My Digital FootPrint

Syed wrote “Black Box Thinking” and “Rebel Ideas” is a sequel or the second part in a three-part series. There is more to come.  He builds on many of the original ideas and adds great new content and concepts.  Fabulous book and worth spending 15 hours with. The core concept is that other than a very few humans, Einstein, Scroties, Lovelace, are we able to create either a new idea or an entire idea.  Diverse thinking is actually required.  Diversity of thought is that you bring in different experiences, perspectives, values and skills - and in doing so you will expand the possible and probable.  The link to this for me is that good governance requires a diversity of thinking.  He thankfully deals with strong leadership and overpowering processes to be clear that this means that you get a diverse possibility but a single person outcome. Strong, as in domineering leadership does not support diverse outcomes.  Strong, as in servant leadership d...

It is all about averages.  If you have a single dimension data set, say height, with a large data set, it is probable that one user will be the average of the entire set. In a two-dimensional data set, height and weight, it is probable that one user may have these two characters as the average of the entire set. In a three-dimensional data set, inside leg measurement, height and weight, it is tending toward impossible that one user may have the three average characters of the entire set. More data makes it more probable, but also more characteristics make average persons more improbable, as mean, mode or medium. Facial recognition uses about 80 nodal points, it is (im)possible that a single data subject in large data set will be average on all points.    The point is that we think more data will create a better understanding of our users. This is unlikely to be the case. What we need to determine are the boundary conditions where the data we have access to enables b...

Have you ever sat there listening to the fire alarm ringing out saying to yourself that is it just a test, a practice run or it must be faulty? Have you been sitting down watching TV and the home smoke alarm goes off and you assume that someone has burned the toast (again) Why is our first instant to ignore (based on experience) and not gather more information? Why is our confidence so high that we know that we are right?  Why, given your life may be a stake, does apathy overrun our response? Wider, why can we not see a new threat, why do we ignore the signs? The second round of COVID19 Why when we know there is at least equal danger to previous time, do we want to assume it is now all OK? Going back or ignoring the protection Why do we prefer to search for evidence of the V-bounce back and ignore the L recession as doom-mongering?  Why, probably because we are choosing how we want things to appear based on our own inner-thinkings and that is driven by bias.  We know we...

After a few days of the lockdown starting, we believed that we needed a survive, revive, and thrive strategy that would provide a framework and structure to move forward with.  We put in place teams to be able to execute a survival plan.  However, looking back we realise we got it wrong.  It was based on the economic model of thinking: faster, cheaper, quicker and how we become more efficient and productive.  COVID19 provided opportunity and threat in equal measure to our market and model, but we kind of looked at the speck in your eye, missing the log in our own eye. Phase 1 of the response was not about surviving, it was in fact about exhaustion. The insights looking back were that phase 1 was all about tiredness, confusion, and being generally overwhelmed. It is clear that this was due to loss of rules, heuristics, and routines which made life possible or at least tolerable. We had been behaving like frogs in water with an ever increasing temperature....