Credit crunch is on the move. We hear about it, and just last week I came to realise how it is affecting real people. I say 'real' because the media hype does not help much to see the reality.
The UK property market (the little I know after searching for flats to let in one area and flats to buy in another) seems saturated. Lots of properties to let and to sell. Two main websites can be used to locate properties: rightmove and findaproperty. Both show more or less the same properties. Both offer maps and now street views. One of them can tell you about crime statistics and council tax rates, together with property sales in the area.
Other websites offer advice. Banks offer you guidance on mortgages. Others allow you to compare mortgage products. Even the UK government has its own website (financial services authority) to tell you more about mortgages, rates, and the whole process of buying a property.
Sophisticated websites, mapping technologies, even chatting facilities with advisors, with simulators about how much you can borrow, how much you will pay for your mortgage. That is all fine and well in a market that might not be saturated.
What websites do not show you (or do it in a very polite way with messages like "on behalf or the mortgagees we have received an offer of...") is the desperation of people. I went round two properties last week end which happened to be repossesed. It was disheartening. Seals around the fridge, freezer, evidence that furniture had been thrown away, and a feeling that once there was a home in there. Now I can understand why a prize awarded to a best photo taken in the US in 2008 showed how some owners left in a rush their property, as if they had been a bomb raid.
Electronic mediation would aim to be transparent, but at the moment is showing little of this side of the situation. Websites cannot show desperation and one wonders if they will ever do so. Of course we still need intermediaries (banks, property agencies and the like), because that is how we have built modern society. But we also need perhaps another type of intermediary which can show us the reality of those who have been negatively affected, we might be able to do something about their situation.
What can technology do? We can reflect the reality, and try to connect minds with hearts, problems with solutions. In my view, a more ethically driven intermediation for reality.
I know that this might sound idealistic, and that there are already questions to my suggestion. Some IT savvy people might say: Tell us more concretely what you expect us to do (for instance a website to share stories or to look for possible buyers, but this is what we already have in place). Well, the current situation is a cold call for everyone of us! All I can say is that there is an immense number of possibilities. I am not a prophet, only someone who has been looking at properties recently. We could build communities to share knowledge about how to beat the crises, to match needs with solutions. I have checked some electronic forums about the credit crunch. There are some which offer advice, others that have campaigns to reduce the price of property.
There could be a response to my request: Welcome to the market, this is how it works. People are driven by their own goals. My reply would be: Is this not what has contributed greatly to the situation we have at the moment? Can we not all think of not having the cake and eating it?
A more systemic response could be devised to the credit crunch: We all have a foot print in society, and perhaps it is time to review it. How we live, and how our single mindedness towards achieving certain goals might not be in tune with our wider environment.
20 March 2009
Patience
A quick note on research: Demands to publish and get money, the credit crunch, facebook, google, blogs, twitter, mobile computing and all these things we need to have are to be taken with patience. I was at an event yesterday in London, the topic did not have anything to do with all these 'inventions'. However, having had the chance to talk to a few people, it made me remember that it is not technology or very sophisticated knowledge what could save the day in research and make our lives meaningful. It is the human component.
We were talking about social research. There was not much difference in a group of around 20 people in relation to how we gather data. Not much difference either in our research questions (I am sure there are differences, but we had to show some degree of unique thinking when formulating them). Not even great difference in problems related to the use of technology in organisations. What made the difference for me...? I mean what is it that we do but we do not accept...? We all manage research in very similar ways when it comes to people.
We do research because we are patient, and because we develop long term relationships with individuals: with students (who could get us access to organisations or give us a research contract); with friends (who will also give us their views about relevant problems in their organisations when having a beer); with colleagues (from other universities within our country or elsewhere, and with whom we might feel a linguistic common ground). Some researchers would find it difficult to accept that relationships include those more intimate (e.g. the wife) in order to flesh out ideas, get access to data or even co-author research papers. Wives also get on board in trips to attend conferences or put up with mourning when things do not go according to plan.
We all try to influence others to get research done or published, some more actively than others. No need to claim objectivity so loudly.
So my learning has been that we can know more but we need to cultivate our garden as Voltaire would say. Using existing contacts, making new contacts we meet in events, and the odd adventure to engage into something new, exciting and risky, they are all part of a patient strategy. That is why research impact might take time to be cristalised in a project or assessed accurately.
Patience...? Need to think of those research questions harder now so I can see how valuable my own efforts before getting others involved.
Voltaire also realised that life puts us in situations we never expected to be. So it is better to make the best of them, but with patience.
We were talking about social research. There was not much difference in a group of around 20 people in relation to how we gather data. Not much difference either in our research questions (I am sure there are differences, but we had to show some degree of unique thinking when formulating them). Not even great difference in problems related to the use of technology in organisations. What made the difference for me...? I mean what is it that we do but we do not accept...? We all manage research in very similar ways when it comes to people.
We do research because we are patient, and because we develop long term relationships with individuals: with students (who could get us access to organisations or give us a research contract); with friends (who will also give us their views about relevant problems in their organisations when having a beer); with colleagues (from other universities within our country or elsewhere, and with whom we might feel a linguistic common ground). Some researchers would find it difficult to accept that relationships include those more intimate (e.g. the wife) in order to flesh out ideas, get access to data or even co-author research papers. Wives also get on board in trips to attend conferences or put up with mourning when things do not go according to plan.
We all try to influence others to get research done or published, some more actively than others. No need to claim objectivity so loudly.
So my learning has been that we can know more but we need to cultivate our garden as Voltaire would say. Using existing contacts, making new contacts we meet in events, and the odd adventure to engage into something new, exciting and risky, they are all part of a patient strategy. That is why research impact might take time to be cristalised in a project or assessed accurately.
Patience...? Need to think of those research questions harder now so I can see how valuable my own efforts before getting others involved.
Voltaire also realised that life puts us in situations we never expected to be. So it is better to make the best of them, but with patience.
2 February 2009
The unexpected: Are we prepared?
Recently I was delivering a course on complex project management, and I was asked the question: Should we embrace or manage the unexpected...?
Interesting question. I was trying to convey the idea that the unexpected happens and in your projects we consider some contingencies, but never the unexpected. Why? Because we plan based on experience. Traditional project management techniques deal with risks by identifying them, prioritising them and then designing control responses.
That is fine and well, only if we identify risks. And we are told that we should talk to those 'experienced' people in order to do so.
The problem is, the unexpected happens with no previous experience. Complexity theory seems to point out that we live in a complex world where small events trigger much bigger ones.
This would work well if we are aware of the small things, and we are able to foresee connections with potentially bigger events.
I can only say that we need to embrace rather than anticipate the unexpected. In projects, this would mean that we need to make cushion for exiting the project or taking it to a different level. We need to keep communication channels open, be able to raise alarms (as cyberneticians would suggest), and have some time and room for maneuvre.
Thinking back again of the unexpected this morning (snow in England, we thought the worst of the winter season was over), it also seems reasonable to ask continuously the question: How heavy do we become that we cannot embrace new things...? Perhaps our luggage is heavy and does not allow us to carry other things. We have heard of the importance of emptying our minds so as to allow new thoughts to be nurtured. Maybe this is why some systems thinkers are now into meditation and spirituality. Francisco Varela wrote about that in his latest book "The Embodied Mind". It is about how we become part of something in the world (what we observe), and perhaps the message for the unexpected is about how we can become part of something else.
My project management students must be wondering why I say these things, and if I have some recommendations to give. Well, researching into tools for modeling and remembering what my good friend Nick Davey said about projects, it is important to prepare the mind to map certain connections between aspects we perceive as important in projects. This is done in projects, but my suggestion is then to map connections and see if they have become too heavy that the unexpected does not have any room. We love to make things complicated, maybe we need to start letting it go abit so that we can respond to new situations.
So the suggestion is: Download freemind mapping software (freemind.sourceforge.net), choose a project or a situation that is in your mind, draw connections between aspects, and see if you have become overprepared, overconcerned or over knowledgeable about it. It might be time to forget it all and draw on a blank canvas!!
To see the diagram, double click on it. I am learning to use free mind! In this project example of off-shoring operations (something that many companies are doing now), I leave room for the unexpected, which could lead us to review what we do in relation to the expected! It might be we need to offload some things we are doing, whilst enhancing the 'informal' (communication, self-organisation) and the learning about the future. Hopefully these things could help us to deal with the unexpected. If not, well, we might need to accept things as they come: "What happens is usually the best", as a good friend used to say.
Interesting question. I was trying to convey the idea that the unexpected happens and in your projects we consider some contingencies, but never the unexpected. Why? Because we plan based on experience. Traditional project management techniques deal with risks by identifying them, prioritising them and then designing control responses.
That is fine and well, only if we identify risks. And we are told that we should talk to those 'experienced' people in order to do so.
The problem is, the unexpected happens with no previous experience. Complexity theory seems to point out that we live in a complex world where small events trigger much bigger ones.
This would work well if we are aware of the small things, and we are able to foresee connections with potentially bigger events.
I can only say that we need to embrace rather than anticipate the unexpected. In projects, this would mean that we need to make cushion for exiting the project or taking it to a different level. We need to keep communication channels open, be able to raise alarms (as cyberneticians would suggest), and have some time and room for maneuvre.
Thinking back again of the unexpected this morning (snow in England, we thought the worst of the winter season was over), it also seems reasonable to ask continuously the question: How heavy do we become that we cannot embrace new things...? Perhaps our luggage is heavy and does not allow us to carry other things. We have heard of the importance of emptying our minds so as to allow new thoughts to be nurtured. Maybe this is why some systems thinkers are now into meditation and spirituality. Francisco Varela wrote about that in his latest book "The Embodied Mind". It is about how we become part of something in the world (what we observe), and perhaps the message for the unexpected is about how we can become part of something else.My project management students must be wondering why I say these things, and if I have some recommendations to give. Well, researching into tools for modeling and remembering what my good friend Nick Davey said about projects, it is important to prepare the mind to map certain connections between aspects we perceive as important in projects. This is done in projects, but my suggestion is then to map connections and see if they have become too heavy that the unexpected does not have any room. We love to make things complicated, maybe we need to start letting it go abit so that we can respond to new situations.
So the suggestion is: Download freemind mapping software (freemind.sourceforge.net), choose a project or a situation that is in your mind, draw connections between aspects, and see if you have become overprepared, overconcerned or over knowledgeable about it. It might be time to forget it all and draw on a blank canvas!!
To see the diagram, double click on it. I am learning to use free mind! In this project example of off-shoring operations (something that many companies are doing now), I leave room for the unexpected, which could lead us to review what we do in relation to the expected! It might be we need to offload some things we are doing, whilst enhancing the 'informal' (communication, self-organisation) and the learning about the future. Hopefully these things could help us to deal with the unexpected. If not, well, we might need to accept things as they come: "What happens is usually the best", as a good friend used to say.
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