Washington Small Business Fair

You live in Washington State, and you own or are thinking about starting a small business. You've got questions, and you'd like to get some of those answered for free.

In that case, put the free Washington Small Business Fair in Renton on your calendar for Saturday, September 6. I went years ago, and I found it well worth my time.

Another face of accountability

I've written about one problem with a focus on accountability. Now Dean Meyer writes of another in The Accountability Trap. If you play a supporting role in an organization, pay attention.

Music, leadership, and effective presentations

I've written about music before, I've written about Benjamin Zander and his presentation style before, and I've written about leadership before.

Now you can see all three topics together in Not aloof and detached, but deeply, deeply human, courtesy of TED and Andrew Taylor's The Artful Manager. It takes about 20 minutes, but stay with it; there are good messages all the way to the end.

Hiring is hard: do it well

Patrick Gray said it well in The IT talent crunch and why it’s the CIO’s fault: hire for the ability to learn for the future, not for the certifications of the past.

Higher oil prices help business

Last year, I made a rash generalization: "Riches can be made off the transitions from one status quo to the other." Now the Wall Street Journal has posted Green Products Gain From New Price Equation, listing a number of products that are gaining a significant price advantage over their competitors by virtue of being green in a time of rising oil-related prices.

Thanks to Grist for the tip.

Sneak peak: Information Dynamics I / II

If you are a current University of Washington graduate student or you live within commuting distance of the University of Washington and if you are interested in learning about system dynamics in an academic setting, put IMT 586 and IMT 587 on your calendar for the coming winter and spring quarters.

If you took IMT 586 last year or if you have a solid background in the material of the first half of John Sterman's Business Dynamics, put IMT 587 on your calendar for the coming spring quarter (yes, that's nine months away). We plan to offer it, assuming we have sufficient enrollment.

I'll make a fuller announcement as we get closer. Ask if you have questions, and let me know if you think you're interested: I'm curious and interested.

Essential systems thinking for managers

This could be entitled "Lessons from teaching system dynamics."

As you may recall, I taught a graduate course in system dynamics at the University of Washington last winter, and I'm scheduled to repeat that course next winter.

While I won't write about that class nor about the systems thinking class I'm co-teaching at Bainbridge Graduate Institute, I wanted to note a few things I have come to think may be at the core of "systems thinking," at least in the system dynamics sense, as a result of thinking heavily about this in the process of teaching others:

• It's very important for people to understand that many of our problems are caused by the systems we create, not by externally-imposed actions. Understanding feedback ideas seems central to grokking that concept. Incidentally, grokking that concept should bring a bit of humility to each of us, and it also opens up possibilities: if we create our own problems, then we have some control over fixing those problems. That's a lesson worth remembering.
  
  
• Causal loop diagrams (CLDs) can be a key tool for making sense of the systems that create the problems we see. Better than that, their dialect, influence diagrams, as described by Geoff Coyle and others (for example, see SYSTEM DYNAMICS MODELLING: A PRACTICAL APPROACH), can be even more insightful and can replace stock and flow diagrams.
  
  
• While I'm not a fan of the "systems archetypes" you may have seen in The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization, there's a lot to be said for understanding what structures and what behavioral patterns are tied together. I don't mean understanding as in textbook knowledge; I mean understanding as in seeing the one and viscerally understanding the presence of the other. Can you look at data (for example, business results), find the pattern that contains the data, and use that to find the structure that likely caused the data? Can you see how to change the structure to make the data be like you wish? If you have the structure in front of you, can you work the other way to estimate the type of behavior you might expect to see? Can you test your theories through simulation or through comparison with real-life situations?
  
  
• Recognizing the difference between stocks and flows is every bit as important as I've written about before. Add to that being able to calculate mentally the changes you'll see in a stock, given the changes you're creating in a flow (mental integration, in other words), and you'll have a better understanding of the impact your actions may or may not have.
  

I came to the conclusion that understanding these ideas well would go a long ways towards helping anyone think more insightfully about tough challenges. Getting there isn't trivial: it seems to require a bit of math and a bit of simulation experience, and having a lot of both seem to help. By themselves, though, math and simulation aren't sufficient; this requires a lot of thinking.

What I'm coming to realize is that having people with these (and other) skills in the management meetings of our companies would be a great help. Instead of just arguing points based on best (unaided) intuition, someone might look at the data and draw some provisional inferences. Someone might think seriously about the type of structure that might have created that data pattern and look for evidence of it in the company and its environment, sketching and discarding diagrams as they go. People might understand the likely effect of interventions based on the current and proposed structure.

Many of you who read this may be able to do all of this already, and that's great! Is it helping you in your work? I hope so; it should.

Others of you may understand when you see others do this but not be able to do it yourself. That's okay; that's why Facilitated Systems is here. If you want to discuss whether your organization might benefit from these ideas, contact me today.

Climate change made understandable

There's lots about climate change that's confusing to those of us who aren't climatologists. What is climate, what is weather, and how do they interact? What are the prime causes of climate change, how well do we understand them, and which causes are more important? What will climate change mean to me?

I happened to discover Reports to the Nation: Our Changing Climate, written by Professor Dennis Hartmann, interim dean of the new University of Washington College of the Environment, and I thought some of you might find it useful, too. While it was published in 1997, it seems to explain many of the key factors. Certainly more up-to-date reports can help, but this one seems both good and easy to read.

Gasoline, pain, feedback, consensus

Speaking of sustainable energy solutions ...

The price of gasoline is rising, as you've no doubt noticed (if it happens to drop today, it seems likely to return to its upward path tomorrow). People are protesting the high prices for the personal and business pain they cause, and politicians (at least some of them) are floating plans to reduce the pain. Manufacturers and retailers are trying innovative approaches to lightening the load on our household budgets.

While the pain is real, I've noticed a strange consensus recently. Both Thomas Friedman and Charles Krauthammer have advocated for using governmental means to keep gas prices high. In Truth or Consequences, Friedman noted that putting a $4 a gallon floor on gasoline prices could be a great cornerstone of a national energy policy to help us lower consumption, which brings with it all sorts of benefits, including our investment in more efficient infrastructure (different means of transportation, for example) and reduced greenhouse gas emissions. In At $4, Everybody Gets Rational, Krauthammer calls for taxes to keep that same $4 a gallon floor and to increase taxes by $0.50 every six months for the next two years.

What we're seeing are feedback effects. As prices rise, we drive less, reducing demand. As demand drops, prices moderate in an attempt to balance supply and demand. (Over the long haul, that's problematic with a non-renewable resource.) Of course, it's a bit more challenging than that, but that simple balancing loop describes the basic mechanism at work.

In a free-market society, as the one we have crafted, the primary feedback signal we have to adjust behavior is economic. When that feedback kicks in, it causes both pain and changed behavior. It would be nice if you could get changed behavior without the pain, but we don't seem to have mastered that as well.

What do you think we ought to do about this? I wrote a possibly pertinent posting three years ago with almost that for the title. Glenn has an idea on The Oil Drum. You may have your own idea.

As a closing note, I've noted before that exponential growth of physical things always has limits, and likely the price of gasoline or petroleum is subject to the same laws. For one idea how the price of oil and gasoline could evolve, see Ugo Bardi's review of the price of whale oil when it was becoming scarce.

Sustainable Energy Solutions

Recently, I wrote about a non-credit course called Sustainable Energy Solutions to be offered this summer by Bainbridge Graduate Institute, where I'm teaching this spring.

Some of you may have been interested but wished for a bit less expensive course, and BGI seems to have heard you: they've reduced the price of this course to $1,500. If you're interested, hurry and sign up; the class starts soon. Tell Jim Stretch that you read about it here.

The Toyota Communications System and sliduments

Presentation Zen says it all.

Is Linus Torvalds lazy?

You've read about lazy employees before. Now I read from Jason Stamper that Linus Torvalds has said, “Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.” Is he lazy—or simply effective?

Better decision making through lemonade??

I've written about good decision making a number of times, but I never included the effect of sweetened lemonade! Get the full research story.

While certainly interesting in its claims, this idea also has links to ideas about stocks and flows (your stock of glucose, etc.) and other systemic ideas. It also seems related to the notion that good nutrition can help, as Charlie Ayers claims in Food 2.0: Secrets from the Chef Who Fed Google (no, I haven't read this one yet, but it sounds delicious intriguing).

I sense the message that we need nutrition for at least three reasons: to survive (breathe, move blood through the body, etc.), to carry out physical activity, and to carry out mental activity. The process of doing those things (even mental activity) depletes nutritional stocks we've established, and thus we need to replenish them to be at our peak condition. (It may be that we need different types of nutrition for the different activities.) Of course, we also have to balance that with our overall accumulation of nutrition lest we find our weight increasing, and we have to watch the type of nutrition lest we find our teeth decaying or our bodies subject to various ills.

Thanks to Dan Goldstein of Decision Science News for the lead.

Making a big difference

Business Week just published John Hagel and John Seely Brown's Changing the World from the Edge describing how University of California, Berkeley students are making a real difference in the world, this time in issues such as "energy efficiency, Third World poverty and disease, and sustainable housing, among others." By the end, they summarize lessons those of us in business might find useful. I like all three of their three lessons, and I'm looking for ways to apply them, too. If you have suggestions, comment here, or get in touch.

That's related to my recent posting called It's a new world in business education. In all these cases, strong change leadership is again coming out of universities and focused on making the world a better place.

Thanks again to the TP! Wire service for the link.