Month: May 2010

Thinking about predictability: More musings about Push and Pull

Chichen Itza photograph courtesy JuanRojo

If you’ve been following this blog for long, then you’ll probably know that I’ve been interested in a number of themes to do with information and its implications on business structures and process. You will also know that every now and then, I use the arenas of food and music to illustrate points or issues.

Of late, much of my time has been taken up in reading (and re-reading) The Power of Pull, and I’ve written a couple of posts on the subject. Messrs Hagel, Seely Brown and Davison have really made me think about things; they’ve answered some of the questions I’ve had for a while, and raised a number of new ones.

In parallel, I’ve also been delving into collapse theory, sparked off by Clay Shirky’s excellent post on the collapse of complex business models. That led me on to digging deeper into Joseph Tainter; I ordered and read The Collapse of Complex Societies straightaway; if any of you is interested in collapse theory, I would strongly recommend you read it; it is also really worth reading a long book review that Professor Tainter did, headlined Collapse, Sustainability and the Environment: How Authors Choose to Fail or Succeed.

Clay has also been responsible for putting a third, connected, stream of thinking into my head, via Kevin Kelly, another must-read person. The Shirky Principle. [Incidentally, you can rest assured I will be reviewing Clay’s upcoming book, Cognitive Surplus. I’ve already ordered it; how nice it was to see that the book was actually being released same-day US and UK. I am so sick of artificial scarcities.]

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky

So that’s where my head is right now. Thinking about institutions built fundamentally around “push” principles trying to survive in a “pull” world. Thinking about institutions that are designed that way through no fault of their own; these principles have been the basis of management and economics thinking for the best part of a century. Thinking about institutions that “try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution”. Thinking about institutions that grow more and more complex over time, and then collapse.
Which leads me to the main point of this post. Predictability.
In the Power of Pull (pg 37) the authors articulate a number of “instincts, assumptions and beliefs” that make up “the philosophy of push”:
  • There’s not enough to go around
  • Elites do the deciding
  • Organisations must be hierarchical
  • People must be molded
  • Bigger is better
  • Demand can be forecast
  • Resources can be allocated centrally
  • Demand can be met
I am particularly taken with the Demand can be forecast/Demand can be met statements. For some years now, I have been bemused at the things institutions do in order to make something fundamentally unpredictable into something somehow more predictable.
Through sheer serendipity I was at Burroughs Corporation when the firm, and the industry, began to realise that the money was moving from hardware to software; I was at Data General when the firm, and the industry, began to realise that the money was moving from proprietary to open; I was at Cap Gemini when the firm, and the industry, began to realise that IT services were moving from national to global scale; I was at Dresdner Kleinwort when the firm, and the industry, began to realise that financial services were moving from analog to digital.
In each case, there was a significant shift taking place in the industry, one that was going to transform the entire market radically. In each case, there was a clear institutional response. And in each case, the response was expected to provide a predictability of outcome that was required to be of unusual precision for such an emergent venture in such a changing environment.
I saw the same thing when it came to “agile” methods and practices. Everybody seemed to understand what the methods and practices were; and then, for some strange reason, everyone expected some incredible level of precision in planning and outcome which militated against any concept of agility; this is what I was referring to as the “planning horizon” problem in a recent post.
These behaviours caused a level of cognitive dissonance in me, and I’ve therefore been thinking about it for some time now. Right now I don’t want to go into why people want this predictability, suffice it to say that it appears to be a Push principle as articulated in the book. What I want to do is concentrate on the things people do in order to achieve this state of predictableness.
The easiest route to guaranteeing predictability is to control the market, have a monopoly. Many companies have tried this in the past, many continue to try this, despite legislation and regulation to prevent this. It is easier to do this in some jurisdictions rather than others; surprisingly, it would appear that some companies in “developed” countries seem to be as adept in sustaining monopolies while pretending to be otherwise, as their emerging-nation counterparts: the processes get more sophisticated and get called lobbying rather than bribing, but the outcome’s the same. Nevertheless, global monopolies are hard to sustain: artificial scarcities (eg region coding on DVDs) get met by artificial abundances (eg chipping of DVD players).
If you can’t have a monopoly, the next thing you do in your quest for predictability is to try and control your customer, make it hard for the customer to leave you. This is not surprising, since financial backers (quite possibly the ones wanting the predictability in the first place) are trained to ask “where’s your lock-in” as part of Due Diligence 101. Overt ways of controlling the customer start looking anti-competitive; as a result, the practice has begin to ease, although there are worrying signs that it will resurge in the guise of customer data import and export.
If you can’t lock in your customer, then you do the next best thing. You convince yourself you have predictability. You use a variety of financial and reporting tools to sustain this pretence, often under the guise of “risk management”. [In this context, I would strongly recommend you read Michael Power’s The Risk Management of Everything, a wonderful little tract that you can download for free here.] Sometimes when I look at everything that happened in the financial markets, I cannot help but feel that the same principles that Clay Shirky speaks of in The Collapse of Complex Business Models applies in modern financial markets. The problem with this approach is that you land up having no defence for “black swans”. In fact I would go so far as to state that the process of pretending predictability is one that systemically creates and increases black swan risk.
If you can’t convince yourself, then it all begans to unravel. Because you’re left with the temptation to convince others of the predictable nature of business while not being convinced yourself. Why? Because “push” organisations work on this basis of precision in predictability. The techniques people use to “convince” others in this respect are immoral at the very least and illegal at the extreme.
Institutions, particularly “push” institutions,  have grown up on the mother’s milk of predictability, of smoothed-out forecasts, of a level of precision that is no longer sustainable in a “Pull” world. They’ve resorted to using an extensive variety of techniques to try and hold on to that predictability; some of them are sustainable in the short term, some of them are downright illegal, none of them have any real value in the long term.
Which brings me to the question that’s keeping me awake. Can a traditional Push institution really become a Pull institution, bearing all this in mind? is that transition, that hybrid state,  really possible? how long can one institution uphold two sets of radically different principles under one style of management?
I tried to imagine a Push institution outsourcing work to a Pull institution, to try and understand what the working agreement would look like. And I didn’t like the answer.
Comments and advice welcome.

On pasta and music and copyright

I love food. I love cooking. I use the analogy of food to learn about information: in fact, I’ve nearly finished writing a book that looks in detail at information as if it were food. One of the foods I love is pasta. Glorious pasta.

[I’m attributing this to Red Giraffe, though I came across this elsewhere without any attribution.]

Nobody quite knows precisely where pasta comes from, where and when pasta began. The web is a rich resource for satisfying any curiosity you may have on the topic; suffice it to say that most of the stories involve thousands of years, a lot of dead people (usually Greeks, Romans and Chinese) and even the odd saint or two. Marco Polo doesn’t quite make the cut, but that doesn’t prevent the Chinese having a stake in the ground millenia earlier.

Some of the stories are more recent and more enjoyable (albeit slightly less credible) such as this one, harvested from the Alexandra Palace Television Service over fifty years ago:

Some of the stories may be hard to believe, but nevertheless people agree on a number of things:

  • Pasta has been around since the year dot.
  • Pasta is made by mixing ground kernels of grain, usually wheat,  with water or egg; while Italian pasta tends to be made of durum wheat and no other, other types of grain are in use elsewhere.
  • Pasta used to be made by hand (or more precisely, foot); since 1740 or so machines have also been used to make pasta.

[attributed with thanks to Donovan Govan]

Pasta comes in many shapes and sizes and forms; if you’re interested, read the wikipedia article. If you want to delve deeper, there is probably no better book than Oretta Zanini de Vita’s Encyclopaedia of Pasta.

[Attributed with thanks to FoodieSteve’s blog]

Pasta proclamations, even patents, have been around for a long time, perfidious and pusillanimous attempts to pervert people’s creativity. There have even been designers who’ve tried their hand at new forms of pasta:

Giorgio Giugiaro’s Marille pasta

Philippe Starck’s Mandala pasta

Think about pasta. Today, anyone can make pasta. Kafkaesque bureaucracies can make up rules about the nature of the grain used, the water used, the egg, whatever, but basically every human being has a right to decide what to make pasta out of. You can buy machines to make pasta. But you don’t have to. You can buy “readymade” pasta made by someone else, or even try and make similar pasta at home yourself. You can even go to the extreme, and buy not just the pasta but the love and labour that goes into making and serving a dish with pasta: you can go to a restaurant and pay a chef to do that for you, pay waiters to serve it to you.

Basically, you can do what you like with pasta, starting with the wheat and water and ending with the cooked meal. At each stage, you have the choice of whether you want to pay someone else to do something or not. Someone else can make the pasta for you. Sell you a machine to make pasta. Write a book and tell you how to make the pasta. Or the meal itself. Someone else can cook it for you, amateur or professional. There are a million ways people can participate in the design, making, cooking and eating of pasta, a million ways people can make money with pasta.

Wonderful, isn’t it? The freedom and creativity that has given us over 1300 types of pasta over centuries, shared and enjoyed by billions.

But you know something? It would take very little to screw all this up, to make a complete codswallop out of pasta. Imagine this scenario:

  • Step 1: Patented genetically modified durum wheat begins to displace “organic” wheats. Over time, all the durum wheat grown in the world is covered by patent. People continue to share recipes and cook and eat at home, and in restaurants.
  • Step 2: The GM wheat manufacturers do deals with pasta machine manufacturers (also patented, of course). You cannot use the machines except with official durum wheat. [This is called putting the DRM in durum, which then gets trademarked as DuRuM]. People continue to share recipes and cook and eat at home and in restaurants. Some people have the gall to build their own machines, some don’t even use machines; they knead the dough with their feet.
  • Step 3: The pasta and pasta machine manufacture and distribution industry does not like this, so, under the guise of public safety, lobbies and gets legislation passed that outlaws all wheat bar non-GM wheat, as happened for a while with mustard oil in India. While they’re at it, home manufacture of pasta is also banned. People continue to do what they’ve been doing for thousands of years, and the legislation isn’t taken seriously.
  • Step 4: The internet arrives, Moore’s Law continues to march, and the digitisation of the pasta world continues. 3D printing becomes reality. People don’t just share recipes with their friends and neighbours any more, they now use the internet to share recipes with people they don’t even know, people living all over the world. Even worse, people start making their own pasta machines even though this is “illegal”. RepRap pasta machine cells spring up everywhere.
  • Step 5: The pasta and pasta machine manufacture and distribution industry, which had been going so well since the middle of the 19th century, is distraught. They find all this modern technology so unfair, despite the irony that they themselves disrupted an entire industry as a result of technological advancement 150 years ago. So they lobby government for even more law, to declare sharing of recipes illegal, to declare 3D machines illegal, to declare the transport and distribution of such recipes and machines illegal. Up goes the cry, the pasta bandit must be stopped. Billions at stake, millions of jobs lost, all because of the pasta bandits.
  • Step 6: Government is so busy looking for WMD in Iraq, looking through their expense claims, looking for oil, looking for lucrative post-government book deals, speaking assignments and suchlike, that they don’t have time to worry about all this. Their noses may have been deep in the trough, but they know what to do every time they hear words like “bandit”. Bandits? We can’t have them. Thieving uncivilised louts, we need to put a stop to this forthwith.
  • Step 7: And so the pasta “bandit” is born. And over time, five thousand years of eating pasta comes to a halt.

Don’t worry, none of this could happen in a civilised country, we have nothing to fear. Especially in civilised countries like the UK, the USA and France.

Think about pasta. And think about music. Think about laws that require you to take down a home video of people singing Happy Birthday to You. Think about laws that require people’s internet connections to be cut off for alleged acts of music “piracy”, somehow seen as criminal theft while being at best, and that too only if proven sufficiently in a court of law, civil offences of copyright infringement. Think about laws that make it impossible to provide free wifi.

Think about the freedoms that are being traded. Yankee Doodle, as the song says “put a feather in his hat and called it Macaroni”.

Soon we won’t have the right to call anything Macaroni. Forget calling a feather macaroni, at the rate our freedoms are being traded we will soon not have the right to call macaroni macaroni. Not unless it was made out of GM durum wheat made using licensed machines on licensed premises, using officially endorsed recipes.

The Digital Economy Act is not about thieves or bandits. It’s about preserving 150-year-old business models that prevent human beings from enjoying 5000-year-old freedoms.