I've been trying to listen less hard to the news, and more to the patterns behind it.
The trickle of you-must-listen-to-my-doom-laden-message just drains me. It reminds me of how people not so long ago were trying to impress upon all of us how important it was that we go to war. Hmmmmm.
The list that has penetrated my defences seems to have a theme. People who abuse people get protected. Whistle-blowers are punished first, and get listened-to second. The business culture surrounding sport seems less than sportsmanlike. The UK tacitly (or explicitly) supports torture. Politicians base their actions on the letter rather than the spirit of the law. Arrogant banking executives get away with blaming what happens on the "circumstances" and not their actions. (Yet the exact opposite is claimed when they are successful.)
Trust is a precious thing — hard to build and easy to lose.
Onora O'Neil made trust the subject of her 2002 Reith Lectures. This was right in the middle of public collapse of trust in major institutions like the National Health Service. I wonder how she might re-frame the lectures in the light of current events?
The real point is how institutions respond to the changing demands made on them. If they are allowed to change that is. For the bankers' "bonus culture", read the public sectors' "targets culture".
The micro-management of public service reform in the UK has been comprehensively reviewed (and demolished) by John Seddon in his new book Systems thinking in the Public Sector Seddon has a background in Deming's quality philosophies and their practical application, and he has written a brilliant follow-up book to his "Freedom from Command and Control". Anyone working or designing in the service arena will find it fascinating.
His analysis leads him to the conclusion that targets and measures always deflect an organisation from it's purpose if they are not derived from the actual work of doing the work. Targets generate their own proxy-purposes, and they don't embody the knowledge of the people who work in the system. In our terms the sub-plots multiply and overwhelm the main plot. The result is always waste.
The Japanese word is 'muda' (pdf 114k). It means 'pointlessness', and can apply to a stupid result (like pollution), or a stupid activity (like keeping people in an ambulance so that it doesn't 'count' that they have arrived at the hospital), or a stupid system.
He also highlights the inevitable 'gaming' that follows — if you set a target then people will find the most expedient way there for themselves — which may or may not be the best solution for the organisation, and is rarely the best solution from the user's point of view.
Studying the way people game systems is a hugely creative space — what if we could harness that creativity? @pistachio gives a perfect example: if you set up a 'beauty contest' that works on numbers (like the Shorty Awards) then it's unsurprising that people will try to game it by getting people to vote for them. In this particular case they engage the talents and bodies of Amazon's Mechanical Turk to inflate the numbers.
Gaming is a natural skill, but it requres accountability and transparency to generate value. That's the point. See, I got there eventually, and without shortcuts.
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