite – rarely made explicit - range of potential functions of existing objects: “At the end of its production a US master sergeant wrote nostalgically of its uses: as seat, pillow, washbasin, cooking pot, nutcracker, tent-peg pounder, wheel chock, and even – with the explosive from an userviceable Claymore mine – popcorn popper.” (Tenner, 2004: 253). What was this? The American army helmet. Innovation-by-‘progressive’ adaptation, or the Market-pull model of innovation, is what traditional business schools, and ‘adaptive radiation’ biologists, teach. This is bland, uninteresting, and very incremental. Innovation-by-exaptation is different because the unforeseen connection between an existing tool and a new function (for which the tool was not designed for) creates the new phase space (the microwave industry sector was created by the serendipitous melting of peanut butter in Dr. Spencer’s pocket whilst working on a magnetron in 1946). For a jump to new function, there must be permissive contexts that create effective bridges between old tools and new functions. Perhaps there are driving contexts, contexts that encourage contiguity of form and function, so that exaptation is promoted. Here the bio literature helps: Ecosystem engineering (Jones et al., 1994), niche constructionism (Odling-Smee et al., 2003) and external physiology (Turner, 2002) all show how new feedbacks between organismal traits and meta-environmental factors appear. The earthworm I cited in my previous blog is a classic example. Such niche construction ‘engineer’ species build their own environment by ‘perverting’ environmental factors, they hijack external fluxes of ‘energy’, which they use to build new niches, thereby changing their selective trajectory – and everybody else’s! Niche construction (like the creation of new industrial niche/sectors) starts with an exaptation, then evolves/adapts into a locked dance between the two pairs: exaptation/adaptation and organism/environment (or goods/market: think automobiles/gas stations or mobile phones/towers). What properties of the context are permissive for exaptations? Clearly, a sparse, almost uninhabited region of phase space has few opportunities for the contiguities necessary to establish functional bridges among tools, technologies or indeed species. Exposure to new contexts (projects) favours translation of tools into new functions (‘horizontal’ exaptation), whereas cooptation of tool modules into new architectures (‘vertical’ exaptation) generates new technological families. We claim that network-based recombinant environments, like the Silicon Valleys, the Cities, and the industrial clusters of the world, are so innovative because they exploit the power of exaptation. To conclude: how many academic articles do you know that discuss innovation as exaptation? tag:www.cognitive-edge.com,2008:/blogs/guest//3.890 2008-03-25T18:32:33Z 2008-03-25T23:39:21Z

A few weeks ago Nature published an interesting article on a the memory of slime mould, a common bacterial film. Bacteria form aggregates with emergent properties, one of which is memory. This triggers some interesting considerations, some of which should...

Pierpaolo Andriani article on a the memory of slime mould, a common bacterial film. Bacteria form aggregates with emergent properties, one of which is memory. This triggers some interesting considerations, some of which should not surprise complexity sympathisers. Bacteria are close to zero intelligent agents, like certain financial traders in modern agent based modelling simulations. However, by interacting with each other they form a kind of super-organism and develop memory. ]]> End of story? Well, I think there is hope for at least three reasons. First, in a delightful short book (The music of life) Oxford biologist Denis Noble shows that out of the about 200 types of cells we have in our body, 199 of them ‘misbehave’ and seem to ‘follow’ Lamarck rather than Darwin. There is only one type which ‘obeys’ Darwin (by the way, if you are irritated by the uncountable conservative economists management and consultant gurus who think that evolution is all and only about mutation, selection and retention, this is your book!). The divide between cultural and biological evolution is less wide than it seems. Second, our community of bacteria shows behaviours that go beyond the single bacterium genetic database (not program). Memory is emergent, it’s not in the genes. Likewise, the argument that cultural evolution is different (from biological) because humans have intentions and free will, may be equally moot as the evolution of artefacts and technologies largely takes place at the aggregated level of societies, where individuals’ intentions only play an indirect role. Third, the whole Darwinian evolutionary castle is based on an asymmetry: species adapt to the environment, not viceversa. Humans instead control their environment by cultural evolution. In a splendid book called, ‘the extended organism’, Turner shows how the humble earthworm (which is really a freshwater species) created an environment which works as its external kidneys. This environment is called the soil and agriculture is a fortunate consequence of the activity of the earthworm. But this is exactly what we humans do. We build the environment that suits us. The environmental asymmetry doesn’t apply either to us, nor to many species. Conclusion: as we can not rule out that both technological and biological evolution follow common dynamical patterns, we can at least risk and apply learning from bio evolution to tech evolution and see what we can learn from it. In my next blog I will show one of the interesting results of this method.]]> tag:www.cognitive-edge.com,2008:/blogs/guest//3.885 2008-03-23T09:19:40Z 2008-03-25T23:40:32Z

To bring my guest blogging time to a close here are a couple of ideas from John Kay to mull on: the first is Business lessons from chess grand masters where "People who hold to a single idea, or a...

Jon Kendall http://www.castletonpartners.co.uk John Kay to mull on: the first is Business lessons from chess grand masters where "People who hold to a single idea, or a fixed design, generally lose in chess, as they lose in battle, in business and in economics."]]> obliquity: achieving goals by not heading for them directly. Obliquity chimes in nicely with Dave's practice of never asking a direct question when gathering narrative material. In summary: "Obliquity is characteristic of systems that are complex, imperfectly understood, and change their nature as we engage with them." Pip! Pip!]]> tag:www.cognitive-edge.com,2008:/blogs/guest//3.881 2008-03-21T08:11:45Z 2008-03-21T08:57:50Z

Ben Ramalingam of ALNAP was kind enough to get in touch with a link to a working paper he co-authored: "Exploring the science of complexity - ideas and implications for development and humanitarian efforts". I confess that so far I...

Jon Kendall http://www.castletonpartners.co.uk ALNAP was kind enough to get in touch with a link to a working paper he co-authored: "Exploring the science of complexity - ideas and implications for development and humanitarian efforts". I confess that so far I have only skimmed it but it seems really worth a read if you have any interest in developing your ability to take part in creating change. The context is international aid, but as with Jake Chapman's paper on UK governmental policy making the diligent application of control freakery and recipe driven programmes shines through like a stream of bat's piss, as Monty Python would say. ]]> here or here.]]> tag:www.cognitive-edge.com,2008:/blogs/guest//3.879 2008-03-20T08:39:57Z 2008-03-20T09:11:28Z

Johnnie Moore passes on a cracking story that does a great job of capturing the (sometimes tiny) gap between control freaks/celebrity chefs and learners. Unfortunately I'm also reminded of a little challenge I talked myself out of a couple of...

Jon Kendall http://www.castletonpartners.co.uk Johnnie Moore passes on a cracking story that does a great job of capturing the (sometimes tiny) gap between control freaks/celebrity chefs and learners. Unfortunately I'm also reminded of a little challenge I talked myself out of a couple of years back when he put out an invite for a series of improv workshops. Ideal practice for consultant as learner and participant I said to myself - and then bottled it, although, thinking back, there was an urgent need to clean out the goldfish tank every Tuesday evening for three months so perhaps I shouldn't be too hard on myself. So on the assumption that public commitment is harder to back out from - do you have any plans for a repeat Johnnie? ]]> tag:www.cognitive-edge.com,2008:/blogs/guest//3.877 2008-03-19T09:09:59Z 2008-03-19T09:54:29Z

Force field analysis, derived from what Lewin termed 'field theory', is often bandied around as a tool to support a change initiative. If you browse the various resources available you'll discover that analysing the forces for and against the change...

Jon Kendall http://www.castletonpartners.co.uk Force field analysis, derived from what Lewin termed 'field theory', is often bandied around as a tool to support a change initiative. If you browse the various resources available you'll discover that analysing the forces for and against the change creates a couple of options: reduce the strength of forces opposing or increase the forces pushing. ]]> for the change. Maybe it's another indicator that change is seen as a process that begins only when the 'decide' stage of OODA has been completed. To put it another way - if you look up "goal setting" on google you'll see that there is a lot of emphasis on establishing whether or not the goal is SMART. Its much harder to find any information on how to arrive at the substance of the goal - which is a bit like making sure the wallpaper is aligned vertically and stuck down nicely and not bothering about pattern, colour, texture and how it fits with your living space. ]]> tag:www.cognitive-edge.com,2008:/blogs/guest//3.876 2008-03-18T21:34:05Z 2008-03-18T21:47:29Z

System Failure by Jake Chapman was initially published in 2001 and updated in 2004 - the focus is on the failure of public policy making and makes a thoroughly argued case for more learning and less control....

Jon Kendall http://www.castletonpartners.co.uk System Failure by Jake Chapman was initially published in 2001 and updated in 2004 - the focus is on the failure of public policy making and makes a thoroughly argued case for more learning and less control. ]]> tag:www.cognitive-edge.com,2008:/blogs/guest//3.873 2008-03-17T12:26:18Z 2008-03-17T12:39:41Z

First of all – apologies for this not appearing by the tomorrow mentioned in the first entry; main excuse is I’ve been thinking, which almost always means delays. Anyway, in the previous entry I was making the case for those...

Jon Kendall http://www.castletonpartners.co.uk David Kolb’s (or Kurt Lewin’s if you prefer) process of experiential learning. Given that Kolb defines learning as “the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience” it’s intriguing to note the apparent lack of enthusiasm for applying his principles in the change/KM industries. ]]> Boyd. The pitch: if your environment is complex learning is best viewed as a process for creating new knowledge than a method of perpetuating existing knowledge. So we are talking learning more as OODA and less as lessons learned. And what makes the sense making perspective so worthwhile is that the perspectives and tools offered provide a way to work with people on the observe and orient side of the equation – up until now the weight of consultancy products and services has been overwhelmingly biased towards decide and act (control freak and celebrity chef). And if you allow observation and orientation to become equals with decide and act in processes like goal setting, strategy formulation, coaching, performance review and feedback they become more like conversations between peers than a managed set of manoeuvres towards a predetermined end. ]]> tag:www.cognitive-edge.com,2008:/blogs/guest//3.863 2008-03-13T11:44:58Z 2008-03-13T11:54:45Z

If you’re involved in organisational change you’ll be aware that - like reincarnation - four box models are making a big comeback at the moment. I thought I’d use my guest blog opportunity to run through a few that seem...

Jon Kendall http://www.castletonpartners.co.uk If you’re involved in organisational change you’ll be aware that - like reincarnation - four box models are making a big comeback at the moment. I thought I’d use my guest blog opportunity to run through a few that seem pertinent from a change perspective. And where better to begin than with Cynefin? After all, once you strip away the squiggly bits, ditch that awkward disorder space and straighten a few lines you have a proper looking four box model: COMPLEX: “learners and participants”COMPLICATED: “celebrity chefs” CHAOTIC: “moving in mysterious ways”SIMPLE: “control freaks” A great improvement – but so what? Well, assuming that we are interested in creating change, the so what is to speculate about the forms of consultancy that align with the Cynefin domains in order to characterise the sort of skills and mindsets we might need in order to be effective – basically a bit of sense making from a practitioner perspective. The simple territory is the land of best practice – what we know we should be doing. The consultancy style that best reflects this domain is “control freak” – after all no one is arguing about what should be done it’s more a matter of cajoling them into doing it. Examples include health and safety, quality systems in all their guises – especially where processes are documented in endless folders. I may have a slightly prejudiced view but, in the UK at least, this seems to attract ex members of the armed forces or people spawned out of organisations with a reputation for success in a particular area e.g. Dupont on safety. Maybe an area for implementing change but not much to offer from a change creating point of view. Moving on to complicated – the land of “celebrity chefs” and recipe driven change. I think the connection with food here runs deep – fortunes are being made daily by transforming the basic discipline of weight management into an elaborate process that requires expert guidance. The art of the celebrity chef is to make the recipe simple enough to explain but sufficiently difficult in practice for you to conclude you need a bit of assistance – whether or not the meal is right for you is another matter again. In organisational change terms I’m thinking of things like balanced scorecard, business process reengineering, any form of government led intervention in the UK (increasing literacy, reducing teenage pregnancy rates), leadership development programmes, multicultural awareness, culture change, blah, blah, blah. The underlying belief here is that organisational change can be understood – and if you understand change maybe you control change. The lack of satisfaction attributed to large scale change initiatives seems to challenge this understanding however. Does acting like a celebrity chef bring anything worthwhile to the change party? The relatively static nature of offerings in the change market for the past few decades suggests not. In the chaotic zone the consultancy model is “moving in mysterious ways” – the messiah who pushes the right button at the right moment. Perfect for those moments of crisis but not much good if you are trying to build a sustainable and resilient organisation. Which brings us to the land of the complex – and given that by definition there is no predictability – the land of consultants as “learners and participants”. We need to act like learners and experimenters in order to discover more about the situation we wish to change and we are participants in the sense that without prior knowledge we don’t have an advantage, or power, over anyone else. So you could say in order to be more effective as a consultant in a complex environment we need to let go of the need to be in a role and start acting more like human beings. More ideas on this to follow tomorrow ]]> tag:www.cognitive-edge.com,2008:/blogs/guest//3.848 2008-02-29T21:30:54Z 2008-03-02T13:21:44Z

Hugh Connor director of social work in the eastern area of N Ireland said to me a couple of years ago that child protection is a very weak chain. He said the links are broken by two things in particular:...

Anne McMurray http://www.annemcmurray.com Hugh Connor director of social work in the eastern area of N Ireland said to me a couple of years ago that child protection is a very weak chain. He said the links are broken by two things in particular: poor professional practice and breakdowns in the relationships between the adults who are meant to be caring for the child or young person. Can't think of an exception to this rule. The chain is fragile in the first place because children have a very weak voice in society. The horrific details emerging about the Jersey children's home this week illustrate the evil abuse of power adults can exercise over children. Imagine if Carlsberg orgainsed alternative family placements for children who cannot live with their natural birth family. Good fostering solutions probably offer close to the ideal. They can provide a personal and close set of relationships where the child can be loved, nurtured and valued. The Carlsberg solution might also use frequent narrative collection to capture the authentic experiences of children. This would alert us to weak signals of unhappiness as well as positive signs of progress. I am about to design and manage a project aimed at improving relationships between foster carers and professional social workers with the aim of creating a truly cooperative culture which the contribution of and role of each party is valued and respected. Strengthening the chain. Children and young people are highly sensitised to atmosphere. They pick up on conflict and fractured relationships betwen the adults on whom they depend. I plan to use anecdote capture from all involved including children and young people. They will tag/index the SMIs and help me develop a survey tool which we can use to take baseline measure of the current culture. The results will be presented back to everyone to diagnose the key issues which need to be addressed by individual behaviour/organisational changes. We will the run this out and repeat in the future to track shifts. Signing off for the week, Thank goodness for Monday Mornings. Without them we would not have the Friday Feeling. Just back from Standing Up at Ravenhill in a gale where Ulster Rugby showed another visiting Welsh team how to play. Thank you Dave for your intellect which has been the engine driving a lot of pioneering and significant developments the last few years and for your generous support to practitioners like me. Keep burning bright. Anne Mc tag:www.cognitive-edge.com,2008:/blogs/guest//3.847 2008-02-28T17:55:06Z 2008-03-02T13:22:15Z

Belfast is beautiful today. Spring is kicking winter into touch. I went out for a run along the river Lagan at lunchtime. I was thinking about a piece in the HBR which I had been reading this morning about medical...

Anne McMurray http://www.annemcmurray.com Belfast is beautiful today. Spring is kicking winter into touch. I went out for a run along the river Lagan at lunchtime. I was thinking about a piece in the HBR which I had been reading this morning about medical diagnostic mistakes due to "poor thinking" and the benefits and risks of what they describe as heuristics. It reminded me of a recent experience. I was asked to facilitate the process of developing a vision for youth justice in N.Ireland. I suggested that we needed to bring the voice of young people into the process. As a result the NIO commissioned a group of young people to go out and talk to other young people about their experiences with the legal system and why young people get into trouble. Their feedback was the kick off session at a two day multi agency event made up of professionals and agencies working in this sector. The young people had prepared thier information and presentaion very well They said the number one reason that young people gave as to why they get into trouble was BOREDOM. At this point a senior professional in the audince interrupted and said that this was wrong because their agency's recent research (done in conjunction with an academic body) had highlighted that drugs and alcohol as the number one reason. The young presenter calmly responded by asking "Why do you think they do drugs and alcohol?" A salutory lesson about how professional entrapment in diagnosing societal issues may lead to misguided interventions which tackle the wrong things. Yesterday I met up with Majella McCloskey who is director of CO3 (Chief Officers Third Sector) in N.Ireland to follow up on the outcomes of Dave's much talked about since Masterclass in Belfast. Majella has really taken on board the power of narrative. She told me that last week there had been a joint dinner of chief officers with public sector leaders in N.Ireland These events are ususally evaluated by classic reaction sheet. This time Majella broke with tradition and asked participants after the event to send her two ancedotes relating to the evening. The first was an email to their chairperson describing ways in which being at the dinner had been beneficial to them. The second was to a peer in another organisation telling them why going to these dinners is not a good use of time. Majella has found the content of the ancedotes which she has been sent rich in information, and very useful for planning future sessions. Kayaking tonight. Rock and Roll. Anne tag:www.cognitive-edge.com,2008:/blogs/guest//3.844 2008-02-27T06:29:27Z 2008-02-27T10:29:20Z

"That was a gorilla I missed..." Have heard a few public sector/third sector leaders in Belfast use this coded phrase this since they were at Dave's Masterclass on the 15th. Gorillas in many guises. Right under our noses. At least...

Anne McMurray http://www.annemcmurray.com "That was a gorilla I missed..." Have heard a few public sector/third sector leaders in Belfast use this coded phrase this since they were at Dave's Masterclass on the 15th. Gorillas in many guises. Right under our noses. At least people now know they are there. A really hectic day yesterday. Started in Armagh in the morning with the Pathclearing project I have been dong for Invest NI - the business and enterprise development agency for N.Ireland. The aim of Pathclearing is to stimulate the business support network in N. Ireland to become more integrated and differentiated in regard to how it supports and signposts female enterpreneurs to the right sources of help and assistance. We know from research that the business support system here is fragmented and difficult for potential users to navigate. We also know that many women tend to develop deep ties of friendship and family networks rather than the weak ties necesary to sustain extensive and diverse business opportunity networks. I was presenting the results of a NI wide social network survey analsysis we have been doing on the business support system. We worked with Flemming Madson (a cool Dane) from Onalytica, London (www.onalytica.com) who provided the online social network survey design, analysis and support. Excellent work. We did a baseline survey in January 2007 and have repeated it in Janaury 2008 to see how the network has developed or changed - which of course it has. We have been stimulating network development during the last 12 months using a range of techniques including the set up of the Pathclearing Google Group which now has 200 members from business support organisations. They create value and mutual business benefits by the regular exchange of ideas, information, services, knowledge and questions. The report of the work will be available in April and I will be presenting it at a conference on the 30th April in Belfast. Spent the afternoon in Belfast running an The Idea Innovation workshop for female entreprenerus which is great fun. The design is based partly on the core prinicples of innovation which Dave taught me: starvation of resources, pressure of time and access to alternative perspectives. We are running these for women entrepreneurs across N.Ireland who want to find new business ideas. Left at 5pm to find 7 missed calls on my mobile and discovered that my other innovation and female entrepreneur programme - No Limits - which involves mentors from Babson College in Boston USA video conferencing (to provide alternative perspectives) with NI business women had hit a few snags on the first run due to time zone differences. Got it resolved and evening sessions went very well. Isn't SKYPE fantastic. Finished the day at a church leaders meeting where among the agenda items was an important one for the Presbyterian Church in Ireland to do with ensuring that the validity of women's ordination and their leadership is not undermined by the use (or in my view abuse) of the "conscience clause" by some male ministers...Time to sort it. Still standing up. Anne