Whom does the change serve?

In my writings on technology ethics, riffing on the fact that so many cool technologies are presented as the Holy Grail of something or other, I have frequently invoked the mediaeval question that Parsifal failed to ask: Whom does the Grail Serve?

• Chatbot ethics - Whom does the chatbot serve? (May 2019)
  
• Driverless cars - Whom does the technology serve? (May 2019)
• The Road Less Travelled - Whom Does the Algorithm Serve? (June 2019)
  

The same question can be asked of other changes and transformations, where technology might be part of the story but is not the primary story.

• Is Organizational Integration a Good Thing? (November 2012)
• The Ethics of Disruption (August 2019)
• What difference does technology make? (October 2019)
  
• Bold Restless Experimentation (June 2020)
  

 

In response to Francis Fukuyama's statement on Big Tech's information monopoly

Almost every abuse these platforms are accused of perpetrating can be simultaneously defended as economically efficient

@mireillemoret argues

Efficiency is important, but it is NOT the holy grail

 

Important for whom? When I get involved in economic discussions of efficiency or productivity or whatever, I always try to remember the ethical dimension - efficiency for whom, productivity for whom, predictability and risk reduction for whom, innovation for whom.

Note: I just started reading Adrian Daub's new book, but I haven't got to the Disruption chapter yet.

---

Chris Bruce, Environmental Decision-Making as Central Planning: FOR WHOM is Production to Occur? (Environmental Economics Blog, 19 August 2005)

Adrian Daub, What tech calls thinking (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2020) 

Adrian Daub, The disruption con: why big tech’s favourite buzzword is nonsense (The Guardian, 24 September 2020)

Francis Fukuyama, Barak Richman, and Ashish Goel, How to Save Democracy From Technology - Ending Big Tech’s Information Monopoly (Foreign Affairs, January/February 2021) 

Further posts

• For Whom (November 2006)
  
• From SOA to better judgement (January 2009)
  
• Redesigning the Banana (July 2009)
• Arguing with Drucker (April 2015) 
• Evolution or Revolution (December 2020)

Fail Fast - Burger Robotics

As @jjvincent observes, integrating robots into human jobs is tougher than it looks. Four days after it was installed in a Pasadena CA burger joint, Flippy the robot has been taken out of service for an upgrade. Turns out it wasn't fast enough to handle the demand. Does this count as Fail Fast?

Flippy's human minders have put a positive spin on the failure, crediting the presence of the robot for an unexpected increase in demand. As Vincent wryly suggests, Flippy is primarily earning its keep as a visitor attraction.

If this is a failure at all, what kind of failure is it? Drawing on earlier work by James Reason, Phil Boxer distinguishes between errors of intention, planning and execution.

If the intention for the robot is to improve productivity and throughput at peak periods, then the designers have got more work to do. And the productivity-throughput problem may be broader than just burger flipping: making Flippy faster may simply expose a bottleneck somewhere else in the system. But if the intention for the robot is to attract customers, this is of greatest value at off-peak periods. In which case, perhaps the robot already works perfectly.

---

Philip Boxer, ‘Unintentional’ errors and unconscious valencies (Asymmetric Leadership, 1 May 2008)

John Donohue, Fail Fast, Fail Often, Fail Everywhere (New Yorker, 31 May 2015)

Lora Kolodny, Meet Flippy, a burger-grilling robot from Miso Robotics and CaliBurger (TechCrunch 7 Mar 2017)

Brian Heater, Flippy, the robot hamburger chef, goes to work (TechCrunch, 5 March 2018)

James Vincent, Burger-flipping robot takes four-day break immediately after landing new job (Verge, 8 March 2018)





Related post Fail Fast - Why did the chicken cross the road? (March 2018)

Developing cultures of high-quality care

#kfleadership Excellent lecture at @TheKingsFund this evening by Professor Michael West. Here are some of my notes.

---

When he left college West was short of money, so he took a job in the coal mines. Productivity was important to everyone, and the pay at the end of the week depended on the quantity of coal extracted. But there was one thing more important than productivity, namely safety.

In many organizations this would just be lip service. But in the coal mines, safety was taken very seriously, and management actions were completely congruent with this.

West argued that the same should apply in the Health Service. Of course productivity is fundamentally important, but the number one priority should not be productivity but high-quality and safe patient care.

Valuing patients and staff turns out to be good management. West's argument is not merely based on rhetoric, but is supported by data. Patient outcomes and patient satisfaction are highly correlated with staff satisfaction and morale, and these in turn are correlated with staff engagement, which West defined in terms of three things: pride, intrinsic engagement and involvement in decisions. Ultimately this links back to improved productivity.

Someone in the audience objected that productivity must always be the top priority, otherwise you risk running out of money to pay for patient care. West replied that productivity follows from good people management. He agreed that the NHS has a great deal to learn from the private sector, and expressed a hope that private sector expertise (including non-executive board members) would not be limited to the Marketing and Finance perspectives.


West affirmed that the NHS is full of intelligent and highly motivated people, and said that the traditional command and control mode of leadership was such a waste of resource. The key role of leaders is to learn from staff, and to realize the potential of the people.

People at all levels require courage to accept challenging targets - in other words, to strive for things that they won't always achieve. The organization must accept and learn from failure to reach these targets. Blaming people for failure to excel is not only stupid and unfair, it is also counter-productive, because it makes people risk-averse and inhibits them from striving for anything that isn't guaranteed in advance.

Leadership includes the courage to seek unwelcome information - for example feedback that indicates things not going well.

After the lecture, I was chatting to a group from a London teaching hospital about accountability. As I see it, accountability doesn't only mean taking responsibility for the consequences of one's decisions (such as short-sighted cost-cutting) but also taking responsibility for what one chooses to pay attention to. One of the classic examples in Moral Philosophy concerns a ship owner who sends a ship to sea without bothering to check whether the ship was sea-worthy. Some argue that the ship owner cannot be held responsible for the deaths of the sailors, because he didn't actually know that the ship would sink. I think most people would see the ship owner having a moral duty of diligence, and would regard him as accountable for neglecting this duty.

In the current climate, the NHS leadership has a duty to achieve high quality patient care and productivity, and the evidence from Professor West is that this can best be achieved by engaging staff at all levels. Executive boards must surely be held accountable if they neglect to do this.

---

See also Culture of Fear (Storify, 27 Feb 2013)

The ship-owner example can be found in an essay called "The Ethics of Belief" (1877) by W.K. Clifford, in which he states that "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence".


Related post: Ethics and Intelligence (April 2010), Agility and Fear (February 2013)

Updated 28 Feb 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

---

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

The value of time management ...

After I blogged about the value of getting things done, @johanlindberg asked me to look at a couple of other time management practices - Burn-Down Charts and the Pomodoro technique.

There must be hundreds of time management practices, and thousands of self-help books and websites encouraging people to organize themselves better. Some of them even tell you to stop reading and get on with stuff.

Why are there so many? Is it because they all work, or because none of them do? Is it because there isn't a single approach to time management that suits everyone, so we all need to read dozens of these before we find one that provides just the right combination of common sense and quirkiness that chimes with our own lives? Or is it because people who have difficulties with time management are always looking for further displacement activity - as if reading just one more book, or buying just one more iPhone app, will suddenly change us from muddled procrastinators into smooth and effective operators?

I cannot see a simple way to evaluate and compare these time management approaches as practical methodologies. Clearly there is enormous subjective value in organizing oneself, just as there is in coordinating a team, and we can certainly see the costs and risks associated with the lack of organization or coordination in particular situations, but organization and coordination are generally valued because they help us achieve our goals, rather than being primary goals in their own right.

What about judging a person or team in terms of achievement? There are levels of achievement that may be relevant here. Firstly, efficiency or productivity in handling a fairly uniform stream of events and tasks. Secondly, effectiveness in handling small variations in the event-stream - small adjustments that represent a continuous improvement loop - (in other words, single-loop learning to maintain a stable set of outcomes with variable inputs). Thirdly agility in anticipating and managing change (in other words, double-loop learning, where the desired outcomes may change as well as the strategies).

"Best practice" time management may help people become more efficient and effective in narrowly defined areas or known tasks. But sometimes the reason for procrastination is that people aren't sure whether that's the right thing to do. Sometimes it really is better to stop and think; and a time management practice that inhibits reflection may ultimately turn out to be a handicap.

Perhaps we should think of time management not as a best practice (which everyone needs all of the time) but as a kind of therapy (which many people need sometimes). In which case, it's not about getting everyone to adopt some standard technique, but having resources available to help people and teams when they experience a certain kind of stuckness. Sometimes true intelligence is knowing when you need help.

The value of getting things done ...

@jackvinson and @steveellwood ask whether anyone has documented the "value" of GTD w/i an organization? (Inspired by my post Meeting of Minds on meeting culture).

GTD stands for Getting Things Done - a popular time management methodology presented in a book by David Allen (subtitle: "The Art of Stress-Free Productivity"), which Wired Magazine (September 2007) described as a Cult of Hyperefficiency. A closely related approach is offered by the 43 folders website.

We might imagine that the value of Getting Things Done could easily be calculated by considering the cost (or opportunity cost) of Not Getting Things Done. But according to the old rhyme, the cost of Not Getting Things Done can escalate indefinitely.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

So how would we estimate the true value of a nail? No doubt the blacksmith would argue the nail's case for being the critical success factor for the kingdom. But someone else might produce an equally plausible argument for something entirely different being the critical success factor.

So we might think that the value of Getting Things Done depends which things get done. But as Gary Wolf explains in his Wired review, Allen differs from a lot of earlier self-help gurus by skipping the philosophical reflection stage. "Instead, he likes to describe his system as a 'bottom up' approach, by which he means that life's values emerge from its tiniest component actions, rather than a top-down approach that starts with deep thought."

So the purpose of your actions is whatever you find yourself doing, emerging from a series of micro-decisions that are triggered by a large number of events (such as incoming email). In other words, POSIWID. The aggregate value of this activity is determined by its overall coherence, rather than its correspondence (alignment) with any externally given goals and values.

In their paper Getting Things Done: The Science behind Stress-Free Productivity (pdf), Francis Heylighen and Clément Vidal describe Getting Things Done as a praxeology - in other words, a theory of practical action. They point out that it is intrinsically difficult to compare the productivity of people using GTD with that of people using different methods.

"The reason is that because GTD does not embrace explicit priorities or optimization criteria, there is no obvious standard by which to measure expected productivity enhancements. A simpler approach may be subjective evaluation: how satisfied with their work are GTD users compared to users of other methods? However, this will still teach us little about precisely how and why GTD is supposed to work."

Furthermore, because there are no obvious standards, it is not clear what other methods it would be appropriate to compare with GTD. How about the Rule of Saint Benedict, for example? (The Rule of Saint Benedict was of course originally intended to govern a community of monks, although some people think it can have secular applications. Whereas GTD appears to be aimed at individuals rather than organizations.)

Given that GTD is billed as a way of reducing stress, perhaps it would make more sense to assess its value in those terms - in other words, evaluate it not as a praxeology but as a New Age therapy. So we should be comparing it not with the Rule of Saint Benedict but with Scientology.

Meeting of Minds

@mcgoverntheory asks whether I know of any research quantifying the cost of the meeting culture in enterprises.

There is a lot of research on meetings, but the cost factors are very complicated to calculate and compare.

There are three elements to the cost of a meeting.

Firstly, the direct cost of the meeting - the travel and subsistence costs of the employees, the daily rates of consultants and contractors, facilities and refreshments. Electronic meetings are often cheaper (at least once the infrastructure is in place), but can be less effective, especially for longer meetings.

Secondly, the opportunity cost of the meeting - what the employees could have been doing if they hadn't been in the meeting. For some jobs, this is calculated on the assumption of constant productivity, so for example if your normal job is writing code or selling products, then every hour in meetings represents a given quantity of code not written, or a given quantity of lost revenue. However, for any job requiring any degree of intelligence, creativity or coordination, the assumption of constant productivity simply doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

The third element to consider is the cost of not having the meeting. Good meetings can make people more productive and creative, and help avoid wasted effort. Good meetings make the organization more intelligent - processes become more efficient, decisions get better, the organization learns more quickly - and this increases the overall added-value of the work done. (As part of my ongoing research on organizational intelligence, I am looking for ways to benchmark this kind of improvement.)

However, James asked not about the cost of meetings, but about the cost of "the meeting culture". In many large organizations, there are meetings for the sake of meetings, meetings out of habit, whose purpose and value is not obvious to the participants. Surely this kind of thing is the very opposite of organizational intelligence?

Perhaps so, but we should not be too hasty to jump to conclusions. Many people, while complaining bitterly about too many meetings, know perfectly well that they couldn't sustain a high level of productivity at the primary task throughout the day without some variation in routine. It's just not healthy to sit at your desk all day. The meeting therefore serves a useful purpose, to provide relief in an otherwise unremitting working routine. There is a complicit connivance at arranging meetings, at which issues are discussed but not resolved, decisions are deferred, absent stakeholders are talked about behind their backs, and managers can gently doze with their eyes open. The purpose of the meeting is what it does (POSIWID).

This kind of meeting culture especially thrives in the kind of Theory X or Fordist organization where people are expected to be busy all the time, and to fill in timesheets, because time is money. In a Theory Y or post-Fordist organization, people are trusted to get the job done. When you have been staring at the screen for too long, you can just go to the vacant lot behind the office and play football for twenty minutes instead of having to invent a pointless meeting.

So the cost of the meeting culture is basically the human and financial and strategic cost of Fordism. Just give me a call, and I'll come and quantify this cost for your organization. Or we could have a meeting about it.

See also Notes on the Value of Culture (January 2010)

Venturesome Consumption

Chris Potts pointed me to the work of Amar Bhidé, which raises some interesting and important questions for innovation and organization change in general, and for EA in particular.

Venturesome Consumption, Innovation and Globalization (pdf)
Paper for a Joint Conference of CESifo and the Center on Capitalism and Society
“Perspectives on the Performance of the Continent’s Economies”
Venice, 21 - 22 July 2006
by Amar Bhidé

1. Absorptive capacity. I think this concept is important both for inter-enterprise innovation (adoption of new business models, practices and technologies by the enterprise as a whole) and intra-enterprise innovation (diffusion of new systems and processes across the organization). Within Lenscraft, this is covered by the Adoption Engineering lens.

2. Productivity and competitive advantage. There is an important question about how innovation generates value, and for whom. If all players in a competitive industry adopt (are forced to adopt) the same innovation, then none of them may gain any net value, but all of them may avoid losing value. Arguably the customers are the beneficiaries, but this is not a straightforward calculation. For example, customers benefit more than banks from the ubiquity of ATMs, although this is hard to quantify, and with other technologies it may be difficult to demonstrate any customer benefit at all. On a Marxian argument, although technology can produce a short-term improvement in profit in an industry, the longer-term effect on profit is downwards, in which case it would be puzzling why monopolies would ever bother. (Indeed, in some utilities, the pressure for technological innovation seems to come largely from the regulators.) The Marxian argument about the falling rate of profit isn't universally applicable, but it behoves champions of innovation within organizations to understand where it does and doesn't apply.

3. ROI. The first two points are not addressed in the bog-standard business case, and the ROI is often grossly over-estimated, based on extremely naive assumptions. A proper joined-up systems analysis would expose the weaknesses here. This relates to what Bhidé calls Knightian uncertainty.

4. Resourceful problem solving. The users have an active role in producing what I have called the "technology-in-use". This also links to the work of Erik von Hippel.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~rxv/orgmgt/ob8.pdf

5. Barriers to innovation and diffusion. Bhidé is interested in national borders; some of us may be more interested in organizational boundaries (both external and internal). But the word "barriers" is an inadequate metaphor - in reality there is a landscape with uphill and downhill contours, making some paths easier and quicker than others, but few paths are completely impassable.

6. One of the consequences of this analysis is that we should be modelling the internal and external flows of knowledge and ideas, as a critical element of a business model. To some extent this is already done in industries like pharma, but these flows largely focus on product development knowledge and don't provide a more general picture.

7. Overall, an important plea for the demand side of innovation to be taken as seriously as the supply side. I completely agree with this.

Process Improvement

Gunfire at Sea: A Case Study of Innovation

In 1899, five ships of the US Navy, aiming at a lightship hulk at a range of 1600 yards, hit the target twice in 25 minutes of firing practice. Six years later, a single gunner with essentially the same equipment managed to hit a much smaller target at the same range 15 times in one minute. This 3000% improvement in accuracy was achieved by introducing a new technique of firing, called continuous-aim firing, which however the Navy establishment at the turn of the century was extremely reluctant to adopt.

The introduction of continuous-aim firing into the US Navy was the work of one man, William Sims, then a junior lieutenant. He learnt the technique from a British naval officer, Percy Scott. Both men had difficulty persuading their superiors to take the idea seriously, despite the spectacular success shown on Scott's ship.

There were three reasons for this difficulty.

First, there was honest scepticism about the new technique: it was hard to believe that such enormous improvements were possible - especially from such a relatively small change in working practices.

Second, the traditional techniques commanded much loyalty: in a changing world, people need to identify with familiar tools and techniques.

Third, the existing structure of the navy relied upon the current technology: relations of power and influence would be altered by the improved status of the gunner, thus disrupting the closed society that the navy was. Sims only succeeded by going over the heads of the admirals and appealing to President Roosevelt, who forced the admirals to accept the change.

Source: Elting E. Morison/MEN, MACHINES, AND MODERN TIMES, (Cambridge, MA: THE MIT PRESS), 1966, pp. 17-44. Extract available from US Navy (html) (pdf)

---

In 1986, I wrote an article on productivity in the IT industry, which drew heavily on this example (pdf).



Technorati Tags: innovation

Automation and Skill

New technologies often present an interesting choice.

• The old way of doing something presents us with a low level of difficulty all the time;
  
  
• A more sophisticated/automated way of doing it spares us the difficulty most of the time, only to present us with occasional bursts of extreme difficulty.

The latter may deliver much higher productivity when you have gotten up the learning curve, but it's a much steeper learning curve. You can't progress from simple tasks to hard tasks, if the technology has already captured all the simple tasks. New technologies call for a concentration of skills, but interfere with our ability to learn these skills effectively.



Software example: code generation tools.