writing at electric speed

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In my last post on entangled thinking I referred to how the advent of Print almost 600 years ago changed the face of Europe. In 2006, as I was going through the editing and re-writing process for an academic article, I noted how limiting the print medium is, especially when transferring what was originally a series of blog posts to create the basis of the article. Adding hyperlinks was more natural to me than using the APA format, which I had used for many years, but I now viewed as a relic of a bygone era. What originally changed and flowed on my blog became a piece of static content. As a blog post, my article had built on previous posts and was open to comments and additions. With the print article, it seemed as if my learning process had been frozen in time.

We now have the printed word at electric speed which Marshall McLuhan predicted that —“At electric speed, all forms are pushed to the limits of their potential.” On social media, especially Twitter and other short forms of posting, the written word gets pushed to its limit and reverses to a new form of orality.

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entangled thinking

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About 500 years ago a new communications technology came along and changed the face of Europe — print. The Protestant Reformation saw the rise of religious wars, which were later followed by the scientific revolution and The Enlightenment. An age of exploration followed, which brought not just gold and silver to the coffers of Europe, but new foods such as potatoes from the Americas, to fuel the Industrial Revolution. These new foods increased the population and in turn brought about the demise of the Indigenous people of the Americas.

Did print help to enable democracy, and is that why the founders of the USA put freedom of the press into their Constitution? If print enabled democracy, will the emerging digital (electric) medium destroy it? Yuval Noah Harari thinks this may be the case, “The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century — the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place — may become their decisive advantage in the 21st century.” 

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we are on our own

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The invasion of Ukraine by Russia highlights how much we are alone in this world. We have not advanced from the 19th century ideal of the nation state. Organizations that focus on our global common humanity, like the United Nations, have been useless in stopping the carnage in Ukraine. The fact that Russia, or any other country, has a permanent seat on the Security Council underlines the UN’s inherent weakness to deal with belligerent states. The weakness of the global order shows how difficult it will be to deal with the impact of climate change.

Most countries today have lifted public health measures to counter the SARS-CoV-2 airborne viral pandemic. Those people who are at-risk or immunocompromised see first-hand how our institutions and markets will help people deal with the impacts of climate change — they won’t. It has become obvious that we are on our own.

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understanding work systems

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Continued from focus on the system.

“Over the long haul, even strong people can’t compensate for a weak process. Sure, some occasional success may come from team or individual heroics. But if you pit a good performer against a bad system, the system will win almost every time.” —Rummler & Brache

The nine-box model is an effective model for unearthing systemic issues that influence how work gets done. It looks at Goals, Design, and Management from three levels — the Organization, the Processes, and the Work Teams. This is a tool I have used for several consulting engagements during my career as a workplace performance improvement specialist.

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learning on the edge of chaos

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“the future of work will be based on hacking uncertainty” —Esko Kilpi

Esko Kilpi passed away in early 2020 and his work had informed my own for many years. He published a number of essays on Medium and I would like to curate some of the highlights from 2019.

“Instead of thinking about the organization let’s think about organizing as an ongoing thing. Then the managerial task, but not necessarily a manager’s task, is to make possible very easy and very fast responsive interaction and formation of interdependent individuals into value creating groups.” —2019-01-15

“We live in a time when we have compartmentalized ourselves into disciplines, using highly engineered processes in the name of efficiency and productivity. But if success is a result of learning and innovation, we need to think differently, we need to cross boundaries to create new insights.
Crossing boundaries is always about working with differences. This is why differences are potentially conflictual in nature, and this is something we should now welcome. Conflicts give rise to the possibility of innovation and the potential for finding totally new solutions.” —2019-01-21

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we have met the enemy

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A long time ago — pre-pandemic and pre-9/11 — I was flying on a commercial passenger aircraft. The flight was over-booked and as I was wearing my Army uniform, I was offered to sit in the jump seat, just behind the pilots. Yes, these things happened in the ‘before times’.

It was a short flight but I had a chance to speak with the pilots. The captain told me that many civilian pilots had a military background but their training and experience resulted in some differences. He mentioned that if there was an observed incident on take-off, most of the civilian-trained pilots would make small adjustments to the throttle speed, aware that fuel costs money for the company.  On the other hand, many of the military-trained pilots might react to an incident by slamming the throttles forward and getting out the situation and in the air as fast as possible. This of course cost more fuel, but from a military operational perspective would probably be the best default action.

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“a profound failure of ethical action”

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Jon Parsons has researched the ethical implications of the pandemic since it was declared by the WHO.

I initially thought that the pandemic, while obviously a serious crisis and heralding an era of disruption, was an opportunity for positive change, a moment people would step up, come together, and enact values of collective care … But all that stopped, and quicker than I would have imagined. Issues came up to do with financial support for workers. Forms of racism and stigma emerged, aimed at specific communities and related to the borders. With global shortages of personal protective equipment, there was a tendency toward forms of nationalism.

By the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021, it became clear what was happening was a profound failure of ethical action. I can think of no greater ethical wrong that has been so obviously committed in such a short period of time in living memory in this country … For example, recent protests have many people questioning what is happening in Canada. As I argue, this is just a symptom of the underlying pathology and a direct consequence of the failure of ethical action.

Such a failure also raises serious questions about challenges coming in the future, such as the capacity to deal with the consequences of climate change or to authentically engage in a project of reconciliation. Given how Canada responded to the pandemic, it is difficult to imagine this country could adequately rise to such challenges. —Covid-19 Ethics in Canada

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twitter enables open knowledge networks

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Twitter has kept me informed through this pandemic. I have been informed by subject matter networks of experts who share their knowledge with the public on Twitter. I was even taken to task by a troll (now off Twitter) for not blindly following local public health advice — “Twitter doctors are apparently more trusted than our medical officer of health.” But given the performance record of our CMOH, the advice from my pandemic list has kept me safer over the past two years.

Imagine if public health had taken the informed advice of Barry Hunt, an engineer specializing in airborne infection prevention. On 31 March 2020, Barry described the droplet theory of the spread of SARS-C0V-2 as — “90 year-old stale dated fake news” — yet the droplet theory was promoted by the WHO until May 2021.

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hope springs eternal

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On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.

“A society which eulogizes the average citizen is one which breeds mediocrity. What the world should be seeking, and what in Canada we must continue to cherish, are not concepts of uniformity but human values: compassion, love, and understanding.” —Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1971)

“Peace is not the absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition of benevolence, confidence, justice.” —Baruch Spinoza

“I’ve met people who effortlessly said, ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ but were unwilling to learn to say people’s name right. Learning and / putting effort into saying someone’s name correctly is one of the most basic things and humane things we could do.” —@blessingmpofu

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knowledge flows at the speed of trust

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Transparency

Businesses that are open, transparent, and cooperative are more resilient because they rely on people, not processes. In a transparent organization there is no way to game the system as an individual. A transparent business focuses on long-term value, not short-term profit. It can also foster innovation, as diverse ideas come to the fore when people openly share their ideas. Workers become a social network, cooperating in order to make the organization better.

Knowledge networks are similar. They function well when they are 1) based on openness, which 2) enables transparency, and 3) in turn fosters diversity — all of which reinforce the basic principle of openness. In such a transparent workplace, the role of management is to give workers a job worth doing, the tools to do it, recognition of a job well done, and then let them manage themselves.

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