On a plane flying back from Boston (Mass.), eaten second breakfast of the day, watched a bit of "Where the Wild Things Are", annoying, fractious kid who needs therapy (or a sharp slap) and a bunch of needy, fractious rather dopey creatures, disappointed, switched it off, didn't even care to see if he was reconciled with his poor benighted mother, bored, listening to Muse, need a coffee, some battery life in laptop, here goes...

Recently, I was working with a colleague who exclaimed "You've got to be a professor to understand that page" when looking at a consulting 2x2.   Indeed there are some great pages in the world that capture some key thoughts or concepts so concisely that they can be expressed just on one page, but need a voice-over to talk through the layers of meaning embedded, maybe like one of those pointillist paintings or a fractal montages that is made up of pictures that are made up of pictures...(but perhaps not a Dali-esque or Picassoid other world view?).

This diagram below (not the one being commented on, I hasten to add), captures the entire eco-system of outsourced application development on both technical & commercial dimensions, ranging from the narrow individual project up to the strategic vendor relationship level


Very clever, of course, but it really deserves to be supported by 20 following pages to unpeel the layers and break out the key concepts, etc., etc.

(oohh, a quick round of orange juice...)

But it looks like this when you morph it Dali-style...



...but that is just plain silly, of course. (but an excuse to try out the Virtual Plastic Surgery Software, why don't you give it a go on one of your favourite photos, and make your self look like your favourite film star, or the Bride of Wildenstein...)

Battery dying....break to watch X-Men Origins: Wolverine, just another load of shouting and uber-angst

Down on the ground now...

However, there are some charts that are very easy to understand, but they do convey a message that is counter-intuitive, and so take a while to get your head round.

This chart is a good example



This shows the output of a model of software development productivity which paradoxically shows that total coding cost falls whilst the developer daily rate increases.  This is, of course, quite counter to the expectations of typical Aggressive Sourcing gigs which tend to focus on bashing down the daily rates.   The Old Wives and proverb writers of yore new about this since the principle of "Pay peanuts and get Monkeys" is well known.

This is what they used to say, but I do wonder if this phrase might be considered racist in these days of off-shoring, say maybe it should now be "Pay Peanuts, get Numpties" or something like that...

The twist in the tail on this analysis is that in the formula P x Q, where P is Daily Rate, and Q is the number of days needed to complete the project, some people (yes, them) are not aware that Q is inversely proportional to P.  This is the essence of the move to Agile development methods, which favours people over process (amongst other things).

Finally, I also offer you the 2x2 I wrote all by myself one day after an afternoon's presentation by one of my erstwhile colleagues, a quite (self) important and entitled sort of chap who gave a long presentation from which I came out reeling with "Framework overload", having survived the discourse from the evolution of Sailing Ships to Dell's policy build to order policy and positive cash to cash resulting...

So I drew this...



So there you go...

I have been away from my desk quite a lot recently cavorting around the motorways of England, racking up the miles on my poor hard-worked steed, but now I have a few minutes to sit down and pass on an interesting observation....

Just a momentary tangent before we head into the main meat, so to speak, there is another blog post that I have been meaning to write about Broadband Britain, Cloud Computing, the Innovators Dilemma, passing by the new statistic that the number of of old people in the UK now exceeds the number of young, and arriving finally at some as yet unthought pithy comment about Silver [read, Grey] Surfers. However, it is really just an excuse to create a comic juxtaposition alluding to the alleged practice of North American ethnic peoples (no longer Eskimo) to abandon their old folk on ice floes, whereas I have observed over the long miles I have travelled in the last few months that we British seem to abandon them at Cherwell Valley Services on the M40...so lets move on

Anyway, my recent revelation is related to this framework below plucked from the world of transformation consulting and change management as relayed to me some years ago by one of my erstwhile consulting chums.  The blobs relate to managing communication with people during significant changes on three dimensions: Rational, Political and Emotional.


The 'sweet spot' is in the centre when all communications are most compelling as they appeal to all these three.

Coincidentally, whilst  trying to be a useful parent and reviewing a Classics essay, I prodded Google about some topic to draw back the veil of my ignorance on such topics and it popped up with Aristotle's three modes of persuasion

• ήθος - Ethos
• λόγος - Logos
• πάθος - Pathos

Thus, in seasonal form...



Whilst equating Ethos to the Political dimension somewhat turns my stomach when I think of the more venal and self-aggrandising aspects of the political world, the three blobs of the R...P...E model are a pretty good match for what Aristotle laid down.

So there you go....

About a year ago, I went though one of those few moments when I thought my normal powers of memory had somehow deserted me. It was not really anything important I couldn't remember, just the word that describes the the lights you see when you squeeze your eyes tight shut. Like this...

So not very significant in the scheme of things: not one of the words I actually use very often in conversation or in Powerpoint presentations. Just annoying, because the word was just lurking on the edge of my perception, out of reach. But something that you can get a bit obsessed about when information normally falls to hand or mind quickly...

So I Googled and Wiki'd and all those searching jobs that normally count as work, and kept finding Tom, Nicole and Stanley and their film, and other flotsam and jetsam on the endless waves of Web surf.

But, eventually, I created a mega-whiz, sharp-as-a-scalpel, spot-on search string that gave me that Eureka moment...Ding!

The word I was looking for was "Phosphene"

Mind you the Eureka moment was over quickly, as I came to that odd feeling that I had never known the word at all so how could I have semi-forgotten or demi-remembered it? But let us not confuse the story with such technical plot twists and devices.

Palimpsest is another word a bit like Phosphene, but in reverse, I know what the letters say, but the meaning slips my mind (a reused bit of parchment, in fact). It is however a word that I have read many times but never ever had the need to write down - until today. It is definitely a clever Stephen Fry sort of a word, or maybe a Will Self word

I wrote "normal powers of memory" at the top of this piece, though we Jungian Is "enjoy" the physical aspects of memory that are imposed by our brain chemitstry, being the dominant long acetylcholine pathway, compared the the short dopamine pathway of Es out there.

If you looked inside my head, it might look something like this...

...but brighter and probably in colour.

So I worked out many years ago that I should not waste my time remembering stuff, when a notebook works much better.

And so on into the Wonderful World of the Web, I have always found it useful to clip bits out and paste them into my digital scrapbook for longevity and to act as my long-term cyber memory. I gave up on browser Favourites early, as they quickly became useless signposts to where information was no more.

In my Adobe period, I printed bits of the Web to PDF files and stored them in a byzantine filing structure. But, eventually I settled on Onfolio and paid some brass for a real product...and then Microsoft bought it and gave me back my money because they were giving it away free in the Windows Live toolbar...then to become a zombie, twilighting product. The death knell was when they switched off the licensing servers last September.

RIP, Onfolio, you served me well

So I had to indulge in one of those distress-driven searches to find a new digital brain. I tried Ultra-Recall which can import Onfolio collections, but has the user experience of a broken lift. I tried TopicScape but that felt like I was in Castle Wolfenstein or Jurassic Park (the " 'I know this, it's UNIX' whilst looking at a mad graphical computerscape " moment), and a host of other paraphernalia and arcana.

So I have ended up with MacroPool's Web Research, which feels a bit like Onfolio...but German...so hopefully it will be most efficient. We'll see...

Last week seemed to revolve around cars and driving, starting the week with long distance trips (to Canterbury and Salisbury), then fixing broken cars, a damaged engine undertray and nixed horns from an unwarranted attack by a particularly vicious piece of traffic calming, plus a petrol leak, culminating in thrashing my old M5 around Cadwell Park on a track day on Friday (a good way to end the week!).  

Cadwell Park is mostly associated with bikers, but is also quite entertaining in a car, especially a tail-happy BMW - when I first enquired about track day insurance a while ago, the bod on the phone gave me a quote, and then when I said it was Cadwell, they said, ah, and added another 50%!

Here is the old girl in her war paint...


...none the worse for our trip into the bushes in the snow a few weeks ago.

In a mad moment of preparation before one of the long drives, we threw out the rubbish bag from the back of the car.  I later got a text from home saying that we had just managed to recycle 28 empty Red Bull cans: something of a record even for me.

Quite coincidentally, I was idly running my eye over two piles of books on the table in my study, all in the process of being read or passing through to the bookshelves...


On the right is a workaday pile of business books that show some current industry themes (Semantic Web, Information Security, Agile IT Organisations..).  The left-hand pile, however, reveals my recent predeliction for texts de-bunking mumbo-jumbo in all its irrational varieties, and I wonder if, maybe, this signals the start of the slippery slope to becoming Grumpy?

OK, Step forward, one and all, to tell me I'm already there...

Anyway, connecting Red Bull with grumpiness in any form, whether caused by lack of sleep, or too much blood in my caffeine stream, I was particularly exercised last week by an article in the paper - so, much so that I tore it out and carried it in my wallet, waving it at people, and saying "Says Who?".

I have it here now and I am waving it at the screen in an agitated way.  It is entitled "Night-owl children ruin body clocks" from the Sunday Times, and the first sentence reads "Children who are allowed to stay up past their bedtime watching television or playing on a computer are at risk of late-night sleeplessness for the rest of their lives".  To me this is grade A bunkum, as despite the strictest bed-times enforced by my parents, a thin gruel of educational TV and definitely no computer games (not invented), today I inhabit a nether-world of late nights, living in a time zone that is somewhere about GMT - 2 ("Mid-Atlantic" according to Windows clock) or GMT - 3  ("Montevideo/Buenos Aires/Georgetown/Greenland").

I recall a moment during an interview many years ago with PWC Management Consulting, walking around the offices taking in the atmosphere. My escort said "We have hot-desking here, and starting time is 9-30am" (how civilised, I thought), "but if you don't get in by 7am then you don't get a desk" (ho ho, st&ff that for a game of soldiers, I thought)

Who are these mysterious people, "they" who dictate when we should sleep and wake? Who says what bedtime is and should be?  In a world of the Internet, Digital TV and 24hour opening at Tesco who needs to have a set bedtime?  Says Who?  Nanny? Granny? the NHS? [see footnote]

Alvin Toffler put his finger on this point in "Future Shock" many years ago, when he commented on the transition from cock-crow, to factory whistle and school bell - training us all to live, work and sleep to a rhythm of coordinated factory production.  Be a good little robot, and Thank Ford for the Brave New World. (OK, mixed literary allusions there, I know)

Well, ranting aside, I was pleased to see later in the week, another article in the same domain, but this one said  Teenagers improve grades with a lie-in.....    Unlike Matter and anti-Matter which annihilate themselves in a E=MC² sort of way when they get mixed together, News and anti-News stories just sort of disappear with a slight "moo" and a whiff of fish.

And so to bed...


[footnote: the worrying aspect is that the article quotes the sort of statistics about insomnia, sleep-walking and sleep-related breathing problems that some intellectually challenged politician might seize on to force us all to go to bed at 8pm...for our own good]

Life, media-style, is normally quiet in the nether regions of Lincolnshire, but having had an earthquake last year, it seems that the papers are thirsting for more excitements from the Wolds.  So we have started the year with an exciting story "Tentacled Alien Destroys Wind Farm Generator", pictured below just after the accident (a genuine photo, for sure)...


I have commented before about the impact of global warming, but I think having an ocean-going octopus visiting now is rather premature, and in fact any, extra-terrestrial cephalopods foolish enough to embrace a windmill is going to end up as sushi.

Of course, the alien story is a good way of diverting attention from the otherwise suffocating Credit Crunch

I was going to write something clever about "interesting times" here but when looking up the origin of the phrase it turns out that the alleged curse has very little provenance - the quixotic and capricious Wikipedia suggest it might be related to the proverb "It's better to be a dog in a peaceful time than be a man in a chaotic period" (寧 為太平犬，不做亂 世人; pinyin: níng wéi tàipíng quǎn, bù zuò luànshì rén).

Bubbles are always predictable with 20:20 hindsight, and make a nonsense of some of the great prognostications and punditry, when all comes crashing to the ground.  Arthur C. Clarke summed up the dangers of prophecy as Failure of Imagination, and Failure of Nerve.  To which we could probably add Failure of Intelligence to make an unholy trinity.  Intelligence comes in many forms of thinking process as well as keeping a good look-out.  Previous major failures of forecasting include the dot.com bust, of the prior forecasts for commercial trends were spectacularly off:

... and which also makes me think that, in the terms of control systems theory, that the whole global commercial and financial system is large and complex enough not to observable, let alone controllable (although the jury is out as to whether it is quantum indeterminate).

Which brings me to one of the classic, but flawed frameworks that are often used in the crystal-ball gazing process: the PEST analysis which attempts to scan important trends in Political, Economic, Socio-Cultural and Technological  domains.  Variants posited include:

• PESTLE/PESTEL - Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological, Legal, Environmental;

• PESTLIED - Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, International, Environmental, Demographic;

• STEEPLE - Sociodemographic, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political, Legal, Ethical;

• SLEPT- Social, Legal, Economic, Political, Technological

• FARM: Feudal, Agricultural, Religious, Magical (for medieval lords, thanes and serfs, etc..)

OK I made the last one up, but it demonstrates that PEST is a rather basic cookie-cutter analytical tool, and certainly not MECE  in its scope.  Inevitably, the framework you use for forecasting is influenced by the current frame of reference and warps the lens with which you look at and filter the trends.

In the spirit of improvement, albeit strapping wings to a pig, I can offer my own variant: PESTO.  The "O" stands for "Oh sh*t", that category of all other things that we didn't think about in the other four categories, or plain just aren't under the microscope, or even do not yet exist, be imagined or people don't think can happen, and so on.

The Red Queen trumps Karl Marx - change is constant and things always move on, become different. Change is, not dialectical, sorry Karl, you backed the wrong horse.

The solutions to long term forecasting problems, is to think/work in short cycles, and react/respond quickly to keep up with the changes, and adapt to events as they arise.  Be Agile!

Postscript: I cannot finish without acknowledging the death of my Uncle Edward in December, the last Gueritz of his generation, and remarkable with it. You can read his story here