Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web
The Hollow Men II: Some reflections on Westminster and Whitehall dysfunction | Dominic Cummings’s Blog
Politics is dominated by discussion of ‘strategy’ and ‘priorities’, but few know how to think strategically (or even what ‘strategy’ is) or how to make and stick to priorities. Misunderstanding of strategy, and the proliferation of rhetoric masquerading as strategy, causes huge problems, including with national leaderships’ attempts to define ‘national strategy’.
This is a huge gap in Whitehall but the system has gone so wrong few even realise the gap is there and those who do cannot do anything about it.
Who is nudging whom? | The Enlightened Economist
What is ‘better’? Is it the (largely) white, male, middle class experts who work in the policy world? What will the wider consequences be of adopting nudges that get ordinary people to pay more income tax and cheat less on benefits, without looking for nudges that get bankers to pay themselves lower bonuses or extract more corporate tax revenues from big companies?
Mobile Is Eating the World | Andreessen Horowitz
There is no point in drawing a distinction between the future of technology and the future of mobile. They are the same. In other words, technology is now outgrowing the tech industry.
Managing Complexity: The Battle Between Emergence And Entropy
And here is the underlying conceptual point. The more open the organisation is to external sources of energy, the easier it is to harness the forces of emergence rather than entropy. What does this mean in practice? Things like refreshing your management team with outside hires, circulating employees, making people explicitly accountable to external stakeholders, collaborating with suppliers and partners, and conducting experiments in “open innovation”.
7 things you (workplace folk) should know about the #futureofwork – #wtrends14 | Perfect Path
We’ll work anywhere. We recognise that no environment will ever be perfect, but we can make the most of any space that comes along. Stop worrying about making somewhere that fits every need – keep it simple and we’ll adapt. But not necessarily the same “anywhere” everyday There is no single space or form of space in which people can best work.
How Does Google Handle IT for Its Workers? Ask CIO Ben Fried – WSJ – WSJ
We have this enormous and unique opportunity to set the culture of the companies we are within, with technology.
I remember years ago, when I joined Google, I looked at the personal technology that Google gave to its people. Google allowed people to use whatever they thought was relevant to them, when everyone else gave people a black laptop and a BlackBerry and said, “You are going to do it our way.”
I think that CIOs need to understand the cultural thing—they define the culture of their company by the technology they give to their employees.
How to influence policy? An interview with Owen Barder of the Center for Global Development – 80,000 Hours
I do think the transparency of government is an important issue. It just makes it much harder to make bad decisions if the analysis that underpins all those decisions is public. It becomes politically unsustainable to do stupid things.
What’s Wrong with Twitter’s Latest Experiment with Broadcasting Favorites — The Message — Medium
In tech platforms, when our signaling ability is limited to technical affordances, we adopt existing tools and transform them into social signals. Things that start off as utilities, or only “technical” affordances, soon acquire social meaning. In Twitter, this is true for both block and favorite (but not mute because it is not visible — hence it is not a signal to the other party. A signal, by definition, is visible).
Government doesn’t get complexity
Government investigations of significant IT failures do not seem to recognise the effects of complexity. Usually, problems are laid at the door of uncertain requirements, poor governance or inadequate management skills. Of course there have been straightforward programmes that have failed for these reasons but, where complexity applies, blaming these alone – and not getting to the root cause – will perpetuate failure. The problem is not in plans, people or methods – it’s in mindset. Trying to build things that really need to be grown just won’t work – no matter how they are managed.