The Massive Gap in Leveraging Digital Opportunities

I was chatting with a friend recently who is newly retired from a municipal public service position. I was sharing some ideas about an upcoming IPAC TRG event (Follow @IPACToronto on Twitter where info will be provided soon) and he provided an account of related organizational issues he witnessed when a very significant investment in a geomatics application showed no return. 

His observations:

• The software was adopted on the all-too-common belief that in some magical way it was self-operating and its introduction would solve some informational problems without further ado
• As a result, there was no attempt to design or deliver a work process that would leverage the software (and no one accountable for that since it wasn't even imagined that it would be necessary)
• There was no consultation with anyone who might have to use it, and even had there been, given the fetishization of the software and the failure of accountability for a strategy to leverage it, consultation probably wouldn't have netted much value. 

It's not surprising that there was little or no interest in learning the software.
Now multiply that a few hundred thousand times and we have the modern workplace. In the meantime, it's left to the IT and admin to make whatever they can of it without full awareness of its potential value or purpose.

Onto that pile of blockage for moving into the 21st century, add 

• The governance map naturally resists being changed and collaborative technologies and their fruits can be seen as subversive

There's no Accounting for It: Areas where the quest for the true story leads us to falsehood

We have confidence in numbers, not the evidence of our senses, as is often claimed. Everything we consider to be accurately observed is, in fact, accurately defined - i.e., defined in a way that makes the phenomenon of interest measurable, countable. Not until we establish the numeric lens of accuracy, or the illusion thereof, do we consider phenomena to exist beyond our thinking, our interestedness. Pause and ponder that.

You see, our confidence is misplaced. We mistake the indicator for reality. The relevance of data resides in the definition (a.k.a. "operational definition") of what is counted, and rarely are such definitions exclusive and exhaustive of phenomena, outside of some narrow scientific disciplines. 

Speaking from his experience in the area of Psychology, Jack Martin of Simon Fraser University explains that, whereas operational definitions provide investigators with initial cues to the identification and more thorough understanding of phenomena, psychologists frequently treat such definitions as if they were conclusive and exhaustive. Complex phenomena, such as human motivation and confidence, are narrowly understood in terms of a small set of predetermined factors. Understanding becomes reduced to some kind of criteriology, a labelling game. The purposes of investigation, learning and discovery, making new and deeper interconnections, are left out of this paint-by-numbers story.

From the psychology lab to the office, the situation becomes culturally entrenched. Those who report, from students to office workers, spend their days manipulating and their nights worrying about institutionalized performance measures, standardized tests, and a daily barrage of transactional data, all narrowly defined and often rather arbitrary, devoid of much concrete relevance. These measures are meant to provide insight into trends, and evidence of this or that performance, but in fact they mostly just

• eliminate context, 
• block connections, common sense and insight
• erode our capacity for reasoning 
• keep us too preoccupied to examine our purposes
• and ultimately put us on the self-sustaining hamster wheel of empty bureaucratic process

The focus on numbers may give us the secure sense that we're getting precise information, but it's a false sense of security.

See also The Logic of Quantophrenia and possibly Amy Lemay on assessing impact as reported by Asha Law at casrai.org.

The Relationship between Objectivity and Bureaucracy

In 2009, I posted a short blog entry, How Organizations Remain Bureaucratic. Here, I'd like to delve a bit further into what is pejoratively known as "bureaucracy" and tie the discussion to a broader cultural theme, one I'll call Fetishizing the Heuristic. The terminology is a bit academic, but apt, so I'll explain.

Heuristics are flexible guidelines, generally sane models, not meant to account for every contingency, but a pencilling in of a plan or set of criteria based on experience. (Maslow's Hierarchy, for example, was intended to be considered a flexible heuristic, but rarely is.)

To fetishize something means to idolize it...

So when a heuristic is idolized, the criteria embodied in a flexible guideline magically come to have a life of their own, alienated from the creative and reasonable minds that set them out. They become viewed as if they issue from a higher order of existence.

So, for example, a preliminary plan is developed that covers a time span, or evaluative criteria are set out provisionally. As soon as dates and scoring methods are assigned, it's as if these plans or criteria issued directly from an eternal source of objectivity, not from the minds of those composing them. (They become reified in processes, detached from the aim that inspired their development.)

The problem that arises is that once the guideline has been drawn up and numbers assigned to what started off as a provisional guideline, no counter-evidence from the actual world of objective reality will change the guideline. Where there is deviation, it will considered as a way of illustrating how things and people have failed to meet the criteria, not as evidence that the model needs adjusting.

Jack Martin of Simon Fraser University wrote in 1996 (in a no longer available newsletter of the American Psychological Association) lamenting how assessment criteria, never intended to be more than reasonable, flexible, useful guidelines, become irrationally narrowed and fixed once they are operationalized (assigned a numerical scale). This causes the quality and relevance of research in empirical psychology to degenerate.

Then, of course, these guidelines become embodied in institutional procedures - further alienated from the agents, the creative and reasonable minds of people in the organization, who would otherwise use their minds to question them, adjust them, and maintain their usefulness.

In practice, understanding how we can fetishize the heuristic should lead us to be more active in questioning and revising plans and criteria as necessary, understanding they issue from human needs and objectives.

The broader, more philosophical understanding is that a lot of the conceptual packaging we use to identify something as objective is faulty and needs to be revisited. We need to re-insert the awareness of our responsibility as agents into our plans and to adjust in an ongoing way to what is happening, rather than mechanizing thought in bureaucratic processes or bracketing ourselves out of existence while we follow an eternal diagram (our role in conceiving it, forgotten).

In a nutshell, don't treat a working hypothesis, guideline, process or model as if it issued from the heavens. After all, it's your model and you should have every right to correct it as more evidence becomes available - and there will always be more evidence, unless you are omniscient.