Archive for the 'Team working' Category

Agonistic planning

Published
by
peter
on 2010-08-09
in Argumentation, Decision theory, History, Joint-Action Society, Marketing strategy, Military strategy, Planning, Politics and Team working
. Closed

One key feature of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations identified by David Halberstam in his superb account of the development of  US policy on Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest, was groupthink:  the failure of White House national security, foreign policy and defense staff to propose or even countenance alternatives to the prevailing views on Vietnam, especially when these alternatives were in radical conflict with the prevailing wisdom.   Among the junior staffers working in those administrations was Richard Holbrooke, now the US Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan in the Obama administration.  A New Yorker profile of Holbrooke last year included this statement by him, about the need for policy planning processes to incorporate agonism:

“You have to test your hypothesis against other theories,” Holbrooke said. “Certainty in the face of complex situations is very dangerous.” During Vietnam, he had seen officials such as McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s and Johnson’s national-security adviser, “cut people to ribbons because the views they were getting weren’t acceptable.” Washington promotes tactical brilliance framed by strategic conformity—the facility to outmaneuver one’s counterpart in a discussion, without questioning fundamental assumptions. A more farsighted wisdom is often unwelcome. In 1975, with Bundy in mind, Holbrooke published an essay in Harper’s in which he wrote, “The smartest man in the room is not always right.” That was one of the lessons of Vietnam. Holbrooke described his method to me as “a form of democratic centralism, where you want open airing of views and opinions and suggestions upward, but once the policy’s decided you want rigorous, disciplined implementation of it. And very often in the government the exact opposite happens. People sit in a room, they don’t air their real differences, a false and sloppy consensus papers over those underlying differences, and they go back to their offices and continue to work at cross-purposes, even actively undermining each other.”  (page 47)
References:

David Halberstam [1972]:  The Best and the Brightest.  New York, NY, USA: Random House.

George Packer [2009]:  The last mission: Richard Holbrooke’s plan to avoid the mistakes of Vietnam in Afghanistan.  The New Yorker, 2009-09-28, pp. 38-55.

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Crowd-sourcing for scientific research

Published
by
peter
on 2010-08-06
in Computer Science, Computer technology, Computing-as-interaction, Human intelligence, Joint-Action Society, Science and Team working
. Closed

Computers are much better than most humans at some tasks (eg, remembering large amounts of information, tedious and routine processing of large amounts of data), but worse than many humans at others (eg, generating new ideas, spatial pattern matching, strategic thinking). Progress may come from combining both types of machine (humans, computers) in ways which make use of their specific skills.  The journal Nature yesterday carried a report of a good example of this:  video-game players are able to assist computer programs tasked with predicting protein structures.  The abstract:

People exert large amounts of problem-solving effort playing computer games. Simple image- and text-recognition tasks have been successfully ‘crowd-sourced’ through games, but it is not clear if more complex scientific problems can be solved with human-directed computing. Protein structure prediction is one such problem: locating the biologically relevant native conformation of a protein is a formidable computational challenge given the very large size of the search space. Here we describe Foldit, a multiplayer online game that engages non-scientists in solving hard prediction problems. Foldit players interact with protein structures using direct manipulation tools and user-friendly versions of algorithms from the Rosetta structure prediction methodology, while they compete and collaborate to optimize the computed energy. We show that top-ranked Foldit players excel at solving challenging structure refinement problems in which substantial backbone rearrangements are necessary to achieve the burial of hydrophobic residues. Players working collaboratively develop a rich assortment of new strategies and algorithms; unlike computational approaches, they explore not only the conformational space but also the space of possible search strategies. The integration of human visual problem-solving and strategy development capabilities with traditional computational algorithms through interactive multiplayer games is a powerful new approach to solving computationally-limited scientific problems.”

References:

Seth Cooper et al. [2010]: Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer online game.  Nature, 466:  756–760.  Published:  2010-08-05.

Eric Hand [2010]:  Citizen science:  people power.  Nature 466, 685-687. Published 2010-08-04.

The Foldit game is here.

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Complex Decisions

Published
by
peter
on 2010-06-27
in Decision theory, Economics, Forecasting, Game theory, Joint-Action Society, Market planning, Military strategy, Planning, Project Management and Team working
. Closed

Most real-world business decisions are considerably more complex than the examples presented by academics in decision theory and game theory. What makes some decisions more complex than others? Here I list some features, not all of which are present in all decision situations.

Continue reading ‘Complex Decisions’

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Metrosexual competition

Published
by
peter
on 2010-03-24
in Corporate culture, Economics, Game theory, Marketing strategy, Team working and Telecommunications
. Closed

Writing about the macho world of pure mathematics (at least, in my experience, in analysis and group theory, less so in category theory and number theory, for example), led me to think that some academic disciplines seem hyper-competitive:  physics, philosophy and mainstream economics come to mind.  A problem for economics is that the domain of the discipline includes the study of competition, and the macho, hyper-competitive nature of academic economists has led them, I believe, astray in their thinking about the marketplace competition they claim to be studying.  They have assumed that their own nasty, bullying, dog-eat-dog world is a good model for the world of business.

If business were truly the self-interested, take-no-prisoners world of competition described in economics textbooks and assumed in mainstream economics, our lives would all be very different.  Fortunately, our world is mostly not like this.   One example is in telecommunications where companies compete and collaborate with each other at the same time, and often through the same business units.  For instance, British Telecommunications and Vodafone are competitors (both directly in the same product categories and indirectly through partial substitutes such as fixed and mobile services), and collaborators, through the legally-required and commercially-sensible inter-connections of their respective networks.  Indeed, for many years, each company was the other company’s largest customer, since the inter-connection of their networks means each company completes calls that originate on the other’s network; thus each company receives payments from the other.  Do you seek to drive your main competitor out of business when that competitor is also your largest customer?   Would you do this, as stupid as it seems, knowing that your competitor could retaliate (perhaps pre-emptively!) by disconnecting your network or reducing the quality of your calls that interconnect?  No rational business manager would do this, although perhaps an economist might. 

Nor would you destroy your competitors when you and they are sharing physical infrastructure  – co-locating switches in each other’s buildings, for example, or sharing rural cellular base stations, both of which are common in telecommunications.   And, to complicate matters, large corporate customers of telecommunications companies increasingly want direct access to the telco’s own switches, leading to very porous boundaries between companies and their suppliers.   Doctrines of nuclear warfare, such as mutually-assured destruction or iterated prisoners’ dilemma, are better models for this marketplace than the mainstream one-shot utility-maximizing models, in my opinion.

You might protest that telecommunications is a special case, since the product is a networked good – that is, one where a customer’s utility from a particular service may depend on the numbers of other customers also using the service.    However, even for non-networked goods, the fact that business usually involves repeated interactions with the same group of people (and is decidely not a one-shot interaction) leads to more co-operation than is found in an economist’s philosophy.   The empirical studies of hedge funds undertaken by sociologist Donald MacKenzie, for example, showed the great extent to which hedge fund managers rely in their investment decisions on information they receive from their competitors.  Because everyone hopes to come to work tomorrow and the day after, as well as today, there are strong incentives on people not to  mis-use these networks through, for instance, disseminating false or explicitly-self-serving information.  

It’s a dog-help-dog world out there!

Reference:

Iain Hardie and Donald MacKenzie [2007]:  Assembling an economic actor: the agencement of a hedge fund. The Sociological Review, 55 (1): 57-80.

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Macho mathematicians

Published
by
peter
on 2010-03-23
in Creativity, Human intelligence, Mathematics, Music and Team working
. Closed

Pianist and writer Susan Tomes has just published a new book, Out of Silence, which the Guardian has excerpted here.  This story drew my attention:

Afterwards, my husband and I reminisced about our attempts to learn tennis when we were young. I told him that my sisters and I used to go down to the public tennis courts in Portobello. We had probably never seen a professional tennis match; we just knew that tennis was about hitting the ball to and fro across the net. We had a few lessons and became quite good at leisurely rallies, hitting the ball back and forth without any attempt at speed. Sometimes we could keep our rallies going for quite a long time, and I found this enjoyable.

Then our tennis teacher explained that we should now learn to play “properly”. It was only then that I realised we were meant to hit the ball in such a way that the other person could not hit it back. This came as an unpleasant surprise. As soon as we started “playing properly”, our points became extremely short. One person served, the other could not hit it back, and that was the end of the point. It seemed to me that there was skill in hitting the ball so that the other person could hit it back. If they could, the ball would flow, one got to move about and there was not much interruption to the rhythm of play. It struck me that hitting the ball deliberately out of the other person’s reach was unsportsmanlike. When I tell my husband all this, he laughs and says: “There speaks a true chamber musician.”

This story resonated strongly with me.  Earlier this year, I had a brief correspondence with mathematician Alexandre Borovik, who has been collecting accounts of childhood experiences of learning mathematics, both from mathematicians and from non-mathematicians.  After seeing a discussion on his blog about the roles of puzzles and games in teaching mathematics to children, I had written to him:

Part of my anger & frustration at school was that so much of this subject that I loved, mathematics, was wasted on what I thought was frivolous or immoral applications:   frivolous because of all those unrealistic puzzles, and immoral because of the emphasis on competition (Olympiads, chess, card games, gambling, etc).   I had (and retain) a profound dislike of competition, and I don’t see why one always had to demonstrate one’s abilities by beating other people, rather than by collaborating with them.  I believed that “playing music together”, rather than “playing sport against one another”, was a better metaphor for what I wanted to do in life, and as a mathematician.

Indeed, the macho competitiveness of much of pure mathematics struck me very strongly when I was an undergraduate student:  I switched then to mathematical statistics because the teachers and students in that discipline were much less competitive towards one another.  For a long time, I thought I was alone in this view, but I have since heard the same story from other people, including some prominent mathematicians.  I know one famous category theorist who switched from analysis as a graduate student because the people there were too competitive, while the category theory people were more co-operative.

Perhaps the emphasis on puzzles & tricks is fine for some mathematicians – eg, Paul Erdos seems to have been motivated by puzzles and eager to solve particular problems.  However, it is not fine for others – Alexander Grothendieck comes to mind as someone interested in abstract frameworks rather than puzzle-solving.  Perhaps the research discipline of pure mathematics needs people of both types.  If so, this is even more reason not to eliminate all the top-down thinkers by teaching only using puzzles at school.”

More on the two cultures of mathematics here.

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Managers of renown

Published
by
peter
on 2009-11-13
in Corporate culture, Heroes and Team working
. Closed

Since we so rarely have the chance to thank those who have influenced us, I have previously listed teachers and non-fiction writers who have influenced me, and listed the public lectures I have attended.  I thought it appropriate also to list the people I have worked with whom I have admired and learnt from as managers, which I do here:  

Victor Barendse, Andreas von Blottnitz, Will Bobb, Gene La Borne, Judy Bradford, Jan Buettner, John Cornish, Don Day, John Griffiths, Neill Haine, Ben Hancox, Tony Hawkins, Michael Heath, JY Hwang, Walter Kamba, Mathieu Lasalle, Marian McEwin, Michael Orr, Maureen Piche, Jerry Rossi, Leanne Thomas, Dennis Trewin, Henry Vandemark, Don Warkentin, Richard Wetenhall.

Effective leadership is context-specific:  what works in one domain on one occasion may not work elsewhere or with the same people at other times.   However, in looking across the people whose management skills I have learnt from, I realize there are some common features which most share to a greater or lesser extent.   One is a sharp intelligence, which may be manifest in many diverse ways (verbally, mathematically, organizationally, etc).  A second feature is a marked ability to read the emotions of others and to sense the social dynamics of a group or a meeting.    Good managers know their audiences well.  A third feature is an ability to read their own emotions (a skill which is surprisingly uncommon) together with an ability to control the public expression of these emotions when it so behooves them;   most of the people I have listed would make good poker players.  A fourth feature is an integrity of purpose – enthusiasm, honesty, transparency, directness, fairness, a willingness to argue for positions, and a willingness to consider evidence before reaching conclusions.  Finally, all of these people are effective at getting things done – not a skill to be sneezed at, despite the generally low status that doing things has among the chatterati.




GTD Intelligence at Kimberly-Clark

Published
by
peter
on 2009-09-14
in Consumer Behaviour, Corporate culture, Decision theory, Getting-things-done intelligence, Market planning, Planning and Team working
. Closed

I started talking recently about getting-things-done (GTD) intelligence.  Grant McCracken, over at This Blog Sits At, has an interview with Paula Rosch, formerly of fmcg company Kimberly-Clark, which illustrates this nicely.

I spent the rest of my K-C career in advanced product development or new business identification, usually as a team leader, and sometimes as what Gifford Pinchot called an “Intrapreneur” – a corporate entrepreneur, driving new products from discovery to basis-for-interest to commercialization.  It’s the nature of many companies to prematurely dismiss ideas that represent what the world might want/need 5, 10 years out and beyond in favor of near-term opportunities – the intrapreneur stays under the radar, using passion, brains, intuition, stealth, any and every other human and material resource available to keep things moving.  It helps to have had some managers that often looked the other way.

Continue reading ‘GTD Intelligence at Kimberly-Clark’

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Commuting in the age of email

Published
by
peter
on 2009-05-26
in Argumentation, Corporate culture, Decision theory, Joint-Action Society, Planning, Post-Industrial Nomads, Project Management and Team working
. Closed

If you believe, as the prevailing social metaphor would have it, that this is the Age of Information, then you could easily imagine that the main purpose of human interactions is to request and provide information.   That seems to be the implicit assumption underlying Lane Wallace’s discussion of commuting and working-from-home here.   Wallace is surprised that anyone still travels to work, when information can be transferred so much more readily by phone, email and the web.

But the primary purpose of most workplace interactions is not information transfer, or this is so only incidentally.  Rather, workplace interactions are about the co-ordination of actions – identifying and assessing alternatives for future action, planning and co-ordinating future actions, and reporting on past actions undertaken or current actions being executed.    To engage in such interactions about action of course involves requests for and transfers of information.    To the extent that this is the case, such interactions can be and indeed are undertaken with participants separated in space and time.   But co-ordination of actions requires very different speech acts to those (relatively simple) locutions seeking and providing information:     speech acts such as proposals, promises, requests, entreaties, and commands.  These speech acts have two distinct and characteristic features – they usually require uptake (the intended hearer or actor must agree to the action before the action is undertaken), and the person with the power of retraction or revocation is not necessarily the initial speaker.   An accepted promise can only be revoked by the person to whom the promise is made, for instance, not by the person who made the promise. So, by their very nature these locutions are dialogical acts, not monolectical.   You can’t meaningfully give commands to yourself, for example, and what value is a promise made in a forest?  Neither of these two features apply to speech acts involving requests for information or responses to requests for information.

In addition, inherent in speech acts over actions is the notion of intentionality.    If I promise to you to do action X, then I am expressing an intention to do X.  If your goals requires that action X be commenced or done, then you need to assess how sincere and how feasible my promise is.  Part of your assessment may be based on your past experience with me, and/or the word of others you trust about me (my reputation).   Thus it is perfectly possible for you to assess my capability and my sincerity without ever meeting me.  International transactions across all sorts of industries have taken place for centuries between parties who never met; the need to assess sincerity and capability is surely a key reason for the dominance of families (eg, the Rothschilds in the 18th and 19th centuries) and close-knit ethnic groups (eg, the Chinese diaspora) in international trade networks.  But, if you don’t know me already, it is generally much easier and more reliable for you to assess my sincerity and capability by looking me in the eye as I make my promise to you.

Bloggers and writers and professors, who rarely need to co-ordinate actions with anyone to achieve their work goals, seem not to understand these issues very well.  But these are issues are known to anyone who actually does anything in the world, whether in politics, in public administration or in business.   One defining feature of modern North American corporate culture, in my experience, is that most people find it preferable to make promises of actions even when they do not yet have, and when they know that they do not yet have, the capabilities or resources required to undertake the actions promised.  They do this rather than not make the promise or rather than making the promise conditional on obtaining the necessary resources, in order to appear “positive” to their bosses.   This is the famous “Can Do” attitude at work, and I have discussed it tangentially before in connection with the failure of the Bay of Pigs;  its contribution to the failures of modern American business needs a separate post.

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Geithner at the NY Fed

Published
by
peter
on 2009-04-27
in Corporate culture, Project Management and Team working
. Closed

The NYT has published the daily schedules of Tim Geithner between January 2007 and January 2009, when he was President of the NY Federal Reserve Bank.  Given the extent to which most of his working days were filled with meetings, one wonders just how he managed to do any intellectual work!

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At the hot gates: a salute to Nate Fick

Published
by
peter
on 2009-04-05
in Argumentation, Decision theory, Film, Heroes, History, Joint-Action Society, Planning and Team working
. 1 Comment

After viewing The Wire, certainly the best television series I have ever seen (and perhaps the best ever made), I naturally sought out Generation Kill, from the same writing team – David Simons and Ed Burns.  Also gripping and intelligent viewing, although (unlike The Wire), we only see one side’s view of the conflict.   The series follows a US Marine platoon, Second Platoon of Bravo Company of the 1st  Reconnaissance  Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, as they invade Iraq in March-April 2003.   Like Band of Brothers, we come to know the platoon and its members very well, feeling joy at their wins, and sorrow at their losses.  The TV series is based on an eponymous 2004 book by a journalist, Evan Wright, who was embedded with the platoon in this campaign.

The TV series led me, however,  to read another book about this platoon, written by its commanding officer Lt. Nathaniel Fick (played in the series by actor Stark Sands).    The book is superb!    Fick writes extremely well, intelligently and evocatively, of his training and his battle experiences.  His prose style is direct and uncluttered, without being a parody of itself (as is, say, Hemingway’s).  His writing is remarkably smooth, gliding along, and this aspect reminded me of Doris Lessing, on one of her good days.   Fick clearly has a firm moral centre (perhaps an outcome of his Jesuit high school education), evident from his initial decision to apply to the military while still an undergraduate classics major at Dartmouth.     Having felt a similarly-strong desire as an undergraduate to experience life at the hot gates, I empathized immensely with his description of himself at that time.   Fick’s moral grounding is shown throughout the book, not only in the decisions he takes in battle, and his reflections on these decisions, but also in the way he refrains from naming those of his commanding officers whom he does not respect.    He also shows enormous loyalty to the men he commanded.

And Fick’s experiences demonstrate again that no organization, not even military forces,  can succeed for very long when commands are only obeyed mindlessly.   Successfully execution of commands requires intelligent dialogue between commanders and recipients, in a process of argumentation, to ensure that uttered commands are actionable, appropriate, feasible, effective, consistent, ethical and advisable.  Consequently, the most interesting features of the book for me were the descriptions of decision-making, descriptions often implicit.   Officers and non-officers, it seems, are drilled, through hours of rote learning, in the checklists and guiding principles necessary for low-level, tactical decision-making, so that these decisions can be automatic.  Only after these mindless drills are second nature are trainee officers led to reflect on the wider (strategic and ethical) aspects of decisions,  of decision-making and of actions.   I wonder to what extent such an approach would work in business, where most decision-making, even the most ordinary and tactical, is acquired through direct experience and not usually taught as drills.  Mainly this is because we lack codification of low-level decision-making, although fmcg companies such as Mars or Unilever come closest to this approach.

Fick’s frequent frustrations with the commands issued to him seem to arise because these commands often ignore basic tactical constraints (such as the area of impact of weapons or the direction of firing of weapons), and because they often seem to be driven by a concern for appearances over substantive outcomes.   In contrast to this frustration, one of Fick’s commanding heroes is Major Richard Whitmer, whose unorthodox managerial style and keen intelligence is well described.  A military force able to accommodate such a style is to be admired, so I hope it is not a reflection on the USMC that Whitmer appears to have spent the years since the Iraq invasion running a marine recruitment office.  Next time that I’m CEO of a Fortune 500 company, I’ll actively try to recruit Whitmer and Fick, since they are both clearly superb managers.

I was also struck by how little the troops on the ground in Iraq knew of the larger, strategic picture.  Fick’s team relied on broadcasts from the BBC World Service on a personal, non-military-issue transister radio to learn what was happening as they invaded Iraq.   We who were not involved in the war also relied on the BBC, particularly Mark Urban’s fascinating daily strategic analyses on BBC TV’s Newsnight.  Were we remote viewers better informed than those in the ground in Iraq?  Quite possibly.

Nathaniel Fick now works for a defence think tank, the Center for a New American Security.  A 2006 speech he gave at the Pritzer Military Library in Chicago can be seen here.   A seminar talk to Johns Hopkins University’s series on Rethinking the Future Nature of Competition and Conflict can be found here (scroll down to 2006-01-25).  And here is Fick’s take on recent war poetry.

References:

K. Atkinson et al. [2008]: Command dialogues. In: I. Rahwan and P. Moraitis (Editors): Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems (ArgMAS 2008), AAMAS 2008, Lisbon, Portugal.

Nathaniel Fick [2005]:  One Bullet Away:  The Making of a Marine Officer.  London, UK:  Phoenix.

Evan Wright [2004]:  Generation Kill. Putnam.

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