Numbers and hospital beds

The Week's best British articles this week drew my attention to the commentary It's only a hunch, but do we put too much faith in computers? by Mary Dejevsky in last week's The Independent. She says that

more and more, the personal is being reduced to electronic data that can be stored, classified and checked on computer. If you can second-guess the computer's requirements, as those with dishonest, as well as honest, ambitions will try to do, your path to success will be clear. But be warned: the day will come when someone, fatally, mistakes that dog for a cat.

She draws on examples each borne of a reliance on data, computers and resulting bureaucracy: computer models that led to false confidence that the sub-prime market was safe; neglect at Stafford General Hospital; the Baby P case.

Interesting, though, that The Week's article was entitled Our dangerous faith in numbers. So which is it; is it the computers that house and manipulate our numbers or the numbers themselves?

Isn't the actual danger that both articles are trying to get at more about the way in which we set objectives? This is something that we crossed paths with when I worked at Henley Centre HeadlightVision (now called The Futures Company) and did a project for the National Consumer Council (now called Consumer Focus). The report, the top document on this page, looked at macro, consumer and regulatory trends likely to affect the consumer advocacy landscape between now and 2020. One we picked up on there was called A more sophisticated approach to competition-based regulation.

Competition-based regulation has tended to take quite a simplistic approach, focusing on economically rational behaviours, and taking little account of the ways in which consumers actually behave. However, concerns have been raised around the effectiveness of this model in certain markets. For example, a recent report into the introduction of competition in the postal sector found that ‘there have been no significant benefits for small businesses and domestic consumers.’

The report was the Hooper report, and the image above is one done by Ian McDermott who was a real-time illustrator engaged at the workshop to help facilitate discussion and expose commonalities.


Isn't the problem that The Independent article is trying to get at the issue of regulation and how this is employed to get the desired results. This is very much the issue of order and freedom discussed in my last post and is also the same problem in education that is discussed by Sir ken Robinson in his book The Element (which I'll come back to in another post).

Why? Because there's a tension between the numbers-based regulation that seeks to set quantifiable targets and on the other end the purely hands-off competition-based regulation that treats human agents as Econs (cf. Nudge) that will ensure only the best providers survive. Over-reliance on the first explains the Stafford General Hospital problem and over-reliance on the second the banking crisis that allowed reliance on unsound models and the short-termism. I don't have an answer (on a postcard, please), but presumably it has to lie somewhere near an outcomes-based regulation in which freedom and order come together to empower and allow scope for responsible people to achieve good outcomes. Maybe that's naivety...

Antinomies and change

Jeremy Bullmore: In praise of Antinomies from JWT on Vimeo.

I've been meaning write about this for a while, but was spurred into doing so over lunch today. The whole talk above is totally worth watching, and talks with typical wit about planning in advertising and the antinomy between art and science that seems to surround it.

If time pressed, as well as out-loud laughs, the first four minutes offer an insight on what seems to be the problem. Quoting E.F. Schumacher's observation from Small is Beautiful, we are told that

'all real human problems arise from the antinomy between order and freedom.'

While this may be the case, we realise as the talk goes on that the answer is simple, and very D&A - it's not one or the other, nor even compromise, but rather it is both one and the other at the same time that is desirable and where parenthood, management and advertising planning thrive. Order and freedom need both be present to raise each other aloft and create successful outcomes.

The reason why lunch prompted me to do this was that it was spent with a Director of Delta7, a company for whom

Visual Dialogue™ uses Big Pictures to help leaders clarify and communicate strategy, increase employee engagement and drive real change.

They do really fascinating work, which in itself uses the alchemy of creative and analytical thought (as, essentually, as visualisation of the data that is organisational structures), to help businesses manage their own antinomy between order and freedom and help them come together for the business' benefit. A couple of interesting examples of their work below, and many more here.

Saying the Green Thing

If you want to take one thing out of this post, it's to keep an eye out for the upcoming documentary We Are The People We've Been Waiting For. The Executive Producer is Lord David Puttnam, and I was lucky to see a hugely stirring sneak preview of the beginning of it. Orson Wells was quoted as saying that

'Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe,'

and this film promises to tell the story of how the right sort of education may be the only way to prevent the catastrophe that would be serious climate change.

If you want to try to find another thing to take out of this post, keep reading.

A couple of weeks back I somewhat gatecrashed a fantastic meeting of Creative Social, a forum for digital creative directors across the ad industry. Some mixture of my honesty and their generosity ended up with me staying for the main event: two fantastic talks about creative responses to the huge challenges presented by climate change, one by Lord Puttnam and the other by Andy, the founder of Green Thing. I've delayed writing this post as I hoped a video might become available of the talks, but it hasn't yet. I'll post a link if it does.

Both talks were, frankly, excellent, powerful and thought provoking. One particular dynamic was how they approached a very serious issue with similar views of the urgency and importance of the topic, but from very different perspectives: Lord Puttnam from the top-down of government and Andy from the very roots-up of the Green Thing's social media. The degree of consensus was overwhelming. This begged the question, if we are all talking about the same thing then what will it take to make the large-scale changes in global political policy and consumer behaviour that we need to stand a chance at preventing catasrophic climate change. I think that the answer is working together to raise each other aloft (D&A).

Before I summarise (totally inadequately) the two talks, I'll warn you that I don't have a cutting analysis to offer - just some interesting thoughts that came out. Neither pulled any punches, and the audience were told in no uncertain terms that if we continue to promote consumerism we should 'go to bed at night wondering why we were put on this earth.' This was not all pizza and Adnams carbon-neutral beer (though there was that too).

Lord Puttnam comes from a background of wonderful and varied experience, but is now putting his reputation behind action on climate change, among other pursuits. The fundamental tension that Lord Puttnam discussed was that between citizens and consumers. We've been drawn into a consumerist society that we feed, and which feeds us, and only now (aided by the recession) are we starting to try to figure out what it means to be a person again. With social right, also comes responsibility, and this is what it means to be a citizen.

A couple of illuminative examples were given of this. To cite just one, not long ago there were 13 regional commercial TV stations, each of which made a sufficient profit and served the needs of the local community. However, the idea of 'shareholder value' led to their agglomeration into one station, ITV, which is now struggling to make a profit and which is less well placed to serve regional communities.

The talk was full of insight and thought, but one last point for me stuck out at the distance of two weeks. For Lord Puttnam, the single most important message is that every action has a consequence - personhood (i.e. citizenship) comes with rights and responsibilities. At the end of the day, government is likely to end up taking some measures which people in their current (consumer) state of mind might find unpalatable. Now's the time for communications to try to soften things up for those citizens (and not make things worse by perpetuating consumerism).

The second talk by Andy agreed with much of what Lord Puttnam had to say, but they have come at it from the point of view that there needn't be this antinomy between social obligation and consumer pleasure. What the Green Thing does so well is to tap into the feelings that lead to over-consumption and align them with actions that are sustainable - they make it cooler not to buy, to walk not drive etc etc. The website is full of examples of this. Not one of the 7 Green Thing behaviours is easy, but through creativity they are made more desirable. How about not buying a MacBook Air? (p.s. this was created before Micky Rourke's return to fame in The Wrestler. Ah well...)