All Life Is Problem Solving

From The Huffington Post and YouTube

Nassim Nicholas Taleb says (pp. xvii – xviii) that a “Black Swan” is an event with three attributes. “It is an outlier . . .” in the sense that it is “outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. . . it carries an extreme impact . . . human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.”

A Black Swan?

Lately, I’ve been harping a lot on the need for transparency and accountability in the Geithner Plan. Here’s Elizabeth Warren, Chairperson of the congressional oversight panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) on the subject.

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Don’t you wish she was the Treasury Secretary?

In a number of earlier posts I’ve discussed the alternative to the Geithner Plan of temporary nationalization followed by restructuring and re-privatization of the Banks. I’ve also pointed to the lack of transparency of the Administration in refusing to explain its decision to follow the Geithner Plan in the context of a fair evaluation against the nationalization alternative favored by so many prominent economists.

Yesterday, in the midst of a fine speech on the economy, President Obama offered part of his reasoning on this choice. After directly mentioning those critics who favor some form of temporary nationalization, he said: [Read more →]

There are three basic policy alternatives for solving the problems of our “insolvent” large banks. We can liquidate them, reorganize them using conservatorships, or provide them with Government subsidization in the hopes that the market value of their troubled assets will rise, and that liquidity and enough asset value to achieve solvency will be restored. The Obama Administration, in following the Geithner Plan, has chosen to follow the third alternative, in spite of much public advice from a growing chorus of the nation’s most prominent economists favoring the second alternative. [Read more →]

In this post I’ll complete my analysis of Dave Snowden’s seven principles of Knowledge Management.

— “Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success. When my young son burnt his finger on a match he learnt more about the dangers of fire than any amount of parental instruction cold provide. All human cultures have developed forms that allow stories of failure to spread without attribution of blame. Avoidance of failure has greater evolutionary advantage than imitation of success. It follows that attempting to impose best practice systems is flying in the face of over a hundred thousand years of evolution that says it is a bad thing.”

I agree that best practices systems are bad news. Some years ago, a friend of mine, Mark Notturno, said that Knowledge Managers should not be concerned with making knowledge maps, but should, instead, be creating error maps, because what our experience really teaches us is where our knowledge has failed and needs to be replaced. Rather than best practices systems, we need lessons learned systems, where the lessons learned are the errors we have made in the past. [Read more →]

Some time ago, Dave Snowden offered his Seven Principles of Knowledge Management. I’ve commented on some of them before in the context of a review of a presentation by John Tropea. However, John’s presentation pre-dates Dave’s blog post presenting all seven principles. I’ve not had time to review Dave’s post since it appeared, but I think it’s well worth a critical analysis. So, here’s my commentary on it, principle-by-principle.

— “Knowledge can only be volunteered, it cannot be conscripted. You can’t make someone share their knowledge, because you can never measure if they have. You can measure information transfer or process compliance, but you can’t determine if a senior partner has truly passed on all their experience or knowledge of a case.” [Read more →]

Still another Gregg beauty is: “This borrowed money is certainly not free. Our children and grandchildren will be hit with the bill. Sadly, in 10 years, we will spend more on interest payments on this debt than we spend on education, energy and transportation combined — almost four times as much.”

First, the children and grandchildren of Americans haven’t had to repay the national debt for many years now. The reason is that the expansion of the economy has very often outrun the expansion of the debt because we’ve often made good public investments when we’ve run deficits. Of course, the exceptions to this were in the Reagan and two Bush Administrations when debt increases outpaced GDP increases because public investments were in the form of ill-advised tax expenditures that had too small a multiplier effect. Second, paying interest on the debt has never been a major problem for the Government. But, if it becomes one, we can easily reduce the burden by “printing money,” or, in more polite language, “monetizing the debt, a move Sen. Gregg, seems never to have heard of, even though it was a favorite move of his favorite President, Ronald Reagan. [Read more →]

Gregg’s next objection to the “budget to beggar us” is:

”Instead of tightening Uncle Sam’s belt the way so many American families are cutting back these days, the president’s proposal spends so aggressively that it essentially adds $1 trillion to the debt, on average, every year.

”Except for some accounting gimmicks, the budget makes no attempt to cut wasteful spending or find savings. It ignores reform for major entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security, which are on track to cost us $67 trillion more than we have over the next 75 years.”

If I hear the analogy likening the Government to an American family one more time, I’ll scream. How many more years will these Republican war horses try to get the American people to believe this really old piece of nonsense. Does an American family have a printing press? Can an American family get everyone else to accept its currency? Can an American family coerce private economic agents into following reasonable rules of the economic road? Of course, the Government is not like one’s family, and what is rational behavior for a family often makes no sense for a Government. In particular, in hard times, when economic demand is down, it is rational for individuals to spend as little as possible to protect themselves; but it is precisely during these times that it is rational for Government to stimulate demand with more public spending, so that individual reluctance to spend doesn’t result in economic deflation and destruction of national wealth. Economists have known about this paradox since the 1920s, why doesn’t Judd Gregg and his fellow Republicans know about it? Why are they talking about the Government acting like a family, when, instead, it should be acting to save families by providing work and an economic multiplier. [Read more →]

On April 1st Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) the Republican stalwart who changed his mind about serving as Secretary of Commerce in the Obama Administration, gave us a beautiful example of the surpassing “rationality” of standard Republican reasoning about the pending budget bill in the Congress in the form of a Washington Post op-ed piece, called “A Budget to Beggar Us. While a critique of his article is like the proverbial “shooting fish in a barrel,” I still thought it might be worth doing, because, really, Republican mouthpieces need to upgrade the quality of their reasoning if the US is to have an effective two-party system, and the only way to convince them of that is to call them out whenever we encounter the usual pap they hand out. So, in this and a couple of other blogs, I’m going to comment on the statements in Sen. Gregg’s piece I find particularly silly, or otherwise objectionable. Of course, I should also, perhaps, comment on the sensible views in his piece, but I’m afraid there are very few of those, and this “stress test” will be long enough as it is. So, in the interests of space, I thought it reasonable to ignore them. [Read more →]

Dave Snowden, whose views I blog about from time-to-time, yesterday offered “a certification rant,” in which he said:

“Just to make it clear, I have no objection to people selling training courses in KM. I have no objection to people developing specific approaches and certifying or accrediting people to practice those techniques, that’s something we do in CE. However we never claim to offer certificates in the field of complexity or narrative. Offering to certify an entire field is a nonsense and awarding pretentious appendages to participants names is compounding arrogance with ostentation.”

This is not the first time Dave has stated this view, and this blog is also not the first time that I’ve stated my agreement with it. My organization, KMCI, in an earlier incarnation, which no longer exists, was one of the first to offer Certification Workshops in KM. Now, we offer Certificates of completion of our CKIM Workshop offering instruction in The New Knowledge Management Approach, and implementing the K-STREAM Methodology for KM programs and projects. For many reasons, stated in detail here, we make no additional claims about the competence of attendees in the general field of KM. In 2003, when KMCI announced its shift from a Certification to a Certificate, the decision to make this change was a hard one for us. We knew that many who were interested in KM, were as or more interested in “a ticket” than they were in “KM”, and we suspected that our decision to change to a Certificate program would cost us training business. I have no way of knowing whether it has or not. But I know the decision to change was the right one, because today, nearly six years later, KM is still a field which lacks consensus on fundamentals, approaches, normative visions, standards, techniques, and tools.