I was surprised to see this HRRR forecast model prediction of tonight's Northeast snow showing no snow for Harrisburg and York, PA, and showing the axis of heaviest snow (4-8″) over or west of State College, PA. This disagreed with overnight AccuWeather and NWS forecasts that showed it further east. This storm will be a good test of last minute “nowcasting” by the new higher-resolution models that we have access to this winter season. I thought I'd “crowdsource” this forecast on the WeatherMatrix Facebook page so my readers could weigh in.
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This is an example of how Social Media is revolutionizing weather forecasting, something I'll be writing about in WeatherWise magazine‘s Jan-Feb. 2012 issue, and it's not at all unseen here at AccuWeather — when our company was started 50 years ago, our founder Joel Myers noted that the average consensus forecast of his entire meteorology class would always beat the best daily forecasters – which is why we have a twice-daily map discussion here at HQ to get all of the meteorologists on the same page – an internal crowdsourcing if you will.
Just the other day, a colleague asked me whether I could suggest some examples of organizations that have been successful with “innovation initiatives” in a commercial setting? He said that he had a CEO who wanted to launch an “innovation initiative” that would provide a laboratory for experiments in-house, so that his firm could become known as an idea factory in their sector.
I replied that I didn’t know of any “innovation initiative” that was ultimately successful on a sustained basis. That’s because if an organization is looking at innovation as “an initiative”, and it introduces that initiative into a culture that doesn’t support innovation, then the culture will sooner or later crush the initiative—usually sooner. So you can have temporary “successes” as “initiatives” with a lot of flag waving and hoopla ceremonies and celebrations of victories, but they don’t last.
If the firm wants innovation, which they should, since innovation is an essential ingredient for survival in today’s marketplace, then they need to ask themselves why are they thinking of an innovation as “initiative”. They need to look more deeply at how the organization is being run and think through what would be needed to make innovation a central part of the organization’s culture.
The three phases of the 20th Century organization
In the 20th Century, organizations tended to go through three phases, as sketched by f Robert X. Cringely’s Accidental Empires, by analogy with a military operation.
In the first phase, you had startups run by commandos. They were unpredictable and uncontrollable yet remarkably productive. They worked hard and fast. They succeeded with surprise and teamwork, establishing a beachhead before the enemy is even aware they exist. They pushed the state of the art, ideally providing creative solutions to customer needs and making existing products irrelevant. However most startups fail because they don’t meet customer needs. Sometimes the product was close to meeting customer needs but it wasn’t ideal and had bugs or even major failings that need more work. However commandos were useless of this type of work: they got bored.
In the second phase, the infantry moved in, i.e. the obedient workers who followed orders and methodically grew a company from its IPO to market dominance. They exploited the opportunity created by the commandos. They took the prototype, tested it, refined it, made it manufacturable, wrote the manuals, marketed it and ideally produced a profit. This work was governed by rules and procedures—all the stuff that commandos hated. While the commandos make success possible, the infantry makes success happen.
In the third phase, the firm was run by police: the bureaucrats and middle managers who defend the entrenched position of an established market leader. The third phase was an occupying force intent on holding territory. A middle manager’s job was to say no to ideas that don’t originate from on high, preferably near the CEO, or which don’t improve the bottom line for the quarter.
In the 20th Century, “management” was seen as the set of bureaucratic practices designed to run the second and third phases. Management comprised hierarchy, command-and-control, tightly planned work, competition through economies of scale and cost reduction, impersonal top-down communications, all focused on making money for the shareholders.
These management practices were seen as timeless truths of the universe, so obvious that there was scarcely any need to articulate them, let alone re-examine them. They are still pervasive in large organizations, business schools and management textbooks. John Sculley tried to run Apple [AAPL] as a third-wave organization. Most big old mastodons today like GE [GE] or Walmart [WMT] are still third-wave organizations.
This way of managing systematically kills innovative activities in organizations. The phenomenon can be observed in:
Generic is worthless–focus on real specific threats and opportunities. Do the collection rather than just speculating without data. Do not extrapolate from the past — instead intuit and shape the future.
Forgoing the plan to build independent floating cities away from chafing laws, some libertarians—led by Milton Friedman’s grandson, no less—have found something better: desperate countries willing to allow the founding of autonomous libertarian cities within their borders.
The seasteader-in-chief is headed ashore. Patri Friedman (that’s Milton Friedman‘s grandson to you), who stepped down as the chief executive of the Peter Thiel-backed Seasteading Institute in August, has resurfaced as the CEO of a new for-profit enterprise named Future Cities Development Inc., which aims to create new cities from scratch (on land this time) governed by “cutting-edge legal systems.” The startup may have found its first taker in Honduras, whose government amended its constitution in January to permit the creation of special autonomous zones exempt from local and federal laws. Future Cities has signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to build a city in one such zone starting next year.
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The brainchild of New York University economist Paul Romer (read his thoughts on FCI here), a charter city combines a host nation’s vacant land (in this case, Honduras) with the legal system and institutions of another (e.g. Canada) and residents drawn from anywhere. Romer’s central insight is that good governance is transplantable—rather than wait for a basket case nation to come around begging, a charter city could help show it the way, as Hong Kong did for Deng Xiaoping.
Phi Beta Iota: The focus on eradicating corruption from day one is most interesting. While the group does not appear to have fully thought through their role as a magnet for criminals, there are regions of Africa, Latin America, and even the now warming Arctic North that could permit this kind of innovation to test its premises.
The Internet isn’t really a technology. It’s a belief system, a philosophy about the effectiveness of decentralized, bottom-up innovation. And it’s a philosophy that has begun to change how we think about creativity itself.
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The ethos of the Internet is that everyone should have the freedom to connect, to innovate, to program, without asking permission. No one can know the whole of the network, and by design it cannot be centrally controlled. This network was intended to be decentralized, its assets widely distributed. Today most innovation springs from small groups at its “edges.”
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I don’t think education is about centralized instruction anymore; rather, it is the process establishing oneself as a node in a broad network of distributed creativity.
So, how does expertise affect these information access strategies? A study of professional athletes’ demonstrated the idea that experts use a “just-in-time” strategy, where information that is required to do well in their respective sports is accessed at the time it necessary. Such strategies also appear to be employed in everyday tasks such as making tea or a peanut butter sandwich (Hayhoe & Ballard, 2005). It seems that experts merely use the same strategies in their specific tasks to perform better. Through the acquisition of a “just-in-time” strategy experts are able to look at what they needed to, when they needed to, faster than novices (Land & McLeod, 2000).
The Pentagon and U.S. intelligence community spend billions of dollars each year trying, with mild success at best, to predict the future.
They organize elaborate wargames, develop computer algorithms to digest information and rely on old-fashioned aggregation of professional opinion.
Past intelligence failures have been costly and damaging to U.S. national security. Trying to avoid previous pitfalls, agencies are on a constant treasure hunt for new technologies that might give them an edge.
The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity in February solicited industry proposals for how to improve the accuracy of intelligence forecasting. Under the auspices of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, IARPA invests in research programs that provide an “overwhelming intelligence advantage over future adversaries.”
Applied Research Associates, a New Mexico-based firm, has launched a program it hopes will improve upon the traditional methods of gathering expert opinion by using computer software that could make better-informed predictions. The system chooses the best sources of information from a huge pool of participants.
ARA won the bid and started working on its Aggregative Contingent Estimation System, or ACES, in May.
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