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....

Being of a fairly rational turn of mind, I don't have much truck with Numerology and similar horoscopological mumbo-jumbo, but I have, over the years, observed that product development tends to have difficulties around 7th major version of a piece of software, the antithesis of the "lucky number 7".  This is not a rigorously tested rule (it could be 5 or 6 or 7 or 8), but something more of an intuition with some empirical basis: rule or not, if it comes to pass for Microsoft, it does not bode well for Windows 7.

...well, not according to the entrails of this goat that I have been using to forecast the future of the global banking system, anyway...

A more robust, analytical explanation is that these difficulties are some manifestation of James Utterback theories about dynamics of innovation; of product and process innovation and dominant designs...



... maybe mixed with a bit of boredom, laziness, hubris, and less rational, human things (lemma  here)

Windows is moving from Vista (6), to version 7, and so maybe it already had its bad moment.  However, it is difficult to see how much more development can go into the product as it is, at 28 years old, quite far down the right hand end of the innovation curve, beyond the flush of youth (worrying about its pension, and oooh, it is so chilly, let's turn the fire up, and what are we having for lunch, i've lost my teeth...)

Exercise for the reader: try plotting where you think Windows 1.0, 3.1, 95, XP and Vista fit on the curve?

Many of the other core information technologies we hold dear today are also really quite ancient: RDBMS, Word Processors, Spreadsheets, all dating from the 1970-80s.  So what's new in the world, multi-touch, then, the much touted new technology for Win 7, who needs it on a desktop, I ask you? 

Don't get me going about Tom Cruise and Minority Report - although I do still keep half an eye on developments in data gloves...

There is a lot of talk of Cloud Computing and other exciting things, but apart from the fact that it is, in the main, new applications that will drive up usage, not base technologies, there is an interesting trend about where computing stuff actually happens, and more of it is likely to be happening in non-human places, and between consenting machines...

If these population estimates above are any way true, then only about 8% of connected devices are human-type information appliances, the other 92% are machine or devices that do things useful or mysterious - the balance is tilted to the machines by the 50 billion cockroaches in the basement;  analogous to the rat statistic - you are never more than six feet from one, but you may not know it...

If you take this Machine-to-Machine (M2M) intelligent device view of the world and mash it up with the Semantic Web & RDF  - creating machine readable data on the web, and maybe, as a by-product, defining the lingua franca so that machine can talk unto machine.

So, if the washing machine says, "I'll be back", get the h*ll out, Judgement Day is coming!

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

We've all been through it and know how it goes...

[Dial 0870 ..........]

((((ringing))))

Welcome to British Tap.  Please listen carefully as the following options have changed,

Subtext: You've not called us before so you wouldn't know that and it makes no difference to you, and all we are doing is wasting your time whilst the call routing system finds somebody who might be able to answer your call

.  
Please note that calls may be recorded for training and quality purposes

Subtext: Because we really don't trust our agents or our customers for that matter and we need to be able to go back and find out what you said and then tell you that you were wrong and that you didn't say what you know you said.

Please select from the following options.
Please dial 1 to buy a new widget, please dial 2 if you would like us to  try and cross-sell you some insurance for the widget you bought from us last week, Please dial 3 to report a fault with your widget

[Dial 3]

Your call is being held in a queue and will be answered shortly.  
Our agents are busy answering other customers calls

Subtext: The people in front of you who are more important than you and were given a better phone number to call.  

Your call is being held in a queue and will be answered shortly.  
We value your call.and would love to answer it as soon as we can

Subtext: but we have not  staffed our call centre properly and things are getting a bit out of hand because we are operating on the cheap.

Your call is being held in a queue and (click)

(((((ringing)))))))

कॉल करने के लिए धन्यवाद British Tap . मेरा नाम Nigel है . मैं आज की मदद से आप कैसे हो सकता है ?

Eh? Oh? My boiler is leaking.

我很抱歉，您所谓的Whistle的热线电话，我会转移你向锅炉热线。请稍等

Sorry, what did you say?

(((((ringing)))))

[thoughts start to wander]

Yes, of course, that old cost-cutting gambit of the offshore call-centre.  

Indeed, whilst the overseas call centre pendulum has been swinging back  on-shore in the last year or so, now with cost crunch following credit crunch we can expect that trend to reverse somewhat.

Call centres and the customer experience that go with it are not the only things to get crunched when belts are tightened, discretionary project spending is one of the first things to be reduced,with projects either being deferred or cancelled.  Whilst this is a very hand tap to close, by turning off spending on projects willy-nilly, as snuffing boring, run-of-the-mill sustaining projects, genuinely innovative activities also usually get the chop.  

Conceptually, the unfettered application of cost-cutting measures looks something like this...



... with good stuff getting damaged at the same time as cutting off all the bad, spendthrift behaviours.

In particular, undiscriminating simplistic cost-cutting can be quite short-sighted and have unforeseen effects down the line.  Indeed,  this process of cost-cutting can accelerate an overall competitive cycle of pain...

...where declining profitability is met by efforts to increase efficiency through cutting costs, implementing new technology or whatever, which drives greater competition, which leads, to, oh dear, declining profitability, ad absurdum.  [By the by, this cycle was posited by two of my colleagues at Mitchell Madison Group, Mark Carrington and Philip Langguth  in their seminal work "The Banking Revolution: Salvation or Slaughter?"]

However, innovation is one of to primary decelerators of this cycle

So the conundrum is how to go about reducing costs without killing the good stuff, thus...

...to take out cost and building competitive advantage through innovation and better customer experience.

The solution generally lies in being more analytical about the cost-cutting process rather than simple "slash and burn", such as:

• Careful prioritisation of projects, for example, choosing to favour of genuine innovation efforts over the projects that just sustain the existing business;
• Taking a system-level view, e.g, over the customer life cycle, and using joined up thinking to ensure that simplistic, functional cost-cutting does not cut across and destroy customer experience, or in the IT software development arena, taking the whole productivity equation into account (rather than focusing solely on daily rates)
• Keeping a focus on profitability, rather than just the bottom-line, so that the overall financial health of the enterprise is improved

Meanwhile, back to the phone...

(((((ringing)))))
(click)

Благодарим ви за свикване на British Tap бойлер гореща линия. Казвам се Tony. Как мога да ви помогне да днес?

Oh, !$R£W"Q^%$£&^%$£&%$£"%^)*&%)(*^%$%^£!!!!
[Slam]

Last year, I came across a couple of surveys about Middle Management that piqued my interest. The first said:

Middle managers emerge as a neglected, disillusioned and frustrated breed in research...a third say they are kept in the dark about company plans, almost two-thirds confess they are at a loss to understand their role   -- jobs.telegraph, "Middle Managers are left in the dark"

And if you read the underlying report you see  that an astonishing 48% of middle managers do not think that communicating with their team is a key part of their job;

The second said:

...under performing middle managers are costing British business £220 billion a year in lost productivity.  Over half (54 per cent) of senior managers felt that middle managers were uncommitted to strategic goals, and 62 per cent criticized lack of management and leadership skills. -- Hay Group,  "Alarming Performance Gap at Middle Management Level"

Whilst this is clearly a puff piece by Hay to sell all sorts of warm and fuzzy HR services, linking the two together, you can see why the senior managers and directors might hold those views.

Middle Management is possibly an endangered species these days, but does still seems to be hanging on in little niches,  according to these surveys, despite hating the job, and apparently failing in the eyes of their seniors, so you wonder why they stick it out?!

Wikipedia makes an amusingly naive attempt to define away the problem...

Middle management is a layer of management...whose primary job responsibility is to monitor activities of subordinates while reporting to upper management.  In pre-computer times [ "What? Jurassic, maybe?", dripping with sarcasm], middle management would collect information from junior management and reassemble it for senior management.  With the advent of inexpensive PCs ["har, har", choking on spittle]  this function has been taken over by e-business systems [paralysed with laughter, writhing on floor].  During the 1980s and 1990s thousands of middle managers were made redundant for this reason ["So simple?"]

...taking a Tom Peter's-like knife to the whole layer, thus:


...with the backbone provided by those amazing "inexpensive PCs" and fantabulous "e-business systems":  However, as a saving grace, the entry does at least refer to communication as a key job function.

I went through an epiphany on this topic some many years ago, when working as a development manager in a computer manufacturer.  I was sitting in a daily "War Room" session held during the torrid Beta trials of a piece of probably under-cooked software.  In the room were the luminaries of Technical and International Sales & Service divisions and assorted lackeys, acolytes, water carriers and coat holders.  In particular, on the Technical Division side was this management line:

• The Technical Director
• The Development Director
• The Development Manager (Me)
• The Project Manager

The Beta trials were displaying all the dysfunction of a classic "waterfall" software development project going to b*ggery, hampered also by a functionally aligned organisation, and all the attendant politics.  So we spent many a fractious morning in the cut and thrust of departmental politics, whilst attempting to alleviate the pain of the early Beta customers.  

Outside that bun fight, the job of a middle manager was supposed to be to "put yourself about", (be seen to) sniff out issues, especially the opposition's dirty laundry, and inform on the organisation to the Directors in your line, in short - a communication role, pure and simple in concept, hellish in reality.

The War Room was, however, one shining light in the risk management firmament - and something that still features many years later in Agile development methods (e.g, as the daily stand-up).  The concept is cribbed directly from military usage and is all about shortening communication lines to improve responsiveness and to win battles.  

And in this gladiatorial "circus", whose job was mainly about communication?  Well, mine.  

The fun started when discussing the approach to some issue and it came down to fixing some malfunctioning product feature, and the bullets starting heading my way.

It was a frustrating, no-win situation:

• I could, for example, just nod the question over to the Project Manager and be seen as weak, but then, why have a dog and bark myself?  
• I could have taken the role as Project Manager from the meetings to control the information flow, but that made a nonsense of the whole War Room, and would have been a recipe for being blamed for everything wrong with the project (which was woven into the very fabric);
• or other strategies which were all equally flawed, within the oxymoronic constraints of the project and the organisation, and most vitally, defied sanity and common sense!

Then, ding, the light went on!  This job is pointless!  

Moving back to the current day, elaborating on the analogy of "organisation as anatomy" , then you can start to think that there are, at the very simplest,  two types of job:

• useful, creative, purposeful roles that move stuff forward, onwards, upwards - like Muscle
• other roles that are like the connective tissues, insulation, piping for insanitary fluids and other ugly bits that get left on the side of the plate of life, yes, Gristle

Visually, then the pure Middle Management communication role has to be seen in this light:

 

I made my decision on this years ago, but for anybody who is still uncertain, I offer this handy little decision-making 2x2 matrix:

Middle Managers Career Game board		Want to be...
		Gristle	Muscle
Treated as..	Gristle	Stay	Move!
	Muscle	Retire	Enjoy