A Networked World

Too good to be true

I have a rule. If someone calls me or comes knocking at my door with a special deal for anything - anything at all - I send them away or hang up on them. And that goes double for the deals that are too good to be true. Like this.
Crossed lines: phone scam dudding small business

For Mr Holroyd it began late last year when a well-dressed man in his 30s appeared at his car parts and plumbing business in Ingleburn offering a package of cheaper phone calls with the added incentive of $5000 worth of free equipment for the workshop.

Mr Holroyd signed up and took delivery of a phone system and a bandsaw that did not work, and an air compressor that did.

Two months later he took a call from Macquarie Bank telling him he was in arrears and owed them $30,000. Mr Holroyd, who was not even aware he was in business with Macquarie, pleaded for more information. Finally he discovered that the documents he signed had left him tangled in a lease agreement with two other companies he had never heard of, who had taken out finance with Macquarie.

There is no suggestion that Macquarie had engaged in any wrongdoing, although the bank was unmoved by Mr Holroyd's predicament. It hired the debt collection agency, which came banging at his door.

Which bit of "we will give you $5,000 worth of equipment as a sweetener for a cut-price phone deal" failed to ring any of this bloke's warning bells? How does he imagine the world actually functions? Does he believe in magic?

These scammers are no different from the Nigerian money scams or the NZ Finance company scam or most superannuation scams, they offer something for nothing. Whenever anybody tells me that something is free I know they are lying to me and that's pretty much the end of the conversation.

Nothing is free. Somebody always pays and the problem is that everyone involved in these deals, including the banks, don't actually care who that is. It can be you, it can be the slaves that work in some Northern Marianas sweatshop, it can be the whole communities living in the midst of vile pollution that shortens their lives and damages their genes, it can be our grandchildren who will find their climate untenable. But somebody always pays. Without exception, ever.

What these con artists depend upon is that you and I are basically corrupt, we all want something for nothing and if they tie it in the appropriate bow we will look away long enough for them to profit.

I don't actually blame the scammers that much, there is plainly a market for their business, if nobody ever accepted anything for "free" it would stop.

We need to teach our kids from kindergarten the simplest of rules; if it looks too good to be true, it is, someone is laying to you and someone, probably you, is going to get hurt. How hard is that to learn?

Nobody is in charge - this is a good thing

Johnnie Moore comes across some great stuff and this is one of the best. Leadership in a self-organising world

Harrison Owen created, or maybe he just channelled, the Open Space process many years ago. He says he did so in two martinis and 20 minutes - pretty productive for a process that's been used hundreds of thousands of times around the world.

Here's Harrison talking about the paradox of leadership in a self-organising world. It's fabulous stuff. He serves his metaphorical liquor 100% proof and with great charm. I certainly feel challenged to up my game in future when talking about this stuff.

Harrison Owen - Talk I - Leadership in a Self-Organizing World from Harold Shinsato on Vimeo.

As usual there are a couple of points I want to argue with.

• Owen, and possibly Johnnie and others still want to talk about leadership and, if they are right about self organising systems and I'm sure they are, then it is not fruitful.

It begs the questions of how we get to decide where we want to lead, how we decide whose leadership to accept, including our own. and leaves unspoken the issue that we almost always abandon those leaders because they fail us. Leadership embodies exactly the kind of idea that Johnnie and Harrison argue so strongly against, that of being able to stand outside the system and, to some degree, direct it enough, or disrupt it enough, to instigate changes in a desired direction.

Leadership is change directed, management is homeostatic, but both entail an ability to stand outside, and you can't.

Which raises for me the much more interesting question of how real change occurs, how actual decisions are made and how they so often offer such great potential that is equally often fail and produce outcomes that can be significantly worse than the problem they were supposed to solve.

I've spent 2 years working around my property with an overall objective of it being as productive and as sustainable as possible. I am building and implementing stuff now that I had no concept of when I first started, I am using spaces that have been transformed utterly from what we inherited and there is much more to come. But I had, and have, no plan.

Along the way I've developed what I recently started calling "listening to the garden", literally standing still inside the space, looking around it without making decisions or judgements, noticing (ht Johnnie) new stuff and blurring other stuff into the overall picture and then carrying on with whatever I was doing. At some point an idea will start to germinate about what needs doing next given the current state of the place and our desire to reach those objectives. A bit later I'll start moving some stuff or building something which I will often stop building for days or weeks until the next bit of it becomes clearer.

I like the process and I'm pleased with the results but here's the thing, everything I build, the raised beds, the trellises, the garden workbench, the toolshed platform, every single thing, is screwed together because I completely expect that some of them will need dismantling and rebuilding or removing and replacing altogether at some future state of the process and I want to be able to reuse the parts.

I have no idea whether what I am doing is in fact right and as long as I am prepared to take apart something that doesn't, or ceases to work, I think I'm OK.

But I have no idea how I make those decisions or where they will lead. Now, what would you call that process? Because I want to see a lot more of it.

• The other quibble is with this metaphor We're all surfers in a self-organising world. Some of us prefer the beach, and some of us think we're in charge of the wave. The challenge is to be in the flow of the wave.

Surfers have an exhilarating ride to be sure, but they can only ever end up back where they started, and the wave leaves them on the sand or dumps them on the rocks but it only ever takes them back to the place they left their towel and their car.

I much prefer the metaphor of sailing. A sailor can go to any place they like, what they can't do is get there by any route they choose, they have to work with the prevailing conditions of sea and wind and their boat. Sometimes they need to tack across the wind for hours to achieve even some small headway towards their goal, and at other times they need to abandon the goal for a while and just ride out the storm.

The process requires determination, skill, patience, wisdom and persistence, but most of all it demands a direct and honest engagement with the reality you can perceive right now and a willingness to accept that the reality has changed on you, either because you have learned to see it better or because it has in fact changed.

Sailors need to listen to the sea as I listen to my garden and deal honestly with the facts of their situation, not those facts that they would like very much to be the case. Those who can't do that, or refuse to, are called strong or determined or leaders and, when they are also lucky they get away with it and are hailed as heroes. But that is just survivorship bias, most of those who act that way drown quite quickly and are erased from the story.

Nevertheless, watch the Owen piece, its a gem.

The read Johnnie's other piece. as usual, he has got there before me.

Behaviour change, revisited

Meanwhile, we're so busy dreaming up desirable futures for each other, that we don't notice all the subtle changes that are going on around us anyway. And while we craft our master strategies, we don't even think about the little experiments we could make to nudge the system and see what happens.

You know, stuff we could do right now, or at least in the next day or so.

I'm starting to notice that the more discussions revolve around the importance of strategy, purpose and other such abstractions, the more likely I am to start daydreaming about what to have for tea or going for a nice walk somewhere.

I love it, nudge the system, see what happens, nudge it again. Its about the best we can do.

On the one hand

This is a brilliant example of the power of Internet tools, creativity and our willingness to act swiftly and decisively when we are committed to something. Vegemite

Who would have thought that tampering (which is how the crowd saw it) with a "low involvement' product such as a salty yeast extract spread could provoke such outrage. Clearly not Kraft, or not initially anyway. The volume of blogs, the venting of spleens and the sheer energy poured into the protest as it spilled out to every corner of the internet should confirm one thing: social media has the power to make or break a brand or product like no other medium.

By yesterday morning a Hitler parody video clip had been viewed 46,000 times, making it the No. 1 comedy clip on YouTube this week, according to analysis by the online risk and reputation consultants SR7, which also logged more than 60 Facebook groups that had been formed expressly for the purpose of getting Kraft to dump the name. One such group, "Australia says no to iSnack 2.0" had more than 2500 members by yesterday morning.

The SR7 director James Griffin goes as far as to label this a "watershed" in marketing. "Regardless of whether or not this is a marketing ploy by Kraft, this is an example of social media determining the outcome of a marketing campaign."

Within five days of announcing a new name, Kraft had done a corporate about-face the likes of which we have not seen in a while...

Kraft is now faced with a very pumped up and aggravated bunch of Aussies who have already brought it to heel and will be watching the company's next move. Any hints that the entire exercise was a conspiracy could sink the new product and damage the Vegemite brand itself.

On the other hand, we are surrounded by pollution, dangerous ignorance, corruption, financial criminality, abuse, exploitation, slavery, intergenerational theft and a panoply of human-created catastrophes and failures that need exactly this level of attention and our response is what?

Re-naming the friggin vegemite.

Some days I despair.

THIS is a goldmine

Just read the whole thing Clive Thompson on the New Literacy

"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

I get so fed up with people trying desperately to demean and undemrine the greatest invention in human communication. All the bogus crap about how it undermines "real" relationships, make us all sad loners with no social skills yadda yadda.

And instead it may be creating the most literate, most communicative, most effective generation yet. No wonder it scares the bejesus out of those who have lived by controlling the message and its distribution.

Sod 'em all.

And Jon turns up with the rest of the motivation for us old farts.

The linearity problem

Yet another great link from Johnnie that triggers something. No straight lines

I enjoyed Alan Moore's slideshare from Reboot Britain, No Straight Lines. It's worth taking a good look.

Al kicks off with a very funny story about a train journey and an iPod that I won't spoil by summarising. And goes into a passionate diatribe against the limits of linear thinking.

Its not just the lack of linearity that we need to accept, its the lack of sequence. Also not wanting to screw up the joke.

But we almost never learn anything in a stepwise, linear fashion. We grab bits of it passing by, and fiddle with our understanding of them, and sometimes for a long time we "just don't get it" because even when we have all the bits they are like a jigsaw puzzle in a bag, the picture is there but we can't 'see" it.

And some people never do. Especially, paradoxically, those who are best at stuff like computer programming where sequence and excruciating detail is critical. Then one day, apparently without any relevant input, we "get" it.

And I suspect that is where, god help me, real innovation occurs. Someone has most of the bits, but can't make them fit so they create a bit, a new bit that didn't exist before but which connects the thing in an entirely different way

And because the world is NOT a jigsaw puzzle, what happens is that the new bit makes all the old bits fit together in different ways as well. Which is why change can be so disorienting.

We recognise that many of the old bits are there but they are somehow distorted in ways we don't understand. So the response of those who were comfortable with the old ways things worked try to pretend that the old bits still work in the old ways, that its just their perception that is wonky; because to accept that the whole world is wonky is just too much of a challenge.

We are, in effect, betrayed by the proximity to familiarity that wouldn't happen if we, say, suddenly moved to Tanzania and had to learn Swahili to survive. When we shift our entire domain we recognise its foreignness, but when that shift happens around us it takes time to adjust to that suspiciously familiar but actually completely different reality.

That seems to me the problem with peak Oil, with Climate change, with the end of western financial capitalism, it all still LOOKS the same, or closely enough to fool us into believing that we don't have to change anything to deal with the problem.

Wrong.

And one more point about non-linearity, it entails outputs that are grossly inconsistent with the inputs and apparently disconnected from them.

A dawning realisation about pandemic disruption

As the NZ Govt boosts powers to control swine flu our national conversation about its implications is beginning to get some reality into it. From the same story:

Schools are concerned that they have not been given enough information to advise parents of the wider effect of closing to prevent the spread of swine flu.

The ministry has told schools to be prepared for sudden closures that could last several weeks, and to talk to parents about remote learning.

But schools say they have not been advised how families could manage if their child was quarantined.

Rangitoto College principal David Hodge said he learned how disruptive quarantine was when 22 students and three staff and their families were placed in isolation after going on the school's Spanish language trip to Mexico.

Closing Rangitoto - a college of 3100 students in Mairangi Bay, North Shore City - could put the whole community in turmoil.

[...] Gladstone Primary principal Dave Shadbolt sent the pandemic plan of his Mt Albert school to parents yesterday.

Most of the advice was about general hygiene, he said, and staff were reminding students about hand-washing routines and covering mouths and noses when they sneezed.

Mr Shadbolt said he assumed families in which both parents worked would have to organise care if the school closed.

The manager of occupational health and safety for the Employers and Manufacturers Association Northern, Paul Jarvie, said the effect of widespread quarantine caused by swine flu would compound on the impact of the recession, especially for workplaces already operating with skeleton crews.

The greatest cost to companies would mostly be loss of productivity, because if an employee had used up annual sick and holiday leave entitlements, an employer did not legally have to pay them.

The national commissioner of Work and Income, Liz Jones, said: "People facing difficulties in special circumstances such as an outbreak of [swine flu] may be eligible for assistance if they do not have access to other resources or support."

I just finished talking with a colleague who worked with the Ministry of Social development when they ran a pandemic simulation and their main problem is how to feed people who are disadvantaged, by health, social or employment status or just plain poverty when they can't set aside enough food for a week, let alone a month or more.

The simulation happened a couple of years ago, but only now is it leaking out into the public domain; pretty much too late as usual.

Had a call from the Aussie ABC Radio yesterday to talk about a Japanese idea for managing infectious disease. I'll post the audio as soon as I can

Unconscionable chiropractic behaviour

Thansk Jonnie for the pointer to Derren Brown's piece Simon Singh stands up to libel claims. Derren says:

I have put my name to a petition that feels that libel laws should not be used to silence discussion of medical practice and scientific evidence. This is following the British Chiropractic Association bringing a libel case against Simon Singh for questioning the evidence relating to their claims. It seems to many people, including your blogger, that the response to this should be open debate and defending of claims, not suing the respected author of an article for highlighting such doubts.

Simon has taken the brave move of appealing the pre-trial ruling, and Sense About Science have joined with him to gather support for the freedom of speech issue that underpins this. It can all be read about here. Simon is quoted as saying:

“It has been a stressful and frustrating twelve months since I published my article on chiropractors and their attempts to treat children with conditions such as asthma. The British Chiropractic Association’s decision to sue me for libel has been an enormous drain on my time and energy.

I have a horse in this race. I've had asthma all my life, Chiroppractic treatement has done wonders for my back when it was in acute pain, but using libel laws to silence debate on evidence is utterly unconscionable.

And absurd. We have so-called debates all the time about the effectiveness of medical treatments from triple vaccines and whether they cause autism (my 2c, even if they do in a very few cases, the risk is justified) to the plethora of drugs that have nasty side effects or don't work as well as the advertising suggests. This demand to be beyond criticism is all part of the corporatisation of society and its in the process of stopping. Chiros need to get with the programme, get down off their pedestals and defend their practiose or get into another line of business.

So much for small is beautiful

A couple of years ago Australia's Howard government had Treasurer Peter Costello out there "warning" that if demographic trends continued, Australia's population would halve by natural attrition by 2050 and the people should make a point of having three kids, "one for mum, one for dad and one for the country".

Apart from sounding creepily like other totalitarian governments of the past, and ignoring the reality that mum and dad had to work every hour available just to put a roof over their heads with no suggestion that "the country" would be practically supportive (state supported child care being yet another anathema to these right wingers) the reality of Australia already being grossly overpopulated never hit the agenda.

Now the Japanese are doing the same. Tired workers urged to go home and multiply.

JAPAN'S workers are being urged to switch off their laptops, go home early and use what little energy they have left on procreation, in an attempt to avert demographic disaster.

The drive to persuade employers that their staff would be better off at home than staying late at the office comes as health experts warn many couples are simply too tired to have sex. A survey of married couples under 50 found that more than a third had not had sex in the previous month. A study by Durex found the average couple has sex 45 times a year, less than half the global average of 103 times.

Japan's birth rate of 1.34 is among the lowest in the world and falls well short of the 2.07 children needed to keep the population stable.

If it persists, demographers say, the population will drop from its peak of 127.7 million in 2006 to 95 million by 2050.

If we are to have a sustainable tenancy on this planet, we are all going to have to face the facts that we cannot sustain our current consumption of finite resources and destruction of renewable ones. It makes perfect sense for island nations, especially those with high consumption patterns, to lead the way in reducing population and building the economic models that enable us to deal with those falling populations.

It wont be easy, especially for those indoctrinated into the yeast culture of breed or die. But unless we find new ways to deal with our impact on the planet, we are pretty close to the planet starting to impact on us.

Australia, NZ, Japan, all have the golden opportunity, what's the bet we throw it away in the isnane chase to have the most toys at the end?

Just stop for half an hour

and listen to this:

Conductor, Benjamin Zander uses the metaphor of the orchestra and a life-time of experience conducting, coaching and teaching musicians to work his magic to overcome barriers to corporate productivity.

I doubt that any corporate has actually been able to absorb and implement his ideas successfully, and his website is pretty ropey at best, but at a personal elvel heb is a great speaker.

Australia Discovers Kohanga Reo

The only sad thing about this story is that it has taken so long to get to a place where New Zealand has been for 25 years: School happens on model for indigenous learning.

A SYDNEY private school believes it has struck pedagogical gold with an innovative solution to educating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children.

Gawura, a small, indigenous primary school within a school at St Andrew's Cathedral School, has had stunning success in its first six months, with two students scoring 100 per cent in their end of year maths examinations and results for all students improving by at least 30 per cent, the headmaster, Philip Heath, says.

The foundation class of seven has ballooned to 21, with a full class of 25 enrolled for next year.

Gawura students study a tailor-made syllabus in a dedicated room on the ninth floor of the Anglican school in the centre of the city, joining mainstream students for afternoon classes, breaks, sport, chapel and other activities.

The key to it is this.

They learn Aboriginal languages and culture and do intensive maths and English lessons to counter worrying statistics that put numeracy rates among indigenous children in year 7 at 30 per cent below the NSW average, and reading rates at 17 per cent below the average.

They are doing it this way because they tried to set up an exclusively Aboriginal school and met strong objections on the grounds of segregation. Interestingly, we have long segregated by gender, to the advantage of girls, but race is still too touchy a subject and lets face it, nobody on the wrong side of the fence trusts the establishment, with good reason.

Except in New Zealand, where a friend of mine Kara Puketapu, and his wife jean set up the first Kohanga Reo back in 1982 to do one thing; preserve the Maori language in a total immersion environment before the community lost all the Kaumatua who had spoken Te Reo all their lives.

The language nests for kindergarten kids grew into Kura Kaupapa Maori where the process was continued into primary school and then into secondary schools where students perform in the normal range for all NZ kids.

The key was critical for every single educational intervention, you have to start where the student is. In the case of Maori kids, and even more for Australian Aboriginal kids, that can be a deeply disadvantaged, hostile, overwhelmed place where your family and community culture is treated as irrelevant and moribund at  worst and at best as a tourist commodity.

I wish them luck, their job is many times harder than Maori because their language and culture is so much more fragmentary and fragmented, at least Maori had a common language to use as the basis for their programme.

I also hope they take the time to hop the Tasman and learn some lessons about how to go on from here, this stuff is too important to be undermined by "not invented here" syndrome.