One of my recent readings has been the late Hans Rosling’s Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World — and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. (Flatiron Books, 2018). It is a fascinating read, loaded with valuable insights. Hans Rosling asked chimpanzees to answer 13 multiple-choice questions about the state of the world. […]
I recently read Javier Blas and Jack Farchy’s The World for Sale: Money, Power, and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources (Oxford University Press, 2021). This fascinating book reads like a novel, almost a page turner. What will the traders do next? They chronicle the history of commodity traders of oil, grain, metals, and […]
Isaac Asimov introduced three rules for robots in his 1942 short story “Runaround,” which is included in his 1950 collection I, Robot. “First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human […]
Many problems and potential fixes are being considered and debated to address the pandemic, associated economic slump, and economic and social inequities. Climate change is hovering in the wings. How do all these potential initiatives fit together? I think we can integrate all of these ideas by thinking about how they all support pursuit of […]
There are many complex contexts that involve a wide range of stakeholders with a broad array of ideas for improving the context of interest. Such contexts can range from neighborhoods to wards to cities to states and countries. I am involved in one right now with 200+ ideas; a few years ago, I played a […]
Most organizations want members of their workforce to be more collaborative, share information, and make better and faster decisions. These pursuits are often termed workforce culture transformation. For very large organizations, for example, elements of the federal government, this can be a daunting aspiration. Consider experiences with two examples of transforming work. Over the past […]
I grew up in New England in the 1960s and 70s. My whole family was Republican. We supported John Chafee, Edmund Brooke, Eliot Richardson, and Nelson Rockefeller. Social liberals and fiscal conservatives. These types of Republicans are long gone. Nixon, then Reagan, and recently Trump discovered that courting southern whites could win elections. Social liberalism […]
I have just finished reading Robin L. Fox’s The Invention of Medicine: From Homer to Hippocrates (Basic Books, 2020). I found it interesting that numerous medical treatises were attributed to Hippocrates many centuries after his death. It seems that the content of these treatises was more credible if attributed to Hippocrates. I have read of […]
The old normal involved lots of bus, metro, and uber rides to meetings with sponsors, colleagues, and friends in pursuit of new opportunities, progress on existing opportunities, and just plain socializing. Transit time was at least an hour per day and sometimes two, sitting in a bus, train, or car catching up on your email […]
What needs to change to transform our society in the ways needed to achieve new levels of equality, performance, and value creation? I have nine suggestions in two broad areas. In general, we need to move from status quo practices to best practices as shown in the table below. Function Best Practices Status Quo […]
Wicked problems defy formulation and resolution. They involve conflicting values, concerns, and perceptions that lead to conflicts, strong positions, and perhaps even hatred of the “others” who have opposing views. We are faced with roughly 50% of the country being in fundamental conflict with the other 50% of the country. Actually, Biden-Harris won 51.3% of […]
If you think the complexity of the current situation – pandemic, global warming, and race relations – is overwhelming, I have a suggestion for coping with the complexity. The just published issue of The Bridge (https://www.nae.edu/Bridge.aspx) provides a wonderfully broad and intriguing set of perspectives of how complexity is manifested throughout our society. We cannot […]
Facebook, Twitter, and other emergent platforms have resulted in the Balkanization of the world of information. There are large subpopulations that believe the moon landing was faked, climate change and the pandemic are hoaxes, and the presidential election was fraudulently stolen from Donald Trump. They only pay attention to information sources that support these views. […]
Subramanian, E., Reich, Y., & Krishnan, S. (2020). We Are Not Users: Dialogues, Diversity, and Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. The authors’ central argument is that we have a much deeper relationship with the things we create than just being users. Social media provides compelling examples of how the usability of the interface, while important, […]
Stephen Covey originated this idea in his book The Speed of Trust (Free Press, 2006). Progress is limited by the extent to which key stakeholders trust in the endeavor of interest and support its pursuit. There are multiple levels of trust. At one level, we are concerned that leaders and other authorities will not mislead […]
It is so very easy to get angry about the current situation in the US. Pandemic, recession, hurricanes, flooding, fires, earthquakes, protests about racial injustice, attempts to pack the Supreme Court and undermine elections are all woven together over the past six months. It is almost a perfect storm of calamities. My anger is not […]
Here is my recent reading/watching list: Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America by Kurt Anderson (Random House, 2020) The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr (Avery, 2020) Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About People We Don’t Know by Malcolm Gladwell (Little Brown, 2019) The Social […]
I have just finished reading a wonderful book by Maria Konnikova, The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win (Penguin Press, 2020). Konnikova is a PhD psychologist who researches decision making and risk. She decides to study this in the domain of poker. She begins as a total novice and […]
Show Me the Evidence was a popular book by Ron Haskins and Greg Margolis published by Brookings in 2014. The central idea was that economic and social policy should be based on credible data rather than just opinion and advocacy. This seems reasonable, although ideology has of late disrupted these intentions. Can this idea be […]
When all the days seem the same and the patterns of daily life endlessly repeat, you can begin to feel that time is gone. The clock has stopped. Nothing progresses. Everything is now. The future, even the past, is on hold. Everything will repeat, again and again. Of course, repetition has always been true. Birth, […]
Recent challenges suggest that the complexity of society in the US has become increasingly difficult to understand and manage. We seem to have great trouble agreeing on anything. Consequently, we do not act to quickly understand what is happening and competently develop and execute compelling courses of action. Let’s explore the sources of the impasse. […]
Two months or one sixth of a year limited to once a week early senior mornings at the grocery store with 6-8 other older folks stocking up. Everybody is in masks. Feels like a heist. I am getting used to the routine of every day being the same as every other day. Actually, it has […]
How can we address alternative facts? I think we should differentiate realities that can be empirically verified versus assertions about why these realities have occurred. Succinctly, we need to differentiate data and evidence from various pundits’ interpretations. I am constantly amazed at the wealth of pundits available who will comment on anything. There are thousands […]
A recent book, Possible Minds (Brockman, 2019), provides 25 essays on the future of AI, building upon Norbert Wiener’s 1948 classic Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. A key distinction among these pundits is between information and control versus computation. This distinction is intriguing. My roots are definitely in the information […]
George Adams was a graduate student in Public Policy at Georgetown. He relied on a cognitive assistant that he named Emily after his favorite aunt. It was sort of a fun thing to do, thinking that Emily might be of some I’ll-defined assistance. George totally underestimated the possibilities. Emily learned from everything George did. His […]
In my last post, I argued that everyone is cognitively unique. Others have argued that everyone is genetically unique. Can we really tailor assistive technologies and medical care to each individual? Is it feasible? Is it affordable? Of course, there are many examples of how we tailor technology to our personal preferences. We adjust the […]
George has been exploring how money is spent and the outcomes produced. His latest quest has been trying to understand the benefits of subsidizing faculty members so they can pursue research. When Marie and George operated at the department level, it never occurred to him to question this. However, Beresford is trying to make it […]
While George continued his sleuthing, Marie focused on building relationships across campus with faculty, staff, students, and alumni, as well as each member of the Board of Trustees. It was a lot of work, leaving her exhausted every evening as she retreated to the President’s House. She tried to stay connected professionally with her colleagues […]
A couple of ideas intersected this week. First, a piece I was reading suggested that the endeavor they were elaborating was “As difficult as baptizing a cat.” Depending on how you have related with cats in the past, this statement evokes an immediate sense of what the baptism experience would be like. I am on […]
I posted a piece on Emily, my cognitive assistant, last March. Several readers have asked me what she really knows. Beyond deep understanding of health and well being, driverless cars, and complex systems in general, what does she know about me? She has complete access to everything I do via computer or other digital devices. […]
I couldn’t tell whether the inquiry related to an opportunity for entertainment, adventure, or travel. To my complete surprise, the inquiry led to a possible offer of employment. The employer wanted me to join a team that would be exploring complexity. I asked what that meant. They said, “It is difficult to explain, but we […]
There is much concern lately that AI will displace human workers and perhaps eventually discard humans entirely. I suppose such scenarios are imaginable. However, I have been thinking about the potential of AI to do work that I currently do poorly. I almost always under invest in this work, often resulting in poor performance, wasted […]
Where will AI take us? I understand that Field & Stream is planning a special issue on AI-based deer, elk, and fish. Gourmet is planning a special issue on robotic food gathering and preparation. Psychology Today is addressing how to deal with conflicts with your cognitive assistant. My cognitive assistant is Emily, an appealing but […]
This has been quite a week for dealing with technology. It started with submitting a revised journal article using a web-based publishing platform. It was unhappy because the zip code for one of my coauthors was missing. It wanted me to add this information but I did not know the user name and password for […]
The first-order consequence of driverless cars, when fully deployed and successful, is that humans will no longer drive cars. That’s the whole idea. Cars will be without drivers. The many Uber rides that I take won’t change that much, except there will be no human driver. There are higher-order consequences of driverless cars being fully […]
I moved to Washington, DC a bit over four months ago. I have long liked the city, traveling here at least once a month for business over almost four decades. During this transition, I started watching TV shows associated with the White House. I have been binge watching The West Wing – just into the […]
Just watched this movie this week, after having read many of the books published on the Great Recession, as well as having served on a National Academy study committee of what happened. During this study, I had a chance to chat with the second most senior executive at one of the major banks involved, one […]
Our operatives have uncovered the motivation and reasoning behind various presidential candidates now emphasizing what many of them are calling the “new realty.” This reality relates to their personal histories, climate change, economic prospects, and so on. All of the candidates have “repositioned” their personal stories to gain voter support. One candidate, born to immense […]
A recent issue of The Economist provided an in-depth review of how high technology financial startups are poaching high-margin financial services from large banks. The large banks are not standing still; they are often acquiring these startups once they prove viable. This may keep them in the game, but high margins are being substantially eroded […]
There is a wealth of self-proclaimed pundits providing pronouncements on sports, politics, the economy, and so on. There seem to be unlimited numbers of Democrat and Republican strategists. Some are wizened pros that have been through many campaigns, some successful and some less so. Many are quite young. Despite having seemingly no credentials, they are […]
I am on the homestretch of being in New York City for three years, actually in the bleachers of Hoboken watching the game played by this remarkable city. For over 400 years, it has been an innovation ecosystem embracing change, creativity, and diversity. The only colony without a religious or political agenda, New York City […]
How many user names and passwords do you have? Do you need passwords with exactly six or eight or ten characters including as least one numeric character and one non-alphabetic or non-numeric character? How often are you required to change them for security reasons? Do you have a list, tucked away physically or electronically that […]
Various pundits in sundry domains attempt to predict what will happen. In domains such as climate change, urban systems, and national politics, which are laced with human and social phenomena, such predictions are folly. There are far too many possible ways in which individuals and social groups can behave in response to evolving events, whether […]
I have recently been involved with an enterprise that has somehow managed to embrace just about the worst transformation practices possible. It all started with the vocabulary the leaders chose to employ. They managed to paint a transformation picture that they apparently had no intention of pursuing. While they portrayed fundamental change, their actions totally […]
Much of contemporary analytics focuses on tabulating and portraying characteristics of existing systems, whether they are for energy supply, health delivery or a wide range of other complex systems. This type of analytics addresses “what is” or in many cases “what was.” This approach is backward looking, which makes a lot of sense if there […]
We continue to anguish over escalating healthcare costs. To gain control of these costs, we need to understand one essential equation. The total cost of healthcare is Total Cost = Costs Per Use x Number of Uses Careful design of delivery processes to eliminate unwarranted care process variations can decrease the costs per use. Variations […]
I just finished reading Michael Lewis’ Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. Lewis relates the story of the Oakland Athletics and their ability to use scientific management to maximize wins per dollar. I could not help but wonder how their empirically derived principles might apply to academia. What is the equivalent of On-Base […]
National defense, and acquisition of weapon systems in particular, has long been a target of transformation. The Packard Commission in 1985 provided a very reasonable set of recommendations for reforming defense acquisition processes. These recommendations resulted in relatively minor changes. Blue ribbon committees both before and after the Packard Commission had comparably minor impacts. President […]
I wrote early last year about Delta Air Lines transforming a great airline into a bus line. I really did not anticipate how bad Delta’s performance could get. I was in Houston on Thursday waiting for a flight to Atlanta. When I checked in at the kiosk, Delta offered me the opportunity to stand by […]
I am pleased to report that IOS Press released “Engineering the System of Healthcare Delivery” this week in Amsterdam. Denis Cortese and I edited this 500-page compendium of the insights and ideas of a wide range of luminaries in healthcare. Our goal was to bring together in one place the thought leaders who are transforming […]
