Archive for November, 2008

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And the next disaster will be …..

Sunday, November 30th, 2008

Last week I introduced the concept of the predictable disaster. A traffic jam forecast generated a lot of arousal. In the Netherlands the ANWB is taking care of the traffic news, updating about traffic jams. The ANWB forecast the ‘predictable disaster’ of a big traffic problems on Monday 24th. However last monday the traffic was not so heavy after all. Lots of laughter, criticism. Tuesday however, the roads were a mess: over 350 miles of slow traffic, or no movement at all. Big discussion. The ANWB claimed that the disaster was prevented: people were disencouraged to travel. Others claim that the ANWB forecast had had no effect at all and that ‘traffic forecast’ should not be given any more.

This is a wonderful example of a subtype of predictable disasters. The ‘disaster’ is inevitable because we now that heavy traffic is bound to happen and that the mean length of traffic jam is rapidly increasing and therefore the ‘high values’ (big jams verses no traffic at all) increase even more. The factors are known: day of the week, weather, time of the day, situation of the roads. On top of that: random factors such as traffic accidents. But the interdependence of them is not yet fully understood: the lack of any traffic problems during big road works two summers ago at the A10 around Amsterdam is still not fully understood.

How does this relate to other ‘predictable disasters?’ Financial crisis? Food situations in the third world? Greenhouse effect? Over population? Shortage of oil supply? And what about the numerous disasters that were likely to happen but never actually did (yet), such as ‘nuclear world war’?

Maybe all of these share the ’statistical side’: there is a chance they might happen, but we do not know or understand the maths of the chances. There is an interdependence of the different factors at stake that sum up to new, unknown factors. If you look at the documentaries on National Geography about aeroplane crashes, you always see this very unlikely combination of seemingly independent causes that you would never suspect to cluster together. On hindsight, after years of research, the combination of factors is quite logic.

So I take back my concept of ‘predictable disaster’. The only predictablility is that disasters will come but we don’t know what and when. Maybe that’s why they are called disaster for.

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Either / Or versus And / And

Friday, November 28th, 2008

One little post about ambiguity. This notion keeps me busy this week. I would like to explain my feelings about this underestimated characteristic of our world at the hand of a speech Frits Spangenberg made at the ESOMAR Qualitative congress in Istanbul.

He said that research could play a role in separating emotions from facts in the whole credit crunch debate. Separating those  could prevent the crisis to go out of hand.

Now I like Frits a lot and I have a huge respect for him both as a researcher and the ESOMAR president. But I think that this is actually a complete mistake. The notion of something to be either emotion or a fact. The root of the mistake is that it would and could be possible to separate emotions from facts and therefor ‘rational concepts’. This is however not true. The interesting fact of this crisis (and all economic crises) is that it makes very apparent  the two cannot be separated. If there is a difference between the emotional and rational way the human mind looks at the world mind (which I doubt) the two are heavily interdependent. Emotions create facts and the facts create new emotions. It is not either / or, it is and / and. The mutual influence between the two creates a complex system were mind creates reality and reality changes mind.

If there is a role for research it is not to separate the two, but to find out the patterns in the way they intermingle.

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What we dream of

Thursday, November 27th, 2008

Can’t help to expand a little bit about the precious stones I found in the White tiger.

One wisecracker for just for fun – a profound analysis of fashion development (page 225):

“The dreams of the rich, and the dreams of the poor – they never overlap, do they? See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do th rich dream of? Losing weight and looking like the poor.”

One about the moral effects of literature (page 125).

“Just because drivers and cooks in Dehli are reading Murder Weekly, it doesn’t mean that they are all about to slit their masters necks. Of course, they’d like to. Of course a billion servants are secretly fantasizing about strangling their bosses – and that’s why the governement if India publishes this magazine and sells it on the streets for just four and a half rupees so that even the poor can buy it. You see, the murderer in the magazine is so mentally disturbed and sexually deranged that not one reader would want te be like him – and in the end he always gets caught by some honest, hardworking police officer (ha!), or goes mad and hangs himself (…)”

The latter mingles perfectly well with the idea of half baked ideas that govern our lifes, rather then rational notions that economists would like us to believe (the assumpion of rational behaviour being the fundaments of most economic theory and therefor for much of the policy our administrations tries to implement).

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Half baked

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

Reading a good book often is like sticking your hand into a ‘grab bag’. You find text in the book that you can savour, little diamonds of truth. For some reason phrases sometimes act like keys, they open up a chamber of thought that you forgot about.

A rich source was the White tiger from Aravind Adiga that I wrote about a few days ago. Check out this part of a phrase (page 11 in the paperback edetion (Atlantic books London):

(…) all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.

I don’t think I ever read a more adequate description of how human gather knowledge and form ideas about the world. I particulary like the evolutionary aspect about it (the ideas in our head bugger each other and create new species). But the most striking blow in the head of any rationalist approach to societal affairs is the concluding: ‘this is what you act on and live with’.

I am in favour of mixing the Nobel prize for fiction with sociology.

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Indian Masala

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008

As I wrote yesterday I read a wonderful Indian novel, The white tiger, an example of ambiguity in motives. I wrote the novel shortly after hearing a wonderful presentation from Aya Gnadig and Harry Key from H,T,P, Concept at the qualitative ESOMAR congress in Istanbul, called Culture Karma Chameleon.

The gist of their presentation was that the complexity of the Indian society  is not easy to dive in to. They sort of summarized the indian culture in 5 words, but none of these actually meant what you would have thought if you read them without context. The word ‘quality’ for instance was applied to gear that needed repair every day, but that proved to be very usefull. The ease to adapte was another aspect of quality.

The most interesting word was ‘Masala’ that apparantly is a sort of symbol for the complexity of Indian society. Literary the word means ’spicemix’. But it is a metaphor for the ‘no fixed state’ that everything is in according to Indian society and for the fact that in india opposites are often held for truth.

This is a difficult concept for western society and especially for the Management culture that is up to now mainly binory driven (a bit can be either true or false). Maybe the Indian society is better equipped for the growing complexity than our own.

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The white tiger

Monday, November 24th, 2008

My best friend Ronald once tipped me that any book from the shortlist of the man Booker prize is a masterpiece and can be bought blind. I would like to call it Ronalds law, and until now it worked well for me. Flying to Istanbul I therefor bought ‘the white tiger’ from Arvind Adiga, allthough I never heard from him, because the cover said ‘Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2008.

Again, a masterpiece. One big letter from ‘an entrepeneur’ to the chinese premier Wen JiaBao. I would like to mention it for one reason: it illustrates brilliantly the concept of ambiguity. The main character is a poor man. He hasn’t even got a name. You sympasize with him. However Adiga cleverly plays with the archetype of the ‘poor and honest’. This book is definitively not a new Uncle Tom. As a reader you are drawn into his life, but that is not exactly made easy. You sort of experience the ambiguity of motives and intent.

The book gives you some insight in the Indian world, but in a part of it that is not only strange to us, but strange to the writer as well as shown in the video from the Booker site.

Maybe this book should be added to a list of marketers reading list, since I notice that often in marketing the concept of ambiguity is not very developted: the one and clear motive is more easy to understand and to act upon, whereas in reality often our motives are a mix of different, often even conflicting motives.

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Let it snow!

Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

Back from a visit to my father in law who lived to be 89. On our way home: snow. It is interesting to notice the impact of a fairly common meteo phenomenon to traffic, even on a sunday. Even if predicted, it looks as of everyone is caught by surprise. Listening to the radio almost becomes funny. Over and over the warning is broadcasted. Over and over the conclusion on the radio can be heard: this would have been a serious traffic jam if the snow had occurred on a working day. Interesting to hear the comment over and over: the weather will be bad until monday morning rush hour.

This leads me to the interesting phenomenon of the predictable disaster. We know traffic is going to be awful tomorrow morning. We can all prevent this problem with a simple action (take the train, work at home) but we won’t. There are a lot of explanations to be made for this: ‘prisoners dilemma’ (if others stay home, I can drive without a problem), the fact we get used to traffic jams and take them into account, a serious jam is like an accepted excuse for arriving too late, thus the ‘punishment’ is not very severe, we need to get at work if we like it or not.

I would like to emphasis in this occasion another explanation that could be relevant. Human mind is very subject to the ’stability fallacy’. We feel that the world is a stable place and we tend to believe the current state to be the platform we will stay on. Because our memory is highly contextual, the memories of different states are not as accessible as they could be. We know in a rational way that thinks can be different, but it is hard to really feel it. Therefor we are prown to a kind of misleading feeling that things will not be as bad as expected.

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The engagement factor

Friday, November 21st, 2008

From Istanbul I came back with my scrapbook full of ideas. One was inspired by two very good presentations, one from Alex Johnston ‘It’s engagement, but is it research?’ and one from Keren Soloman ‘Getting intimate with our world’. Karen came up with the wonderfull concept of ‘Awarenes Quotient’ that I will definitively put in my dictionary (how can the research increase your AQ?)

I have always felt that the one of the underestimated effects of qualitative research is the level of engagement it arouses. Usually research is only judged on the level of insight it produces. But since insight without action is useless and the level of ‘action prowness’ is basically defined by the word ‘engagement’ this factor should always be used in assessing the methods. Without engagement any research delivers nothing but a clever report: expensive paper. With the choice of methods researchers should includen not only the level of insight expected, but also the level of engagement the method arouses.

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The beauty and the beast

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

Just returned from the Istanbul ESOMAR qualitative congress. The only downside was that my stomach still is in bad shape, and the turkish food is not appropriate for stomachs with an attitude. Being at a congress, listening to so much presentations always has some ‘magic’, the magic of emerging subjects. I don’t know what that is, maybe a sort of ‘Zeitgeist’, because it is not in the parts, but in the whole: patterns in the subjects that emerge, patterns that emerge from the discussions. Two related interesting observations:

1: the quality of the presentations in terms of presentation skills and powerpoints was very high. This was a feeling most spectators had. It sets a standard. But it also introduces a complete new theme in the researchers grand narrative: researchers have always been more content driven. The qualitative now switch to the more emotional ‘looks’. I think this pattern of ‘better surface’ will continue to exist because the best presentations set the standards. I wonder how this theme will evolve further and how it will spread to the main conference (more quant driven and less ‘fancy’)

2: in conferences like this all of the cases about techniques and methods look like success stories. This is inevitable. You want to get a message accross, a new approach that you share. You are not going to show any downsides apart from the obligatory ‘problems’ that in these presentations always appear to be minor points, easily to be adressed. Your new method is always going to be the beauty and not the beast. I don’t want to argue that this makes the congress less valueble: new plants should be pampered and watered and so should new approaches.

For the latter I would like to share an initiative that I think is really brilliant: the mistake bank. I got the link from the website of John Caddell. Maybe we should open an anomynous mistake bank for our profession! Lets unleash the beast!

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Turkish Delight

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

The ESOMAR qualitative congres is in Istanbul this year. Good choice. One of the good things in Istanbul is that the better hotels provide free wireless internet. I haven’t had that in any place up to now. The second good thing is that they pour out an excellent tea, brewed in the English way.

The congress started with a musician as a key note ’speaker’. It was Tuluyhan Ugurlu . The idea of having a concert in stead of a speach was brilliant. Tuluyhan played piano and was accompanied by a Turkish flute that I really loved. The intersting part however, was that he had a slideshow running while playing. The slideshow gave an impression of Anatolian history since the Hittites. For my ears – and some of my fellow Dutch – this felt like utter propaganda. All of the ancient tribes that inabited Anatlolia where wonderful, glorious and open minded. All of them where in favour of acknowledging women rights and respected all faiths. And the last and glorious leader was Attatürk. To give you an impression of his playing:A concert played

The interesting part was that I guess Tuluyhan did not at all intent to do this, he probably wanted to say that we all should respect women rights and different faiths and that he loved the country he is living in. Looking at his web site I think he wanted to stress the universal aspect of life, by going back so long in history.

So what we encountered was a different believe system. Ironically the ESOMAR president, Frits Spangenberg, just mentionned another aspect of the Turkish believe system: YouTube is blocked in Turkey to prevent unpatriottic video’s to be posted.

Interesting to see how strong these believe systems are, and how difficult it is to communicate between two systems. It shows quite clearly when the cleft is so huge. But in a more subtle way there are so many diffences in those systems that you could ask yourself: do we really communicate? Or is it more often an exchange of words.

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