Dilbert teaches us that we are ruled over by a pointy haired boss who has no clue about the details of what is actually going on. In fact time and time again our performance is being evaluated by people who really don't understand the details. Not just management. Consultants, researchers, all the rest of it, who actually, often do not know anything about what it actually takes to accomplish a certain job. Doesn't sound good really.
Surely, only someone that understands what's going on would be qualified to judge and make recommendations. Let's break down what our judges are often asked to do:
Assess / Evaluate – how good was x?
Research – Why did x happen? What do y people think about x?
Recommend – What should we do next?
For the first and second – understanding the subject matter is really not needed. I can make reasonable comparisons on things that I don't understand the subject matter. One can see what the users think. In fact, having excessive understanding of the program itself could simply lead one to loose sight of the forest for looking at trees. Regardless of the brilliant foo() function, if users don't like it and it costs double what a similar program cost, something has gone wrong. Certainly there are some who can wear multiple hats – understanding the details but not getting lost looking at small shiny things. But I reckon they're the exception, not the rule.
What those who don't understand the subject matter are utterly unqualified for are for the most part recommendations. Without a firm grasp of the subject matter at hand, how can you say what should come next? Perhaps by luck there is a shining example somewhere else to draw on from evaluation, but without it, you're lost. For someone who doesn't know the subject matter to tell me that what I did was good or not is fine. For them to tell me about what they think about why that was is also fine. For them to tell me a plan for what to do next, when they don't have a clue and haven't experienced it, is often frustrating and arrogant.
Bottom line: The clueless can actually make pretty good judges, but not the best for making plans.
Friday, 10 June 2011
Saturday, 4 June 2011
Accept stones from glass houses; avoid a downward spiral
In dysfunctional environments many might think they have answers. Answers often seem relatively apparent. Even whilst those prescribing the answers are not practicing that themselves; like the doctor telling us not to smoke, just before he goes for the cigarette break.
So it's easy to find the double standards think of one self as high and mighty for having identified that and then hastily ignore what was said. That the doctor smokes doesn't invalidate what he said about cigarettes though.
All we get is a downward spiral between all stakeholders - every iteration leading overall standards lower and lower. Before one knows it all the stakeholders in any given project; all knowing the dangers of smoking cigarettes and telling each other about it, and yet all themselves turn into chain smokers.
So I for one will start looking at the rocks thrown from those who reside in glass houses, or stone houses, in more or less the same way - on the merit of the rock that's just come crashing through the window.
[Photo by Thomas Hawk used under Creative Commons http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/5687171572/ ]
Wednesday, 27 April 2011
Capacity building critique
Few things in international development seem to be sexier than capacity building. It's the solution to everything. If only there would be more workshops, more capacity building, more training problems in any given developing country will surely, one day, vanish.
But please, when exactly is that day going to come? Capacity is mobile. It has legs. It can generally walk out the door. And where the demand for it is higher than supply, it often does walk out the door.
Whilst we are waiting for Nirvana with every one building capacity feeling good about themselves people are still suffering because the services that should be delivered from this capacity ain't coming. And they won't even when the workshop is over if the capacity decides to move somewhere else.
An equally important question is: how can we rework this job to reduce the needed capacity for it? Think like Henry Ford! He pumped out the Model T for prices no one thought possible doing it that way. And he didn't need to wait for capacity to be built to start the automobile revolution, because he designed jobs in a way that they could be done by almost anyone.
Of course not everything can be reduced to that level. But quite a few things can be broken down a lot more than they often are. And that can help get results today, not whenever after tomorrow which may or may not ever come.
That doesn't mean keeping people stupid either. Having a spell check does not stop me from learning how to spell. Having a calculator does not prevent you from doing long hand multiplication if you want to. Capacity building is not the whole picture, and it's not the whole answer, and it's generally too slow for the short to medium term.
But please, when exactly is that day going to come? Capacity is mobile. It has legs. It can generally walk out the door. And where the demand for it is higher than supply, it often does walk out the door.
Whilst we are waiting for Nirvana with every one building capacity feeling good about themselves people are still suffering because the services that should be delivered from this capacity ain't coming. And they won't even when the workshop is over if the capacity decides to move somewhere else.
An equally important question is: how can we rework this job to reduce the needed capacity for it? Think like Henry Ford! He pumped out the Model T for prices no one thought possible doing it that way. And he didn't need to wait for capacity to be built to start the automobile revolution, because he designed jobs in a way that they could be done by almost anyone.
Of course not everything can be reduced to that level. But quite a few things can be broken down a lot more than they often are. And that can help get results today, not whenever after tomorrow which may or may not ever come.
That doesn't mean keeping people stupid either. Having a spell check does not stop me from learning how to spell. Having a calculator does not prevent you from doing long hand multiplication if you want to. Capacity building is not the whole picture, and it's not the whole answer, and it's generally too slow for the short to medium term.
Saturday, 24 April 2010
Javascript Games w/OLPC...
Just tried to finish off the falling object math game that I've been working on for ExeLearning to complete the little pack being made. Objective: small sprites falling against a background of around 640x480 at maybe 10-13fps.
Thought - let's test the performance of that - jQuery based animation (which is using DOM) - can just cope with one small moving sprite across a 640x480 background object if you hack jQuery.js to change the hardcoded refresh time (13ms which is really not needed)... But if you just try to introduce a second sprite... again hopeless situation.
Thought - what about canvas? Wrong concept... the scaling in it means that it thinks on every paint request to scale it... Performance so bad I have to ctrl+alt+erase to restart. You can look at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/HTML_canvas_performance but even after that it improves - to the point where you desperately need to click on move away...
Thought - what if we could keep all the animation within an iframe? That way the repaint area could be constrained, images that needed scaled by the XO would be scaled only once. Progress! We have half way a little bit jerky animation. Take the iframe back down to 400x400 and we have what looks like decently smooth acceptable arcade kind of animation.
There also seems to be a difference between using the jquery animate method and using setInterval yourself (just to be on the safe side I stored the position of the sprite as a variable instead of retrieving, parsing, then setting again the css property).
And there you have it - now several million times (instead of seventy million or however many times found on your normal laptop) the computing power used to go to the moon can in fact be used to create an arcade game in the browse activity on the XO.
Thought - let's test the performance of that - jQuery based animation (which is using DOM) - can just cope with one small moving sprite across a 640x480 background object if you hack jQuery.js to change the hardcoded refresh time (13ms which is really not needed)... But if you just try to introduce a second sprite... again hopeless situation.
Thought - what about canvas? Wrong concept... the scaling in it means that it thinks on every paint request to scale it... Performance so bad I have to ctrl+alt+erase to restart. You can look at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/HTML_canvas_performance but even after that it improves - to the point where you desperately need to click on move away...
Thought - what if we could keep all the animation within an iframe? That way the repaint area could be constrained, images that needed scaled by the XO would be scaled only once. Progress! We have half way a little bit jerky animation. Take the iframe back down to 400x400 and we have what looks like decently smooth acceptable arcade kind of animation.
There also seems to be a difference between using the jquery animate method and using setInterval yourself (just to be on the safe side I stored the position of the sprite as a variable instead of retrieving, parsing, then setting again the css property).
And there you have it - now several million times (instead of seventy million or however many times found on your normal laptop) the computing power used to go to the moon can in fact be used to create an arcade game in the browse activity on the XO.
Saturday, 20 February 2010
The Corporation Movie is unfair
Just finished watching the corporation as a public sector friend of mine suggested... well...
Interesting film well put and persuasively conveys a point of view... but the token nature of covering both sides of corporations is a little disappointing from such a serious undertaking.
Given the evolution of CSR over the last 30 years (and there’s both real CSR and greenwashing) why is there so little coverage of this in the film?
It’s interesting that there’s almost no coverage or quantification / rankings of CSR between different companies...
There are socially responsible stock indexes (such as FTSE4Good) that generally outperform others; and those companies practicing green-washing generally get exposed and generally don’t benefit by doing so in the way that those who really conduct business ethically do. Those companies that have nice words and in practice ride rough shot over anything contrary to their short term gains typically wind up near the bottom of such indexes or excluded.
No mention of things like Business in The Community’s Corporate Responsibility Index (http://www.bitc.org.uk/integration_and_advice/cr_index/cr_index_2008/cr_index_08.html) and different auditing techniques... Volumes of journal articles and practice completely neglected. A lot more than a non-responsive security system shown in the film.
The notion that corporations are legally obliged to place short term financial gains before all other interests is totally untrue. That public corporations are often short term by nature of their stockholders could be argued, but by this argument could one explain how corporations also make massive long term investments in infrastructure, factories and the like which take 20 years to pay back?
So.... Now available on itunes (from Apple Corp) , put together and spread by technology (developed by various corporations), all of which cost more to develop than one or a small group could possibly accept unlimited liability for and would be difficult to judge by any entity government or otherwise if allowing those people to incorporate for that innovation is in the public good...
Forum Post on film's website
Interesting film well put and persuasively conveys a point of view... but the token nature of covering both sides of corporations is a little disappointing from such a serious undertaking.
Given the evolution of CSR over the last 30 years (and there’s both real CSR and greenwashing) why is there so little coverage of this in the film?
It’s interesting that there’s almost no coverage or quantification / rankings of CSR between different companies...
There are socially responsible stock indexes (such as FTSE4Good) that generally outperform others; and those companies practicing green-washing generally get exposed and generally don’t benefit by doing so in the way that those who really conduct business ethically do. Those companies that have nice words and in practice ride rough shot over anything contrary to their short term gains typically wind up near the bottom of such indexes or excluded.
No mention of things like Business in The Community’s Corporate Responsibility Index (http://www.bitc.org.uk/integration_and_advice/cr_index/cr_index_2008/cr_index_08.html) and different auditing techniques... Volumes of journal articles and practice completely neglected. A lot more than a non-responsive security system shown in the film.
The notion that corporations are legally obliged to place short term financial gains before all other interests is totally untrue. That public corporations are often short term by nature of their stockholders could be argued, but by this argument could one explain how corporations also make massive long term investments in infrastructure, factories and the like which take 20 years to pay back?
So.... Now available on itunes (from Apple Corp) , put together and spread by technology (developed by various corporations), all of which cost more to develop than one or a small group could possibly accept unlimited liability for and would be difficult to judge by any entity government or otherwise if allowing those people to incorporate for that innovation is in the public good...
Forum Post on film's website
Wednesday, 17 February 2010
Cultural translation machine?
Exactly, well isn't always so exact...
One of the interesting things I find in Persian is that it generally isn't that exact. When asked where something is, rather than saying in the basement next to the stairs on the left, one would say just "it's down" typically.
If communication is the process of giving and receiving a message then there is the problem of cultural perception glasses putting the message out of tint.
Perhaps the fact is that more explanation is required and expected, so perhaps what we need is a standard for a 'cultural dictionary'. It is one thing to translate the words. It is another to convey the true meaning, the whole message. Yes it would be better to really understand completely and adjust and adapt, but sometimes we don't always have that much time. Learning a language takes quite some time, understanding a different way of thinking and truly accepting it, well this is something different. Just going over the notions of intercultural exercises isn't really addressing the issue.
Particularly when expatriates need to lead teams in different countries and react accordingly, what we really need is a dictionary. For example it isn't unknown for Germans to be found just a little bit too much to the point. Then others get upset, then that takes time to recover, well ultimately
Something like
Or....
On the one hand over simplistic, but a starting point. When you go to a country you would obviously try to avoid doing something that is considered taboo there (we hope) like kissing in public where this isn't allowed. Frankly sometimes I just have too many other things to think about, and when that's the case, I fall back into my own culture without realizing.
The spoken word may not be that high a percentage of communication overall, but it is what nails the details. Or so we think. But then it doesn't when we use the same language but at the same time a different language.
Hmmmm.... Thoughts anyone?
One of the interesting things I find in Persian is that it generally isn't that exact. When asked where something is, rather than saying in the basement next to the stairs on the left, one would say just "it's down" typically.
If communication is the process of giving and receiving a message then there is the problem of cultural perception glasses putting the message out of tint.
Perhaps the fact is that more explanation is required and expected, so perhaps what we need is a standard for a 'cultural dictionary'. It is one thing to translate the words. It is another to convey the true meaning, the whole message. Yes it would be better to really understand completely and adjust and adapt, but sometimes we don't always have that much time. Learning a language takes quite some time, understanding a different way of thinking and truly accepting it, well this is something different. Just going over the notions of intercultural exercises isn't really addressing the issue.
Particularly when expatriates need to lead teams in different countries and react accordingly, what we really need is a dictionary. For example it isn't unknown for Germans to be found just a little bit too much to the point. Then others get upset, then that takes time to recover, well ultimately
Something like
| German 'Meaning' | English 'Way of saying' |
|---|---|
| That was very bad / awful work. | "That wasn't what we needed to do. We have a lot of room for improvement and we gotta do better next time" |
| What the hell are you doing? That's stupid! | I don't see any sense in doing that |
Or....
| British 'Meaning' | Afghan Way of Saying |
|---|---|
| We must do this exactly like that... | This thing is very important. It's needed for x/y/z. Talk through the steps. Quiz understanding. Check at regular intervals. If we do a different, this would cause this problem, if we do b different, that would cause that problem... |
| That was very good - we should continue like that | This thing done like this will bring benefits x/y/z ... has been well done... |
| We should invest in this | There is a very good opportunity here - if we can work together we could benefit... |
On the one hand over simplistic, but a starting point. When you go to a country you would obviously try to avoid doing something that is considered taboo there (we hope) like kissing in public where this isn't allowed. Frankly sometimes I just have too many other things to think about, and when that's the case, I fall back into my own culture without realizing.
The spoken word may not be that high a percentage of communication overall, but it is what nails the details. Or so we think. But then it doesn't when we use the same language but at the same time a different language.
Hmmmm.... Thoughts anyone?
Friday, 5 February 2010
Multi active effectiveness?
If we accept that in many places the practice of doing quite a few things at once, having people coming and going, and 'flexible' timing are the norm, and will continue to be, then we need to grapple with the challenge of how to effectively achieve change and carry out projects anyway.
Well, first what the heck do we mean by effectiveness? I guess to attempt to accomplish a given objective using the minimum required resources (time, money, assets, etc).
So we have some key challenges here:
Well technology gives us an answer to the first issue. Now everything I need to do 99% of my jobs is sitting on my laptop - so anywhere anytime I can just get on with something that I need to be doing (coding, writing, whatever).
Sometimes things that we are relying on may or may not happen as planned. Clearly then we need to throw out Just in Time (JIT) methods. One of the pre-requisites of JIT is to have an extremely reliable supply chain, otherwise the overheads saved are going to be a lot lot less than the wastage / cost of not having the item / stock etc. that we were relying on.
Personal followup - this is a tricky one. Somehow it feels like this could be automated, but I'm sure that an automated phone recording just would not have the same effect as actual follow-up / checks. So I better budget it in my plan. Padding schedules to account for this is legit.
On the frontier in the developing world many places are running like this. Too often my first instinct was to try and fight all of the above. Yet this all too often might be just a painful failure.
Actually the funny thing is this - in an environment of uncertainty where things may or may not come together; it actually makes rather a lot of sense to have quite a few different things going on at once. Putting all the eggs in one well defined clearly planned basket may have a much higher chance of failure than other places. So rapidly changing plans and possibly having a few extra plans is pretty sensible really...
Well, first what the heck do we mean by effectiveness? I guess to attempt to accomplish a given objective using the minimum required resources (time, money, assets, etc).
So we have some key challenges here:
- We need to try and avoid time spent 'waiting' going to waste
- What we rely on may or may not appear as planned
- Sometimes a lot of personal follow-up is required
Well technology gives us an answer to the first issue. Now everything I need to do 99% of my jobs is sitting on my laptop - so anywhere anytime I can just get on with something that I need to be doing (coding, writing, whatever).
Sometimes things that we are relying on may or may not happen as planned. Clearly then we need to throw out Just in Time (JIT) methods. One of the pre-requisites of JIT is to have an extremely reliable supply chain, otherwise the overheads saved are going to be a lot lot less than the wastage / cost of not having the item / stock etc. that we were relying on.
Personal followup - this is a tricky one. Somehow it feels like this could be automated, but I'm sure that an automated phone recording just would not have the same effect as actual follow-up / checks. So I better budget it in my plan. Padding schedules to account for this is legit.
On the frontier in the developing world many places are running like this. Too often my first instinct was to try and fight all of the above. Yet this all too often might be just a painful failure.
Actually the funny thing is this - in an environment of uncertainty where things may or may not come together; it actually makes rather a lot of sense to have quite a few different things going on at once. Putting all the eggs in one well defined clearly planned basket may have a much higher chance of failure than other places. So rapidly changing plans and possibly having a few extra plans is pretty sensible really...
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