Day: 6 July 2007

As promised, I ordered a copy of Michael Power‘s new book, Organised Uncertainty. And I’ve given it my first riffle-through, preparing my plan of attack for the next wave through the book. It’s a fascinating read for people of my persuasion. [If you don’t know what my persuasion is, then please take a look at The Kernel For This Blog and About This Blog, both of which should be accessible at the top of this page, depending on how you got here.]

Power quotes Douglas and Wildawsky as saying in 1982:

Can we know the risks we face, now or in the future? No, we cannot: but yes, we must act as if we do.

Later on, Power states ….”More importantly for the purposes of this book, the emphasis of communication was increasingly on the process of risk management rather than on its content.”

I came across early vestiges of this, of the impact of reputational and similar risks on organisations and their management structures, very early on in my project management career. [And I guess I got so frustrated by what I saw that it was only natural that I found my way to The Audit Explosion, and much later on to The Risk Management of Everything. It was only a matter of time before I took steps to meet Professor Power; we had lunch sometime in 2004, and now, having read his latest book at least one, I realise it is time to meet him again.]

Until I read Organized Uncertainty, I never really made the connection between this overgrowth of risk management and the distrust of agile management techniques. I never really understood the Emperor’s-New-Clothes-Syndrome. Now, slowly, light is beginning to dawn, to leach into my landscape.

Once you switch focus from content to process, agile techniques don’t stand a chance. Agile in a “content” perspective leads to the Baconian “A man that starts with doubts shall end in certainties”; agile in a “process” perspective leads to the other Baconian statement “A man that starts with certainties shall end in doubts”. These two positions are polar opposites.

As Douglas and Wildawsky stated, people act as if they know the risks they face despite not knowing them; they then disparage people who act to discover and potentially mitigate hitherto unknown risks. The Emperor’s New Clothes.

More later.

Information overload is of the commonest pushbacks against the take-up of social software “behind the firewall” in enterprises. I’ve always believed in “filtering on the way out rather than on the way in”. Now that’s great in theory, but the practice gets harder as the firehose grows in diameter and I get older. As a result, I’m always on the lookout for different ways of visualising things.

Recently I was pottering about at home while my youngest child (Hope, my daughter aged 9) was surfing, and I went to take a look at what she was doing. She was happily using StumbleUpon, one of my favourite tools, to go she knew not where. [Yes I do make sure that inappropriate content is blocked].

And she stopped at this video. As usual, I’ve made it available on my VodPod in the sidebar as well. [Incidentally, if you’ve ever wondered why I VodPod at the same time as providing the link, the answer’s simple. If you want to find the video link later you would normally have to search through my archives for the right post. Instead, by my using VodPod, you can get here straight from the sidebar.]

I think the Animusic videos are great ways of giving people a chance to visualise music, there’s something vaguely Heath Robinson-meets-Mozart about them. I will ponder over this for a while, trying to consider where else this type of imagery would come in useful.

Visualisation techniques are essential tools when dealing with information firehoses, and (IMO) are far more effective than filtering techniques. When you can add decent collaborative filtering, recommendation and ratings mechanisms to good visualisation techniques, the world is your firehose.