If It’s Not Simple, It's BS

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, "any scientist who can't explain to an eight-year-old what he's doing is a charlatan." This principle is especially true in strategy, perhaps our most human management activity.

Artificial Intelligence & Robotics can eventually handle many jobs, but can they make & deploy strategy? Can they motivate a team to be better than it's parts, to rise together in some great endeavor?

"How will you win? What is the logic?" I`m a proverbial broken record in strategy sessions. It's remarkable how difficult we find these questions. We've been taught that complexity is profound. In fact, it's a crude state. Simplicity, by contrast, marks the end of a process of refining.

The late great physicist, Richard Feynman looked and talked like a New York City cabbie. His Caltech freshmen lectures in Physics, and all his books are classics for their simplicity & humor.

How did Feynman achieve that level of clarity? Through slow, patient reflection, by turning a problem over and over in his mind until a 'simple' explanation suggested itself.

And that's where the shoe pinches in our time-starved era. Who has time to turn a problem over and over in their mind these days? Who has the time, as Einstein did, to imagine himself riding a light beam - so as to makes sense of time and gravity and light?

Which invokes the second great law of strategy: less is more.

Knowing we'll be time-starved, please let's not over-fill our strategy plates, like teenagers at a buffet. "First we'll do this, then this and this and that over there. Oh, and then we'll..."

One of the many benefits of Lean Start-up and Design Thinking is that they force you to simplify and clarify your offering. We test our 'Minimum Viable Product', on the way to our 'Minimum Viable Company'.

Similarly, in strategy, we want to deploy our 'minimum viable plan', watching carefully what happens, and ever ready to adjust to the inevitable 'known, and unknown, unknowns' that confront us.

Breakthrough entails walking up the stairs in the fog, continually making & easy quick experiments, most of them yielding a negative result.

Best wishes,

Pascal

Singapore FinTech Festival & the Shape of Things to Come

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Just back from a splendid week in hot, sticky & smart Singapore and the FinTech Festival.

Despite the jet lag, I thought I’d send out a quick note, with more to follow (when I’m vertical again.)

I took in as many Innovation Labs as I could, talked to umpteen start-ups and met splendid developers. I saw the Eight Essential Technologies* in action & gained some sense of what’s here and what’s coming.

The Festival was focused on banking and insurance, but it’s clear that “analogue” industries will be changed at least as much as “digital” industries. (The line between them has been erased, no?)

Consider the TUAS expansion project, which will triple Port of Singapore’s size – (it’s already one of the world’s biggest and best.)

The new port will be a ‘Smart’ port, with digital technology, sensors, automated cranes, driverless vehicles, drones to inspect equipment, and a smart grid. The goal is seamless and efficient port clearance and a 50% cut in turnaround times – (already best in class).

Meanwhile, Maersk and other shipping companies are using Blockchain to create seamless and efficient flow of goods around the world. One focus area is Trade Finance.

The goal is to make a complex, wasteful, error-laden process involving multiple actors (buyer, seller, intermediaries, multiple banks, regulators and insurers) – virtually instantaneous.

FinTech’s effect on people will likely be even more profound.

Prime Minister Modi’s simple and powerful address summarized the effect to date India to date:

• One billion identity cards – which allow people to open bank accounts, and qualify for government services
• One billion new bank accounts – and all that implies (e.g. savings accounts, credit cards, micro-loans, insurance etc.)
• 200 million new micro-loans…

The numbers and implications are awe-inspiring: innumerable people in innumerable small villages across a vast sub-continent will have better lives.

Now they can get paid directly, securely grow their savings, qualify for small loans, insurance and healthcare.

Less waste and hassle; more dignity and choice.

Here’s a deep bow to all the fine people I’ve met. Looking forward to getting to know you all better! Bravo Singapore!

All for now,

Pascal

Big Data – Caveat Emptor

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.

Let the buyer beware…

Don’t want to be misunderstood folks. Big Data is, in my view, one of the essential technologies.

Big Data, and its partner technology, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Augmented Reality, Drones, 3-D Printing, Internet of Things, and Blockchain are transforming our lives – mostly for the better.

But we need to know where each technology applies, and where it does not.

Aristotle defined two domains: the domain of things that cannot be otherwise, and that of things than can be otherwise.

The former comprises things like matter, physics and chemistry. Water is water and cannot be otherwise. It evaporates when heated and freezes when cooled.

You can predict how it will behave by applying the laws of science. Big Data works well here.

The latter domain, that of things than can be otherwise, comprises fickle things like economics, politics, fashion, public opinion, and behavior.

Big Data does not work so well here. (A deep bow here to the great Roger Martin, former dean of the University of Toronto’s business school.)

Can we expect Big Data to effectively answer questions of design, marketing, opinion and behavior? Can we outsource our thinking about strategy to Big Data?

These are all the purview of creativity, intuition, imagination – which are our forte.

Gary Kasparov, arguably the greatest chess player ever, emphasizes the importance of ‘fantasy’ in chess, arguably our greatest strategy game and business metaphor.

This is the same man who played the super-computer, Big Blue, to a draw, an encounter the New York Times likened to ‘Man vs Forklift’.

(Big Blue, let it emphasized, was programmed by the world’s top grandmasters, and rebooted before each game, so that Kasparov was, in effect, facing a new super-computer opponent.)

Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s – let’s use Big Data where it works best, and recognize its limitations.

For example, don’t expect Big Data analytics to give you the ‘super-nova” moment, the blinding strategic insight that illuminates the path forward.

In my view, the centaur concept provides the proper metaphor and way forward.

Like the half human-half horse of mythology, the intelligent human being working with, and guiding, well-designed AI, has the potential to blend the best of both worlds, machine and human.

I like the thought of my doctor working with AI and Big Data.

The next Kasparov or Kasparova may well have Big Data and AI riding shotgun.

Best regards,

Pascal

Four Hundred Thousand Views – Thanks, Folks

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

What if nobody reads the damned thing?
Pascal Dennis

A few weeks ago the Lean Pathways Blog team & I observed a milestone, a footprint in time: 400,000 views

We’re humbled and grateful. Thank you all for reading our humble & imperfect offerings. When we started in 2010, I didn’t know if you’d be interested.

But I felt it was important to do, in some small way, what kind Japanese senseis did for me when I was a young, thick engineer.

There is a right way of managing, of leading, of being. There are core standards of behavior, just as there are core technical standards in the great professions.

Leadership is informed and governed the Great Virtues, just as Chemical Engineering, the profession I was trained in, is informed and governed by the laws of chemistry, physics, mass transfer, heat transfer and the like.

Our blog seeks to highlight these core principles of leadership and management, which are the foundation of achievement, growth & fun.

These principles will become even more important as the Digital revolution accelerates. I coach more and more IT executives and they are hungry for a solid foundation.

You can’t reach for the stars unless you’re rooted in the earth. The great technologies of our day – Internet of Things, Drones, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Blockchain, Robotics, 3-D printing and the like – will change the world. If we root them in the core principles of leadership, the change will be for the better.

So we’ll continue to blog, kibitz & reflect on Lean, Agile, Digital and the eternal verities.

Tip of the hat to the splendid LPI Blog team – Dianne Caton, our graphic artist, and Steve Macleod, our IT leader.

Thanks, Di and Steve, for all your fine work & support.

And thanks to you all for your interest, fine questions and feedback.

Here’s to eight more safe, happy and engaging years,

Pascal