management – Andi Fugard (∧⇒)

Ed Catmull’s “starting points”

Get the team right.
Hire people for their potential to grow.
Hire people smarter than you.
Solicit ideas from everyone in your organisation.
Solicit ideas proactively.
Identify barriers to candour and address them.
Understand disagreements, people disagree for a reason.
Root out fear.
Don’t assume you’re right, cultivate doubt.
Create structures and processes that uncover what’s real.
Truth should be in meetings, not hallways.
Forget line-of-command, just communicate.
Share problems, don’t tone them down.
Measuring success and failure without evaluating process is deceiving.
The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them.
Change and uncertainty are part of life, build capability to recover.
It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks; it’s their job to make it safe to take them.
Failure isn’t evil, it’s a necessary consequence of doing something new.
Trust doesn’t mean you trust people to not screw up; it means you trust them even when they do.
Finding and fixing problems is everybody’s job; anyone can stop the production line.
Measure people by their ability to solve problems, not by the mistakes they make.
Share early and share often; don’t wait until things are perfect.
Organisational structure is not communication structure; everybody can talk to anybody.
Don’t make too many rules; most don’t need them; address those who do directly.
Imposing limits often encourages creativity.
Exceptionally hard problems force us to think differently; welcome them.
Organisations are conservative; it takes substantial energy to move them.
If one agenda wins, we all lose.
Protect new ideas, even not-so-great ones.
Crises are not always lamentable; they test values and bond people.
Excellence, quality, and good should be earned words, attributed by others to us.
Balance is more important than stability; do not make stability a goal.
Making our product great is the goal; don’t confuse the process with the goal (Catmull, 2014, pp. 315–319).

Spotted in Flyvbjerg, B. (2024). Heuristics for Better Project Leadership: Teasing Out Tacit Knowledge. Project Management Journal, 55(6), 615–625.

“How would you like to use this time?” Thoughts on two group relations conferences

I attended two group relations conferences in 2019: one for a weekend, another for a week. I’ve just rediscovered an evaluation sheet from the first, which we were asked to complete. Here are a couple of sections from that:

How would you describe this conference to a colleague?

A group relations conference is very different to traditional academic conferences. There were about 70 participants, 10 of those consultants. A series of contrived, ambiguous situations were setup encouraging us to experience, think about, and discuss intra- and inter-group dynamics, and how we and others feel in groups. Conventions we take for granted were challenged. Along the way, consultants provided thoughts and feelings about what might be going on from their somewhat detached perspective, sitting slightly outside the group. I don’t want to say more because it might spoil your experience of how a conference evolves, but one theme for me was becoming much more aware of the different kinds of events and experiences which I have already had in various groups. Something about the conference amplified these.

What do you think will prove to be the most useful thing you have learnt on this weekend?

It’s a collection of things – I can’t bring myself to reduce them to one!

Renewed faith in the kindness of strangers – how quickly people can develop connections with each other in challenging circumstances.
Renewed awareness that people have a lot going on in their lives, which they bring to groups. We heard many specific examples of this.
Committees and other meetings extend beyond the meeting room, i.e., it’s not just that people discuss things before going to a meeting but the meeting exists outside the formal meeting…
Smiles and eyes across a room can be comforting in difficult situations. (I already knew this but now feel more conscious of it.)
Thinking also about the differences between the brief working relationships setup at conference and longer-term working relationships.
Thinking about how the child vs. adult vs. parent distinctions (e.g., in transaction analysis) aren’t completely clear cut, e.g., adults can be playful, children can have immense caring responsibilities.
Thinking about the huge number of ideas, theories, we each have about ourselves, groups, authority. How we learn, express, and (sometimes) test these out and (even less frequently) change our minds.

Organising effective policy research teams – the case of INR

Interesting clues from the US State Department’s INR, according to this week’s report by Dylan Matthews:

Most INR analysts have a PhD – some have professorships – and have worked on their topic area for an average of 14 years. There are few generalists.
The organisation is relatively small and analyses tend to be written by individuals rather than large teams.
Analysts work with State Department policymakers and so have a clearer understanding of what information is most useful to them.

Timpson’s boss on upside-down management (Channel 4)

Diagrammatic templates for problem solving

This looks useful.

“Use the difficulty”

Michael Caine talking about rehearsing a play where other actors improvising had got carried away.

“They started throwing things, and he threw a chair, and it lodged in the doorway. And I went to open the door, and I got my head around, and I went [to the director], ‘I’m sorry, sir, I can’t get in.’

“He said, ‘What do you mean?’

“I said, ‘There’s a chair there.’

“He said to me, ‘Use the difficulty.’

“I said, ‘What do you mean?’

“He said, ‘Well, if it’s a comedy, fall over it. If it’s a drama, pick it up and smash it. Use the difficulty.’”

What happens when you set targets – examples

Goodhart’s (1975) law states that

“Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.”

Here are some examples.

1. Ambulance response times (see Bevan and Hood, 2006)

Statistically unlikely spike exactly at the target suggesting something has happened to the data.

2. Phonics test scores (see Dorothy Bishop’s blog post)

A higher score is better performance. There’s a dip just below the pass mark of 32 and then a big spike, suggesting scores have been changed.

3. Call centre response times (see Caulcutt, 2004)

“The Times reported in October 2003 that the telecommunications regulator, Oftel, intended to investigate the workings of one of the newly established directory enquiry companies. According to the report: “Sixty call centre workers at the 118 118 directory enquiries service will be sacked in an attempt to head off a scandal over staff who deliberately gave out wrong numbers to boost their pay”. Why did they do this? It appears that the motivation was provided by a bonus system that rewarded employees for dealing with calls in less than 40 seconds.”

4. Final high school exam scores

Matura scores in Poland, 2013. To pass you need 30% or above.

(See here, spotted via @MaxCRoser.)

5. “‘G4S cheats’ made 1,000 FAKE 999 calls to boost performance figures”

“Staff at scandal-hit G4S boosted performance figures by making hundreds of fake calls to a 999 centre run by the firm.

“Five employees have been suspended after allegedly making more than 1,000 “test calls” – many reportedly at quiet times when they could be picked up quickly.

“Without them G4S would have missed key targets of answering 92% of calls within 10 seconds in November and December 2015, so incurring a financial penalty.”

(Mirror article)

References

Bevan, G., & Hood, C. (2006). What’s measured is what matters: targets and gaming in the English public health care system. Public administration, 84(3), 517-538.

Caulcutt, R. (2004). Managing by fact. Significance, 1(1), 36-38.

Goodhart, C. A. E. (1975). Monetary relationships: A view from Threadneedle Street. In Papers in Monetary Economics, Vol 1, Reserve Bank of Australia.

Social organisation without authority

Colin Ward (1966), Anarchism as a Theory of Organization:

“[…] ‘anarchy’ means the absence of government, the absence of authority. Can there be social organisation without authority, without government? The anarchists claim that there can be, and they also claim that it is desirable that there should be.

“Anyone can see that there are at least two kinds of organisation. There is the kind which is forced on you, the kind which is run from above, and there is the kind which is run from below, which can’t force you to do anything, and which you are free to join or free to leave alone. We could say that the anarchists are people who want to transform all kinds of human organisation into the kind of purely voluntary association where people can pull out and start one of their own if they don’t like it. I […] attempted to enunciate four principles behind an anarchist theory of organisation: that they should be

“(1) voluntary, (2) functional, (3) temporary, and (4) small.

“They should be voluntary for obvious reasons. There is no point in our advocating individual freedom and responsibility if we are going to advocate organisations for which membership is mandatory.

“They should be functional and temporary precisely because permanence is one of those factors which harden the arteries of an organisation, giving it a vested interest in its own survival, in serving the interests of office-holders rather than its function.

“They should be small precisely because in small face-to-face groups, the bureaucratising and hierarchical tendencies inherent in organisations have least opportunity to develop.”

GCHQ’s director’s Turing speech – a research team manual?

Just read the (4 Oct 2012) speech about Alan Turing, given by Iain Lobban, Director GCHQ, at the University of Leeds.

Fantastic stuff in there. Here are some excerpts.

On learning to solve problems

“… [Turing] reported to Bletchley Park as agreed and immediately started working with [Dilly] Knox [expert on the Enigma cypher …]. Knox’s influence on Turing at this time is immense. The older veteran cryptanalyst shared everything he knew about Enigma with Turing, who eventually used this knowledge to write the first four chapters of his treatise on Enigma […]

“…[Turing] was happy to learn from Dilly Knox, happy to use that knowledge as the foundation for what he would develop subsequently, and was diligent in recording what he had learned and how he developed that into new areas so that others could profit from his knowledge just as he had profited from that of Knox.”

“Knox could only take Turing so far and his quest for experience-based understanding of the cryptanalysis of Enigma took Turing to France in January 1940…”

Team work

“There are lots of different ways in which people can work as part of a team. Turing’s way was to take in other people’s ideas, develop and build on them, and then pass the product on to other people to be the foundation for the next stage. He took the idea of electromechanical processing of Enigma messages from the Poles but developed their idea into something radically different. When Welchman later enhanced the Bombe with his diagonal board, Turing was among the first to congratulate him on this major improvement. Turing was part of the team, and shared in the success of the team.”

Respecting diversity

“I strongly believe a Sigint agency needs the widest range of skills possible if it is to be successful, and to deny itself talent just because the person with the talent doesn’t conform to a social stereotype is to starve itself of what it needs to thrive.”

“I don’t want to pretend that GCHQ was an organisation with twenty-first century values in the twentieth century, but it was at the most tolerant end of the cultural spectrum. In an organisation which valued the skills and characteristics that difference can bring, Turing’s homosexuality was less of a talking point than his insights into the complex crypt problems of the day. When he was put on trial, Hugh Alexander, the Head of Cryptanalysis at GCHQ went, with official approval, to speak as a character witness on his behalf, saying in court that Turing was a national asset.”

Exploiting serendipity

“Geoffrey Tandy was posted to Bletchley by the Admiralty in a spirit of helpfulness: his posting officer had understood him to be an expert in cryptograms, a word still used in the Admiralty at that time to mean messages signalled in code. In fact he was an expert in cryptogams: non-flowering plants like ferns, mosses and seaweeds. But while this knowledge might not have appeared to be of much use, Tandy became expert in German naval Enigma and because of his work on seaweed was able to provide unique advice on the preservation of cryptologic documents rescued from the sea.”

The role of management

“Part of my job is to continue to foster that atmosphere: to attract the very best people and harness their talents, and not allow preconceptions and stereotypes to stifle innovation and agility.”