Category: Humans

The Numbers Beneath, The Numbers Ahead

Posted on by Christopher Berry

2020 hasn’t been easy. Figures from the US Census Household Pulse Survey can be used to tell a story of anxiety, hunger, depression, desperation and hopelessness. Millions are hurting. 2020 is hitting the poor, the young, and those who are low to mid-skilled the hardest. 2021 isn’t looking easy. Vaccines will take time to rollout. The recovery depends on collective health security. Health security causes confidence, confidence causes increased risk tolerance, increased risk tolerance leads to investment, and investment stimulates growth in private sector productivity, labour market demand, and opportunity. It will take time for each part of the chain to develop. It all lags. A return to the previous trend line doesn’t address the underlining cause of wage polarization.[…]

Will Covid-19 change population density?

Posted on by Christopher Berry

Canadians are a people shaped by physical and social geography. Both explain a portion of why we are who we are, and how we relate to each other. Covid-19, an executable snippet of code wrapped in protein with the sole goal of persistence, is shaping us. It has already affected our social demography. Will it change Canada’s social geography? What It Is Population density is a pretty good indicator of attitude. I can’t make the claim that it’s always causal for all people, After all, did living with 25,000 others in a square kilometre in downtown Toronto make you more conscious of mental health challenges facing the population, or were you always conscious and chose to live with others who[…]

Mandate levels, group choice, and organization

Posted on by Christopher Berry

The diagram below, something that John Cutler put together, made me think. I got a kick out of it. Maybe you will too. First, I’ll unpack the image. Second, I’ll contribute a few thoughts. What are you looking at? If you look down the centre, you’ll see nine instructions, called mandate levels, labelled from A to I. At level A you’ll find the instruction “Build exactly this [to a predetermined specification]”, at F, “Increase/decrease [metric] known to influence a specific business outcome”, and at I, “Generate [long-term business outcome]”. To the left, you’ll see a few boxes, labelled Eng, Design, PM, and GM. To the right, similar boxes labelled PROD DEV TEAM, PM, GM. The organization on the left is[…]

The Rate of Forgetting

Posted on by Christopher Berry

What if the rate of forgetting is interrelated with the rate of learning? What might that mean? The Knowledge Funnel The Knowledge Funnel is a model that describes how knowledge is made useful by an organization. At one side, you got mysteries. We live in an era where the number of mysteries vastly outnumbers the amount of knowledge. There is no shortage of mystery. Heuristics are rules of thumb that work most of the time, but not all of the time. There are lot of heuristics. They tend to form the core value driver for many organizations. There are comparatively fewer algorithms. Those organizations that have fit algorithms are often extraordinarily profitable and competitive. Some researchers focus on converting mysteries[…]

Airlocking

Posted on by Christopher Berry

What is Airlocking? Airlocking is a process where a belief spreads and locks-in to the point that direct, disconfirming, evidence is disregarded, and people believe something to the point that they’ll kill themselves by throwing themselves out of an airlock. If there is another term for this phenomenon, could you please let me know? In the meantime, I’ll call it Airlocking. Etymology Consider the following scene from Avenue 5, Season 1, Episode 8. It aired just as those in the United States and Canada were understanding the full gravity of Covid-19 in March, 2020. TV is useful because it gives everybody the opportunity to experience the same phenomenon for themselves, independently. Everybody has a different reflection. The whole episode is[…]

The Humanity of Productive Meetings

Posted on by Christopher Berry

This post is a continuation of The Technology of Productive Meetings from November 2019. Below, you’ll find a summary two frameworks: ORID and Stances, before extending it further. This post is intended for those on the human side of data science. Carbon is harder than silicon. Summary The ICA teaches a group facilitation method that features the ORID framework. The ORID (Objective, Reflective, Interpretive, Decision) framework offers a path for a group of individuals to ship a decision. While the facilitator helps the group through the steps, it is the group itself that ships the decision. The method acknowledges the way people feel their way through a decision. The facilitator crafts a sequence of questions which match each one of[…]

Deep Learning: Evolution or Revolution?

Posted on by Christopher Berry

Is what is happening in analytics, in industry, an evolution or a revolution? What is Analytics is the science of data analysis. Those who practice analytics self-identify as analyst, digital analyst, marketing scientist, data engineer, researcher, among many others. Tukey (1962, The Future of Data Analysis, The Annals of Mathematical Statistics, (33), 1) called them all practitioners. The goal of the practitioner depends on their context. That context largely, but not always, depends on the state of knowledge, state of the culture, or sometimes, normatively, the state of maturity, of the group they belong to. Large organizations can have a large amount of difference within them. It’s not uncommon for an operations department to be extremely mature and for its[…]

Product Managing Data Science

Posted on by Christopher Berry

In this post, I’ll outline some of the best parts about product managing data science. Data science is the creation of product from data, requiring a blend of the skills of technology, statistics, and business. Product Management brings and keeps product in the world, requiring a blend of the skills of technology, user experience, and business. All of the challenges of product management appear in data science. And then some. The Knowledge Funnel The Knowledge Funnel is a concept introduced by Roger Martin in Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (2009). At the top of the funnel, you got mysteries. It would seem that there are an uncountable number of mysteries. In the middle, you have heuristics,[…]

The Technology of Productive Meetings

Posted on by Christopher Berry

Can meetings be more productive? The BBC’s Sean Coughlan wrote a piece entitled “Pointless work meetings really a form of therapy” and it struck a chord. I shared that out on Friday, November 15, 2019. It’s a short press summary of what Patrik Hall co-authored in a book. The press doesn’t say what that book is. So I wrote Patrik. The book is called Mötesboken : tolkningar av arbetslivets sammanträden och rosévinsmingel. His co-author, Malin Akerstrom, wrote a related paper – The Merry Go Round of Meetings: Embracing Meetings in a Swedish Youth Care Project. It is worth a read. I have a few thoughts. There are (at least) two forms of technology: physical technology and social technology. Physical technology[…]

Behold the awesome power of homophily

Posted on by Christopher Berry

There are many calls to break up tech. Break up what, exactly? Regulate tech? Regulate what? There’s a lot of polarization about what to do about Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Google. That polarization is in part driven by anger. Dig a bit deeper and see fear. Maybe you’re feeling it. Here’s how I see it. The Assumptions People are heterogenous. Peoples’ beliefs are heterogenous. Peoples’ willingness to believe are heterogenous. Peoples’ inventiveness and imagination are heterogenous. Peoples’ willingness to tell or repeat stories are heterogenous. Peoples’ susceptibility to stories, and to storytellers, are heterogenous. Peoples’ need to belong are heterogenous. People form networks because they need to belong. Information (Gossip, facts, stories) is transmitted along those networks. These variables (information,[…]