Posts from — January 2010

[I continue my notes on Kinston & Algie's decision systems.]

As we continue with our exploration of the seven approaches to decision making that were originally developed by Jimmy Algie, reformulated by he and Warren Kinston, then extended by Warren [refs follow below], keep in mind that they can also be seen in two other ways.

Languages of Achievement: The words and syntax you use to talk about getting something done, how even your group should achieve a goal. Even when talking about getting to the same goal, people using two different approaches will argue endlessly about the approach.

Action Path: The way or path that you take in order to achieve your goal. This is why the decision approach is so important: it’s not just how you think but how you take action to achieve or solve a problem.

The Imaginist / Initutionist Decision Making Approach

The Imaginist (sometimes “intuitionist”) decision-making approach is normally thought of as the Creative one. The reason is that it works by imagining new things. It’s focus is on internal experiences. This approach emphasizes vision and charismatic leadership. Imaginists succeed when the issue isn’t clear, when things are confused. These are people who lead you out of a fog of confusion by describing something that doesn’t exist.

Examples of Imaginist include Jim McCarthy’s Software for Your Head: Core Protocols for Creating and Maintaining Shared Vision
, Dan Pink’s “right-brain revolution”, most of Peter Block’s The Answer To How Is Yes, and most of the “find your inner compass” people. Many of these people come out of Empiricist-dominated fields. McCarthy ran the team at Microsoft that developed the software that developers use to create software. My old high-school lab partner became an electrical engineer and is now a “passion expert” with a thriving private practice. They see the degeneration of their Empiricist values and look for something that can be more.

That something is the Imaginist system.

[Read more →]

One of my friends suggested that I check out the pilot for the 2009 TV series called Being Erica from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). She thought that it had a lot of ties to things that I had discussed.

[Read more →]

From “How Companies Spend Their Money” [PDF] (McKinsey Global Survey)

A survey of executives from around the world highlights how frequently — and why — a company’s resource allocation decisions go wrong.

Companies start off well, respondents say: senior executives are heavily involved in these decisions and routinely assess the prior performance of business units and the value creation protential of proposed projects, among other critera.

However, respondents also describe a climate in which optimistic forecasts are coupled with risk aversion. Companies can also be deliberately led astray: more than a third say that executives hide, restrict, or misrepresent information when requesting funds.

I found this interesting enough to link to it but I don’t have time to comment. Perhaps someone else can explain why how we have come to expect and embrace unethical behaviour from executives (e.g., “misrepresent information”). I’m betting that Michelle Carter has a insightful answer about being non-requisite and these shenanigans.

I’ve been reading Jim McCarthy’s materials lately. He used to be in charge of the Visual C++ group at Microsoft. His work there was nothing short of phenomenal: MS-VC++ came out of nowhere and demolished its long-time rival. Sure, MS has scads of cash but that wasn’t the whole picture. Borland went from 85% marketshare to nothing in a very short time because McCarthy’s team had put together a product that users wanted to use. We can argue over whether that produced good software (I’ve suffered years of putting up with VC++ programmers who didn’t understand the basics any better than I did, and I was management) but it did sell. And sell extremely well.

Lately, McCarthy and his wife, Michelle McCarthy, have been pushing The Core and its accompanying Core Commitments. I enjoyed the McCarthy’s rules for developing successfully, but this is ridiculous. It’s like he started going through an encounter group and decided that all relationships should be run with such artifice.

[Read more →]