Archive for the ‘Technology is not the point’ Category
Social Business circa 1989
Social business? It’s just plain business
Gutless Wonders and the Control Illusion
Ian Davis, previously worldwide MD of McKinsey, once said, “Long-gone is the day of the gut-instinct management style. Today’s business leaders are adopting algorithmic decision-making techniques and using highly sophisticated software to run their organisations.”
An astounding example of the control illusion. Nothing sits better in a crisis than intense rationality. Trouble is, we’re deluding ourselves.
For one thing – as neuroscientist Antonion Damasio proved by studying people with damage to the part of the brain where emotions are generated – decisions are driven by emotions. With our rational brain alone, we’ll just weigh pros and cons until the cows come home.
Although our subconscious is in charge, we insist on living an illusion of conscious choice – simply because it feels so comfortable and alluring. The more chaotic and bewildering the world around us, the more that neat illusion beckons. We duck down, distrust (our people and ourselves), flick the switches to ‘tight control’ mode and abort anything risky, like experimentation.
Now I’m all in favour of data and analytics – in fact metrics are key to agility – but only when the numbers aid creative, whole-brain decision-making. Certainly not at the expensive of good judgement and gut feel.
The world is rife with easy lies that satisfy our control-illusion-fueled thirst for order: putting more people in prison reduces crime; financially incentivising staff improves performance; increasing the price of alcohol reduces drinking; markets are driven by rationality…
It’s yet another lie that gut-instinct management style is replaceable by algorithmic decision-making software.
The truth? The extreme usefulness of technology and data is being massively compromised by misuse. Spending money on software won’t solve our problems, unless we overcome the control illusion and exercise some solid emotional judgement. Half-assed attempts to retrench when the going gets tough hasn’t rendered our leaders any wiser nor more effective.
Has it?
After all, the average life expectancy of a company in the S&P 500 has dropped from 75 years in 1937, to 15 years today. What’s more, the 3/2 law of employee productivity demonstrates that tripling your number of employees causes productivity to drop by half. The reality is that corporate performance has worsened as digital technology has penetrated the economy.
It’s about time we recognised that cultural and structural changes in business are fundamental to making our technology useful. Blindly pumping out numbers is a wasteful business for gutless wonders. Muscle-bound chart-wielders are unable to move.
Instead we need to arm intuitive people with data that aids emotional decision-making, set them free within loose structures and replace ‘if you can’t measure it, don’t do it’ with ‘if you can’t make a decision on it, don’t measure it’.
Then focus on fine-tuning your organisation to enable rapid, decentralised decision-making.
Purposeful experimentation = innovative leaps.
Good replicators get replicated
Over 3 billion years ago, a remarkable accident occurred…
Molecules were created that could make copies of themselves.
Not that surprisingly really – probability-wise – given the zillions and squillions of instances of stuff swooshing around and colliding.
Essentially the earth’s first replicator was born. As Eric D. Beinhocker said in The Origin of Wealth, GOOD REPLICATORS GET REPLICATED. This is a thought worth pondering for a very long time. The implications are huge.
This golden rule was basically the point of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene [1976], in which he explored how genes will get copied if they can, regardless of the consequences; and so long as you have variation, selection and heredity, you must get evolution, or ‘design out of chaos without the aid of mind’ (Dan Dennett). This is basic circular logic.
The really interesting thing that happened next was the birth of the second replicator on earth…
Us.
We humans copy information, or ‘memes’, from person to person, brain to brain. There’s variation and selection… it’s basically a design process. Just like genes, if memes can get copied they will – from hand gestures, to wearing earrings, to language, to toilets, to education. We’re all essentially propagating copying machines.
The thing is, we don’t just copy useful, beautiful, true things. That’s part of the reason our brains have grown so large. Rather than staying economical, concerned only with lighting fires, hunting, breeding; our brain capacity is extended to encompass other things, like Britney Spears, sudoku and advertising. In fact our brains have become mighty strange, hijacked by parasitic ideas, like religion (and like most parasites, we end up with a symbiotic relationship). Just as it isn’t our fault when our germs harm others who haven’t developed an immunity, we can’t be blamed for effectively wiping out others’ traditions by spreading our memes; and we can’t be surprised when those who aren’t immune to things we’re used to are very freaked out as a result.
This is something to bear in mind as we spread our teachings and technologies. Likewise, we should be aware of the evolution of technology and its parallels with genetics and mimetics. Good replicators get replicated; and the ‘fit’ is determined by the environment. So just as plants producing oxygen led to oxygen breathers like us prospering; you could say that we’re essentially destroying our current environment to make way for computers.
That may sound a little dramatic, but it’s worth considering whether the ‘fact’ that we invented the internet and other technologies is really true. Didn’t the internet evolve as a result of mimetics, i.e. the copying of cultural ideas from brain to brain over a period of time, whereby the best replicators get replicated?
At the same time, we can see how humans are evolving via technology. For example, before we could read and write, our memories performed much better. Nowadays that’s exacerbated by Google-mentality, skimming and quick kicks. We’re getting very good at developing technologies that remove functions from humans.
So what?
Well, the really interesting thought in all this is that we might be entering the era of the earth’s third replicator. In order to get what Susan Blackmore calls ‘temes’ (technological memes), you need the variation, the selection, the copying, all done outside of humans. Of course we’re starting to see that happen.
So maybe we didn’t create the internet for our own benefit. Maybe we’ve been looking at it all the wrong way. Instead, consider that ‘temes’ spread because they must. Just like the selfish gene.
If teme machines replicate, it won’t matter if the planet is unstable. They can thrive without us.
We are the old machines.
Management is so last century
As David Weinberger said in The Cluetrain Manifesto, ‘Management is a powerful force, part of a larger life-scheme that promises us health, prosperity, calm and no surprises in every aspect of our lives, from health to wealth to good weather and moderately heated coffee from McDonald’s. We are all victims of this assault on voice, the attempt to get us to shut up and listen to the narrowest range of ideas imaginable.’
Here here.
It’s bizarre, when you think about it, that we seek health, prosperity and calm in a framework that’s configured to avoid surprises (not to mention the fact such management frameworks do quite the opposite, restricting prosperity and wrecking your health… duh!).
Essentially a framework that avoids surprises is setting us up for a fall, given that life is totally unpredictable (just look at the accuracy of trending, forecasting and predicting in retrospect – we’re pretty much always wrong, usually wildly, except for the one in a zillion folk who are hailed as heros / experts because they won the prediction lottery).
We’re actively encouraged (forced?) to surrender our individuality in return for a financial bribe and a supposedly non-disturbing, secure, predictable, managed environment. How damaging is that?
If we focused on understanding basic psychology – and in particular neuropsychology – rather than technology, management, or most things to do with ‘professionalism’, we’d learn to cope with surprises. There’s no anti-depressant and productivity tool quite like understanding what your brain is up to (which is normally the opposite of all the crap we reel off in our inner narrative). We’d learn to adopt calm by flicking switches that send neurons on productive paths, as opposed to destructive panic / depression / fear trains of thought. Most importantly, we’d learn that we have myriad choices… without all the BS constrains we confabulate, largely as a result of managed structures and irrational fears.
Coupled with the lack of cynicism and suckerism for imbalance and hype, our denial, biases and love of fallacy are at best sub-optimum… at worst bloody dangerous.
Every last pirate-lynching dinosaur the management structure spews out has been conditioned to fear change – to be unwilling to accept that bettering society involves doing new stuff that isn’t business as usual. It’s not business as usual! IT IS NOT BUSINESS AS USUAL!! Some folk never seem to get it. “But I’ll be out of a job!” they shriek. “More fool you,” we think quietly, while we bend and flex and change at pace with the world… mostly ignoring them and opting to avoid a ‘proper job’ at all costs (although some of us work form the inside).
The thing is, the pirates, the Scrmblrs and every single one of us are changing and bettering society from the bottom up. We’re faster, more innovative and powerful. We organise without organisations. We run on leadership, not management; passion, not KPIs. We’re not afraid to let one-another loose… in fact we love loose cannons. They’re our favourite.
You know who you are!
(Email me!)
More on Punk Capitalism
Someone asked me yesterday what exactly Punk Capitalism means…
Punk was all about a DIY revolution, rejecting authority and hierarchy, working for yourself without taking cues from the mass market, setting up businesses that aren’t fussed about competing and place purpose over profit, advocating that we should produce as much as we consume. Nowadays we’re all working more independently and struggle with crappy managers / bosses, we want richer experiences and creativity is our most valuable currency. We’re coming to the end of the Industrial Revolution cycle… the final nails are going in the coffin for mass production (and in turn mass marketing) – starting with the internet making it free to transmit stuff digitally ourselves. Now punks in lab coats are working on things like 3D printers, already in use by Adidas, BMW, Sony etc for making prototypes. Once these are available in our homes there will be no boundaries left between producer and consumer – just creativity. It’s not far off Star Trek replicators! Then nobody has to be bribed to do shit jobs. Phew! What we deem piracy is the best form of distribution in a Punk Capitalist world.
My previous post mentions this here; and refers to this book as the ultimate Punk Capitalism and piracy resource.
Where’s my replicator?
On the subject of TECHNOLOGY NOT BEING THE POINT… I am, smugly, young enough not to be excited by new technology (!)
In fact, where is my goddam replicator??? Where’s my reasonably priced holiday in space?? Not only that, but why can’t I even browse the internet on my freakin’ iphone at a decent speed?
We marketing / mobile / futurist / geek types get very excited about new cool technology… we dish out awards to agencies for creating fancy stuff that uses the latest breakthrough thing… when really we’d be better off concentrating on the people of the world, first and foremost. The technology is (well, it should be) a given. Marketing isn’t rocket science. It isn’t quantum physics. We’re not limited by our inability to build machines that bend space time, or by particle accelerator breakdowns. Let’s get real… we’re only really limited by our imaginations; and by our understand of what the hell human beings will actually benefit from.
Copyright ResonanceBlog 2009
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