October 2011, Newsletter, Kiwi Scrum

Kiwi Scrum has 2589 members. That's an increase of 24 for the month. Welcome to the new members, and thanks to those who have invited people they know, to join this group.

This month's newsletter was inspired by Andrew Sims.

Who posted "The Case for Social Media in Business". Understanding how to use the Internet to power up your life, and your business opportunities, is what this month's newsletter is about. I'm not going to mention Facebook, and talking to your customers, and finding ways to push your message. Prof. Clay Shirky wrote a book called, "Here Comes Everybody". The sub-heading is, "How Change Happens When People Come Together". That's what you need to know about and to understand. There is much to learn: nobody can teach you about it. You have to learn personally by immersion, quietly gathering your own experience. How do you understand, "Occupy Wall Street"? How is that relevant to your business?

The October LinkedIn hint:

"Markets are Conversations" according to "The Cluetrain Manifesto". Regular users of LinkedIn should now be using the conversations in LinkedIn Groups, as part of their daily routine. Of course, you can't follow the discussion in 50 groups, but you should, read from at least one group a day, and try to contribute yourself to at least one discussion every week.

If you are not familiar with "The Cluetrain Manifesto" you should take the time to learn about it.

Professionalism

The key achievement for most young adults is to complete your training, to undertake some years of work as an apprentice or understudy, and to finally be accepted into your trade or profession as a full member. monkeys

You are trained to "see" with a certain professional understanding about how the world works and what "is" or "is not" a valid source of authority. We usually accept that these standards are ones that maintain high moral principles and demand the best conduct possible in the execution of daily professional practice. But, within our profession we tend to behave like the three monkeys. Professional bodies the world over are incapable of disciplining their own members. This is true in medicine, in science, and in the law, it's also true in accounting, building, drug manufacture, everywhere you care to look.

Our schooling serves us well, on one hand; but also makes us blind to the things that go on in our own field of work that we should be changing. A person can easily practise "blindness" to what's happening in plain sight, if his reputation and income would be threatened by the ability to "see".

The Useful Common:

My mail last week referred me to the film "Longitude" (250 minutes, in 21 parts on Youtube) . In 1707, the English fleet was wrecked on the rocks off the Scilly Isles, because they were 90 nautical miles away from the position Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell had plotted by dead reckoning. Over 2000 men were lost. The Longitude Prize of £20,000, was a reward offered by the British government for a simple and practical method for the precise determination of a ship's longitude. The prize, established through an Act of Parliament (the Longitude Act) in 1714, was administered by the Board of Longitude. (Wikipedia) The film exposes hundreds of examples of the best and brightest; scientists, politicians, ships captains and their officers, and the Admiral himself all exercising professional "blindness" in order to preserve the status quo. It tells the story of John Harrison, a carpenter, who became a self taught maker of timepieces. "Longitude" also tells the story of Rupert Gould, who rediscovered the original timepieces Harrison had built, and restored them to working order.

The Board of Longitude was abolished in 1828. It never awarded the Longitude Prize to anybody. The Board obstructed John Harrison, for many reasons that they considered professional, and based on good science. John harrison presented his first timepiece in 1735. He was paid £500 for a "minor achievement." He was supported financially by the clock maker, George Graham, who became a mentor. Harrison produced improved chronometers in 1739, in 1749, and in 1759. The third chronometer (1749) was awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society, with the generous support of George Graham, who died two years later. Winning the Longitude Prize had become Harrison's life's work. (33 years so far.) With this fourth chronometer, based on a new pocket-watch principle, Harrison met the requirements of the Longitude Prize in 1864, but the Board wasn't satisfied. After protest the Board paid half the prize, £10,000. Ten years later Parliament, acting on a request by King George III, passed a bill authorising a special payment of £8,750 to Harrison.

Captain James Cook took a copy of Harrison's chronometer on his second voyage (1772-1774). He was very pleased with it's performance, and continued to use it.

The big news on the useful common this week is the long overdue rebellion against corruption and the lack of democracy on the USA, that calls itself "Occupy Wall Street". Both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party are the Board of Longitude, each in their own way reinforcing their own political strength rather than acting in the best interests of the USA. This disgraceful behaviour has probably always existed, but in the last 40 years it's been extremely pronounced. I thought we'd see riots in the street during the administration of GW Bush.

From Johnnie Moore's Blog:
"Clay Shirky has offered these perceptive tweets about the Occupy Wall Street protests.
People complaining that #OWS don't have coherent demands haven't noticed that US response to the crisis isn't coherent either.
Groups of voters have incompatible goals, so working democracy doesn't produce coherent policies, but livable compromises.
#OWS doesn't win by proposing a better compromise. They win by subjecting the current one to disintegrating pressure.

Thomas Keneally's recent book, "Three Famines: Starvation and Politics", looks at Ireland, Bengal and Ethiopia, and makes the point that all famines have multiple causes, one of which is political obstruction. (Hear this interview with Kim Hill on Radio NZ National. 46 minutes) Famine doesn't occur where effective democratic government exists. Every famine has it's equivalent of the Board of Longitude, a political group, that for it's own reason's prevents the best use of existing food, and ensures the maldistribution of the aid that's offered.

Our New Knowledge

In my lifetime I've seen the source of information shift from only "official sources", which were supposed to accurate and trusted, to a diversity of sources, many of them new, like Wikipedia, Aljazeera and Wikileaks, which are supposed to be "unreliable". We've discovered that the official sources often operate like the Board of Longitude. They make profound statements designed to assure us that everything is good hands. We can now see with our own eyes that this is frequently not so.

Our old institutions are out of touch with the demands of the 21st Century. To change them we have to discover a real world that is consistent with our values, and write new constitutions and methods of supervision or control that work in today's context.

At first this is not good news. Much of what we know about the world is false, our beliefs have been fed by propaganda. While "Official sources" still suffer from the Board of Longitude problem, the quality of our information has improved, and better information tells us that a better world is both desirable, and possible. Occupy Wall Street, is demonstrating that optimistic belief in practise.

Innovation: In my research, I discovered in John Harrison a new hero for my study of innovation. Innovators are often trapped by following a course of early success that leads to a dead end. Very few individuals have the courage to recover from that. John Harrison worked for 23 years building his clockmaking skills and building the first three chronometers. He discovered in the process that his method was completely wrong, a dead end. Having the courage to realise that his life's work had been chasing down the wrong rabbit hole is the mark of a truly great man. Harrison understood that the solution was more likely to be found in building a chronometer based on a pocket watch, which was an idea borrowed from the work of George Graham and his apprentice Thomas Midge. (Midge was also trying to win the Longitude Prize.) In 1753 while still working on his third sea-clock, Harrison designed a pocket watch, and commissioned another apprentice of George Graham, John Jefferys to build it. (There were many people building inaccurate pocket watches by now.) The fourth chronometer Harrison built for the Board of Longitude, was based on improving that pocket watch design.

Official inquiries into disasters or mistakes often suffer from Board of Longitude sickness too. For instance the many inquiries into the conviction of Arthur Alan Thomas, were unable to resolve the contradictions in the case. However the best example I know of is the Presidential Commission charged with investigating the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, the Rogers Report.

When the Rogers Report was presented, Richard Feynman, one of fourteen members, insisted on writing a dissenting opinion. History seems to show that this view was closest to the truth.

"For a successful technology," Feynman concluded, "reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled."

Feynman later wrote about the investigation in his 1988 book "What Do You Care What Other People Think?". The second half of the book covers the investigation and the issues between science and politics. (Wikipedia)

Social Change: Social change is leading economic change. The example of the Arab Spring's peaceful occupations, have had a profound impact on the world. Because of the freedom of information and 24 hour news cycles, we can all witness the failure of many of the systems and institutions, we've carefully built and trusted for generations. From old political dictatorships, to countries with fraudulent "democratic systems", to FIFA, to Formula One, the IRB, and the Olympics, extending to institutions and professional bodies everywhere, the smell of the Board of Longitude is ever present. As the old certainties fade and crumble into chaos, and somehow a new order will need to be established. This is the work of the next twenty-five years. We are all involved in that now, like it or not. Failure is more probable than success, but we have to try. Business as usual is to fail too.

Engage with other people and Groups: The forces trying to maintain the status quo are strong. You need support. You need a strong personal base, good mentors and quality information. You'll come up against the equivalent of the Board of Longitude many times in your life. You have to fight with your own grounded information, proven in you own experience.

In such an engagement in the last week, I've become aware of proposals to explore the Canterbury Plain for natural gas. If suitable shale rock can be found, gas will be extracted by a process known as fracking (hydrological fracturing). The group I met think that this will endanger the ground water in Canterbury, one of the precious resources of the region. The Green Party are organising a petition against fracking that is now occurring in Taranaki. This is a classic case of prospective economic development clashing with the idea of environmental protection. The problem here is the assumption that everything that will drive up the GDP, is necessarily "good". If we can park that wrong idea, a more sensible evaluation of the project and the possible benefits v risks might be possible. There is a "No Fracking Canterbury" list here.

De-schooling yourself

We live in the hinge of history, and that presents great opportunity and enormous challenges. Will you be part of the solution or part of the resistance? Do you add value, or are you merely extracting value?

The world is deeply unjust. Our systems are both financially and environmentally unsustainable. Governments everywhere are committed to extracting excess value from the Earth today, while destroying soils, the ocean, water supplies and the climate. We do this knowingly, so we cannot claim to be innocent. The effect of this action is to reward our generation and to create poverty and hardship for our grandchildren. What do you call a system that does that? What do you call people who choose comfort for themselves, and knowingly inflict worst conditions of future generations? What name should I call myself?

However we resolve this problem, you and I are responsible for what we choose to do. The only responsible way to tackle the problem is to begin with your own knowledge base and your own behaviour. Change yourself, or as Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see in the world".

Success requires co-operation, which will demand much of our communication skills and our ability to educate each other. You can't begin until you learn to question the status quo. What worked in the industrial age can no longer be a satisfactory guide for how we must live in the future. Your task and mine is to learn a new way of life, that is sustainable. Some of us will be successful in that. Change will be opposed. The Board of Longitude's first response to any challenge is to kill off the source. We are all social animals. We need to be accepted by our peers. There are very good human reasons why the model of the Board of Longitude persists.

You can't begin until you learn to question the status quo. What worked in the industrial age can no longer be a satisfactory guide for how we must live in the future. Your task and mine is to learn a new way of life, that is sustainable. Some of us will be successful in that.

Volunteers: We shouldn't expect the innovations that will drive our future to come from the obvious places, from big companies and government programmes. Innovation doesn't work like that. The innovators are the ones who come from unlikely backgrounds and who like John Harrison, volunteer to do the hard work of proving a principle. The powers that be always respond in the same way, to people like that. The Board of Longitude is alive and well.

Use an RSS Reader: I've encouraged you all to use an RSS reader. Here's a link I hope you'll find useful. Harold Jarche is an educator with a knowledge management insight. His blog website is here. This

is the feed.

Write a Blog: Your blog can be private or public. We should all keep one. In the beginning something that starts with "What I learned this week" would be easy to write, and very useful in the long run. If you write a page once a week, in a year you will write 50+ pages of your own collected wisdom, stored in a place where you can easily find it when you need it. Don't put this off. Do it.

There is a printable version of the Newsletter here. (4 pages)

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