Towards the Habermas Machine

Google DeepMind has just announced a large language model, which claims to generate a consensus position from a collection of individual views. The name of the model is a reference to Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action.

An internet search for Habermas machine throws up two previous initiatives under the same name. Firstly an art project by Kristopher Holland.

The Habermas Machine (2006–2012) is a conceptual art experience that both examines and promotes an experiential relation to Jürgen Habermas’ grand theory for understanding human interaction. The central claim is that The Theory of Communicative Action can be experienced, reflected upon and practised when encountered within arts-based research. Habermas’ description of how our everyday lives are founded by intersubjective experience, and caught up in certain normative, objective and subjective contexts is transformed through the method of conceptual art into a process of collaborative designing, enacting and articulating. This artistic reframing makes it possible to experience the communicative structure of knowledge and the ontological structure of intersubjectivity in a practice of non-discursive ‘philosophy without text’. Feiten Holland Chemero

And secondly, an approach to Dialogue Mapping described as a device that all participants can climb into and converse with complete communicative rationality, contained in a book by @paulculmsee and Jailash Awati, and mentioned in this Reddit post Why is Dialogue Mapping not wide spread? Dialogue Mapping was developed by Jeff Conklin and others as an approach to addressing wicked problems. See also Issue Based Information Systems (IBIS).

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Update

Christopher Summerfield, one of the authors of the DeepMind paper, spoke at the Royal Society on October 29th 2024. https://www.youtube.com/live/cW1Wq7_8v1Y?si=oqo8Lw7479x4QqKt&t=18890

All the examples shown in his talk were policy matters that could be reduced to Yes/No questions. Such questions would traditionally be surveyed by asking people to place themselves on a scale from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree, and it is easy to see how a language-based method such as the Habermas Machine offers some advantages over a numerical scale. But not clear how this works for more provocative questions, let alone wicked problems.

Someone in the audience asked if this method would work in what he called a compromised democracy, and Summerfield acknowledged that the method assumes what he called a good faith scaffold. Obviously all democracies in the real world are imperfect, and he didn't go into the question as to how sensitive or vulnerable the method might be to such imperfections, but the method might conceivably help to overcome some of these imperfections under some conditions: for example, Summerfield referred specifically to the tyranny of the majority.

While the performance of the Habermas machine in their study compared favourably with the performance of human mediators, Summerfield suggested that we should move away from thinking about AI in these terms. The point is not to create AI-based agents that can behave like intelligent people but to build intelligent institutions - tools for creating social order and fostering cooperation. As my regular readers will know, orgintelligence has long been an important theme for this blog. See for example my post On Organizations and Machines (January 2022).

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Jeffrey Conklin, Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems (Wiley 2006). See also CogNexus website.

Paul Culmsee and Jailash Awati, The Heretic's Guide to Best Practice (2013)

Nicola Davis, AI mediation tool may help reduce culture war rifts, say researchers (Guardian, 17 October 2024)

Tim Elmo Feiten, Kristopher Holland and Anthony Chemero, Doing philosophy with a water-lance: art and the future of embodied cognition (Adaptive Behavior 2021) 

Michael Tessler et al, AI can help humans find common ground in democratic deliberation (Science, 18 October 2024)

Beyond the symbols vs signals debate (The Royal Society, 28-29 October 2024)

Wikipedia: Issue Based Information Systems (IBIS), Wicked Problem

See also Influencing the Habermas Machine (November 2024)

All our eyes on the disgraceful Horizon

The scandal at the British Post Office, details of which are now emerging in the Public Enquiry, provides illustrations of many important aspects of organizational behaviour as discussed on this blog. 

Willful blindness. There is a strong attachment to a false theory, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, as well as the appalling human consequences.

Misplaced trust. Trusting a computer system (Horizon) above hundreds of ordinary people. And both the legal system and government ministers trusting the evidence presented by a public corporation, despite the fact that contrary evidence from expert witnesses had been accepted in a small number of cases (see below).

Defensive denial as one of the symptoms of organizational stupidity. In July 2013, Post Office boss Paula Vennells was told about faults in the Horizon system, and advised that denying these would be dangerous and stupid. This is something the Post Office had denied for years. ITV March 2024

A detail that struck me yesterday was a failure to connect the dots. In 2011, the auditors (EY) raised concerns about data quality, warning that if Horizon was not accurate, then they would not be able to sign off Post Office company accounts. Ms Perkins, who was giving evidence at an inquiry into the scandal, said at the time she did not make a link between the two. BBC June 2024. The pattern I'm seeing here is of assuming the sole purpose of audit as satisfying some regulatory requirement, with zero operational (let alone ethical) implications of anything the auditors might find. And assuming the regulatory requirement itself to have no real purpose, being merely a stupid and meaningless piece of bureaucracy.

Another failure to connect the dots occurred after Julie Wolstenholme successfully challenged the Post Office in 2003 with the aid of an expert technical witness. Why didn't this prompt serious questions about all the other cases? When asked about this at the enquiry, David Mills said he had not properly assimilated the information and pleaded lack of intelligence, saying I wasn’t that clever. I’m sorry, I didn’t ask about it. ITV April 2024

In my other pieces about organizational intelligence, I have noted that stupid organizations may sometimes be composed of highly intelligent people. Now that's one pattern the Post Office doesn't seem to illustrate. Or have the Post Office bosses merely chosen to present themselves as naive and incompetent rather than evil?

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Tom Espiner, Ex-Post Office chair was told of IT risks in 2011 (BBC 5 June 2024)

ITV, Secret tape shows Paula Vennells was told about problems with Horizon and warned not to cover it up (29 March 2024)

ITV, Former Post Office boss tells inquiry he was not 'clever' enough to question Horizon IT system (16 April 2024)

Other Sources: Post Office Horizon IT Enquiry, British Post Office scandal (Wikipedia), Post Office Project (University of Exeter)

Thinking Academically

At Goldsmiths University yesterday for a discussion on Paratactical Life with Erin Manning and Brian Massumi. Academic jobs at Goldsmiths are currently threatened by a so-called Transformation Programme, similar to management initiatives at many other universities, giving critical urgency for those in the room to consider the primary task of the university in society, and the double task of the academic. For which Erin Manning advocates what she calls strategic duplicity.

This involves recognizing what works in the systems we work against. Which means: We don't just oppose them head on. We work with them, strategically, while nurturing an alien logic that moves in very different directions. One of the things we know that the university does well is that it attracts really interesting people. The university can facilitate meetings that can change lives. But systemically, it fails. And the systemic failure is getting more and more acute. Todoroff

One of the domains in which this duplicity is apparent is thinking itself. And this word thinking appears to have special resonance and meaning for academics - what academia calls thinking is not quite the same as what business calls thinking (which was the focus of my practitioner book on Organizational Intelligence) and certainly not the same as what tech calls thinking (the focus of Adrian Daub's book).

One of the observations that led to my work on Organizational Intelligence was the disconnect between the intelligence of the members of an organization and the intelligence of the organization itself. Universities are great examples of this, packed with clever people and yet the organization itself manifests multiple forms of stupidity. As of course do many other kinds of organization. I still believe that it is a worthwhile if often frustrating exercise to try to improve how a given organization collectively makes sense of and anticipates the demands placed on it by its customers and other stakeholders - in other words, how it thinks. However any such improvements would be almost entirely at the micropolitical level, I don't have much idea how one would go about dismantling what Deleuze calls the economy of stupidity.

Although I think the concept of organizational intelligence is a reasonable one, and have defended it here against those who argue that organizational functions and dysfunctions can always be reduced to the behaviours and intentions of individual human actors, I don't imagine that an organization will ever think in quite the way a person thinks. There are some deficiencies in organizational thinking, just as there are deficiencies in algorithmic thinking. For example, there are some interesting issues in relation to temporality, raised in some of the contributions to Subjectivity's Special Issue on Algorithms which I guest-edited last year.

For Brian Massumi, the key question is what is thinking for. In an academic context, we might imagine the answer to be something to do with knowledge - universities being where knowledge is created and curated, and where students are supposed to acquire socioeconomic advantage based on their demonstrated mastery of selected portions of this knowledge. Therefore much of the work of an academic is taken up with a form of thinking known as judgment or sorting out - deciding, agreeing and explaining the criteria by which students will be evaluated, using these criteria to assess the work of each student, and helping those students who don't fit the expected pattern for whatever reason.

But what really gives a student any benefit in the job market as a result of their studies is not just a piece of paper but a sense of their potential - for both thinking and doing. The problem with students using chatbots to write their assignments is not that they are cheating - after all, the ability to cheat without being found out is highly valued in many organizations, if not essential. The real problem is if they are learning a deficient form of thinking.

(This is far from a complete report on the afternoon, merely picking out some elements of the discussion that resonated with me.)

 

Update: Comments have been added to the goodreads version of this post.

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Philip Boxer, The Three Asymmetries necessary to describing agency in living biological systems (Asymmetric Leadership, November 2023)

Philip Boxer, The Doubling of the Double Task (Asymmetric Leadership, February 2024)

Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2020)

Benoît Dillet, What Is Called Thinking?: When Deleuze Walks along Heideggerian Paths (Deleuze Studies 7/2 2013)

Kenan Malik, The affluent can have their souls enriched at university, so why not the poor as well? (Observer, 2 June 2024)

Brent Dean Robbins, Joyful Thinking-Thanking: A Reading of Heidegger’s “What is Called Thinking?” (Janus Head 13/2, October 2014) 

Uriah Marc Todoroff, A Cryptoeconomy of Affect (New Inquiry, May 2018)

Richard Veryard, Building Organizational Intelligence (Leanpub, 2012)

Richard Veryard, As we may think now (Subjectivity December 2023)

Related posts: Symptoms of Organizational Stupidity (May 2010), On Organizations and Machines (January 2022), Reasoning with the majority - chatGPT (January 2023), Creativity and Recursivity (September 2023)

On Organizations and Machines

My previous post Where does learning take place? was prompted by a Twitter discussion in which some of the participants denied that organizational learning was possible or meaningful. Some argued that any organizational behaviour or intention could be reduced to the behaviours and intentions of individual humans. Others argued that organizations and other systems were merely social constructions, and therefore didn't really exist at all.

In a comment below my previous post, Sally Bean presented an example of collective learning being greater than the sum of individual learning. Although she came away from the reported experience having learnt some things, the organization as a whole appears to have learnt some larger things that no single individual may be fully aware of.

And the Kihbernetics Institute (I don't know if this is a person or an organization) offered a general definition of learning that would include collective as well as individual learning.

If you understand #learning is the process of acquiring #knowledge which is a measure of an individual's "fitness" in performing a given task, you can use the same system model on both humans and organizations.

— The Kihbernetics Institute (@Kihbernetics) January 3, 2022

I think that's fairly close to my own notion of learning. However, some of the participants in the Twitter thread appear to prefer a much narrower definition of learning, in some cases specifying that it could only happen inside an individual human brain. Such a narrow definition of learning would not only exclude organizational learning, but also animals and plants, as well as AI and machine learning.

As it happens, there are differing views among botanists about how to talk about plant intelligence. Some argue that the concept of plant neurobiology is based on superficial analogies and questionable extrapolations.

But in this post, I want to look specifically at machines and organizations, because there are some common questions in terms of how we should talk about both of them, and some common ideas about how they may be governed. Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, saw strong parallels between machines and human organizations, and this is also the first of Gareth Morgan's eight Images of Organization.

Margaret Heffernan talks about the view that organisations are like machines that will run well with the right components – so you design job descriptions and golden targets and KPIs, manage it by measurement, tweak it and run it with extrinsic rewards to keep the engines running. She calls this old-fashioned management theory.

Meanwhile, Jonnie Penn notes how artificial intelligence follows Herbert Simon's notion of (corporate) decision-making. Many contemporary AI systems do not so much mimic human thinking as they do the less imaginative minds of bureaucratic institutions; our machine-learning techniques are often programmed to achieve superhuman scale, speed and accuracy at the expense of human-level originality, ambition or morals.

The philosopher Gilbert Simondon observed two contrasting attitudes to machines.

First, a reduction of machines to the status of simple devices or assemblages of matter that are constantly used but granted neither significance nor sense; second, and as a kind of response to the first attitude, there emerges an almost unlimited admiration for machines. Schmidgen

On the one hand, machines are merely instruments, ready-to-hand as Heidegger puts it, entirely at the disposal of their users. On the other hand, they may appear to have a life of their own. Is this not like organizations or other human systems?

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Amedeo Alpi et al, Plant neurobiology: no brain, no gain? (Trends in Plant Science Volume 12, ISSUE 4, P135-136, April 01, 2007)

Eric D. Brenner et al, Response to Alpi et al.: Plant neurobiology: the gain is more than the pain (Trends in Plant Science Volume 12, ISSUE 7, P285-286, July 01, 2007)  

Anthea Lipsett, Interview with Margaret Heffernan: 'The more academics compete, the fewer ideas they share' (Guardian, 29 November 2018)

Gareth Morgan, Images of Organization (3rd edition, Sage 2006)

Jonnie Penn, AI thinks like a corporation—and that’s worrying (Economist, 26 November 2018)

Henning Schmidgen, Inside the Black Box: Simondon's Politics of Technology (SubStance, 2012, Vol. 41, No. 3, Issue 129 pp 16-31)

Geoffrey Vickers, Human Systems are Different (Harper and Row, 1983)

Related post: Where does learning take place? (January 2022)

Where does learning take place?

This blogpost started with an argument on Twitter. Harish Jose quoted the organization theorist Ralph Stacey:

Organizations do not learn. Organizations are not humans. @harish_josev

This was reinforced by someone who tweets as SystemsNinja, suggesting that organizations don't even exist. 

Organisations don’t really exist. X-Company doesn’t lie awake at night worrying about its place in X-Market. @SystemsNinja

So we seem to have two different questions here. Let's start with the second question, which is an ontological one - what kinds of entities exist. The idea that something only exists if it lies awake worrying about things seems unduly restrictive. 

How can we talk about organizations or other systems if they don't exist in the first place? SystemsNinja quotes several leading systems thinkers (Churchman, Beer, Meadows) who talk about the negotiability of system boundaries, while Harish cites Ryle's concept of category mistake. But just because we might disagree about what system we are talking about or how to classify them doesn't mean they are entirely imaginary. Geopolitical boundaries are sociopolitical constructions, sometimes leading to violent conflict, but geopolitical entities still exist even if we can't agree how to name them or draw them on the map.

Exactly what kind of existence is this? One way of interpreting the assertion that systems don't exist is to imagine that there is a dualistic distinction between a real/natural world and an artificial/constructed one, and to claim that systems only exist in the second of these two worlds. Thus Harish regards it as a category mistake to treat a system as a standalone objective entity. However, I don't think such a dualism survives the critical challenges of such writers as Karen Barad, Vinciane Despret, Bruno Latour and Gilbert Simondon. See also Stanford Encyclopedia: Artifact.

Even the idea that humans (aka individuals) belong exclusively to and can be separated from the real/natural world is problematic. See for example writings by Lisa Blackman, Robert Esposito and Donna Haraway.

And even if we accept this dualism, what difference does it make? The implication seems to be that certain kinds of activity or attribute can only belong to entities in the real/natural world and not to entities in the artificial/constructed world. Including such cognitive processes such as perception, memory and learning.

So what exactly is learning, and what kinds of entity can perform this? We usually suppose that animals are capable of learning, and there have been some suggestions that plants can also learn. Viruses mutate and adapt - so can this also be understood as a form of learning? And what about so-called machine learning?

Some writers see human learning as primary and these other modes of learning as derivative in some way. Either because machine learning or organization learning can be reduced to a set of individual humans learning stuff (thus denying the possibility or meaningfulness of emergent learning at the system level). Or because non-human learning is only metaphorical, not to be taken literally.

I don't follow this line. My own concepts of learning and intelligence are entirely general. I think it makes sense for many kinds of system (organizations, families, machines, plants) to perceive, remember and learn. But if you choose to understand this in metaphorical terms, I'm not sure it really matters.

Meanwhile learning doesn't necessarily have a definitive location. @systemsninja said I was confusing biological and viral systems with social ones. But where is the dividing line between the biological and the social? If the food industry teaches our bodies (plus gut microbiome) to be addicted to sugar and junk food, where is this learning located? If our collective response to a virus allows it to mutate, where is this learning located?

In an earlier blogpost, Harish Jose quotes Ralph Stacey's argument linking existence with location.

Organizations are not things because no one can point to where an organization is.

But this seems to be exactly the kind of category mistake that Ryle was talking about. Ryle's example was that you can't point to Oxford University as a whole, only to its various components, but that doesn't mean the university doesn't exist. So I think Ryle is probably on my side of the debate.

The category mistake behind the Cartesian theory of mind, on Ryle’s view, is based in representing mental concepts such as believing, knowing, aspiring, or detesting as acts or processes (and concluding they must be covert, unobservable acts or processes), when the concepts of believing, knowing, and the like are actually dispositional. Stanford Encylopedia

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Lisa Blackman, The Body (Second edition, Routledge 2021)

Roberto Esposito, Persons and Things (Polity Press 2015)

Harish Jose, The Conundrum of Autonomy in Systems (28 June 2020), The Ghost in the System (22 August 2021)

Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (2005)

Gilbert Simondon, On the mode of existence of technical objects (1958, trans 2016)

Richard Veryard, Modelling Intelligence in Complex Organizations (SlideShare 2011), Building Organizational Intelligence (LeanPub 2012)

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Artifact, Categories, Feminist Perspectives on the Body

Related posts: Does Organizational Cognition Make Sense (April 2012), The Aim of Human Society (September 2021), On Organizations and Machines (January 2022)

And see Benjamin Taylor's response to this post here: https://stream.syscoi.com/2022/01/02/demanding-change-where-does-learning-take-place-richard-veryard-from-a-conversation-with-harish-jose-and-others/

Creative Tension in Downing Street

Earlier posts on this blog have explored Creative Tension in the White House - from FDR to the Donald - and analysed them in terms of my OrgIntelligence framework. In this post, I want to look at the UK experience, drawing on a recent report in the Guardian.

Those who worked closely with him say Johnson encourages rows and tensions over policies as he considers all sides of the argument and figures out what he will do next. Some argue that it generates a creative energy in which he thrives and is the process by which he arrives at a final decision. Ask others, and they say he cannot make up his mind until options have been whittled down by time and after those he relies on to walk out in exasperation. Syal

The article quotes several people talking about the Prime Minister's leadership style, based on various ideas about decision-making, risk and diversity. There are also some remarks about the ethical implications.

Previous articles about Mr Johnson's leadership discuss his management style with cabinet colleagues and advisers (Simpson), and his style when addressing the nation (Moss). Whatever he may think in private about the challenges of Brexit or COVID-19, and whatever difficulties he gets into when discussing solutions with his colleagues and advisers, the Prime Minister's instinct apparently leads him to present them to the public in extremely simple and confident terms.

Post-heroic leadership seems to be the order of the day. Stokes and Stern talk about the need to adopt a less gung-ho style when presenting the government's approach to wicked problems. They quote from a paper by Keith Grint advocating several supposedly anti-heroic behaviours: curiosity and sense-making ("asking questions"), bricolage ("clumsy solutions"), and ranking collective intelligence above individual genius.

The UK government's approach to the COVID-19 pandemic has sometimes seemed erratic and inconsistent. But given the complexity of the problem, and the volatile and ambiguous data on which decisions and policies were supposedly based, a more consistent and single-minded approach might not have turned out any better. 

In Greek myth, the Gordian knot stands for wicked problems, and Alexander's simple yet imaginative solution quickly resolves the problem. To the supporters of Brexit, this represents the only possible escape from European satrapy. Nothing post-heroic about Alexander. 

So what does that tell us about Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson?

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Keith Grint, Wicked Problems and Clumsy Solutions: The Role of Leadership (Clinical Leader 1/2, December 2008)

Gloria Moss, Is Boris Johnson's leadership style inclusive? (HR Magazine, 23 August 2019)

Per Morten Schiefloe, The Corona crisis: a wicked problem (Scandinavian Journal of Public Health, 2021; 49: 5–8)

Paul Simpson, What is Boris Johnson's leadership style? (Management Today, 11 October 2019)

Jon Stokes and Stefan Stern, Boris Johnson needs to show a ‘post-heroic’ style of leadership now (The Conversation, 27 April 2020)

Rajeev Syal, Does Boris Johnson stir up team conflict to help make up his mind? (The Guardian, 1 March 2021)

Related posts: Creative Tension in the White House (April 2017)

Operational Excellence and DNA

In his 2013 article on Achieving Operational Excellence, Andrew Spanyi quotes an unnamed CIO saying operational excellence is in our DNA. Spanyi goes on to criticize this CIO's version of operational excellence, which was based on limited and inadequate tracking of customer interaction as well as old-fashioned change management.

But then what would you expect? One of the things that distinguishes humans from other species is how little of our knowledge and skill comes directly from our DNA. Some animals can forage for food almost as soon as they are born, and some only require a short period of parental support. Whereas a human baby has to learn nearly everything from scratch. Our DNA gives very little directly useful knowledge and skill, but what it does give us is the ability to learn.

Very few cats and dogs reach the age of twenty. But at this age many humans are still in full-time education, while others have only recently started to attain financial independence. Either way, they have by now accumulated an impressive quantity of knowledge and skill. But only a foolish human would think that this is enough to last the rest of their life. The thing that is in our DNA, more than anything else, more than other animals, is learning.

There are of course different kinds of learning involved. Firstly there is the stuff that the grownups already know. Ducks teach their young to swim, and human adults teach kids to do sums and write history essays, as well as some rather more important skills. In the world of organizational learning, consultants often play this role - coaching organizations to adopt best practice.

But then there is going beyond this stuff. Intelligent kids learn to question both the content and the method of what they've been taught, as well as the underlying assumptions, and some of them never stop reflecting on such things. Innovation depends on developing and implementing new ideas, not just adopting existing ideas.

Similarly, operational excellence doesn't just mean adopting the ideas of the OpEx gurus - statistical process control, six sigma, lean or whatever - but collectively reflecting on the most effective and efficient ways to make radical as well as incremental improvements. In other words, applying OpEx to itself.

Andrew Spanyi, Achieving Operational Excellence (Cutter Consortium Executive Report, 15 October 2013) registration required

Related posts: Changing how we think (May 2010), Learning at the Speed of Learning (October 2016)

Carillion Struck By Lightning

@NilsPratley blames delusion in the boardroom (on a grand scale, he says) for Carillion's collapse. "In the end, it comes down to judgments made in the boardroom."

A letter to the editor of the Financial Times agrees.

"This situation has been caused, in part, by the unprofessional, fatalistic and blasé attitude to contract risk management of some senior executives in the UK construction industry."

By no means the first company brought low by delusion (I've talked some about Enron on this blog, as well as in my book on organizational intelligence), and probably not the last.

And given that Carillion was the beneficiary of some very large public sector contracts, we could also talk about delusion and poor risk management in government circles. As @econtratacion points out, "the public sector had had information pointing towards Carillion's increasingly dire financial situation for a while".



As it happens, the Home Secretary was at the London Stock Exchange today, talking to female executives about gender diversity at board level. So I thought I'd just check the gender make-up of the Carillion board. According to the Carillion website, there were two female executives and two female non-executive directors in a board of twelve.

In the future, Amber Rudd would like half of all directors to be female. An earlier Government-backed review had recommended that at least a third should be female by 2020.

Lombard: Sir Philip to review why so few female senior executives. He could use a beefed up UK's governance code to propel women to top jobs

— kate burgess ft (@katebur95633594) February 9, 2016

But compared to other large UK companies, the Carillion gender ratio wasn't too bad. "On paper, the directors looked well qualified", writes Kate Burgess in the Financial Times, noting that "the board ticked all the boxes in terms of good governance". But now even the Institute of Directors has expressed belated concerns about the effective governance at Carillion, and Burgess says the board fell into what she calls "a series of textbook traps".

So what kind of traps were these? The board paid large dividends to the shareholders and awarded large bonuses to themselves and other top executives, despite the fact that key performance targets were not met, and there was a massive hole in the pension fund. In other words, they looked after themselves first and the shareholders second, and to hell with pensioners and other stakeholders. Meanwhile, Larry Elliott notes that the directors of the company took steps to shield themselves from financial risk. These are not textbook traps, they are not errors of judgement, they are moral failings.

Of course we shouldn't rely solely on the moral integrity of company executives. If there is no regulation or regulator able to prevent a board behaving in this way, this points to a fundamental weakness in the financial system as a whole. As @RSAMatthew writes,

"There are many culprits in this tale. Lazy or ideologically blinkered ministers, incompetent public sector commissioners, cynical private sector providers signing 'suicide bids' on the assumption that they can renegotiate when things go wrong and, as always, a financial sector willing to arbitrage any profit regardless of consequences or ethics."

There is a strong case that diversity mitigates against groupthink - but as I've argued in my earlier posts, this needs to be real diversity not just symbolic or imaginary diversity (ticking boxes). And even if having more women or ethnic minorities on the board might possibly reduce errors of judgement, women as well as men can have moral failings. It's as if we imagined that Ivanka Trump was going to be a wise and restraining influence on her father, simply because of her gender.

As it happens, the remuneration director at Carillion was a woman. We may never know whether she was coerced or misled by her fellow directors or whether she participated enthusiastically in the gravy. But we cannot say that having a woman in that position is automatically going to be better than having a man. Women on boards may be a necessary step, but it is not a sufficient one.

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Martin Bentham, Amber Rudd: 'It makes no sense to have more men than women in the boardroom' (Evening Standard, 15 January 2018)

Mark Bull, A lesson on risk from Carillion’s collapse (FT Letters to the Editor, 16 January 2018)

Kate Burgess, Carillion’s board: misguided or incompetent? (FT, 17 January 2018) HT @AidanWard3

Larry Elliott, Four lessons the Carillion crisis can teach business, government and us (Guardian, 17 January 2018)

Vanessa Fuhrmans, Companies With Diverse Executive Teams Posted Bigger Profit Margins, Study Shows (WSJ, 18 January 2018)

Simon Goodley, Carillion's 'highly inappropriate' pay packets criticised (Guardian, 15 January 2018)

Nils Pratley, Blame the deluded board members for Carillion's collapse (Guardian, 15 January 2018)

Albert Sánchez-Graells, Some thoughts on Carillion's liquidation and systemic risk management in public procurement (15 January 2018)

Rebecca Smith, Women should hold one third of senior executive jobs at FTSE 100 firms by 2020, says Sir Philip Hampton's review (City Am, 6 November 2016)

Matthew Taylor, Is Carillion the end for Public Private Partnerships? (RSA, 16th January 2018)


Related posts

Explaining Enron (January 2010)
The Purpose of Diversity (January 2010)
Organizational Intelligence and Gender (October 2010)
Delusion and Diversity (October 2012)
Intelligence and Governance (February 2013)
More on the Purpose of Diversity (December 2014)


Updated 25 January 2018

Creative Tension in the White House

In his 1967 book on Organizational Intelligence, Harold Wilensky praises President Franklin Roosevelt for his unorthodox but apparently effective management style.

"Roosevelt devised an administrative structure that would baffle any conventional student of public administration." (p53)

. @tonyjoyce Roosevelt set up "constructive rivalry ... structuring work so that clashes would be certain". Wilensky on #orgintelligence pic.twitter.com/MczcrYlypI

— Richard Veryard (@richardveryard) April 8, 2017

A horrible management technique designed to keep your subordinates so busy fighting with each other they can't challenge you for leadership https://t.co/WSOiHagBOx

— Jon H Ayre (@EnterprisingA) April 8, 2017

In contrast with FDR's approach, Wilensky notes some episodes where White House intelligence systems were not fit for purpose, including Korea (Truman) and the Bay of Pigs (Kennedy).

What about President Trump's approach? @tonyjoyce suggests that Trump is failing FDR's first construct - checking and balancing official intelligence vs unorthodox sources. However, Reuters (via the Guardian) quotes Republican strategist Charlie Black, who believes Trump’s White House reflects his traditional approach to running his business. “He’s always had a spokes-to-the-wheel management style,” said Black. “He wants people with differing views among the spokes.“

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Sources

Reuters, Kushner and Bannon agree to 'bury the hatchet' after White House peace talks (Guardian, 9 April 2017)

Related posts

Delusion and Diversity (October 2010)
The Art of the New Deal - Trump and Intelligence (February 2017)
Another Update on Deconfliction (April 2017)

Linear Thought

Various concerns have been raised about Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, previously described as "disruptive" by a former Pentagon official, and now the subject of heated investigation and speculation around his short-lived role in the Trump administration, his alleged links with Russia and other countries, and his alleged obsessions about various topics.

According to the Guardian, US and UK intelligence officers were also anxious about Flynn's capacity for "linear thought".

I guess most people will interpret this concern as "insufficient capacity". When I searched for "linear thinking" on the internet, I found a number of pages that contrasted linear thinking with various forms of supposedly bad thinking, such as "fragmented thinking". I also found pages that tried to divide people into two camps - the scientific "leftbrain" types who think in straight lines, and the artistic "rightbrain" types who think in circles.

However, systems thinkers might be concerned about someone at that level having too much capacity for linear thought. (As one might be concerned about someone's capacity for gossip or deception.) In a previous post on this blog, I defended Flynn's former boss, Gen. Stanley McChrystal (labelled an "ill-fated iconoclast" by James Kitfield) against the claim that he was not a systems thinker. (This claim was based on a remark McChrystal had made about a subsequently notorious systems dynamics diagram. I argued that McChyrstal's remark could have been made either by someone who doesn't get systems thinking, or at the other extreme by someone who really gets systems thinking.)

The question here is about greater or lesser capacity for various kinds of thinking, because I'm trying to avoid the fallacy (identified by @cybersal) of categorizing people as this or that type of thinker. She rightly insists on seeing systems thinking not as an all-or-nothing affair but "as a lens to be applied in a particular type of situation".

By the way, Flynn himself has appeared on this blog before. In January 2010, using the lens of organizational intelligence, I reviewed his report on Fixing Intel. While I was sceptical about some of his recommendations, I can affirm that the report showed considerable capacity for systems (non-linear) thinking. Make of that what you will.


Links

Phillip Carter, What is Michael Flynn's game? (Slate, 31 March 2017)

Luke Harding et al, Michael Flynn: new evidence spy chiefs had concerns about Russian ties (Guardian, 31 March 2017)

James Kitfield, Flynn’s Last Interview: Iconoclast Departs DIA With A Warning (Breaking Defense, 7 August 2014)

Stanley McChrystal, The military case for sharing knowledge (TED2014, March 2014)

Stan McChrystal, Career Curveballs: No Longer A Soldier (22 April 2014)

Greg Miller and Adam Goldman, Head of Pentagon intelligence agency forced out, officials say (Washington Post, 30 April 2014)


Related Blogposts

A Job Description for Systems Thinking (November 2009)
Making Intelligence Relevant ("Fixing Intel") (January 2010)
Understanding Complexity (July 2010)

The Art of the New Deal - Trump and Intelligence

In his 1967 book on Organizational Intelligence, Harold Wilensky praised President Roosevelt for maintaining a state of creative tension in the US administration. Wilensky reckoned that this enabled FDR to get a more accurate and rounded account of what was going on, and gave him some protection against the self-delusion of each department.

(In FDR's time, of course, it was considered entirely normal for an administration to be staffed by a bunch of white men with similar education. And yet even they managed to achieve some diversity of perspective.)

Early reports of Donald Trump's administration suggest an unconscious echo of the FDR style. Or perhaps a much earlier pattern.

At the center of it all has been a cast of characters jockeying for Trump’s ear, creating a struggle for power that has manifested in a mix of chaos, leaks and uncertainty. The Trump White House already bears more resemblance to the court of a Renaissance king than to most prior administrations as favorites come and go, counselors quarrel over favor and policy decisions are often made by whim or without consultation. (Guardian, 4 Feb 2017)

But it is difficult to see this as "creative tension" resulting in an "accurate and rounded" view.

“Trump thinks he’s invincible,” says Hemmings, who doubts whether his advisors will ever question or criticise him. “Usually leaders choose the people around them to keep them in check, and Trump needs people to temper his hotheadedness and aggression. Instead, he’s picked advisors who worship him.” (Independent, 2 Feb 2017)

Wilensky's book also discusses the dangers of a doctrine of secrecy.

Secrets belong to a small assortment of individuals, and inevitably become hostage to private agendas. As Harold Wilensky wrote “The more secrecy, the smaller the intelligent audience, the less systematic the distribution and indexing of research, the greater the anonymity of authorship, and the more intolerant the attitude toward deviant views.” (Gladwell 2010)

And secrecy seems to a key element of the Trump-Bannon modus operandi.

“These executive orders were very rushed and drafted by a very tight-knit group of individuals who did not run it by the people who have to execute the policy. And because that’s the case, they probably didn’t think of or care about how this would be executed in the real world,” said another congressional source familiar with the situation. “No one was given a heads-up and no one had a chance to weigh in on it.” (Politico 30 Jan 2017)

But perhaps in reaction to the Bannonite doctrine of secrecy, there has been a flood of leaks from inside the administration. Chris Cillizza suggests two possible explanations - either these leaks are intended to influence Trump himself (because he doesn't take anything seriously unless he hears it from his favourite media channels) or conversely they are intended as a kind of whistle-blowing.


Marx thought that history repeated itself. (Alarmingly, Trump's Counselor Steve Bannon adheres to the same view.) So are we into tragedy or farce here?

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Rachael Bade, Jake Sherman and Josh Dawsey, Hill staffers secretly worked on Trump's immigration order (Politico, 30 Jan 2017)

Chris Cillizza, The leaks coming out of the Trump White House cast the president as a clueless child (Washington Post, 26 January 2017), The leaks coming out of the Trump White House right now are totally bananas (Washington Post, 2 Feb 2017)

Malcolm Gladwell, Pandora's Briefcase (New Yorker, 10 May 2010)

Rachel Hosie, The deeper reason we should be worried Donald Trump hung up on Australia PM Malcolm Turnbull (Independent, 2 Feb 2017)

Linette Lopez, Steve Bannon's obsession with a dark theory of history should be worrisome (Business Insider, 2 Feb 2017) HT @BryanAppleyard

Carmen Medina, What is your Stupification Point? (6 May 2010)

Joseph Rago, History Repeats as Farce, Then as 2016 (Wall Street Journal, 4 November 2016) paywall

Sabrina Siddiqui and Ben Jacobs, Trump's courtiers bring chaotic and capricious style to White House (Guardian, 4 February 2017)



Related posts

Puzzles and Mysteries (January 2010)
Enemies of Intelligence (May 2010)
Delusion and Diversity (October 2012)

Learning at the Speed of Learning

According to a recent survey by McKinsey,  "the great majority of our respondents expect corporate learning to change significantly within the next three years".

It seems that whatever the topic of the survey, middle managers and management consultants always expect significant change within the next three years, because this is what justifies their existence.

In this case, the topic is corporate learning, which McKinsey recommends should be done "at the speed of business", whatever that means. (I am not a fan of the "at the speed of" cliche.)

But what kind of change is McKinsey talking about here? The article concentrates on digital delivery of learning material - disseminating existing "best practice" knowledge to a broader base. It doesn't really say anything about organizational learning, let alone a more radical transformation of the nature of learning in organizations. I have long argued that the real disruption is not in replacing classrooms with cheaper and faster equivalents, useful though that might be, but in digital organizational intelligence -- using increasing quantities of data to develop and test new hypotheses about customer behaviour, market opportunities, environmental constraints, and so on -- developing not "best practice" but "next practice".

Richard Benson-Armer, Arne Gast, and Nick van Dam, Learning at the speed of business (McKinsey Quarterly, May 2016). HT @annherrmann

Chris Argyris and Donald Schön, Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective. Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley, 1978.

Political parties and organizational intelligence 3

According to Wikipedia, a party leader is the most powerful official within a political party. I think this statement is debatable. Party leaders in recent history have had varying degrees of power and influence over their own party members, let alone the wider political system.

Writing in The Atlantic during the election campaign, @jon_rauch expressed strong opposition to the conventional view of party leadership.

The very term party leaders has become an anachronism. ... There no longer is any such thing as a party leader. There are only individual actors, pursuing their own political interests and ideological missions willy-nilly, like excited gas molecules in an overheated balloon. ...

This is not only a problem of leadership and individual agency, but also a question of the nature of the political party as a viable system with collective agency and intelligence. Rauch continues

The political parties no longer have either intelligible boundaries or enforceable norms.

The relationship between the politician and the party has always been problematic - consider Winston Churchill who changed party allegiance twice before becoming party leader. But the root cause of this problem is unclear.

Political parties are what things look like when you put politicians in charge.

— David Allen Green (@DavidAllenGreen) August 3, 2016

@DavidAllenGreen or they are machines for turning people into politicians

— Sean Owen-Moylan (@SeanOwenMoylan) August 3, 2016

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Jonathan Rauch, How American Politics Went Insane (The Atlantic, July 2016)

Wikipedia: Party Leader (retrieved 4 Feb 2017)


Related posts

Political parties and organizational intelligence 1 (May 2012)
Political parties and organizational intelligence 2 (June 2015)

Political parties and organizational intelligence 2

#orgintelligence #politics @rafaelbehr contrasts the behaviour of the Conservative and Labour parties.

Before the 2015 election, the Labour party practised collective denial ("misplaced confidence", "kidded themselves"), believing that "organization could compensate for uninspiring leadership". Following the election, "a danger now is oversteering the other way".

Denial and oscillation are two of the principal symptoms I have identified of Organizational Stupidity (May 2010).

Contrast this with the Conservative willingness to invest in 'blue collar conservatism'. Behr attributes this initiative to George Osborne, one of whose political gifts "is the self-knowledge to identify gaps in his own experience and to plug them with astute appointments". Cameron, he suggests, is much less intellectually curious than Osborne. And yet it is Cameron who carries through Osborne's plan to appoint Robert Halfon in order to recalibrate the Conservative's relationship with the working classes.

What reveals itself here is a form of intelligence and leadership that is collective rather than individual, a form of collaboration and teamwork that has not been strongly evident in the Labour Party recently.

Steve Richards goes further ...

"During Cameron’s leadership the Conservatives have become more alive as a party, impressively animated by ideas and debate. Cameron appears to be an orthodox Tory but likes having daring thinkers around him, even if they do not last that long. ... In recent years Conservative party conferences have been far livelier than Labour ones, which have been deadened by fearful control freakery."

... and insists that "the next Labour leader must not be frightened by internal debate".

One of the essential duties of leadership in any organization must be to boost the collective intelligence of the organization. Not just debate, but debate linked with action.

Patrick Wintour reports that there was plenty of (apparently) healthy argument in Labour's inner circle.

"Meetings were quite discursive, because there were a large number of views in the room. ... [Miliband] enjoyed that. He used the disagreement as a means to get his own way. It is a very interesting case study in power, in that he would not be described typically as a strong leader, but very consensual. The caricature of him is as weak, but internally he had great control."

But that's not enough.

"The team that Miliband had assembled around him consisted of highly intelligent individuals, but the whole was less than the sum of its parts – it was, according to many of those advisers, like a court in which opposing voices cancelled one another out."

Furthermore, an important requirement for organizational intelligence is that it is just not enough to have an inner circle of bright and well-educated 'spads', and to appoint either the cleverest or the most photogenic of them as "leader". Perhaps the Labour inner circle deeply understood the political situation facing the party, but they neglected to communicate (forgot to mention) this insight to others. The vanguard is not the party. Any party that aspires to be a movement rather than a machine must distribute its intelligence to the grass roots, and thence to the population as a whole.

Exercise for the reader: count the ironies in the above paragraph.


Finally, intelligent organizations have a flexible approach to learning from the past. @freedland argues that Miliband was single-minded about the future, and refused to tackle the prevailing narrative about the Labour government's role in the 2008 economic crisis.

"The management gurus and political consultants may tell us always to face forward, never to look over our shoulder, to focus only on the future. But sometimes it cannot be done. In politics as in life, the past lingers."

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Sources:

Rafael Behr, The age of machine politics is over. But still it thrives in the Labour party (Guardian 4 June 2015)

Jonathan Freedland, ‘Moving on’: the mantra that traps Labour in the past (Guardian 5 June 2015)

Tim Glencross, Attack of the clones: how spads took over British politics (Guardian 19 April 2015)

Brian Matthews, The Labour Party and the Need for Change: values, education and emotional literacy/intelligence (Forum, Volume 54 Number 1, 2012)

Steve Richards, Labour’s next leader should look to David Cameron, not Tony Blair (Guardian 1 June 2015)

Patrick Wintour, The undoing of Ed Miliband – and how Labour lost the election (Guardian 3 June 2015)

Chris York, The Rise Of The Spad: How Many Ministers Or Shadow Ministers Have Had Proper Jobs? (Huffington Post, 13 November 2013)

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Related Posts:

Symptoms of Organizational Stupidity (May 2010)
Political Parties and Organizational Intelligence (May 2012) (August 2016)
Dark Politics (May 2015)


Updated 6 June 2015

Corporate Grind

#QTWTAIN @lucykellaway asks if those workers who stay for years with the same companies (are) unambitious and mediocre, or does the corporate grind make them so?

Her article addresses the perception that people seemed to get dimmer the higher they went in the organization. If this perception is correct then there are several possible explanations

• increased quality of intake
• higher turnover of more talented and ambitious people (who may expect to get better opportunities elsewhere)
• dulling effect of corporate life

If it is true that organizations systematically lose the best people and/or turn good people into mediocrities, then according to Stafford Beer's POSIWID principle, this is effect reveals the defacto purpose of the organization.


But perhaps the perception that people get dimmer as they get more experienced is wrong. Perhaps they simply display different forms of intelligence that are associated with collective excellence rather than individual brilliance. Clearly it would be natural for organizations to promote those kinds of intelligence that produce good corporate outcomes. However, it is likely that not everyone (especially fresh graduates) would see or appreciate these forms of intelligence.

According to the conventional metaphor, the corporate grind turns people into round pegs. When I was young, I used to think there was some kind of virtue in being a square peg: now I'm not so sure. However, there is undoubtedly a problem for any organization that cannot accommodate a few brilliant square pegs.

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Lucy Kellaway, Why firms don't want you to be brilliant at your job (BBC Magazine 20 October 2014)

Twitter Update from @lucykellaway Today was my pearl anniversary at FT. Is 30 years' service a triumph or disgrace? (16 Apr 2015). My answer: Obviously a triumph for the FT to keep such a journalistic pearl.

Working for the Machine

#orgintelligence The recent appointment of an algorithm to a Board of Directors raises the spectre of science fiction becoming fact. Although many commentators regarded the appointment as a publicity stunt, there has always been an undercurrent of fear about machine intelligence. Even the BBC (following Betteridge's Law of Headlines) succumbed to the alarmist headline Could a big data-crunching machine be your boss one day?

There are several useful ways that an algorithm might contribute to the collective intelligence of a Board of Directors. One is to provide an automated judgement on some topic, which can be put into the pot together with a number of human judgements. This is what seems to be planned by the company Deep Knowledge Ventures, whose Board of Directors is faced with a series of important investment decisions. Although each decision is unique, there are some basic similarities in the decision process that may be amenable to automation and machine learning.

Another possible contribution is to evaluate other board members. According to the BBC article, IBM Watson could be programmed to analyse the contributions made by each board member for usefulness and accuracy. There are several ways such a feedback loop could enhance the collective intelligence of the Board.

• Retrain individuals to improve their contributions in specific contexts.
• Identify and eliminate individuals whose contribution is weak.
• Identify and eliminate individuals whose contribution is similar to other members. In other words, promote greater diversity.
• Enable trial membership of individuals from a wider range of backgrounds, to see whether they can make a valuable contribution.

Organizational Intelligence is about an effective combination of human/social intelligence and machine intelligence. Remember this when people try to develop an either-us-or-them narrative.

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#QTWTAIN

Jamie Bartlett, Will Artificial Intelligence put my job at risk? (Spectator 6 June 2014)

Adrian Chen, Can an Algorithm Solve Twitter’s Credibility Problem? (New Yorker 5 May 2014)

John Rentoul, Will Artificial Intelligence put my job at risk? (Independent 6 June 2014)

Richard Veryard, Does Cameron's Dashboard App Improve the OrgIntelligence of Government? (23 January 2013)

Matthew Wall, Could a big data-crunching machine be your boss one day? (BBC News 9 October 2014)

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Other Sources

Algorithm appointed board director (BBC News 16 May 2014)

Bud Caddell, Your boss might be better as an algorithm (Quartz, 16 November 2017)


Related Posts

Intelligence and Governance (Feb 2013)


Link added 11 December 2017

National Decision Model

@antlerboy asks does anyone know theoretical underpinning of the (rather good) police decision-making model?

The National Decision Model (NDM) is a risk assessment framework, or decision making process, that is used by police forces across the UK. It replaces the former Conflict Management Model. Some sources refer to it as the National Decision-Making Model.

Looking around the Internet, I have found two kinds of description of the model - top-down and bottom-up.

The top-down (abstract) description was published by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) sometime in 2012, and has been replicated in various items of police training material including a page on the College of Policing website. It is fairly abstract, and provides five different stages that officers can follow when making any type of decision - not just conflict management.

Some early responses from the police force regarded the NDM as an idealized model, only weakly connected to the practical reality of decision-making on the ground. See for example The NDM and decision making – what’s the reality? (Inspector Juliet Bravo, April 2012).

In contrast, the bottom-up (context-specific) description emerges when serving police officers discuss using the NDM. According to Mr Google, this discussion tends to focus on one decision in particular - to Taser or not to Taser.

"For me the Taser is a very important link in the National Decision Making Model . It bridges that gap between the baton and the normal firearm that has an almost certain risk of death when used." (The Peel Blog, July 2012). See also Use of Force - Decision Making (Police Geek, July 2012).

ACPO itself adopts this context-specific perspective in its Questions and Answers on Taser (February 2012, updated July 2013), where it is stated that Taser may be deployed and used as one of a number of tactical options only after application of the National Decision Model (NDM).

Of course, the fact that Taser-related decisions have a high Google ranking doesn't imply that these decisions represent the most active use of the National Decision Model. The most we can infer from this is that these are the decisions that police and others are most interested in discussing. (See footnote)

In a conflict situation, a police officer often has to decide how much force to use. The officer needs to have a range of tools at his disposal and the ability to select the appropriate tool - in policing, this is known as a use-of-force continuum. More generally, it is an application of the principle of Requisite Variety.

In a particular conflict situation, the police can only use the tools they have at their disposal. The decision to use a Taser can only be taken if the police have the Taser and the training to use it properly. In which case the operational decision must follow the NDM.

More strategic decisions operate on a longer timescale - whether to equip police with certain equipment and training, what rules of engagement to apply, and so on. A truly abstract decision-making model would provide guidance for these strategic decisions as well as the operational decisions.

And that's exactly what the top-down description of NDM asserts. "It can be applied to spontaneous incidents or planned operations by an individual or team of people, and to both operational and non-operational situations."

Senior police officers have described the use of the NDM for non-conflict situations. For example, Adrian Lee (Chief Constable of Northants) gave a presentation on the Implications of NDM for Roads Policing (January 2012).

The NDM has also been adapted for use in other organizations. For example, Paul Macfarlane (ex Strathclyde Police) has used the NDM to produced a model aimed at Business Continuity and Risk Management. which he calls Defensive Decision-Making.

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How does the NDM relate to other decision-making models? According to Adrian Lee's presentation, the NDM is based on three earlier models:

• The Conflict Management Model (CMM). For a discussion from 2011, see Police Oracle.
• The SARA model (Scan, Analyze, Respond, Assess) - which appears to be similar to the OODA loop.
• Something called the PLANE model. (I tried Googling this, and I just got lots of Lego kits. If anyone has a link, please send.)

There is considerable discussion in the USA about the relevance of the OODA loop to policing, and this again focuses on conflict management situations (the "Active Shooter"). There are two important differences between combat (the canonical use of OODA) and conflict management. Firstly, the preferred outcome is not to kill the offender but to disarm him (either physically or psychologically). This means that you sometimes need to give the offender time to calm down, orienting himself into making the right decision.

And the cop needs to stay calm. George “Doc” Thompson, who taught US police a de-escalation technique known as Verbal Judo, once said "We know that the most deadly weapon we carry is not the .45 or the 9mm, it is in fact the cop’s tongue ... A single sentence fired off at the wrong person at the wrong time can get you fired, it can get you sued, it can get you killed."

So it's not just about having a faster OODA loop than the other guy (although clearly some American cops think this is important). And secondly, there is a lot of talk about situation awareness and anticipation. For example, Dr. Mike Asken, who is a State Police psychologist, has developed a model called AAADA (Anticipating, Alerting, Assessing, Deciding and Acting). There is also a Cognitive OODA model I need to look into.

However, I interpret @antlerboy's request for theoretical underpinning as not just a historical question (what theories of decision-making were the creators of NDM consciously following) but a methodological question (what theories of decision-making would be relevant to NDM and any other decision models). But this post is already long enough, and the sun is shining outside, so I shall return to this topic another day.

 

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Footnote

I referred above to the decisions that police and others are most interested in discussing. 

Argyris and Schön introduced the distinction between Espoused Theory and Theory-In-Use. Perhaps we need a third category to refer to what people imagine to be the central or canonical examples of the theory. We might call it Theory-in-View or Theory-in-Gaze.

This is not quite the same as Prototype Theory, which determines membership of a given category in terms of the similarity to the canonical example.

Update 2022: Reading Annemarie Mol has introduced me to Lolle Nauta's concept of exemplary situation. So perhaps that's the term I should use?

 

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Sources and Links

Michael J. Asken, From OODA to AAADA - A cycle for surviving violent police encounters (Dec 2010)

Erik P. Blasch et al, User Information Fusion Decision-Making Analysis with the C-OODA Model (Jan 2011)

Tom Dart, ‘Verbal judo’: the police tactic that teaches cops to talk before they shoot (Guardian 21 July 2016)

Adrian Lee, Implications of NDM for Roads Policing (January 2012).

Steve Papenfuhs, The OODA loop, reaction time, and decision making (PoliceOne, 23 February 2012)

National Decision Model (ACPO, 2012?)

National Decision Model (College of Policing, 2013)

SARA model (Center for Problem-Oriented Policing)


Related Posts: National Decision Model and Lessons Learned (Feb 2017), Decision-Making Models (March 2017)

Intelligence and Governance

Katy Steward of @TheKingsFund asks What Makes a Board Effective? (Feb 2013). She's looking specifically at the role of the Board in the National Health Service, but there is much that can be generalized to other contexts. She asks some key questions for any given board.

• Are its members individually effective and do they communicate effectively – for example, do they challenge themselves and others?
• Do they use energetic presentations and have insightful conversations?
• Do they support their colleagues and have good decision-making skills?

In this post, I want to develop this line of thinking further by exploring what the concept of organizational intelligence implies for boards.


1. Boards need to know what is going on.

• Multiple and diverse sources of information - both quantitative and qualitative
• Understanding how information is filtered, and a willingness to view unfiltered information as necessary. 
• Ability to identify areas of concern, and initiate detailed investigation 

2. Boards need to make sense of what is going on.

• Ability to see things from different perspectives - patient quality, professional excellence, financial accountability, social accountability. 
• Ability to see the detail as well as the big picture. 
• Courage to investigate and explore any discrepancies, and not to be satisfied with easy denial.

3. Boards need to ensure that all decisions, policies and procedures are guided by both vision and reality. This includes decisions taken by the board itself, as well as decisions taken at all levels of management.

• Decisions and actions are informed by values and priorities, and reinforce these values. (People both inside and outside the organization will infer your true values not from your words but from your actions.) 
• Decisions and actions are guided by evidence wherever possible. Ongoing decisions and policies are open to revision according to the outcomes they yield.
• Decision-making by consent (Robertson)

4. Boards need to encourage learning.

• Effective feedback loops are established, monitoring outcomes and revising decisions and policies where necessary. 
• Courage to experiment. Ability to tolerate temporary reduction in productivity during problem-solving and learning curve. Supporting people and teams when they are out of their comfort zone. 
• Willingness to learn lessons from anywhere, not just a narrow set of approved exemplars.

5. Boards need to encourage knowledge-sharing

• All kinds of experience and expertise may be relevant 
• Overcoming the "silos" and cultural differences 
• The collective memory should be strong and coherent enough to support the organization's values, but not so strong as to inhibit change.

6. Boards work as a team, and collaborate with other teams

• Effective communication and collaboration within the board - don't expect each board member to do everything. 
• Effective communication and collaboration with other groups and organizations.
• Circle Organization (Robertson)

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Note: The six points I've discussed here correspond to the six core capabilities of organizational intelligence, as described in my Organizational Intelligence eBook.


See also

Brian Robertson, The Sociocratic Method. A Dutch model of corporate governance harnesses self-organization to provide agility and a voice to all participants (Strategy+Business Aug 2006)

Steve Waddell, Wicked Problems, Governance as Learning Systems (Feb 2013)


Updated 1 March 2013

How Offices Make People Stupid

@benhammersley at #RSAwork talks about the future of office work, and identifies some of the ways that organizations make themselves stupid. The irony is that a lot of these mechanisms were supposed to make offices more productive and efficient, and to promote collaboration and creativity. As Ben puts it

We have optimized being on top of things rather than getting to the bottom of things.

Let's start with open plan offices. As Ben tells the story, these were introduced in an ideological attempt (supposedly originating in North California) to flatten the office hierarchy, to remove barriers between people, and to encourage people and technology to work together in perfect harmony. There are various dysfunctional versions of this Californian Ideology - see my post All Chewed Over By Machines (May 2011).

In practice, various interesting forms of behaviour emerge in open plan offices. Ben notes the widespread practice of more powerful workers grabbing the desks near to the wall, leaving juniors huddled in the middle in a state of permanent anxiety, as if they were antelope anticipating the lion's pounce.

Many offices are designed as semi-open plan, with people huddled in cubicles, but with the constant chance of someone popping a head over the partition.

In some offices, there is a deliberate policy to move people around - sometimes called hot-desking. One of the supposed benefits of this policy is that it encourages workers to constantly develop new relationships with their transient neighbours. For companies whose workers don't spend all their time in the office, this policy also reduces the amount of office space required. However, the uncertainty and anxiety of getting any desk, let alone a decent desk near the wall and away from the more irritating co-workers, might be regarded as a negative factor.

Putting aside the economics and culture and psychological impact of open plan offices, the essential justification is that they promote communication and collaboration. These elements are necessary but not sufficient for productivity and innovation in a knowledge-based organization. Not sufficient because productivity and innovation also depend on concentrated hard work.


However, many offices are not conducive to either productivity or collaboration. @mkonnikova writes, In 2011, the organizational psychologist Matthew Davis reviewed more than a hundred studies about office environments. He found that, though open offices often fostered a symbolic sense of organizational mission, making employees feel like part of a more laid-back, innovative enterprise, they were damaging to the workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction. (The Open-Office Trap, New Yorker January 2014) 

And the open plan office certainly doesn't help people focus. People are forced to defend themselves, either by doing the serious work outside the office (I find I can usually focus better in a cafe than in the office) or by donning noise-cancelling headphones to signal their unavailability for casual conversation.

Another mechanism that supports superficial communication and collaboration while destroying focus is email. For a summary of Ben's critique of email, see my post Towards the Carbon Neutral Office (Feb 2013).

Besides the technical problems with email, there are also major social problems. For example, there are organizations whose employees feel under pressure to receive and respond to emails at all times. If your boss (or a major customer) sends you an email at the weekend, you may feel obliged to answer. Some people can stand up to this kind of pressure, and ask the boss politely but firmly whether the matter can possibly wait until Monday. Others cave in, and find themselves working extreme amounts of unpaid overtime.


Both open plan offices and email can be seen as a manifestation of a deeper force undermining organizational intelligence, namely hyperactivity. In his book Crossing the Postmodern Divide (1992) Albert Borgmann extends the concept of hyperactivity to society as a whole, and defines it as a state of mobilization where the richness and variety of social and cultural pursuits, and the natural pace of daily life, have been suspended to serve a higher, urgent cause (p. 14).

In many contexts, hyperactivity is literally counter-productive - it impairs productivity. See for example @tonyschwartz 's opinion piece Relax! You’ll Be More Productive (New York Times 9 Feb 2013). And as @ebase tweeted from the #RSAwork event, changing the tempo of communication often improves the quality of communication.


We may find some elements of hyperactivity in organizations with low levels of motivation, where people drag themselves reluctantly to work. But it is perhaps even more common in organizations where talented and successful people are praised and rewarded for exceptional levels of effort and achievement, where everyone appears to be highly motivated, and where behaviour that doesn't conform to the hyperactive norm is regarded negatively. In an otherwise impressive presentation on Netflix Culture Freedom and Responsibility, Netflix indicates that it expects this behaviour.

We’re all working online some nights and weekends, responding to emails at odd hours, spending some afternoons on personal time, and taking good vacations.

Someone at the RSA commented that the traditional protection against this kind of organizational pressure was the trades union. One purpose for collective representation was not to resist any progress, nor to see every management initiative as an opportunity to get something in return for their members, but to act as a voice against unsafe, unreasonable or unfair working conditions. Maybe it's hard to complain about the occasional weekend phonecall, but if the boss is making a habit of phoning staff at weekends, someone needs to tell them that this is not helping anyone achieve greater productivity or effectiveness.

The trades union has disappeared from many offices, there are various social and political reasons for this, and I'm not going to waste any time campaigning for their reinstatement. But what I think is worth noting here is that some useful feedback loops, formerly provided by trades unions, are no longer operational, and this makes it easier for organizations to spiral into uncontrolled, destructive hyperactivity.

To sum up, there are some interesting relationships between intelligence and physical environment (open plan offices) as well as some interesting relationships between intelligence and virtual environment (smartphones), together with a power structure that fails to protect people and organizations from the worst effects of these environmental factors.

Andrew Armour, What Happened To The Office Of The Future? Ben Hammersley Speaking At The RSA (February 2013)

Bryan Borzykowski, Why open offices are bad for us (BBC Capital, 11 January 2017)

Ben Hammersley, Tomorrow's Work - Why Yesterday's Expectations are Ruining Today's Future (RSA, February 2013)
 

Related posts: On Working At Home (March 2014)

Updated 4 Feb 2017

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For more ideas on Organizational Intelligence, please read my Organizational Intelligence eBook.