Author: JP

Musing about 2011 and an un-national generation

Happy New Year everyone.

If you haven’t heard of William Stafford before, you should try and spend some time reading his poetry. Stafford, who died in 1993, was made the US equivalent of Poet Laureate in 1970, and was known for his gentle, pithy style. A prolific poet, he is estimated to have written over 22,000 poems, though only a fraction are available in print.

One of my favourite Stafford poems is At The Un-National Monument Along The Canadian Border, shown below, a good reason to go out and buy a collection of his poems today:

If you like what you see above, there’s also a decent archives site you can find here.

There are many reasons for my liking the poem. Even now, years after coming across it, I can still savour every line. I must admit I have a particular fondness for the ending, the sheer power and imagery of phrases like “hallowed by neglect” and “celebrate it by forgetting its name”.

There’s also a tangential reason for my liking the poem. Stafford’s use of the word “un-national”, a word that resonated quite powerfully in me.

For many years now, I’ve been pondering what it means to be “global”. [As I’ve written before, I was born a foreigner: my name was alone enough to tell people in Calcutta that I wasn’t from there; my colouring and accent were enough to tell people in Madras that I wasn’t from there. And yet, as the name of this blog suggests, I am extremely fond of Calcutta, and consider that the city, and its people, played a critical role in forming and shaping what I am today.]

When I joined BT some years ago, the issue of “being global” came up in conversation with the then CEO, Ben Vervaayen. At the first meeting I ever had with him, Ben brought up the issue, asking me to consider carefully the distinctions between “international”, “multinational” and “global”. And, especially since it was a topic of some personal interest already, I obliged.

And where I got to that evening sometime in 2006 was this: that perhaps a key distinction between “global” and all those other words like “international” and “multinational” lay in the fact that it didn’t contain the suffix -national, that the essence of being global could not be defined in the context of nations. There was a born-foreignness to it, a statelessness as it were.

Some years before that, I’d had the pleasure of discussing some of this with friends and colleagues at Dresdner Kleinwort, particularly Sean Park and Malcolm Dick. Incidentally, if you haven’t watched it yet, you must see Sean’s 2005 AmazonBay video. Amazing. [Disclosure: I’m a venture partner with Anthemis Group].

Particularly around the time that Sean was creating the video, we spent some time discussing the “death zone”, the vulnerable space in the middle as businesses migrated to the extremes of global and hyperlocal; it was here that the conversation first meandered into the “stateless” topic, as we ruminated on the fact that quite a few of the institutions destined for the death zone seemed to be characterised by having national structures and ambitions.

Against this backdrop, I’ve been spending time thinking about the whole national-versus-stateless thing, particularly since it seemed to come up in so many of the areas I was interested in. Our laws and regulations and business practices are intrinsically so national in structure and intent that they get incredibly messy when applied to things un-national. Here are a few examples:

These are just simple, random examples that come to mind, where there’s a tension between national law and global products and services. National versus un-national, stateless, global.

More recently, some six months ago, Jay Rosen referred to Wikileaks as the world’s first stateless news organisation. Incidentally, while touching on the subject of Wikileaks: you must read Clay Shirky’s “half-formed thoughts” on the subject, covering some of the issues of international versus stateless.

While in India, I read Tim Wu’s The Master Switch, which deals with cyclical development in information and communications industries, sine-curving between closed and open. One of the things that struck me about the book was that each cycle appears to be described in the context of a single country. If you haven’t read it yet, it’s well worth a read. Take a look at Cory Doctorow’s review here.

The internet, the Web, the Cloud, these are essentially disruptive global constructs for many of us. The atoms that serve as infrastructure for these global constructs are physically located in specific countries; the laws and regulations that govern the industries disrupted by these constructs are themselves usually national in structure; the firms doing the disrupting are quasi-stateless in character, trying more and more to be “global”; emerging and future generations have worldviews that are becoming more and more AmazonBay, discarding the national middle for the edges of global and hyperlocal.

We are all so steeped in national structures for every aspect of this: the law, the governance model, the access and delivery technologies, the ways of doing business — that we’re missing the point.

Everything is becoming more stateless, more global. We don’t know how to deal with it. So we’re all trying very hard to put genies back in bottles, pave cowpaths, turn back waves, all with the same result.

Abject failure.

And things are fraying at the edges. For some years now, I’ve been commenting on the internet, intellectual property law and identity, in the belief that these three “i”s are the foundation of the new, global, order. And of course I’ve tended to write about these things in the context of music and film and books and food, because those are the places where I see the cracks in the current foundations, as things move from analog to digital.

But it goes well beyond these. Take fundraising. It’s gone global. I love Causes, what it means, what it stands for, what can happen as a result. To me Causes is essentially global. Yet it has to have national collection processes, tax rebates, bank accounts. For most causes this dichotomy is fine, since so many causes are global. But what happens when you’re trying to raise political funds? Is an IP address a reasonable test of eligibility? Is physical residence?

The emerging generations want to use services independent of location of “origin” and location of “delivery”. Attempts to create artificial scarcity (by holding on to dinosaur constructs like physical-location-driven identity) are being responded to by a whole slew of spoofing and anonymisation tools; as the law becomes more of an ass in this context, you can be sure that the tools will get better.

For centuries now we’ve been learning about what happens when barriers to migration get reduced, as people, goods and capital flow more freely across borders. Countries haven’t disappeared as a result; but their powers tend to be modified to suit the borderlessness.

2011 is the year where we’re going to see this accelerate in new ways, as the implications of the copy-machine nature of the internet permeate every facet of our lives, including, but not limited to, government, business, health, education and welfare, rather than the traditional web-was-built-as-distribution-mechanism-for-films-music-and-advertisements hogwash. 2011 is the year we transform ourselves as we accelerate the move from things analog to things digital, as we continue the shifts from static to dynamic, from stabile to mobile, from on-premise to cloud, from individual to community….. and from international to global.

The un-national generation is here to stay. And they’re on the move.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Holidays or whatever else takes your fancy

Whatever it is, I hope you’re able to take some time off to relax, to refresh, to recharge yourself.

I’m going to try my best to be offline for a long while. So, in the holiday spirit, I wanted to share a few things with you very quickly.

First and foremost. Wolfgang’s Vault. I’ve been using the Vault for some years now, yet I don’t remember writing about it.The free streaming live music alone makes the site worthwhile; I’ve chosen to be a paid-up WVIP, and for a (shy? not really) retiring hippie like me, the vault is Fort Knox. There’s gold in them thar hills. Take today for example:

Visiting the site, I was greeted by new live videos of The Allmans/Whipping Post, The Band/King Harvest, Ten Years After/Love Like a Man, along with some fresh Zappa. How can you top that?

And all this, a few days after I’d received this book in the post, along with a bonus USB stick carrying some fabulous Airplane tracks. They’re going to be listened to on the way to Calcutta.

To me Wolfgang’s Vault is an extreme nonrival good. My enjoyment of the Vault is not diminished one jot or tittle by the act of my sharing news of its existence. Incidentally, the iPhone app is pretty good as well.

From music to books. I was at Waterstones yesterday, idly looking around, hoping to stock up on some analog reading matter for the journey. And I met Stephen Benatar, who’d set up a table and was selling his books there, largely self-published. What a nice man. We had a chat for a while, I landed up buying four of his books (the only ones he’d got on sale that day), and I like everything I’ve read so far. An interesting talent. I look forward to discovering more of his work.

From books to food. Have you read Alimentum? Fascinating journal, describes itself as “the literature of food”. Read two issues so far, very good.

And finally to an old friend, one I haven’t seen for a while. I will have to correct that.

Hugh MacLeod. Hugh’s usually in good form, often in fine form. Here’s his latest, on the high-end microaudience:

It’s not just tidings of great joy that Hugh writes/draws about, he has this uncanny ability to touch you where you’re still able to feel something. So if you haven’t discovered Hugh yet, now’s the time.

But in the meantime.

Tidings of great joy to all of you.

gently musing about keeping secrets and trust and privacy

There I was, quietly reading last week’s Economist, and I came across this article on UK telephone calling habits, drawing from MIT’s Senseable City Lab research on the subject.

Its core finding? Calling habits tend to reflect cultural/political boundaries.

While I’d been aware of the study, I hadn’t seen this particular representation of the data. And it reminded me of something else I’d read about, and written about, a few years ago. There was a paper titled Understanding Individual Human Mobility Patterns, by Gonzalez, Hidalgo and Barabasi (yes, he of Linked and Bursts fame).

Its core finding? People were creatures of habit when it came to making mobile phone calls. Often from the same place, at the same time, to the same people, for the same duration.

A little while later, a bbc.co.uk headline caught my eye. Facebook connections map the world.

Apparently an intern had been working at Facebook, trying to map friendship pairs relative to cities of residence. The core finding? The friend graph network looked a lot like the political map of the world, with a few glaring exceptions.

When it comes to communications, we’re as predictable as can be. We’re creatures of habit. We tend to speak to the same people. Many of these people have similar cultural, geographical or political backgrounds to us.

That’s enough, I hear you say, mumbling scatological questions about ursines in forested areas. Which is all fine, but given recent events to do with secrets and leaks, I felt it was worth making a few points here:

  • 1. If you really want to keep something completely secret, don’t tell anyone.
  • 2. If you do want to (or sometimes even have to) tell someone, then only tell people you trust.
  • 3. Which means that if you do want to keep a secret online, you must have a way of making sure that all the people you’re telling are people you trust.
  • 4. Which in turn means that you have to have a way of figuring out who those people are and whether you trust them or not.
  • 5. The more people you tell, the harder it will be to make sure of these things.

Or, as Bruce Schneier so elegantly put it, access control is hard. [If you haven’t done so already, read his article on Real-World Access Control from just over a year ago.]

Trust is a key component of secrets, and for that matter a critical component of privacy as well. When my daughter friends me on Facebook, she trusts me not to delve into her wall and posts and conversations and photographs. She trusts me to respect her privacy. Even though she gives me the right to invade it.

This is nothing new. There are drawers in my bedroom I don’t open, they’re my wife’s things. There are drawers in our children’s rooms that we don’t open, they’re their things.  And they’re private. If a guest should sleep in one of our bedrooms, we don’t expect that guest to be looking into cupboards and drawers.

Respecting privacy is common courtesy amongst friends. We trust each other.

When you trust someone with a secret, you give that person the right to betray you. Trust, like faith, grows only when exercised.

The very concept of bankruptcy comes from a breach of trust, and the consequences of breaching trust. The word bank itself comes from the word banco, meaning bench. Lombardy merchants, the early bankers, gathered together and transacted business while seated on benches. Your word was your bond. You were trusted. And if you breached that trust, they sent the heavy mob after you. Who dumped you unceremoniously off the bench, then, just to make sure you understood what had happened, they broke the bench in half, for good measure. So the banco was rutto. Bankrupt.

Privacy and confidentiality and secrecy have always been about trust.

And yet trust is about one other thing.

Transparency.

Bilateral transparency. Multilateral transparency. And sometimes universal transparency.

We have to be careful. Some of the events that have happened, they happened because of poor design (too many people trusted) poor implementation (too many things to be kept secret) and poor behaviour (too many indiscreet actions).

The events did not happen because trust broke down; the events did not happen because transparency is wrong. Trust models will continue to emerge, will continue to evolve, and we will continue to learn about how to scale them.

We have to be careful. Because there will be a backlash against trust-based models, there will be a backlash against transparency. If we don’t do anything, there will be a reversion to the evils of “lobbying” and “briefing”, behaviours designed to break trust down even further. You know the types, they exist in every government, every firm, every department of any scale. Whispering behind the scenes. Wielding the power of corruption. The corruption of power.

And this world will be poorer as a result.

Sea of Joy

….waiting in our boats to set sail/ Sea of Joy

Steve Winwood, Sea of Joy. Blind Faith, Blind Faith, August 1969

Steve Winwood. One of my all-time favourite musicians. Someone whom I heard for the first time in the early Seventies, someone whom I’ve been an ardent fan of ever since. Even went to a pub in Gloucestershire decades ago because I was told he drank there, just to see him in the flesh. He wasn’t touring then. He has, since, resumed touring, and I’ve been fortunate enough to see him maybe half a dozen times since. I was able to see him “live” twice this year, and I shall be doing so again next May. In fact, I took the photograph above while watching him play with Eric Clapton at Wembley Arena earlier this year. But that’s not what this post is about. [Even if I did enjoy being able to link to the concert using setlist.fm; what a lovely service!].

Sea of Joy. One of my all-time favourite songs, taken from one of my all-time favourite albums, Blind Faith by Blind Faith. A song dating back to times when working out the meanings of song lyrics was a hard thing to do…..”Once the door swings open into space, and I’m already waiting in disguise”……There was a time when I used to try, until I heard what might have been an apocryphal tale about the Doors and Mr Mojo Risin’. Erudite people had written erudite essays about what Jim Morrison may have meant in his repeated use of the phrase “Mr Mojo Risin” in a number of Doors songs. Extremely erudite essays about the meaning and role of mojo at the time, in terms of hoodoo and voodoo symbolism and representations of power and sex-appeal. And it is possible that Jim Morrison may have been influenced by all that when he chose to use the phrase as a motet. But. But then I heard the story of a little old lady who wrote in to some magazine some years after Morrison’s death, wondering what all the fuss was about. She said that the Morrisons used to live next door to them when little Jim was growing up. And Jim used to come and play in their yard. And her husband made up the phrase Mr Mojo Risin’ to describe the young James Douglas Morrison, who would have been 67 last week if he hadn’t died so tragically in 1971. Her husband liked crosswords and suchlike. And Mr Mojo Risin’ is a perfect anagram of … Jim Morrison. As I said, the tale is apocryphal. I don’t have a shred of evidence to back the story. And yet I believe it.

But that’s not what this post is about either.

This post is about a sea of joy. Maybe even an ocean of joy. Oceans of joy.

The internet.

I know, I know, comparisons can often be odious. And while pictures paint thousands of words, they come with frames. And anchors. Which can constrain imagination.

Nevertheless.

I’ve always imagined the internet to be a whole heap of rivers, feeding many seas, feeding one large ocean. Living, breathing, moving. A giant organism which is more than just a space. Containing water, that wondrous substance that helps keep us alive. A place where people swim and frolic, laugh and play. An environment of magic, of depth, of beauty we’re still discovering. A place full of life in all its brilliance. A repository of rich resource we can mine and use, sensibly and sustainably. And yet a place where danger lurks, where death too can be found. With pirates. And with pollution.

Despite all that, a sea of joy.

Which is partly why I’ve found recent discussions about Wikileaks intriguing to say the least. For some time now I’ve been talking about having to “design for loss of control”, referred to here and here, here and at the TED Salon here.

Humour me for a moment or two.

Imagine it’s raining outside. [For some strange reason I find this very easy to do. Perhaps it’s because of where I choose to live.] Imagine you go for a walk around your house, with a beaker in your hand, collecting rainwater, getting absolutely drenched in the process. [For an even stranger reason I’ve done this, as part of a school Physics question set by Resnick and Halliday, in 1974….I remember the question as “Drops are falling steadily in a perpendicular rain. You need to get from A to B in this rain. In order to encounter the least number of raindrops in your journey, would you (a) travel at your fastest speed (b) travel at your slowest speed or (c) travel at some intermediate speed you determine? Explain your answer.“]

Anyway, where was I? More importantly, where were you? Oh yes, I had you out collecting rainwater. Imagine you have a beaker full of rainwater. Imagine you take that beaker of rainwater and pour it into a nearby brook, which feeds a river, which empties out into a sea and forms part of the oceans.

For the sake of argument, let’s leave aside the philosophical question of whether you “own” the rainwater you collected. Imagine just trying to find that rainwater in the ocean, something you’re going to have to do if, for some reason, you’re keen on staking a claim to your rainwater.

Hmmm.

The sea is designed to be plentiful, abundant. Quite different from lakes and ponds, which are contained and isolated, controllable. And often stagnant. [No, I’m not going to enter into angels-dancing-on-pins arguments about the Caspian Sea or for that matter the Dead Sea here].

Making things that are abundant by design somehow appear scarce is not an easy task. As I’ve said before, and said many times before, every artificial scarcity will be met by an equal and opposite artificial abundance; over time, the artificial abundance will win. Region coding of DVDs and music DRM are simple examples of the principle.

So it is with the internet. When you make something digital, you have something that is cheap to copy. When you connect that digital something to the internet, you have something that is cheap to distribute far and wide. That is why Kevin Kelly called the internet a “copy machine” in his seminal essay, Better Than Free, from which the illustration below is taken. If you haven’t read it yet, stop here and follow the link. It’s a must-read.

So now the internet exists, does it mean no one can keep a secret any more? No. It’s just like in the good old days before the internet: if you want to keep something secret, try not telling anyone.

The internet is designed to share.

There are many things that people don’t want to share, for a variety of good reasons: personally identifiable information; commercially sensitive information; and information demonstrably pertaining to national or international security. Sometimes it’s because the information is held asymmetrically and misused; in polite society we would call this “blackmail”, and in the civilised world this is illegal. Sometimes it’s because the information is considered “private”, and a right to privacy is seen to exist, a right not to be embarrassed because something you said in private somehow makes its way into the public domain. Which is why the recent spate of leaks has caused such consternation. Contrast this with Eliot Spitzer and the Wall Street firms he went after, the whistleblower/leak aspect of all that happened, and the difference in reaction then. Contrast this with Talking-To-Journalists 101, which says Nothing Is Ever Off The Record. In England, thirty years ago, when I was given rudimentary media training, I was told “always imagine that anything you say, everything you say, could be on the first page of the Mail tomorrow”.

Bruce Schneier, an erstwhile colleague and someone whose writings and sayings I pay attention to, wrote a wonderful little piece on the subject, making five simple points:

  • Encryption is not the issue
  • Secrets are only as secure as the least trusted person who knows them
  • Access control is hard
  • This has little to do with Wikileaks
  • Governments will have to learn what the music and film industries have been forced to learn already, that it’s easy to copy and publish digital files

You should read the whole essay, which I’ve linked to here. Bruce is brilliant, terse and trenchant as ever.

Clay Shirky, another writer I have a lot of time for, writes a very balanced piece here, about the importance of the legal process in all this. Any medium of communication, any method of publishing and propagating, needs to have its principles and guidelines, and over time, its laws and its regulations. Of particular importance is the following paragraph from his post:

The key, though, is that democracies have a process for creating such restrictions, and as a citizen it sickens me to see the U.S. trying to take shortcuts. The leaders of Myanmar and Belarus, or Thailand and Russia, can now rightly say to us, “You went after WikiLeaks’ domain name, their hosting provider, and even denied your citizens the ability to register protest through donations, all without a warrant and all targeting overseas entities, simply because you decided you don’t like the site. If that’s the way governments get to behave, we can live with that.”

Due democratic process is always important; it is doubly important when we’re dealing with an emergent, valuable phenomenon. Such as the internet and all things digital.  Which is why I was so concerned with the apparently trivial all-downloaders-are-thieves approach that Mandelson et al sought to steamroller through via the Digital Economy Act. Which is why I remain concerned now. [Incidentally, I’m delighted that BT was part of the lobby that fought for, and won, a judicial review into the DE Act].

Not that I have anything against secrets per se.

Secrets are important, and there is a place for secrets. There are ways of keeping secrets secret.

Sharing is also important. And there is a place for sharing. It’s called the internet.

And it is really important that there continue to be ways of keeping shared things shared.

Which is why I appreciate the tireless work of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society in all this; John Palfrey, and, more recently, Urs Gasser, do a great job there. Which is why I look up to people like Charlie Nesson and Jonathan Zittrain and Larry Lessig as they strive to make sure that the law cannot be confused with genus Equus subgenus Asinus, and that due democratic process is followed when new laws are constructed. Which is why I appreciate the time that people like Doc Searls and Cory Doctorow spend on this. Which is why I appreciate the work of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; of the Open Rights Group; of Creative Commons; of the Web Science Trust, particularly for their work on open data. People in all these places have somehow found the time and the motivation to devote to this cause. I am privileged to count many of them amongst my friends, too many to list here. You know who you are. Thank you.

You see, it’s not really about Wikileaks. Artificial scarcities will continue to be met by artificial abundances. There will be many more Wikileaks. In many places. At the same time. And some of them will be very damaging. Which is not a good thing. But. There is a right way to stop it. It’s called the democratic process.

The internet is about sharing. It’s about making it easier to copy things and to move them around, to publish at scale. It’s about making it easier for Linus’s Law: Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. It’s about the power of democratised access. Access to publishing. Access to editing, to changing. Access to reading. Access to community skills and talent.

The internet makes it possible for us to do things we could never do before, like the World Wide Web itself. Like Wikipedia. Like Craigslist. Like being able to listen to “A symposium on Wikileaks and Internet Freedom” live yesterday at the Personal Democracy Forum, as thousands of us were able to do yesterday.

The internet is capable of transforming lives at the edge, making radical impacts on education, on healthcare, even on government. Of course the internet is dependent on all of us having ubiquitous affordable connectivity, something I continue to be optimistic about. It will happen. Perhaps not in the way we thought it would. But it will happen. And there won’t be a digital divide. Because that too would be an artificial scarcity….

Steve Winwood, when he penned Sea of Joy, also had these words to say in the song:

Having trouble coming through,
Through this concrete, blocks my view
And it’s all because of you.

All because of you. The “you” in that phrase is us. We have a responsibility to future generations that the internet is governed the right way, that the right laws are formulated and promulgated, that the right process is followed.

Because there are generations to come….

Waiting in their boats to set sail, Sea of Joy.

A sideways look at cognitive surpluses and knowledge “management”

Doc Searls used to keep reminding me of something he attributed to Don Marti: Information doesn’t want to be be free, it wants to be $5.99. Incidentally, talking about Doc Searls, here’s a bonus for Cluetrain devotees: the first time all four original Cluetrainers were together in one place, at Defrag in Denver last week.

Where was I? Oh yes, information doesn’t want to be free. You know something, sometimes I feel the same about knowledge. It doesn’t want to be free. As Paula Thornton said some years ago, maybe knowledge doesn’t want to be managed either.

Ever since I read Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus earlier this year, I’ve been thinking about the book’s implications for “knowledge management” in the enterprise. Which is why I wrote what I did yesterday, and planned to follow up today. Which is what I’m doing here.

Let’s start with knowledge. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to define knowledge in the enterprise as “information about anything and everything that makes our customers’ lives easier; as a corollary, information about anything and everything that helps us make our customers’ lives easier”. I feel that such a definition is in keeping with the ethos of Peter Drucker’s immortal saying “People make shoes. Not money“. If we make our customers’ lives easier, they will thank us for it. With their attention, their time, their loyalty, and even their money.

Using this definition, the management of knowledge can be defined as “the process by which we create, collect and share information that makes our customers’ lives easier”.

So who should be involved in such a process? Who would know the most about what would make our customers’ lives easier?

Our customers.

If you accept that logic, then the customer should be at the heart of any knowledge management system.

Who else? People who deal with the customer. Those who “touch” the customer. Followed by people who know something about the products or services those customers want or sometimes even need. Followed by people who know something about the process by which the products or services get created, delivered and exchanged for value.

Which means pretty much everybody in the enterprise. The extended enterprise. All the way to the customer.

Okay, so that’s the what and the who of knowledge management. Let’s take a look at the how.

One way of defining the how is to look at the things that failed in the past.

  • The right people weren’t involved.
  • Access and edit permissions were hierarchical rather than networked, preserving “expertise”
  • Information was inaccurate; without scale, the costs to correct were too high.
  • Information was missing: only text could be captured, image and sound were missing.
  • Information was out of date; production, reproduction and distribution costs were prohibitive, reviews were infrequent.
  • Information was inaccessible. Analogue, poorly indexed, and hard to copy.

Today, all these failures can be dealt with. Scale is not an issue for companies designed to make proper use of the internet. Network-based architectures are inherently more flexible than their hierarchical predecessors: role- and function- based permissioning is simpler to implement. Smartphones allow us to capture all types of media, not just text. Connectivity is pretty much ubiquitous. And the information is held digitally in the cloud, taggable, searchable, retrievable. From anywhere. Anytime.

Taking a leaf out of Clay’s book:

We have the means. Cloud computing infrastructures. Smart phones. Cloud services that allow people to converse with each other, share and annotate digital objects, improve upon them.

We have the motives. Human beings are inherently social, we like sharing. We enjoy the bonding, the peer respect, the recognition. No man is an iland, intire of it selfe.

We just haven’t had the opportunity before. Enlightened bosses are now providing that opportunity, by focusing on outcomes rather than input timesheets, allowing their staff to determine what happens with their cognitive surpluses.

Knowledge workers, part of the tertiary sector, are intrinsically different from those employed in the historical primary and secondary sectors of agriculture and manufacturing. Their work is lumpy, amorphous, misshapen, non-linear.

This is not a new problem. Many “professionals” faced real challenges of scheduling and prioritisation, and found it impossible to have true predictability in workflow. Ask a doctor. A nurse. A teacher. A policeman or fireman. Their lives have been about lumpiness and unpredictability and non-linearity.

But we were stuck in the manufacturing mindset, so we pretended these anomalies didn’t exist. And we designed our education and healthcare institutions as if they were industrial in origin. Look what they’ve done to my song, ma.

Today is another day. We now have means, motive and opportunity. All we have to do is to allow people to make use of their cognitive surpluses. Focus on outcomes rather than inputs. And make everything we do centre on the customer.

[Okay, after a period of quiet I’ve now written two posts in two days. Which means the risk of getting flamed is high. I await your comments. With some trepidation. ]