Ideas I wanted to remember and share.
“A vision becomes a framework for possibility when [it] is free-standing — it points neither to a rosier future, nor to a past in need of improvement. It gives over its bounty now. If the vision is ‘peace on earth’, peace comes with its utterance. When ‘the possibility of ideas making a difference’ is spoken, at that moment ideas do make a difference.”
-Rosamund & Ben Zander,
The Art of Possibility (p. 169-170)
I’ve posted about this before, but it continues to amaze me.
“More than 90 percent of corporate spreadsheets contain material errors. The European Spreadsheet Risk Group was set up in 1999 purely for the purpose of addressing issues of spreadsheet integrity. [The] disastrous consequences of uncontrolled use of spreadsheets are always disturbing, and make for somewhat gruesome reading. [I] believe that errors in spreadsheets are a regular occurrence in most organizations.”
-Danielle Stein Fairhurst,
Financial Modeling in Excel (for Dummies) (2017, p.23-26)
The ultimate business response to the need for sustainability:
“Be generous by creating an enterprise that is regenerative by design, giving back to the living systems of which we are a part. More than an action on a checklist, it is a way of being in the world that recognises that we have a responsibility to leave the world in a better state than we found it. It calls for creating enterprises whose core business helps to reconnect nature’s cycles, and that gift as much as they can.”
“The most profound act of corporate responsibility for any company today is to rewrite its corporate by-laws, or articles of association, in order to redefine itself with a living purpose, rooted in regenerative and distributive design, and then to live and work by it.”
-Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics (2017)
“The most important assumptions of a model are not in the equations, but what’s not in them; not in the documentation, but unstated; not in the variables on the computer screen, but in the blank spaces around them.”
-John Sterman
(as quoted in Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics)
“Two prime ministers are sitting in a room discussing affairs of state. Suddenly a man bursts in, apoplectic with fury, shouting and stamping and banging his fist on the desk. The resident prime minister admonishes him: ‘Peter,’ he says, ‘kindly remember Rule Number 6,’ whereupon Peter is instantly restored to complete calm, apologizes, and withdraws.”
After a number of similar scenes occur, “the visiting prime minister addresses his colleague: ‘My dear friend, I’ve seen many things in my life, but never anything as remarkable as this. Would you be willing to share with me the secret of Rule Number 6?’ ‘Very simple,’ replies the resident prime minister. ‘Rule Number 6 is ‘Don’t take yourself so damn seriously.’ ‘Ah,’ says his visitor, ‘that is a fine rule.’ After a moment of pondering, he inquires, ‘And what, may I ask, are the other rules?'”
“‘There aren’t any.'”
-Rosamund and Benjamin Zander,
The Art of Possibility (2000, p.79)
Is it number 6 to emphasize that as one rule among many, it doesn’t take itself so seriously? (Meta-Rule Number 6.)
“It’s easier to armor ourselves than to step out of our armor. … Staying present with your shame takes far more courage than riding it into aggression. Staying present with your shame, neither indulging in it nor avoiding it, furthers the authentic warrior in you, the one who can sit in the fire of deep challenge and difficulty, and remain present without numbing himself or disconnecting from others. Remaining present with your shame takes guts. Doing so deepens your capacity for vulnerability, and therefore also your capacity for being in truly intimate relationship.”
“If men want an arena that calls forth their full heroism, this is it: to heed the call to face our planetary disasters and disaster-making with huge resolve and stamina and compassion. Imagine all the energy that goes into armoring and overprotecting ourselves (overbudgeting for defense) instead of going into truly facing and cleaning up the mess we’ve made of our home—and our own inner terrain.”
“Remember that emotion and reason work best when they work together.”
-Robert Augustus Masters, To Be A Man
(p. 38-39, 127-128, 282)
“Dynamic systems studies usually are not designed to predict what will happen. Rather, they’re designed to explore what would happen, if a number of driving factors unfold in a range of different ways.”
-Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems (p. 46)
“The argument against great design is always cost and speed. The discussion about cost and speed is not really about cost and speed. It is an agenda that declares that human experience is a low priority. […] Don’t ever take the argument about no funds and no time at face value. Our stance about cost and speed is simply a measure of our commitment.”
“There is more than enough time and just enough money.”
-Peter Block (Community: The Structure of Belonging p.162)
“The deep challenge here is… letting go of our comforting illusion of control, the illusion that we’ve done our job as leaders: we’ve done all the analysis, we’ve got the plan, things are going to go according to plan. Paradoxically, it’s only when we give up the illusion of control that we get the real thing, by shifting to sense-and-respond.”
-Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations
(illustrated version, p. 118)
In 2009, a researcher surveyed 35 quantitative analysts who build forecast models across a variety of industries and government. Out of those, “just one respondent stated he had ever attempted to check actual outcomes against original forecasts.” In other words, almost no one actually checked to see whether their predictions came true. Even the one respondent who did say he checked didn’t keep any hard data about the level of accuracy.
The inevitable consequence is that “fundamentally flawed models that don’t even come close to matching the eventual observations may be used without question indefinitely.”
It’s easy to imagine why model builders may not proactively want to check their past predictions. For one thing, if the results are poor enough, it could make it hard to justify hiring the model builder in the future.
But why don’t businesspeople who use the model forecasts in their decision-making specifically request such retrospective analysis?
It’s possible that some model users do that tracking themselves, so it didn’t show up in the survey of model builders described above.
But I also suspect it has a lot to do with the discomfort we feel around uncertainty. Mainstream business culture is oriented around the concepts of “measure, predict, control”. So the less accurately it turns out we can predict, the more that entire world view is undermined. If you are committed to the world view, if indeed your entire career and belief system is predicated on the world view, you will tend to do whatever you can to avoid potential disconfirming evidence.
Fortunately, next-stage organizations are beginning to appear, with an entirely different world view characterized by “sense and respond”. Prediction is far less critical, and uncertainty is far less problematic. This indeed makes quantitative models themselves less important (but by no means irrelevant). In situations where these models continue to be used, I hope to see more acceptance not just of retrospective analysis, but of other indicators of uncertainty such as confidence intervals and statistical significance.