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!