ThinkingShift

ThinkingShift reader, Oohlala, has pointed me in the direction of a great resource called the Better Business Game. It’s a simulated experience in managing social and environmental issues in a business. Your role is as the new CEO of a company and the game takes you through a number of decision points. The aim is to balance various stakeholders’ satisfaction levels with corporate social responsibility concerns and you can track satisfaction levels via graphs that appear throughout the game. Depending on how you go, at the end of your one year stint as CEO, you’ll either face an angry crowd at the Annual General Meeting or applause from stakeholders.

The game features news reports and has been put together from general business experience across a number of industries. So the first scenario for example is - you receive an email from the Head of Human Resources saying that she’s received some worrying information about a proposed joint venture with a company in Asia. Media reports talk of harassment of workers and child labour in Asian factories. The joint venture is critical to the company’s stakeholders but, should you decide to go ahead, the company could be in for some severe press criticism. What action would you take as CEO?

Thanks Oohlala!

Update: Patrick Lambe over at Green Chameleon has now played the CSR game and makes some interesting observations around decision games versus closed-option simulations.

As someone with an undergraduate degree in History and a life-long love of the discipline, I wasn’t exactly thrilled to read this article from City Journal. In New York, they apparently have something called the New York State Regents Exams. Thirty years ago, the American History Regents was very different to what it is now - seems my cat might able to pass the 2007 history exam as it’s been dumbed-down considerly (and no, my cat’s not dumb).

The History exam has three parts: 50 multiple-choice questions on American history; 15 questions about 8 historical documents; and two essays, one of which requires the student to make use of the documents and the other a general thematic essay. But it seems the exam is now filled with cartoons and photographs. I remember sitting my HSC exams (way back in the Jurassic Park days) and believe me, there were no multiple questions. I was presented with 12 or so questions (I studied both modern and ancient history in High School) and we had to write essays on 6 if I remember.

So here’s an example of what you’d find in the NY Regents History exam. Documents 3a and 3b are photographs entitled “Suffragists’ Parade 1913″. The banners of the women marching along very clearly have the words “suffrage” and “liberty”. The difficult question then asked is: “What was a goal of the women shown in these photographs?” What the?? How hard is that? Even if the student had no idea, he or she could just write down “to obtain suffrage” and probably pass. And then there’s the super hard task - Document 4 is a reproduction of a poster entitled “12 reasons why women should vote”. All the reasons begin with Because eg “Because laws affecting children should include the woman’s point of view….”. The question the students have to sweat over? “According to this document, what were two arguments suffragists used in this 1915 flier in support of their goal?“.

And the thematic essay will really give the students are roasting - it asks them to identify two changes in American life that resulted from industrial expansion in the 19th Century and to discuss one positive or negative effect. Just in case the poor student has a memory lapse from the burden of too much study, the exam paper helpfully lists some suggestions - “increased immigration, new inventions or technologies, growth of labor unions, growth of monopolies, growth of reform movements, and increased urbanization“.

Really, I find this extraordinarily offensive. And to rub salt in the wounds, apparently the marking system (a mystery if you ask me) allows for an “adjustment” in marks, which means that a student could obtain a correct answer for only 20 out of the 50 questions and still pass! According to my uncanny maths ability, that’s less than 50%.

I decided to sit the exam myself - well, I downloaded the Regents History exam and answered the questions. Not hard IMHO but I might have a slight advantage as my Uni major was American History. My cat scored 100% :)- You can download the test here (June 2007 United States History & Government Examination).

I’m going to see if I can lay my hands on my old Higher School Certificate History exam papers (that was around 400 AD :)- But I decided to check out the NSW HSC exam papers in Ancient and Modern History as a comparison to the NY Regents exam. You can find the 2005 HSC Ancient History exam paper here. I’m pleased to see that students are asked to answer one question from a selection of 12 questions in Section 1: Personalities in their Times (and I see that good old Scipio Africanus is still there). Section 2: Ancient Societies again asks students to answer one question from Questions 13-25 (and very interesting questions I might add: seems there’s a lot more emphasis on Ancient Egypt than in my day). There are some photos in the exam, but no give-aways in the photos. And Section 3: Historical Periods follows the same one question format.

Check out both exams for yourself. What do you think?

A University of Oxford ethicist believes that new technologies should be used to “make humans better”. This is just plain scary if you ask me. Australian born ethicist, Julian Savulescu, was recently in Sydney where he gave a lecture entitled “The Ethics of New Science and Human Enhancement”.

Savulescu spoke about radical technologies currently available such as cloning, artificial reproduction and stem cell developments. Now, I’m all for these technologies if they are used to improve human well-being or cure diseases, but I get a tad concerned when I hear ethicist’s like Savulescu say that we could use genetic testing to “select better children”.

We are already in the grip of a society obsessed with human enhancement, which produces plastic looking people or people willing to inject botox into their bodies (let’s recall botox is a botulism toxin). We are a society more interested in self-image, beauty and money - so where would we draw the line on human enhancement?

The good professor makes a comparison between fish oil and direct genetic intervention when he comments that parents try to intervene in their children’s’ lives with supplements like fish oils to hopefully improve brain functioning. And because we intervene, he believes this should give us license to meddle from the start of life - through IVF - to test for factors we may not desire in our children such as depression or neuroses. He’s also a great fan of using performance enhancing drugs in sport, calling for a change in rules so that safe performance enhancers could improve sport for athletes and fans.

This just doesn’t sit well with me. Did the good professor ever watch Gattaca - a film about a future society in which your DNA determined your status in life? Ethan Hawke’s character was born with a congenital heart condition, which snuffed his chances of being a space traveller. So he assumes the life of someone whose DNA would allow him to achieve his dream of space travel. The plot of this film was all about how natural babies, who were born into a genetically-enhanced world, didn’t stand a chance against babies whose DNA was twigged in the womb so they would live a long and disease free life. Great in theory, but it led to a society that discriminated not along racial lines but according to genetics.

Why is that we are never satisfied with what Nature has given us? What is it about humans that we seem to strive for homogeneity rather than diversity - we want to look alike toting the latest huge designer hand bag; we want the perfect pert nose or Angelina Jolie lips; we buy magazines with glossy photos of Barbie-doll looking celebrities who are lauded as the idealised standard. Why can we not accept flaws or imperfections and simply be happy and get on with life?

I have a sense I’ve just read a seriously important essay - two-part essay actually. I haven’t quite got my head around it yet but for me it articulates some very important notions that I need to reflect on. The author is Curtis White (Prof of English at Illinois State University) and his two-part series appears in Orion Magazine (March/April and May/June 2007 issues). The titles of his two essays are The Idols of Environmentalism and The Ecology of Work.

I’ll do my best to summarise the two essays. I think there are many layers to his writing and insights and I’m just hovering on the surface at the moment. But here goes. Curtis says that environmentalism is failing. Yes, environmentalists are in a battle with “powerful corporate evildoers” but both the environmentalists and the corporations are all locked into the one system - capitalism. All of us (including those desperately trying to save the environment) are mere functionaries of a world designed for the “visible God” of money, profit, wealth generation, power. The vast economic order of capitalism has reduced humans to doing two things: working and consuming. We depend on the market system for our national wealth, our family security and comfort, our jobs, even our sense of identity.

The capitalist meta-narrative “creates a hole in our sense of ourselves…and it leaves us with few alternatives but to try to fill that hole with money and the things money buys. We are not free to dismiss money because we fear that we’d disappear, we’d be nothing at all without it“. And so we are weak and fearful. And whilst we talk about the destruction to the environment, we cannot imagine stepping outside a system on which we so crucially depend. As White says: “Only a weak and fearful society could invest so much desperate energy in protecting activities that are the equivalent of suicide“.

By this, he means that carbon credits for example (as a way of combating global warming) or the Kyoto protocol are simply capitalist schemes that perpetuate the problem. We believe that we can confront a problem that is external to ourselves, when what White believes is that we have lost a sense of awe, that we are spiritually impoverished, and we have lost rich traditions. Now at first I thought this might be fluffy bunny stuff - a call to return to the pre-technology/industrial era in which we all made our own clothes, grew vegetables, danced around fires, lit candles to show us the way, sang around the piano - that sort of stuff. But no, what White is saying I think is more complex than this - he’s saying that we must go beyond environmentalism. We have become so integrated into an order of work that makes us “inhuman” and intolerant (and apathetic) about the destruction going on around us (whether this is of the Earth or violence within society). He is saying that science and the language of science has become our religion over the last 200 or so years and that we must “...return to our oldest spiritual convictions: a reverence for creation and a shared commitment to the idea that religion is finally about understanding how to live in faithful relation to what has been given to us in creation“.

Okay let’s pause here: this is not some religious nut rallying against science as the Devil. White says that there are three important questions we must ask ourselves as these will ultimately decide our human existence and will establish the organising principle in a world beyond environmentalism:

• What does it mean to be a human being?
• What is my relation to other human beings?
• What is my relation to Being as such, the ongoing miracle that there is something rather than nothing?

If our answer to the first question is that we’re all here to have a jolly good party and pursue wealth and happiness; and if the answer to the second question is we merely have an economic relationship; and if our relation to the world is only to “resources” that we can exploit for profit - well, then we’re all stuffed but should be able to live comfortably in this capitalist world because we expect nothing more or better.

But if we answer that there should be a greater sense of self-worth in being a human; that there should be more justice in our relationships with others; and more reverence for simply being alive in a world surrounded by the beauty of Nature - then we must either “live in bad faith” with capitalism or begin to describe a future that is radically different from our current existence and one that returns us to our nobility.

What really stopped me in my tracks with his essays was his description of two things: we are living in the early stages of an era of consequences. Entrepreneurial freedom leaves behind a culture that accumulates - wealth, success, power. It makes cheap things that don’t last or destructive things that snuff us out. But the consequences of capitalism’s activities are climate change, species extinction, human population collapse. The second thing that I thought interesting was his description of green capitalism - the imperatives of environmentalism are not part of capitalism’s reasoning. “Capitalism can think profit, but it can’t think nature“. Green capitalism - “buy organic”, “go green” - is the marketing arm of capitalism. It’s entrepreneurialism without conscience. White says that capitalism is not sustainable and that it’s a system intent on its own death. But he’s not some left-over Communist calling for a return to the good old days of the Cold War. He is, however, someone who is willing to question capitalism, which is demonstrating intellectual conscience.

Our desire to protect capitalism means that environmentalism has also abandoned humans - to the market economy - and our reliance on scientific language, he believes, is a way of acknowledging the superiority of the capitalist/scientific meta-narrative eg using words like ecology, ecosystem, habitat. One of White’s key insights is this:

“In accepting science as our primary weapon against environmental destruction, we have also had to accept science’s contempt for religion and the spiritual….Environmentalism…should look to create a common language of care (a reverence for and commitment to the astonishing fact of Being) through which it could begin to create alternative principles by which we might live“.

But are we able to willingly give up a system within which we’ve become comfortable (from an economic perspective not a spiritual perspective)? White believes “We are not ready. Not yet, at least“. Really, you have to read these essays. They will make you stop and think.

How cool is this! I read that some people think this is a totally useless map (can’t recall where) but I reckon it’s pretty funky. Japanese company, Information Architects, has just released its 2007 map, which is basically a journey of web trends. It looks like a map of the London Underground and depicts the 200 most successful websites on the web, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective. Mostly, it features English language websites but does include some Japanese, German and Chinese sites.

Click here and check out the map. By placing your mouse over any named site, a pop-up will appear. And the map has been organised to show different “trend lines” - so for example if you follow the Social News Line (dark green), you’ll find Digg, Netvibes, Reddit etc. The rise of political blogs is shown via a thin pink line, so here you’ll find the increasingly influential Huffington Post and Daily Kos sites. The Know How Line consists of sites like Wikipedia, WebMD Health, Answers.com and Yahoo Answers.

Apparently, there are some insider jokes embedded in the map, which may require a good knowledge of the Tokyo transit system. But I did find this one amusing: “Google has moved from Shibuya, a humming place for young people, to Shinjuku, a suspicious, messy, Yakuza-controlled, but still a pretty cool place to hang out (Golden Gaya)“.

An interesting report has been released by Goldman Sachs, which highlights how an increasing number of business leaders view corporate social responsibility as a way to build trust with stakeholders, compete successfully, build business value and deliver higher stock prices. The report examined 6 industry sectors - energy, mining, steel, food, beverages, and media - and showed that companies in these sectors who were considered leaders in implementing environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies have outperformed the general stock market by 25% since August 2005. And 72% of these companies have outperformed their peers over the same period. You can download the report from the United Nations Global Compact site.

A complementary survey carried out by McKinsey & Co has found that CEOs are now listening to the call for increased environmental, social and governance strategies. 90% of CEOs surveyed say they are focusing more on ESG than 5 years ago. 72% of CEOs believe that corporate responsibility should be fully embedded in strategy and operations, but only 50% think their firms are actively doing so. You can can download the McKinsey survey from the UN Global Compact site too.

Whilst there is no global legal responsibility (yet) for companies to issue sustainability reports, it’s good to see that a number of companies are responding to internal and external demands to be transparent about their business activities.

I also found another report from KPMG and the Global Reporting Initiative (NGO started in 2000) very useful. The publication analysed sustainability reports published in 2006 by 50 leading companies and found that there were some surprising business opportunities from climate change, mostly in carbon credits.

UNESCO has released a statement into the nature of knowledge acquisition and sharing in a technology-mediated world. Adopting the “Kronberg Declaration on the Future of Knowledge Acquisition and Sharing” it highlights the following key points (and I’m quoting):

• knowledge is the key to social and economic development;
• Creation, acquisition and sharing of knowledge have been going through dramatic changes because of rapidly emerging new information and communication technologies (ICT) and the societal transformations that they generate;
• New approaches are needed to bridge international knowledge gaps while ensuring cultural and linguistic diversity;
• The Internet and new education technologies provide manifold opportunities for all;
• There is a need to continuously harness new technologies and processes to develop knowledge societies that are people-centered, inclusive and development oriented.

It goes on to suggest some political and structural changes that might be needed to improve knowledge acquisition and sharing. The most interesting one I thought was the “concept of universal “knowledge norms”, which is defined as “…assessment and certification models for measuring competence in various areas of skills and knowledge”. But other changes were noted:

• The impact of technology on the evolution of knowledge societies;
• The impact of emerging technologies on models of knowledge acquisition;
• The future role of classical knowledge acquisition structures including those of teachers/trainers;
• The role of public-private partnerships in knowledge acquisition and sharing;

Specifically, looking at the next 25 years, the group of visionaries involved in the assessment anticipate that:

• knowledge acquisition and sharing will increasingly be technology-mediated (ie online) and will create new knowledge communities;
• there will need to be more focus on social and emotional abilities and skills;
• the importance of acquiring factual knowledge will decrease, whereas the ability to find one’s way in complex systems and to find, judge, organise and creatively use relevant information, as well as the capability to learn, will become crucial;
• the importance of the role of teachers as instructors will decrease or rather morph into one of coach, guide, facilitator of learners, whilst their role as validators and interpreters of knowledge creation, sharing and acquisition will increase;
• learners will play a more active role with content creation and dissemination and open access to and free flow of content will be of increasing importance;
• face to face knowledge acquisition settings will remain important (ie communities of practice) and will provide socialising environments.

The assessments calls for all stakeholders to come together to ensure that developing countries are included so that the digital divide is lessened. And very interestingly it states that diverse languages should be preserved but at the same time competencies for knowledge acquisition and sharing need to be identified “in one or more global languages”. New and creative business models need to be created it says to provide “high quality content”.

You can download the Kronberg Declaration here.

This is the fourth outing for ThinkingShift’s How Curious! category. There are so many weird, wonderful, bizarre and curious items I could bring you that I struggle to reduce things to just four or five items per How Curious! feature. But I have some good ones for us today.

Will the fish suffer? There’s a bizarre experiment going on in Finland. Some poor salmon, trout, pike and perch, species common to Finland’s coastal waters, will be subjected to Uriah Heep. Who or what is Uriah Heep you may ask (had to look this one up for myself). According to Wikipedia, Uriah Heep was (and still is) a British rock band active since the 1960s. The aging rockers will perform a ‘fish concert’ for 3,000 fans, including said fish. The point? To see if the fish suffer any distress or abnormal behaviour. The Finnish researcher behind this experiment says: “It could be quite nasty to arrange such an aquarium and a performance venue (so close to the fish) especially when the (band) is a bit old-fashioned.” Eh? Why Uriah Heep I ask? The fish might want something a bit more contemporary rather than some old rock and roll dudes. I haven’t found out yet what the results of the experiment are and whether the fish jumped out of their aquarium with the first loud twang of a 1960s guitar! Source: Reuters

Thinking of a new career? Being a Kiwi, it is with a twinge of embarrassment that I bring you this story. Should you be fed up with your career, you may soon be able to enrol in a new tertiary course in New Zealand. Education types are in full discussion over in the Land of the Long White Cloud. Courses in prostitution (yes, you read correctly) are being considered. But said courses would need to meet stringent funding criteria: “… meet minimum quality standards, demonstrate genuine community need and meet Government priorities laid out in the Tertiary Education Strategy”. Now, I’m just not going to ask how they’d be assessing quality; I’m not sure what the community need would be; and I’d love to see the Strategy! Would this be a three year course I wonder? And being a Uni lecturer myself, I’d be intrigued to see the Subject Outline - perhaps, History and Philosophy of an Ancient Art; Dressing for Success; You and Your Client. Source: NZ Herald.

Pride and Embarrassment. I’m sure you’ve read Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, probably at school. Her book has been in publication for over 200 years and been retold in numerous films. But in today’s cut throat publishing world filled with piranhas, sorry literary agents - would Austen get published in a Potter-mad world? An enterprising Austen enthusiast made only minor changes and sent off opening chapters and plot synopses to 18 of the UK’s largest publishers and agents. Guess what? All 18 turned down Austen’s work with a resounding “no thanks”. What’s really curious to me is that only one of the 18 recognised Austen’s work. Hello? Austen’s book was retitled to First Impressions but the opening line remained the same: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife“. Source: Guardian Unlimited.

Leave the iPod at home. I have a sleek black iPod for when I’m out and about exercising. I occasionally jog (I’m more a treadmill hamster) but news from Canada has caused me to rethink. Apparently, iPods, jogging and lightning is one electrifying mix. A 37-year old jogger decided to brave a thunderstorm and jog whilst listening to his iPod. Alas, lightning struck a near-by tree and directly traced a path through the metal in the jogger’s earphones, burning his chest, neck and face. It must have been one heck of an explosive trip - the poor chap’s eardrums were ruptured and the bones in his middle ear were dislocated. Not to mention his jaw broke in four places. This brave dude still jogs but he leaves the iPod at home. Smart. Source: Reuters.

Rethink that trip to the Congolese jungle. I remember studying H. Rider Haggard novels at University and thinking how the steamy, impenetrable African jungle must be full of undiscovered animals and fierce, exotic tribes. Okay, long time ago; but seems I might not have been that wrong. Did you know that deep in the Congolese jungle are some chimps, giant ones at that, who kill lions, catch fish and howl at the moon? Yep, this fact eluded me too. Seems local lore speaks of a hybrid creature: a chimp gorilla, which has remained hidden to scientists due to the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Some intrepid scientists have managed to push through the region and croc-infested waters and discovered not a hybrid but unique, super-sized chimps who love a bit of cat-flesh. They are called the Bill Apes (named after a near-by town - I reckon a better name could be found for these chimps. If they’re super-sized, maybe McChimps?!). They’re obviously pretty fierce as they sleep in nests on the ground and are not afraid of encountering a leopard, buffalo or elephant. These chimps like to smash things around, such as hard-shelled fruits and snails, and use sticks up to 2.5 metres long to catch fish. Not sure why they are said to howl at the moon. Think I’ll take the Congolese jungle off my list of “Must Visit” holiday spots! Source: Guardian Unlimited.

I’m a great fan of Dan Gillmor’s book, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, and his blog, Backfence. After reading his book a couple of years ago, I had grand plans to set up a citizen journalism site for my local area (still thinking about it). So a Wired article and an experiment in citizen journalism piqued my interest.

Wired became involved in a project called Assignment Zero, which explored crowdsourcing (or what happens when a crowd or community gathers together). In this case, the experiment was to focus on pro-am journalism and a “crowd of volunteers” would write content around how average citizens are upending established business through citizen media initiatives like Wikipedia and blogs. Assignment Zero was open to the public for 12 weeks but the crowd apparently was too tough to manage.

After some technology glitches and general confusion amongst participants, the major lesson learned appears to be that crowds require organisation. The original aim was to produce 80 feature stories on crowdsourcing but Jay Rosen, the NYU journalism professor who initiated the project, believes that only 28% of Assignment Zero worked. So what happened?

Seems there are further lessons:

• the topic of crowdsourcing was too broad, too nascent and too nebulous. It created confusion rather than passion.
• the technology didn’t help participants engage with the site and the open source publishing system chosen (one that is common for community-driven projects) didn’t have editors assigned. So when volunteers signed up and went onto the site, it was basically a ghost town.
• in the first week, there were 500 volunteers but only one Assignment Zero staff member. So organising fell back on the volunteers themselves and given the confusion over the broad topic and technological issues, many volunteers drifted away.
• 30 volunteer editors were assigned to manage the various topics and understand the technology being used, but online organising is different to physical organising and the editors found themselves lacking in experience with online projects.
• half-way through the 12 weeks, a lot of volunteers had shot through; some topic pages had been abandoned; and communication between contributors and editors was fraught with difficulty (mmm….sounds like a few discussion forums I know).

A redesign of the site took place and social networking features such as photos and discussion areas were added, and contributors could now review each other’s work. A major lesson was that a community controls what is spoken about and shared- so many of the topic pages had to be ditched as volunteers just weren’t interested. Instead of being asked to write feature stories, volunteers were now encouraged to interview someone they admired - given this clear task, which was easier than writing a long feature piece, the crowd started to gather. This is similar in a way to my experience with Communities of Practice - if they are given a specific purpose (not a task!), then they have some direction they can take control of - they become a Community of Purposeful Practice.

Many of the interviews gathered were of professional standing - well-sourced, written and edited. The community allocated itself to topics organically, depending on who had the passion, the knowledge or interest. But a major lesson would appear to be around the model of engagement. As the article says: “….one model that doesn’t work is attempting to use crowdsourcing simply as a cost-saving measure. Communities must be cultivated, respected and deftly managed if they are to come together to create economic value.“

And the knowledge management practitioners amongst us will not be surprised to learn of another lesson from this project. Volunteers decided to engage with the community for a variety of reasons - enhancing one’s status within the community; the opportunity to learn or perfect a skill; or the intangible reward of working with others toward a achieving a shared goal.

I’ve been following the topic of crowdsourcing for awhile and you can check out a great blog on this - Jeff Howe’s Crowdsourcing: Tracking the Rise of the Amateur. Howe was the author of the Wired article and was involved with Assignment Zero. One of his original articles - The Rise of Crowdsourcing - is here.

An IT work colleague put me onto the Visual Literacy e-learning programme. The site focuses on the ability (a critical one I would suggest) of creating, evaluating and applying conceptual visual representations. The challenge of visualizing knowledge for successful communication is one we grapple with on a daily basis.

If you log-in as a Guest, you can check out some demo tutorials and, in the Maps section, you can find a great resource - A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods - which you can download here. What’s great about this Table is the breakdown into categories of visualization methods: Data Visualization; Information Visualization; Concept Visualization; Strategy Visualization; Metaphor Visualization; and Compound Visualization.

So under Metaphor Visualization, for example, you’ll find a Story Template, Iceberg, Heaven ‘n’ Hell Chart; under Compound Visualization, you’ll find a Knowledge Map, a Rich Picture, a Learning Map etc. It’s really fascinating stuff - Information Lense, Semantic Networks, Soft System Modeling, Evocative Knowledge Map - they’re all there; just place your mouse over whatever you’re interested in and enjoy!