Development Without Lightbulbs

Judge not less ye be judged (if we can judge it at all?)

2011-06-10T05:28:00.000-07:00

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.

Accept stones from glass houses; avoid a downward spiral

2011-06-04T09:54:00.000-07:00

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/ ]

Capacity building critique

2011-04-27T10:55:00.000-07:00

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.

Javascript Games w/OLPC...

2010-04-24T20:29:00.000-07:00

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.

The Corporation Movie is unfair

2010-02-20T09:35:00.000-08:00

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

Cultural translation machine?

2010-02-17T12:10:00.000-08:00

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

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?

Multi active effectiveness?

2010-02-05T07:37:00.000-08:00

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:

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...

More historical rambling...

2010-01-23T08:22:00.000-08:00

It seems to me that society's habit to somehow looses it's ability to consider the real value of a "revolution" is as strong as ever...

I remember back in history class learning how in the 1840s railway mania gripped the UK as building a railway (like making a dot com company) was deemed somehow a magic ticket to get rich. Unfortunately for some three railway lines going the same way wasn't quite such a magic ticket to get rich.... nor was the sail powered loco... or the rocket powered one...

Not too much unlike the idea that the Internet, without applications, would make the travel agent that runs a website (lastminute.com) more valuable than British Airways (which was profitable at the time as far as I remember) who happen to own a fleet of jet aircraft...

Now if we consider 1:1 computing in developing countries and the empowerment that we could deliver to educating the children who are in amongst the worst imaginable circumstances to shape their own destiny, well, let's learn from the dot com revolution, it won't magically take care of itself. Some was the case with the railways. Before it could really work all the edges needed rounding off, everything needed sorted out (finance models and the introduction of shareholders for example had to change almost completely, management, the works...)

The revolutions do in the end of course change the world dramatically, perhaps not quite as quickly as expected, and perhaps after a bit of finishing work, perhaps in other ways... but in the end they do.

Amazing Similarities...

2010-01-16T13:33:00.000-08:00

"As yet, however, we have but vaguely appreciated the importance of "the larger question fo increasing our national efficiency.""

Hmmm... national efficiency, resources coming in, not the visible outcomes we expect, could be Afghanistan 2009 for sure...

But that was FW Taylor writing in 1903. But there's plenty more similarities between the time that Taylor was writing and right here right now in Afghanistan (and other developing countries I assume). The family, extended and honour was more important. Most of the same kind of shops were all in the same place. Most workers were not used to working in managed environments.

To what extent does modern management theory originating from studies on western (or at least relatively secure and wealthy societies) where their parents were working in what we would recognize as a managed environment apply to a post conflict S. Asian society? To what extent are more humanist theories really relevant here?

What Taylor saw was mostly people whose skills had been passed down by rule of thumb through the family. Sounds familiar. Generally expertise / expectations were not really out there...

Even if someone is completely motivated; then how can he/she accomplish reasonable results if the benchmark is not really known, the job not really designed, and the person's efforts, for lack of experience, possibly quite misdirected...

Actually my unscientific guess would be if we could achieve Taylor / Ford level efficiency in Afghanistan we'd be flying high by comparison.

In my opinion much of what Taylor was criticized for afterwards was actually ignorance of what he really said, that the interests of the employee and employer must be in alignment, and the positive outcomes, must be shared. If we don't forget this, then there's every reason to believe that these methods could be a more mutually beneficial way forward superior to more humanistic thinking. Set against a backdrop of rote learning how can one expect the results you look for by applying mostly coaching models etc?

Go to many offices and one will find plenty of folks just sitting on MSN and there are plenty of staff assessment forms and all the rest of it. Taking what Taylor says, checking out how much one *should* expect, then sharing improved outcomes, the result would likely be better.

Given how close the outside environment there would be to what we see out here, is turning the clock back a moment the way to move forward faster?

Dysfunctional?

2010-01-10T09:23:00.000-08:00

Much has been made of the relative failure to accomplish basic work outcomes with the huge influx of international cash here in Afghanistan...

But what, oh what, is the basis for expecting efficiency and reasonable outcomes from given inputs here? Some people have cried that... let's rewind another step...

What exactly is the priority of society, what has it been? Work? No. Efficiency? No. Family, honor, pride, yes...

Imagine we in the west went to the western world and tried to achieve development 'milestones' of reducing divorce, teenage pregnancies, and the like... How far would we get, even with a huge influx of resources?

Heck, would we even know that much about how to manage any 'resource' to try and achieve milestones like that? Doesn't look like it... So many social care groups, family groups, churches, etc, and are we getting any closer to the 'milestones'?

Hell no... Before university I worked for Turning Point, at the time as I recall the UK's biggest social care provider. I was working mostly with learning disabilities, people effectively without family in many cases... It's a lot more rare that Afghanistan would be, in this regard, so dysfunctional...

It's frustrating to see a dysfunctional situation, in any guise... Here people complain all the time about how dirty Kabul is... then throw trash straight out the car window as they complain. But then don't we bemoan the status of our society as we sexualize materials for a younger and younger target audience and buy glossy magazines (or read it online) about the private lives of celebs?

And then he said "let there be light"..

2009-01-26T12:15:00.000-08:00

And the miracle has come, without announcement, without apparent reason... the lights in Kabul are on - almost 24/7...

Weird - you betcha... what the heck is all this light doing? Why is it in? Why does my phone charger work when I plug it in?

First we heard "there has been no building on the Uzbek side of the power line that is supposed to come" then maybe there is somehow 70MW, maybe 20MW, not quite sure...

Maybe we just had a lot snow lately and it melted, which made the dam run better, in which case the power will disappear.

And it's now doubled in price to $0.14/kwhr - not quite the $0.02 it used to be for the lower residential rate...

Here's hoping...

Would you like a Nazi magazine in the lobby?

2009-01-14T05:18:00.000-08:00

We're spending billions of dollars on the Military operation here in Afghanistan. Most of the cultural sensitivities here are pretty obvious.

Today I was supposed to leave back to Kabul from Jalalabad Airforce Base. So you come through some gates to some kind of main checking area. And just to show what could people we are, to all the guests, labourers, truck drivers, etc. they have a porno mag on the table...

They have a huge cluster of huts called 'Psyops' figuring out no doubt all kinds of ingenious ways of making people like us...

How would we back in the west feel if someone setup a base and then put a magazine about how we needed to revive Hitler and race sciencse on the front door? Probably not very good, because that magazine would be aganist and a comlpete violation of our core beliefs, of our society, the whole nine yards...

So what on earth are we doing here? And why does no one seem to care about it? What kind of diplomacy is this?

Most folks here are pretty tolerant of what you do under your rules in your space. In front of everyone else, come on, this is basic basic stuff here.

Disclaimer here - I know the folks who work in that base have a much more dangerous life than I do, and considerably more disconnected from the local society. But what I wanna know if they can spend that much on psyops and all the rest then why can't we basically mind our manners in front of the people who are hosting us?