Sneaky strategies

Feelings, banking, the public sector, and bad sandwiches in London.

Hello friends,

Instead of sun-washed, strike-struck Marseille, I’m in cloudy, cucumberless London this week to observe the first hearings in a significant piece of data protection litigation.

The defendant is a Big Tech Company. They are trying vigorously to have the claim against them thrown out before a full hearing. Their barristers’ chief arguments for throwing out the claim haven’t been about the claim’s substantive merits. Instead, they’ve focused on explaining how the claim doesn’t comply with tiny but crucial details of the particular civil procedure under which it must proceed if allowed to continue. Sneaky. We won’t know the outcome of these first hearings for several months.

The sandwich situation near the Royal Courts of Justice has been dire — contrast, a key aspect of a good sandwich, is nearly entirely absent.

Not-knowing in various contexts has been front of mind in the last few weeks for other reasons.

The feels

Last week, I ran the third in the series of monthly Interintellect conversations about not-knowing. This most recent conversation, “Fear is the mind-killer,” tried to untangle the connections between how we feel and how we think about not-knowing. Here’s a summary of the highlights.

Bank lyfe

The banking kerfuffle unfolding right now is yet another instance of big, smart, rich businesses and policymakers calling non-risk situations of not-knowing “risky” and acting as such — this is both ubiquitous and deeply problematic.

It is entirely a coincidence that next month’s discussion about not-knowing is on precisely this topic. The fourth discussion in the Interintellect series will be about why it is so irresistibly tempting to use the word “risk” to describe, think about, and act in non-risk situations of not-knowing — and the problems this creates. We'll start from a short article I wrote last year about how to think more clearly about “risk.”

In any case, you should join us for “Misnaming the beasts” on Thursday, 20 April, 20-22h CET. More information and tickets here. As usual, get in touch if you want to join but the ticket price is an insurmountable barrier.

Sneaky strategies

A few weeks ago, I gave a guest lecture at SciencesPo on the connection between public sector work and not-knowing.

tl;dr: It’s hard for public sector organisations to innovate because they have structural blockers to productive relationships to not-knowing. The way to fix this is with sneaky strategies that seem trivial, boring, or oblique.

In a bit more detail, my main points were:

1. A productive relationship with not-knowing is essential for innovation.

2. The most important public sector problems are the most important problems we face. These are almost always wicked problems, which makes innovation essential in public sector work.

3. Unfortunately, at least five design impedances prevent public sector organisations from having productive relationships with not-knowing, and thus from innovating. These are

   1. Extensive protocolisation.

   2. Intense cat-herding.

   3. Internally contradictory time horizons.

   4. Politically mandated certainty orientation.

   5. Fear of failure associated with hierarchisation.

4. These design impedances make it much harder for public sector organisations to even acknowledge that they face situations of not-knowing, let alone integrate not-knowing into how they work. Innovation is hardest in the sector that needs it most.

5. Oblique tactics calculated to disguise their true objective of injecting strategic not-knowing into an organisation — what I call sneaky strategies — can help public sector organisations get around these design impedances and so enable public sector innovation. Some sneaky strategies include

   1. Open-ended roles and negotiated joining.

   2. Using tradeoffs to set goals.

   3. Training to become more comfortable with the discomfort of not-knowing. (I've also made a tool for training in productive discomfort.)

   4. Low-level protocol modifications.

   5. Initially innocuous experiments of increasing cost and scale.

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Recent and not-so-recent writing

1. Translating ideas from one context to another requires meaning-making. Understanding the hidden mechanics of idea translation — meaning-making being a crucial one — is fundamental to understanding why some ideas/innovations gain traction and grow while others fizzle out.

2. If big organisations find it so hard to deal with not-knowing, the question naturally arises of whether any type of large organisation can escape the design impedances that obstruct a productive relationship with not-knowing? One possible answer: Amorphous organisations where membership is continuous, not binary.

Until next time,
VT