You behave like you’ve seen in films

Everything you know about how to act in life, what will happen in life, and what the possibilities are in life, you got from stories. Books, comics, films, pop videos, television, adverts. All the interactions, all the characterisations, all the ways of speaking looking and posturing — all written and imagined by writers. True, they’re often observed from life, and often not, but such scenes to play, actions to perform and attitudes to strike are also abstracted and distorted for dramatic effect. All the behavioural transactions we exhibit are inherited from those we’ve seen other people perform, otherwise it’s not a valid currency. The most memorable and vivid examples of such transactions are often those transmitted through mass media.

The boring sections of life, any interstitial inconsequential ‘glue’ in-between the notable parts, is edited out while dramatic situations are exaggerated. This is then passed on via contemporary culture through generations until the original direction or observation is lost. These snippets and expressions and communications become normalised as “the” way to do things. But we can’t actually invent any of these things ourselves in isolation without being heavily influenced by what we see and experience around us and most of what we experience in volume is stories. In todays terms, this means stories transmitted in mass media. Everything we know about how to act in life we learned from films and television, comics, books, etc.

You might be doubting me right now, ready to deny this and ready to argue back but consider the way in which you are picturing yourself retorting in your mind. You got that catalogue of moves and facial expressions and ways of speaking from somewhere. Maybe some children’s cartoon series, maybe a graphic novel, maybe a film you once saw. Maybe not. Maybe someone down the pub or at a party or club, who in turn got it from a cartoon or film or an advert on telly. Your lexicon of expressions and attitudes and actions are a validated mashup of the most vivid transactional moments in your media consumption.

Looking for the magic that’ll rescue you from work

There’s no magic that’ll save you from having to do the work in life. There isn’t some significant alternative state to your life in which, once you enter it, you’re relieved of all the hard work and judgement of success. There’s no lottery win that’ll change everything. Even if you did win the lottery, you’d have learned nothing — it‘s not repeatable, and you can’t just do it again when you need to. What you need is the learning of repeatable or reproducible actions or processes. Otherwise it’s not you doing it — any success gained is not your success. Therefore, in order to achieve success, be prepared for a proportional amount of actual effort to put in. It’s not going to happen with no effort or work, but our response to the word “work” can vary according to what we mean by work.

In our minds, are we equating “work” to someone digging a ditch, laying railway tracks, banging metal in a workshop? Does a graphic designer do any work — you don’t hear any banging sounds, so is there any work happening? Does a photographer work — I’m remembering of course the days when there was such a thing as a professional photographer and their phone used to ring — people wondered, where’s the work in just pressing the shutter? Does a salesperson do any work — at least some days in a month, yes they probably do — their work is persuasion. Does marketing count as work? Some of it certainly does — a lot of their work is even a mystery to themselves, as you’ll discover in the world of social media marketing, but a lot of it is promotion, and if that work isn’t done, the product isn’t promoted.

There’s also no magic idea that is likely to occur to you that will change the world and make your fortune just by itself. There’s plenty of good ideas, but absolutely none that are self-propelled so that just simply having the idea is all that is required to happen. No good idea is so good that you can then sit back and reap the rewards without any further effort. All ideas require development and implementation, but further, they require promotion and persuasion, and those last two are usually much more work than the first two.

Unfortunately, a mediocre idea that has been thoroughly promoted to a critical mass of people, persuading them  that it is perhaps a better idea than it really is — stands every chance of succeeding. Whereas, an excellent idea that has not been promoted very much — only a few people around you even know it exists and most of them don’t understand the benefits properly — stands every chance of staying exactly where it is. This indicates the potency of promotion and persuasion and that they are stronger forces than a good idea alone. It might even be the case that with skilful and industrious promoting and persuading, you don’t even need an idea at all, just a process of work that can be exercised.

Varied providence of nations adjusts effects of agency upon success

Before I go further with this article, seeing as you’ve got past the title, I’d better define what I mean by “agency”. There are among other definitions, philosophical definitions of agency and sociological definitions of agency, but they both converge in the way that I would find useful for this conversation. They both imply the ability to take action, whereby the decision to take action and the direction or form in which this action is to take, is decided within the person we are referring to. The competing force is that of “structure”, and the structure within which the person operates acts among other things as a set of constraints or limitations, or even affords opportunities, most usually both.

For example, a school might have a certain level of formality or strictness, compared with another school, and this places limitations on the exercising of free will on the students (and teachers). If there are innate needs to rebel or act demonstratively the more constrained students might yet still exercise those needs, but they may be less practiced at them and therefore do it too well and too much. At a workplace, there might also be a certain level of formality or strictness, compared with other places to work. This, of course, places limitations on the happiness and sanity of the workers, who should not stand for this watered-down form of slavery, and should instead leave and find nicer jobs, leaving behind those out-of-date slave drivers to struggle by themselves. Or you might be employed in a nice place with a nice management, although hardly anyone actually is.

But what about whole countries or nations? They too have quite different structures, and it is interesting to see how the differences in nation state structures manifest in real differences in agency within the populace. Different countries have a different amount of “supplied” assistance or governance or rules that guide or constrain a person’s actions and behaviour. This could be seen to give rise to differences in agency as perceived by the nationals of various countries. Some nations try and place quite defined and delineated restrictions on behaviour and expression, and also on the level of detail of support, help or security. Variously, this could have an influence upon the collectiveness or individuality of the people of that nation.

In some countries, if you don’t have a job or income, you’re broke. In other countries, you might not be, you might have a layer of assistance. To give a tangible example, in some countries, there’s very clear definitions of where the road stops and the pavement begins, in other countries, there isn’t — the road just sort of “becomes” the pavement in a rough and ragged unfinished fashion. Does this mean that road safety is less? Perhaps not really, perhaps the responsibility of provision of safely acting shifts from the country or county into the individual. Some countries have a structure that is provident, which might substitute for action within the individual. Other countries simply don’t, which causes the individual to have to take action. However, the heroic success stories there that we would hear about can tend to mask the hidden failures that, if provided with help or support, could have demonstrated a difference. Is the structure that we find ourselves in more of an inadvertent ingredient in success than we usually consider?

Conversations come in different flavours

People start and engage in conversation on the Internet, just as they also  do in real life. Different conversations have different reasons, of course, but they also have different styles. These flavours or methods of going in the desired direction can affect the content of the conversation by biasing it. The conversation will progress using positive or negative, constructive or destructive expression. If the reason for the conversation is predominantly an exercise in purely the style of the conversation, it would be fair to say that it will feature   no actual productive outcome at the destination. There’s no end product — because in those cases that simply isn’t the reason to have the conversation.

I would suggest developing an alertness for ‘where this conversation is going’ both online and in real life, in terms of not only the outcome or reason for the communication, but also for the style. It might be helpful to remove yourself from the situations in which a certain kind of communication is evidently of a destructive and negative style, as you’re sure to have more productive things to be doing at that particular time.

If you have to be present, you don’t have to participate. If you have to participate, try and steer or shift the focus around to make the purpose of the time spent more positive and generative if you can. Perhaps you could draw to the attention of the other participants that what’s going on is unconstructive and unhelpful — you’ll have to play that by ear. Online, it is easy to get swept into posts on forums that degenerate into absurd displays of ego protection in the guise of expertise, or even plain immature negativity. In real life, you’ll also notice the differences in styles of meetings, gatherings, in business and in more relaxed scenarios. Spot those unconstructive style differences early, and if you can, abandon the endeavour — there’s no requirement to be part of such a waste of time and energy.

Have more sex and get more money

Have I got your attention? Good. Getting other people’s attention is what propels most of the Internet. Actually, all of the Internet. There’d be nothing on the Internet at all otherwise. And elsewhere in the real world there’d be no advertising; no books written; no films made; no music recorded; no photographs taken; no television programmes; no news journalism; no paintings; no labour strikes and no terrorism. I want your attention because, well, not just the warm and cosy feeling of gratification and validation, which is the most direct immediate result, but also via a more circuitous route of increasing the probability of being able to offer something of value to you, and thus increasing the risk of being rewarded appropriately in the long run.

One of the interesting things about the unintuitive nature of our networking relationships is not only that the quantity of connections follows a scale-free power-law progression, but also that the type of relationships matter somewhat too. In real life, our interpersonal networking tends to take two dominant directions — business or friendship relationships. Business relationships are often about provider / client differentials. Sometimes they’re about equal relationships, in which one side provides something that the other side is lacking in, and vice-versa — basically, acting as contra-operating provider / client relationships. Friendship relationships are complicated. There are several initial condition situations, and several strategy choices to run the relationship by.

The initial conditions may begin in the playground as “best friends” learning that people offer value and we can consume that value — but within a fairly innocent and basic notion of transactional value. As we grow up, we experience romance, which modifies our idea of value. Into adulthood, some get the hang of how those relationships can impact our social effect. We experience the extrinsic value of having a partner, that the relationship itself can have an effect on your network fitness. Hence, some people even collect relationships. Others may observe other’s relationships and hanker after similar situations without easily achieving anywhere near as many followers.

Perhaps more traction to escalate ones network fitness is gained through personal relationships than what we term as business relationships. This is not to say that one should attempt to have sex with as many partners as possible in order to widen one’s connections. One only has to look at cultures which consider baby mothers and absent fathers to be the norm. Those involved in such highly connected networks are not necessarily enjoying a high powered state of business success. It’s often quite the contrary, with more mouths to feed, limitations placed upon times and places, and consequently not accessing a rich range of rational choices for progress — like dragging an anchor.

Very often a partner is supportive and will believe in you when times are bleak. It’s tempting to think that if one partner in a relationship supplies such a lot of help, then why not simply increase the amount of relationships? However, the stability of one single relationship for a longer term may prove more valuable than the immediate benefits of a highly varied relationship scene, if for no other reason than long-term reputation. But this shouldn’t prevent being promiscuous in other associations that are not romantic. Perhaps the best way forward in business is having learned a lot about the value of interpersonal relationships, to go full circle and return to being a bit more like we were in the playground again, with networks of multiple “best friends” innocently evaluated by reputation, loyalty, and support.

What shape is your network? You’re wrong

What shape is your network? Do networks have shapes? People seem to think so. They’re referred to as “topologies” and you see the same sort of mentality in organisational charts. Similarly, your organisation’s org chart is lying to you. A blatant lie. It draws a picture — a graph of arrows and nodes, or vertices and edges — people believe it, yet it’s wrong. The topology of most organisations is a top-down hierarchy, in which the power is centred at the top and commands are passed down through levels of control and authority lower and lower reaching the workers at the bottom. On the “factory floor” or the “sales force” or “front line”. Whichever analogy describes best the people who spend all their time doing the applied work and none of their time commanding (or “managing”) subordinates. This is still a dominant topology for many organisations other than the very young startups, which pretend to be flat and equal, and the very trendy, which pretend to be informally mixed up and organically interconnected and equal, man. However, if you draw out the org chart of any organisation, it is a deceptive lie. Your org chart is lying to you.

Who is connected to who? The traditional and expected way of viewing this is by authority. Who can issue commands to who, who can sack or promote who, who pays who. Another way of viewing the situation is by who influences who, and viewed this way the connection graph looks totally different. Some people in an organisation are not influential at all. Even at the top. There are people at the top of an organisation that few even recognise as working there, most people don’t attach their name to their face, and what function they perform is a mystery. If they have any influence at all, it’s a generally vague ‘fear’ experienced from a distance instilled by association with certain offices that most people don’t go near. Apart from that quiet background-level impression, they have no specific influence at all. You can almost ignore those people. Without them, life would not be detectably different. However, your organisation’s traditional-style org chart is simply a map of fear — that’s all it is.

Then you have people at the top who everybody knows — their name, their aim, their personality — and although any interaction with them is definitely one-sided (they own the company, or can sack you, or promote you) it is at least reassuringly predictable and not such a mystery. You kind of know where you stand with those people, you know enough about them to transact usefully. They’ve publicised or made known all of the necessary information about themselves over the course of time as a social investment. However, it may often prove to be that the most influential people in an organisation, and therefore, where the most dynamic transactional value activity in the network takes place, is not at the top. It’s elsewhere, and could be anywhere — it doesn’t relate to your accepted org chart at all. We’re beginning to glimpse a different network graph altogether.

There are popular nodes in a network, and these become even more popular because they offer the richest connections to the most other nodes in one easy action. The people that everyone knows, the gossips through who all traffic travels. The people who act as interfaces between all the departmental networks in the organisational environment. Not just the hubs within the departments, but the circuses that connect the different departments and even the outside world.

Who sees everybody in the organisation? Who interacts with everybody? Not just a casual “hello” and “goodbye” but a useful transaction offering value, that bridges domains. Who are the circuses? These are often also the influencers. If they get a new type of phone, or wear a new fashion item, or use a new app, ride a new type of bike, or read a new book, or shop online through a certain site, or have their hair in a certain way, soon a few more people align themselves with these choices. Many people within and connected to the organisation gain value from these people who influence, and they afford credibility and reputation to these influential highly connected circuses. However, you won’t see any of that on an org chart. Essentially, if you’re an owner or founder or some other chief of an organisation and you think you’re the boss because you’re in the top area of your org chart, there’s a fair chance you’re wrong. Your  org chart is actually a map of fear, and it’s been lying to you all along.

Your morsels of value

What do I mean by network value? In a network, the popular nodes become even more popular, according to a “rich get richer” fashion known as “Preferential Attachment”. Previously I have used the example of the London Underground, although that is not a particularly good example in terms of dynamics, because the popular stations are interchanges. There is very little occasion for a new interchange to suddenly pop up at a station that hitherto was not an interchange. New stations don’t materialise that often, so the whole analogy proves a bit slow to visualise in action.

The network value of a vertex in a network, which is rewarded by affordability of opportunity to increase connections in a scale-free manner, is itself a complex parameter. What do I mean by value? Up to now, we’ve just been assuming we mean that we offer something, perhaps something unique or perhaps something appreciated or liked or funny or thoughtful or provoking or some other appealing lure. If a node in a network produces something no other node does, and if as coincidence would have it, other nodes in a network actually appreciate that product, then that’s what we’ve been imagining what I mean by “value” within a network. But this is quite subjective.

Lots of nodes, sorry, people, produce and present to the network more or less nothing. When they do, it might be of low importance such as mentioning that their cat rolled over. Or it might be something derived that they are simply passing on, like a retweet or a pasted-in motivational quote. Motivational quotes are a freely utilised currency. As far as I’m aware, Henry Ford, Bob Marley and Thomas Edison don’t actually have twitter or facebook accounts, what with the inconvenience of being dead and all that. Yet much of what they ever said in their lives is passed around freely. Not only as a way of cheering people up (or ‘motivating’ them), but packaging it as a kind of “you got that good feeling from me” emotional transaction.

As I say, a node that produces is not always offering value to the network. In a work environment, if someone farts, the value of their unique production is generally not appreciated or liked, nor does it give everyone else a good feeling. So you see, it’s subjective. What we consider value is often measured and quantified in terms of a qualitative effect on us. The more happy it makes us, the more value we assign to that direct contact on the network that packaged their output into tiny little morsels, nibble after nibble. We afford network fitness to them as a reward. But only if we calculate that they offer value to us, and this is purely in terms of how good it makes us feel at the time. It’s all very much instant gratification, there’s almost nothing long-term about this, and it doesn’t correlate with any true usefulness of the information, just how sweet it tastes to us.

Drowning in social networking

Who are all these people subscribing me or following me or whatever? I don’t know them and they don’t know me. The most they can possibly know about me is from my picture, profile and a quick look at the latest stuff I posted or tweeted or the videos on youtube that I make. None of those followers know what kind of a person I really am, nobody knows anything much about me unless you’re a long-term friend. However we all need to expand our connections, but the vast majority of those we connect to will turn out to be passively useless. Of course, you have no idea which ones those are, because someone connected to you may seem to be contributing nothing but they in turn may connect to someone else who connects to someone else, who, well, you get the idea. Distant and weak links are often valuable. Not all the time, but it happens.

The point is, these social networks are actually directed graphs, even though it doesn’t seem like it. There are people who tweet out or post out. There are people who don’t, or hardly ever, or when they do it’s about something mundane in their life such as their cat looking cute again. There are people who read these messages and people who ignore most of them. When you have a lot of followers and in turn you follow a lot, you can’t possibly spend all day reading it all, you’d get nothing done. Some people produce content on the social networks, some people consume content, some redirect, retweet or repost and act as hubs within their own networks. Some even act as circuses linking the hubs that they pay attention to, at the expense of discrete islands of nodes.

Therefore some information is going out from many nodes, some information is coming in to many nodes, and not all nodes balance this equally. The network value of a node is related to how actively it will process from input to output usefully to others (either reading it, or retweeting it, etc). If it does nothing, or just occasionally posts about the cat, it’s effectively just noise. However, as I stated, you can’t just remove all the first degree connections that seem useless, they may be connected further away to someone more useful —you simply never know.

A lot of this chasing followers in the hope of a sudden viral success of whatever it is we’re all about, reminds me of something. It reminds me of the last years of the 20th century when everyone was swapping banner ads on their web rings. It’s not actual productive work. Yes, it gets the word out there and an amount of that kind of promotion is a good ingredient, but it can’t take your whole day, day after day. If everyone did that, nothing would get made, grown, produced or fixed. My advice therefore is to concentrate far more on what it is that you produce that is of value, and less so on publicising it, otherwise you’ll get nearly nothing done in life. Turn your back, get on with whatever it is you actually do and make some more of it. Be productive. You can market it afterwards. Unless, that is, your whole productive output is structured only around social media “marketing”, in which case you’re effectively useless. But that can’t be the case, I’m sure you can actually do something that people are interested in experiencing.

Winning inside! Celebrate personal design improvements

In a workplace that seems day by day to grow increasingly prescriptive, administrative and bureaucratic, how can an initiative-driven employee survive? The feeling is that the opportunities for experiencing real instances of success are becoming fewer and fewer, replaced by sporadic surprise corporate messages of abstract success from above. So how can one return to the days when it was enjoyable to get up in the morning to go to that job? You can’t just up and go to another job because that other job will be like that too by now. All jobs have become increasingly prescriptive, administrative and bureaucratic.

If you stay where you are, with your regular salary, how can you turn it back into the job that you once liked? One answer, they say, is to celebrate little wins. This is easy to misinterpret. Some see it as celebrating little tit-for-tat victories over someone else, like a constant cold-war — grind down or be ground down. This is simply not a healthy attitude — don’t engage in personal pettiness, it’s energy inefficient.

Instead, what I mean is to celebrate personal design improvements. Now, these are nothing to do with your career opportunities or your performance in your job or even the direction of the organisation itself. Well, maybe they are but in an indirect way. They’re more related to your own foundation as a credible and reputable human being. Your own design can be improved. Wait, if you’re already perfect, stop reading now — this is not for you. For the rest of us, what I mean is that we are all on a hero’s journey that involves becoming a better person than we were before. We can all do that. We can all identify problems in our own makeup and like any product, the next model or next version can feature improvements.

Think of your own phone or tablet or laptop, and compare it to the first one you ever had. You were compelled to upgrade quite readily and regularly because the design was improved. It’s the same with you and I. We can all be improved even in tiny ways. The innovation process is to identify a problem and its specification, which leads us to a solution, then we implement it. You must celebrate each little design improvement in yourself. Once you implement it, celebrate it! Let everyone else know. Tell your workgroup or social networks what the problem was, and what you did about it! Celebrate your personal design improvements. Now no matter how restrictive your job gets, at least you’re independently winning inside!

The difference between achievement and success

What is achievement?

Achievement is where you push your envelope of potential, your boundary of potential, your horizon of potential, beyond what you thought you were capable of. However, it’s not just about putting in more effort — more hours worked or units processed. What counts more is how we have recognised problems, designed a specification for a solution, identified a solution that fits, and proceeded to implement it. A hole in the ground is a problem, we need to know the shape and size of the hole (the specification) and what to fill that hole in with (the solution), and then actually fill it in (the implementation).

In that case, what is success?

Success is where you are rewarded for promoting the transactional value of the product of your achievement to the market. A product of an achievement that reaches one person and offers value that benefits them is rewarded. The same product from the same achievement reaching a hundred people and offering value that benefits those, is also rewarded. However, each of those hundred people in turn might also be connected to another hundred, and each of those to another hundred, and so on. Consequently, the transactional response for the value you offer becomes your scale-free reward of network fitness. In other words, it comes back to you multiplied — and that’s how we do that.

Be a Circus — link the networks

You cannot simply engage solely in the activity of “marketing”. There has to be something to market. You have to have a product. This has to be created or generated or grown or picked or mined or recycled or otherwise obtained somehow. It seems to me that a lot of people are quite willing to do this “marketing” thing, in favour of attending to the creation or generation step. You can’t market nothing, you have to add something of value, and no, marketing marketing doesn’t count, that adds up to nothing. How much time should we spend making and creating, and how much time for publicising that we’ve made the stuff, or have the stuff or are the stuff? I suspect those that are attracted to the perceived benefits of this “marketing” activity are precisely the sort of people who simply don’t make things or create things or even fix things.

There are people who make and create and generate, and I include the people who also repair and upgrade and maintain. However, there is certainly another type of person who shuns the innate ability we all have to produce because they offer a different value. Instead, they act as what I will term “circuses” between hubs of people in a clique, topic domain or community. In the same way, some people in those groups of people — the trades, interest groups or organisations, act as hubs by earning respect and visibility through their value and expertise. At the hub and community level, many of the highly connected and visible hubs that exhibit high network fitness within their communities, are usually also producers and consumers of the specific topic they are involved in.

The hubs are effectively people who know about other people in a domain and what they like and require. Because of this value the hubs are rewarded with connection fitness, in that domain. Everybody goes into and out of that hub, and more so because of their connectivity. They become visible and popular within a domain. They are the hubs that everyone connects to. They know their stuff, they know their people, they know their people that know their stuff. High network fitness.

The circuses are a different type of people who know about other people across various domains along with what they produce, the value they offer, and where it can fit. They probably know quite little in detail about what happens in each specific community and domain and trade, but enough to carry a surface level conversation. Enough to get the inkling about it. Enough to be able to deal with the concept abstractly, but not from the inside. What they can do is hook up one concept with another. Know which plugs and sockets on the patchboard might prove useful to hook together. In fact, they often don’t even know that, they simply connect them anyway. If nothing happens, nothing happens, but otherwise, something might happen! And because of their highly connected network fitness, hooking together the diverse hubs themselves, they get significant scale-free magnitudes of rewards.

That’s probably how things work in life, so there you are: the secret, all yours — enjoy. Tweet this around in between your pictures of kittens, and let the world know what I’ve taught you today. Become a Circus!

People are our product

I can see why social media is so compelling for most. We have a kind of herd instinct — well, it’s certainly not a true herd instinct in the sense of cattle, but we are fairly gregarious, us humans. It’s almost like our instinct to return to a group for security is being triggered all the time. It rewards us in the same way each time we are exposed to it, and when we aren’t we are reminded of the feeling. We have a kind of itch inside that prompts us, whenever there isn’t any overtly engaging conscious stimulation, to turn around and catch up with what the herd is doing. In past times, this may have involved going down the pub or similar venue. Going to a church or something like that. Going to the beach or a park or somewhere that affords “promenading”. The phone or tablet we carry is a constantly alluring gateway to get back to the crowd again for our regular hit of validation.

Even in shopping centres and tube stations, people standing on the right on the up escalator will simply look at the people standing on the right riding the down escalator, and vice versa. We like to look at each other, be with each other and discern differences in each other. We get a lot of pleasure from just looking at another human being — it’s obviously of value. There are even entire magazines devoted to looking at people. And television programmes. And films in the cinema. We value other people, their presence and existence makes us feel good.

In fact, that is precisely the point we should be taking to heart and embodying as the core of our businesses and products and endeavours — that people are effectively the product. People are our product. All of us. We are our product. We make stuff, for other people. We do stuff, for other people. We fix stuff and say stuff and squeeze stuff and show stuff — all for other people. People are who we connect to in our social networks, people are our societies. Our product is effectively nothing but people.

We offer value to each other — or at least, we should if we want to be successful, and we can measure our success by the connections we are rewarded with, and how influential we become within our networks. Maybe in addition there’s some kind of transactional reward involved, featuring temporally decoupled representational stored effort tokens, or maybe not. But that isn’t the main point. The value we gain is that of connectivity and agency within the network. If we offer value we may be rewarded with connectivity that affords network  fitness. One person connects to us, if they like what we offer, good, but if they don't they can pass the connection on to another and if they pass the connection on and so on, this builds our influence and allows our reach to extend. One person passing the good word on to another is how reputations are built, and the reputation stays or persists much longer than any set of connections in your network. We’re not really building networks, then. We’re really building reputations, and the way that we do this is by using the network as a substrate upon which our reputation grows.

Is Planet Earth skint?

Is Planet Earth broke? Has the world run out of money? Are we financially so overdrawn that life on Earth cannot continue because it is skint? Is this how it all ends? Not with a bang, nor a whimper, but a knock? Consider the concept of money. What is it? When was the last time you saw some? That’s probably why people have trouble defining what it is. Money is counterintuitive, it behaves as a fluid. It represents stored energy expenditure that is temporally decoupled. In other words, it’s a token of past or future stored effort that can be moved about in time and given to someone else in return for an equivalent amount of effort on their part.

Energy expenditure in the sense that we’re interested in is essentially analogous to work or effort. For the most part, to do work involves expending some energy. Yes, even bankers and estate agents. If I bake a loaf of bread, you could do the same. However, if I bake two loaves of bread and you catch two fish, I might accept a fish for a loaf, if we both agree. If you wanted today’s loaf but you didn’t manage to catch the fish today I might let you have a loaf and you owe me a fish, if I trust you. If you’re a stranger, forget it. Same as if I burned the loaves today I could still get a fish and owe an extra loaf tomorrow, if I were known and trusted. If we had some kind of agreed token instead, we could dispense with the direct barter and I get a coin for a loaf, I give a coin for a fish, and a stranger with no loaves or fish gives a coin even though we don’t trust her. It represents the effort involved in catching a fish or baking a loaf, or some equivalent effort that we’ve all agreed on. Or we could store the money for later when we might need more of it, like to buy a small twin-engine personal jet plane. Work, or effort, therefore is associated with expenditure of energy.

Think of the work you’ve done today, or this week, or last month. It’s easy to see that working self-employed seems like a linear relationship — do a lot of work and get paid for it. Put half the effort in and not get paid as much. Put no effort in at all and get nothing. But as we all know it’s not that straightforward. In a job as an employee, it’s easy to see people putting more effort in than yourself, and people putting less effort in than yourself, yet all getting paid similar amounts at similar times. It’s easy to see that the ‘free-rider’ effect limits the amount of work in a team or group to a socially normal expectation. Even though some people coast along going through the motions of holding a job down and yet getting paid, while others excel, and yet get paid, we all actually do some amount of work. Hardly anybody gets away with doing nothing. We all work, we all expend effort, and we all therefore qualify to make money.

I said that the fluid “money” is a temporally decoupled token of stored effort. This is the essential mechanism behind trade and transactions in the modern world. Fiat money is the use of something otherwise totally useless, as the thing that money is made of. We use coins, which are not much use to eat or sleep on or anything else other than buying something else with. Similarly with paper money, which I suppose you could burn if you want to keep warm. The KLF must’ve been getting pretty cold prior to that day in 1994. Money these days as we know is simply a number in a bank database, not even backed up by a Gold Standard, and this is still a fiat currency. Even with forthcoming popularity of cryptocurrencies, the most popular of which is currently Bitcoin, we still store or exchange effort in something that is otherwise totally useless in itself.

The world has a lot of people in it. Many of those people spend their day at work in a job. Many of those in jobs actually seem to do some real work — they can’t possibly spend all morning looking at Facebook. What would they do in the afternoon? We have a lot more people in circulation in the world now than we did before this recent recession. The one that frightened everyone since 2007 to about last year when Daft Punk ended it by releasing “Get Lucky” followed by Pharrell sealing global financial recovery with “Happy”. We all perform work, put in effort, and this gets stored for later or passed around as money. We have more productive capacity now than the world has ever had.

We should not and must not persist in this dismal attitude toward economics that allows falling down into austerity measures just to tighten up and restrict production. We must realise that the planet is not broke. Where did all the money go? Where was it to begin with? Is Planet Earth skint? Broke? Bankrupt? Of course not. Planet Earth should not hang up the sign saying “out of business”. We are not a broke planet. We have the work, the effort, the temporally decoupled system of representing transferrable stored energy — the money. It’s somewhere, it can’t have escaped. And if it turns out that we didn’t have as much fiat nonsense as we thought we did, we can easily make a lot more. Let’s get to work!

What is a network? Fitness, Value, Tournaments

If you search for fitness models on the Internet you’ll find an impressive range of pretty young things who don’t stray far from a gym. They’re certainly nice people to look at, but that’s not what I’m referring to here. A fitness model from the network context is a way of describing how it grew to where it is now, or how it may have failed to grow, or what it may be likely to do next. The assumption is that the nodes in the network are competitive and will seek an increase in the degree of their connections at the expense of other nodes degree connection. The Bianconi + Barabási model expresses this mathematically, which means that I won’t go into it here right now. Or anywhere. Ever.

I would suggest, however, a further parameter to this model. The existing facet of fitness could be viewed as intrinsic but let’s add another parameter that I might call ‘value’, which could be seen as an extrinsic dimension. If a node offers ‘value’ then it is given ‘fitness’ in terms of affordability of degree connections. Either way, the Barabási-Albert model of preferential attachment does give us an insight into why we have scale-free networks that can ramp up a given dimension into the stratosphere, for example when a meme goes ‘viral’ in popularity.

We are within a network of other people, perhaps in a family or friends context, and perhaps in a business context, with all of our connections. Therefore we are a vertex, surrounded by edges connected to other vertices. As a node, then, how do we consider and evaluate our ‘fitness’ within a network? And if we follow my modification of the above model and consider that there is another complementary parameter of ‘value’, how do we evaluate our value? Do you proffer value? Does your value afford the rewarding of network fitness? Does your network fitness promote visibility and popularity to attract more connectivity? Is your network fitness greedy from a competitive point of view, or generous from a collaborative point of view?

It’s my opinion that the Barabási-Albert model or the later refined Bianconi / Barabási model is missing an ingredient, because as it stands, it recognises fitness as a greedy action of competition success. However, people don’t necessarily work that way, or at least, not for very long (especially if we add the complication of the breadcrumb-path of reputation as a persistence aspect, etc. but we shouldn’t complicate it here, let’s keep it simple. Oops, too late). People in business leverage a blend of competition and collaboration — too much of one or the other and it’s not a good business success. The models require an extra thing, and I suggest that this is an outward-pushing ‘value’ aspect, that complements the inward-grabbing ‘fitness’ aspect. Being rewarded for offering value is akin to collaboration and is rewarded by fitness affordance which is of course akin to competition according to the BA and BB models above.

One more thing. The Tournament in graph theory is a directed graph, which forms the directivity progressively along a duration. In other words, there is a predetermined topology of the network but the directivity is not laid down yet. It gets laid down connection by connection. The outcome of this is that it describes a dominance model, and relates to social choice theory. The reason that people make choices is interesting, but the reasons that people within an influencing and influenceable group make their choices is even more interesting. With great power comes great scriptwriting and marketing, or something like that, and the responsibility of being a big noise in a highly connected network is possibly more paramount than many people realise. I suppose the only advice I can give is to be a valuable person for the sake of your reputation, because the reputation forms a persistent record. Whether that means being nice, or whether that means you can get away with being a bastard, that’s up to you — it’s your value, your fitness, your transactional reputation imprint.

What is a network? Scale-free networks

Previously I mentioned Preferential Attachment (the “rich get richer” phenomenon of some networks) which explains why popular nodes in a network become highly connected, and are highly connected because they are popular, and are popular because they are highly connected, etc. We see this on the Internet as things either go viral or things basically don’t move at all, plummeting to obscurity and beyond! It happens with people, some of us are highly connected, some are effectively islands, and most have just the average amount of connections. However, we may be connected to highly connected people on social networks, such as the Fry, the GaGa, the Kutcher types. Those superstars tweet it all and get retweeted by so many followers to their followers in turn, and the cycle is thus reinforced.

However, we could be being fooled here, as the size of the connected population is huge. Our intuition is that one follower may be fairly easy to gain, two followers must be twice that much work, ten followers, ten times that time and effort. A hundred thousand followers must take more than a lifetime to achieve!

How old are you? More than likely somewhere in the range of 20s to 70s, with a few outliers outside of this range. It’s rare to encounter someone older than 100, it is predicted that the first 150 year old person has already been born. Maybe. Maybe in the distant past a person did reach 150 but nobody wrote it down. Maybe H5N1 will mutate into human to human transmissible form soon and wipe out two thirds of the worlds overpopulation. Who knows? The point is, we’re used to a certain range of ages, and to find someone over a century is unusual. We never encounter a person over a thousand years old. Or a hundred thousand years old. We never encounter a person taller than the tallest building. We never encounter a person several thousand times more intelligent than average. What about strength? What about shouting loudest? What about jumping highest?

These parameters are kind of within “human scale”. We’re used to thinking about a kind of tangible scale, expecting measurements to fall within certain familiar boundaries, and applying a linearity to these dimensions. A ten year old took ten years to get there, a thirty year old, three times that much! I dug a hole 1 metre deep in a day, in ten days it was 10 metres deep. And so on.

However, in some networks, we experience an alternative dimensionality of Scale-Free networks. These are networks in which certain dimensions might have a mean of a certain value but it’s easy to find a few instances of crazy escalation up into the sky. That’d be like walking around and seeing most people about the age of a human, but now and then meeting someone that was around in the Cretaceous era. This is a scale-invariant situation — there’s no human scale to it any more. The results might be said to follow a power law distribution or Pareto distribution. Superstars getting insane amounts of connections in social networking while the rest of us will never get beyond a few thousand (or a few, in many cases). The spread of the World Wide Web and the quantity of websites on it. The relative growth of wealth of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, compared to the growth in earning power of all those in the same class as those people at school.

Most people work in a job and get paid. The job requires a certain amount of work as the input, and in a fair situation, it pays somewhat under what you’re worth as a reward. Therefore we’re used to thinking about income in a way that has a linear relationship. I do a certain amount of work in a week, I get paid a certain amount of money in a week. Sounds fair? That’s how it is. So how is it we have examples of super-rich billionaires? Do they do vastly more work than you and I? I’ve only got 24 hours in a day, and so have they, so how do they get a hundred thousand times more work done than I can? It’s not fair. Why can’t we go to our boss and ask for a pay rise, of a hundred thousand times what we’re getting now? Sounds fair? Sounds fair to me.

What is a network? Direction jobs letters

Previously I discussed networks and the notion that we use the word “network” all the time. We don’t fully appreciate all that the word connotes, so that what one person thinks of when you say “network” is quite different to another person’s thought.

I mentioned Euler’s solution to a famous “seven bridges problem”, what would become graph theory, with vertexes and edges. The London Tube map is a diagram of nodes and connections. Some stations are highly connected, acting as hubs between many tube lines, some not as many interchanges, but most are connected to only their previous and next station. Bank; Waterloo; Kings Cross; Hammersmith come to mind. If you change lines on your journey, stations like those look like good interchange opportunities and become quite busy — everyone uses them at once. This usually means that more people choose to use them, demonstrating the “rich get richer” behaviour of many networks, called Preferential Attachment. Highly connected vertexes become even more popular because they are highly connected.

I mentioned Six degrees of Separation, that having a close group of people has disadvantages. A homogenous group of people all interested in the same thing for the same reasons are prone to solving the same problems the same way, making the same mistakes, and processing new information with little variance. They spread ‘interesting’ relevant news rapidly with the effect that everyone in the group soon knows what everyone else in the group knows. This might sound nice and cosy and cohesive, but wait. What if one of the group leaves their job?

Some connections between nodes, in other words, some edges between vertexes, are asymmetrical. In other words, they only go one way, and don’t go back. In effect, they are arrows that only point one way. There may be a way back, via a different edge. Or there may not.  In such cases, the network becomes a directed network. The food chain is a directed graph, wolves and rabbits are connected. A wolf often eats a rabbit but a rabbit never eats a wolf. A rabbit eats lettuce but lettuce never eats a rabbit. Think of your own personal social networks. Chances are many connections have directed behaviour too. When job hunting, it feels different asking for a reference from your boss than a friend or coworker, the result may be different too. The directed network has an effect on the shape of the network and the timing and flow of information into it and out of it (if any flows out).

It wouldn’t be a surprise to say that a lot of people got their job not because of a cold application in response to a job ad, but because they knew someone, or knew someone who knew someone. When faced with job-hunting again, people will often reach out to those in their immediate networks for any information that might help (as if they were withholding info until just now). People in our own networks know and share the same information and are interested in the same kind of thing, noticing the same kind of opportunities as each other. Widening the range of contacts to people in the network much further away in terms of degrees of connection may actually give better results.

Those distant connections are exposed to other networks that your colleagues might not be, carrying other news not available within your immediate network. Mark Granovetter wrote in 1973 on the “strength of weak ties”. You may find a certain type of person at the periphery of networks, not afraid to cross over into other departments or groups of disciplines. The type of person not willing to pigeonhole themselves and interested in many and various endeavours in life, with contacts across them all. This can be of value — the chance to import knowledge or methods from distant departments. This type of person incidentally is often a catalyst where disruptive innovation can occur, crossing techniques and methods from one discipline they’re exposed to, to another. Even within our own organisations, departments elsewhere in the same company have different and valuable knowledge. If only they were connected. This is the notion of social capital.

In 1967, Stanley Milgram carried out an experiment forwarding letters to strangers to gain more information on the “small worlds property” of some networks. Even at that recent point, debate arose over how many degrees of separation existed in typical real-world networks that we are all familiar with. Exactly how connected was our world? Would two random people in a population know each other? Directly? Through an acquaintance? Through more links than that? The experiment at Harvard was designed to find the average path length between two nodes in the network, in this case, nodes being people. Random people in chosen cities in America were sent a letter to forward to someone in particular, if they knew them, and if they didn’t know them, to send it to someone else they imagined might know the intended recipient. There’s a lot more to the experiment than that, of course, the package introduced the experiment and had postage paid replies to invite participation; tracking postcards back to Harvard, etc, but essentially that’s what the experiment did.

The results were quite interesting and somewhat revealing. In one part of the experiment, 160 letters went out and 24 hit the target, sent to his home address, but 16 of those 24 all came through the same person, a clothing merchant identified as “Mr Jacobs”. Others of the letters came to the target through his office, and over half of these came directly through two other men. Why so many coming in through so few? Are these people acting like the busy stations on the London Underground? Are those men each playing the part of a kind of social hub? This is quite possible. Some people are highly connected, and their highly connected nature increases their connectivity as people favour connecting to the already highly connected — again, Preferential Attachment (the “rich get richer” mechanism), except we’re not necessarily talking about financial riches, but richness of social capital in their social networks.

What is a network? Connections mornings graphs

A short while ago I posed a fairly straightforward question — “What is a network?” — except it’s not straightforward at all. It’s an overloaded word — a word that does multiple duties according to the context.

Except that the contexts these days are so wide as to overlap a lot of the time, hence the clarity and focus of the meaning is diffused. Everybody knows what we mean by ‘network’ — but not many people have a clear and precise definition. It’s one of those words which we see and nod and say to ourselves “yep, networking – I know what that is”. I usually find that if a person can’t clearly explain something to someone else (let’s say, to a Martian that’s just landed) then that person probably doesn’t actually know it at all — they merely think they do.

In the case of networks this is of course an easy illusion — we’re all on the Internet, we know that’s a network, we therefore know what a network is. Those in jobs might have a desk with computer on with a Cat5 cable coming out the back of it and off into a mysterious hole in the skirting board. Equally mysterious people come round to fix your network and tell you why stuff can’t be installed on the computer.

Even before the Internet people have been saying that business is all about ‘networking’. Okay, I’ll bring the Cat5 cable. Oh, not that sort of networking. What then? I need to ‘hook up’ with other people face to face, to “network” with them. Much time was spent in uncomfortable rooms in offices, trying to be well-behaved and impressive to strangers, forcing the act of ‘networking’ to happen so you could say you’ve ‘networked’. Even more time was spent in restaurants and rather comfortable pubs, also apparently ‘networking’.

Networking in the business context is simply turning up face to face where there are others that have also turned up? Networking is simply turning up? Is that the driver behind that manic willy-waving contest of arranging networking meetings to compel one to turn up even earlier than sanely comfortable and pretending that it’s normal and that we’re not only awake but somehow productive as a result?

Networks are very interesting in ways which most of us are not thinking of when we think of networking. For example, in 1736, Leonard Euler drew an interesting diagram, of bridges. I won’t go into it here, that link explains the background. The resulting diagram forms a chart or “graph”, which has blobby nodes and connecting arrows on. The node we would come to call a “vertex”, the arrow would become known as an “edge”, so graph theory is all about edges and vertexes (okay, “vertices” if we have time to be grammatically correct).  If a vertex has more than one edge touching it — in other words, if a node has more than one arrow connecting to it — then we refer to that number as the number of “degrees” that node has.

That’s where the idea of “Six Degrees of Separation” comes from, by the way. The exact number of six is not necessarily true – it depends on the particular population, not the whole world in one go. But it’s kind of true enough to give us the understanding of social connectivity we see in Twitter, Linked-in etc. You might be connected to me. I might be connected to a bunch of other people. Each of those may in turn be connected to other groups of people. Someone in one of those groups might also be connected to me somehow. It happens. These first-degree, second-degree and even third-degree connections are quite close to us.

One of the problems with having a tight, regular and uniform networking group, especially all first and second degree connections, is that news spreads rapidly and if anything happens, everyone in the immediate degrees of your group get to know about it all pretty quickly. This might seem good, but the downside of everyone knowing what everyone else knows is that there’s less opportunity for variation. There’s less likelihood of individual thinking in solutions, and less actual opportunity availability— less than you’d think. I’ll explain this in a later post.

However, not many people would dispute that if you want success, you’re not going to find it by yourself. You’ve got to get out and get with other people. Success does not open your door and walk into your living room, getting in the way of the television as it passes in front. You get out and go to it. That’s why we all prize the idea of networking, because of the perceived value it can offer. I just wish more people knew in detail what they mean by networking when they talk about it. It’s far from intuitive.

How do new ideas happen?

Have you ever had a new idea? Happens all the time? Used to happen more? Been happening more lately? What do you do with new ideas? Do you remember them? Forget them? Do you think you’ll remember them and then end up forgetting them? Do you write them down in a notepad or something like that, or on your phone or tablet?

Idea management is a complex process, and it doesn’t come easily. With a little discipline and attention the ideas can be captured during the brief period that they’re resting on your shoulder, before they fly off again to be forgotten forever.

But what about the nature and mechanism of innovation itself? How does innovation occur in the first place? The structure of innovation is rarely neat and tidy, and rarely in whole units of what one might consider to be an innovation. Anything new that has been thought of has almost certainly not been thought of in one entire chunk of innovating. Starting from a clean slate and ending up with a fully formed idea ready to implement. Oh no, not like that. Maybe in fiction, but it certainly doesn’t happen like that in reality anyway.

In most cases, a person coming up with what others might classify as an innovation have been exposed to the problem space for some time. Working in the world of that particular problem. Struggling with defining what the problem is, how big it is, what it is, what it isn’t, what it should be or could be or must be. The problem’s territory or world is what I might term the problem space, in which the innovator resides, often for some time, and the solution is the eventual target. In other words, things rarely happen overnight. They might seem like it from the outside, but to the person innovating, they’ve probably been within the problem space for years, even before they realised that there’s even a problem to solve.

The other interesting structural characteristic of innovation is that, again, it doesn’t occur as a whole unit, it almost always consists of mostly stuff that you already knew, or stuff you already have, or stuff that is already in place. The moment of inspiration isn’t to have the entire idea from scratch, the moment of inspiration is more usually to suddenly realise that what you already have, already know and already did can fit together in a way that you simply hadn’t seen before. A new arrangement. An arrangement that allows an advantage or solves a problem or enables something further to happen. You look around, there’s nothing magically novel that wasn’t there a minute ago, except yes there is - a new configuration, a new way of putting it together, a new way of utilising or processing or perceiving it all. You had what was necessary all along.

In fact, it’s even more surprising than that. Not only did the innovation spend a long while cooking in the problem space before it surfaces, and not only did the innovation consist of a new way of looking at what you already have, but in most cases, the solution that’s staring you in the face isn’t even a new one. Chances are, you’ve even had this idea before. Several times over, in fact. You had it, forgot it, later you had it again under a new configuration, forgot it again, and so on. Finally, it persists and at the moment of insight you suddenly see it for the value it really offers. (This time you write it down). That’s insight. It’s called insight because it points in. A sight that points inward. Inward at what you already know, already have and already do. The realisation of a sudden clarity in sight. Yet, you had it all along!

Sequence is important

The order in which we do things is very important. Initial conditions are important. What happens next is important. I’m not any kind of cook, but I imagine that cooking is probably like this too — you can’t just empty all the ingredients at once into a receptacle and cook it and end up with a three course dinner. Or maybe you can, I’ve no idea. I doubt there’s really an endeavour in life in which it doesn’t matter at all in which order you do things. Not important activities, anyway. Even making a cup of tea is a religious matter — milk in first or last?*

Let me ask you a question. What comes next:
1 2 3

If you answered 4, that’s a perfectly logical response, but if you answered 5, you’re also correct.

How is 5 the next in the sequence? Well, we might be just beginning a Fibonacci sequence. Let me present it in a more correct way:

0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 and so on.

Let’s say you have the first number — 0.
Let’s say you put in a second number — 1.
These two numbers represent our initial condition.

Now, take the two most recent numbers, add them together and this is your next number. Take the two most recent numbers, add them together and this is your next number. Take the two most recent numbers, add them together and this is your next number. And so on. This is the process we will apply.

Well, life’s a lot like this. We have initial conditions, and we have processes.

The initial conditions may be the way we’re born, for example. We’re born into certain families with certain belief systems and certain attitudes to wealth (or more usually, a lack of it), and certain ways of looking at the world, wherever in the world we’ve had the luck to be born. Or, you could think of initial conditions as where you are now. What you’ve got now. What you start with if you were to start now. If you’re about to embark on a big change in your life from now on, you have to take it from where you are now, who you are now and what you’ve got now. Those are your initial conditions.

The processes we might also call strategies. A strategy is simply a predictable repeatable already-defined approach to doing things, applied no matter what. Occasionally we find the strategy doesn’t work effectively so we have to do something on the spot, something exceptional, some made up fix, instead of following the plan, just enough to get us back to the strategy. We call these tactics.

A tactical approach deals with cases as they occur, each in a specific way.

A strategic approach deals with everything according to a defined process.

With the Fibonacci sequence, the strategy is simple, as I said above, “take the two most recent numbers, add them and this is your next number” and then do it again and keep doing it. No matter what the last two numbers on the stack are. Doesn’t matter. Don’t care. As long as there’s two numbers on the top of the stack, we’ll take them, add them, push the result onto the top of the stack, and then do the whole operation again and again. That’s the strategy. That’s the process. That’s the thing we do in life. If you have a specific approach to life, if you respond to things that happen in a characteristic way (you know, according to your character), if you have your way of doing things, then you have a strategy and you’ll do it no matter what, to whatever happens. Doesn’t matter, don’t care, just do the strategy as usual, it got us this far so it must be the correct thing to do.

If you change the strategy to a different strategy, let’s say, “take the two most recent numbers, divide the newer one by the older one and chuck away the remainder, and this is your next number” and you run this strategy over and over, you will get a totally different result. You’ll end up at a different destination, even from the same beginnings.

As I say, life’s a lot like this. There are people with comfortable beginnings, and people with tough beginnings. There are people who have a certain strategy to what happens in life, and there are other people who have a different strategy to what happens. Some people seem to have no strategy, treating everything as it comes on a tactical basis but in reality, this is some kind of strategy in itself (not a particularly strong one, though). Change one part of the initial state of the fibonacci sequence and apply the same process and you get a different result — try this:

Instead of 

0 1 1 2 etc

run it beginning

3 1 etc

see what you get. Same process, different initial conditions. Totally different destination in life. Busy millionaire instead of daytime telly on the sofa. Unfortunately, we can’t very well do much about who we are, the family we’re born into, the country, the economy, the educational opportunities planned from birth, etc. We can’t even do much about where we are today, retrospectively — we can’t go back to yesterday and make a change. We take it from where we are now. What we can change, though, is the process in our lives. The strategy. We can re-strategise any time we like, and if we like the results, stick to it as though it’s a proper strategy and we meant to do it like that all along. The strategy we live by is a specific sequence. Put the milk in first, every time, or put the milk in last, every time? Or put the milk in first if it’s a teapot and last if it’s a teabag in a mug. It’s a sequence, it’s a process, it’s a strategy.

* The answer is last, if you’re using a teabag, first if you’re using a poncy teapot — the teabag requires tea to brew at pretty much boiling point. If you let cold milk cool the hot water before it has a chance to perform the action you just end up with tea-coloured hot water instead of a proper cuppa. However, if you think you live in the Edwardian era and use a teapot, then the brewing occurs in the teapot, unhindered by the cooling effects of cold milk, and therefore the tea can be poured into cups that already have a bit of milk. This would have been a necessity in the olde times as the bone china in those days was quite prone to fracturing with contact with boiling hot water, and the milk in the cup helps avoid this outcome. As you see, the initial conditions followed by the sequence of the process consequently applied is important. Especially with tea, which is of course of utmost importance.

Trim the fat

How much stuff have you ever bought, and simply stored in a cupboard or attic (whatever a cupboard is — a board for cups?). How many of us have an attic full of crap of various grades, from ‘it’ll come in useful’ to ‘I don’t want to chuck it away but it’s in the way down here’, to ‘I was saving this to give to someone’ and even for the technophiles among us, the “magic attic” phenomena, related to the “magic drawer” which is the place where stuff that doesn't work gets put and a year or so later it comes out and magically works again, or usually not.

Okay, forget about attics, a lot of people don’t actually have an attic and have to leave stuff cluttered around the living area in drawers, shelves and corners. What about closer to home a bit, what about your phone? Or your tablet. What about the amount of apps we download through the play store or App Store because it was free or seemed useful or was cool a the time. How many apps have you got on your phone or tablet that you never use, have never opened, and can’t even remember what it does? Apps that you daren’t even open in case you actually do find out what it does. Apps with a clever but meaningless name, and a cute but meaningless icon. Apps that you thought were going to enhance your life but just got stashed away in case it might be useful in the future, or suchlike. How much stuff have we got like that our lives?

Recently I went on a cull on my iPad to get rid of the apps I don’t ever use, have forgotten what it did, or can’t figure out what it does from the icon or name. If I never used it, will I miss it? Of course not. Out it goes. This is a traumatic enough thing to apply to our phones and tablets. Maybe we should be brave and apply it to our attics, cupboards, corners and rooms. Trim the fat.

For now, though, maybe I should get rid of what isn't immediately useful. For example, in my fridge I have a rare roll of Kodak infrared 135 E6 film. My film scanner is broken (it’s in the magic attic) and I haven't shot film on my cameras in over a year, and will never, pretty much guaranteed, ever process E6 film again. Why do I keep this several-year-old expired but “valuable” roll of infrared film in the fridge? In case it comes in useful! We'll, so far it hasn't —maybe I should go on the evidence and chuck it out.

At the moment I’m on a well earned break from my business start ups, enjoying the weather down in Cornwall for a few days, maybe when I get back to London the first thing I’ll do is to throw out that symbolic roll of E6 infrared film and feel the relief.

Is feedback useful in business and real life?

We need feedback, they say. Not when you’re on the radio, of course, the delay through the transmission process will cause your own voice to return later and echo through the same process. Not when you’re singing on stage, either, as you’ll get a high pitched tone as the mic and amplifier picks up its own signal from the speakers, causing a positive feedback loop. That’s no good. But all other times, feedback is what we want. Is that right? We want feedback?

If the bad kind, on stage, in broadcasting, is bad because it is positive feedback, then what is negative feedback? That’s all over the place too — technology is full of negative feedback systems, for correcting deviations, etc. Aircraft navigation and flight controls use negative feedback to ascertain how far off course we are, how far out of the desired steering the plane is, etc. At home, the central heating has a thermostat which uses negative feedback — is it at the correct temp yet? No, then keep heating. Is it at the correct temp yet? No, then keep heating. Is it at the correct temp yet? Yes, then stop doing what it’s doing — stop heating. Most systems we use all day use negative feedback for correction and control, it’s an essential part of modern system design, from cybernetics to signal theory (see Claude Shannon’s work, if you’re interested in that sort of thing).

What about us? In business, in real life? Do we need feedback? Which sort? Are we cybernetic systems, designed to operate through error correction via a negative feedback loop? I would suggest it’s not that simple. Yes, we operate mechanistically in many ways, but not totally. We are subject to the mass reinforcements of feedback that amplify, exaggerate and ramp up the input to increase the output that are all typical of an out-of-control positive feedback loop. When we’re told of news of a bank that’s perhaps on shaky ground and there’s a slight risk that in the distant future it may fail, we all queue up at the doors to get our money out, and guess what, the bank fails. It’s that horrid positive feedback again, isn’t it.

What about negative feedback. Our lives are full of that. You need not look any further than our partners or spouses to find a constant and reliable source of negative feedback. Corrective criticism designed to adjust what we’re doing can obviously improve the outcome. Anyone involved in quality control in mass production knows this — if there’s an issue or fault, detecting it, measuring it, and bringing this evidence to the source of the error as negative feedback will hopefully adjust and correct the error, so that subsequent production is within tolerance. That’s pretty normal for modern production in most industries.

However, although the negative feedback loop indubitably works so well for keeping systems under tight control, is it the way humans work? To a certain level, yes of course. If you’re learning something, or training someone, highlighting errors or incorrect actions will hopefully cause subsequent attempts to occur within acceptable boundaries. Learning a musical instrument, a language, a sport, etc. You want to know what you’re doing wrong, and in quite significant detail, otherwise you’ll continue doing it, perhaps never knowing why things aren’t turning out quite right.

However, as hinted at in reference to partners, there’s a tendency to think that if negative feedback achieves so much good, then just keep doing it, and doing it more! Not just partners, but work colleagues, everyone we are in contact with in fact. Of course, that falls into the category of positive feedback and escalates to a level of saturation representing the most that we can put up with. Occasionally, though, that top level is reached and broken, so people split up, people walk out of jobs, people shout at customer service workers, people even go out on strike and have marches.

What about positive feedback as the antidote? If used carefully, it can be a good thing, it can be a reinforcement, an encouragement, and an ingredient for growth. As referred to earlier, 100% positive feedback is no use. Telling someone they’re fantastic all the time when they’re not is really unproductive and can be damaging, but never telling people they’re doing okay when they’re doing okay is also unhealthy. You can achieve a lot with negative feedback but you can’t go all the way with just nothing but criticism, and similarly you can have quite damaged outcomes with nothing but positive feedback but used now and then it’s quite a good ingredient.

What about no feedback at all? Well, there I think is the biggest problem. People working alone or at home or teleworking or setting up new businesses on their own, are at risk of having absolutely no feedback at all. Most feedback you’ll get from the Internet is simply non-existent — no feedback at all — you’ll be totally ignored. You don’t exist. Your efforts add up to nothing.

The next level of feedback is simply a simple “+” or a “like”, which might well only indicate that the person reading it didn’t disagree with it and wants some way of remembering it later, on that fictitious day that they’ll come back to everything they’ve ever bookmarked and read some of it again (I don’t know, maybe the Internet firehose dried up that day, nobody posted new stuff, so we all have to read some old stuff). The Internet is a strange and unintuitive system when it comes to feedback design principles. There’s a lot of positive feedback tendencies about it — things can ramp up out of control very quickly, “going viral” as they say (in reality it’s more like a stampede than a virulent outbreak) and then it’s old news, buried forever like Crazy Frog or All Your Base Are Belong To Us. There’s no shortage of negative feedback on the Internet either — you don’t have to look far to find maximum criticism occurring any day of the week.

But the risk of working on your own is that there’s absolutely no feedback at all — your efforts might be good, or might need adjustment, but the particular response curves of the system are simply not linear (technically, there’s hysteresis, which is partly the reason things can go viral) and this lag or disconnection can be disconcerting, depressing and give the impression that you’re being completely ignored.

We need feedback — to tell if we’re on the correct path or not. Without feedback we might think we’re doing okay but we’re really heading off in an incorrect direction. Or worse, without feedback we don’t get any validation that what we’re doing amounts to anything worthwhile at all, so we stop wasting our time on it and do something else instead, or at least, slow down, in case it turns out to be a waste of time.

If you’re doing your own thing, if you’re working alone, if you’re not part of a group, then there’s an additional resource drain of having to have faith that what you’re doing might one day add up to something. Even when in the face of things, there’s nothing complete right here and right now, and the whole world is ignoring you, giving no feedback at all — neither positive nor negative — just nothing. It’s under those circumstances that we must remember what we’re doing and fix our sights on the eventual outcome — the goal, the destination, the thing we’re doing it all for. We have to be our own feedback loop.