Month: August 2019

Saturday, 8.52pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Defy the central planners. Upend their designs for your life. Be a staunch individualist. Stand on your rights. – A.E. Samaan

I wonder how many genuinely evil people have existed throughout history.

Most of us can think of a few examples who have had their cruelty extensively documented.

We know and read of functionaries who have been given the power to abuse others by their governments.

And every society has its criminals – but at some point everything becomes circular as the history of the criminal often starts with their experiences first as a victim.

But we should probably be careful before labelling people with absolute terms – although in today’s social media age that kind of restraint is hardly practised.

So, while it is easy to use the language of evil when trying to understand the behaviour of large multinationals, is it the right way to look at things?

For example, there are books that denounce the oil business, the tech industry and many other industries you can think of – pointing to their history of doing everything they can to intimidate, silence and crush the opposition.

Stories of the way Intel under Andy Grove acted, for example, are part of Silicon Valley folklore.

He thought, apparently, that only the paranoid survive, bringing his cold war thinking to his approach to doing business.

The point I’m making is that when you look closely at power you also see the potential for actions that can be construed as evil.

As you know, power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Most of the time, however, it is likely that the actions organisations take have some fundamental idea of good at their core and then they get wrapped in layers of view and opinions of those with power and responsibility until eventually the core is buried and all we see is the exercise of power.

Centralised power.

And most experiments with centralised power seem to have rather undesirable consequences for those without power.

What am I trying to say with all this stuff.

The way most large organisations in the tech sector want you to organise your life goes like this.

1. Use their devices for everything you do.
2. Keep all your data on their cloud.
3. Do all the processing and analysis you want to do using their services.
4. Increasingly trust their ability to do everything for you using AI and Big Data.

Now, vendors are often surprised that governments and people don’t sign up to their very reasonable suggestion that you use them for everything you could possibly want to do.

But many of us, instinctively and viscerally, don’t want to give up control of our lives.

Or at least, we wouldn’t if asked up front.

But we do give it away, to apps and services over time, drawn in by the fact that the services are usually free.

At the same time is there anything genuinely important that you trust to these systems without any other way to get to them?

For example, if the Internet went down tomorrow for a month, would your life fall apart?

I suspect it would for most of us actually.

But, if the big companies went down – say Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple – would you be unable to do your work or get on with the things that made you or your business an income?

I don’t really have a clear answer to the problem of whether you should do everything on the cloud or not.

It’s a personal decision to some extent.

The quote that starts this post is by A.E Samaan, the pen name of an investigative historian – and I came across his work as I looked for quotes about central planning.

The thing we have to understand is that freedom and liberty and all those things free people take for granted were actually quite hard won things.

And there are always organisations, with the best of intentions, who believe that things would be better if we gave up some of those freedoms.

And these days the kinds of freedoms we are encourage to give up include the skills to hold and process our own data.

It seems so simple – let us do all the thinking for you – while you get on with the important task of living and sending out your social media updates.

I am not sure that this is a good thing for people.

For example, most people think that kids these days are digital natives.

They are very good at using technology – but only a small number of them can design or program that technology.

In essence, it’s like they can read but not write.

In other words, many digital natives are actually digital semi-literates.

It’s easier to control a semi-literate population than an educated and vociferous one.

These vaunted technologies of today – big data, AI and the cloud – can be centralised ones and controlled by a few.

And that is the strategy that some companies are going to follow.

But it would be better for us if they were decentralised and democratised.

And that is the strategy that we, as people, should follow.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Thursday, 9.20pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Understanding variation is the key to success in quality and business. – W. Edwards Deming

I wonder if I have stumbled on a trending genre – historical non-fiction exploring relatively recent technology.

On my reading list, for example, I have Power Play, The Hydrogen Economy and The Quest about the changing energy system, and a few others that talk about software businesses and electric vehicles.

The fast-paced narrative, investigating how these technologies are developing, make for interesting reading, but one has to question how much one can rely on such material – and whether the projections of what will happen matter or not.

Someone said that when you’re too close to events what you’re doing is journalism – reporting on what’s going on.

History requires you to take the long view – to filter out the significant from the insignificant – and that takes time.

The reason this distinction is important is because we face problems at the moment that are perhaps better solved by studying history than journalism.

Take carbon reductions, for example.

Most people agree that we need to move to a world where we put less CO2 into the atmosphere.

I learned recently that trying to do that is like trying to plug a leak in a boat – you also need to bale out the water or you’ll sink eventually as the water keeps trickling in.

We need to emit less carbon and also build the technology to suck it out of the atmosphere – but that’s a different point.

The important point is how you’re going to go about reducing your emissions.

Imagine you’re a big company and the way you operate now means you stick a whole load of carbon into the atmosphere.

You need to do things that bring that number down so what do you focus on?

There is a huge temptation to think you have to measure everything – get your information in real time and with all that information you’ll magically end up going in the right direction.

An equivalent thing here is the amount of effort going into AI research.

What everyone seems to be heading towards is making you the perfect digital assistant – an entity that can manage your schedule and order things for you – you just have to say the words.

However, do you really need a digital secretary?

Is that going to make you more productive – or is the fact that you need that kind of support a hint that your life is busier than it needs to be.

Tinkering at the surface with schedules and reminders is not the same as making deep changes at the core.

And that’s what’s needed to make a difference – whether you want to grow your business, cut emissions or lose weight – real change at the core.

And that change requires you to study history, not the ephemera and noise of right now – of social media and the 24 hour news cycle and whatever else that’s screaming for your attention.

Most of the time most things just behave the way they do because the system is the way it is.

The chart in the picture above is a control chart – a simple way of showing from the data whether something is normal or not.

If you’re inside the dashed lines that level of variation is just normal – it’s what you should expect.

Your weight should fluctuate between those lines.

Your company emissions should track between those lines.

Everything stays stable as long as the system is stable.

It’s when you go outside the lines that things start to matter.

If you go above the top line and stay there – then something has changed – and the same thing applies to the bottom line.

That’s when you should get out your ladder and go and investigate.

This simple model is the foundation of something called the mean-variance framework and it helps you distinguish between what’s important and what’s not important in almost any scenario you can think of.

And it’s not taught – or hardly taught anywhere.

If you’re interested the best book to get started is Douglas Wheeler’s Understanding Variation.

What history teaches us is that systems and technology come and go.

They’re not going to save us.

We’re going to have to do that ourselves – and that starts by learning how to think carefully about what we’re doing and if we’re doing what’s important or not.

Because some of these problems we’re facing are pretty big ones.

Cheers,

Karthik

Monday, 9.22pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Sometimes just breathing is enough. Marty Rubin

Have you ever felt the pressure to deliver – the weight that comes with expectations – from others or from yourself?

Many of us are uncertain about our ability to deliver time after time.

We’re not sure whether something is a fluke or not.

We all face situations when we’re under pressure – so what happens?

How do we react?

This is the topic Dr Alan Watkins explores in this TED talk and it’s an interesting lesson for those of us in such situations.

Imagine you need to give a talk in front of a group of people – what happens inside your body?

Well, you’re under stress. Even if in your mind you’re prepared and confident, your body is readying itself for an unnatural and unfamiliar situation, one where you’re exposed to a group of others.

The stress signals start travelling through your body, telling your brain that you’re sweating.

Your heart starts to beat faster, erratically, pumping more blood through your system.

Your brain uses goes through a lot of blood – taking in the fuel needed to keep working but when you’re in danger this blood is sent to other parts of your body – your hands, to defend yourself and your legs, to run away.

The brain compensates by shutting down parts you don’t need – like the frontal lobe where your logical and reasoning functions live.

And, like the National Grid, when it loses power, the rational part of your brain blacks out.

This is a perfectly rational response in a world where stopping to think about the kind of animal hurtling towards you, fangs bared, is going to end badly for you.

But in a world where the threat is of a mildly dissatisfied audience this response is a little extreme – but it’s how your body is wired.

So, if you want to do something about it you’ve first got to recognise the signs.

First, your heart starts going faster, your heart rate becomes variable and erratic and you find it difficult to think clearly and start to panic.

Pushing through won’t solve the problem, not will working harder or ignoring the problem or getting upset.

What will help is to breathe.

In particular, breathing slowly in and out in a rhythm.

In Watkins video he talks about breathing in for a count of four, holding for four and breathing out for six.

You’re taught something similar in yoga – breath in for four, hold for four, breathe out for eight, hold for four.

Whatever you choose, the idea is to make it smooth and repeat the pattern.

And, if you do that, you’ll start to get your heart rate acting normally again.

The point is not to bring it down, but to get the variability down – from erratically going up and down to back within a normal range – whether high or not.

As you do that, the signals will go to your brain to turn the frontal lobe back on, and you’re back in business.

So, the next time you find yourself facing something to do and feel a growing sense of panic, take a minute and breathe.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Saturday, 9.32pm

Sheffield, U.K.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. – Margaret Mead

I’m reading Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, which tells the story of his journey from India to Silicon Valley and his journey to the top of the firm, becoming only the third CEO in its 40 year history.

Microsoft had been left behind – focusing on a lucrative PC business while Google took over the web, Amazon took over the cloud and Facebook took over relationships – and Nadella’s job was to figure out what needed to be done to keep the company relevant.

Imagine you had such a problem to solve – you were the Captain and had to figure out which direction to go in – where would you start?

Nadella’s approach, described in the book, offers a rare perspective – an unusual insight into the mind of a leader raised with Eastern values operating in the trenches of the West – and you get a glimpse of this in the quotes and stories he tells.

For example, he quotes Ray Ozzie, who in a leaving memo wrote “The one irrefutable truth is that in any large organization, any transformation that is to ‘stick’ must come from within.”

It may seem obvious that if you want to create a change that lasts you need to get the people in the business involved, on side and excited about what is going to happen.

Too many leaders, however, think that organisations are like armies, and they can come in, give orders and change everything.

Or, they’ll come in and fire everyone and start again.

Or they’ll come in, create incentives and prizes for performance and get results.

This kind of thinking is exemplified in the trend for incoming CEOs and managers to have a 100 day plan – what are they going to do in the first 100 days.

That approach is centered around them – their ideas – their plans. That has to do with them assuming that they know more than everyone else and will just knock heads together and make things happen.

What they should be doing in those first hundred days is listening.

Nadella says that he had a team of individuals – people that ran things that worked by themselves – in silos.

They felt they were doing fine and didn’t need him coming along and telling them what to do.

So, what did he do?

He writes that he met each leader individually, “taking their pulse, asking questions and listening.”

It would have easy to have a meeting and spend the time talking about his vision – but I imagine that even if he knew what needed to be done – the act of asking questions and listening was what made his leaders realise that he was there to work with them rather than just be the boss of them.

It’s also nice that his team realised that they had to make their cloud service, Azure, support Linux because that’s what startups use – and that’s where the big new digital businesses will come from.

One of the things that you should notice when you see how Nadella approaches change is how important it is to have people who are on the inside working on things.

That means if you’re a consultant you’re going to struggle to get your ideas accepted if you’re on the outside of the team, looking in.

You’ve got to be a participant in the process, someone who is on the same side as the organisation you’re working with.

And that’s not an easy thing to do – if you get a job there then you’re into the politics and less able to give an independent view.

If you’re too far outside you’ll never get started.

Now, there’s no clear answer to this – but there is a difference between the legal and commercial structures involved and the nature of the team.

You’ll get on the inside if you understand the world view of the people inside – if you can see what’s happening through their eyes.

Then, if you have that understanding and you can help the leader get things done, there’s a good chance you’ll be invited onto the team – and the way in which that’s done from a legal and commercial point of view will get resolved somehow.

The point is that you should see consultancy not like a doctor advising a patient, where the patient heads off to live with the disease and the doctor heads home for a glass of wine.

Instead, you should see consultancy as getting on a aircraft as part of the flight crew – with aligned interests with the crew and passengers on the importance of getting back to the ground safely.

The doctor is involved – you’re committed.

And the change you make will stick.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

I learned to go into business only with people whom I like, trust, and admire. – Warren Buffett

I was listening to a Jay Abraham podcast and one of the speakers said something – almost a throwaway line – that suddenly made sense to me in a way I hadn’t appreciated before.

He said something like “When I’m looking at an opportunity I first want to know what needs to be done. Then I want to know who is going to do it. If I know those things then the how is easy – and I just need to find the capital to pay to get it done.”

I’ve written about this before, questioning whether Sinek’s popular model of “why, how, what” makes much sense, and wondering if it should be replaced with a different model that starts with “to what end?”

Still, looking back at this, it’s still not particularly clear what order one should follow.

So, why did this one stand out?

If you’ve read this blog for a bit you’ll be aware of my interest in Soft Systems, a methodology that helps approach “wicked” real world problems.

Wicked problems usually involve human activity systems – the kinds of things we do as a society – ranging from the complexities of government to the way in which the people in a company decides which projects they want to do.

The reason this is hard is because people have points of view – they have a perspective on a situation and express this in the form of a narrative – a story that helps them make sense of reality.

Now, if you have a story in your head about a situation – for example, if you believe that encouraging more cars on the road will add to air pollution and affect children’s health, then you are likely to oppose the building of a new school on the grounds that it will increase traffic.

The people who want to build the school will have views on how it will provide a better education for children in the area and help with regeneration.

Both are valid points of view, but that’s all they are – world views.

They just happen to be incompatible and possibly irreconcilable.

Societies have come up with ways to deal with this – using systems of planning and consultation to do or stop doing things.

The same thing happens, at a much smaller scale, when you want to work with an organisation and have to go through a sales process.

If you want to be successful when selling your services you have to start with where the customer happens to be.

If they have a need it can probably be expressed in the form of a “what” question.

What needs to happen?

Usually, some input (I) needs to go through a transformation (T) and be turned into an output (O).

What you’re describing is a system and if the system is non-human, you talk about its function and if it’s a human activity system you talk about purpose.

The purpose of Soft Systems is to understand “purpose” – it’s a strangely recursive thing, where you use a modelling language to express what’s in people’s heads – taking multiple narratives and turning them into a model that people can agree with.

What happens in practice is that the minute someone knows what needs to be done their thoughts turn to who can do it for them.

If you know that your boiler is broken, for example, isn’t the first thing you think about who you can call?

And ideally, you want to call someone you know, someone who has done work for you before and someone you can trust.

And if you call the right person they’ll know how to do the job and you’ll be fine.

The what-who-how model seems to actually represent what goes through people’s minds in practice.

If you’re selling, then, you should probably stop.

Instead, if you try to help the customer understand what they want then, when they get it, they’ll think about who can help them – and you’ll be right there in front of them, ready to offer your services.

In Jay’s podcast, they put this first bit really quite simply – you have to start with empathy for your customer.

Soft Systems is simply a rigorous way to be empathetic – to see things from the point of view of the person in front of view.

It should come as no surprise that if you have the ability to be empathetic you’ll be a better salesperson.

And you’ll also be the kind of person people want to work with again and again.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh