Stemming the loss of great thinkers

We each have different ways of thinking and during the current run-up to the general election in the UK, we are all being bombarded with different points of view.  No matter what the issue - the economy, climate change, health, security, defence, education and so on - there will be a plethora of views as to what are the pressing issues and how they should be tackled.  Very often the political narratives include an abundance of metrics and statistics, accompanied by simple strategies to cure our societal ills.  But it’s all about competing points of view, albeit portrayed as ‘facts’, and when politicians state their opinions, they reflect their unstated political agendas and biases.

In recent years I have become very interested in the way people think, including, of course, my own thought processes.  We ought to know more about our own minds than the grey matter of others and very importantly, the history that influenced our personal agendas and biases.  My early education up to my mid teens, was a mixture of arts and sciences but like all education systems at that time, I was encouraged to form a strong underpinning understanding of ‘rational thinking’.  I believe rationality still forms a firm foundation for children’s learning.

At the age of 16, I was asked to decide whether to pursue an ‘arts’ or ‘science’ learning path - ‘fuzzy’ versus ‘techie’.  There was no professional careers advice or consultation with others and I chose the ‘techie’ route.  Today’s acronym for my post-16 education is STEM - science, technology, engineering and mathematics, which led me into a satisfying career in engineering, business management and consulting, in that order.  STEM and rationality go together hand-in-hand and certainly in my early years in design and development of signal and data processing systems, I never questioned logical thinking.  For me it was the only way of thinking.  I loved the world of truth tables, Venn diagrams, Boolean algebra, binary and linear thinking, etc, as well as clever mathematical ‘tricks’ such as Fourier and Laplace transforms.    Some of my friends and family couldn’t understand the pleasure I gained from my esoteric activities but conversely, my colleagues shared my passion for a numerate and logical life.

After I moved into business management, I made the big mistake of believing I could apply engineering, mathematical and logical reasoning to the complexities of human systems.  Unfortunately, it was many years later before I realised the error of my ways.  Ironically, many of my ‘non-STEM’ management colleagues also revelled in a numerate, linear, logical-thinking environment, which I guess is hardly surprising given the simplistic financial focus of the corporate world.  Nothing has a chance of being believed unless it can be represented by numbers on a spreadsheet.  If a CEO commits to doubling the company’s turnover in five years, there might be a few wry smiles from market analysts and investors.  If the optimism is supported by a wodge of P&L and cash flow forecasts, the share price will go up overnight!  In their book ‘The Challenge of Uncertainty’, Humberto Mariotti and Cristina Zauhy, highlight the human symbiosis with data and I can relate to that.  You don’t have to be from a STEM background to be data-driven.  Throughout society, data is seen as a product of ‘objectivity’, even though as ‘subjects’ we all, by definition, live in a subjective world.  

It wasn’t just data that excited me in the commercial world but also the focus on linear modelling of business processes in order to re-engineer key operations with the aim of achieving dramatic performance improvement……..at least that was until I saw the light!  I don’t claim sole responsibility for the case study I am about to describe because I was aided and abetted by some very respectable consultants!  I initiated a business improvement programme in an engineering business that I headed.  We convinced ourselves that by adopting lean principles, we could, through efficiency improvements, triple the sales turnover of the company and that was a conservative estimate!  We established a core team, involving staff at all levels and disciplines within the company.  They chose a production process as a pilot project and did a detailed analysis of the sub-processes, including the flow of parts and information, from an order coming into the factory to finished products being delivered to the customer.  Their (erroneous!) assumption was that it was a linear process with plenty of potential for efficiency improvement that could be easily modelled before implementation, efficiency improvements could be predicted and performance could be measured with a set of easily understandable metrics.  It was lean manufacturing in action!

The enthusiasm was infectious.  The business was going through a difficult trading period and morale was low.  So presentations to the workforce on a simple panacea for a turnaround had been extremely well received.  People wanted to be part of the pilot project and even those who weren’t directly involved were keen to offer their support.  The re-engineering of the production process was based on the introduction of lean techniques, with the primary objective of optimising the workflow and for a while it worked!  Production times were cut, costs went down and quality was improved….the ‘machine’ was lean!  But therein lies the problem.  It wasn’t a ‘machine’ and shouldn’t have been treated as a simple (or even complicated) mechanistic process.

I could write a book on this experience, but I won’t!  Suffice to say, the best talent was attracted to the pilot project diverting some valuable attention away from the remaining 90% of the company’s ‘business as usual’, those ‘left behind’ felt demotivated, the new process was too slick for the amount of business available so sales effort was also diverted away from ‘the 90%’ to keep the new lean ‘machine’ fed and there were other equally negative unintended consequences.  The sad thing is that as a champion for change in the company at that time, intuitively I wasn’t convinced the initiative wouldn’t be problem free.  Remember the popular maxim, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  But I got carried along with the euphoria and desperately wanted it to succeed.  There was, however, too much time and effort convincing ourselves that some simple tools would solve a simple problem and lead to some impressive predicted results.  We had failed to take into account the systemic effects of our isolated production process on the rest of the organisation and the fact that anything involving humans becomes complex, which can’t be modelled.  The result is a lack of predictability, i.e. uncertainty. 

So to conclude, I am not knocking lean manufacturing.  I am not knocking STEM.  I am not knocking rational and logical thinking.  I am not knocking the use of simple models and tools.  I am not knocking the use (rather than abuse!) of metrics.  But I AM knocking an education system, which, from an early age, encourages us to view a complex world with a simplistic mindset.  We need to balance logic and analysis with intuition and synthesis.

As ever, Einstein was right!

I'm only human after all....

I’m only human after all….

I can’t get Rag’n’Bone Man’s song ‘Human’ out of my mind right now.  Songs come and go in my cerebral matter but this one’s been around for a few days and it doesn’t want to go.  The lyrics are simple and pertinent to many of the challenges we face.  I’m thinking in particular of the political shambles in the UK driven by the Brexit saga that cuts across traditional mainstream political divisions and is an example of humans displaying their worst individual and collective behaviours.

In my opinion (three words that should preface every statement I make!), one of the worst human traits is not to accept the subjective world we live in and suffer the delusion that ‘facts’ exist.  The assertion of ‘facts’ can be extremely divisive.  So, for example, when politicians assert “….what the people want is….” and proceed to describe an outcome that I and many others definitely do NOT want, the hackles rise and a bad situation is made worse.  But politicians are “only human after all” and therein lies the problem.

History will probably portray Brexit as a good example of a highly complex human-driven system, from which hopefully there will emerge some lessons learned.  Although that’s probably wishful thinking because if we learned lessons from history, why do we still have wars, famine, inequality, crime and so on?  The answer to that rhetorical question could be….we’re “only human after all” and the purpose of society is what it does - adapted from Stafford Beer’s: “The purpose of a system is what it does.”  Known by some as POSIWID.

I would hope that one of the lessons learned from the Brexit catastrophe, which is a long way off reaching a conclusion, is that there are no simple solutions to highly complex problems.  Sound bites don’t work. So a simple Leave/Remain referendum to establish the UK’s future relationship with the European Union, raised many more questions than it was designed to answer and destabilised a relatively stable political system.  

Returning to the lyrics of the song:

“Take a look in the mirror

And what do you see

Do you see it clearer

Or are you deceived

In what you believe

'Cause I'm only human after all

You're only human after all

Don't put the blame on me

Don't put your blame on me.”

A Union, such as the European Union, is a highly complex organisation that cannot be understood by making simple observations of its constituent parts.  An analogy is water, which is made up of hydrogen and oxygen.  But studying the properties of the two dry gases does not explain the wetness of water.  Also, when we observe, we are part of the observation.  Heinz Von Foerster said: “Objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer.”  So if you don’t like what you see, “don’t put the blame on me, don’t put your blame on me.”

For me as someone who enjoys systems thinking, Brexit has been and continues to be, a welcome diversion from theory to practice.  It’s just a pity that what appears to be the current direction of travel isn’t where I want to go but who knows where the complex twists and turns will take us?!

Innovation - does perspective matter?

I attended and was a speaker at an excellent event titled ‘The Innovators’ Assembly’.  As the title suggests, the theme for the day was ‘Innovation’.  A range of subjects was covered and from a personal point of view, I benefited from the nuggets of knowledge that I picked up from the impressive diverse experience of the speakers and the other attendees.

I very often find that it is only when I reflect on what I have learnt that I feel inclined to explore further some of the thought-provoking gems of the day and there was one sound bite, in particular, from one of the speakers that I have considered, which prompted me to publish this blog post.

“Research is the process of turning Money into Knowledge.  Innovation is the process of turning Knowledge into Money.”

It’s snappy and easy to remember, so what’s wrong with that?  Well in my opinion, the repetition of the noun “Money” devalues the message - excuse the pun!  I know that from a business perspective, it would be irresponsible to ignore the financial perspective but from the wider societal point of view, I do not believe profitability should be the primary driver of innovation.

Profit is like the air we breathe. We need air to live, but we don’t live to breathe.  Money is a medium of exchange that has been invented by the human species to do transactions and money per se should not be the driver for the ability of humans to demonstrate innovative behaviour.  The innovation bandwagon is the star of the show at the moment in the world of commerce.  The language of innovation is so common that one wonders where it has been hiding until now.  I am amused at some of the strap-lines that can be seen on, for example, the sides of lorries, such as ‘Delivering Innovative Supply Chain Solutions’ whereas not so long ago, the descriptor would more likely have been ‘Transport’!

Harvard psychologist Shawn Achor says that the happiest people are those that express themselves and create everyday.  Whether this is a song, a soufflé, a spreadsheet, or whatever, the choice is yours.  The point made is that innovation is an innate individual and collective competence, which for most is a joy to demonstrate.

Returning to the commercial perspective, businesses are complex adaptive systems whose survival depends upon doing the right things.  If companies have goals that align with societal needs and they employ their intrinsic desire for innovation to maintain competitive advantage, they will generally survive.  Oh and by the way, they are likely to make money too!

The title poses a question ‘Innovation - does perspective matter?’  I don’t think it does, it’s a given for survival, in the same way as the air that we breathe keeps us alive.

That’s my thought for the day and my thanks go to Active Insight, the organisers of The Innovators’ Assembly, for stimulating it!

WHAT versus HOW to think

There's always something that prompts a blog post.  This time it was the World Cup Group G football match between Belgium and England.  It was followed on the UK's ITV channel by the programme Good Evening Britain, co-hosted by Piers Morgan and Suzannah Reid.  The guests included the actor Danny Dyer and the leader of the UK Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn.

The main purpose of the show was to judge the mood of the country following the football match but it inevitably digressed on to other topics.  One digression was the fact that Danny Dyer's daughter, Dani, was a contestant on the programme Love Island.  I have never watched Love Island so I cannot judge it but it is the type of programme that Piers Morgan felt was not the sort of show befitting of Dani Dyer's talents.  Danny Dyer admitted he did have concerns but said as a parent "I've always believed you don't teach them what to think, you teach them how to think."  This profound statement stopped Piers Morgan on his adversarial track and Jeremy Corbyn could be observed to nod sagely.  It got me thinking too and hence this blog post!

Parents do have a tremendous influence on their offsprings' values, which obviously affect their subsequent thought processes and particularly the way they consciously or subconsciously develop mental models as they navigate their way through the challenges that life throws at them.  Mental models are processes that we employ to help us break down complex issues into understandable and organisable chunks.  The problem is, however, that attempting to understand complexity by breaking it down into building blocks of simplicity, often doesn't work!

The picture at the beginning of this post, illustrates an elephant being examined by six blind men.  The illustration comes from the parable of Blind Men and an Elephant, which originated in the ancient Indian subcontinent.  Each man has a different perception of what the object is based on what he is currently feeling and crucially, making comparisons with previous experiences.  So the end of the trunk feels like a snake, the tusk feels like a spear, the ear feels like a fan, the body feels like a wall, the tail feels like a rope and the leg feels like a tree.  The elephant is so big that none of the observers recognises the interconnections between the individual chunks of simplistic understanding and therefore, the realisation of the elephant is not apparent.

Returning to Danny Dyer's statement on HOW to think, if parents teach children the importance of trying to understand the bigger picture (the whole) before making judgements on easy-to-define chunks of knowledge (the parts), then his statement really was profound.  That said, the WHAT and the HOW can be inextricably linked and the parent has to try to decouple his or her WHAT from the HOW that is being taught.  If the blind daughter of the blind man feeling the elephant's trunk, asked him WHY he thought it was a snake, he should tell her that is his opinion based on his experience.  He should suggest she asks the other men and maybe others who are not blind, for their opinions.  That way she might soon conclude it was an elephant!

So the parental teaching of HOW to think must include the fact that parents, like all human beings, only have opinions and anyone seeking the 'truth' must be prepared to explore many opinions and try to understand the reasons behind the others' judgements, by asking WHY.  Even then, their understanding of the 'truth' will only be yet another opinion but at least it should be well informed.  Richard Dawkins, the renowned scientist, wrote a letter to his 10-year-old daughter explaining the problems of living in an irrational world.  He warned her about three bad reasons for believing anything - tradition, authority and revelation.  Without evidence, you should't believe something just because it's always been done that way (tradition), or because the person who told you about it is very important (authority), or because someone who believes it had a 'gut feeling' (revelation).

"I've always believed you don't teach them what to think, you teach them how to think."  (Danny Dyer)

Yes Danny, but it's really not that simple!

Productivity - The Regional Perspective

Throughout my business life and particularly when I transitioned from engineering design and development to business leadership and management, productivity has become a well-used word in my vocabulary.  In my mid-career years, I was obsessed with it, driven by it and tried to excite others with the opportunities to improve it.  It was only when I started to look back on those years, which was a time when I thought I knew it all (!), I now realise what little impact business leaders and government policy makers can have on solving the productivity conundrum.

So what's the conundrum?  From the UK's perspective, the puzzle is to understand why the national productivity is lower than many other global players, including Germany, France, US and Italy.  Also, within the UK, it is equally puzzling to explain why London and the south east of England are the only two regions in the UK where the productivity is higher than the national average.  The danger is that when politicians get there teeth into issues and data like this, which they have done in every government that I can remember, they come up with 'solutions' to the problem, which regrettably subsequently become tomorrow's (bigger!) problems.

The fallacious argument in its simplest form, is that improving regional productivity, outside London and the south east of England, will improve national productivity....conundrum solved!....if only it was that simple!!  High profile projects aimed at boosting regional economic growth, like the Northern Powerhouse, are, in my opinion, a political ruse, which may benefit some individuals and companies (notably financial institutions and property developers) but are unlikely to address the productivity problem....if, indeed, it is a problem.

So is regional productivity really a problem or is it merely an issue to keep governments and civil servants busy whilst formulating and enacting policies aimed at improving the wealth of the nation.  I have lived and worked in the North West, South West, South East and London regions of England in the UK.  Productivity became a part of my parlance in all my business management roles but tended to dominate my thinking after leading a management buy-out of a medium-sized engineering company - part of a category of businesses generically known as SMEs (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises) - in the South West of England.  It was (and still is!) a great company in North Devon but was not performing as well as it could or should.  Having a financial interest in a company certainly focusses the mind on productivity!

Managing a business in a remote corner of the UK can be a very lonely affair because professional and business networking is more difficult compared with metropolitan environments, particularly those with 'clusters' of synergistic companies, for example the software companies in the Thames Valley and the financial services companies in the City of London.  I made the effort to engage with other businesses in the region through different organisations to help the development of the company.  This proved to be a delicate balancing act between the tangible benefits that the regional network brought to the business and the negative effect of the diversion of my time away from day-to-day management of the company.  One thing that soon became apparent to me was the region did have a distinctive 'culture' that had a strong and direct impact on business strategy.  In the words of Peter Drucker: "Culture eats strategy for breakfast."  It's almost impossible to change the culture of a company, let alone an entire region!

During my quest for business support, I sampled many of the offerings to SMEs and the purpose of this blog post is not to provide a comparative assessment but rather to focus on what I learnt from experience.  Regional industrial strategies, whether or not they are supported by government, will not affect the underlying culture of a region.  Many regions, like the South West of England, feel insecure because of their remoteness from London.  Many companies, like the one I ran in North Devon, also have a culture of insecurity because they operate as 'islands of enterprise' without the benefits of like-minded neighbours.  A hi-tec SME in a provincial market town, draws little or no benefit from being part of a local business community dominated by shops, hairdressers, estate agents, agricultural suppliers and hotels.  The downsides are manifested in many ways but particularly in career development.  A young engineer working in the SME will soon run out of in-house career advancement options and will be forced to move from the town, and probably from the region, if he or she wants to progress.  The same feeling of entrapment would not be felt by an employee of a company in closer proximity to the capital.

So I soon learnt that even government investment does not change regional identity.  Regional productivity is just one characteristic of a complex social and business cultural mix, but that doesn't stop governments wading in and creating organisations to administer the investment of public money in regional economic development programmes.  The organisations include the former Training & Enterprise Councils, the former Business Links, the former Learning & Skills Councils, the former Regional Development Agencies and the current Local Enterprise Partnerships....to name but a few!  The proliferation of "former" is because every time there is a change of government, the previous government's organisations are axed and a new brand comes in, often with the same people.

There are some good committed people working hard and trying to make their regions more productive but in my opinion, in many cases it's like shovelling water uphill because culture, like gravity, is something we have to live with and exploit the positives rather than try to change the unchangeable negatives.  The positive side of any social culture is that there are people who genuinely want to make a difference and if they can be helped, rather that hindered, by the support of regional government-funded agencies, they can bring tangible benefits to businesses.  I recall two excellent examples of groups spawned in the early years of the new millennium in the South West of England. 

  

The South West Manufacturing Advisory Service (SWMAS) provided specialist support to SMEs particularly through the introduction of lean manufacturing.  Despite being severely threatened by the closure of the regional MAS organisations by the current government, it has carried on regardless and continues to offer an excellent service.

Beacon South West brought together companies from a diverse range of industries, and with a proven track record of success, to promote good practice, share ideas and exchange experience.  Sadly Beacon South West did not survive the wielding of the axe by the current government.

Although regional productivity was implicit in the raison d'êtra for both SWMAS and Beacon, it was not the driving force per se.  The companies they supported were generally looking for 'best practice', which could improve individual company productivity but not necessarily that of the region.  Two 'lifestyle' businesses might sit happily alongside each other servicing the needs of a small town but if one suddenly becomes more productive, driving costs and prices down, it could force the other one out of business!

So my message on regional productivity is simple....it's not simple!  Regions are not independent, they are interdependent, just like nations are interdependent.  Yes Britain does depend on Europe and Europe depends on the rest of the world....despite what the Brexiteers might tell you!  Let's accept the fact that productivity is not a sensible guide to the economic 'health' of any region and focus instead on helping businesses to achieve their goals, whilst giving them confidence in the longevity of regional support.

Maybe we'll only see the light when the lights go out.

It's a while since I've published a blog post.  I have been put off recently because, apart from spending much of my time on other commitments, I felt my posts were tending to cover well-trodden ground.  Whilst that's true, if all bloggers and authors were to follow that axiom, nothing would ever get published!  So the theme of this post is our inability to take climate change seriously and take the appropriate actions NOW to try to prevent a global disaster.

It's certainly very well-trodden ground but when I hear some world leaders, who shall remain nameless, questioning the established scientific evidence for climate change, I despair.  The good news, of course is that there are still many influential members of the global community who do see the need to reduce rapidly the use of fossil fuels.  Many of the global movers-and-shakers, however, are totally committed to year-on-year economic growth and that's a problem.  Economic growth requires population growth, which in turn feeds economic growth.  So it's a vicious or virtuous cycle, depending on your perspective.  From the perspective of those of us who worry about the future of the planet, it is definitely vicious!  From the politician's perspective who is more concerned with growth in gross domestic product (GDP), it's a virtuous cycle.

According to the United Nations Population Fund, human population grew from 1.6 billion to 6.1 billion people during the course of the 20th century.  During that time emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the leading greenhouse gas, grew 12-fold.  Yes it's a non-linear relationship, which is scary!  So we need to focus on sustainable development rather than economic growth per se, which is anathema to capitalism as we know it.  An excellent article in The Guardian showed the impact we can make on reducing greenhouse emissions by birth control. 

"The greatest impact individuals can have in fighting climate change is to have one fewer child, according to a new study that identifies the most effective ways people can cut their carbon emissions.

The next best actions are selling your car, avoiding long flights, and eating a vegetarian diet. These reduce emissions many times more than common green activities, such as recycling, using low energy light bulbs or drying washing on a line. However, the high impact actions are rarely mentioned in government advice and school textbooks, researchers found."

Of course, changes in population from birth control take decades to show meaningful results.  So, in my opinion, we need a three-prong attack:

1. Governments and individual citizens to take a responsible attitude towards climate change, including curbing CO2 emissions and limiting global temperature increase to no greater than the levels agreed as part of the Paris Accord.
2. Governments and individual citizens to take a responsible attitude towards birth control.
3. Education, education, education!  The responsibilities we have to the planet that we and the other 8.7 million species share, must form part of the essential knowledge base of all individuals and should, therefore, be a foundation of the basic learning curriculum.

Easily said!  The problem is we are running out of time to prevent catastrophic environmental consequences from more than two centuries of neglect of the planet, since the Industrial Revolution. 

Well trodden ground?  Maybe but there is plenty more treading to be done and no time to discuss the size of the boots! 

Not for the Uninitiated

So the UK has voted for Brexit.  That's the will of the people!  There has been much written and spoken on the outcome of the referendum and I have no wish to continue that specific debate in this post.  However, the Brexit issue has prompted me to concentrate my recent thinking on the role of referenda generally within the nation's governance.  In particular, are we as citizens adequately qualified to make sensible judgements on highly complex socio-economic problems?

Let's take a look at the issue of competence and the role of experts.  There's something rather quaint about making decisions on important issues by combining the expertise of 'experts' with the pragmatism of 'the people'.  The justice system for determining guilt or innocence is a classic example.  Richard Dawkins in his essay "Trial by Jury", questions why in a court of law, twelve jurors selected from 'ordinary people' are preferred to a single 'expert' judge when determining important verdicts affecting people's lives.  From his logical analysis, he concludes:

"And should I be charged with a serious crime, here's how I want to be tried.  If I know myself to be guilty, I'll go with the loose cannon of a jury, the more ignorant, prejudiced and capricious the better.  But if I am innocent........, please give me a judge."

Basically, Dawkins argues that better judgements are likely to be achieved by an 'expert' judge than by a collection of well-intentioned, but collectively influenced, 'amateur' jurors.  In fact, he goes further to suggest that multiple and independent judges might provide an even more reliable verdict.  That seems to make sense to an amateur like me!  " Trial by Jury" is one of the essays included in Richard Dawkins' book, "A Devil's Chaplain", published in 2003 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Devil's_Chaplain.  It is a good read and I recommend it to the enquiring reader.

Let's extend Dawkins' reasoning to referenda.  Why should a slight majority verdict of a sample of the voting public (they don't all vote) produce a better decision than a consensus of independent experts?  I ask this rhetorical question in good faith particularly when the outcomes of so many referenda are rarely resounding YESs or resounding NOs, which begs yet another rhetorical question, why not just toss a coin and save the vast expenditure of an ineffective (in my opinion) democratic process?  I am really not intending to be flippant.  I have a genuine concern about the validity of any decision-making process that purports to produce a simple one-dimensional answer from a multi-dimensional complex problem, particularly when the process is so often underpinned by a plethora of at best inaccurate, and at worst false, arguments.

I am not intending to rubbish our political processes but merely suggesting that some highly complex issues are definitely not for the uninitiated but should perhaps be left to our democratically elected institutions.  Indeed, why not entrust major decisions to elected MPs, guided by cross-party select committees and drawing on the expertise of suitably qualified experts, within and outside government?  I thought that's what parliamentary democracy was all about!

Whether something is right or wrong is a matter of judgement, whether it is correct or incorrect will become apparent in time.