Category: Four pillars

Today’s Evening Standard informs me:

Windfarm owners in the country are used to facing legal challenges and complaints from nearby residents, who claim the ranks of vast windmills are an eyesore. But in Germany — Europe’s biggest user of windpower — it is the windfarms that are suing each other.

At the heart of the complaints is a bizarre but serious question: who owns the wind?

A court in Leipzig is currently hearing a case involving a dispute between two operators. One, whose farm is up and running already, is protesting that a planned bigger windfarm nearby will create a slipstream, decreasing the speed of the airflow to its own windmills.

The unwanted neighbour will, claims the complainant, hit the productivity — and the profits — of the original farm.

If you want to read the whole story, you can find it here, thankfully not behind a paywall. [You do have to register, though].

Intriguing. We have “ancient lights”, an archaic property law in the UK that protects the level of sunlight received by a window; we have riparian water rights as well as prior appropriation water rights, that protect the flow of water; now we have questions of wind ownership and wind rights.

What these three things have in common is something to do with the right to enjoy something that forms part of the commons, the right to protect a level of access to commons that existed beforehand. So if the internet was originally perceived as a commons, then…..

I wonder.

Does anyone out there know anything about the various statements purporting to be Ehrlich’s Law? I was researching a German scientist named Ehrlich when I came across this in Wikipedia:

Ehrlich’s Law:  “People pay way too much attention to things that are easily quantified.”

Seemed a perfectly reasonable thing to say, very John Allen Paulos. So I tried to look into it. Wikipedia drew a blank. Answers.com did the same. So I googled it and found that Ehrlich the quote-writer was a busy person indeed. There wasn’t just one Ehrlich’s Law, there was a litter of them. Included in that litter were:

• The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.
• It is a mistake to allow any mechanical object to realize that you are in a hurry.

Many Ehrlichs. Many quotations. No hard facts. Any ideas out there?

Another quote from Abraham Flexner’s “The Usefulness of Useful Knowledge“, the kernel for my earlier post today:

….Thus it becomes obvious that one must be wary in attributing scientific discovery wholly to any one person. Almost every discovery has a long and precarious history. Someone finds a bit here, another a bit there. A third step succeeds later and thus onward till a genius pieces the bits together and makes the decisive contribution.

Science, like the Mississippi, begins in a tiny rivulet in the distant forest. Gradually other streams swell its volume. And the roaring river that bursts the dikes is formed from countless sources.

Sounds a bit like Doc’s snowballs, doesn’t it? And not a patent in sight.

I guess quite a few of you will already have read Abraham Flexner’s essay “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge“. Flexner was the founding Director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and originally wrote the essay as a memo for thr General Education Board; he later used it as the basis for an address published in Harper’s Magazine in October 1939. If you are interested, you can use the links provided to request a full-text version of the article. [I was lucky enough to find an original, which I refer to below].

Flexner was seen as quite a radical educator, and his comments make interesting reading. Some quotes:

I am not for a moment suggesting that everything that goes on in laboratories will ultimately turn to some unexpected practical use or that an ultimate practical use is its actual justification. Much more am I pleading for the abolition of the word “use”, and for the freeing of the human spirit. To be sure, we shall thus free some harmless cranks. To be sure, we shall thus waste some precious dollars. But what is infinitely more important is that we shall be striking the shackles off the human mind and setting it free for the adventures which in our own day have, on the one hand, taken Hale and Rutherford and Einstein and their peers millions upon millions of miles into the uttermost realms of space and, on the other, loosed the boundless energy imprisoned in the atom. What Rutherford and others like Bohr and Millikan have done out of sheer curiosity in the effort to understand the construction of the atom has released forces which may transform human life; but this ultimate and unforseen and unpredictable practical result is not offered as a justification for Rutherford or Einstein or Millikan or Bohr or any of their peers. Let them alone. No educational administrator can possibly direct the channels in which these or other men shall work. It is not really so. All the waste that could be summed up in developing the science of bacteriology is as nothing compared to the advantages which have accrued from the discoveries of Pasteur, Koch, Ehrlich,  Theobald Smith, and scores of others — advantages that could never have accrued if the idea of possible use had permeated their minds.

I love that last line. “….could never have been accrued if the idea of possible use had permeated their minds.”

I think it was Wernher von Braun who said “Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing”.  Many years later, Howard Schneiderman, who for many years ran R&D at Monsanto, said something along these lines:

When you turn down a request for funding an R&D project, you are right 90% of the time. That’s a far higher rate of decision accuracy than you get anywhere else, so you do it.

And that’s fine. Except for the 10% of the time you’re wrong. When you’re wrong, you lose the company.

I think there’s a thread through all this, a thread that links stuff like this to Polanyi’s Tacit Knowledge, continues through Gladwell’s Blink, even shows up in the various types of skunkworks extant in creative environments. Michael Schrage, in Serious Play, seems to take a similar view. And that view is this:

When we’re just messing around, much of the time we’re not really messing around; what we’re doing is releasing stuff we “know” but can’t articulate or express. This stuff is of real value. And there’s more. When we mess around, we also do away with some of the masks and anchors and frames that constrain our thinking, and as a result we can gain new insights.

That’s why I like blogging. The freewheeling, the musing, the messing around. The learning that takes place as a result. The provisional nature of the conversation. How people comment and take me on new journeys I would otherwise not have taken, a personal StumbleUpon.

Recently I wrote about meeting Doug Engelbart for the first time, courtesy of a dinner invite from Tom Malone. Before dinner, I had the opportunity to hear Doug speak at a Center for Collective Intelligence seminar at MIT. As you would expect, he covered a lot of ground very quickly, and I won’t attempt to document all of it here.

One particular thread, however, intrigued me so much I feel driven to share it here, to see what people think. The quotes are as close to verbatim as I could make them; apologies for any inaccuracies or misrepresentations:

Tackling a large-scale problem requires a strategic rather than a tactical approach. The paradigms that shape our individual and collective perceptions of big problems, and of their possible solutions, they tend to evolve much more slowly than the problems themselves, due to the inherent complexities of the big problems. [….]Far too many of the possible improvement steps will change the design environment for other improvement candidates. So we have to depend on an evolutionary process. We can learn to facilitate and accelerate that process.

What struck me about that line of thought was its potential applicability in aiding root cause analysis of complex systems problems. More and more, systems environments are growing more and more complex, as wave upon wave of device descend on our network shores; boundaries of the enterprise keep getting stretched, both in the supply chain as well as in the customer chain; the impacts of globalisation and disintermediation, of offshore and outsource, continue to be felt.

While all this has been happening, there have been a few other shifts as well. Each enterprise has tended to become multivendor in itself, with a greater number of hybrid environments; if anything, this has been accelerated by the opensource movement. Then, as telephony becomes software, there is also a  movement of intelligence from the core to the edge of the network, and this tends to aid customer-to-customer interaction at that edge. As a result, looking at any given large enterprise, we tend to see the following characteristics:

• Sharp increases in device population and proliferation
• Steady creeping-out of the enterprise boundary
• An increase in hybrid environments
• Significant extensions to supply and customer chains
• Greater and more complex electronic relationships
• All happening over a global footprint
• All happening 24 x 7

When something goes wrong, it isn’t always that trivial to work out the root cause. The more complex the problem, the more likely we are to apply some sort of serial process to solving it. And maybe that’s where collective intelligence should meet Agile. Where we use the power of well-established knowledge bases and tie it up to the experience of a large collective in order to focus on a problem, then use an accelerated evolutionary process to iterate through the possible solutions, taking care to avoid “changing the design environment for other improvement candidates”.

Initially, I used to think about Agile somewhat narrowly, keeping to the bounds of systems development. Over the years, I’ve come to realise that, more than anything else, Agile is a mindset and a business strategy. It is only more recently that I’ve come to consider Agile as a problem-solving tool and an aid to bug-fixing, but I wasn’t sure about that. Now, having heard what Doug had to say, I’m beginning to think there is something to it after all.

I’d love to hear your views, particularly from people who use a combination of agile methods and collective intelligence techniques to solve complex systems problems.

An aside: In a many-sided marketplace, is every participant a fractal representation of the marketplace itself? Sometimes when I look at a large enterprise, it seems to behave like an open software platform in its own right. Just a thought…. for some time now I’ve been intrigued by the fractal nature of organisation structures, and at the comic ways we use to try and de-fractalise them by PowerPoint and memorandum.