Stories

Category: Quotes

  • Relishing change

    Relishing change

    Jack Welch in General Electric’s Annual Report, nearly two decades ago:

    We’ve long believed that when the rate of change inside an institution becomes slower than the rate of change outside, the end is in sight.

    The only question is when.

    Learning to love change is an unnatural act in any century-old institution, but today we have a Company that does just that: sees change always as a source of excitement, always as opportunity, rather than as threat or crisis.

    We’re no better prophets than anyone else, and we have difficulty predicting the exact course of change.

    But we don’t have to predict it.

    What we have to do is simply jump all over it!

    Source: Welch, J., 2000. General Electric Annual Report 2000 (Annual Report). General Electric, Fairfield, Connecticut, USA.

  • Skunk Works: 14 rules to live and die by

    Skunk Works: 14 rules to live and die by

    Lockheed’s Skunk Works may be one of the earliest models for sustaining innovation inside an organization – never mind the nefarious mission of making flying machines to kill people. These are the basic operations rules enunciated by founder Kelly Johnson in 1954, as cited in his successor Ben Rich’s book:

    1. The Skunk Works program manager must be delegated practically complete control of his program in all aspects. He should have the authority to make quick decisions regarding technical, financial, or operational matters.
    2. Strong but small project offices must be provided both by the military and the industry.
    3. The number of people having any connection with the project must be restricted in an almost vicious manner. Use a small number of good people.
    4. Very simple drawing and drawing release system with great flexibility for making changes must be provided in order to make schedule recovery in the face of failures.
    5. There must be a minimum number of reports required, but important work must be recorded thoroughly.
    6. There must be a monthly cost review covering not only what has been spent and committed but also projected costs to the conclusion of the program. Don’t have the books ninety days late and don’t surprise the customer with sudden overruns.
    7. The contractor must be delegated and must assume more than normal responsibility to get good vendor bids for subcontract on the project. Commercial bid procedures are often better than military ones
    8. The inspection system as currently used by the Skunk Works, which has been approved by both the Air Force and the Navy, meets the intent of existing military requirements and should be used on new projects. Push basic inspection responsibility back to the subcontractors and vendors. Don’t duplicate so much inspection.
    9. The contractor must be delegated the authority to test his final product in flight. He can and must test it in the initial stages.
    10. The specifications applying to the hardware must be agreed to in advance of contracting.
    11. Funding a program must be timely so that the contractor doesn’t have to keep running to the bank to support government projects.
    12. There must be absolute trust between the military project organization and the contractor with very close cooperation and liaison on a day-to-day basis. This cuts down misunderstanding and correspondence to an absolute minimum.
    13. Access by outsiders to the project and its personnel must be strictly controlled.
    14. Because only a few people will be used in engineering and most other areas, ways must be provided to reward good performance by pay not based on the number of personnel supervised.

    Source: Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos. Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed (1994). Kelly’s 14 Rules & Practices may also be found here.

    Photo: Skunk Works logo on Museum’s SR-71. Photo #2005-6014 by Dane Penland, Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

  • The idea of a university (updated)

    The idea of a university (updated)

    So I’m reading John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University, which begins by asserting that the university “is a place of teaching universal knowledge”. I’m fascinated by the historical context (Catholicism in Protestant England), by the strength and substance of the ideas, and by the narrative style of carefully-constructed arguments. I’m also struck, however, by the centrality of learning as transmission, the line of demarcation between invention and teaching, and the belief that it is possible to know by disconnecting from society (although I acknowledge that concentration and flow tend to require quiet, in a pragmatic sense):

    To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person. […] He, too, who spends his day in dispensing his existing knowledge to all comers is unlikely to have either leisure or energy to acquire new. The common sense of mankind has associated the search after truth with seclusion and quiet. […] It must be allowed on the whole that, while teaching involves external engagements, the natural home for experiment and speculation is retirement.

    If all three of these characteristics of institutionalized knowledge creation and production no longer align with the demands of the world we live in, what needs to change and how likely is the change to occur within organizations founded on very different ideas and assumptions?

    Newman’s Idea is also crystal-clear with respect to the relationship between the university and the corporation (in his context, the Catholic Church):

    Just as a commander wishes to have tall and well-formed and vigorous soldiers, not from any abstract devotion to the military standard of height or age, but for the purposes of war, and no one thinks it any thing but natural and praiseworthy in him to be contemplating, not abstract qualities, but his own living and breathing men; so, in like manner, when the Church founds a University, she is not cherishing talent, genius, or knowledge, for their own sake, but for the sake of her children.

    Through the lens of organizational learning and the need for mission-driven organizations in a knowledge economy to invest in their people, this rationale stands, in my opinion.

    Photo: Aerial view of Finney Chapel, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, United States (oberlin.edu)

  • MOOCs for teachers, then and now

    MOOCs for teachers, then and now

    In February, Daniel Seaton and his colleagues shared data about the very high level of teacher participation (28% identified as past or present teachers) and engagement (over four times more active in discussion forums than non-teachers) in a series of MITx MOOCs.  Very interesting article when thinking of teachers as multipliers, mediators and facilitators of learning (and not just transmitters). Unlike earlier MOOC research that has been criticized for being ahistorical, Seaton shares the following example of pre-MOOC massive, open online education:

    One of the earliest precursors to modern MOOCs targeted high school teachers in the United States. In 1958, a post-war interpretation of introductory physics called “Atomic-Age Physics” debuted at 6:30 a.m. on the National Broadcasting Company’s (NBC) Continental Classroom. Daily viewership was estimated at roughly 250,000 people, and over 300 institutions partnered to offer varying levels of accreditation for the course. Roughly 5,000 participants were certified in the first year. Teachers were estimated to be 1 in 8 of all certificate earners,  indicating reach beyond the target demographic of high school teachers. Through its expansion of courses between 1958 and 1963, the Continental Classroom represented a bold approach in using technology to address national needs in education reform. In contrast, the current MOOC era has largely focused on student-centric issues like democratizing access.

    Source: Seaton, D.T., Coleman, C., Daries, J., Chuang, I., 2015. Enrollment in MITx MOOCs: Are We Educating Educators? EduCause Review.

    Ho, A.D., Chuang, I., Reich, J., Coleman, C.A., Whitehill, J., Northcutt, C.G., Williams, J.J., Hansen, J.D., Lopez, G., Petersen, R., 2015. HarvardX and MITx: Two Years of Open Online Courses Fall 2012-Summer 2014. Social Science Research Network Working Paper Series.

    Photo: Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab (1950-1951) (ORAU.com)

  • Blame it on Plato

    Blame it on Plato

    Even as computer-mediated communication is now embedded into nearly every aspect of life, the sentiment persists that written and therefore distance communication is intrinsically inferior. Here is the very interesting introduction from Andrew Feenberg’s classic article – written in the late 1980s – calling into question the presumption of superiority in the face-to-face encounter:

    In our culture the face-to-face encounter is the ideal paradigm of the meeting of minds. Communication seems most complete and successful where the person is physically present ‘in’ the message. This physical presence is supposed to be the guarantor of authenticity: you can look your interlocutor in the eye and search for tacit signs of truthfulness or falsehood, where context and tone permit a subtler interpretation of the spoken word.

    Plato initiated our traditional negative view of the written word. He argued that writing was no more than an imitation of speech, while speech itself was an imitation of thought. Thus writing would be an imitation of an imitation and low indeed in the Platonic hierarchy of being, based on the superiority of the original over the copy. For Plato, writing detaches the message from its author and transforms it into a dead thing, a text.

    Such a text, however, can cross time (written records) and space (mail), acquire objectivity and permanence, even while losing authenticity (Derrida, 1972a). That we still share Plato’s thinking about writing can be shown in how differently we respond to face-to-face, written, typed and printed forms of communication. These form a continuum, ranging from the most personal to the most public.

    Feenberg, A. The written world: On the theory and practice of computer conferencing. Mindweave: Communication, computers, and distance education 22–39 (1989).

    Photo: Marble statue of  the ancient greek philosopher Plato (Source: alienaxioms.com)

  • What is a wicked problem?

    What is a wicked problem?

    In 1973, Horst W.J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber, two Berkeley professors, published an article in Policy Sciences introducing the notion of “wicked” social problems. The article, “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” named 10 properties that distinguished wicked problems from hard but ordinary problems.

    1. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem. It’s not possible to write a well-defined statement of the problem, as can be done with an ordinary problem.
    2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule. You can tell when you’ve reached a solution with an ordinary problem. With a wicked problem, the search for solutions never stops.
    3. Solutions to wicked problems are not true or false, but good or bad. Ordinary problems have solutions that can be objectively evaluated as right or wrong. Choosing a solution to a wicked problem is largely a matter of judgment.
    4. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem. It’s possible to determine right away if a solution to an ordinary problem is working. But solutions to wicked problems generate unexpected consequences over time, making it difficult to measure their effectiveness.
    5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot” operation; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial and error, every attempt counts significantly. Solutions to ordinary problems can be easily tried and abandoned. With wicked problems, every implemented solution has consequences that cannot be undone.
    6. Wicked problems do not have an exhaustively describable set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan. Ordinary problems come with a limited set of potential solutions, by contrast.
    7. Every wicked problem is essentially unique. An ordinary problem belongs to a class of similar problems that are all solved in the same way. A wicked problem is substantially without precedent; experience does not help you address it.
    8. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem. While an ordinary problem is self-contained, a wicked problem is entwined with other problems. However, those problems don’t have one root cause.
    9. The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways.A wicked problem involves many stakeholders, who all will have different ideas about what the problem really is and what its causes are.
    10. The planner has no right to be wrong. Problem solvers dealing with a wicked issue are held liable for the consequences of any actions they take, because those actions will have such a large impact and are hard to justify.

    Source: Cited in HBR’s Strategy as a wicked problem (also worth a read). Rittel’s and Webber’s original paper can be found online. Photo credit: Wicked signs (Aukje Dekker/Flickr).

  • Soufrière

    Soufrière

    “What I like,” whispered my dinner companion, “is that these publishing types have survived the fire of digital transformation, emerging out of the boiling pits of disruption, and all of that. Some were dismembered before, during, and after – acquired and merged, sold and resold. All paid a terrible price, but bear their bruises and scars proudly. They are not only smart but also scrappy, battle-seasoned veterans whose eyes still gleam with the thick knowledge that they produce. The culture (and, yes, the economy) that sustains their work is very much alive, circulating in networks that don’t care whether they are made of silicon or white matter. Blood, sweat and tears, man! And, yes, most if not all are showing a profit!” And then, like a drop of sulfuric acid on the rusty metal plate separating ‘education’ from ‘publishing’ in our fragmented knowledge universe: “Beats babbling on about 70-20-10, eh?” Indeed.

    Photo: Climbing La Soufrière in Saint Vincent (Ian Usher/Flickr).

  • Practice practice practice

    Practice practice practice

    Is there any evidence that university-based continued professional development (CPD) fails when trying to develop competencies needed by humanitarian and development professionals? Or, to reframe the question, are traditional brick-and-mortar universities best equipped to support the lifelong learning journeys of people committed to this line of work? Then again, how could an industry that seldom evaluates its own effectiveness (relying instead on accreditation as a proxy) demand that universities be accountable for quality of learning outcomes?

    “Online delivery of education is also expanding rapidly to meet the career-specific education and training needs of adult populations. While such educational opportunities, including many at the sub-degree or certificate level, are increasingly important for social advancement and economic development, they are often not effectively accommodated within traditional higher education governance, financing and quality control mechanisms.”

    Source: Tremblay, K., Lalancette, D., Roseveare, D., 2012. Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes feasibility study report  volume 1-design and implementation. OECD, Paris, France

  • Thick knowledge

    Thick knowledge

    Toby Mundy on books as thick knowledge:

    “[…] Books have a unique place in our civilisation […] because they are the only medium for thick descriptions of the world that human beings possess. By ‘thick’ description, I mean an extended, detailed, evidence-based, written interpretation of a subject. If you want to write a feature or blog or wikipedia entry, be it about the origins of the first world war; the authoritarian turn in Russia; or the causes and effects of the 2008 financial crisis, in the end you will have to refer to a book. Or at least refer to other people who have referred to books. Even the best magazine pieces and TV documentaries — and the best of these are very good indeed — are only puddle-deep compared with the thick descriptions laid out in books. They are ‘thin’ descriptions and the creators and authors of them will have referred extensively to books to produce their work.”

    I’ve found myself going back to searching for well-written, comprehensive, in-depth books for sourcing both foundational and most-current knowledge. This notion of ‘thick knowledge’ makes a lot of sense.

    Photo: Rainbow (Katey/flickr).

  • Seven months

    Seven months

    Alan Todd, Founder and CEO, Corp U:

    Today’s workplace culture is evolving at a break-neck pace as technological advances, shifting demographics, and new economic realities force corporations to reorganize, on average, every seven months. The challenge is real. Fortunately, so are the solutions.

    Source: The Science of Learning: How to Develop Mindsets for Success in the Workplace

    Photo: My baby at seven months, on a beach in Soulac, France. August 2012. Personal collection.