Post-Holiday Crash Time

Possibly my most favourite time of Christmas is not the opening of presents, or the big dinners, or the family coming to visit. Those are all very nice; but I think that December 30th is my favourite day of the holiday season. For it's on days like today - after all the visits are done, all of the food is eaten, and all of the gifts are openend - that there's nothing left to do but sit quietly together and enjoy whatever novelty Christmas has brought this year. The kids are busy planning elaborate underwater castles for their new WebKinz (a real-world stuffed toy with a virtual-world life), the cats are making strained meowling noises at the squirrels running through the snow outside our windows, my wife is sipping tea and thumbing through the mail.

And me? I've been on the couch all morning reading books on my new Sony electronic book reader (my wife gives really good gifts). Say what you will about it -- I'm convinced that these little gadgets are going to revolutionize the book publishing industry as much as the iPod has revolutionized the music publishing industry. Creating a non-physical format for ANY product opens up entirely new markets and interesting economic effects. With the non-physical format, authors no longer have to compete with each other for limited shelf space. There IS no shelf!

For example, the book reader came with 100 free books of my choice from Sony's "Classics" collection. These are books that are in the public domain, but which would still take up printing and shipping costs as well as valuable shelf space if delivered in physical format. Consequently, they might not be easy to find in the local bookstore or library. And any one of them, in physical format, would cost me about $10 each and take weeks, if not months to deliver. In electronic format, however, I'm off reading your selection in seconds! Yes, it's not the same as reading a physical book. But it's a close enough experience that the benefits far outweigh the negatives. Plus, the reader can hold literally thousands of books in its memory card!

I've made the first two free books good ones: Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" and Darwin's, "On the Origin of Species". Both are marvelous reads (if you can overcome the long-winded nature of writers centuries-past), and they both do a great job of explaining a very important phenomenon: the emergence of apparent order and complex structure from a system composed of unorganized interacting basic elements. Understanding such emergent behavior is the key to everything.

So with some apologies to readers who were wanting me to blog about urbanism, I'm going to take a little detour for a while. I'm going to spend the upcoming posts writing about what I think are the new emergent behaviors in economics. It may take some time, but when I'm through, I think I should be able to describe my vision of the ideal city in terms of powerful economic forces, rather than in terms of wishful neo-hippy karma.

Until next time!

-- Geoff

The Trinity of Change

Hey, it’s a new blog entry! Many thanks to people like Kenn, Chris, and yes, my parents, for encouraging me to get back on the horse. It’s not that I don’t have lots to say. It’s more that by the time I get around to typing out what I had to say, I’ve got a big stack of new thoughts to form into words. As they arrive in my head, they land on top of the old words, smothering them into yesterday’s news. The whole process reminds me of my kitchen dishes, actually. “If only you would clean up those ideas and set them out to dry before you cook up a new batch, it wouldn’t be so hard to scrape the crud off of them,” I can hear my mother say…

Exactly like my dishes…

Anyway, this blog entry comes from something I cooked up earlier last week (editor's note... uh, more like earlier last month), and I’ve got to get it published before it starts to mold. I've been looking at how systems change, and what are the necessary conditions to achieve a large system change. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book, “The Tipping Point”, describes the conditions necessary to “tip” an idea into the public consciousness. But he doesn't really explain the mechanisms of change. For example, his book doesn't explain how the Marshall Plan was achieved; only how the idea of the Marshall Plan was able to spread into the public consciousness.

Spreading an idea is only about a third of the story, actually. (Malcolm, take note...) It's not sufficient for an idea to tip. For example, literally 10's of millions of people marched to protest the idea of the second Iraq invasion. This surely counts as an idea which tipped! Yet, the invasion went ahead anyway. Why?

The answer is that for real change to happen, you require three ingredients:

1. Leaders have to throw real weight behind the change. In any change, you will have people or groups who are resistant. This is just human nature -- we like things the way they were because we naturally believe that staying the course is safer than changing course. You need leaders who can lend authority to the change, to convince the resistant that the change will be worth the effort

2. Evangelists to communicate and convince the people of the message. Good ideas with good leadership can fail if they aren't communicated in a way that can convince those who are impacted by the change. Look at the struggle BC has had deploying its new carbon tax, or the failure of BC "STV" voting system proposal (that last one did really hurt my head). Unless the change has a clear, articulate evangelist who is able to bring the message home, it is also likely to fail.

3. Administrators who can manage the change. Even good ideas with solid leadership and popular support can fail if they are not properly managed and administered. Sometimes love is not all that you need; sometimes you need forms and audit trails and decent old-fashioned project management. I see this all the time in my job. Good project management makes all the difference between a smooth transition, and a chaotic one. These administrators are rarely recognized by the history books, but any large-scale change requires careful management, and this cannot be left up to the leaders and evangelists.

So there you have it. Leaders, Evangelists and Administrators. The trinity of change. Next time you see someone advocating change without people to fill all three of these roles, prepare for a bumpy ride.