complexity | The Fourth Revolution Blog

How Failure is where Success Likes to Hide in Plain Sight

I like very much that quote: “Failure is where success likes to hide in plain sight. Everything you want out of life is in that huge, bubbling vat of failure. The trick is to get the good stuff out” writes Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) in the excellent book ‘How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life‘.

If we try new things and get out of our comfort zone we’ll be confronted by failure more than once. It is tough psychologically and practically to overcome failure. Still we always need to dig further to discover what is worth saving, or what nugget of success lies there in the rubbles.

Scott Adams concludes, “Failure always brings something valuable with it. I don’t let it leave until I extract that value.”. Do you have the discipline to do that?

Why You Should Have a Success System Rather Than Success Goals

Scott Adams in the excellent book ‘How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life‘ is strongly against setting goals. He advocates rather develop a system for success and stick to it – and be ready to capture opportunities when they pop up at the right time.

The main reason according to him is the conservation of personal energy: “Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction”

I find this viewpoint very interesting and challenging. Establishing a system that works consistently and reliably allows to avoid focusing on challenging goals that might never be reached, and allows to focus on a daily routine that will bear fruit. Hence for 2016 I have decided to focus my effort more on setting up a system than setting goals. And you?

Why We Should be Particularly Wary of Unanimous Situations

Unanimous opinions and decisions should be looked upon suspiciously, because they might reveal common cause of mistake. “Unanimity is often assumed to be reliable. However, it turns out that the probability of a large number of people all agreeing is small, so our confidence in unanimity is ill-founded. This ‘paradox of unanimity’ shows that often we are far less certain than we think.” The idea is developed in this excellent post on phys.org ‘Why too much evidence can be a bad thing‘.

“Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect on trial was unanimously found guilty by all judges, then the suspect was acquitted. This reasoning sounds counterintuitive, but the legislators of the time had noticed that unanimous agreement often indicates the presence of systemic error in the judicial process, even if the exact nature of the error is yet to be discovered. They intuitively reasoned that when something seems too good to be true, most likely a mistake was made.”

In any case the paper shows that when results of a process or experiment are too consistent to be true we should search for a common cause that might explain this consistency. An example in the paper is particularly vivid: “Police in Europe found the same female DNA in about 15 crime scenes across France, Germany, and Austria. This mysterious killer was dubbed the Phantom of Heilbronn and the police never found her. The DNA evidence was consistent and overwhelming, yet it was wrong. It turned out to be a systemic error. The cotton swabs used to collect the DNA samples were accidentally contaminated, by the same lady, in the factory that made the swabs.”

So the next time that you are faced with an overwhelming unanimity, look further for a possible cause that have nothing to do with what is being decided or sought. It might save the day!

How Overprotecting from Different Points of View is a Moral Hazard

There is a bit of a controversy in the US at the moment about excessive coddling (protection) of college students. Basically in some colleges, many issues can’t be discussed any more or taught because of the potential to offend some students. This created astonishing concepts such as ‘micro-agressions’ (move or words people feel aggressive) or ‘trigger warnings’ (the need to announce in advance that the subject or the words that will be used might offend, giving the opportunity to retreat in a safe space).

This has come to a point where President Obama had to comment: “I’ve heard some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal towards women. I gotta tell you, I don’t agree with that either. I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view. I think you should be able to — anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with ‘em. But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, “You can’t come because I’m too sensitive to hear what you have to say.” That’s not the way we learn either.”

And more: “The purpose of college is not just … to transmit skills,” he said. “It’s also to widen your horizons, to make you a better citizen, to help you to evaluate information, to help you make your way through the world, to help you be more creative.”

What is the future of these students that can’t face certain issues and want to protect themselves from anything they might feel offensive? How are they going to manage being in the world? We can be sure they won’t move out from their cozy american environment and fear the world around them. This is the root of future US conservatism and protectionism, and dysfunctioning adults.

We all need to learn to face the world however uncomfortable it can be to us to forge character. Let’s not shrink from the nasty stuff surrounding us; let us face them and deal with them. Overprotection from offensive ideas is a moral hazard that needs to be addressed.

How to Identify Quality when Products Become Commodities

Following up on our previous post ‘Why Democratization Creates Commodities‘, let’s dwell on the issue of finding quality products in the midst of the avalanche of available products and data.

Peer ratings are essential in new Collaborative Age to replace the filtering and quality control by institutions.

Of course it has drawbacks (creating trends and popularity which might not be entirely warranted) but not necessarily worse than the personal preference of an editor. The main issue is that while the opinion of an editor might be known, collaborative rating has a somewhat unpredictable outcome that might be influenced (and even possibly manipulated) through early ratings generated by supporters. Still when a domain becomes mature, collaborative rating does become effective and less influenced by initial ratings.

Democratization without a peer rating system won’t work. Both need to develop together. Be suspicious of democratization drives that would not be accompanied by a strong peer rating system!

How Cars Are Nowadays The Most Sophisticated Machines on the Planet

“New high-end cars are among the most sophisticated machines on the planet, containing 100 million or more lines of code. Compare that with about 60 million lines of code in all of Facebook or 50 million in the Large Hadron Collider” – according to the New York Times ‘Complex Car Software Becomes the Weak Spot Under the Hood’.

le-corniaud — Cars were previously a much less complex contraption…

Complexity is there – many different parts with various codes that need to communicate so that everything works. Results can be quite unpredictable. Cheating can even be hidden inside the code, as the recent Volkswagen scandal showed.

The issue of code safety is a tremendous challenge to manufacturers and regulators alike. A strong position would require to remove all code lines that are not used in a particular model, but that is extremely costly as it goes against standardization. At some point it will be difficult to avoid unpredictable behavior of the system if there are various computing centers performing different functions in the car. Today, access to the proprietary code used by automakers is not even granted because of copyright protection. This will certainly evolve, and a framework for guaranteeing a minimum level of code reliability will have to be put in place.

Why the Winners in the IoT Space Will be Those That Will Overcome Security Issues

The Internet of Things (IoT) means that an increasing number of “things” are connected to the internet. It’s coming, and it is going to change the industry.

Hacked_car in ditch — Hacked car in the ditch (Wired)

Read the now well-known story how hackers managed to compromise completely a Jeep Cherokee in Wired. Don’t you find that scary? And that is just the start of the problem as more and more objects get connected.

We can heap up all sorts of security layers, once something is connected to the internet, it will always be possible with sufficient effort to hack it (it needs to be worth the effort of course!). The questions about security, safety and privacy linked to the Internet of Things are substantial, and they have no obvious answer yet. This excellent article in Forbes summarizes the challenges. Now it is clear that for the moment “Connectivity [of things] has outpaced security“.

The winners in the Internet of Things space will be those that implement a comprehensive security approach – like those who won in the area of peer-to-peer online payments (like paypal) were ultimately those who were the best at avoiding fraud. It is about implementing a comprehensive systemic approach to security, and not a device-based approach.

Why There Will be More Conspiracy Theories and Believers

Psychology shows that faced with uncertainty, we always desperately try to recognize patterns and explanations. And the more uncertainty, the more we seek patterns. This explains a lot of conspiracy theories: they are just a way for people to find order in the uncertain.

lots of conspiracy theories after 9/11 — Lots of conspiracy theories after 9/11

Conspiracy theories flourish after each event that appears to be significantly out of sync with the normal: 9/11 attacks, the strange disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 etc. Everything we can’t explain directly, which appears to be weird in the order of things, is susceptible to a conspiracy theory.

Because complexity increases in our world, unexpected major events are also due to happen more frequently, and be even more out of sync with the average. Therefore, we can expect that more conspiracy theories will also come up as people struggle to find sense to what happens to them and the world.

There will be more conspiracy theories and believers because it is so hard to apprehend that complex systems sometimes show behavior significantly out of sync with the normal and average. Before believing in conspiracy, pause for a moment to ask yourself whether it would not just be the normal behavior of our complex world.

How Artificial Intelligence is Already Influencing Our Genes

Artificial Intelligence is already reorganizing humans. The statement developed in this post ‘AI will reorganize the human population‘ by Silver Keskküla struck me. But “it is actually difficult to argue. Surely there are thousands of kids born to couples that found each other on internet dating sites and since often the matching algorithms on those sites are based on machine learning and artificial intelligence, then we effectively have AI involved in the matter of whose DNA gets mixed.”

And this is even when speaking only of “Weak AI” (“computational agents that exhibit problem solving abilities in restricted domains that we typically assume require intelligence“), not even of higher levels of artificial intelligence that we fear might maybe sometime try to overcome humankind.

Thinking about it, since our emotions are increasingly influenced by social networks, which are increasingly monitored and facilitated by Artifical Intelligence, AI does indeed progressively enter our lives, and even our intimate lives.

The rest of the post is a bit of an advert for the author’s new startup, but his idea to influence human migration by proposing easier comparison of different cities globally depending on one’s project is quite amazing.

In any case, let’s realize that AI is already influencing our lives probably more than we currently imagine, on a day-to-day basis.

Why Most of Our Problems are Problems of Perception

“Engineers, medical people, scientific people have an obsession with solving the problem. in reality, when actually once you reach a basic level of wealth in society, most problems are actually problems of perception” – says Rory Sutherland.

Rory Sutherland is a name in the advertisement industry and probably knows better than most the power of the frame of perception in which people are. Changing the frame is often the solution – alas it is also often hard and long to do. That’s a tool that coaches are using though when it comes to helping people overcome challenges or situations where they feel loss of control.

The key of Rory’s point, however, is that scientific, objective, mathematical approaches are certain to fail. It is all in the way people look at issues. Therefore even if it is difficult, effort needs to be made to change the frame of perception rather than to try to persuade using objective arguments. It comes down to effecting deep changes in people, and this needs a lot of help and support.

Is your problem a real issue or only a problem of perception? What about changing your frame of reference?

Hat tip to Valeria Maltoni’s always excellent blog, and the post ‘The Power of Reframing Things‘

Why Systemic Understanding is Required for Deciding on Changes

It is amazing how most people think and act to optimize their little corner without taking into account the entire system they are in.

In my consulting practice I am involved in a number of process changes in organization. The more these organizations have integrated systems and processes, the more delicate any changes are because of the consequences across many disciplines. Still, a lot of people are just trying to optimize their small segment of work, generally trying to remove some stuff they are doing not for their own sake, but for the sake of the organization. It is not the solution!

This is particularly visible in large projects, which generally involve Engineering, Procurement and Construction. These different areas are deeply inter-related, and most people don’t understand that. Changes in one area can have significant consequences in other areas. It takes experienced people that have a systemic understanding to accept or refuse those changes. We can’t let people try to optimize locally. Optimization needs to be global, systemic.

The complexity of our lives increases. We don’t always understand the indirect consequences of our actions. Let’s try to systematically take a systemic view before changing things.

How Improving Risk Management in Infrastructure Projects is Not Enough

Delivering infrastructure projects in a way that delivers the expected benefits is essential for the good utilization of public and private resources. Still, many infrastructure projects do fail, sometimes miserably and publicly, like for example the new Berlin Brandenburg airport. Causes are almost always the same – poor governance, poor management of changes during the project, and poor coordination of contractors and their interfaces.

The new Berlin Brandenburg airport, still empty 4 years after construction finished

An interesting paper by McKinsey proposes as a solution to these failures that the risk management framework around large infrastructure projects should be deeply reviewed. In typical McKinsey style they state “In our view, most overruns are foreseeable and avoidable. Many of the problems we observe are due to a lack of professional, forward-looking risk management“. The paper goes on with good recommendations on how to implement a comprehensive and consistent risk management process throughout the entire project lifecycle.

But is that sufficient? In my view, process-based solutions are only effective if there is no basic governance breakdown. And more often than not, this is the issue, with situations such as:

over-inflated usage expectations, to justify the investment, based on other motivations (political, status within the company, etc.),
under-estimated costs and duration to make the investment more palatable to investors,
under-estimated effort to coordinate the project and poor contractual approaches with contractors
etc.

It happens too often that we are called as consultants to sort out an issue in the mechanistic project execution only to find out that it is the entire project governance that is rotten to the core.

No amount of process will deal with this issue if the system is not ready for candor and self-examination. It is often necessary to take a broader view and address the complexity of decision-making to deal with problems. It’s often tough and we feel like pulling teeth, but that is what needs to be done when things go awry in infrastructure projects.

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