Context: Bosses putting a ‘digital leash’ on remote workers could be crossing a privacy line I wonder if it would be all that difficult to demonstrate that each extra technical and surveillance-oriented component in a system of management and governance is actually more of a burden and cost than is the uncertainty invoked by remote […]
Context: Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? The brilliant systems (i.e. organisational, operational) theorist Russ Ackoff once framed an uncannily similar issue along the lines that our organisational systems are in general exquisitely well-structured to continue producing precisely the wrong kind of thing. We might constructively decompose the problem into one not dissimilar […]
Monocultural or ideological hegemony in organisational leadership is a recipe for disaster. As a general observation, when organisational systems fall into overtly biased configurations and power symmetries, it is rarely a consequence of willful misdirection. From the interior surface of a half-mirrored labyrinth of self-validating justification and institutional logic, this kind of monocultural percolation may […]
Context: Why venture capital doesn’t build the things we really need The aesthetics of commercial self-interest and valourisation of accelerated profit making (and taking) detached itself some time ago – and in many if not most instances – from the functional utility of providing what is actually needed. The selection mechanisms in place work extremely […]
Work into refining the viability of octopus farming continues apace. I doubt that there is any other animal on Earth the farming of which would so closely resemble the cultivation of extraterrestrial life. Reflections on a big(ger) picture: In what ways does accelerated aquaculture only continue to generate the problems which have led to the […]
Cyber security is a fascinating and rapidly evolving problem-space. What possible solutions exist in regards to coordinated governance and oversight? If a centralised software and hardware development methodology iss used – compliance to formal standards could be assured but the (logically and materially inevitable) emergence of vulnerability and exploit would mean that this systemic coherence […]
Questions could (and should) be asked of the extent to which systems, architectures, models and programs can be (and are) produced for the primary self-interest of the organisations which provide those solutions. Bureaucracies and (all of) their diverse hierarchical predecessors, for instance, are classically-versed in the dark arts of creating systems and mechanisms that generate […]
Good fortune or success may be more often a matter of statistical probability than of human intention or intervention.
As the frequency of technological change accelerates, the amplitude and range of uncertainty is concurrently amplified.
It is a gargantuan investment and leap of faith to assert, predict or seek to influence technological trajectories over a time scale of centuries.
The skills-sets required to obtain seniority are so often decoupled from those skills-sets actually required to perform professionally at that level.
The inelegant facts of a manager’s burden can not be denied…
