The ‘old A30’ and building on top of what went before

Admin on 30/08/2021

If we want a sustainable future we have to build things that can be built on top of

‘The old A30’ is now a nature reverse where kids ride bikes, old couples go for walks on Sundays, and the occasional adder suns itself. Before this old road was replaced by the new A30 it was one of the busiest roads in Cornwall, notorious for traffic jams and accidents. But before it was a metaled road for the modern motorcar it was a coaching route for horse-drawn coaches traveling between Bodmin and Indian Queens. And long before that it may have been used by the Roman army marching between the east and west sides of Cornwall. And even longer before that it might have a prehistoric trackway. It’s had quite a history.

What makes that history fascinating, when looking back from our point in history, is how the road was built upon over time. The same road, taking more or less the same route, serving the same purpose, for thousands of years. Until now. Now it’s no longer a road. It was replaced, not build upon as it had been generation after generation, but replaced with something completely new.

Replacing things rather than repairing and upgrading them can’t be a purely 20th/21st century idea, but it isn’t hard to see how the technological innovation, capitalism, free market and competition, consumerism, advertising, and a thousand other things of the last few hundred years have formed the psyche of the modern world that leads us to think that building new things to replace old things is better than building upon old things.

Maybe what we can build upon and what we must replace depends on the nature of the thing. Are physical things different to immaterial things? Perhaps the first communication network people ever build was signal fires on beacon hills to warn settlements in the valleys below of invading clans. Millennia later, legend has it that once there was a time where there was nowhere a person could stand in England and not hear church bells ringing out to call worshipers from the fields and villages. The churches formed a different communications network, with a different purpose and using different technology, than the signal fires. They did not build upon or replace the physical infrastructure of the signal fires, but perhaps they took similar ideas about mass communication and built upon them.

New technologies brought new communication networks. Radio and television didn’t replace or build upon the churches and bell ringing, anymore than they did so with the signal fires, but the idea of broadcasting the same message to the masses from a central location was built upon and taken to further with refined messages available all day everyday. And then came the internet and the world wide web. Building upon those mass communication ideas and upon the telecommunications infrastructure, replacing old wires with new, and enabling more people to send a receive even more refined messages, the internet can trace it’s origins back to those signal fires that stood ready to warn our ancestors of danger.

How much of what we build today is built with a future in mind that includes being built upon? Our modern business thinking conditions us to believe that being disrupted and replaced as a bad thing, unless we’re the ones doing the replacing, beating the competition by achieving the competitive advantage that comes from customer lock-in and network effects. Where collaboration is mentioned in business plans and strategic text books it is as a means of partnering with other organisations to achieve even greater competitive advantage. Never is any thought given to collaborating with future organisations, in as yet un-imagined ways by building things that can be built upon.

If we want to create a sustainable future we must consider whether to replace or to build upon, what to take from before or to create new, and when to be competitive or truly collaborative. When we build things we should have an eye on the possible future of what could be built upon our thing and make that it a reality. We can give the builders of the future more choices if we make the right decisions now.

Weeknotes #262

Admin on 07/08/2021

What I did this week:

Bootstrap problems

My focus this week has been around shaping up plans for the rest of the year to ensure we’re able to develop and deliver the changes to the products that we want. There are all the practicalities budgets, availability, timelines, etc., to consider and coordinate with the ideas that are shaping up for what the products should achieve. How these two intertwine and affect each other as they move towards having the people and time to deliver the scope of work is an interesting [bootstrap problem](https://jonathanweisberg.org/publication/2012 The Bootstrapping Problem/#:~:text=Bootstrapping is a suspicious form,problem and surveys potential solutions.) where all assumptions are based on assumptions. The idea of fixed product teams removes the need for figuring out the complexities of logistics and gives a more solid grounding to base assumptions about the work that can be done. But where product teams are project based, none of that grounding exists. This problem is as old as software, and yet is still very much a real problem for the majority of charities that rely on funding for specific projects.

Change of theory

I took part in a user research workshop on a tool for working with Theory of Change. I found it a really interesting idea and have been thinking about it ever since. Being able to validate some of the assumptions in a Theory of Change to figure out what impact the activities and mechanisms are having and then make decision about whether to change the activities to achieve the intended impact or accept the activities and change the impact to be achieved would be really useful. It could introduce a level of rigor as the data that informs the model builds up over time rather than remaining a hypothesis. The challenge for many social good organisations will be whether they really want to get to that depth of understanding.

Innovation in charities

I’ve pretty much finished the research phase of my dissertation so am moving onto analysis. I’ve already got lots of interesting insights about innovation in charities and I’m intrigued to see what theory I can build as the case studies develop.

Notes

I’ve been experimenting with using my website as a notebook to add some of my thoughts more regularly and try to see if it helps me build and develop ideas. I’ve occasionally used Twitter, Notion and paper for this but never with any real usefulness.

What I read this week:

Digital maturity in the not for profit sector

This report is full of insight about “the organisational journey towards improvement and increased capability in using data” and includes findings like “The cost of data is huge, hidden, and often wasted. Most leaders don’t see the value of data. There’s lots of counting but not enough meaningful analysis.”. I wonder how the not for profit sector compares to other sectors.

Talent is evenly distributed, opportunity isn’t

Rand Fishkin, talking on the One Knight In Product podcast about alternative ways to build software startups, says “talent is evenly distributed, opportunity isn’t”. How companies recruit, organise work, incentivise, etc., makes a big difference in how opportunity becomes more evenly distributed.

What I thought about this week:

The future of digital nomadism and off-grid developers

At the extreme of remote working are people who earn their living on the internet and live their lives away from the conventions of mainstream society. Kevin Kelly talks about the right to mobility and how that affects our notion of what a digital nomad is (not just twenty-somethings living in Thailand and setting up drop-shipping websites and affiliate marketing). Alex Standiford is a good example. He’s an off-grid developer, living in a RV in New Mexico. In my thinking about the 21st century Outsider, for the book I’ll never write, the off-grid developer looks like one of the archetypes of a digital nomad, where it isn’t so much about ‘nomad’ meaning ‘always moving’ but more about not being tied to a particular location and being able to make the choice about where to live and work because the internet has decoupled those two.

Contracts and covenants

I had an interesting chat with Ross that started out about type 1 and 2 decisions but moved onto the more interesting topic of contracts and covenants. In trying to understand the difference between the two, I think we’d say that the logic of a contract is , ‘you agree to do what I want and I agree to do what you want, and we both have recourse if either of us doesn’t’, whereas a covenant is more, ‘this is what I’ll do for you regardless of what you do for me’. So many of our interactions with people and organisations are based on contracts, either implicit or explicit, but this seems based on zero sum thinking where one person is only willing to give if they get something in return. The relationship between natural and legal rights and responsibilities that are expressed in contracts are, obviously, very complex, but maybe the idea of covenants, which consider giving as non-zero sum game, where you don’t always need to get something in return, adds another perspective.

Perhaps we are all myth-makers

Ashley tweeted, “perhaps we are all myth-makers rather than truth-seekers, and our real quest is not to figure out what is Real but to steer ourselves towards Good“. Perhaps in a post-truth world we can be more open to Heraclitus’ ontological position that reality is ever-changing rather than Parmenides notion that all being is fixed and static. Arguably, without the notion of the world around us having some underlying static structure to it humans would never have made the scientific breakthroughs that we have, it’s really hard to study something unless you believe it to be the same as when you observed it yesterday, but without adopting that stance we could never have reached our definition of truth, and therefore become truth-seekers.

Of course, it isn’t one or the other, both notions about the nature of reality have existed together for a very long time, and allow us to see the world in complex ways, but we do have a tendency to think that there is an objective ‘truth’ about things for which there really isn’t. The example of this that’s on my mind this week is conversations with colleagues that were full of discussions about misunderstandings around language and how we and others were interpreting what had been said. I wonder if the misunderstanding of misunderstanding is that there is a single truth to be understood. When people discuss things they are making meaning as they go, not explaining a scientific fact, and yet we attempt to understand what they said as if it was.

The Futures Cone helps think about possible, probable, plausible futures. Perhaps we need a Meanings Cone that helps us think of our interpretations as possible, likely, unlikely, impossible to help us understand each other better because we consciously don’t base our understanding on the assumption that there is a single truth in what someone says.

What I’m grateful for this week

Feedback begets feedback

The more feedback I give the more I seem to get. Or may I just notice it more. Either way I’m grateful for being able to give feedback and for receiving it.

Tick TOCS Tick TOCS Channeling change through theory into scenarios

Admin on 27/12/2020

Tick TOCS Tick TOCS Channeling change through theory into scenarios

Many different methods exist for building scenarios. Bishop, Hines, and Collins cite almost two dozen scenario building approaches. Methods vary across a process landscape that includes contrasting uncertainties; mapping permutations and combinations of outcomes from key variables; and dynamic forecasting models. Good futures work includes clearly identifying the theories of change underlying
scenarios: what drives the changes that create alternative futures?

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Wendy_Schultz2/publication/270684776_Tick_TOCS_Tick_TOCS_Channelling_change_through_theory_into_scenarios/links/54b27f990cf2318f0f94faca/Tick-TOCS-Tick-TOCS-Channelling-change-through-theory-into-scenarios.pdf

Six pillars: futures thinking for transforming

Admin on 27/12/2020

Six pillars: futures thinking for transforming

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a new approach to the study of the future.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper describes six foundational concepts (the used future, the
disowned future, alternative futures, alignment, models of social change, and uses of the future), six
questions (will, fear, missing, alternatives, wish, and next steps as related to the future) and six pillars
(mapping, anticipating, timing, deepening, creating alternatives, and transforming), giving examples
and case studies where appropriate.
Findings – In an increasingly complex and heterogeneous world, futures studies can help people to
recover their agency, and help them to create the world in which they wish to live.
Originality/value – The paper integrates and builds on a variety of futures studies’ concepts, ways of
thinking and techniques and integrates them into a new approach.
Keywords Social dynamics, Epistemology, Change management, Economic change, Forward planning
Paper type Conceptual paper

https://www.benlandau.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Inayatullah-2008-Six-Pillars.pdf

Weeknotes #221

Admin on 23/10/2020

This week I did:

Higher fidelity supersedes lower fidelity

It has been a week of prototyping, user testing, and getting into the details of how processes will work, what API’s need to do, what content do we need, and how we use messaging to communicate expectations and responsibilities. Understanding young people’s expectations as they use our products is really important for how we communicate (in the holistic sense) there and our responsibilities to create a safe community.

Free School Meals

I had an idea about using tax relief claims from working at home as donations to charities tackling child poverty so I set up a page on my website and sent some tweets. I’m not a fundraiser or digital communications expert, and don’t have much of a following on Twitter, but it felt really uncomfortable putting myself out there with something like this. I usually get to hid behind websites. I don’t know how charity fundraisers do it every day.

Buddy Chat

I had a buddy chat with Bobi from Be More Digital. It’s the first time I’ve done anything like it but it was good fun. I think of it as part of the stigmergy for achieving the digital transformation of the charity sector, which is clearly such a big and complex thing that it can’t be achieved using a strategy, which would require centralised coordination.

What Nokia got wrong

I’ve been working on my assignment for the Innovation Management and Policy module of my Masters. It’s an analysis of how Nokia went from the market leader in the mobile phone industry to losing it all to Apple, Google, Samsung, etc. It’s not part of my assignment but I think the game Snake had a lot to do with the adoption and dominance of Nokia phones.

200 Digital Tools

I added the 200th digital tool to my list this week. There are still lots more I want to add, and I’ve been thinking about what to do with the list as it grows. One of my ideas is about joining up different products into different business model workflows. I have no idea what this would look like yet other than a curate shortcut to picking the right tools and products for setting up side-projects and small business ventures.

Visualize Value

I joined the Visualize Value community “of 1,300 builders and makers focused on increasing their value by creating valuable things.” as part of exploring business models. I’m not interested in building a business, I am interested in building business models.

And I read:

Conditions for Collaboration

Conditions for Collaboration - Part 2: the role of shared infrastructure by Nick Stanhope is a call for shared infrastructure and collaborative working. But there is tension between a strategy for such working which says that a single coordinated approach that says 50 digital maturity tools is too many lets pick one, and stigmergy, an approach that doesn’t require a centralised coordinated approach but transmits signals for others to follow and says 50 digital maturity tools allows far greater usage and application. Does what tool you use matter if they all get to where you want to go?

Our Digital Future

“Over recent months many of us have been talking a lot about the impact the COVID pandemic has had on the adoption of digital ways of doing things in healthcare. I say adoption rather than transformation because I have a view that we have not, by and large, transformed the way we deliver services or pathways. What we have done at a large scale is adopt ‘digital’ tools to replace physical interventions with virtual ones.” I wholeheartedly agree with Toby’s point of view, and his thoughts around building digital as a core competency in organisations to redesign what those organisations do and how they do it for the modern age.

Edtech’s Answer to Remote Learning Burnout

This in-depth analysis and prediction for the EdTech space from A16Z is really interesting for anyone with anything to do with online education, or ‘education’, as it’s called in the 21st Century.

The Great Reset

I began reading some of the articles from Time’s The Great Reset, a website about “the kind of future we want. TIME partnered with the World Economic Forum to ask leading thinkers to share ideas for how to transform the way we live and work.” There are some really interesting things to think about, including how Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, want to discuss the State of the Digital World and use their fame and influence to encourage people to listen to experts. I think we’ve learned over the past few months with Coronavirus and decades with Climate Change that people don’t listen to experts so it seems there is a need for intermediaries to facilitate the communication.

And thought about:

The Block Web

I wondered a while ago why websites are conceived or and set up to work like old paper documents and how this limits what we can do with the contents of those pages. And now we see products like Notion which are built around the idea of blocks, each of which have their own ID and which are used to build up pages. The future I imagine for these blocks is where they become the default for embedding and referencing content on web pages. An example might be where one website mentions the price of a product on another website, and if that price changes on the original website it is automatically changed on the mentioning website because it linked to the block with the price.

What to do with all the digital litter

How much of the internet digital storage is taken up by google site pages I started and never used, Evernote pages I’ll never look at again, records in databases for websites I forgot I created an account for. What do we do about this increasing digital litter?

And got recorded by Twitter as an impression for:

Newsletter Operating System

Janal tweeted, ” Launching pre-orders for my first info product. This one’s for newsletter writers. Problem: Managing a newsletter is time-consuming. Solution: I’ve created a dashboard that helps save you hours in the curation, writing & growth process” It’s great to see more people launching digital products like this, and it’s interesting to me to think about the business models that are being used. The most difficult part of the models seems to be the marketing and promotion. Producing is easy by comparison. But in the attention economy, getting people to take notice and take action is more of a challenge.

How I attracted 20,000+ visitors on a Notion page in 5 months

Felix Wong tweeted, “I thought VirtualMojito.com is just another silly idea. Now, this has become a project I like to work on every minute.“, which is another curation-as-a-service product using nocode. I find these kinds of side-project business models hugely fascinating.

Ethics of Algorithms

Mariarosaria Taddeo tweeted, “Check out ‘The Ethics of Algorithms: Key Problems and Solutions’ our paper on the ethics of algorithms“, which is on my reading list and, given the impact unethical algorithms are having/will have on our lives, should probably be on everyone’s reading list…

Weeknotes #214

Admin on 05/09/2020

I did:

The future is asynchronous

I presented some discovery work I’ve been doing for the next phase of our online learning environment. It has been centred around user needs of accessing the platform, booking on sessions, and asynchronous session delivery. Thinking about asynchronous delivery, all the different ways we can support young people to achieve outcomes, is really interesting. It opens up so many more opportunities not only anytime/anywhere, but more importantly about how young people develop a sense of agency around their professional development.

Some thoughts on the Charity Digital Code of Practice

What might a digital charity look like in fifty years? What kinds of thinking models might be needed between now and then to make digital every part of a charity? “Becoming a digital charity offers new modes of operating. It isn’t just digitising existing ways of working, but completely transforming the business model and how they achieve their purpose. But its all about steps in the right direction. The Charity Digital Code of Practice can help charities think about what those steps might look like.”

Launched The Fire Control Problem

I launched my SMS course after the team at Arist helped me with a technical issue of their system not accepting UK phone numbers. Its one of those virtual world meets the physical world problems.

Its interesting to me to be using the process that the course describes in figuring out what to do with the course.

Things I’ve learned so far:

  • SMS learning is for individuals. It seems obvious but I hadn’t really thought about it. There is no sense of other people learning the same stuff like you might get from a more open platform like Twitter.
  • SMS is very one way. It doesn’t allow users to question or debate the contents, they have to take it at face value.
  • The concept of achieving uncertain goals rather than the usual approach of defining them first is a bit of a hurdle to get over, and if the user doesn’t grasp the proposition from the start the rest of the lessons might be a bit confusing.
  • The concept might lend itself to an exploratory approach of ideas rather than purely as a means to achieve goals.

Year 2: The revenge

I picked the modules I’ll be studying for the second year of my MSc:

  • Innovation policy and management.
  • Digital creativity and new media management.
  • Blockchain technology and its impact on innovation, management and policy.
  • Research methods in management.
  • Dissertation.

It’s going to be a busy year.

I thought about:

Culture eats strategy for breakfast

Catchy statement, sounds like it might be true, but how might you test it? It seems to me that if you were to describe what makes ‘culture’ and ‘strategy’ opposite to each other you might describe culture as more subtle, amorphous, vague, driven by story-telling, and strategy as objective, defined, perhaps more scientific or numbers-based. So, based on this, if an organisation is driven by its narrative rather than by insights, then it could be true to say that it is led by its culture and not its strategy. Another question is whether that’s a good thing or not. (And just to add another thought; “Systems swallow culture and strategy whole”.)

Testing vs learning

When launching a product, testing is about confirming what you know, learning is about being open to finding out things you didn’t even know you didn’t know. Both are important but learning is the most difficult because it can only happen with real people using the product.

The fear of digital

What is the fear of digital about? Is it the fear of being replaced, the fear of the new, of the unknown?

Stigmergy

“Stigmergy is a form of self-organization. It produces complex, seemingly intelligent structures, without need for any planning, control, or even direct communication between the agents. As such it supports efficient collaboration between extremely simple agents, who lack any memory, intelligence or even individual awareness of each other.” Maybe this is the opposite of strategy that I’ve been looking for.

And I read:

Remote work and the future of the high street

“The high street is dying. Remote/home working as a result of COVID 19 is exacerbating this. But I think there’s an opportunity to do everything better.“

Ross describes a town where, “Air quality is high. The local economy is booming. Social mobility is high and unemployment is low”, and essentially asks the question is it possible to have all of these things in the same place at the same time.

So, if I understand what he’s saying correctly, rather than office buildings being full of people from a single company there will be offices with people from lots of different organisations. These co-working spaces will bring people into town centres via environmentally sustainable transport and thus making town centres being convenient places for the kinds of tasks that you have to do in person, things like getting a haircut, banking, and frequenting a cafe or coffee shop.

But we have to ask, why do those things require lots of people to all travel to a location that is convenient for the hairdressers, banks and cafe owners, rather than the business travelling to convenient locations for their customers? The answer used to be obvious, because its more economically viable for the business and because consumer behaviour supported it. When people had no choice but to go to workplaces then businesses would open to provide for the needs of all those people in one place. Giving people a choice changes consumer behaviour. If everyone has a choice (and of course not everyone will) about whether to go to a town centre to work, will there be enough people to sustain that local economy? There will undoubtedly be fewer people, so what defines economic sustainability might be different to pre-COVID times, but will is be enough to drive cause low unemployment and high social mobility?

I think the nature of the problem, as with so many of the post-COVID-rebuild efforts, is one of tight or loose-coupling. In pre-COVID times town centres, and lots of other parts of the economy/society were tightly-couple. Tight-coupling is fragile and risky, it relies on stability throughout the system, it can’t accept too much drastic change. Tightly-coupled systems are like a house of cards, if one card shakes, those connected to it and connected to those that are connected to it feel the effects of that shaking. To create another tightly-coupled system of town centres, one where each part is reliant on all the others for its stability and success, would be to fail to learn from the shock our economy is going through. So perhaps Ross’ vision of town centres as nice places to work could be a reality, but depending on how it is built effects how long it lasts.

An example of the loose-coupling of town centres? Amazon is buying town centre warehousing space far more cheaply than it could of when high street property values were at pre-pandemic levels so that they can deliver across the surrounding town far more quickly than they could from warehouses farther away. Amazon know how to be loosely-coupled. Their warehouses don’t have any great reliance on the surrounding infrastructure and systems that make up a town. As long as Amazon can get vans in and out of the warehouse and have a steady supplier of workers (and if not they’ll bus them in from other towns), they are happy. Whatever happens in the local economy, Amazon can continue unaffected. That is loose-coupling.

The Hacker Ethic of Work

“In the hacker ethic of work, work has to be interesting and fun and, above all, must create value for the worker, the organization and for society as a whole. Workers also must have freedom to organize their work in a way that is more functional to reach their own goals and in the manner that best fits their needs and insights”.

Simone Cicero, who has written more recently about platforms and complex systems, wrote about the hacker ethic of work in 2015, describing it as in the quote above, as an approach to work that involves creativity and freedom. In our complex world, an organisation that is able to adopt the hacker ways of making things that are open and reusable, collaborative and co-created, agile and flow-based, and understand user’s needs can become market leaders.

For me, this article from 2015 and Ross’ article are connected by a thread that approaches work more from the side of the worker than the side of the organisation. Both seem to me to be asking for a change. They recognise a move away from the industrial concept of the worker as a tool to be used by the machines of business and towards the worker as a nodes in the complex systems that make up our economy, society, and environment.

Simone says, “as individuals living today we have a duty to face the future with the eagerness not just to see it happen but, rather, to choose to be part of it and give it a different shape”.

Industrialisation

“Industry and its discontents“, a podcast by Seth Godin in which he talks about the system of industrialisation. He says industry craves productivity because cheaper wins but cheaper products require cheaper labour, which requires of people that they do morally questionable things to meet their short-term needs. This feels like one of the most important podcasts I’ve ever listened to and mentions many of the justification for moving away from the industrial mindset.

I see in all three of these the theme of society moving away from industrialisation and towards digitisation. The digitisation of society won’t provide some perfect utopia, it will be full of challenges, problems, inequalities, and unintended side-effects

It’s about legacy

“A “programme in which they repair stuff” shouldn’t be compelling viewing. It’s only made so because we hear people’s stories, and what the objects mean to them. And within each episode, we have the “will they be able to restore it? What will it look like?” arc of the chosen objects. We need to be clear that fundraising works best when we talk about individual stories, and what changes as a result of a donor’s support and our organisation’s intervention. This is how we make a connection.”

I’m fascinated by fundraising, as a discipline, a sector and a practice. I think, because it seems so unique. It only exists in the third sector. Things like HR and Marketing, as interesting as they are also, exist in every sector. So, Richards newsletter, and his post about The Repair Shop are like little peaks into the world of fundraising and the mind of a fundraiser.

Because of the way my brain works, I struggle to understand the things Richard talks about, things like love, legacy, restoration, and I guess the connections that storytelling creates. I can conceive of fundraising in a transactional way as a value exchange between three parties; the donor, the charity, and the beneficiary, and how is differs in nature from a commercial value exchange between two parties and adds to fundraising’s uniqueness, but how it actually works in practice is a mystery to me. Is it just marketing by another name? Is it sales, or should it be? Perhaps what I’d like to understand is more about the approaches fundraising uses to fit it into my mental models for the shift from industrial to digital.

Oh, and he mentioned my tweet about what a strategy needs to express in his email newsletter, which was a complete but nice surprise.

Some people tweeted:

Salaries in charity job adverts

There is a claim (I see it mostly on Twitter, from which you can draw you’re own conclusion) that putting the salary in job adverts helps to tackle the gender pay gap. I was interested in where the idea comes from, how robust it is in theory, and whether there is any research or evidence, so with a bit googling I tried to track it down.

There is a press release from the Young Women’s Trust that states, “Employers should stop asking job applicants how much they earn and include salary details in adverts to help close the gender pay gap”. The press release goes on to mention the salary history/wage equity laws that have been introduced in the United States that make asking a candidate about their current/previous salary illegal but doesn’t mention salaries in job adverts again.

I couldn’t find any research that concludes that including salary details in a job advert has any affect on the gender pay gap (I’m not suggesting that it doesn’t exist, just that I didn’t spend very long looking for it). There is some research that says following salary history bans employees received “increased pay for job changers by about 5%, with larger increases for women (8%) and African-Americans (13%). Salary histories appear to account for much of the persistence of residual wage gaps“. And I there is some research that shows that “when there is no explicit statement that wages are negotiable, men are more likely to negotiate for a higher wage, whereas women are more likely to signal their willingness to work for a lower wage. However, when we explicitly mention the possibility that wages are negotiable, these differences disappear completely.“

Looking it at from a complexity point of view of course its impossible to know what action will have which result so we can’t say that having salaries in job ads won’t contribute to tackling the gender pay gap, but based solely on what I’ve seen, we can’t say that it will either. Perhaps it is better instead to focus on a wider commit to better hiring practices across the the charity sector.

Also, I’ve seen concerns expressed about how we go about making change happen. If naming and shaming charities on Twitter (and actually, organisations don’t tweet, real people probably with the words ‘social’, ‘media’ and ‘executive’ in their job title do) is the default means to get them to change their practices, then what does that say about the charity sector?

But, here’s the interesting question: in a world of misinformation and easily swayed opinions, if something feels like the morally right thing to do but is based on growing public opinion and not on firmly established research and viable hypothesis, is it still the right thing to do?

Architecting organizations by designing constraints

Simone Cicero tweeted “A new approach to organizing is slowly establishing itself. This new approach is essentially small-scale, emergent and outside in, and doesn’t aim at simplifying complexity but at rhyming with it. This approach is based on architecting organizations by designing constraints.”

This is intriguing to me because of my interest in modes of organising within the three spheres of society. If Simone is seeing a new mode in the market sphere, one that conforms to more modern, perhaps non-newtonian, concepts from complexity science, then I’d like to understand more about it.

Is the market unsympathetic?

Justin Jackson tweeted “The market is unsympathetic to your passion. You can build whatever you want, but ultimately you’re beholden to the market and what it wants. Without customer demand, you don’t have a business.”

Yes, in the most obvious way, as we understand markets as unthinking mechanisms of capitalism, they have no sympathy for what any individual puts their time and energy into. But the reverse doesn’t seem to be true. Markets do need people who are passionate and invested in what they build and how they build it because without that passion nothings gets built and the market has nothing to be unsympathetic about.

Fake Grimlock replied: “LEARN PASSION FOR THINGS PEOPLE WANT. IT THAT SIMPLE.”

Connected systems

Admin on 01/08/2020

Connected systems aren’t just nodes in a network, they are made up of sensors collecting information, ‘brains’ interpreting the information, and apparatus acting on the interpretation and creating more data for the sensor to collect. It is these Interconnected feedback loops that create connected systems

Examples for the future might be cyborg limbs providing feedback to human brains, roads that detect when they are developing potholes, and buildings responding to the people in the room.

These connected systems of the future will require ‘sensing materials’, they’ll be built to respond to change.