More on the Tao of BP

Long sequence that started with John Moore's comment on Open Access, and ended up with Ton Zijlstra's Piece on Every Signal Starts Out As Noise from which he points to this poster from Blogwalk 1.0

About half way down he has this entry.

Organisational Conditions - recognition of the fact.... - that formal structure are not reality.

Which is as concise a term I've seen for my Tao of Business Processes. Ton says:

As one of the organisational attitudes I put forward as required to do this, was the notion "that every signal starts out as noise". It sounded cool at the time. What I meant was that you cannot know in advance what is useful information until you recognize it as such. Noise in this situation more or less equals unsorted data and information, and signals are data-patterns.

Read the whole thing, this guy is making very intertesting good sense. Then, just for the hell of it, read these two pieces from the Scientific American. None so Blind which includes this little gem

Picture yourself watching a one-minute video of two teams of three players each. One team wears white shirts and the other black shirts, and the members move around one another in a small room tossing two basketballs. Your task is to count the number of passes made by the white team--not easy given the weaving movement of the players. Unexpectedly, after 35 seconds a gorilla enters the room, walks directly through the farrago of bodies, thumps his chest and, nine seconds later, exits. Would you see the gorilla?

Most of us believe we would. In fact, 50 percent of subjects in this remarkable experiment by Daniel J. Simons of the University of Illinois and Christopher F. Chabris of Harvard University did not see the gorilla, even when asked if they noticed anything unusual (see their paper "Gorillas in Our Midst"). The effect is called inattentional blindness. When attending to one task--say, talking on a cell phone while driving--many of us become blind to dynamic events, such as a gorilla in the crosswalk.

We literally cannot see what we are not prepared for; even something that we have already identified as information, a gorilla, can be perceived as noise, how much more likely is it that we will perceive completely new information as noise first.

Then look at this brief tour round our Confirmation Bias which is the other side of blindness to new information. In this one we make snap judgements based on our experience, predilections, genetics for crying out loud, and then look for supporting evidence.

Combine them all and you have any number of pathways to bloody silly, let alone actually dangerous and indefensible decisions, in business, politics and our personal lives.