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.

It's the volts that jolts but it's the mills that kills....so what?!

Many years ago when an electrician was installing a new distribution box in my home, he said:

"It's the volts that jolts but it's the mills that kills."

I remember it well because shortly after making the statement he got an electric shock, which fortunately wasn't serious.  High voltage without the ability to deliver high current is normally not a killer.  In the case of the electrician, however, he was lucky because 240 volts from a mains electricity source, which is capable of delivering many amps, thousands of milliamps or 'mills', can cause serious injury and indeed has been known to kill.  Compare that with the 'belt' that I got yesterday when I closed the door on my car, after my teeshirt had rubbed against the seat upholstery causing a static electric discharge of possibly several kilovolts but from a high resistance source capable of delivering a minuscule amount of current.  In that case I experienced a jolt but the consequence was harmless.  So it's volts times amps, which happens to equal power, which determines the lethality of the jolt.

In the military world, there's another well-known saying:

"Threat equals intent times capability."

So a hostile state might hate you vehemently but without the military capability to put their words into action, they do not pose a threat.  Likewise, a neighbouring country might possess formidable weaponry but have no desire to use it against you, in which case the threat to you is minimal.  "Intent" is analogous to "volts", "capability" is analogous to "mills".

There are many other electrical power analogies within life's journeys.  How many people have we met in our lives who are all words (volts) but no action (mills), or conversely have no intention to introduce positive changes (volts) despite having the capability (mills)?  A few prominent politicians spring to mind!  But whilst there might be a degree of self-satisfaction each time we spot an occurrence of human behaviour that follows a very simple and demonstrable relationship, I don't believe it furthers the understanding of the complexities of life.  Indeed, breaking down relationships into manageable chunks, which might follow simple but obvious rules, can, in my opinion, lead to a false sense of security and ignorance.

The economics discipline is full of simple rules that are used in different ways to explain and try to introduce an element of certainty into a chaotic world.  Even the simple laws of supply and demand have been subjected to much criticism by eminent economists who can provide cases where the expected relationships between supply, demand and price do not hold.  Indeed, many would argue that economics per se is case-based rather than rule-based.

It is a rule that Power in Watts = Voltage in Volts x Current in Amps, although there are some assumptions underpinning that statement.  That said, in some cases, the volts will jolt and the mills will kill.  The electrician who installed my distribution box was very lucky because although there were enough mills to kill him, they didn't!

So beware of any physical rule or law that purports to apply to and provide some sort of certainty to societal behaviour.  The perception of certainty kills wisdom!

The Use and Abuse of 'Objectivity'.

My comment to an excellent post published by Humberto Mariotti - Big data: one more illusion (a second look) - was whether it's time to remove 'objectivity' from the English language, or at least redefine it.  Humberto suggested I might like to write a post on my proposal.  Well here it is!

Let's start with a definition of objectivity from macmillandictionary.com:

"A state or situation in which something is based only on facts and evidence."

"....facts and evidence" are, in my opinion, the two nouns that belittle the definition, because both are based on perception.  OK, so let's amend it to "....perceived facts and evidence".  Not sensible, I'm afraid, unless we personalise 'objectivity' to the observer's perception, in which case, by definition, 'objectivity' becomes 'subjectivity'.

Here in the UK, we are being bombarded daily with 'facts and evidence' to encourage us either to vote to stay in the European Union (EU) or conversely, to exit from the EU.  Often the same 'fact' is used to support the two different arguments!  So for example, the UK's net contribution to the EU budget of €7.3bn (a 'fact' that is also disputed!) is seen to the 'remain' group as an 'investment' but to the 'exit' group as a 'cost'.  Numbers might be considered to be as factual as you can get but the way numbers are presented and interpreted is bound to be subjective.

There is a fallacy (in my opinion!) that the aspiration for objectivity can be achieved by obtaining a consensus of opinions and this is an argument used by some for trial by jury.  Richard Dawkins pours scorn on this argument in his essay on the subject, which he concludes as follows:

"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."

His disparaging opinion of trial by jury results from his view that the twelve assessments of the jury members locked in a jury room are unlikely to be independent.  Their views can be massively swayed by one or two vocal individuals.  So why should a jury be more 'objective' than a judge?'

Returning to the title - The Use and Abuse of 'Objectivity' - I believe the noun 'objectivity' does have a meaning where it is used to express an aspiration.  We all strive to establish the 'truth' of the world in which we exist and as I have written before, our perceptions are formed by aggregating different perspectives throughout our lives.  We might see our personal subjectivities as objectivities - perception is reality - but the real objective truth, whilst existing, will never be discovered or confirmed by mere homo sapiens.

I can live with that!