Thinkers vs Doers - breaking down the barriers.

In a world facing so much political, economic and social uncertainty, surely the human species can harness its collective knowledge and experience to address some of the challenges?  Can we turn to historical events and learn from those experiences?  Do we spend too much time in deep thought and analysis, rather than evaluating real and tangible solutions to problems?

Thinking and doing are symbiotic processes, so it’s wrong to suggest a rigid division between the two mental models.  As we think, we draw on practical experiences.  Likewise, when engaged in new practical activities, our neural processes are constantly absorbing information and influencing the tasks.  That said, as I muse through my posts over the years, I notice a strong bias towards thinking rather than doing.  Likewise, if I reflect on many of the works of eminent contributors to discussion platforms such as LinkedIn, a similar pattern can be observed.  Why is this?  Well I guess it’s because it’s easier to think rather than to do and crucially, abstract thoughts don’t bear the weight of accountability compared with the real world of implementation, because they’re not visible in a real form.

A typical bridge between thinking and doing, is planning and this is where the fun really starts!  A concept can become a product, but it might not be the one that was originally planned.  A disease might be exterminated with an antidote, but an unexpected side-effect might be more harmful than the original malaise.  An architect might design a super environmentally friendly housing estate, but planning permission could be blocked as a result of objections from the local NIMBY community.  So bridges can often become barriers and the best laid plans may fall apart!

Over the past couple of decades I have tried to improve my knowledge and understanding of systems thinking.  Although the fundamentals are easy to grasp the examples of successful applications to wicked problem solving, are disappointingly rare.  I think that’s because the transitions from thoughts to actions means determining boundaries.  But how can a system have a boundary?  In the words of John Muir: ”When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”  The implicit assumption there, of course, is that the world is a boundary.  Not so, because our planet is an infinitesimal part of the universe.  Therefore we create boundaries to allow our brains to manage the information, and that’s true for Human Intelligence (HI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).  So is true systems thinking achievable?   I don’t think so.

It’s difficult to think in a system context because day-to-day life isn’t like that.  A clock repairer will focus on the components that make up the clock and why, for example, the second hand keeps sticking.  They are unlikely to question the need for a timepiece and how it relates to planetary motion.  So the boundary for the clock ‘system’, in the eyes of the repairer, might be its wooden case.  And the accountability for fixing the sticky hand, sits fairly and squarely with the repairer.  Any systems thinking that might explore hypotheses such as human life without clocks, can be dismissed at this point, even though many organisms live without them.

Honestly, I’m having difficulty knowing how to bring this post to a satisfactory conclusion.  As a species we have demonstrated impressive thinking and doing capabilities over many decades.  Although over the past hundred years, it has been more about development than invention - a car is still a car, a train is still a train, a telephone is still a telephone, a tv is still a tv.  But go back two hundred years and none of them existed.  I guess what we have experienced is that the tools that have assisted thinking, e.g. modelling, simulation, AI, etc, have outpaced the tools that have assisted doing, e.g. manufacturing and process automation.  It’s relatively easy to try out new ideas in a virtual environment, whereas in the 1700s and 1800s, things had to be built in order to test the new concepts, and I do wonder if we spend too much time now pondering all the eventualities, rather than cutting metal and trying out the new product for real.

Now to conclude, let me declare my hand.  In my early engineering career, I generally felt more comfortable in a design, rather than production, environment.  So I would want to have confidence in the design of a product or system before releasing it to production.  I soon learnt, however, that this was not always the most effective way to solve practical problems.  Very often it makes sense to build parts of the system before finalising the overall design.  So the doing proceeds before the thinking is complete.  That way you can iron out some of the risks before scaling up for full production.  The same principle can be applied to solving social problems.

At the time of writing, the UK is considering a social media ban for children under 16.  Whilst the UK is thinking about it, the Australians are doing it, having recently introduced a ban.  This is sort of, but not quite (!), analogous to the previous example of releasing parts of a system for production, in order to evaluate critical parts of a system design.  Why not wait a while and use the Australian experience as a test bed for the UK’s proposed legislation?  It’s the same problem in different territories but it’s not helpful to allow territorial and political boundaries to constrain our thinking……or doing!

It’s food for thought!

Footie - A Masterclass in Complex Adaptive Systems

My interest in football started about seven years ago, strongly influenced by a good friend who is an ardent lifelong Manchester United fan.  My expertise in systems thinking spans several decades, starting with a career in systems engineering and becoming very interested in holistic systems thinking over the past 20 years in various roles.  I enjoy watching football from the comfort of my armchair and I don’t support any particular club.  I might, however, have a temporary allegiance to one of the teams on a match-by-match basis.  I tend to favour the underdogs!  What fascinates me, and increases my enjoyment of the game, is viewing football from a systems perspective.

When discussing systems thinking, I often cite the weather as an archetype of a complex adaptive system that exhibits deterministic chaos.  There is a strong focus on the weather right now, particularly in the context of climate change, and at last the realisation that whilst we can’t control it, we can hopefully influence the direction of travel, e.g. managing anthropogenic carbon emissions to reduce global warming to safe levels.  In the world of football, I believe the same principle applies, outcomes can at best be influenced but not controlled, which is why a team’s performance rarely responds in the way that is expected with short-term ‘fixes’, e.g. appointing a new manager!

The football world generally, and any match specifically, are examples of a complex adaptive system, which can also be chaotic as well as complex.  While teams strive for structure and predictability, the unpredictable nature of human behaviour, environmental factors, and non linear interactions ensure that chaos is an ever-present part of the game.  This balance between order and disorder is what makes football so dynamic and captivating.  I’m not sure, however, that the lack of predictability is fully appreciated by pundits when analysing the performance statistics.

I love stats because I’m a numbers person.  But simple metrics are not the best way to model and understand complex scenarios.  They can be valuable tools for identifying trends and probabilities, but they cannot guarantee outcomes due to the sport’s inherent unpredictability.  If we take, for example, the key performance indicators of Expected Goals (xG), Possession Stats, Shots on Target, Pass Completion Rates, Defensive Stats (Tackles, Interventions), these are usually published on sports apps whilst games are in progress.  It’s interesting to compare the stats with the results and all too often a win is not supported by a set of ‘good’ stats.  For example, high possession is viewed by many pundits as ‘good’ because it implies strong control of the game, but when Leicester won the Premier League title in 2015/16, they averaged 42.4% possession, the lowest of any Premier League champion in recorded history.

Stats in football are powerful tools when used in context, helping with performance analysis, recruitment, and tactics.  However, their abuse often stems from ignoring qualitative factors, overemphasising surface-level numbers, and misrepresenting performance through cherry-picking or small samples.  A balanced approach that combines statistical insights with expert interpretation is crucial for meaningful analysis.

Despite all that……..it’s a great game………Come On You Reds!!!!

Is unpredictability becoming a comfort zone?

 

Life is unpredictable.  Yet we try to search-out security.  And when it doesn’t happen, we acknowledge the unpredictability, which provides a weird sort of comfort.  It’s as though an unpredictable space is a natural comfort zone.

If we look at the world around us from whatever perspective dominates our thinking, we face uncertainty.  Economic instability, climate crisis, war-torn communities, unacceptable gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ - in every desperate scenario the dominant underlying cause is human behaviour.  But the behaviour includes an inability to  clear up the mess we have created and develop a predictable and sustainable norm.  Is the inability a consequence of the limitations of our thought processes, which we might recognise but fail to acknowledge?  But rather than admit failure, we sometimes create a model to explain to ourselves, and others, the complexities of a difficult scenario.

In the system thinking world, a causal loop diagram (CLD) is a widely used tool.  A CLD visualises how different variables in a system are causally related.  They are certainly helpful when trying to understand complex or complicated problems (there is difference) but the two-dimensional, static nature of most CLDs can, at best, only provide a snapshot of a multi-dimensional, dynamic system.  All that being said, the CLDs can provide a comfort zone when faced with unpredictability.

In the world of football, every game is unpredictable.  Pundits can wax lyrical on stats, but stats are backward looking and the future is rarely an extrapolation of the past.  But if experts can’t talk about past form, what else is there to discuss?  And if the results were truly predictable, it would take away the excitement of the games.  There are those who think thy can influence the results; players who touch the turf or say a prayer on their way onto the pitch.  I know one ardent fan who always uses the same urinal before home games - the comfort break and comfort zone both in one place!

The paradox is that the comfort zone of unpredictability is, for many, not very comfortable because there is always the thought of an eventual negative outcome.  We tend to worry about what might go wrong rather than be excited by what might go right.  Worrying is using your imagination to create something you don’t want.  If we think of the unpredictable state being analogous to an airport departure lounge but with more unknowns, we know where we want to go but accept there are uncertainties.  In the ‘real life’ departure lounge, our flight could be postponed, cancelled or, in the worst case, experience a mid-flight fault.  But the stats tell us it is highly probable it will leave on time and arrive at the planned destination, on schedule.  In our ‘imaginary’ departure lounge, we tend to anticipate our destination will not be where we want to be and will leave us in an undesirable state.  So, for example, the football fan’s team will loose a crucial match and face relegation; rather than hammering the opposition and continuing their journey to the top of the league.

So throughout life, we hop in and out of ‘departure lounges’, as a temporary respite from what we believe will be undesirable outcomes.  Maybe we should be more positive in our thinking and focus on the potential opportunities, rather than the problems - it’s a pity I don’t practice what I preach!

The Creative Edge

 

In my familiar stomping ground of business and technology, the term ‘Creative Edge’ is often used to sell an organisation’s capability.  But what does it mean and how is it achieved? 

Let’s start with ‘Creative’.  In the business context, it embraces originality, innovation, visioning and transformation,  In many high-tech companies, such as Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon, creativity is the name of the game.  So what about ‘Edge’?  In the same context, it means superiority, which, for the companies mentioned, goes hand-in-hand with creativity.  They feed off each other.

There are many companies, however, that  might depend on a range of technologies, old and new, embedded in highly critical systems and infrastructures, for example rail transportation networks.  These will configure products and systems that have significantly longer lives than, for example, Apple products. For these companies, ‘Edge’ is just as important as in the fast-moving information technology sector, but the ‘Creative’ culture is quite different.

Whereas a Microsoft engineer will be motivated to design and get to market, products and systems that outperform the competition on a daily basis, a rail systems engineer has to accept the rail network will always be a mix of legacy systems, modern technology and ongoing projects aimed at developing a greener and more efficient network.  Both sectors require first-class engineering talent, but the challenges they face are quite different.

Research suggests there is a positive correlation between creativity and happiness; there is also evidence of a virtuous circle between the two, so each positively reinforces the other over time.  When it comes to recruiting and developing engineers, does this mean the high-tech companies, delivering products with lifecycles of perhaps a couple of years, have an advantage over organisations that develop systems designed to be in service for decades?  That doesn’t need to be the case.

Whatever the product, system or service that an organisation is delivering, engineers love to solve problems, and it is the problem-solving environment that provides a fertile bed for creativity, but it has to be encouraged.  Regrettably many risk-averse organisations have cultures where deviating from the norm is actively discouraged….”That’s not the way we do things around here”.  This article is not focussing on culture change per se, but clearly it is part-and-parcel of encouraging creativity.

Peter Drucker’s quote: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”, has stood the test of time.  Company bosses can preach ambitious vision statements, but if they are out of kilter with their company’s underlying culture, they are very unlikely to become a reality.  Culture is an emergent property of individual employee behaviours, but the collective characteristic is far more dominant than the individual influence.  So, for example, if an employee with experience of working with companies where they enjoyed a high degree of autonomy, is seduced to join an organisation with an exciting vision statement but with a command-and-control management style, they will be unlikely to succeed.

When companies recruit, the process is typically one-sided; the company interviews the applicant, not the other way around.  Perhaps it should be a two-way exchange.  After all, if the company is investing in bringing talent on board and the talent is contributing their skills and expertise to the business, both parties should ensure they are receiving a fair return on their investment.  Arguably, both sides should ensure a good culture match.  From the potential employee’s perspective, the company should not just be assessed from its vision, but also its past achievements.  Is its future aspiration compatible with where it has come from?  Apple is synonymous with innovation and creativity.  Its journey since it was founded in 1976 has been super impressive, with numerous game-changing innovations.  But in recent years, iPhone models have been brought to market with incremental improvements, none of which can be described as game-changers.  Nevertheless, Apple watchers remain convinced that technological evolution will lead to revolution, because it’s in the company’s DNA.  So past achievements are an important factor when assessing company culture.

So returning to the original question: what does ‘Creative Edge’ mean and how is it achieved?  There shouldn’t be too much debate about the ‘what’ although the context obviously varies in different sectors and organisations.  The ‘how’, on the other hand, is dependant on  continuously recreating a competitive culture, individually and collectively, throughout the organisation.

It’s easier said than done!

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!