My last two posts both describe particular effects of what might be called the Incompetence Principle, which can be put into words as:
In any large organisation important decisions can ONLY be made by someone who has absolutely no idea what the whole thing is about.
(The corrollary of this principle is that if something is so flippin' obvious that everyone knows exactly what should be done, then of course since no one can be found who does not understand it nothing is done and the whole thing has to be delayed indefinitely.)
Of course at first such ideas look totally bizarre and wrong, but it is amazing how easy it is to find situations in which they seem to apply. (Hundreds of examples can be found at http://www.clientcopia.com/) so one can see the Incompetence Principle as a worthy companion to Parkinson's Law.
The best known explanation for the phenomenon is that of people being promoted until they reach their Level of Incompetence (ie the idea that anyone who can actually do the job they are paid for will be promoted until they reach a level at which they are incompetent, and then they will stay at that level or in that job for a long time, all the while having little or no idea what they are doing), but of course the whole thing is self-sustaining, because an incompetent manager will all too often (perhaps more often than not) be unable to recognise talent or competence when he/she sees it, and will promote people of his/her own kind.
All of that is annoying in terms of natural justice and for the number of petty irritaions produced (as last two blogs), but it is all the more so when one remembers the number of really incompetent individuals who get appointed to really senior positions and receive the sort of salaries that have recently led to so much resentment of Bankers.
If anyone really has an unusually high degree of talent in a particular sphere and an employer really can derive enormous advantage from the use of that talent, then an employer can justifiably decide that the value of that individual is such that it is worth paying a large salary in order to gain such benefits, and if the talent in question is rare then the person concerned will have a choice of employers and will naturally choose the employer who pays.
That is the justification for the high salaries one hears of, but the evidence of recent events (in banking and elsewhere) is that although really competent people may draw high salaries, there are many people who receive six and seven figure salaries who have very little talent of any kind, let alone a level of talent that should merit a high salary. Time after time one hears of highly paid people making decisions that any average man or woman in the street would know were totally misguided and doomed to fail; we are then conned into believing that said highly paid prat knows more than we do, but the end of the story turns out exactly as any ordinary person would have predicted. Far from being unusually capable, the person being given such responsibility (and being paid so much for that) seems uniquely incapable, so how do they get appointed?
Appointing staff, even highly paid staff such as senior management, is a task that can be done well and produce good results, or can be done shoddily with useless results. To that extent it is no different to any other task where the quality of the outcome matters.
I once spent some years working closely with production managers, and any of them would have taken it for granted that the to ensure that a task is carried out to a consistently acceptable standard there must be an inspection procedure. Someone other than the worker concerned must be in a position to examine the work done. How can this principle be applied to the appointment of senior staff?
What is needed is a procedure by which those to whom senior managers are ultimately responsible can actually assess the quality of an appointment at the time it is made. For companies in the "private sector" this would mean the shareholders, and for any public body it would mean the public, and in either case it would mean that when any appointment is made to a post above a certain level of seniority, the qualificatiosn and relevant experience of the appointee should immediately be made available (to the shareholders or to the public at large as appropriate). The shareholders/public would then have the opportunity to assess for themselves the basis on which the appointment was made, and I have personally been in a position to know the details of many appointments that simply would not have been made if they had been subject to any sort of review of that kind.
(An example of what I mean would be the appointment, some years ago, of a manager of a large IT department. At the time of his appointment, the appointee knew less about computers or any similar equipment than the average person in the street, and had no desire to learn about any such "technicalities", but was appointed ahead of other eminently able candidates because one of his schoolmates happened to be a senior director of the company.)
THINK ABOUT IT !
Thursday 28 January 2010
Wednesday 27 January 2010
Idiots in charge of Radio
Imagine that you are in charge of a large corporation whose function is the provision of Radio transmission to a whole nation or a public serrvice basis, and imagine that this large corporation operates transmitters on a number of different wavebands and frequencies.
Now let us suppose that about while almost all of the frequencies you use can be received by ninety percent of the population, there is only one of all those frequencies that can be received by the entire population. For ten percent of the population that frequency (which happens to be the only one on the Long Wave Band) is the only one they can ever receive.
Now all is well until it turns out that there is a single-interest group to whom you want to allocate several hundred hours of air-time per year, and you have to decide which of your numerous frequencies to let them have.
One might imagine that anyone making such a decision would prefer to spread this requirement over a number of the available frequencies, so that it no one group of listeners becomes too unfairly inconvenienced, but what if there was some reason why all of the air-time devoted to this particular special interest group should always be on the same particular frequency ?
You now have a choice:
1. You could allocate one of the ordinary FM frequencies for this purpose, and those who normally listen to that programme (but were not part of the special interest group) would then have to suffer the inconvenience of listening to something else instead, or
2. You could allow the special interest group unrestricted access to the Long Wave Band frequency, which of course would mean that ten percent of the population will be deprived of any alternative to the special-interest transmission. If they do not want to listen to that, then that would be just their hard luck.
One might have thought that given such alternatives, any official with a shred of understanding of the implications would choose the first of the above alternatives (and even share the load a bit by making some of the lost programming available on other FM frequencies). Why would one knowingly vicimise ten percent of the population?
If you would like to know why a supposedly responsible official would choose No 2, then ask the senior management of the BBC why such a large proportion of Radio 4's long wave transmission is devoted to Cricket.
Why does Cricket have a right toso many hundreds of hours of airtime?
If such a vast amount of time is justified, then why can it not be shared between all the BBC's networks?
If it must all be on one of their networks then why should the one chosen be the only one accessible to many people?
You may think that those are fair questions to which there should be straightforward answers, but to date no one in the BBC has even been able to understand the issue at all.
They insist that there are a few tens of thousands of people who want to listen to uninterrupted cricket all day whenever there is a match in progress (anywhere in the world), and of course that may be true, but however often I have asked they have been unable to understand that there are people in UK who do not live in London or enjoy radio reception of as good a standard as is available in the London area.
Another example of this same mental handicap can be found in the way Digital Radio is being introduced.
All conventional broadcasting is to be phased out in 2015 (including the long wave as above), and those responsible "hope that it will be possible" to get the new Digital transmitters running all over the country by then. (ie where I live we could be left with no radio transmission at all for a while)
I asked why there could not have been a time of "parallel running" in which both systems were available to allow time for us all to change over, get new equipment etc.
The answer was that there HAD BEEN such parallel running; both systems had been running for some years. Well of course they had in favoured areas such as London, but what about the millions of people not so favoured ?
Now let us suppose that about while almost all of the frequencies you use can be received by ninety percent of the population, there is only one of all those frequencies that can be received by the entire population. For ten percent of the population that frequency (which happens to be the only one on the Long Wave Band) is the only one they can ever receive.
Now all is well until it turns out that there is a single-interest group to whom you want to allocate several hundred hours of air-time per year, and you have to decide which of your numerous frequencies to let them have.
One might imagine that anyone making such a decision would prefer to spread this requirement over a number of the available frequencies, so that it no one group of listeners becomes too unfairly inconvenienced, but what if there was some reason why all of the air-time devoted to this particular special interest group should always be on the same particular frequency ?
You now have a choice:
1. You could allocate one of the ordinary FM frequencies for this purpose, and those who normally listen to that programme (but were not part of the special interest group) would then have to suffer the inconvenience of listening to something else instead, or
2. You could allow the special interest group unrestricted access to the Long Wave Band frequency, which of course would mean that ten percent of the population will be deprived of any alternative to the special-interest transmission. If they do not want to listen to that, then that would be just their hard luck.
One might have thought that given such alternatives, any official with a shred of understanding of the implications would choose the first of the above alternatives (and even share the load a bit by making some of the lost programming available on other FM frequencies). Why would one knowingly vicimise ten percent of the population?
If you would like to know why a supposedly responsible official would choose No 2, then ask the senior management of the BBC why such a large proportion of Radio 4's long wave transmission is devoted to Cricket.
Why does Cricket have a right toso many hundreds of hours of airtime?
If such a vast amount of time is justified, then why can it not be shared between all the BBC's networks?
If it must all be on one of their networks then why should the one chosen be the only one accessible to many people?
You may think that those are fair questions to which there should be straightforward answers, but to date no one in the BBC has even been able to understand the issue at all.
They insist that there are a few tens of thousands of people who want to listen to uninterrupted cricket all day whenever there is a match in progress (anywhere in the world), and of course that may be true, but however often I have asked they have been unable to understand that there are people in UK who do not live in London or enjoy radio reception of as good a standard as is available in the London area.
Another example of this same mental handicap can be found in the way Digital Radio is being introduced.
All conventional broadcasting is to be phased out in 2015 (including the long wave as above), and those responsible "hope that it will be possible" to get the new Digital transmitters running all over the country by then. (ie where I live we could be left with no radio transmission at all for a while)
I asked why there could not have been a time of "parallel running" in which both systems were available to allow time for us all to change over, get new equipment etc.
The answer was that there HAD BEEN such parallel running; both systems had been running for some years. Well of course they had in favoured areas such as London, but what about the millions of people not so favoured ?
Coincidence
A long time ago (in the early 1960s I think) I read a book in which some of the plot centred around a "subversive dictionary", and what were supposed to be entries from said tome appeared at the top of each chapter. I mention that because one of those definitions has stayed with me. It defines "Coincidence" as "You didn't know the other side of what was happening." and of course it can be considered subversive in that it discourages anyone who takes it seriouslyfrom accepting that what they are seeing is a matter of chance until/unless they have exhausted all other possibilities.
This principle has stayed with me, and I have to say that it has served me well in many different contexts. When, for example, anything complicated is malfunctioning, then a clue to the cause can usually be found by questioning any part of the situation that looks at all coincidental even if there is no obvious connection between the coincidence and the fault.
Another key idea is what the cognoscenti would call "Statistical Significance".
If I were to toss a coin three times and get three tails, then that would be a fluke, but it would not be cause for any suspicion, but if I tossed that coin three hundred times and got three hundred heads then I think most people would show some curiosity about the coin itself or how I was tossing it, rather than thinking of what had happened as coincidence. The more times something happens, the more likely it is that there will an explanation other than pure fluke (though whether one can find the real explanation may be another matter of course.)
All of this has come to mind as I have been thinking about purchases that J has made in recent months, to wit:
This principle has stayed with me, and I have to say that it has served me well in many different contexts. When, for example, anything complicated is malfunctioning, then a clue to the cause can usually be found by questioning any part of the situation that looks at all coincidental even if there is no obvious connection between the coincidence and the fault.
Another key idea is what the cognoscenti would call "Statistical Significance".
If I were to toss a coin three times and get three tails, then that would be a fluke, but it would not be cause for any suspicion, but if I tossed that coin three hundred times and got three hundred heads then I think most people would show some curiosity about the coin itself or how I was tossing it, rather than thinking of what had happened as coincidence. The more times something happens, the more likely it is that there will an explanation other than pure fluke (though whether one can find the real explanation may be another matter of course.)
All of this has come to mind as I have been thinking about purchases that J has made in recent months, to wit:
One Dell Laptop
A Digital Camera
Another Dell Laptop (to replace the first)
An official, non-pirated copy of Photoshop
A Potters Wheel from one of the market leaders in that field
The reason I mention that list in a post about Coincidence is that not one of them was fully usable when received by J.
The first Dell laptop produced fault after fault over a period of nearly 12 months before Dell eventually agreed to a refund
The camera is at this moment still back with the manufacturers because of a fault with its flash mechanism
The second Dell laptop, was purchased with the refund from the first, and has had to have a change of hard-disk
Photoshop as supplied has turned out to include known problems with some editions of Windows XP, such that the software would not actually load. Details of what to do about this were (apparently) to be found in the Help-file but were not accessible until loading was complete (Catch-22) and no mention of the problem appeared on packaging etc.
The Potters Wheel was supplied with a crucial screw inadequately tightened, so that it ran unevenly which made it useless. A phone call to the supplier elicited an immediate suggestion of what to check and what to do about it (which then took only a couple of minutes to fix) but why wasn't it checked before it was despatched?
Five large purchases, each from an apparently reputable supplier, and all five of them with unexpectedly serious shortcomings. Is that coincidence, or is it indicative of something that is happening to design and/or production standards generally? How common must such faults be?
We hear an awful lot nowadays about how fast technology is advancing. I wonder how long it will take until "the trade" begins to rediscover the importance of good honest quality, or their customers wake up enough to demand it. What would happen if a supplier were to advertise that they would not be even trying to be at the front of the race towards the "most advanced" product, but would only market products that were 100% tested and reliable (and apply that same philosophy to any neww version of said product that they would ever introduce.)
I find it particularly galling, for example, that a version of Photoshop that I could have bought 5 years ago would have been 100% straightfrward but that has been ruined by "improvements" made since. Why can we not have the choice of buying the reliable (back-number) version of the software ? They don't like "piracy", but at the moment (paradoxically) it would take a pirate to supply goods of adequate quality.
A Digital Camera
Another Dell Laptop (to replace the first)
An official, non-pirated copy of Photoshop
A Potters Wheel from one of the market leaders in that field
Each of these has been purchased brand new and each has cost some hundreds of pounds (They are also the only purchases she has made in that time-frame.)
The reason I mention that list in a post about Coincidence is that not one of them was fully usable when received by J.
The first Dell laptop produced fault after fault over a period of nearly 12 months before Dell eventually agreed to a refund
The camera is at this moment still back with the manufacturers because of a fault with its flash mechanism
The second Dell laptop, was purchased with the refund from the first, and has had to have a change of hard-disk
Photoshop as supplied has turned out to include known problems with some editions of Windows XP, such that the software would not actually load. Details of what to do about this were (apparently) to be found in the Help-file but were not accessible until loading was complete (Catch-22) and no mention of the problem appeared on packaging etc.
The Potters Wheel was supplied with a crucial screw inadequately tightened, so that it ran unevenly which made it useless. A phone call to the supplier elicited an immediate suggestion of what to check and what to do about it (which then took only a couple of minutes to fix) but why wasn't it checked before it was despatched?
Five large purchases, each from an apparently reputable supplier, and all five of them with unexpectedly serious shortcomings. Is that coincidence, or is it indicative of something that is happening to design and/or production standards generally? How common must such faults be?
We hear an awful lot nowadays about how fast technology is advancing. I wonder how long it will take until "the trade" begins to rediscover the importance of good honest quality, or their customers wake up enough to demand it. What would happen if a supplier were to advertise that they would not be even trying to be at the front of the race towards the "most advanced" product, but would only market products that were 100% tested and reliable (and apply that same philosophy to any neww version of said product that they would ever introduce.)
I find it particularly galling, for example, that a version of Photoshop that I could have bought 5 years ago would have been 100% straightfrward but that has been ruined by "improvements" made since. Why can we not have the choice of buying the reliable (back-number) version of the software ? They don't like "piracy", but at the moment (paradoxically) it would take a pirate to supply goods of adequate quality.
Monday 18 January 2010
Today's Emperors?
In my opening post yesterday, I mentioned the story of the Emperor's New Clothes (see below), so now is a good time to mention two outstanding examples of the same phenomenon in the modern world.
1. Cannabis "Everyone knows" that cannabis is bad, and that there should be laws strong enough to eliminate its use completely, but I have yet to meet anyone who can tell me in what way it is so evil. I have never used it myself, but study after study supports the idea that cannabis is no more a threat to anyone than either alcohol or tobacco, but time after time governments overrule or ignore such findings. Why? (As a friend of mine used to say: "You never hear of anyone going home and beating up his wife after smoking weed, and that is more than you can say about alcohol")
2. Nuclear Deterrent "Everyone knows" that countries like UK and USA need to spend vast amounts of money to maintain a "Nuclear Deterrent", but no one (not even those whose job is to actually make such decisions) has any idea who might conceivably be deterred, or from doing what. Does anyone really believe that any western democracy would ever actually USE such a weapon? Surely the very idea is unthinkable, but if no one believes that such a weapon would ever actually be used, then how can it be a "deterrent" ? Are there not many better uses for all that money? (Imagine for example the effect of spending the same vast amount of money on the conventional forces that we do actually use.)
1. Cannabis "Everyone knows" that cannabis is bad, and that there should be laws strong enough to eliminate its use completely, but I have yet to meet anyone who can tell me in what way it is so evil. I have never used it myself, but study after study supports the idea that cannabis is no more a threat to anyone than either alcohol or tobacco, but time after time governments overrule or ignore such findings. Why? (As a friend of mine used to say: "You never hear of anyone going home and beating up his wife after smoking weed, and that is more than you can say about alcohol")
2. Nuclear Deterrent "Everyone knows" that countries like UK and USA need to spend vast amounts of money to maintain a "Nuclear Deterrent", but no one (not even those whose job is to actually make such decisions) has any idea who might conceivably be deterred, or from doing what. Does anyone really believe that any western democracy would ever actually USE such a weapon? Surely the very idea is unthinkable, but if no one believes that such a weapon would ever actually be used, then how can it be a "deterrent" ? Are there not many better uses for all that money? (Imagine for example the effect of spending the same vast amount of money on the conventional forces that we do actually use.)
Intelligent Authority ?
The other day, for about ten minutes, I was a lawbreaker (but without being caught).
I am not really an anti-social sort of person, and I would normally be described as reasonably law-abiding, but I feel a great resentment when the law is used inappropriately or unnecessarily.
My undetected crime was that of parking outside the library while J popped in to change her audio-book. (I remained in the car)
Now of course it is necessary that the mobile library van can park there when it needs to (probably no more than a few minutes each day), but does that really mean that the same space cannot be used for any other purpose at any other time ?
When I thought about it, I realised that there are many other spaces that have similar restrictions for equally flimsy reasons, so I wonder why "those that know about such things" have never considered the obvious compromise.
My idea would be that instead of being labelled as "No Parking" such places should be marked in a way that allowed a vehicle to wait only if there was a driver in the vehicle, and then on condition that he/she would move their vehicle if the "official" user required it. In the case of the library, this would allow for what I was doing in any case, but would not cause any problems for the Mobile Library if it did turn up, and something similar applies at a number of other places in our town.
In fact the same principle would normally ensure that any parking was very short term, and that would perhaps be a useful option in all kinds of other situations too.
Are ideas like that a sign that I am some sort of genius ? Or is the lack of them a sign of utter incompetence on the part of those who impose an ever-increasing burden of restrictions on each of us ? Surely one or the other of those must be the case (and I am not quite arrogant enough to claim that it is the first ! )
More on this in a later post maybe
I am not really an anti-social sort of person, and I would normally be described as reasonably law-abiding, but I feel a great resentment when the law is used inappropriately or unnecessarily.
My undetected crime was that of parking outside the library while J popped in to change her audio-book. (I remained in the car)
Now of course it is necessary that the mobile library van can park there when it needs to (probably no more than a few minutes each day), but does that really mean that the same space cannot be used for any other purpose at any other time ?
When I thought about it, I realised that there are many other spaces that have similar restrictions for equally flimsy reasons, so I wonder why "those that know about such things" have never considered the obvious compromise.
My idea would be that instead of being labelled as "No Parking" such places should be marked in a way that allowed a vehicle to wait only if there was a driver in the vehicle, and then on condition that he/she would move their vehicle if the "official" user required it. In the case of the library, this would allow for what I was doing in any case, but would not cause any problems for the Mobile Library if it did turn up, and something similar applies at a number of other places in our town.
In fact the same principle would normally ensure that any parking was very short term, and that would perhaps be a useful option in all kinds of other situations too.
Are ideas like that a sign that I am some sort of genius ? Or is the lack of them a sign of utter incompetence on the part of those who impose an ever-increasing burden of restrictions on each of us ? Surely one or the other of those must be the case (and I am not quite arrogant enough to claim that it is the first ! )
More on this in a later post maybe
Sunday 17 January 2010
OK This is where we are starting from.
Ever since I was a small boy I have identified very closely indeed with the young lad in the story of the Emperor's New Clothes, because it has always seemed clear to me that he and I share the same open-eyed trust in own own perceptions and the same reluctance to just believe what everyone else says we should believe.
With the benefit of more experience of the world, I now believe that the ending of that story is wrong however. Such is the popularity of those who reveal the truth that everyone else has overlooked or suppressed that in reality the crowd would almost certainly turn on him, and he would be lucky not to be lynched. (The record would subsequently show that he had made a vicious assault on the life of a universally honoured Emperor, or something like that.)
In the story we are told that that lad acted out of ignorance as well as from the courage of his own convictions, and I think I often share that quality too. Often it is because no one has told me what it is that I am supposed to think or believe that I work it out for myself and reach an answer that has not been seen before. (Often, for example, when no one has told me that something was supposed to be impossible I have just got on and done it - but of course in the end I have always paid the price for such heresy!)
All that is by way of background to the sort of things I will be writing in this blog.
I have always had a knack of asking questions no one has asked before, and reaching conclusions that no one has thought of before, and the purpose of this blog is to share a few such ideas.
For the record: Most of the "craziest" ideas I have ever had have later, sometimes years later, been propounded by respected authorities on the subject in question, and later still have become so accepted that no one even remembers that there was ever a time when they seemed less than obvious. So if some of what I write on this Blog looks crazy to you now .........
With the benefit of more experience of the world, I now believe that the ending of that story is wrong however. Such is the popularity of those who reveal the truth that everyone else has overlooked or suppressed that in reality the crowd would almost certainly turn on him, and he would be lucky not to be lynched. (The record would subsequently show that he had made a vicious assault on the life of a universally honoured Emperor, or something like that.)
In the story we are told that that lad acted out of ignorance as well as from the courage of his own convictions, and I think I often share that quality too. Often it is because no one has told me what it is that I am supposed to think or believe that I work it out for myself and reach an answer that has not been seen before. (Often, for example, when no one has told me that something was supposed to be impossible I have just got on and done it - but of course in the end I have always paid the price for such heresy!)
All that is by way of background to the sort of things I will be writing in this blog.
I have always had a knack of asking questions no one has asked before, and reaching conclusions that no one has thought of before, and the purpose of this blog is to share a few such ideas.
For the record: Most of the "craziest" ideas I have ever had have later, sometimes years later, been propounded by respected authorities on the subject in question, and later still have become so accepted that no one even remembers that there was ever a time when they seemed less than obvious. So if some of what I write on this Blog looks crazy to you now .........
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