Shift Happens - revisited, with sources

My last blog post was a video titled “Shift Happens”, and I asked for feedback about the sources –  many thanks to everybody for their responses.  It turns out that the video was updated in June 07 (see below), and comes from a group of US based educators, Kark Fisch and Scott McLeod.  I’ve attached their list of sources below.  There’s also a wiki where you can join the debate at Shift Happens. 

 

Slide	Source
In the next 8 seconds 34 babies . . .	Web search on population, then did the math.
Name this country . . .	Angus King Presentation - http://web.mac.com/northeastleadership/iWeb/Angus_King/Podcast/A19C541A-7E2C-4BB3-A581-63EA068369CE.html
2006 College Graduates, college graduates in India that speak English.	Geoffrey Calvin, Fortune Magazine, July 25,2005 http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/07/25/8266603/index.htm
China #1 English Speaking Country	Somebody at the Milken Conference – reported at http://weblogg-ed.com/2006/more-musings-from-milken/
U.S. Department of Labor Statistics	Originally from Ian Jukes - http://web.mac.com/iajukes/iWeb/thecommittedsardine/Handouts_files/fgtgtg.pdf Also: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/nlsoy.pdf and ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/news.release/History/tenure.09212004.news
College Majors	New College Majors: U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration. http://www.doleta.gov/BRG/Indprof/biotech_profile.cfm (New media: washingtonpost.com, February 23, 2005)
10,000 hours of video games	Interactive Videogames, Mediascope, June 1996.
10,000 hours on phones, 20,000 hours of TV, 250,000 emails/IMs	Mark Prensky, Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, 2001.
U.S. 4-year-olds	Kaiser Family Foundation Report, 2003, http://www.kaisernetwork.org/health_cast/uploaded_files/102803_kff_kids_press.pdf
Years to Market Audience	http://www.un.org/cyberschoolbus/briefing/technology/tech.pdf
Number of Internet Devices	http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/
Text Messages	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_message_service
1 of 8 Couples Met Online	Fortune Magazine 8-7-2006 - http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/08/07/8382578/index.htm Quotes Diana Farrell, head of the McKinsey Global Institute
eBay Revenue	http://finance.google.com/finance?q=EBAY&client=news
Google Searches	Web search (of course!) - http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2156461
MySpace	http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=myspace.com
YouTube	http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=youtube.com
Words in English Language	Originally from Ian Jukes - http://web.mac.com/iajukes/iWeb/thecommittedsardine/Handouts_files/fgtgtg.pdf   Lots on the web, many indicating more than 540,000 – including Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language
3,000 Books	Originally from Ian Jukes - http://web.mac.com/iajukes/iWeb/thecommittedsardine/Handouts_files/fgtgtg.pdf   Lots on the web including http://www.princetoninfo.com/200405/40512c03.html
Technical Info Doubling	Ian Jukes - http://web.mac.com/iajukes/iWeb/thecommittedsardine/Handouts_files/fgtgtg.pdf Cites George Gilder - http://www.amazon.com/Telecosm-World-After-Bandwidth-Abundance/dp/0743205472/sr=1-2/qid=1172692403/ref=sr_1_2/002-0116902-0249611?ie=UTF8&s=bookshttp://www.amazon.com/Telecosm-World-After-Bandwidth-Abundance/dp/0743205472/sr=1-2/qid=1172692403/ref=sr_1_2/002-0116902-0249611?ie=UTF8&s=books
Fiber Optics	Ian Jukes - http://web.mac.com/iajukes/iWeb/thecommittedsardine/Handouts_files/fgtgtg.pdf   Some from George Gilder, some from Ray Kurzweil, some from ?
Children in Developing Countries	http://www.laptop.org/
OLPC	http://www.laptop.org/
Computers and Humans	Ray Kurzweil book - The Singularity is Near - http://singularity.com/ Also http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1
Students Collaborating	Specifically references the Horizon 2007 Project - http://horizonproject.wikispaces.com/ but of course there are many examples of this.
Over 5 Millions Conversations	See this post - http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/2007/03/over-two-million-served.html - for an earlier count, then revisited some of those sites for updated counts.

— Philip Greenwood

 

Tags: Strategic+Information

Are you looking for an inspiring project?

Let’s say you’re a great Project Leader…you know how to do it!  You grok it!  And you’re asking yourself the question: “What shall I do next?”

You know it’s going to be big and you know it’s going to be important because it’s GOT to be inspiring. It’s got to be something that is worth you and your team spending your most precious and irreplaceable resource on (time)…

Well here a couple of sources of inspiration for you:

http://www.storyofstuff.com/

http://www.geni.org/

The Catherine Jones Foundation – A small project with huge Implications.

Do something meaningful to you, today! 

— Philip Greenwood

P.S. This IS my meaningful project.

Tags: Projects

Complexity Blindness

Is the idea of using different strategies for different levels of complexity new to you?  On reflection, I've had remarkably few conversations with clients about complexity-based approaches to projects over the last 20 years. The idea itself is not new.  I've come to the conclusion that there is a widespread phenomenon we might call "simplicity bias" - the desire to see a situation as simpler than it is.  I'd like to suggest some evidence for this assertion:

• The use of simplifying metaphors
• The use of simplifying assumptions
• The simplification of news stories by journalists (the Monomyth again)
• The need to simplify messages for senior executives to win their confidence (they are surely able to deal with complicated messages to have risen to that position!)
• The insistence on applying Best Practises despite their widespread failure
• The insistence of placing the blame on an individual when disasters happen, rather than recognising the systemic causes.

(I admit that you could, alternatively, level the accusation that consultants have "complexity bias" - the desire to make a situation appear more complex than it is, but since I am also arguing that experts are not better at changing organisational systems when they are complex and chaotic, where is the pay-off?)

If we habitually understate complexity, then we must be overstating the effectiveness of competence and expertise.  We must be overstating our ability to plan project activities.  We must also be taking a much bigger risk with large development projects than we might anticipate.  This is the illusion of control.

— Philip Greenwood

Tags: Project, Leadership, Black, Book, Complexity, Chaotic

Project Management & Leadership Search Engine

A while back we put quite a lot of effort into this custom Google search engine, and while the traffic has been steadily increasing, it can still be improved...the more people use it, the better feedback we get, the better we can make it!

The link for the search engine home page is here:

http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=011867071513363012666%3Atbng4tlbkso

The code for adding the search box to your web page is at:

http://gmodules.com/ig/creator?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fcoop/api/011867071513363012666/cse/tbng4tlbkso/gadget

If there are topics under-represented, or sites that you feel should be included, please leave a message in the comments.

— Philip Greenwood

Tags: Google, Custom, Search, Engine

Ensuring Project Complexity has been Properly Assessed and Acted Upon

We've had an initial look at how we typically understate risks, but there's another question:  Are you implementing into a stable organisation?

It's a bit of a trick question, isn't it?  You'd love to say "yes", but you know the more accurate answer is "no". You know you live and work in an evolving and changing organisation in which any structure that you can clearly perceive is already the past, and what instead matters most may be the "perturbations" on the edge of the current structure, which have the potential to manifest a substantive change.  But will that change your implementation plan?  The temptation to make the assumptions that the organisation is simple, linear, equilibrium-seeking and isolated is extraordinarily strong, because it gives you the feeling of control.  But it is illusory.

For the sake of this discussion, let's define a scale of complexity to describe the organisation as a system (in the engineering sense):

• Simple  - Least complex
• Complicated
• Complex - Learning to predict outcomes is expensive
• Chaotic - Practically unpredictable (but not technically random)

If the organisation was a Simple system, changes would be easy - you would simply categorise the problem and apply a best practise that addressed the issue.  Experience tells me that this works occasionally, usually on a very small scale.  On the other hand, I've seen many implementations of ERP systems trying to apply "best practises". Typically the organisation finds its own approach once the consultants leave.  So once the implementation group exceeds about a dozen, then it is no longer appropriate to describe the organisational behaviour as Simple.

Some organisations can be categorised as Complicated systems.  Such organisations respond well to expert intervention; examples of these organisations are certain kinds of industrial operations.  In these organisations toolkits such as Six Sigma and the Theory of Constraints (Lean) work well.  If the organisation can be disassembled into components, optimized, and then reassembled to create a better functioning whole, then this is the domain you are in, and you should follow the Six Sigma mantra of "DMAIC" - Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control.  But remember that manufacturing and distribution is only a component of what the organisation does, and these tools may not be appropriate elsewhere in the organisation.  And how can you tell in advance whether your industrial operation is suitable for intellectual disassembly?

I hate to think of organisations as Chaotic, because it's possible I'm being led by fashion, however in my opinion most sizable organisations are certainly Complex, and possibly Chaotic in their behaviour.  They respond to changes in ways that aren't obvious.  And when you change a component of the organisation defined by the scope of the project, it has interfaces into the rest of the organisation:  The scope is not the change!

We often hear quoted the idea that "insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results" - variously attributed to Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin.  However, for organisation systems with high degrees of complexity, insanity may well be doing the same thing twice and expecting the same results - because you make the changes at different times, the system you are changing is different!  Because you've already made a change to a part of the system, then the system you are changing is different!  This is the domain for which the famous "butterfly effect" is a metaphor.  Tiny changes in initial conditions may (or may not) yield substantially different end results.

In such complex organisational systems, the expert is powerless, and you are left with testing, piloting, rolling-out and correcting - an organic, evolutionary approach to change, in which you attempt to learn as you go along, but should not be surprised that you fail!

— Philip Greenwood

Tags: Project, Leadership, Black, Book, Complexity, Chaotic

Computing Awards: IT Leader of the Year shortlist

The VNUNET.com shortlist is out, for IT Leader of the Year, and among it are many familiar names and organisations:

• Mark Akass from BT Global Financial Services;
• John Crane from National Australia Group Europe;
• Richard Cross from ITV;
• Rorie Devine from Betfair;
• my old colleague Benoit Laclau from EDF Energy;
• Gareth Nutt from Mouchel Parkman (I’ll have to look this up!);
• very unsurprisingly Al-Noor Ramji from BT;
• and Darrell Stein from Marks & Spencer.

Congratulations to all, and I’m sure you’ll now be expecting my call, as well as every other product and service vendor in the Kingdom.

I was intrigued by the synopsis paragraphs…each one incorporated a suggestion that the candidate had implemented a strategy and achieved results.  It implied, though without support, that the stategies were brilliant, and the results outstanding.

I found this curious, because this is a leadership award, and in only one case did the synopsis paragraphs discuss leadership behaviours – that of Rorie Devine – who runs ‘fortnightly “talkback” sessions to encourage feedback from engineers, and sends out a weekly email called “Rorie’s Ramblings” to share the ups and downs of a week as a CTO.’

Perhaps all the other candidates do these things too, and it’s VNUNET.com’s technical bias that is showing, but I’m pretty sure none of the brilliant strategies were fashioned, nor the outstanding results achieved, without the support of extensive project teams.  So why not talk about project leadership behaviours when you’re talking about IT leadership?

— Philip Greenwood

Tags: VNUNET, IT, Leadership, Shortlist

TribeCo.

The morning comes, and with that excited feeling in your stomach you turn up to your new job. You are truly ‘engaged’.. you’ve seen your new employers marketing literature, you’ve bought into the story they tell their customers about their fast moving, innovative, go-getting team, and you are ready to become a part of that; one of the shiny happy faces staring out from the cover of the “new joiners” information pack. One of the high achievers, part of the family… ready to make a difference!

Unfortunately, figures from Gallop suggest that within six months of starting only 38% of employees are still engaged… after 10 years of employment that figure drops to 20%! and worse still…

Guarantee Project Success 2

I suggested in my previous blog piece the idea that a powerful definition of a project would be:

“A project is the way that an organization takes a risk”.

I think this is powerful for several reasons:

1. It’s universal – it doesn’t matter what type of project you’re running, you invest resources with the intention to capture value.
2. It formally acknowledges uncertainty – every project has it, but most teams are in denial about the extent of it. For instance, enterprise transformation projects are very often a process of discovery, rather than the execution of a set of pre-defined steps – yet I seem them planned-out like concrete projects all the time!
3. When you take risks you continually assess alternative outcomes for merit. These are “real options” and they have positive inherent value.
4. It creates a tacit permission to consider course changes during the project if new outcomes are perceived.  The selection of these outcomes would still be considered success!
5. A thorough consideration of project domain complexity will reveal that we tend to vastly over-simplify our approach to them.  The definition suggests the proper appraisal of the project’s complexity is necessary.
6. It embeds the project within the organization, and the portfolio of changes that are occurring inside it and in its external context.

It’s unusual to discuss risk-taking, rather than risk-management.  Most project management tools are risk management tools, focusing on minimizing risk for a single course of action, a single outcome.  Risk taking is another art entirely.

I’m sure I’ve got more to say about this subject – until next time!

— Philip Greenwood

Tags:  Project+success, Project+failure, Risk+management

Guarantee Project Success

One of our successful adwords campaigns has this headline, but I confess it troubles me a bit.  Is it possible to guarantee project success?  I think it is, but it depends on your frame of reference.  If you define a project as something like:

“A project is any outcome you’re committed to achieving that will take more than one action step to complete.”

Then you’ve set yourself up for a very binary pass/fail criteria, and your next action is going to be running to the Gantt chart.  I’ve been contemplating the experience of leading and running projects, and I’d like to propose what I believe to be a much more powerful definition:

“A project is the way an organisation takes a risk.”

I want to leave this idea with you – to gestate – and I’ll be exploring it over my next few blog pieces to see where it leads me.

— Philip Greenwood

Tags: Project+success, project+failure, risk+management

The Big Idea 2007

You can be happy at work.

(Just in case you haven’t heard.)

Unfortunately it’s not my idea, but it is being popularized by Alexander Kjerulf, who calls himself the Chief Happiness Officer.

Mr Kjerulf has written a book on the subject, called “Happy Hour is 9 to 5: How To Love Your Job, Love Your Life and Kick Butt at Work”, and also “The Happy at Work Manifesto” (free down load).

Apart from the fact that I agree with him, I’d like to point out ‘policy’ 11:  “I do my best work when I’m happy – When I’m happy I’m engaged, motivated, committed, more creative, less risk-averse, more service-minded and more productive”.  Does this sound like something you want for your team?

Great!  But not so fast, slick.  Here’s another recent book:  “Stumbling Upon Happiness” by Daniel Gilbert – an extraordinarily well informed study of how we deceive ourselves about happiness.  My three line synopsis:

1) We’re not very good at remembering what made us happy, so

2) We’re not very good at predicting what will make us happy, and

3) We often pretend we were happy when we weren’t because of societal norms.

So you’re not going to get much insight about nurturing happiness from your team’s answers to your questions about happiness.  But, according to the Hawthrone Effect, the act of asking may just inspire them to be more engaged, motivated, committed, more creative, less risk-averse and more service minded.

Sound familiar?  It turns out that the Big Idea 2007 has its roots in the Big Idea 1932.

— Philip Greenwood

wikitags : [[wiki:beaufortes:happiness]]

Tags: Hawthorne+Effect, Happiness