Matt Ridley – When Ideas Have Sex

Matt Ridley is one of the people who had a great influence on my thinking.  In the mid nineties, when I was in my early-mid teens, he wrote a weekly column in The Daily Telegraph (the paper my parents got) called Acid Test.  The weekly topics varied widely, but included economics, science, human behaviour and the like.  Each column would follow a similar pattern:

• He would introduce an often topical piece of conventional wisdom
• He would tell you that it was wrong
• He would tell you why it was wrong in theory
• Then he would give several examples showing it to be wrong in practice

Later I would come to read several of his books, including The Red Queen and The Origins of Virtue.

Here he is speaking at TEDGlobal 2010.

Creating a Social Enterprise

On Wednesday I went to a seminar run by i-Social Entrepreneurs in Birmingham, on setting up a social enterprise.  I’m still toying with the idea I described here although my conception of it keeps shifting.  At the seminar I coined the term “volunteer virtual assistants” which seemed to fit nicely with my current take on it.  Basically, if you are a tiny, struggling social enterprise there may be a role that “volunteer virtual assistants” can play for you.  Perhaps you don’t have the time or the skills to sort out that cashflow spreadsheet, do that research, or proof read that proposal.  You might not need a permanent volunteer, just a couple of hours of someone’s time to enable you to get on with pushing the organisation forward, not getting bogged down.  Well connected groups, e.g. those affiliated to churches, wouldn’t need the service because they are already connected to a large community, but many struggling one-man-bands might.

But I digress.  The seminar was fascinating, particularly the preponderance of people who already work in caring professions (social care etc) but can see the writing on the wall vis a vis how public services will be funded and commissioned in the future.  It appears that David Cameron’s “Big Society”, an inspiring but frustratingly vague concept, is already being planned for by those that we will need to take the lead in providing services.

Other observations include: three-quarters of the attendees were women; that Loaf chap (the excellently named Tom Baker) got a mention – he seems to be a bit of a Birmingham celebrity; social enterprise is a very quickly growing sector, and this will almost certainly increase.

All in all, an interesting and inspiring session, albeit one not really aimed at me as it turned out.

UPDATE – see here for a one-page overview of the virtual volunteering thing – others seem to be pursuing similar things according to i-volunteer

How do large companies think?

Dutifully, I filled in the Survey Monkey survey that I received at work.  My department was canvassing our opinions on how they communicate with us.  As is so often the case, I felt I had something to say on the matter but the questions didn’t allow me to do so.  This is (paraphrased) what I wrote in the “any other comments” bit:

Generally I think that the quality of the communications we get is quite good, although there seems to be an excess of titles – perhaps they could get rationalised a bit?

More importantly though, the problem is not communication from “on high” (I don’t say that as a dismissive comment, merely as a description), but communication “on the ground”.  It is SO difficult to find information on the intranet, either via browsing or searching, and so difficult to make connections with other people – this is the problem.  How can we cross-sell when it is so hard to find out what is going on and make connections?

I would characterise the communication as being analogous to good quality magazines and newspapers – good material, but conceptually stuck in the last century.  Communication now is about wikis, blogs and blog comments, and social networks – i.e. connections between end-users, not mediated by a central authority.  I’m not saying we should all start blogs on the intranet, but we need to rethink how we communicate as a company.

Globally, we employ about 15-20,000 people, with a large concentration of people in the UK.  I would think that this should be sufficient to create a “critical mass” of people who could post and edit material on the intranet.  I’ve heard the term “corporate wiki” before and I guess this is what I am envisaging.  If it could work for anyone it could certainly work for a very large interdisciplinary consultancy, although I have no idea how well they work in practice.

One-stop-shop for risk screening values

I’ve just had ANOTHER brilliant thought (quote at 5 mins)!  Well, my colleague did, but she said I was welcome to it, and if I made any money out of it I said I would buy her a drink.  Seems like a good deal to me.

For those of you who are not involved in environmental consultancy and risk assessment, you might assume that by now it would be a simple thing to determine if the level of a contaminant in something (soil, water, food etc) is dangerous or not.  It isn’t.  The problem is that the available screening values (which can be enshrined in legislation, or simply the firm opinion of the relevant agency, which almost amounts to the same thing) are smeared thinly and irregularly across the internet.  If you come across a non-standard contaminant in a non-standard situation, it can be a nightmare even to find out whether there ARE any statutory limits, let alone what they are or if they apply to your particular situation.

There could well be an opportunity for the brave soul(s) who decides to collate ALL of this information into one easily searchable database.  You could charge quite handsomely for access to this, so long as you could guarantee the currency of the information, because for the consultants who need to deal with the figures time is money.  One graduate could spend one day searching for information for one project they are working on, and still not necessarily get the correct information.  That’s £250 right there, gone.  Multiply that by a lot of projects and it could save consultancies serious money, as well as making their services more saleable because they could guarantee they would be using the most up-to-date and relevant information (this is a problem more often than you would think).

Seth Godin and I are obviously thinking along the same lines.

Crowd-sourced Consulting for Charities

A few weeks ago I discussed how you should capture those ideas you get that might just turn out to be good ones.  Needless to say this was prompted by one of those ideas. which I have now written down.

You can find it here.  Let me know what you think.

Requiring the services of consultants can be an expensive barrier for small charities and similar organisations to achieving their goals.

The cost of consulting is largely a factor of the man-hours required to complete a project. Often the bulk of the man-hours are assigned to a graduate or another grade of staff that does not necessarily have a significant level of experience. The “authority” that a consultant report has is often given by the very time-limited input of a senior member of staff. The author’s experience of costing consultancy reports suggests that often less than 20% of the cost of a report is related to this authority.

The remaining work load could be packaged up into a series of discrete chunks with simple instructions that a motivated volunteer with an appropriate skill-level could easily achieve. This would mean that the bulk of the work could be done by volunteers whilst still achieving an outcome of sufficient quality.

It’s interesting how writing things down affects how you look at ideas and concepts.  When an idea first comes to mind you hold it only in your head and it all seems to click, but having to write it down demands that you establish a logical flow of how it all fits together.  Having done this I’m not as convinced as I originally was about it, but there still might be something there.

Inspiration eludes me

A few weeks ago I was always 2 or 3 blog posts ahead so that come Mon/Wed/Fri I always had something to post, even if my mind was blank at that particular time.  I then had one really busy week when I used up all my spares so I am now blogging hand to mouth.

As with blogging, so with life.  You always need some ideas in the pipeline so you have something to work on if you hit a wall with your current project.

How to capture those ideas

You know those ideas you get, usually in the pub, which start with the words “Wouldn’t it be great if…” and go on to describe a neat business concept?  Of course, you never do anything about it, and then you vaguely wonder why some people are really successful and you  are not.

Perhaps the successful people write those ideas down.  This forces you to think a bit harder about it than if you are just shooting the breeze over drinks; it also means you can put the idea to one side for a while and come back to it.  I’m going to start writing my ideas down.

I’m trying to come up with a format that can describe such an idea in 1-2 pages, and that just captures the initial excited thinking – research and the like can come later.  These are my heading ideas for this format:

Initial concept – What form did the idea take when you first thought of it?

Sketch – How would it work, what would the process/product look like to the customer/user?

Target Audience - Who is it for?

Precedents – What existing business ideas that you know about make you think that your idea could work?

Assumptions – What (probably unspoken) assumptions have you made about customers, competitors, logistics?  This will give you a list of things to follow up if you take the idea forward.

Anything else?

Psychometric testing – they’re in my head!

I uncovered a character profile from some psychometric testing I did a couple of years ago.  I’m generally sceptical about such things but this excerpt, from the section on how to interview me, is pretty close to the mark:

Expect logical answers as opposed to socially acceptable ones.

In the event of rational stonewalling, do not hesitate to throw in some socially provocative questions.

There are a few subjects that I try my best to avoid debating, either because long experience tells me that you can’t sway people and the topic is just too emotive (fox-hunting, abortion); or I don’t know enough and really can see both sides (Irish Republicanism, for example).

Apart from that I’ll debate the hind-legs off a donkey.  Ideas are important, and we make too many lazy assumptions (myself included).  If I disagree with someone I swing between excessive combativeness and asking mild questions to draw out someone’s train of thought before putting their contradiction to them.  Both are probably a bit mean.  My favourite conversation using the latter technique though led to the girl I was talking to tell me that she thought global starvation was on the way because as people got richer there would be fewer and fewer farmers.  I gently suggested she hadn’t considered the concept of supply and demand.