Some weeks back, I needed some bits to baby-proof my blind cords. So I drove to Tuggeranong at 7am and asked a kid in a Bunnings shirt to help me.
He took two seconds to think about my request, then led me from aisle 7 halfway down aisle 5 and showed me a useful selection.
The extraordinarily helpful store clerk turned out to be a civil engineer from Colombia making his personal transition to the Australian way of life.
He was astute enough to notice that I am also an outlander. We began to chat discursively, as outlanders will. At some point he asked for my opinion about the Stop Online Piracy Act.
In this context I understood SOPA as a metonym for a cluster of topics that include Rupert Murdoch, cultural imperialism and intellectual property as theft. That can go deep, and I had not yet had my coffee.
So I said that on the topic of economic interests seeking to reshape the internet, I deferred to Timothy Wu. My new friend jotted down the title of Wu’s recent book, The Master Switch, on a post it note, and we parted.
Wu evokes the history of information industries from technical, business, social, political and legal perspectives to frame his consideration about the problematic future of the internet. This can be useful in many contexts, including adventitious chats in aisle 5 of the Tuggeranong Bunnings.
WHH is happy to publish Professor Richard Jones’ review of The Master Switch.

At a meeting last year, Richard Jones remarked that artificial intelligence (AI) research never seems to produce artificial intelligence, only clever technologies.

I thought: there must be a story in that. There was. You can download the strange and twisted saga ‘Artificial intelligence and natural stupidity revisited’ from the WHH online library.

When we pitch AI as a film, I’m thinking maybe Schwarzenegger as the hyper-confident soon-to-be Nobel Laureate from Carnegie-Mellon. Maybe you’ve got a casting suggestion?

On the clever technology front, The Conversation has published an article by Richard called ‘Corruption, computers and the developing world’. <http://theconversation.edu.au/corruption-computers-and-the-developing-world-440>

That article is shorter and much less twisted than our note on AI. It shows how clever technologies can be applied in the ‘fraud triangle’––the apices being need, opportunity and self-justification.

I think Richard’s ideas have application in the developed world, perhaps even here beside Lake Burley Griffin. If you want to talk about that, we expect to sign non-disclosure agreements.

I’ve worked on knowledge and skill strategies a fair bit over the past three decades. Ten years ago Richard Jones helped me solve a problem for a client who wanted to develop a national knowledge strategy for public-private partnerships.

For starters, we needed to map the different kinds of expertise players in this domain recognise and pull together for bid and project teams.

Richard and Jane Atkin, who now works for Lonely Planet, helped me get something useful down on a white board in half an hour.

I learned what we were drawing was a ‘limited domain ontology’, and heard about the newly-minted semantic web concept. This was cool stuff!

Like a month or so later my co-director Virginia Wilton gave me neutral friendly feedback: every time I dropped words like ‘ontology’ and ‘semantics’ in meetings, I was losing people.

Incommunicable enthusiasm is lethal in both consulting and education, so I curbed my tongue.

A decade went by fairly quickly and the other day I asked Richard: ‘So what happened to semantic web?’ We looked into it, and quite a lot has happened.

While semantic web may not make you a Web 2.0 billionaire it can be very useful in publishing ‘deep’ government information sets. And if any substantial public agency decides to make Microsoft SharePoint 2010 work as an internal collaboration and workflow platform to support external publishing, it can use a good ontologiser as it plans its staff development program.

You can download our ideas note from the library.

WHH is a small but complicated business. We need to be able to ‘morph’ to fit complex clients’ requirements. So our staff and associate network contains a lot of diversity.

Theory predicts that well-managed diverse groups can leverage cognitive conflicts and achieve outstanding results that no single individual could have imagined.  Of course, diversity also increases the potential for emotive interpersonal and intergroup conflict that prevents anyone doing as much and as well as they could have done alone and unaided.

Work groups with like values and skills and develop good feeling and achieve consistent results. This may involve some suppression of disturbing feedback from outside the group, and negative characterisations of members of out-groups.

We celebrate a lot at WHH. That’s not only because we help clients achieve astonishingly good outcomes. I also believe that it is also a way of developing our capability to do so. These celebrations are not without adventures in interpersonal risk taking.

At a recent staff birthday one person present asked another: ‘if you couldn’t denigrate an ethnic group or women, could you tell a joke?’ This sally triggered some competitive joke-making about each other’s jokes. I joined in. Later I reflected that we had some work to do.

I dug out a piece John Lonergan wrote for a learning program a few years ago, about the kinds of humorous interventions that derail real talk about serious matters. The notes at the back of this paper also give an insight into John’s career. He’s been watching boards and management groups discuss serious issues––or find ways to avoid discussing issues seriously––for decades.

You can download John’s paper, ‘The thermostat effect’, from the WHH library.

John Lonergan has a national and international practice in some of the most difficult consulting niches. He coaches boards and executive groups that are facing challenges that require painful change. He investigates cultural issues in the mergers and acquisitions field.

John worked in a WHH team in a graduate program we manage, so I’ve been in the room with him for perhaps forty great days. He also provides coaching and consulting through one of our panels.

John has a talent for holding a room with a story. I love it. He talks about things he’s observed, and his reflections about those things. I’ve got him to write down one of these stories. It is a good read but it’s much better when you’re in the room with him.

I’m sure it would not feel the same if we made a video of him to run on the site. What you get in the room with John is what you feel in an intimate theatre when a really good performer or singer-songwriter is working with something very true in themselves.

You can download one of John’s stories, ‘Your first position’, from the WHH Library>>