Data and AI

How solid is Tim’s plan to redecentralize the web?

Irina Bolychevsky – Medium

As a corollary to the comment here a few weeks back on Tim Berners-Lee’s ideas for shifting the power balance of the web away from data-exploiting conglomerates and back towards individuals, this post is a good clear-headed account of why his goal – however laudable – may be hard to achieve in practice.

What makes it striking and powerful is that it is not written from the perspective of somebody critical of the approach. On the contrary, it is by a long-standing advocate of redecentralising the internet, but who has a hard-headed appreciation of what would be involved. It is a good critique, for example addressing the need to recognise that data does not perfectly map to individuals (and therefore what data counts as mine is nowhere near as straightforward as might be thought) and that for many purposes the attributes of the data, including the authority with which it is asserted, can be as important at the data itself.

One response to that and other problems could be to give up on the ambition for change in this area, and leave control (and thus power) with the incumbents. Instead, the post takes the more radical approach of challenging current assumptions about data ownership and control at a deeper level, arguing that governments should be providing the common, open infrastructure which would allow very different models of data control to emerge and flourish.

Organisational change Strategy

Clearing the fog: Using outcomes to focus organisations

Kate Tarling and Matti Keltanen – Medium

This post is a deep and thoughtful essay on why large organisations struggle to find a clear direction and to sustain high quality delivery. At one level the solution is disarmingly simple: define what success looks like, work out how well the organisation is configured to deliver that success, and change the configuration if necessary – but in the meantime, since reconfiguration is slow and hard, be systematic and practical at developing and working through change.

If it were that easy, of course, everybody would have done it by now and all large organisations would be operating in a state of near perfection. Simple observation tells us that that is not the case, and simple experience tells us that it is not at all easy to fix. This post avoids the common trap of suggesting a simple – often simplistic – single answer, but instead acknowledges the need to find ways of moving forward despite the aspects of the organisational environment which hold things back. Even more usefully, it sets out an approach for doing that in practice based on real (and no doubt painful) experience.

If there were a weakness in this approach, it would be in appearing to underestimate some of the behavioural challenges, partly because the post notes, but doesn’t really address, the different powers and perspectives which come from different positions. The options – and frustrations – of a chief executive or board member are very different from those elsewhere in the organisation who may feel some of the problems more viscerally but find it harder to identify points of leverage to change things. The argument that in the absence of structures aligned to outcomes and goals we should fall back to alignment around purpose is a strong one, but the challenge of even achieving the fallback shouldn’t be underestimated.

It’s a pretty safe bet though that anybody struggling to find ways of helping large organisations to become fully effective will find ideas and insights here which are well worth reflecting on.

Innovation

The art and practice of intelligence design

Martin Stewart-Weeks – Public Purpose

Geoff Mulgan has written a book about the power of collective intelligence. Martin Stewart-Weeks has amplified and added to Geoff’s work by writing a review. And now this note may spread attention and engagement a little further.

That is a ridiculously trite introduction to a deeply serious book. Spreading, amplifying, challenging and engaging with ideas and the application of those ideas are all critically important, and it’s hard to imagine serious disagreement with the proposition that it’s the right thing to do. But the doing of it is hard, to put it mildly. More importantly, that’s only one side of the driving problem: how do unavoidably collective problems get genuinely collective solutions? And in the end, that question is itself just such a problem, demanding just such a solution. Collectively, we need to find it. It’s well worth reading the book, but this review is a pretty good substitute.