Our iceberg is melting" by John Kotter

This is a fable about a colony of penguins who discover that their iceberg is melting. They have to decide what to do next. The purpose of the story is to illustrate the eight necessary steps in change management.

(It is probably just as well that the story isn't about how to deal with global climate change because the penguins' solution is to move to another iceberg and it seems unlikely that hmans will be able to move to another planet some time soon.)

There are setbacks and barriers along the way but the five strong team of Louis, Head Penguin; Alice, pushiest penguin Fred, young creative genius the Professor; and Buddy, hunkiest penguin succeed over the nay-sayers led by Nono.

It's cure and it's a fable and it illustrates how to approach a change.
December 2014; 137 pages

"Reengineering the corporation" by Michael Hammer and James Champy

This supposed classic, updated in 2001, is rather disappointing. Its big idea is that businesses processes that are broke need fixing (sometimes even before they are recognisedly broke). But the fixing cannot be little incremental tweaks, it must be radical.

The way in which their success stories have reengineered has been (a) to move away from the fracturing of tasks that characterised the Adam Smith division of labour and Henry Ford's assembly line production and (b) to use information technology. The authors are at pains to point out that the use of IT by itself will not revolutionise businesses but it is equally clear that none of the proposals they make could succeed without IT.

Another idea is that they have to consider customer satisfaction because nowadays customers demand almost personalised choice.

They also point out that a company is people. However, many of their success stories involve sometimes significant down-sizing. They get angry about workers resisting change suggesting that many businesses cannot survive without their radical reengineering proposals but they fail to see that the workers facing redundancy may prefer a few more years of staggering on before the business goes bust to immediate dismissal.

I did like their characterisation of a hierarchy as being inherently resistant to change: "For an idea to win acceptance, everyone along the way must say yes, but killing an idea requires only one no."

One of their solutions relies on the fact, probably true, that the vast majority of customer requests are effectively the same so that a small number of standardised processes can cope with them. In other words, a process triage can divert 95% of tasks to be done quickly by cheap less trained staff using standard templates or scripts and then send the remaining 5% to the specialists. Therefore part of reengineering involves creating standard process templates for workers to use.

I liked the following quote: "To understand what is being changed a team needs insiders; but to change it, a team needs a disruptive elements. These are the outsiders."

Another idea they include is benchmarking. In fact they have included a lot of ideas all of which I have encountered elsewhere. But they claim that only when all these ideas are put together in the reengineering package will years achieve the radical improvements they are touting.

I was confused by this quote on page 195. "There is no guesswork or subjectivity involved in deciding these rewards [performance pay bonuses]. They are based on subjective measures."

Overall this book contained a few ideas I had met before packaged together. There was a lot of padding. In particular the three new chapters which are detailed case studies of three companies. These were unnecessary but without them I guess they couldn't have sold another book.

September 2014; 246 pages.

"Drive" by Daniel Pink

This is a fantastic and deeply thought provoking book.


 It is to do with what motivates human beings. Pink describes the two traditional types of motivation as our biological drive (food, sex etc) and externally imposed rewards and punishments. Then he points out that these are simply not enough. Children play. Adults volunteer. Health care workers do more than they are expected to: they talk to patients, they assist nurses. This happens all the time. Clearly there is a third form of motivation. Wikipedia works because of this third form.

Then he asks how we can use this third drive in business and schools. He describes what not to do. He shows how carrots can actually demotivate in the long term. If you start paying your kid to do chores he will (a) only do the chores if he is paid and (b) see chores as inherently unpleasant and lose enjoyment from doing things. Pink says the secret is to turn work into play and suggest that what traditional motivations have done for too long (especially perhaps in schooling) is to turn play into work.  And finally Pink explains how to use drive 3.0: by giving people autonomy and purpose and by encouraging them to seek mastery.
OK, so it's not that easy. But I have made note after note in the margins and I am going to try to adapt these ideas at my school big time.

Brilliant and potentially revolutionary. August 2012; 215 pages.

"The Checklist Manifesto" by Atul Gawande

Gawande is a surgeon whose failures led him to devise an aeroplane-pilot-style checklist approach to operations. He claims that this reduces failure and complications hugely and significantly.

He suggests that "Know-how and sophistication have increased remarkably across almost all our realms of endeavor, and as a result so has our struggle to deliver on them." (p11) This is because the systems delivering have become too complex for individuals to master. This causes deep customer dissatisfaction. "Failures of ignorance we can forgive. .... But if the knowledge exists and is not applied correctly, it is difficult not to be infuriated." (p 11) This is the point at which failure becomes negligence.

His examples are mostly from surgery. Most operations involve a team of people, often including newcomers, attempting to apply standard procedures to a very individual patient. In the barely controlled chaos of an operation obvious steps are sometimes missed. Furthermore, the team is often handicapped by a lack of communication or by hierarchy and subservience preventing people from over-ruling the god-like surgeon. Gawande believes that checklists have two functions: firstly they prevent obvious steps being missed (he says that since using checklists he has not spend a single week without discovering that a step was about to be missed in his own operating theatre) and secondly they increase team spirit and help to flatten the hierarchy.

He claims that the classic hospital checklist is the four 'vital signs' (temperature, pulse rate, blood pressure and respiratory rate) chart which was introduced by nurses not doctors in  the 1960s.

Builders have used checklists since buildings became too complicated for a single 'Master Builder' to construct. Builders use two sorts of checklists: one for which jobs have been done and one for ensuring that everyone who needs to be informed has been informed.

His checklist rules.

• Every item on a checklist must be non-ambiguous.
• Some checklists are proactive and should be read out before performance, others are retroactive and should be a check after performance.
• One's procedure needs to incorporate one or more 'pause points'. Each pause point contains a single checklist.
• Checklists should be physical; ideally the whole team should agree that each item can be checked.
• Each checklist should take no more than sixty seconds.

When Gawande was designing a surgical checklist he took a lot of time to reduce the list to the barest bones (sorry about the pun!). He deliberately left out complicated items (because they might be ambiguous) and he only included items that had leverage. Operating theatre fires kill many fewer patients than post-operative infections so the checklist focuses on antibiotics rather than asbestos. This keeps the list short enough that surgeons will use it even in high pressure situations.

He emphasises that checklists help communication and team working.

He also points out that there has been significant resistance to introducing checklists into surgery despite the remarkable success rates of the WHO research that he worked on. Human beings (and perhaps especially prima donna surgeons) don't like discipline.

I would add that his checklists typically operate in situations where the system is complex but each part can be broken down into simple steps. Can they be equally successfully in the arcane mystery that is persuading pupils to learn?

Like many American books his message is very small; I think I have encapsulated it above. He spins it into a (short) book by telling stories and adding lots of detail in the stories and lots of statistics. Nevertheless, this is an enjoyable and thought-provoking read.

December 2011; 193 pages

"Fifty Management ideas you really need to know" by Edward Russell-Walling

This is full of lots of interesting ideas although the concept of management seems to be restricted to commercial, preferably industrial, companies. From time to time I got a really good idea from it, rarely a paradigm-breaking idea, occasionally an idea I could directly use. But it was fun.

December 2011; 203 pages

'Smart Swarm' by Peter Miller

This book analyses animal behaviour and tries to learn lessons for they way humans do things (especially in the business world). He considers ants, bees, termites, birds, fish and locusts. Some of his lessons seem contradictory but I suppose one wouldn't expect behaviours that have evolved would necessarily be the same in species that fill different ecological niches. Thus the haphazard way in which ants pass communicate and therefore manage the nest is very different from the way honeybees do.

Foraging ants wander randomly to find food and then scuttle straight back to the nest, laying down a pheromone trail as they do so. Other ants follow the pheromones, laying their own. Soon the best trails are those most strongly marked with pheromones so the ant paths become marked. I have experienced this; if you disrupt an ant trail using an obstacle such as your foot which they have to go around and you leave that long enough then remove it the ants will continue to loop around the now non-existent obstacle, blindly following the pheromones. That might suggest parallels with business!


Instead of relying on a priori algorithms to lay down procedures top-down, just trying something and scoring how well it succeeds can quickly transform routing problems through complex networks (such as the travelling salesman problem) whether geographical or virtual.

Honey bee scouts search for great places for the swarm to hive and then return home and communicate with the others using dance. Lots of scouts do this, many checking out the places suggested by their rivals and then (maybe) and the hive then decides. They have a sort of distributed democratic decision making procedure. First the scouts possess diversity of knowledge, second the hive only swarms once there are sufficient scouts agreeing on the best place to go (a sort of Tipping Point concept).

Miller explains the Wisdom of Crowds idea in terms of the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire 'Ask the Audience' strategy. Imagine you have to choose which person was NOT a member of the Monkees (A, B, C or D) and you asked 100 random people. Suppose only 7% know the right answer but 10% can narrow down the answer to a 50:50 guess and another 15% can eliminate one wrong answer leaving the remaining 68% to make a pure guess. So the right answer gets 7+5(half of 10%)+5(one third of 15%)+17(one quarter of 68%)=34%. The other options will share the remaining 66% giving 22% each. So there will be a clear majority for the right answer even though 93% of the sample guessed (to some extent)!

But the key to true wisdom is to ensure a useful diversity of knowledge and that this is expressed. There are lots of irrationalities to which humans are prey when making decisions such as anchoring (eg when a salesman suggests an initial figure for the cost of a product so that all other prices are compared to this 'anchor'). Other decision traps include preferring the status quo and the 'sunk-cost' trap. Miller diverts to talk about the Beer Game ( from Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline) and then explains how town meetings in Vermont are run according to Robert's Rules of Order (whose best rule is that everyone who wants to should have the chance to speak before anyone may speak twice).

Miller next compares the way termites repair a damaged hill with the chaos that ensues when a highly connected system such as a power network fails and a small initial failure cascades through the system (which made me think of what happens when a person dies). Termite hills apparently are designed to regulate the environment inside the nest (which is actually below ground) by using resonating air columns to catch and tame turbulent winds. Miller suggests we should develop buildings where the walls are porous and thus able to regulate the internal environments of the buildings without using energy eg for air-conditioning.

Termites work using stigmergy,  a form of positive feedback in which the action that one agent performs makes it more likely that the same or other agents will perform the same action, such as when you get an intrinsic reward from the performance of a task. Stigmergy involves indirect collaboration which, Miller implies, could solve failures of highly connected networks, although he never really suggests how. It seems to be connected to wikipedia.

Miller then compares two forms of networks: small world and scale free (which is one in which a proportion of nodes are many times more connected than other nodes in a 1/r way). Random failures affect small world networks most but scale free networks are very vulnerable to hub failures (if one airport in the world closes then air travel is unlikely to be affected because most airports handle a few planes to weird places but if that airport is Heathrow then there is big trouble). In scale free democracies a small group of well connected individuals are able to impose their will on everyone else. Later Miller shows that informed individuals can also effect big changes on inter-connected systems as the Wisdom of Crowds meets Tipping Point meets Critical Mass.

Generally "it doesn't make much sense to discuss the properties of network structures ... without also discussing what it is that you want them to do." (p149)

He also explains about the power of mimicry in social animals when discussing the flocking of birds or fish. He discovers that starlings use a sort of small worlds network in which they pay attention to 7 other starlings (presumably because they cannot cope with the amount of information processing that paying attention to more than 7 implies). This creates swirling behaviour and also the sort of phase transition discussed by Philip Ball in Critical Mass. In schools of fish communication seems to travel in a wave that moves up to 15 times faster than any single fish. Because this form of communication means that not every animal needs to be on high alert against predators, all animals can spend more time feeding and therefore each animal is more likely to survive. The phase transitions seen between one sort of shoal formation and another are classic threshold situations: Critical Mass meets Tipping Point.

Society "consists of institutional arrangements to overcome those divergences between perceived individual interest and some larger collective bargain." (pp265-266)

I learnt the expression 'ground-truth' which means to apply a theory or simulation to the real situation to see whether it works in practice.

Other great books in this area include:

• Six degrees about small world networks by Duncan Watts
• sync by Steven Strogatz
• At Home in the Universe by Stuart Kauffman about fitness landscapes
• How Nature Works by Per Bak about sandpiles and self organized criticality; an excellent explanation of complexity science
• Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin which is a brilliant introduction to this whole field
• The Information by James Gleick although his Chaos (not reviewed on this blog) is perhaps better

Other books not reviewed on this blog on this topic include:

• The Wisdom of Crowds 
• Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell about fads
• Ubiquity which is brilliant about fractals and power laws
• Critical mass by Philip Ball which is a brilliant explanation about phase changes

Fascinating although a lot of what is said are points better made elsewhere.

May 2011; 269 pages

"The Decisive Moment" by Jonah Lehrer

Lehrer is a neuroscientist who wrote Proust was a neuroscientist. He also writes a blog called The Frontal Cortext. 

His essential thesis in this book is that we are not the rational beings that we like to think we are, nor can we be. Our emotions are essential to us being able to make decisions and to make the right decisions. Many micro decisions are made faster than we can think (for example a batsman hitting a cricket ball that was bowled at a speed that makes it impossible to react by thinking. These decisions are made by our subconscious which has learnt how to make the right decisions based on long practise. He gives the example of a radar operator during the Gulf War who spotted a blip on his screen moving towards an aircraft carrier. The blip was moving in the same place and at the same speed as a friendly plane; nevertheless he took the decision to shoot it down. Later it was found to have ben a missile. No analysis of the tapes could provide evidence of why his hunch had been correct; his decision was made essentially on his gut feeling. But later it was realised that the blip had first appeared 3 sweeps of the radar later than a normal plane and it had been this (and the hours of staring at radar screens) that had aroused the fearful feelings in his subconscious.

But Lehrer also provides examples of situations where rationality has conquered emotions (thank goodness), for example the firefighter who, realising that he couldn't outrun a fire, decided to set the hillside in front of him alight and then lie down on the smouldering remains, thereby creating his own firebreak. Then there was the pilot whose plane lost all hydraulic control to ailerons, flaps, undercarriage, everything. The only way he could steer the plane was to fire the two engines at differential rates. He worked this out by a process of careful rational thought while the plane was falling through the air.

Things I learned and linked with:

• The Dweck experiments in which students praised for their intelligence on a first test chose easier subsequent tests and scored worse on a final test than matched students praised for the efforts on the first test who chose harder intervening tests and therefore challenged themselves and learned faster. (p5-57)
• A quote from Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics: "Anyone can become angry, that is easy. But to become angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not easy." (p107)
• ADHD as a manifestion of the retarded development of the pre-frontal cortex which renders the sufferer unable to resist the temptation for immediate gratification. During adolescence the pre-frontal cortex of an ADHD sufferer can be 3.5 years behind 'normal'; however they usually catch up by the end of adolesence. Teenagers find it hard to resist temptation if the consequences are delayed; the solution may be to make the consequences immediate. "When West Virginia revoked driving permits for for students who were under the age of 18 and who dropped out of school, the dropout rate fell by one-third in the first year." p113
• 'Choking' happens when you start to think about an action that has moved into the unconscious competence arena, like a golf player who starts thinking about the swing that has become natural to him. Moving something back from unconscious competence into conscious competence means that the rational mind starts to interfere with processes that have been filed away into the subconscious; this causes mistakes. p135
• Too much information can distract and confuse experts who have learned to act using instinct. "College counselors were given a vast array of information about a group of high school students. The counselors were then asked to predict the grades of these kids during their freshmen year in college. The counselors had access to high school transcripts, test scores, the results of personality and vocational tests and application essays from the students. They were even granted personal interviews .... The counselors were competing against a rudimentary mathematical formula composed of only two variables: the high school grade point average of the student and his or her score on a single standardized test .... the predictions made by the formula were far more accurate than the predictions made by the counselors .... While the extra information considered by the counselors made them extremely confident, it actually led to worse predictions." p155 This makes me think of our sixth form interviews!
• "Being certain means that you aren't worried about being wrong." p202
• There are two types of thinkers: hedgehogs and foxes (there is a Greek saying that the fox knows many thinfs but the hedgehog knows one big thing). Hedgehogs are certain. They ignore contrary information. "The fox relies on the solvent of doubt. He is skeptical of grand strategies and unifying theories." p231
• CRM (Cockpit Resource Management) is the training programme that tries to convince air cockpit crew to dissent from the view of the pilot. p242-3. Using it during cardiac surgery at Nebraska Medical Centre has raised the percentage of 'uneventful' surgeries from 21% to 62%.

A fascinating book, not as magisterial as Irrationality but a quick light read through the mechanisms of decision.

April 2010; 247 pages

Irrationality by Stuart Sutherland

This book reviews over a hundred psychology experiments which show people behaving in irrational ways. It is well written and amusing and fairly easy to read; it also gave me sometimes scary insights into how people can foul up.

I have become much more aware of how important psychology is and how clever some of their experiments are. They really cut out "common sense" and all our vapid saloon bar theorising to show you exactly how daft we are.

But it is much more important than that. Sutherland shows that irrationality is the reason why engineers make planes that crash and nuclear power stations that fail; irrational generals slaughter thousands needlessly, and irrational management techniques cost millions.

The basic error is the 'availability effect'. Our brains cannot hold much evidence at one time when we are trying to make a decision so we tend to base decisions on the evidence that is most available. Often that it what we have just been told so, for example, a salesman can manipulate our decision to buy by providing evidence in favour of a purchase while keeping quiet about the opposite. One really dark side of the availability error is that we tend to notice the unusual so we associate unusual people such as minorities with unusual behaviours such as deviant behaviours like criminality.

Then there is the 'halo' effect. If you're good looking, you must be smart as well, and athletic, and ...

Another example of irrationality is 'Groupthink'. People in a group tend to leave the responsibility for decisions to others. This explains why a crowd of witnesses is less likely to go to the aid of a person being attacked than a single person; each individual in the crowd waits for someone else to make the first move. But Groupthink makes management decision making very difficult especially when there is a leader: everyone tries to think the way they think the leader wants them to think. Yes men are dangerous. So are financial advisers: they follow the herd. Even harder for the leader is that he tends to think he is right more often than he actually is (partly because he only remembers his successes, partly because he ignores all the successful things that might have happened had he not led the organisation along a different route) and that people find it very hard to backtrack on a public pronouncement.

Making it even harder to change direction is the 'sunk cost error'. If you buy a case of wine at £6 a bottle and it rises in price to £60 a bottle would you drink it or sell it? Most people think the wine is still worth only £6 a bottle so they would be happy to drink it even if they would never ever buy wine for more than £10 a bottle. The sunk cost error is particularly prevalent with watching bad films or bad plays: "I've paid £20 a ticket for this so I will sit through 3 hours of boredom rather than quitting at half time" although £20 and 1.5 hours boredom would be better than £20 and 3 hours boredom. As Sutherland says: "the past is finished, it cannot be changed, and its only use is that it may be sometimes possible to learn from it." (p 55) and "all that matters is ... future gains and losses" (p 71). After losing 57,000 men on the first day of the Somme Haig continued to attack... Poker really exercises the sunk cost error

A counterintuitive experiment is the one that found that paying for an altruistic act (such as giving blood) makes people devalue the act and makes them less likely to repeat it. Therefore school prizes are likely to make the prize winner value their achievement less (and makes the losers jealous). Sutherland points out that it is good for a teacher to give constructive feedback on a piece of work (as detailed as possible) but that grades are counter-productive.

There is the 'plausibility error'. When someone tells you something that is true you are more likely to believe his next statement. Liars use this trick. Advertisers make statements which will be believed by their target market (the example given is "dogs are just like people") before following up with less verifiable product claims.

People can't do probabilities. When judging situations they all too often think of the things that did happen and not of the cost of missed benefits of the things that might have happened instead (but didn't); this is an example of the availability error. People are dreadful about estimating risk and they are also over-confident that they are right: everyone from financial advisers to doctors over-estimate their success rate

Other irrationalities include:

• "the fallacy of like causes like" (p 133)
• Boomerang effect: eg Brexit? Cognitive Dissonance? "Once someone is strongly committed to a belief ... contrary arguments may only serve to increase its strength" (pp 35 - 36) 
• Anchoring effects (p 168)
• Failing to spot regression to the mean (p 210)

He is particularly interesting about cognitive dissonance although he doesn't call it that. He notes that "People strive to maintain consistency in their beliefs, often at the expense of the truth." (p 65) (an example is the halo effect (p 65)) and so "People try to prove that their current hypothesis is correct" (p 99). Thereupon "evidence favouring a belief strengthens it while when the same evidence disconfirms a belief, it is ignored: the belief remains intact." (p 107) which means that "anyone who has made a decision is usually extremely reluctant to change it, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is wrong" (p 95)

He proposes an adaptation of the PMI technique to make decisions. Write down all the pros and cons on a piece of paper. By each one write their 'utility value' (ie score how pro or how con they are) and their probability of occurring. Even if you just estimate these it will be better than intuition based on a few pieces of evidence. Then tot up the overall scores.

But he recommends as well doing 'multiple regression analysis'. This calculates the r score of each separate factor that might be used to judge performance (based on past records). In the future each factor score will then be weighted by the r factor; these weightings will then be totalled. He claims that this will always give better results than humans working by 'intuition' even though it is often rejected by humans because it doesn't give perfect results (further evidence of irrationality).

This was a fascinating book with massive implications for management.

There are also some wonderful snipes at a wide variety of targets:

• A uniform: (p 48) "may give people an inflated sense of their own importance"; "is socially divisive"; and encourages people "to behave in extreme and irrational ways"
• "games played between different countries ... far from promoting amity between them, will only foster animosity." (p 50)
• "'We can't do that: it will set a precedent' ... is wholly irrational. The proposed action against which it is directed is either sensible or not. If it is sensible, taking it will set a good precedent; if it is not sensible, the action should not be taken." (p 55)
• "America has become a nation of masochists who spend hours aimlessly jogging and deprive themselves of all but the nastiest foodstuffs." (p 90)
• "As a diagnostic tool the Rorschach ... is virtually worthless" (p 118)
• "It is impossible to learn anything about someone's personality from the way he draws a person." (p 120)
• "Graphology does little if any better than chance" (p 121)
• "A lot of knowledge is a dangerous thing - it may not increase accuracy, but it does lead to false confidence." (p 176)
• "Financial advisers on average do consistently worse than the market in which they are investing" (p 176)

It is rare to find a book so thought-provoking and at the same time so beautifully written. This was a pleasure to read.


Feb 2009; 238 pages