A Networked World

#NetHui and Digital Literacy

At last week's excellent NetHui, run by Internet NZ, I was asked to plug in 5 minutes worth on Digital Literacy. As usual, I tried to give it a bit of a spin. (starts at 41.12 and runs 6 minutes - the cut [poor sync] is Download Nethui_digital-literacy)

Here's the full version that probably takes a bit more than 5 minutes.

As one of the other presenters suggested, Digital Literacy means different things to different people and I want to pick up on some points raised by Mike Dickison and maybe be push them out a little, perhaps just shove them off the cliff.

For me digital literacy includes knowing when to take one of these and stick it in your mouth.

The reason for this is simple; in Miami Beach on Memorial Day this year, a bunch of out-of-control cops pumped over 100 shots into a private car in a public place, killing an unarmed black man inside (now there's a surprise) and wounded some bystanders.

A young man called Narces Benoit saw what was happening and whipped out his cellphone to record the scene. One of the cops noticed what he was doing, broke off his shooting gallery duties and came charging at Benoit, waving his gun and screaming at him to get out of his car and hand over the cellphone, which he did.

The cop them smashed the cellphone under his boot and arrested Benoit. Nevertheless, within a few hours, the video of the event was going viral on Youtube because, when he saw the cop rushing at him, Benoit had the presence of mind to take out of the phone his digital media storage card and put it in his mouth.

The difference between Benoit and the cop is what I call Digital Literacy.

A few months ago in the Australian Navy, a female recruit was having a sexual relationship with another recruit. The guy in question thought it would be terribly cool to capture the "action" with his webcam and broadcast it to his mates. She was not happy and complained to her commander about the breach of trust and privacy. He essentially told her not to be a spoilsport and swept the matter under the rug.

The young woman became even less happy and shared her experience on facebook. Within days her commander and his boss and his boss and HIS boss were all publicly on the mat, caps in hand, staring at their shoes and explaining HOW they were going to solve the problem of their appalling leadership.

The difference between the young woman and the Australian Navy is what I call Digital Literacy.

About the same time, footballer Ryan Giggs was having an affair with model Imogen Thomas and when it was discovered he sought the help of the UK Supreme Court which obligingly issued a "super injunction" forbidding the publication of the facts.

Within hours, over 70,000 Twitter users had turned the super injunction into a legal fiction.

The difference between the Supreme Court and Ryan Giggs fan base is what I call Digital Literacy.

And all over the Middle east and North Africa this year, people have risen up, trying to throw off a generation of oppression, corruption and violence against them. Now we have had revolutions for a long time, but in the past they have needed a core of intellectual, philosophical and operational leadership, surrounded by a cadre of activists willing to take the message into the community.

Those roles are now being taken over by the whole community using social media tools. It is that takeover and the loss of the privileged position of leadership that I call Digital Literacy.

In Christchurch's major earthquakes, at risk of their lives and while their buildings and their city crumbled around them people grabbed their cellphones and videoed the event as a way to record their own experience to share with others and possibly to provide evidence of what happened to them if they didn't make it out.

That too I call Digital Literacy.

Literacy of any kind is not just being able to read and write the words, it is understanding the meaning, the significance and the context of the communication, then knowing how to manipulate them.

The best example I can think of is the advent of film to entertainment. The first films were little more than stage plays with a camera placed in front of them to record the action. But it wasn't long before we saw the appearance of film literacy, using the unique language of the cinema to tell the story in its own way. The language includes backgorund music, closeups, tracking and pan shots, framing and the million other ways to use a camera that are not available to stage plays.

So we cannot expect that Digital Literacy will look in any but the most superficial ways, like hard copy literacy. In fact, by my definition Digital Literacy is happening all around us, all the time, with increasing frequency.

For 20 years we have talked about the ICT Revolution, blithely ignoring the fact that all revolutions break stuff, and the thing they break first and most irreparably, is the status quo, to expect the revolutionaries to restore the powers of the old guard is nonsense.

Digital Literacy does not consist in being able to write a CV in a word processor nor manage our accounts with a spreadsheet, they are far too often, a way for the old guard to try and force the revolution into a mould with which they feel comfortable.

Our problem is that digital illiteracy is rife in Government, business, education, health, justice and the NFP sectior, very often among those who are pushing hardest for solutions.

The real digital literacy challenge that we have is to shift the old guard into actual digital literacy so that our organisations, which have real, and vital, work to do, can engage with, communicate with, work with an increasingly digitally literate community; so that they can swim in that literacy instead of drowning in it as they are doing right now.

MY problem is that I   have no idea how the hell we are going to do that.

Digital Literacy does not consist in being able to write a CV in a word processor nor manage our accounts with a spreadsheet, they are far too oftten, a way for the old guard to try and force the revolution into a mould with which they feel comfortable.

The damage done by Wikileaks

I'm sure that it comes as absolutely no surprise to any diplomat nor their employing government, that their counterparts from other nations routinely lie to them about pretty much everything. Nor should it come as a shock that some of their counterparts think of them as idiots or worse.

A diplomat is someone who lies professionally for his country and any diplomat not fully aware of that is a liability and should be fired forthwith.

So it is unlikely that the Wikileaks data dump provides anything more than confirmation of normal suspicions and, being diplomats, these people will have no trouble whatever continuing both to deal with, and lie to, each other with unruffled feathers for many years to come, their personal flutterings soothed by regular application of canapes and booze.

On the other hand, what the leaks can very much damage is the credibility and safety of governments at the hands of their employers, viz, us.

While most of us have a default position that our masters, elected and otherwise, treat us and our aspirations and needs with dismissal when it is not outright contempt, it is another thing altogether to discover how regularly and egregiously they betray our interests in the pursuit of their rarefied and esoteric goals in the Great Game.

Wikileaks has the mission of fleshing out and adding fine detail to those betrayals and in doing so they undermine the pretenses and obfuscations and credibility, the authority of nation states in relation to their own people.

THAT is why the bastards are screaming in moral panic; that is why they are plotting the destruction of the torchlight shone straight into their corrupted hearts.

That is why we all have a duty to support Wikileaks, because it has the potential, at last, and in fact, to keep the bastards honest.

Update:  What is the betting that, if sweden is able to have Julian Assange extradited, the rape case will be dropped but he will be held because there is an application from the US for his extradition to their jurisdiction? I'm going with about 80%.

Plus, after spending so many uyears in a very happy association with sweden and its reputation for openness, I'm bloody horrified by their role in this.

Mega

Lomania

The sooner this guy self destructs, the better for us all. Tamaki's 700 'sons' swear oath of loyalty

The leader of Destiny Church, Brian Tamaki, who not long ago anointed himself bishop of the church he founded, has now proclaimed himself the church's "spiritual father" and designated the male members of the church as "spiritual sons".

At a special service during the church's annual conference in Auckland at the weekend, about 700 male members of the church swore a "covenant oath" of loyalty and obedience to Mr Tamaki and were given a "covenant ring" to wear on their right hands.

A church document describes the covenant as "a solemn oath of commitment that is binding, enduring and unbreakable. You are bound to covenant ... Covenant is an irrevocable, undissolvable oath of commitment".

There's another word for that kind of relationship; slavery. And if these 700 "sons" don't wake up to their "father's" serious ego problem, they will become his shock troops next.

There's a time to stop this dangerous crap, and it is now, before it gets out of hand. He has feet of clay like the rest of us, someone needs to dig them up pronto, although he is as cunning as a fox, he already has the antidote in their veins.

"You will hear all sorts of statements and opinions but you must be
prepared to ignore them and consistently hold him in the same high
regard no matter what you hear."

Somewhat surprisingly, the protocol says that Mr Tamaki is human and does make mistakes.

However, the sons must "be prepared to defend against any problems arising out of his mistakes.

A
loyal man is supposed to 'cushion' the effect of a mistake on Bishop
and to protect him. NEVER intentionally expose his weakness."

Now, we know that he knows that there is something under the covers. All that matters is what that something is.

Towards the new normal

Whenever I'm with Steve barnett, he's usually drinking and I'm the designated driver. Mostly because he and my wife are members of a wine club and when they go on high-class pub crawls (or winery tours) and I of the cardboard palate drive the people mover. When he talks about business he reminds me a lot of Johnnie Moore and Rob Paterson; and me. Learn fast: things aren’t (ever) returning to “normal”.

National Bank (NZ) Chief Economist Cameron Bagrey... confessed he’s embarrassed that his profession’s consistently got it wrong: failed to predict the current recession and doesn’t have a clue how to fix.

He says only one thing’s for certain: we can’t go back to the way it was. Anyone who thinks that things will return to “normal” is stupid. The policy makers are determined it won’t; determined we figure out new ways to do, manage and teach business and the economy. Previous answers are wrong.

[...] I seriously doubt NZ Business Education can change from its prescriptive right-answer model any time soon, hobbled as it is by administrators and their anti-professional, centralised rules and controls, and know-no-better student and employer market.

I’m sceptical too that NZ business managers can abandon their manager-knows-best, right-answer approach any time soon: go deeper than recite the superficial lists of “secrets” peddled in popular business management literature.

Actually, if Steve thinks its only NZ managers, he's dreaming. The managerial class is global, its largely responsible for the problem and will cling to its paycheque till the collapsing businesses they parasitise crumble in their hands.

[...] Here’s the guts: (really) involve everyone; confess ignorance (starting at the top); spend time together generating a long term goal that everyone’s passionate about but not sure how to achieve; get very clear on the medium term strategy and short term goals that stand to take you towards the long term; openly generate and agree clear individual and collective accountabilities in achieving the change; openly measure progress to keep individuals and groups (at all levels) openly accountable for their contribution; continually review and revise in the light of individual and collective experience; take every opportunity to talk about the long term goal and the actual action and progress towards it.

I think he's optimistic here.

In the new normal, we have so little idea of what will work that the idea of goals and strategies may be a waste of time as well. As our energy and financial resources are decimated we will gain new appreciations of those resources that are left.

I think there might be some new parameters that will have more power in the future.

• We will demand much higher value returns for any of those irrecoverable resources that we expend, especially if we hand them to someone else.
  
• We will increasingly trade time for goods and services. Where we have invested a lot througout my lifetime in "saving time" we will now "spend" or invest, that time ratrher than use a resource like energy.
• Things will slow down in some areas such as travel and material flows
• Information shipping will speed up as we reduce even further the documentary exchanges and rely more on electronics (saving paper, energy etc)
• Discretionary spending will evaporate and the industries based on them will disappear. If we spend more time waiting, travelling or producing things we will have less liesure time and less money to spend in it.
• Energy and material flows at a personal, community and business level will become a critical part if every economic model and activity.
• The idea of waste will disappear, we will be much more conscious that we can't 'afford" it any more. The idea that we should pay for packaging, then pay to have it taken away and pay again in opportunity costs merely to have a wrapper will become laughable, if not criminal
• Product design, durability, ease of use and fitness for purpose will become absolute criteria for everything
• We will all need to try many, small actions that may or may not succeed. We will need to be deadly honest about the outcomes and rethink those that fail while iterating those that seem to succeed.
• We will need to acknowledge that, at a time of paradigm shift, nothing will be reliable for quite a long time; what worked yesterday may not work again tomorrow. That is why small, iterative actions will be the only safe ones, there will be no more going large.
  
• Your turn. What other geenral rules do you think might fit here and does this make any sense at all?

I'm planning some renovations to my house - we have been since we moved in 2 years ago - and the other night I was using Google Sketchup (a brilliant bit of software) to turn the 2D plan into a 3D model so we could try stuff out.

I put in a work bench for building things and a wet area for wine making and a pot still for recovering essential oils from the flowers and herbs and plenty of space for creating stuff and storing it and for tools and consumables like glues and screws and so forth.

And then I stood back and realised that I am making not just a workshop a small artisanal factory that would fit in the 19th century or earlier. I'm doing it because it is the logical outcome of thinking about local production andtrying to close the energy and material flow loops as tightly as possible.

When i build stuff, I use screws not nails so that everything can be dismantled and used again in something else. More rules.

• Low energy dismantle-ability
• Repurposing all manner of manufactures
  
• Building things that can be applied to new uses
• Shared spaces, shared tools, shared skills
  

What else?

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.

Expertise and analysis

This in Marketwatch today. U.S. job losses accelerate to 263,000 in September

Nonfarm payrolls fell by a greater-than-expected 263,000 in September, the Labor Department reported. It marked the 21st consecutive month of job losses.

None of that is a surprise to anyone paying attention to what is happening in the world but something that troubles me is beautifully shown in the attached graphic.

The orange marker is what the experts and analysts agreed would be the number. But it was wrong, not just a bit wrong, but badly wrong. Its been happening all over the map; the only thing that experts these days appear to agree on is something that is wrong. How come they are still experts? I'm a bunny, I dropped out of University in my first year but not only did I see all this coming, I took actions to prepare for it and I now work on the assumption that my analysis of the situation is pretty good - supported, led, guided etc by other people for sure, but people I have chosen because they appear to have a realistic understanding of the world, ie, my analysis of their performance is also good. So I have to wonder what the hell these experts are looking at and how they are able to reach their inevitably erroneous conclusions. And when it comes to analysts, what in hell are they, in fact, analysing, and what kind of analytical tools are they using on these data?

And above all, why don't they seem able to learn that what they are doing is SNAFU? seems to me that the only part of their title that is valid is the anal part, they seem to be pulling a lot of their work from there.

The only answer that I can come up with is corruption. There's almost certainly some of the "if you give me the words I want I'll pay you lots of money" kind of corruption, but I think it goes further. I think we have reached the point of "this file cannot be opened because it is corrupted". Somewhere deep in the workings of our system, things are not right, the DNA appears to have been corrupted, mutated into a form that may not be compatible with survival. Convince me I'm wrong

Updated responding to Brane and Robin below

Pretty much agreed with both of you.

It seems to me there has been a marriage (make that a prostitution) between mathematics and magic called economics.

But what really gets me is that we are all dealing with pretty much the same data and drawing such hugely divergent conclusions. Which means that there is something seriously wrong with the psychological algorithms governing their thinking.

You and I look at the entrails of a dead chicken and we see entrails, and maybe dinner, they see things that make their owners happy.

There is a market for economic theories and those that feed the preferences and predilections of those already in power will get the attention, regardless of how wrong they may be.

Or to use the infamous words of Tony Blair and co, they "fit the facts around the policy"

Unfortunately, this works pretty well for a long time (the universe appears to be very tolerant of stupidity and corruption) right up till the moment when it fails completely.

No doubt the Roman divines managed to read endless success for their owners until the barbarians smashed down the gates of Rome. If only those smashing our gates were no more than a more successful tribe. They are not, we have pushed our habitat to its limits and now we are hard up against the laws of physics and genuine mathematics.

BTW, I tried to post this in the comments field and got the response "We're sorry we cannot accept this data. Anyone else experienced that?

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.

Elizabeth Farrely gets it spot on

Once in a while you get a glimpse of actual good sense, a small slice of the truth shines through, even the corporate media. Like this: Elizabeth Farrelly

The ridge on the Rhodesian ridgeback is a mild form of spina bifida, but club rules make it "the escutcheon of the breed," instructing, further, "all ridgeless puppies shall be culled." This has softened, since the film was made, to mere prepubescent desexing, but still actively selects for genetic disease, which is no less stupid.

And it was this, I finally figured, that kept recalling the NSW Right.

Our repeated election of politicians we know to be defective similarly selects, over the years, for perfidy, cronyism and prioritisation of tribal ritual over public good.

The war in Afghanistan has made clear that democracy and tribalism don't mix. Yet here in NSW we're becoming more tribal by the moment.

Neo-tribalism, a back-to-nature movement that draws on Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, idealises the tribe as open, egalitarian and classless - much as we see Australia. But tribalism has the opposite effect, constructing from rumour, superstition, xenophobia and big-man culture a fear-based hierarchy in which the few always dominate the many.

The fallacy that tribes formed on ethnic, familial, racial or corporate loyalties can coexist within a functioning democracy is multiculturalism's fatal flaw.

We all belong to tribes. Neighbourhoods, footy teams, churches, Facebook groups, families. But a healthy democracy, as John Rawls noted, requires each of us to think and vote abstractly, as if we had no vested interest in the outcome. Tribes that - like the NSW Right - demand that their members prioritise group values over those of the general populace are deeply, dangerously anti-democratic.

This is how we get John Robertson, who once promised to "put D9s and chainsaws through Currawong if I want to" as Minister for the Environment, as well as Climate Change and Energy. It's how Minister Keneally can approve a massive 188-berth marina (half as big again as the proposed Rose Bay marina) at Lake Macquarie, with five-storey residential units on bushland - proposed by Pitt Town developer Keith Johnson ($438,000 to the NSW ALP) and call it "a lively new foreshore precinct." It's how people like Richo get paid $25,000 a month by property developers for government ''access''.

There's no law against Labor MPs filling their offices and departments with spouses, relatives and friends. It's not illegal for the party to cultivate legions of the biddable who play musical chairs between departments, consultancies and ''independent'' panels - then, when the Libs get in, dive underground like mudskippers awaiting rain.

It's not illegal, but it's cosy, nepotistic and wrong. Wrong because it produces a private clubby atmosphere where party and personal interests coincide so emphatically as to obscure all else. Wrong because it generates tentacles of power that pervade and distort organisations. And wrong because it selects for deformity, so it's those with strong, healthy values, like those ridgeless ridgeback puppies, who get culled.

In 'Collapse', Jared Diamond talks about how whole societies 'choose" to fail, but, while detailing the sequence and the consequences, he doesn't actually suggest the mechanism by which those choices are made.

This is it, the mechanism, selection for deformity. The other factor is the power law, once certain types have reached a sufficient level of penetration in a system, and it doesn't matter what that type is but nothing is more certain than that it will, like Windows or VHS or MP3, once it passes that threshold, power laws guarantee its domination, even if an objective evaluation would demonstrate the catastrophic effects it would produce.

The most important lesson we have to learn is how to break inherently suicidal power structures. I don't see a lot of evidence of that, do you?

Servants and Masters in NZ

A perfect example of the power and effectiveness of institutional culture.
CYF staff told: you're minister's servants - National - NZ Herald News

Child Youth and Family staff at a regional office have been told they are Social Development Minister Paula Bennett's servants who should not trouble their master with concerns about their work.

In an email dated August 13, supplied to NZPA by Labour Party deputy leader Annette King, Kaitaia CYF staff were told to show respect to the minister when she visited the next day.

"It is not appropriate for staff to pour their hearts and souls out to the minister," a manager wrote. "This is a formal visit and she is not your 'friend'. It's a bit like the relationship between a servant and a master, ie the servant knows their place. She should not be presented with the woes of the office, or lack of resources, or anything like that."

However, the email said it was okay to state there were challenges that could be managed.

The minister claims that she is disappointed in the manager and that she very much wants to hear what the staff has to say etc etc etc.

But the institutional culture is working perfectly.

Successful underlings always know what the boss wants and seek to provide it. Managers are especially sensitive to the actual agendas and desires of their bosses. The messages are always in code and this manager's failure was not that they know perfectly well what the minister actually wants, the failure was that they made it explicit and then the bloody fool put it in writing.

Paula Bennett has made a speciality of stepping in it and then walking it across the shag pile. This is just another example of what is coming down from the top.

The mother of invention

Johnnie continues to look at how innovation happens and gently nudges necessity in a couple of quotes.
Johnnie Moore's Weblog: Innovation, disruption, control etc

Bob Geldof made a similar point at a NESTA bash a few months back, where he said innovation happens naturally in response to strong need, linking Ireland's dire poverty to its subsequent reputation for innovation.

In The Future Eaters, however, Tim Flannery finds the delta of that proposition.

"When the first reports of the Tasmanian Aborigines reached Europe they created intense interest. Europeans thought that their simple tool kit and lifestyle meant that they were a very primitive people. For a very long time after, it was widely believed that these apparently truly primitive people had survived in their remote corner of the world because they had not had to compete with more advanced races.

"The French savants of the Baudin Expedition, who observed the Tasmanians in 1802, were amazed that even though the Tasmanians lived in an often bitterly cold climate, they lacked clothing. Extraordinarily, they also lacked the ability to make fire. Mannalargenna, one of the last of the Tasmanian Aborigines to live a traditional life, told of what would happen if a group's fire was extinguished. He said that people had no alternative but to eat raw meat while they walked in search of another tribe. Significantly, one of the universal laws among the Tasmanians was that fire must be given whenever requested, even if the asker was a traditional enemy who would be fought after the gift had been given.

"The French were also struck by the fact that the Tasmanians did not eat fish, even though they were abundant in Tasmania's coastal waters. Francois Peron records that when members of the Baudin Expedition offered some fish which they had caught, the Tasmanians expressed amazement and horror. This was not an isolated instance, for earlier, in 1777, members of Cook's third expedition recorded that Tasmanians reacted with horror or ran away when fish were offered to them.

"There are some other quite extraordinary features of Tasmanian culture. The Tasmanians, for example, had no hafted implements (such as axes), no implements made of bone, no boomerangs or spear throwers, no dingos and no microlithic stone tools. Indeed, their entire tool kit seems to have consisted of about two dozen kinds of objects."

"It is easy to see how the limited material culture of the Tasmanians could seduce the savants of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries into classifying the Tasmanians as the world's most primitive people. Not surprisingly, the anatomists of the day had an almost insatiable demand for corpses. Through dissection, they hoped to find additional evidence supporting the idea that the Tasmanians were primitive; maybe even a kind of living, missing link. Needless to say, these anatomical studies yielded no such evidence."

"Until very recently, many people found no reason to doubt the conclusions of nineteenth century science concerning the Tasmanians. But detailed archeological research, much undertaken only in the last few decades, has now shown conclusively that there was nothing primitive about the Tasmanians at all. They were, instead, a highly specialized offshoot of the Australian Aborigines, whose culture evolved under the extraordinary constraints that 10,000 years of solitude would place on any small band of humans.

"The most striking evidence concerning the evolution of the culture of the Tasmanians has come from the study of campsites occupied over the last 7,000 years. Deposits that date to 7,000 years ago or more are full of bone tools, including awls, reamers and needles. There seems to be little doubt that these implements were used for sewing, probably to make skin cloaks similar to those used by the Aborigines of southern Australia right up until the nineteenth century.

"The variety of bone tools found in Tasmanian middens dwindles with time, until eventually, about 3,500 years ago, the last of them disappear from the archaeological record. This suggests that stitched clothing was lost from the material culture of the Tasmanians at about this time.

"Interestingly, the older archaeological sites show that fish--although despised as a food in historic times--once formed an important part of the Tasmanians' diet. Evidence from some sites suggests that fish made up about 10 percent of their diet in the past. . . . Then suddenly, about 3,500 years ago, the remains of fish cease to appear in refuse dumps."

"The most plausible explanation [for the simplification of the material culture of the Tasmanians] seems to lie in the unique isolation and small population size of the Tasmanians. The theory goes something like this. A small group of people are less likely to come up with technological innovations than a larger group. If the group is completely isolated, then new ideas cannot reach it. Because of this, innovation in material culture is slowed. Because the population is small, activities and knowledge may be lost simple through the early death of skilled people before they can pass their skills to the next generation.

"Losses such as that of clothing and the ability to make fire may have resulted from rare, early deaths occurring over a long period of time. The 5,000 Tasmanians lived scattered in small groups. It may be that only one or two people in any one group had all the skills necessary to make bone needles and prepare skins. Over 12,000 years there is a high chance that the few such specialists in any one area would, at some stage, die before they could pass their skills on. Repeated chance events like this might have led to the loss of many skills that require specialized knowledge.

"If the population is small enough, there may be strong evolutionary pressure to dispense with high-risk activities. This is because risks that are acceptable for larger populations can threaten the very survival of smaller ones. The loss of fish from the Tasmanian diet may be an example of a high-risk activity that is strongly selected against and thus lost, in small populations."

"Eating fish can be a risky business, because occasionally a dinoflagellate bloom known as a 'red tide' can lead to mass poisonings. The simultaneous death of hundreds of people in a large human population is a great personal tragedy, but it poses no threat to the survival of that society because the statistical chance of losing all members of one age group or sex is tiny. Such a poisoning in a small population, however, can be a disaster for the entire group. This is because, through chance, it may kill a significant proportion of the women of child-bearing age, or all of the older and more knowledgeable individuals. In order to avoid such catastrophic events, extreme conservatism may be selected for in small societies. This is because in evolutionary terms it may be better to forego the benefit gained from eating such 'dangerous' food as fish, rather than risk an extremely rare but catastrophic poisoning event."

Innovation has a high risk of failure, failure is only acceptable when there is a comfortable distance between that failure and death by starvation. In other words, comfort and wealth are (up to a point) necessary to enable innovation. If I am confident in being able to eat tomorrow, and for the foreseeable future, and to deal with most minor medical issues that might arise, I will be prepared to try new foods, new crops, new recipes and to accept their failures as a learning.

If I live on the edge of survival, I will be MUCH less likely to try new things.

That will be compounded in a culture where personal, individual survival is the highest good. In those cultures where personal sacrifice may be occasionally necessary to ensure the survival of the community (and in some cases like Inuit and Australian Aboriginals or Tikopians where recognition of the end of your value to the community leads to your own death) more experimentation may be possible.

As a slave-owning culture we have been isolated from those kinds of necessities and very possibly lost our ability to recover them in time, but the payoff has been the freedom to innovate.

That our innovations are now choking us speaks volumes for the care we have taken to weed out those innovations that promote selection for failure.

BTW, I'm not being rhetorical about the slave-owning, I keep 60 horses under the bonnet of my car, dishwashing and clothes-washing slaves in my kitchen and laundry, carpentry slaves in my basement, food preservation slaves as well. Not to mention all the food growing, processing and haulage slaves that bring me goodies from round the world.

And what do I do with all this wealth and comfort? Build better iPods so I can listen to music or demand to watch movies on my mobile.