HELP THE RADAR'S DOWN

Bad news for bookies, pundits and psephologists - the old fashioned way of predicting through balancing talent, achievement and form has gone out of the window.

As they might say in Iceland:  “Við þandir Englandi. Svo mikið fyrir mannorð þeirra.“

Does anyone know what’s going to happen next? We got the prospects for Corbyn, Brexit, Leicester City and Trump wrong. We seem to have lost our touch. Just as “Big Data” arrived to allow us to forecast with greater sureness something weird has happened.

Unpredictability rules OK …or have we just lost the plot?

The late founder of Body Shop, Dame Anita Roddick, said:

“Running a company on market research is like driving while looking in the rear view mirror.”

But that’s what all the big institutions have been doing for a long time.  Headhunters select candidates on the basis of where they’ve been rather than what they might do. Hence their arrival into (and thereafter departure from) similar jobs to the ones they’ve had before, showing how efficiently we recycle senior executives. The biggest change in our world is that mass movements like epidemics-of-extreme-opinion happen faster than we could have imagined in older and slower times. Apathy is dead. The silent majority has started to shout.

Some of the things that we couldn’t have imagined - everyone uncomplainingly wearing seatbelts, smoking being banned in virtually all public spaces, adult smokers down from 46% in 1974 to 19% in just 40 years and plastic bag aversion…. what’s effectively a “fine” of 5p per plastic bag has produced an 80% decline in uptake in Tesco alone.

The thundering herd embraces games and fashion too - Pokémon-Go for instance where the groundswell of excitement may burn out but the appetite for the next PG will be waiting for more.  We’re told we need leadership. Well, look at the leaders. Are the Trumps, Le Pens, Wilders, Putins, Erdogans and others what we really need in a civilised world? Aren’t they all just part of a wave of militant nostalgia?

We are spending so much time focusing on the past,  looking in that rear view mirror, rather than exploring the future.

But what we aren’t doing is looking at and listening to what Martin Lindstrom calls “small data” (author of “Brandwashed - Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy”). His thesis is small changes and phenomena make the difference and anticipate the tidal wave that creates trends. Like people beginning to think that smoking looked unfashionable and unusual was what it took to prick the nicotine bubble.

Radar can help us predict the future but having a sense of conviction as to where we want to go and being determined to get there matters more.  A long time ago Sarah Lee had a great idea for promoting their cake mix. “Just add an egg” they said.

We need to find the egg that’s missing in our lives and then - well - just add it.

LET'S HAVE A LONG MEETING

I was talking to a friend recently about the role of Communications in a big corporation. This discipline like HR is one which has grown and entwined itself through organisations. It’s yet another function to blame when things go wrong. But does it fulfil a useful role?

I personally don’t have an internal communications strategy in my own house. My wife tells me what to do and I do it. It really is that simple but in a 10,000 or bigger business ensuring the misunderstandings that can ruin a business are avoided, is vital.

Improving the quality and quantity of communication in a large business covering different countries and cultures could probably improve productivity and save money faster than anything else. It’s also certain than in a knowledge economy where there is an explosion of data and information, filtering and controlling the information dissemination needs new disciplines.

Just for a moment imagine this 10,000 strong business where the following happens.  Simple jargon-free English is the norm so the irate manager who said the following never has to get irate again.
“If I hear the word ‘upcoming’ again I shall be down-coming and someone will find themselves outgoing.”

E-mails will be short in short easy to understand sentences. Always. Every e-mail will have an ACTION REQUIRED section at the end. People who write complex e-mails will be required to do a “Communications Course.”

All documents, all of them, will have a short executive summary which has as point one - why this report has been prepared and point two - what readers are being asked to consider and decide.

Presentations should only last 20 minutes. In exceptional circumstances presentations may be longer but no presentation will ever last more than one hour. No presentation will have more than one slide per minute. No slide will have more than 12 words on it. No meeting should last more than the length of an average examination (namely 3 hours). The consequence of this is that agenda creation and the rigorous use of pre-meetings and meeting preparation will intensify. In fact meetings will become an art-form in celebration of clarity and minimalism.

All executives will receive regular coaching in clarity of, impact creation and brevity of communication in the business context.

In all appraisals “Quality of Communication” will be a KPI or Important measurement of performance and potential - acronyms are being weeded out as abominations.

Face to face communication is being encouraged but all new recruits are being coached in something new to them called “telephone manners”.

What’s wrong with all this is it smacks of the “Thought-Police” and a regimen of communication dictatorship. But this is not an attempt to create a 21st century Tower of Babel.  Quite simply a more focused and disciplined communication strategy is needed in most companies if we are to produce a generation of effective, rigorous and clear thinking managers.

It’s that simple.

BIG DATA IS BRILLIANT

Everyone is talking about “Big Data.” It’s transforming the way we think and analyse stuff. We have discovered that correlation has become more important than causality. That what happens is more important than why it happens. The book by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier published last year - “Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think” is highly recommended.

We know the increase of information is accelerating. For instance all the information and data that currently exists will double in the next three years. With more information we need less exactness. Nowadays the equation 2+2= 3.9 is good enough. We don’t need to be exact if we can see the big

Today social media and CCTV may be more useful research tools than anything else we have. Google Translate has extraordinarily proved to be the best translation service around. The software uses “corpus linguistics” techniques, where the programme "learns" from professionally translated documents, specifically UN and European Parliament proceedings but increasingly from all kinds of documentation – lots and lots of sources – big, big data. (In passing how it is nice that the forest of paper produced by the UN and EU can go to such good use.)

Intriguingly they say the service improved since the linguists they’d hired when they started up (well you would want linguists in a translation service wouldn’t you?) left the business because they wanted linguistic perfection whereas this being a product of big data is not that subtle. This is one of the few examples I’ve come across where big trumps clever.

The existence of robust data obviating the need for the tabloid use of anecdote allows us to spend more time using our brains to think rather than using them as pickaxes to mine for information. Anyone who tells you that guessing is more fun than knowing hasn’t come across the thrill of irrefutable information.

Its application is critical in the medical field where the speed of big data via social media allows a disease to be detected before it becomes an epidemic (and because detected early it can never become a pandemic.) We hear less about avian flu today in part thanks to big data.

So the big data  boom is happening and we have however sufficient glimpses of the future to see we’ll be doing less intellectual “grunt-work” in the future and more intellectual “stunt-work”.
To be sure there can and will be issues of data protection that arise from increasing access to data but the excitement lies in big data allowing us the freedom to think more clearly.

How to solve problems and make brilliant decisions. (Business Thinking Skills that really work) published by Pearson