When Good Ideas go Bad
My thinking for this last week has focused on the report “Systems Failure” published by the Institute for Government and the associated blog and twitter discussion [#ukgovit]. There are some really good comments but together they represent a cacophony of ideas – distilling a course of action, of best advice, from the din of divergent opinion is problematic.
The Value of Ideas – Quality * Coherence
It is all so reminiscent of my time at the British Computer Society Healthcare Group just prior to the launch of the National Programme of Health, which became Connecting for Health and which history recognises as one of the largest failed promises in IT. Why so, how did this happen and were the ideas people responsible [not simply the Dilbert like cadre of dumb managers].
Really then what happened was that the enthusiasm and ideas of the innovators produced the spark that something needed to be done but, of themselves, they were incapable of making it happen – too many strong opinions, to many divergent views and simply too many obdurate arguments What then should a policy maker do?
In this case Tony Blair brought in the consultants – who from the power of bogus abstraction – captured the promise of the gaggle of enthusiasts but with the veneer of coherence. Their Powerpoints suggested it could be done – wait – that they could deliver the world’s biggest IT project and that the commercial processes would help identify companies experienced enough to do the work and big enough to handle the responsibility.
companies experienced enough to do the work and big enough to handle the responsibility? [My analytical mind objects to this last – experience is a learning and size is a matter of diminishing populations. Small companies learn big companies copy. The outcome was evident for anyone who know statistics – the qualification of size produced such a small number of firms that delivered a thin envevlope of experience].
The situation was obvious if you spoke to the project teams withing the large (and now loss making contracts). Why were you chosen? because we are big. Have you done anything like this before – no! All of the expertise from the passionate, knowledgeable enthusiasts was discarded – not because of the quality of their individual ideas but because together they became toxic. Anmd of course the debris of the National Programme continues – a renewed skepticism about IT projects, a missed opportunity, good experience ignored and financial waste.
In another post I have introduced Belbin’s ideas on destructive IQ.
Statistics 101
The situation also reminds me of one of my first faux-pas at work. In my early career for a software company I was considered the statistics experts due to my ‘nerdy’ behaviour – fine I relished it long before geek was cool. At a management meeting the operations director of the software house showed a plot of project performance – with the project size graphed against the project estimating (and hence profitability) with some 50 points on the graph some 40 appeared strongly correlated with a reasonable scatter – an excellent basis for a commercial company. The remaining 10 were for big projects and showed significant f not random scatter.
Invited by the Ops Director to comment on my advice – my immediate response was “do’nt do big projects“. This was the message from the data but not the message the company wanted to hear – who were building their business on large projects. It was also not the most astute answer but, 3 years later, after I left the company it was proved to be correct. The company lost money and was taken over as a result of dependency on large project. They were just too impatient to learn!
And so
Just two things to do ….
- To quote Bob Dylan – It’s peace and quiet we need to go back to work again – hopefully taking just a few of the really good ideas with them. Not necessarily the best ideas, but the one that play nicely together
- Learn about the zone of statistic significance for experience – and take your time and your opportunities to build experience