Horses for courses

The opportunity that alcohol offers to change the world always astounds me. The number of times beer has helped me and a few friends resolve all of the world's problems are just too many to count. The only surprising thing is waking up the next day to find that the problems are still there.

Over the weekend I had one of those experiences. It's all to do with Universities and the application of knowledge. It's not news to say that British and other Universities have changed a lot over the past few years. Things like the huge expansion in student numbers, the introduction of fees and market mentalities, and the development of R&D enterprise parks are just a few.

My experience of the academic world, and of the twilite zone of business development, intellectual property exploitation and application of knowledge tsarted us off. But the collected wisdom of an engineer, a retired company director, my dad's reflections over the years as a remarkable polymath researcher and lecturer, together with a biomedical researcher made all the difference.

I won't say we reached a consensus, but what I came away with was a sense that Universities have fallen or are falling between two pillars, and not doing as well in either as perhaps some of the alternatives could.

One lamentation I hear is for the good old days of pure research, and the opportunities for people in one discipline in a University to wander the library pursuing the kind of trail now represented by Internet hyperlinks. This was a creative, exploratory activity. It led sometimes to innovation, and sometimes to new perspectives on old problems.

And yet this is now the kind of thing that the wise companies of today are paying consultants millions each year to help them develop in their people. The number of seminars, consultancies, publications, websites, blogs and whatever dedicated to bringing innovation and creativity to the business world is staggering.

Meanwhile, universities are less and less places for minds to wander, discover, explore and create. There is an increasing introduction of business management and financial practices. Diversifying revenue streams, marketing, R&D full cost accounting ...

From two traditionally different parts of our societies there are converging paths. But for me, both are missing a huge point. The type of organisation that a university is - its structure, its culture, its place in society, its processes, its history has a fundamental effect on what it can successfully do. Universities have tried very hard to change, but they are not very good at what they are trying to do more of, and they are less good at what they used to do more of. This is not to say they shouldn't change, or that the good old days were as great as they are remembered to be.

But staying with the argument, how many academics spend very significant amounts of their time now dealing with, battling with, and occasionally losing to the administrative costs of an organisation doing something it was not created to do? What is the opportunity cost of a highly trained scientist, historian or engineer spending so much time doing something else?

In the world of business, the economic landscape is changing dramatically fast. What i suggest is happening is that businesses that are able to change dramatically enough their organisation, structure, people and culture have a chance of surviving. But there are many more new organisations that are starting from scratch specifically for today's purposes that will be around in the future, even if the 'failure' rate can be shocking at times. Nonetheless, this very flexibility makes it hard to establish continuity in terms of expertise, tacit knowledge, creative opportunity and costly research.

Ah well, this is all very logical, you may say; we see more and more partnerships between universities and businesses. Yes we do. Tell me how well they work. Tell the stories about how much time and effort is spent in trying to bridge the organisational and cultural gaps between these two. Is it working? Is it working as well as it could? And more crucially, will it stop universities and businesses from focusing on their strengths, or will it drag them closer and closer together?

I reckon there's a relatively logical thread there. I want to cut it now.

I believe it is a mistake to follow these processes any further. It is like two-party politics; it creates massively aligned tensions on a single axis between the two, and whether it pulls both ends towards the centre or polarises them towards the extremes, it is not getting the best out of the people, effort and knowledge that are all involved.

I believe that what we need is a new model of temporary organisation that can break the two-point dynamic. Instead of trying to set up hybrid models of businesses with university directors, and employing ex-finance directors as university business office directors, we should be looking at a new model altogether.

What we need is the new breed of renaissance entrepreneur that I've met suffering within all sectors. People who are passionate about pure research, about exploring ideas for their own sake; but who are not single-minded enough to dedicate their entire lives to such pursuits. people who have no interest in setting up long-term empires, and entrenching power structures, but instead prefer to create their lives as a series of spectacular stories or events. People who see opportunites and then get enormous satisfaction from leading or catalysing a band of fellow travellers to make it a real difference to people's lives.

Social entrepreneur doesn't do it for me. It's a related term maybe, but I'm specifically talking about the university and business context. It's needed, I'm up for it, and I'm looking forward to finding people to do it with.

Gurteen's Knowledge Quotes

David Gurteen has a fascinating site; have a look...

I subscribe to his (almost) daily knowledge quotes, and today's is:

We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success; we often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.

By Samuel Smiles

I'm more than ever convinced that fear of failure, and particularly institutionalised fear of failure, is the biggest threat to innovation, personal growth and learning at all levels in our societies. If we continue to seek to blame instead of to understand, then this will only get worse.

Can we understand without blaming? Can our public organisations be accountable and be allowed to make mistakes? How do we manage that tension? What happens when people die? What deep individual motivation moves us to blame someone or something for mistakes, not only fatal ones?

Persuasive presentations

Steve Denning was talking about presentations and persuasion at the weekend. His comments focused on the act of persuasion during presentations, about changing people's minds in real time. I asked myself questions about whether this is how we change our minds, or at least how some of us do. Do we need time to reflect on what we've heard? Do we need time to internalise a point of view and let it resurface as our own idea? I know that in a good active debate I have myself defended, (and watched other people defend), a long- or firmly-held point of view in the heat of the moment, but reflect later. By defending, our views are tested, and flaws and weaknesses can be revealed. But it's quite hard to accept the implications, and more importantly perhaps, construct an alternative view based on the new disposition of beliefs or truths. I wonder what the dynamics of a presentation need to be to accomplish this in one go. I wonder what's been studied in the way of attitude change processes that might help understand this. Ah well, yet another fascinating area I probably won't have time to explore ...

Dream teams

I came across some research yesterday that looked at what makes a dream team. The thing that struck me was that the researchers had looked at theatre teams as well as others. That brought to mind a government initiative in Denmark that offers a theatre (rather than a theatrical) approach to business. This evolved out of the more traditional (passive or one-way) relationship between arts and business, with business sponsoring the arts. The Learning Lab explored this through a collaboration - The Creative Alliance - with a project called 'Artful Creation: Learning Tales of Arts-in-Business', that led to a book by Lotte Darso publised last year. You can read the first chapter free as a pdf on the website. I think it's got some great ideas, and when I've read the whole book, I'll no doubt have more to say!

Science as entertainment: tags and consensus

One last thought prompted by Clay Sharkey's essay before I head off for a cup of tea.

The massive number of web users collectively 'deciding' if books are probably entertainment is one thing. What kind of creative connections, conclusions or meaning would come out of the fire if this could somehow be applied to science?

I remember something that struck me almost 20 years ago now when working on a contract for the then Nature Conservancy Council with my (hero) boss Ken Gregory. We were tasked with short-listing sites based on their scientific interest to the geomorphology of rivers. I devised a system for selection with a view to making the process transparent and (in theory at least) replicable and adaptable. One particular site came up through this process that produced some discussion about whether it should be included or not.

The essence of our discussion was that this site had been important to the subject, but the research carried out there was old and both the research and the researcher had fallen out of favour. In other words, the science had moved on, according to the collective consensus of the field. And so what was or was not of scientific interest had also changed. Science and scientists are as much part of society as movie fans or wine drinkers. And a lot of what is regarded as 'fact' is subject to the same social factors, even if there are significant differences (another story there).

What impact could or will tagging and monitoring have on how science as a world operates?

How will peer-review as a process be affected by the changes in publication that blogs and wikis are driving? Can, should and will anyone be able to review what particular scientists are saying all over the place, rather than having to rely on the peer-review journals? This is happening in debates in wider society, but what's happening 'inside' science communities?

I think there are fundamental issues here that I'd be interested in talking about. Anyone interested in that?

By the way, in the end we dropped the site out of the selection, and I added a postscript to my description of the selection process to include the relevance of 'current', 'consensus' in fluvial geomorphology as a factor.

Organic projects : Thinking the world too tidy?

The main thought I got out of the Clay Sharkey essay on classification is the essential need for traditional classification systems to be hostages to the future. One example he gives is to consider the difference between the following two statements:

A: "This is a book about Dresden."
B: "This is a book about Dresden,
and it goes in the category 'East Germany'."

Well, East Germany turned out to be a temporary affair compared with Dresden. So statement A is still true, whereas statement B isn't. And of course, city names can change too.

But apart from classifications becoming out of date, and in the internet context of the essay, out of date very quickly, for me there is a greater risk. If we believe our classification for too long, we become increasingly out of touch with reality, but we also risk trying to impose our out of touch view on the world and other people.

This can mean at one level that no one knows what we mean when we talk about a 'beat combo'; it may mean our company goes down because we no longer have any idea what their customers think or want, or because we can't change and grow to match them; or it may mean that our views of the benefits of our technology colour our interpretation of disastrous consequences. Perhaps the most extreme level may be that leaders of countries and empires impose their classification, their view on reality, on the rest of the world.

Is this the greatest danger of this type of mechanical, non-organic approach to understanding the world?

On a project management level, the essay parallels my thinking on how the design and value of processes and structures for a project must be organic and grow, change and even die if that's right. Otherwise they take on a life of their own, and become increasingly detached and irrelevant for their purpose.

Why doesn't this happen anyway? I think it's because it's hard for most of us to deal with uncertainty. Too many of us like leaders who are certain, even if they're wrong. Too many of us like systems that are familiar and stable, even if they no longer do anything useful. I think a great challenge is to be able to foster ways for project teams, groups and individuals to be more comfortable with uncertainty in the present.

Many change management principles aim to map out the future, and for people to participate in that process. There may well be value in that; maximising awareness of the reality out there and its future has value. But I think it misses the point I'm trying to make. (I don't want to get into a critique of change management here, it's another converstaion entirely .)

My point is that there are huge benefits to understanding the origins of the fears that drive us to put too much faith on certainty. There are massive advantages in cultivating the skills and confidence to deal with uncertainty here and now, every day. Ontology, classification, rigid structures, whatever you will, these things can get in the way of creativity, growth, change and successful adaptation to a world that is changing in many ways at an increasing rate. I also firmly believe that this doesn't mean forgetting our history, or that there is no certainty, that there are no points of reference. I believe that these things are just more profound - more like principles than rules - and the natural world has numerous examples for us if we look for them.

Organic classification

I finally got around to reading one of Clay Sharkey's recent blog essays - Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags. Apart from its interest to my recent thinking on organic thinking, biomimetics and so on, I was pleased to read about one of my habits that some friends have described as bizarre or even 'anal' (rather unkindly I feel). Clay writes:

(My mother, who was a reference librarian, said she wanted to reshelve the entire University library by color, because students would come in and say "I'm looking for a sociology book. It's green...")

Yes, my book shelves, at least those that have ANY sense of order, are arranged by colour. I may not remember the author, the date, the precise subject - but I almost always remember what colour it is. The main problem with this system is publishers who make the spines a different colour from the face. (I am not yet of a mind that this is done deliberately ro undermine my classification system.)

I often find my CDs the same way, although the typically narrow and numerous shelves don't lend themselves to the same approach.

Anyway, the main thing is that I recommend this as a good essay, if you're interested in some particularly practical applications of an organic/gardening approach to modern human living.

By the way, does anyone remember that episode in Porrige when one of Fletcher's inmates says "I read a book once. Green it was." What was the guy's name?

It just ain't natural.

Does human behaviour disturb natural processes or is human behaviour a natural process?

I put this question as a way to express an idea about drawing insiration from natural processes in dealing with projects and people. There is surely profound inspiration to be found in the natural world for philosophies, forms and processes that can help us live and work together. I suggest that we are more likely to identify and adopt them if we view ourselves as an inclusive part of the natural world, however we may currently view our behaviour.

My ways of feeling part of the natural world, and quite explicitly identifying and using natural processes and structures to help me understand, live and work in it, are my love of gardening and garden design, and landscape photography. Whether it be elevated histories of garden design or the daily practices of subsistence gardeners I get inspiration and understanding of our relationship with very basic natural elements, air, water, soil, sun. I've also found analogies to group relationships, to the timing of processes, and even to the hierarchy of need, that help me understand problematic group dynamics, and to prepare new groups for working together.

My key point is that the gardening analogy includes people, and so I think helps us view the natural world models as something which we are naturally and successfully part of. Of course, however useful this may be, it's only ever going to be one view of reality, and sharing views of reality with others is another key aspect of succeeding in groups.

Status symbols

I've just had the great pleasure of accepting an appointment as a Visiting Investigator at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. My work on the MASSE project, together with the proposal I mentioned, have led to this elevated status. I'm genuinely pleased about it.

It also got me thinking about other symbols of status in the academic world. I was talking to one or two people about what happens at academic meetings, and how much of value seems to happen in the shadows rather than on the podium; networking over lunch, coming up with great ideas over a beer in the evening(where DO all those ideas go?) This is very similar to views I've heard of conferences in other domains.

My question was, if this is true, does it reduce the visible parts of such events to purely symbolic status? And if we accept that is the case, does that make them less valuable or even leave them without value?

It was no surprise to hear lots of different points of view, sometimes opposing, and sometimes from the same people, myself included. (On one hand ... but on the other hand ... like Topol in Fiddler on the Roof.) What seemed a general conclusion though was that the symbolism reflected the status in the wider community - it was a behavioural presentation of status as it exists in the community at large. To that extent it was refreshing at this particular conference to see a significant broadening of disciplines, topics and ages. If this does represent the reality of the community at large, then maybe the days of science advancing 'funeral by funeral' (Max Planck) may be well and truly behind us. What do you think?