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Wednesday, May 21, 2003 |
I posted this chart a few days ago which shows how interventions in the first two years of a child's life can have a dramatic impact by grade 10. It has got me thinking more about the nature of initial conditions and trajectory.
One of the reason I have been a light poster recently is that the weather has been so nice that I have been working in the garden all the time. Robin my wife has been getting our tomato plants ready for about 6 weeks. She has grown them from seed and under lights, she has provided enormous care. Even now, as we can expect more frost, they are now hardening off in a frame but not planted. Once they are planted, other than watering, there is not much we have to do. They will have reached the tipping point, where they will do most of the work themselves. I am wondering is this not a central truth. Once our children are a certain age, for better or worse they tend to get on with life and much of the destiny of their trajectory has the power.
If this is true, then new companies need a huge amount of tending and nurturing in the early years. I wonder if VC would work better if a VC saw his role as a parent of a gardener. It is not enough to provide only the money. It is not helpful to be critical - if this is a natural model, then the VC's need to find out what are the 2 essential acts that they need to perform. We know in human development that reading and touch are the most highly leveraged interactions. What is the business equivalent?
3:19:03 PM 
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If we think of the sinking of the Titanic, we can make sense of my earlier post on how Intellectual Capital Works and why measuring the speed and bandwidth of information is important. Every organism, organization and individual is confronted all the time with new events. On that night in April 1911, the men on watch in the crows nest saw an iceberg. Here are the IC issues.
Flow 1 Identifying the Threat /Opportunity is a human issue. In Titanic's case it was about how quickly they actually spotted the ice. Sometimes threats are hard to see. They are indistinct and meld into the fog. So a lookout has to have good eyes and experience. As important a good look out has to be able to assess the threat. How quickly they were able to assess the threat was important. Once they had assessed the threat their role was to alert the control system on the Titanic to the threat. The general issue is that organizations have to rely on the frontline to see the new threats and opportunities.The more channels into the system the better. The more the "lookouts" are trained to be observant, the better. the better tools they have the better. and so on.
Flow 2 - Initiating the organizational response. An organizational issue is to ensure the best possible link from the crows nest to the bridge. The general issue is to ensure that indistinct information can be processed and come into the domain of the decision makers. (Tacit to explicit) As I recall on the Titanic, all they had was a bell. An alarm and a phone would have been better. Speed is important as is getting the attention of a decision maker on the bridge who can make a decision to change course. There is a lot of noise in a traditional head office and it is hard to get its attention. A ships bridge is waiting for alerts. A head office is likely embedded in its day to day operations. But it is only at head office that a decision to alter course can be made. this is where most organizations are extremely vulnerable. There needs to be a process to capture alerts from good lookouts. Weblogs would be helpful. A critical issue would be the level of trust that had been built over time between the lookout and the bridge officer. A high level of trust would enable the bridge officer to act even before he had seen the threat with his own eyes. A low level of trust would have meant a delay. Weblogs build trust as well. Command and control cultures are very slow to react and do not like weblogs. Weblogs would be an indicator to an analyst that an organization could deal with Flow 2 well.
Flow 3- Enacting the command decision. In Titanic's case this was a good part of their system. The voice tube to the wheel and the telgragph to the engine room gave an immediiate response. In many organizations this is a very slow part of the process as the entire scenario has to be replayed. Weblogs would short circuit this. At my former employer all large projects toof $50 million and 5 years. Too slow a response. In Titanic's case, Flows 1 and 2 were too slow to avoid hitting the berg. Most organizations over plan. Not the US Army who drive through Baghdad was an example of how to paln by doing. They did not know how strong the defences were. The drive through exposed that they were weak and the rest of the force piled in behind. If there had been resistance another choice would have opened up.
What we are really talking about is an organism's nervous system. The flaw in my mind of much of the conversation about knowledge management is that we have not clearly given a good business case for it. The Intellectual Capital Model works. It also reinforces the Boyd OODA Loop idea of the need to Observe. Orient, Decide and Act which in turn says that the competitve issue is to do this faster than your opponents.
My intuition is that social software will be critical to supporting this process and in expanding the information bandwidth and the immediacy of the flows.
So deliberately building channels with maximum response time and bandwidth would be a strategy that I would recommend.
3:06:28 PM
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Canada reports mad cow case. Canada reports its first case of mad cow disease in a decade, in the western province of Alberta. [BBC News | World | UK Edition]
Another nail in the coffin of the model of the export model for Food. No matter how well contained, the trust has been lost. In the UK trust in beef has never really come back. Mad Cow and Foot and Mouth in the Uk has lead to a huge acceptance by the mainstream of organic agriculture. As each country moves to surplus or at least sufficiency, it will use any health issue to close its borders. We have seen this in Canada in the case of Wart for Potatoes in PEI, now for Beef in Alberta and using dumping for lumber in BC.
Canada's history and current ag policy has ben to use our large land base to grow food for export. It is a moribund policy that cannot be sustained - it also drives terrible use of the land and water. But i think that the uncertainty of markets will do more to stop it than any environmental argument
11:42:58 AM
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Cool visualizations need a home. Visualization of flows in social networks.
 Thomas Burg points to Visualizing Flows In Social Networks. Follow the links, they worth it!
Frederico Casalegno, Roberto Tagliabue, and Marco Susani presented an intriguing visualization of flows in social networks at last November's Doors of Perception [Smart Mobs]
[Mathemagenic]
It would be great is something like this could be useful. Built into some existing social networking environment?
Perhaps they can convince Jonathan Abrams to include this in Friendster?
[Marc's Voice]
Many have asked how to measure the value of social interaction. In my early work on Intellectual capital my partner Hubert Saint Onge and I came to the conclusion that if we measured the velocity and power of the flows, we would find the value.
What do we mean by this?
Here is the typical organizational knowledge situation. A customer/supplier/environmental event occurs such as a shift in preference or anew technology. The organization needs an individual to spot this event and to extract meaning from it - what does this event mean for us? Is it important even if it is small? This is flow 1.
He/she then has to convey this meaning to their colleagues who have the power to give a go/no go decision on how and whether to respond as an organization. This is the critical Flow 2 choke point. Here the organizational culture plays a key role. In a typical command and control hierarchy, the flow from the front line to the decision makers is slow and gets a lot of distortion. Low trust demands a great deal of "proof" before a case can be agreed on to react or to pro-act.
Assume a go decision. Than a plan has to be developed and acted on and a change to the organizational process executed. This is flow 3. Again in a command and control model this is a slow and poorly done part. In a networked model this can be done both fast and well.
Assume the response has been set in motion. The process begins again with an organizational observer seeing the result and determining new meaning and recommending a new response.
If you "see" an organization in this light, you see its nervous system. You can measure these flows as you can electric current for both volts, amps and resistance. An analyst can begin by making assumptions about these floes. You can assume for a start that strong command and control - top down - organizations will be slow and inaccurate in their response to their environment. You can assume that organizations that use weblogs and have a culture that is collegial can respond quickly and accurately. For all the failure in peacekeeping, the US military have worked very well to increase the flows up and down and across. We see the results in Iraq
9:20:32 AM
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Your kid is not an empty storage container, ready to be filled with curricular content.
Stories like this creep me out, even if they say Primary school testing and targets are to be streamlined to make exams for seven-year-olds less formal and part of a wider teacher-led assessment yada yada.
Testing programs are not about educating kids. They're about perpetuating the bell curve. As a kid who spent most of his formative years at the back ends of nearly every bell curve the system could throw at him, and who regarded his school experience as a 13-year prison sentence that commenced at age 5, I can tell you there isn't a damn thing in any top-down government-mandated educational testing program that answers any kind of market demand from kids themselves ? who are born with extravagantly unique souls, each with its own agenda and an endless series of questions (there's your real demand) for the purposes of its own education. Few of those questions are addressed by official curricula, testing programs, or even compulsory school attendance.
The unintended agenda of bureaucratized education is laid out very nicely in The Six Lesson Schoolteacher, by John Taylor Gatto in 1991. Dig it. [The Doc Searls Weblog]
Well, it is an article about England but many of the points are just as true for American public schools. They are all top-down hierarchies that are ill-equipped, in my opinion, to deal effectively with this current era. Where they work, it is through the bottom-up approaches taken by individual teachers. Teachers who are seldom rewarded for their effort. The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher is well worth reading, even if you disagree with it. Modern public education is an outgrowth of the needs of the Industrial Revolution. Standardization is what drove this revolution and these processes were applied to education.We need a new reformulation of public education to deal with the Information Age. I hope we see this in my lifetime. I fear it will be as big a battle as any but the groups that learn how to do this will succeed at a more rapid pace than those that follow old processes. This will, of course, scare the old guard which will react in ways that will only hasten their own demise. [A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog]
I am now convinced that our approach to school is one of the most powerful blocks to a better society. If we deconstruct what we really learn at school it gives us this picture.
1. You are an empty vessel and I am the expert. It is my job to fill you. - Result, we stop taking responsibility for our own learning. It is very hard to rediscover later in life that you can and should be your own teacher.
2. Everything you need to learn is in a book or in my words. Actually experience is the best teacher not abstraction. We now medicate 30% of the kids in school because they cannot sit still and hear their "mother's voice" drone on. Only 43% of places at university today are held by men! Most have been crushed and put off by a passive over-feminized system. So much for Girls being second class school citizens!
3. All knowledge comes in separate boxes. The bell rings and it is English. The bell rings and it is math. The real world is a connected system. More than anything this concept of separate subjects with no linking context is a tough meme to break.
4. Collaboration is bad. We are taught that you should share toys - bad idea - but not share work. Sharing work - the key to life and productive work - called cheating and is heavily punished.
5. We are so frightened of failure that we have taken all risk and challenge out of school. As a result we have taken out the value of achievement.
8:49:00 AM
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© Copyright 2003 Robert Paterson.
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