武夷山

Arnold Brown在The Futurist（未来学家）杂志2007年第5期发表文章，”Not with a bang”: Civilization’s Accelerating Challenges（世界“不是毁灭于一声巨响”：文明世界面临的加速出现的挑战）。全文可见http://www.allbusiness.com/company-activities-management/operations-billing/5523347-1.html。文章说：

世界上各类组织的数目在迅速增加，导致所有管理层次的人才都奇缺。现在奢谈“追求卓越”其实很可笑，我们不过是在“追求胜任力”。

有一个说法叫“洞穴定律”，其意思是：你已经陷在洞里，就不要再往下挖了。技术所造成的问题，不一定能靠更多的技术来纠正。

还有一个说法是“锤子定律”：锤子在手，你看什么都是钉子。（博主：不看问题的具体性质，想用统一的“先进”手段去解决，是行不通的。）

Malcolm Gladwell在Blink一书中说：基于“薄层信息”做出的直觉判断比基于搜集大量信息做出的判断更优越。

The Wisdom of Crowds（众人的智慧）一书的观点是：集体思维优于个体思维。从事虚拟现实研究的Jaron Lanier嘲笑说，这种观点是数字马克思主义。

现在，基于技术的犯罪是有利可图的，而且风险较小。因此，全世界很多聪明的年轻人都被吸引过去，从事技术犯罪活动。这样，充任管理人才队伍的聪明人就更少了。

对付复杂性失控的唯一药方是强调适应性。在这个日益复杂的、官僚化的、人才短缺的世界上，不能再专注于规模、系统之类的东西，因为这些东西最终是无关宏旨的，而要关注真正要紧的东西――有效性。

诗人T. S. Eliot（艾略特）在The Hollow Men（空心人）这首诗中说，也许世界“结束的方式／并非一声巨响，而是一阵呜咽”。 各种组织都必须更有适应性，否则会“缓缓滑向呜咽的停顿”。

（艾略特这句诗的译法，我采用了“绿豆”先生的，特此致谢，全部译文见http://tieba.baidu.com/f?kz=23870678）

原文如下：

"Not with a bang": civilization’s accelerating challenge: information overload and incompetence are among the side effects of increasing technological and societal complexity. Businesses, governments, and other organizations that hope to survive must become more adaptable and adept at harnessing the growing power of teams and expert systems.

By Brown, Arnold
Publication: The Futurist
Date: Saturday, September 1 2007

In "The Hollow Men," T.S. Eliot wrote that the world will end "not with a bang but a whimper." Eliot's prescient lines increasingly look as if they will show us how our future is likely to play out. More and more, it seems that the world will end, not with an explosion, but with a slow grinding to a halt as everything just stops working.

The increasing complexity of our structures and systems, accelerated by technology, is a major factor. So, too, is the great growth in the number of organizations--businesses, government agencies, NGOs--in the world, a growth that is clearly leading to a shortage of talent at all management levels. Another factor is the unchecked spread of bureaucracy, where procedures become more important than accomplishments.

Looking back as we see all this occurring, it is almost laughable to contemplate the idea of searching for "excellence." More and more, we are instead searching--desperately--for competency.

Citizens everywhere--in the United States, China, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Russia, France, and scores of other countries--ask why their governments can't do even the simplest things right. In the United States, after the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe, every involved government--from local to federal--proved hopelessly inept. The FBI, after spending hundreds of millions of dollars cannot get its computer systems working correctly. The vaunted Israeli military bungled its recent campaign in Lebanon.

Consumers also look in vain these days for the efficiency that business has always boasted about. Large global corporations set up electronic payment systems for their vendors that nobody in the companies knows how to make work. The New York Stock Exchange decline on February 28, 2007, was made worse by a computer glitch that nobody knew how to fix. Disgruntled customers everywhere struggle in vain to battle through automated systems that are good only for infuriating people. And, ironically, people in business increasingly complain that communication is impeded by too much e-mail.

There is growing awareness of the negative aspects of having too much information and of having systems to gather it that are too elaborate and too prone to error and breakdown. Being too dependent on information is seen as addictive. As IT systems get bigger and more complex, it becomes increasingly difficult to test them and to avoid failures and crashes. All this leads to significant waste of money--for example, canceled IT projects in the United Kingdom have cost more than a billion and a half pounds in the last six years. The frustrations that result from this can be seen in Spain, where people can go to a scrap yard and pay to pick up a sledgehammer and smash old computers or cell phones or anything else causing them stress.

Businesses and all other organizations continue to devote resources and money to building ever more complex information-gathering systems. The difficulties created by the enormous quantities of information generated, may, at least in some cases, no longer be outweighed by the benefits. Two old standbys--the Law of the Hammer and the Law of the Hole--can be used to help assess the potential value, or lack thereof, of any efforts to add more information capability. The Law of the Hammer says that, when you give a child a hammer, everything becomes a nail. Some organizational tasks can be done better with less. But when you have invested millions in an IT system, you use it whether or not it is the appropriate tool. The Law of the Hole says that, when you're in one, you should stop digging. Problems caused by technology are not necessarily corrected by more technology.

In his book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point) argues that instinctive judgments based on what he calls "thin slices of information" are better than judgments based on gathering more information. He gives many examples to support his contention that instinct can be superior to knowledge, such as psychologists making more accurate diagnoses with less information rather than more.

The instantaneous success of Blink--it debuted at number one on The New York Times bestseller list--seems to be part of what increasingly looks like a revolt against the over-whelming amounts of information the computer age has provided. Indeed, we are increasingly aware that more information is not always better.

* New research shows that thinking too hard about simple actions interferes with the learning process and slows down the brain circuits that process information.

* Brain research on Buddhist monks seems to indicate that how you think, not what you think about, can improve brain activity and that practicing meditation can actually change brain circuitry.

* The stress of taking exams has been shown to hinder flexible thinking, impairing students’  ability to solve complex problems or respond to open-ended questions.

* More scientists report that their research shows the importance of the instincts and impressions of other people’s choices in decision making.

Overcoming the Talent Shortage

There is growing belief in business circles that the shortage of individual talent is reaching the crisis stage, as exemplified in a 2007 cover story in The Economist. On the other hand, or perhaps as a response, businesses of all kinds are looking toward groups and teams rather than individuals. The BBC is developing tools that let listeners and viewers download content, build on it, and share the results online with others. Some publishers are developing "networked" books, which are written and edited online by groups rather than individuals.

The team experience in business has been uneven. One apparent problem is the innate competitiveness of those who are both capable and ambitious. They not only want to win, but they also want to get recognition, reward, and advancement for winning. The team approach does not always satisfy those desires. So companies that want to go the team way--or feel they need to because of a shortage of talent--will have to find ways to meld the star and team systems. This is a problem that those who run athletic teams seem to struggle with endlessly.

The team concept’s latest manifestation is the growing popularity of group think. Books like The Wisdom of Crowds by New Yorker writer James Surowiecki contend that collective thinking is superior to individual thinking--and more likely to be right. Virtual-reality researcher Jaron Lanier, among others, scoffs at this, calling it "digital Marxism. " He claims it is just another form of belief in consensus and that it will have the same deadening effect on creativity as Marxist collectivism had on economic growth and development.

Paralleling these developments is what could be called the "compliance conundrum." For business, so much effort, energy, and innovation go into complying with laws, regulations, and court rulings--e.g., the Sarbanes-Oxley Act governing corporate audits--that a kind of entropy sets in. The diversion of these resources drains from the organization at least some of its vitality and creativity. Consequently, it becomes even harder to meet accelerating consumer and constituent expectations.

Alice of Alice in Wonderland found that she had to keep running faster just to stay in the same place. Similarly, business is finding that the better it performs, the harder it has to work to keep up with the consumer expectations it creates. No matter how well companies do, the gap between expectations and perceptions of performance persists--and can even increase. (The same problem exists for government agencies and nonprofits, as we saw in the Hurricane Katrina aftermath.)

People increasingly have unrealistic expectations about the ability of government, businesses, and institutions to avoid making mistakes, or to fix things that have gone awry. This can be seen in the intense analysis undertaken in the United States by the National 9/11 Commission, which might not have come into being without pressure from the family members of those who died on that date. It is also evidenced by the very heroic work and words of the late actor Christopher Reeve in his unsuccessful fight to walk again despite the heavy odds against him doing so. News of stem cells that can regenerate damaged body parts and devices that enable blind people to see and deaf people to see and deaf people to hear by transmitting sensory data directly into the brain, along with other developments in the area of brain-computer interface, foster consumer expectations, when the reality is that practical implications are still far down the road.

As the pace of development and breakthrough in the scientific and medical fields advances ever more rapidly, and these items are covered by the exponentially increasing number of news sources, people’s expectations of infallibility from societal institutions will increase.

New Opportunities for Crime

Advances in both information technology and biotechnology, along with expanding globalization and political changes, are fostering new types of crimes and expanding the scope of those crimes and the methodology used. Infotech has made possible one of the most discussed "new" crimes of the day--identity theft (although some believe it is not as huge an issue as media reports and government initiatives make it out to be). Glitches and weak spots in security software allow criminals entree into even the most complex, and supposedly secure, systems. Software developers and IT system managers are unable to stay ahead of the sophistication levels of identity thieves and hackers. In a game of one-upmanship, the security stakes are continually ratcheted up. For example, a program for discerning what data has been entered into a computer via simple audio recordings of keyboard clicks is yet another security threat that has arisen. As businesses, governments, and organizations of all types around the world increasingly rely on larger and more complex IT systems, the financial costs and security risks for system failures are tremendous. Globally, an estimated $1 trillion was spent in 2006 on IT hardware, software, and services.

As the volume of electronic records on individuals increases, more opportunities will open up for theft. The initiative to create a national medical database in the United States is just one example of the ways in which information on a country’s citizens will be amassed. In the Netherlands, the government has plans to open electronic files on all children at birth that will track them throughout their lives.

The opportunities for crime in the new age also contribute to the shortage of management talent. Because technology-based crime can be lucrative and relatively risk-free, as well as antiestablishment, many bright young people all over the world are attracted to it.

The Rise of Noncarbon Life-Forms

In an information-rich age, it appears that the ability to process information wisely and effectively is becoming far more valuable than the ability to gather information. Human resources management has to rethink the approach that measures only those human attributes that can be tested and verified, such as levels of education attained. As brain research advances, we may be able to better evaluate people's capabilities. For now, perhaps we need to choose HR people--and all kinds of executives--who can demonstrate that their instincts about people are more accurate than their reading of test results.

What all this is leading to is something revolutionary. We are entering a future in which decisions in the home, marketplace, workplace, and perhaps even voting booths will increasingly be made by noncarbon life-forms--networks, robots, structures, electronic devices, and virtual entities. It is this othersourcing, rather than outsourcing, that will represent the real challenge to workers in the years ahead.

As noncarbon life-forms instruct us about healthy choices, appropriate style, necessary and luxury products in virtual worlds, aspects of behavior, security, risk, education, and work, we will increasingly be giving software designers--and ultimately self-learning and autonomous entities--our proxies in all forms of decision making. In the same way that our choice of automobile tires or vaccum cleaner bags today is determined by the machine we are fitting them to, so, too, will the myriad products and services that emerge over the next decade be increasingly chosen based on the dictates of non-human entities in our lives--e.g., medical networks diagnosing your ailments and expert-system judicial panels resolving your neighborhood disputes.

It has been customary to believe that machines are not as prone to error as humans. But as nonhuman entities get more complex and do more complex human tasks, we may find that they are increasingly fallible. Witness the program glitch that exacerbated the big stock market decline on February 28. Managers will have to give more thought to having effective human oversight of noncarbon life-forms, and much more thought to the increasingly complicated nature of human-machine interfaces.

The only possible remedy we have for complexity accelerating out of control is to put our emphasis on adaptability. In this increasingly complex, bureaucratic, and talent-short world, we must stop focusing on the things that are ultimately irrelevant, such as size and systems, and instead concentrate on what really matters. Efficiency--doing things right--should not be the goal. Instead, it should be effectiveness--doing the right things.

Organizations of all kinds, living as they are in a world of constant, rapid change, must do whatever is necessary to make themselves flexible, nimble, responsive, non-bureaucratic--adaptable. Otherwise, they may slowly grind to a whimpering halt and prove Eliot right.

FEEDBACK: send your comments about this article to letters@wfs.org.

About the Author

Arnold Brown is chairman of Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc., 200 East 33rd Street, Suite 91, New York, New York 10016. Web site www. weineredrichbrown.com. He is also chairman of the World Future Society board of directors and co-author, with Edie Weiner, of Future Think, which is available from the Futurist Bookshelf, www.wfs.org/bkshelf.htm.