f9acdec6

The Destruction of ruZZia

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 12:47:59 GMT

The number ONE focus of the free world!

[Wrocław, 29 March 2023]

THE DESTRUCTION OF RUZZIA NOW NEEDS TO BE THE ONLY FOCUS OF THE FREE WORLD. THERE IS NO HIGHER PRIORITY.

Environmentalism, fighting racism or poverty, LGBTQ+ rights, and any other righteous geopolitical/social agenda, will be immediately and totally insignificant should the kremlin impose its dehumanising and murderous worldview and nihilistic values on the world. Destroying putin's regime is our existential mission!

"Russia will be a problem for the next coming generation or longer", is a depressively pessimistic view by Latvian Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš. Not if we can help it! We are given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to eliminate ruZZia, and the very thought of ruZZia, from the world's conscience. Let's seize it bravely and decisively NOW!!!

Our destiny should be to force a ruZZian regime collapse through a hermetic economic and military blockade, sabotage/disruption (of course, deniable) and maximally supporting Ukrainian victory (massive transfer of state-of-the-art military tech and logistica;/training/intel support) and their seizing ruZZian territory to create a wide demilitarised safety zone. This would be right and justifiable in international law, given the systemic threat that ruZZia has posed and exercised against other countries since 1945.

Sell the eastern regions to China (in return inter alia for debt forgiveness to the developing world - that should bring most of the 'uncommitted' countries onto our side - and a guarantee of Taiwan's self-determination), create autonomous/ethnic democratic republics where appropriate, place the remaining Muscovy rump under interim international administration.

Kick ruZZia out of all global governance bodies, especially the UN/UNSC, bring putin and his cronies to justice (the Hague) and burden the ruZZian population with restorative and punitive repatriations until its debt to Ukraine and the rest of the world is fully repaid by the grandchildren of today's murderers.

Enterprise 4.0: A Strategically Fit Digital Enterprise

piotr.ney@hotmail.co.uk (Piotr Ney) — Sun, 30 Oct 2022 12:52:38 GMT

Enterprise 4.0: A Strategically Fit Digital Enterprise

The Strategic Digital Enterprise Fitness ^© (SDEF) methodology developed by Doctor Ney Ltd. is a new, smarter approach to corporate strategy.

We sideline the traditional top-down and rigid process of developing any specific future-state operating model, as expressed through customary processes and organisational structure. Instead, adopting a capability based approach, we treat a company as a responsive, homeostatic and holistic organism , which needs to continually self-adjust to thrive in an environment of accelerating structural change, driven by rapid innovation and equally rapidly evolving customer careabouts and behaviours.

Our goal is to agree the proposed value proposition of your brand for your most valuable future customers and, instead of anchoring this to any set set operating model, then define what dynamic enterprise capabilities need to be created and sustained to secure their loyalty and spend.

Our SDEF methodology is an agile philosophy focused on maintaining dynamic enterprise fitness by incrementally embedding enhanced digital capabilities. SDEF is thus a process of continuous adjustment and corporate renewal. It promotes organisations becoming deeply digitally-enabled, lean and fluid networks of continuously evolving and dynamically reconfigurable capabilities and resources.

Digitally fit enterprises are ones that optimise digitally orchestrated:

1. operational fitness

2. diversification fitness

3. integration fitness

4. innovation fitness

with the agility to excel in the new digital economy.

Want to find out more?

Read: www.linkedin.com/pulse/radical-digital-2-strategic-enterprise-fitness-dr-piotr-ney/

Contact: piotr@drney.co.uk

No part of this work may be published, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author.

Strategic Digital Enterprise Fitness ©

piotr.ney@hotmail.co.uk (Piotr Ney) — Sun, 30 Oct 2022 00:42:06 GMT

Radical Digital: Strategic Digital Enterprise Fitness ^©

[London, 23 April 2020]

In Reimagining the enterprise for the digital age , I argue that a tactical use of digital technology, the digitalising of existing business paradigms and business-as-usual (BAU) processes, is unlikely ever to deliver sustainable competitive advantage.

Instead, considering the truly transformative potential of digital, a combination of strategic outside-in and inside-out digital perspectives needs to be applied. An example of the outside-in perspective, which focuses on specific technologies, could be, “how could our logistics change through adopting blockchain?”. The inside-out strategic digital perspective more fundamentally reimagines how, if we were designing our enterprise from scratch, we could harness digital innovation to transform to a truly differentiated business model.

Enterprises still typically approach digital transformation in a very traditional way. First design the digital-first target operating model (TOM) and then the roadmap to deliver it. In this article, I argue that this is no longer adequate. Any target design is likely to be already out-of-date before it is even fully implemented. My Strategic Digital Enterprise Fitness (SDEF) approach is not fixed on delivering a specific, fixed, future-state operating model. This transformational approach looks beyond this, treating corporate renewal as the continuous process of developing the dynamic, agile, digital enterprise capabilities, which make the enterprise fit-for-purpose for our Economy 4.0.

An insight from biology: forget operating models, think operational fitness

In the last article, I encouraged digital innovators to look well beyond the current business paradigm to challenge its axioms and entrenched modi operandi, with questions such as: “how do we rapidly evolve our culture and operations to best deliver our future products to our future customers?”. In this simple question, we actually encapsulate at least five complex dimensions:

who will become our most valuable customers in the future?
what will their behaviours and careabouts be?
what will our products need to become to support these behaviours and satisfy these careabouts?
what operating model will we need to create and deliver these products?
what digital and other capabilities do we now need to develop to make this realistic?

It is worth remembering, that future customer behaviours and careabouts could differ significantly from those we recognise today, so our products and capabilities, as well as brand claims such as those around CSR, could equally need to be very different from today's.

I have discussed general insurance as an example of an industry that is likely to be revolutionised by digital. For consistency, allow me to continue with this current “our company, in isolation, sells predefined policies to individual customers” archetype of the insurer.

The simple question above, if pursued with a radical digital mindset, could for example explore the potential metasystem transition of an insurer into a player in (multiple, self-organising) digital ecosystems, where many traditional products (in this case protection) increasingly evolve into hyperpersonalised, context-aware, embedded and ubiquitous features of the ecosystem, and traditional actors increasing evolve into dynamically reconfigurable, multi-role entities. In other words, the concept of general insurance could radically be transformed beyond recognition, into a profoundly new paradigm in the digital world.

So what should the ideal digital target operating model be?

I sometimes pose this question rhetorically in strategy workshops with business leaders to subtly test whether they truly appreciate the transformative promise of digital and to gauge their scale of ambition for disruption. This of course is a trick question.

Adopted as a strategic competence, digital makes much conventional operating model design conceptually redundant, especially in tertiary sector domains like BFSI (the ‘I’ here of course stands for Insurance). Farewell then to rigid functional structures, hierarchical organisations and value chains hard-coded with long-term, inflexible commitments and outdated legal constructs. All of these are rooted in industrial age thinking. Yet future state enterprise visioning exercises by business leaders (often with the help of expensive consultants and conducted in times of commercial duress) persist in churning out PowerPoint decks of phased migration roadmaps from current (rigid) operating models, with their embedded axioms, to new (rigid) versions.

This conventional, approach to future state enterprise design is no longer fit for purpose in the increasingly complex and unpredictable digital economy, driven by rapidly accelerating yet gloriously stochastic innovation processes. Technological and commercial disruption makes those impressive PowerPoint decks fast redundant. The enterprise needs to be redesigned not for the current Five Forces landscape, but its future and yet unfamiliar mutation (future offerings to meet the future needs of future customers), within a future societal and regulatory environment. Future in this context often arrives well before the business completes the planned migration journey.

One reaction is to regularly invite back those expensive consultants to continuously flex the target models and roadmaps. But as this ingrained approach to business strategy (migrating from one steady state to another, usually as a response to stress) mimics the punctuated equilibrium theory of natural evolution, indulge me to refer to some further insights and parallels in evolutionary biology, which suggest a different approach.

Evolution is chaotic and fuelled by complex, multilevel causalities. It is also directionless. Neither is it pushed by some invisible power or intellect (with my apologies to God), nor is it pulled by some desired and pre-defined future end-state. Biologists have long discounted popular ideas of any directional evolutionary impetus, such as the intuitive notion that evolution naturally favours increasing complexity (think, you host trillions of microbes, which outnumber the number of your own, human cells and account for more than half of your body weight!).

Instead of teleologically favouring any specific design or end-state, natural evolution drives preferentially in the direction of increasing fitness. This suggests that for the enterprise to thrive in the digital age, it is its operational fitness, and not any specific operational model, that we should focus on developing.

Two further convincing patterns in evolutionary trajectory are also directly relevant to digital enterprises. I quote;

“Two great trends are evident in the evolution of life on Earth: towards increasing diversification and towards increasing integration . Diversification has spread living processes across the planet, progressively increasing the range of environments and free energy sources exploited by life. Integration has proceeded through a stepwise process in which living entities at one level are integrated into cooperative groups that become larger-scale entities at the next level, and so on, producing cooperative organizations of increasing scale” .

The Strategic Digital Enterprise Fitness (SDEF) philosophy

Inspired by such judicious insights from Mother Nature, allow me now to return to the world of digital and introduce you to the concept of Strategic Digital Enterprise Fitness (SDEF) . This enterprise philosophy does not advocate the waterfall style development of, and then anchoring to, any specific operating model. It focuses on creating and sustainably maintaining dynamic operational fitness using an agile philosophy , by incrementally embedding enhanced digital age characteristics (its new digital DNA) into the operating model and culture.

SDEF drives the process of continuous readjustment and promotes the view of operationally fit enterprises as deeply digitally enabled, fluid networks of continuously evolving and dynamically reconfigurable capabilities and resources.

Some examples of these digital DNA characteristics include…

• increasing, digitally-orchestrated operational fitness

nimble in every dimension;
innovative in every dimension; culture of actively involving everyone in driving enterprise evolution;
ultralean, networked, distributed and dynamically reconfigurable structure;
culture of empowerment and autonomy;
clear focus on the continuous renewal of core competitive competencies;
insight-driven, digital-first and IoT-enabled processes throughout;
socially engaged and emotionally convincing to all stakeholders, esp. customers and staff;

• increasing, digitally-orchestrated diversification fitness

flexible and easily configurable products;
mobile, modular and portable operating elements and resources;
open innovation model;
ability to rapidly develop niche competencies and resources;
competitive, innovative niche and adjacent markets competencies;
product strategy oriented to quickly customising core offerings for specific microsegments;

• increasing, digitally-orchestrated integration fitness

industry-leading, open, digital collaboration platforms;
collaborative culture (including active co-creation with partners and customers)
an environment which promotes cooperative and self-organising tribes (e.g. communities of practice), networks and ecosystems;
advanced AI to effectively manage growing degrees of content complexity, nestedness and overlap;
visual/virtual network and content navigation;
ositive focus on diversity, creative abrasion and cross-pollination of ideas.

Strategic Digital Enterprise Fitness: a summary

The strategic digital fitness focus ensures that the enterprise maximises its odds to thrive in an unpredictable and rapidly evolving environment. The sustainable competitive advantage of any digitally fit enterprise, and the consistently supranormal returns this generates, becomes a function of the renewal velocity of its digital capabilities (to keep resource based theorists happy, these ideally need to be demonstrably innovative, imperfectly imitable and non-substitutable) and the managerial competence to dynamically reconfigure and deploy these resources in time and in line with changing business priorities.

To control and prioritise investment in digital, business leaders must never forget that, as with any other resource, its utility always remains directly proportional to its contribution within a strategically agreed domain of action, such as improving customer experience or reducing front-office operational cost. Just because a digital application is cool, it does not necessarily mean it will positively impact your business.

You will have noticed that I have clustered the above examples of digital DNA corporate characteristics to reflect the three evolutionary insights from biology. There are indeed many other analogies between the digital enterprise and natural evolution trajectories. But there is also at least one essential difference. Digital transformation leaders can play God (through vision, guidance, investment, engagement) to give their enterprise evolution a push, set its initial direction (its desired trajectory) and continuously evaluate its progress and the improving fitness of their business. In my professional experience, future success can be delivered successfully without a PowerPoint graphic of the future state at the outset.

I call on business leaders to embrace digital innovation as a radical catalyst to fundamentally transform their operating and market philosophy. The approach to this transformation should look beyond developing a roadmap to some defined future operating model. It needs instead to treat corporate renewal as the continuous process of developing the dynamic, agile, digitally-orchestrated enterprise capabilities, which make the enterprise fit-for-purpose for Economy 4.0.

References:

i. John E. Stewart, “The direction of evolution: The rise of cooperative organization”, Biosystems, 123, pp.27-36, Sept.2014

ii. Strategic Digital Enterprise Fitness (SDEF) is actually a term that I had personally invented some time ago as useful conceptual shorthand when discussing strategy. If you may find it useful yourself, I would be delighted if you adopt it!

iii. You may recognise this as the well-known dynamics capabilities perspective discussed initially by David Teece, Gary Pisano and Amy Shuen (in "Dynamic capabilities and strategic management", Strategic Management Journal, 18 (7), pp. 509–533, 1997) and enhanced by several academics and studies since.

Dr Piotr Ney is an energetic promoter of innovation, digital transformation, customer and operational excellence, and sustainability, with some thirty five years of change leadership, consultancy and senior executive experience. He has an MBA in International Business and a PhD in Economics and Management, lectures part-time in Innovation Management and Disruptive Strategy and is a popular speaker at global business events. Piotr works in London and internationally as an independent consultant and educator.

Copyright © 2020 by Piotr Ney. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be published, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author.

Chaos and its Aftermath: Interview with PR24 on 28 Oct 2022 (in Polish)

piotr.ney@hotmail.co.uk (Piotr Ney) — Sat, 29 Oct 2022 08:25:52 GMT

Chaos and its aftermath: Interview with Polskie Radio 24 on 28 October 2022 (in Polish)

[Wrocław, 29 Oct 2022]

As a Brit based in Poland, I am regularly asked by Polish business leaders, politicians and media to comment or explain what is happening on the Islands. Here is my interview yesterday with Polskie Radio 24 (PR24). I was asked to discuss the current political chaos, including three prime ministers within weeks. https://polskieradio24.pl/130/5925/artykul/3061506,nowy-premier-wielkiej-brytanii-dr-piotr-ney-rishi-sunak-awansowal-dzieki-ciezkiej-pracy

This was my opinion [Polish translation follows below]:

BREXIT: There is a common misconception in Poland that naive Brits somehow did not expect the negative economic effects of Brexit, at least in the medium term. This is not true. Most British people understood that we would face many economic challenges, not least because EU accounts for half of our foreign trade. Yet Britain was never comfortable in EU. Its culture and character would never allow it to be subjugated to a foreign based, inept supranational bureaucracy. It could never accept France and Germany dictating its policies, especially foreign policy. The driver of Brexit was our deep cultural attachment to sovereignty and freedom. But on the downside, Brexit has caused a lot of disruption and since January 2020, Britain has been sailing in stormy, unchartered waters.

BORIS JOHNSON: After winning a remarkable landslide election in 2019, Johnson had solid policies and a post-Brexit strategy and an unobstructed mandate to deliver these. But personally he reeled from scandal to scandal. He remained very popular with most voters and MPs, but increasingly media challenged his fitness to govern. When some of his key ministers started to resign, the time came for Boris reluctantly to go.

LIZ TRUSS: After a winding and bruising campaign, the hubristic and self-promoting Liz Truss (Foreign Secretary) beat the former Chancellor Rishi Sunak in a ballot of Conservative Party members. A tiny cohort of only about 0.3% of the total UK electorate. Older, more middle class and more white than the rest of the population. Liz Truss proved a total disaster, by far the most incompetent Prime Minister in UK history. Within 44 days, she managed to crash the entire national economy and lose every shred of support for the government, a truly remarkable feat of ineptitude! Truss should be consigned to the garbage of history. No doubt many books and PhD theses will try to explain how someone so incapable became the leader of a major world economy.

RISHI SUNAK: Youngest Prime Minister for 200 years, first of Indian heritage and a digital native. He is a credible leader for a young and ethnically diverse electorate. He became a very successful banker and rose politically not because of stunning charisma or theatrical personality (like Boris) but through sheer diligence and a pedantic attention to detail. He has kept Jeremy Hunt in post as Chancellor and two have been aggressively “fixing the mistakes” of Truss. The markets have responded positively. The UK still sails in stormy, unchartered waters, but the ship is rapidly steadying.

The critical and immediate challenge to Sunak and Hunt is their budget statement on 17 November, which needs credibly to set out public spending cuts & tax rises to help repair the huge black hole in public finances. But stability and budget responsibility are mere hygiene.

Beyond that, in my opinion, we need an aggressive strategy of economic growth. Britain needs to attain global leadership in technology, innovation and the digital economy. And it can achieve that with the right level of investment and support.

Jako Brytyjczyk mieszkający w Polsce jestem regularnie proszony przez polskich liderów biznesu, polityków i media o komentowanie lub wyjaśnianie tego, co dzieje się na Wyspach. Oto mój wczorajszy wywiad dla Polskiego Radia 24 (PR24). Poproszono mnie o omówienie obecnego chaosu politycznego, w tym trzech premierów w ciągu kilku tygodni. To była moja opinia:

BREXIT: W Polsce panuje błędne przekonanie, że naiwni Brytyjczycy jakoś nie spodziewali się negatywnych skutków gospodarczych Brexitu, przynajmniej w perspektywie średnioterminowej. To nie jest prawda. Większość Brytyjczyków rozumiała, że staniemy przed wieloma wyzwaniami gospodarczymi. UE stanowi połowę naszego handlu zagranicznego. Ale Wielka Brytania nigdy nie czuła się komfortowo w UE. Nasza kultura i charakter nigdy nie pozwoliłyby na podporządkowanie się obcej, nieudolnej ponadnarodowej biurokracji. Nigdy nie zaakceptowałyby dyktowania jej polityki przez Francję i Niemcy, zwłaszcza zagraniczną. Motorem Brexitu było nasze głębokie przywiązanie do suwerenności i wolności. Z drugiej strony Brexit spowodował wiele zakłóceń i od stycznia 2020 r., Wielka Brytania żegluje po niespokojnych, nieznanych wodach.

BORIS JOHNSON: Po zdobyciu niezwykłej większości w parlamencie w 2019 r., Johnson miał solidną politykę i strategię post-Brexit oraz niezakłócony mandat do ich realizacji. Ale osobiście przechodził od skandalu do skandalu. Był bardzo popularny wśród większości wyborców i posłów, ale coraz częściej media kwestionowały jego zdolność do rządzenia. Kiedy niektórzy z jego kluczowych ministrów zaczęli rezygnować, przyszedł czas na niechętne odejście Borysa.

LIZ TRUSS: Po burzliwej i bolesnej kampanii, arogancka i samopromująca się Liz Truss (sekretarz spraw zagranicznych) pokonała byłego kanclerza Rishi Sunaka w głosowaniu członków Partii Konserwatywnej. Niewielka kohorta składająca się tylko z około 0,3% całego elektoratu Wielkiej Brytanii, starsi, bardziej z klasy średniej i bardziej biali niż reszta populacji. Liz Truss była totalną katastrofą. Okazała się zdecydowanie najbardziej niekompetentnym premierem w historii Wielkiej Brytanii. W ciągu 44 dni zdołała załamać całą gospodarkę narodową i stracić każdy strzęp poparcia dla rządu, co jest naprawdę niezwykłym wyczynem nieudolności! Truss powinna zostać wyrzucona na śmietnik historii. Bez wątpienia wiele książek i prac doktorskich spróbuję wyjaśnić w nadchodzących latach jak ktoś tak niezdolny został liderem wielkiej światowej gospodarki.

RISHI SUNAK: Najmłodszy premier od 200 lat, pierwszy o indyjskim dziedzictwie i digital native. Jest wiarygodnym liderem dla młodego i zróżnicowanego etnicznie elektoratu. Stał się odnoszącym wielkie sukcesy bankierem i wyrósł politycznie nie dzięki oszałamiającej charyzmie czy teatralnej osobowości (jak Boris), ale dzięki czystej pracowitości i pedantycznej dbałości o szczegóły. Utrzymał Jeremy'ego Hunta na stanowisku kanclerza, i w dwójkę teraz agresywnie „naprawiają błędy” Truss. Rynki zareagowały pozytywnie. Wielka Brytania wciąż pływa po wzburzonych, niezbadanych wodach, ale statek szybko się stabilizuje.

Krytycznym i natychmiastowym wyzwaniem dla Sunaka i Hunta jest oświadczenie budżetowe 17 listopada, które musi wiarygodnie określić cięcia wydatków publicznych i podwyżki podatków, aby pomóc naprawić ogromną czarną dziurę w finansach publicznych. Ale stabilność i odpowiedzialność budżetowa to tylko higiena. Poza tym moim zdaniem potrzebujemy agresywnej strategii wzrostu gospodarczego. Wielka Brytania musi osiągnąć pozycję światowego lidera w dziedzinie technologii, innowacji i gospodarki cyfrowej (digital economy). I może to osiągnąć przy odpowiednim poziomie inwestycji i wsparcia.

Free Kaliningrad! Free Ukraine!

piotr.ney@hotmail.co.uk (Piotr Ney) — Mon, 17 Oct 2022 14:24:17 GMT

The free world needs urgently to free Kaliningrad from illegal Russian occupation

[Wrocław, 17 April 2022]

PUTIN MUST BE IMMEDIATELY REMOVED FROM KALININGRAD!

Kaliningrad has critical strategic importance. It is and never has been Russian. Putin is occupying this exclave illegally. While inexplicably the United Nations has not (yet!) addressed this issue, Kaliningrad has progressively been fortified and armed to become the base of the Russian baltic fleet and the forward offensive platform from which Russia could threaten Europe with conventional and nuclear aggression.

Putin has already demonstrated his keen following of Hitler's and Stalin's geopolitical stratagems. His next aggression is likely to echo Hitler's Danzig policy and pursue the creation of a "land corridor" to this illegal exclave through Lithuania and Poland. Putin is already using Kaliningrad as part of a veiled nuclear threat in response to Sweden's and Finland's desire to join NATO. We must act now!

At the end of WWII, Stalin brutally invaded this territory and ethnically cleansed it. However, the USSR (and now Russia) never acquired any legal title to this exclave. The Potsdam Agreement of August 1945 did not allow any annexation of this territory, it merely placed Kaliningrad under the temporary administration of the Soviet Union, as its Article VI states, “pending the final determination of territorial questions at the peace settlement”.

Kaliningrad was named by Stalin in July 1946 after Mikhail Kalinin, his second in command and a leading communist murderer (against some stiff competition). The very name of this illegal exclave is an insult to Poland, not least because in March 1940 Kalinin in person countersigned the order to execute 25,700 Polish officers and intelligentsia as part of the infamous Katyn massacre, a significant and tragic milestone of Polish national history. While I write this, Putin is threatening the destruction of the Katyn memorial site, in order to avenge Poland's steadfast support for Ukraine.

As part of any post Ukraine invasion peace agreement, the UN needs to seize Kaliningrad back from Russian control. Of course, Russia would veto this, so this move should be linked to Putin's removal from the Security Council, as per my first point in https://www.ney.world/after-putin-what-the-world-did-next .

Repossessing this territory cannot be illegal, as it is being occupied illegally. Stalin purged the Prussian population and then settled it with Russians trucked in from the steppes. They need now to be sent packing back to Russia. No pity and no compensation!

International order and the rule of law need to be visibly restored. Local assets, such as the real estate that the orc horde leaves behind, should revert in the first instance to the descendants/families of those dispossessed by Stalin in 1945 and the rest auctioned off towards a rebuilding and resettlement fund.

Kaliningrad should be placed under UN or other international administration, such as a coalition of Poland and the Baltic states. It then needs to be renamed and demilitarised, else it will continue to pose a threat to the world, a gangrenous growth on Europe's east shoulder.

After Putin: What the world did next

piotr.ney@hotmail.co.uk (Piotr Ney) — Sat, 01 Oct 2022 12:07:43 GMT

Once Putin is defeated in Ukraine, the free world will need to act courageously and systematically to restore rules-based order and lasting world peace.

[Updated, Wrocław, 26 July 2022]

Putin’s murderous, unprovoked war rages just across the Polish border. As I write this on 26 July 2022, over five million heart-rending refugees, mostly women and children, have already arrived here in Poland to escape the deadly Russian invasion. And they keep arriving, with 22.6 thousand just yesterday. It’s almost impossible to visualise the scale of this exodus. Ordinary Polish folk have opened their homes to feed and shelter them.

Meanwhile, their menfolk dig in around the Donbas, Odessa and other cities waiting for Russian assaults, while Putin’s bombs, rockets and shells fall indiscriminately around them, turning everything to rubble.

It is easy to be overcome with seething anger.

Anger at Putin and his barbarian ruling mafia. Anger at his cowardly chain of command, who implement his brutal orders to maim and kill indiscriminately. Anger at their inhuman orcs who rape and plunder civilians. Anger at Lukashenko and Kremlin’s other flunkeys.

Anger at duplicitous Germany who courted Putin’s regime over the years, pretending not to notice Russian atrocities in Crimea, Chechnya, Georgia or Syria, and whose strategic addictions to his hydrocarbons have financed this current campaign of terror.

Anger at India, Pakistan, Mexico and other morally bankrupt countries, who not only abstained from the recent UN General Assembly vote, but are actively liaising with Russia to profiteer from mass murder and help it bypass sanctions. Anger at leaders in Africa and elsewhere, who similarly refuse publicly to condemn the Russian invasion.

I am convinced that Putin will lose this war. I am convinced that Putin will be removed from the Kremlin. There is no second life for tyrants. The entire world order is at stake. So while Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy leads his brave warriors to victory, I and others are already starting to channel our collective anger into something more hopefully positive, into defining the war’s aftermath – what happens next?

The ultimate goal of the Free World should not be the cessation of hostilities or even the full withdrawal of Putin from Ukraine. It must be to leverage this crisis to catalyse a transition to a new world order, where Russia will never again pose any threat to its neighbours, and where others (such as China) realise that the world will no longer tolerate more brutal wars of choice.

There are several enablers for lasting post-war peace. I present some of these here. While these ambitions may seem excessively bold, such as reclaiming Kaliningrad or global offensive nuclear disarmament, I am optimistic that after Russia is defeated in Ukraine and its regime changes, we will have a unique opportunity to address a global geopolitical transformation.

My challenge is, “if not now, then when?”.

If you support these ambitions, help me communicate these widely. Post this article on your social media. Forward it to your politicians and opinion makers. If you have further suggestions, please let me know. Together, we need to design and build a lasting post-war peace.

1. UN Security Council

The General Assembly should immediately agree on a process to remove Russia from the UN Security Council. While the original UN charter did not consider the situation of one of its Security Council members being the aggressor, the UN is a membership organisation, so there is nothing stopping its membership (the General Assembly) agreeing on a mechanism to remove Russia from this body.

Eliminating Russia’s veto would then free the UN to consider a range of actions, including sending UN observers or even a peacekeeper force into Ukraine.

A much deeper shakeup at the UN is also long overdue. Over the years, the inept, corruption-ridden UN has been systematically infiltrated with Russia and China sympathisers. What else could for example explain UN staff being instructed not to use terms such as "invasion" or "war" when discussing Ukraine?

2. Justice: International court and a global snatch network

International relations with Russia will never heal, and there can never be any lasting peace, until Putin and his cronies are brought to justice.

While some would be delighted to see Putin and Lukashenko hanging by their ankles from lampposts on Maidan Nezalezhnosti with their throats cut open, we need to show that we are morally superior to these barbarians. We are defending a humane, rules-based civilisation.

So justice needs to be seen to be delivered with cold rationality and precision. Whether it’s through the International Court of Justice in The Hague (the principal judicial body of the sadly inept, corruption-ridden UN above) or a specially commissioned international court of justice.

In the meantime, we need to set up an effective global snatch network, a persistent, distributed and international network of active duty agents and the ‘back-office’ governance of the surveillance, planning and co-ordination of all activities over the next few years to hunt down and physically seize (or assassinate if appropriate) Russian murderers, anywhere in the world, including on Russian territory.

There is no statute of limitations for genocide or war crimes. Let’s learn from Mossad. Fifteen years after the end of WWII, they seized Adolf Eichmann, the patron of the Nazi Holocaust, in Argentina and smuggled him to Israel. He was executed by hanging. After the 1972 Olympic atrocity, Mossad similarly tracked down and assassinated members of Black September one by one, all around the globe.

This is the template we should follow. I am hoping that Mossad, as well as its British and US special service equivalents, are already coaching the Ukrainian secret services in this area.

3. Comprehensive war reparations

Russia’s children need to be seen to be repaying Putin’s debt for many years to come. Sanctions should not be lifted until all reparations are fully paid. All proceeds from Russia’s strategic revenue streams, such as oil and gas sales, should be governed by an international body to fund the rebuilding of Ukraine and the reimbursement of all indirect costs of this unprovoked war, such as the humanitarian aid given by Poland and the international community.

Do not feel sorry for ‘normal’ Russians. Many independent polls agree that over 70% of the Russian population supports Putin and the Ukrainian invasion. Even with local TV and radio under Kremlin’s control, if the Russian public were interested in the truth, it is easily available through digital media or from their diaspora.

It is a lazy evasion of an uncomfortable truth to claim that this is one man’s war. Putin is a product of a morally bankrupt Russian society, its inherent cruelty and its unsatiated empire ambitions.

It is Russians – not Putin - who press the triggers to rain shells, bombs and rockets on civilians. It is Russians – not Putin - who starve and maim children. It is Russia and the majority of Russians – not only Putin - that the civilised world is at war with.

But we need to be conscious of historical precedents, such as 1919’s Treaty of Versailles, which humiliated Germany and became the recruitment banner for its emergent Nazi party. We need to design a balanced mechanism by which Russia compensates the world for its aggression in a way that does not alienate its future generations and push them into sympathy with nationalist extremist agendas.

In the meantime, all property of Putin’s oligarchs should be confiscated and proceeds from these assets credited into the Ukraine rebuilding fund. Similarly all Russian government assets overseas should be nationalised with the same objective.

4. Truth and reconciliation

The reparation regime above, and reconciliation and enduring order in Russia, are contingent on the Russian public receiving free and true information about the war. Most Russians do not have access to narratives other than Kremlin’s propaganda. According to the best polls, most Russians today believe that they have a fair and honest leader, who is fighting for justice. Putin’s true character and his lies need to be loudly and soundly exposed.

Until there is free media and public dialogue in Russia, and a systematic process of national reconciliation, Putin’s defeat in Ukraine could metamorphose into a poisonous ultranationalist myth and potentially explode in another conflict in years to come.

5. Return of seized territories

Russia needs to immediately and irrevocably return Crimea and all seized Ukrainian territory, including Donetsk and Luhansk, its puppet statelets seized in 2014.

In addition it needs to return all other previously illegally annexed territories, such as Transnistria and Abkhazia (both seized in 1992), South Ossetia (controlled since 2008) and return the Kuril Islands to Japan.

6. Kaliningrad

The issue of Kaliningrad is worth discussing distinctly as it has such critical strategic importance. Kaliningrad is the base of the Russian Baltic Fleet and the forward offensive platform from which Russia could rapidly launch both conventional and nuclear attacks on Europe. But it is simply not a legal part of Russia!

At the end of WWII, Stalin brutally invaded this territory and ethnically cleansed it. However, the USSR (and now Russia) never acquired any legal title to this exclave. The Potsdam Agreement of August 1945 did not allow any annexation of this territory, it merely placed Kaliningrad under the temporary administration of the Soviet Union, as its Article VI states, “pending the final determination of territorial questions at the peace settlement”.

Kaliningrad was thus renamed by Stalin in July 1946 after Mikhail Kalinin, his second in command and a leading communist murderer. The very name of this illegal exclave is an insult to Poland, not least because in March 1940 Kalinin in person countersigned the order to execute 25,700 Polish officers and intelligentsia as part of the infamous Katyn massacre, a significant and tragic milestone of Polish national history.

As part of any post Ukraine invasion peace agreement, the UN should strip Kaliningrad away from Putin, place it under UN administration, rename and demilitarise it, else it will continue to pose a strategic threat to the world, and specifically to the Baltic states and Poland.

7. Declaration permanently ending Russian irredentism

The world needs a treaty blocking any future Russian irredentist claims to any territories of the former Russian Empire or USSR, such as the Baltic states, Transnistria or northern Kazakhstan.

Russia needs to clearly and irrevocably declare that it has no outstanding territorial claims on any nation or peoples, and that it will respect the sovereignty of all nations in the future.

8. Expulsion from remaining world bodies

It’s all very well for Russia’s feeble team to sit out FIFA’s current football competitions. More meaningful in terms of the current sanctions regime would be their expulsion from bodies such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. With thousands murdered by Putin and millions of refugees pouring over Ukraine’s borders, what on Earth are these institutions waiting for to start treating Russia as the pariah it should be?

9. Amnesty and reform

To sustain peace and international engagement, Russian society needs to be based on just law, a politically independent judiciary, and a multi-party system chosen through free elections. Urgent reforms should be implemented to make this happen and sanctions not lifted until it does. Laws criminalising free assembly, speech and legitimate reporting (including Putin’s newest ‘fake news’ law) should be repealed.

In the meantime, all so-called ‘political’ prisoners, including everyone arrested during the current anti-war protests in Russia, should be given immediate amnesty and compensation.

10. Returning all Ukrainian citizens

Similarly, all Ukrainian soldiers captured and civilians forcibly resettled need to be urgently returned to their homes and compensated by Russia. As Human Rights Watch reports only this week. Russian forces have tortured, unlawfully detained and forcibly disappeared thousands of civilians in the occupied Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.

Local mayors, civil servants, police officers, teachers, journalists and anyone suspected of opposing the occupation are systematically disappeared into an inhumane hell. The barbarian orcs do not of course care that torture and inhuman treatment of anyone is prohibited under international law, and constitutes a war crime and a crime against humanity. And they are not simply following brutal orders because, as many first-hand reports testify, they sadistically enjoy beating, electrocuting, starving and raping their helpless captives. After all, FSB agents have been trained and systematically dehumanised to do just that, it’s their modus operandi.

11. Removing Putin’s agents from Germany and the rest of Europe

Germany is a disgrace. It's a shame that it took a murderous and unprovoked attack on Ukraine for most EU luvvies to finally realise this. Merkel has the blood of Ukraine on her hands. She needs to be deeply investigated as there is growing evidence that she and some of the key members of her inner circle were actually Stasi/KGB/FSB trained sleeper agents, whose generational mission was to make Western Europe dependent on Russia’s largesse.

They prematurely shut down Germany’s nuclear power stations. Instead of building a single LPG terminal to make the purchasing of gas from other countries possible, Germany instead invested in two Nord Stream pipelines, in order to become energy dependent on Russia and to make immoral profits on reselling Russian natural gas to the rest of Europe. Germany even sold its key hydrocarbon storage facilities (located on German soil!) to Kremlin backed companies.

In the meantime, Merkel blocked Ukraine from joining NATO and EU, while Europe’s migrant crisis was orchestrated by the FSB on her watch. I could go on...

I do not believe that Mutti and her cronies were so ignorant or naive. They simply enacted a long term plan devised by the Stasi, KGB and later the FSB. Merkel (who is increasingly suspected to be a Stasi trained sleeper agent – better late then never, I suppose), Schröder the Clown (a corrupt Russian bribe taker) and their duplicitous gang need to be investigated and tried. One day soon the truth will be exposed and the German political house of cards, and the useful idiots that have been propping them up over the last 20 years, will come crashing down.

There are Russian agents and bribe takers in political roles in several European countries, especially in the ex-Soviet republics and the Baltics.

As Kiril Petkov, Bulgaria’s prime minister who was forced to resign last month says, Kremlin backed corruption in eastern Europe is rife. “We curbed corruption locally but found we had a bigger enemy: Russian influence,” he told The Times today. “We didn’t understand that corruption and Russian influence in Bulgaria are the same thing. Corruption is Moscow’s best foreign policy instrument in the Balkans”. This gangrene needs to be systematically tackled across Europe and excised, with those involved brought to justice.

12. Denuclearisation

Finally, the ultimate commitment to world peace by Russia would be it adopting a policy of nuclear disarmament. Russia could work with NATO to provide each other with security guarantees and anti-missile systems to protect Russia from any nuclear (and possibly conventional) missile attack. Once this is in place, both sides can actively pursue offensive denuclearisation.

It costs an eye-watering level of continuous investment to maintain an effective nuclear deterrent. The Congressional Budget Office projects some $634 billion cost over the 2021–2030 period, or an average of over $60 billion a year to the US tax payers alone. This could instead be spent on anti-missile shielding and other nuclear containment technologies to offer reliable protection to partnering countries against rogue players, such as North Korea.

As the song goes, you may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. After Putin’s failed Ukrainian war, it is not beyond imagination that a truly democratically elected, international rules based and pacifist oriented administration could be sworn in to take Russia on a new positive path. This would be the ultimate phoenix rising from the ashes of today’s evil war.

The above list is just a start. If you agree, help me communicate these ideas widely. Post this article on social media. Forward this to your politicians and opinion makers. Discuss this with your friends. If you have further suggestions, or wish to join me in developing these ideas further, please get in touch. Together, let's help design and build a lasting post-war peace!

No part of this article may be published, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author.

HRH Queen Elizabeth II: Interview with PR24 on 10 Sept 2022 (in Polish)

piotr.ney@hotmail.co.uk (Piotr Ney) — Sun, 11 Sep 2022 06:26:59 GMT

The Legacy of Elizabeth II: Interview with Polskie Radio 24 on 10 Sept 2022 (in Polish)

This morning, I had an opportunity to speak again on Polskie Radio 24. I was asked to share my thoughts about what the 70 year reign of the Queen meant for the UK and the impact that her death may have on her people and the monarchy. I thought that I was opining reasonably well in my broken Polish, until I was interrupted by the live proclamation from St James’s Palace of King Charles III of becoming our new Sovereign.

Dziś rano miałem okazję ponownie przemawiać w Polskim Radiu 24. Poproszono mnie o podzielenie się przemyśleniami na temat tego, co 70-letnie panowanie królowej oznaczało dla Wielkiej Brytanii oraz wpływ, jaki jej śmierć może mieć na jej naród i monarchię. Myślałem, że w mojej łamanej polszczyźnie wyrażam opinię całkiem nieźle, dopóki nie przerwała mi na żywo proklamacja z Pałacu św. Jakuba króla Karola III o zostaniu naszym nowym suwerenem.

Link to the recording / Link do nagrania: https://polskieradio24.pl/130/5925/artykul/3034340

"I thank God for the example of her life"

"The Queen gave Great Britain a sense of stability, durability and stoicism", said Dr. Piotr Ney (British analyst and economist) on Polish Radio 24.

British Queen Elizabeth II died at the age of 96. She was the longest reigning monarch in the history of the United Kingdom. She took the throne in 1952. In 2015, she broke the record of Queen Victoria, her great-great-grandmother. After the death of Elizabeth II, her son Charles becomes the new king.

Dr. Piotr Ney, a British analyst, spoke about the reign exercised by the deceased monarch.

"This undemocratic head of state for over 70 years was universally respected and even loved. I humbly admit that although I do not agree with the principle of monarchy, in practice I thank God for the example that Queen Elizabeth lived", he emphasised.

In the opinion of Dr. Ney, Elizabeth II was the embodiment of values that are "in danger of extinction".

"She was an example of duty and sacrifice in a world that seems to be increasingly dominated by narcissists. For 70 years she has devoted herself to her nation, her people", he observed.

Radical Digital - The Missing Pandemic Innovation Boom

piotr.ney@hotmail.co.uk (Piotr Ney) — Sun, 28 Aug 2022 19:52:24 GMT

Radical Digital - The Missing Pandemic Innovation Boom

[Wrocław, 28 August 2022]

Two years ago, many leading strategy/innovation management consultants perceived the pandemic as a welcome catalyst to accelerate the Fourth Industrial Revolution (aka Industry 4.0). I was one of them. I wrote several sanguine articles. I worked hard to persuade my clients (major banks, telcos) to increase the scale and pace of their investment in digital transformation. I’m happy to report that the outcomes of these specific projects have been strategically and financially positive and we often greatly improved customer experience.

But at the macro industrial and economic levels, as an article in today's The Economist contends, the covid-fuelled innovation rush has not resulted in significant economic gains, such as a step-change in worker productivity. Read it here https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2022/08/28/the-missing-pandemic-innovation-boom

The article posits some explanations. A key suggestion is that due to the various other, severe global market disruptions, short-term crisis management has taken precedence over investment in long-term innovation. But this does not explain why there are so few realised benefits from the innovation investments already supposedly operationalised.

The attempted explanation as to why specifically the automation boom has not improved overall productivity, as companies had already invested heavily in AI/ML, could also be even more convoluted.

In 2019, I published a series of articles titled "Radical Digital", and a couple of these focused on "Reimagining the enterprise for the digital age". Sadly my arguments then have proved to have been prescient. I revisit these now not because of some "I told you so!" arrogance, but because specifically during today’s discontinuity and disruption, we can’t continue to fail to innovate our way out of our troubles.

These are two examples of what I consistently argued in 2019/20 – https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/radical-digital-reimagining-enterprise-age-dr-piotr-ney/ and https://www.ney.world/strategic-digital-enterprise-fitness

“The transformative potential of emerging digital technology is fast outpacing the ambitions and current implementation capability of most market incumbents in both the private and public sectors. Instead of truly transforming their approach to the market, many organisations typically continue to view digital transformation principally as the digitalising of their existing business paradigms and their existing business-as-usual (BAU) operating models.”

“There is nothing wrong with this medium-term focus per se. I have myself directed several transformation projects thus defined, successfully delivering significant business benefits. A digital shift often does rapidly mobilise the virtuous cycle of improving customer experience and revenue, while reducing service cost.”

"However, this predominantly tactical focus on benefits by most organisations obscures the bigger picture and often impedes the development of more strategic (yet alone truly visionary) digitally disruptive business paradigms.”

In short, my opinion was and still is that most companies tinker with digital, rather than employing its potential to really transform their operating models. Also most do not have the skills to deliver radical digital, even if they wanted to!

Do you agree? Does this resonate with your insight and experience?

The good news is that there are plenty of highly skilled managers and consultants who can deliver radical digital innovation driven change, given the full support of their companies. The technologies themselves have rapidly matured, so the risk of operationalising them has decreased. The methodologies for radical transformation – such at the Strategic Digital Enterprise Fitness approach, which I have developed with my colleagues – have also rapidly matured, and have been fine-tuned in the trenches.

So I urge all enterprise and industry leaders to revisit digital as a strategic and radical opportunity to fundamentally change the way they do stuff, and not merely as a tactical approach to shaving cost.

As the saying goes, if you are affected by any of these issues, do not hesitate to contact me on piotr@drney.co.uk .

Saying goodbye to a favourite yellow friend

piotr.ney@hotmail.co.uk (Piotr Ney) — Fri, 06 May 2022 10:39:36 GMT

Selling a remarkable classic Porsche 911 to support Ukraine

Friends, I know that this is not a marketplace, but desperate times (in this case a brutal war just across the border from me) call for desperate measures.

And also this is my website, so I can do as I please! ��

My grandfather came from Lviv, so I am emotionally rooted in the current conflict. I have done my share of helping Ukraine and its refugees from here in Poland. Now I am preparing to go to Ukraine next month with some very special colleagues. We are in the process of getting our kits and logistics organised. We are paying for everything from our own pockets.

In addition to some humanitarian aid, defensively I need to invest in a Level IV ballistic (bulletproof) helmet & body armour (expensive!), secure comms (expensive!), and offensively in LOTS of ammo - the price of which has shot up (pardon the pun) as you'd expect. For those interested, I am buying premium 9x19mm JHT 147gr and XTP 147gr at some €1.50/round! That's OK for my Glock pistol, but my CZ Scorpion submachine gun just burns through the cash! ;-)

So I am selling my favourite ever car to fund this.It's a Porsche 911 (993) 3.6L Carrera Cabriolet - the very last of the classic air cooled 911's! I've had it from new, it was custom made for me in 1996, it's speed yellow , RHD, with factory-fitted RS Clubsport Aerokit, colour coded Cup Design wheels and dials, and other custom upgrades.

If you or anyone you know could be interested in this classic Porsche at a discount price, please PM me. I will even throw in a personal (cherished) number plate. The cash will help me stay safe and effective in Ukraine!

The car is currently available to view at Ashley Nickells in Guildford- for more pix/details/contact see http://ashleynickells.com/porsche-911-993-carrera-cabriolet/

FREE UKRAINE!

We beat the Guinness World Record today!

Mon, 02 May 2022 07:14:06 GMT

Wrocław remains the World Capital of the Guitar!

[Wrocław, 01 May 2022]

WE BEAT THE GUINNESS WORLD RECORD TODAY! ��

This afternoon, the 20 ^th annual Hendrix-inspired and world famous guitar event, the HEY JOE FESTIVAL, took place in Wrocław.

As ever, the sunshine was glorious! ☀️ ☀️ ☀️

Officially 7676 guitarists partied, strummed our way through Hey Joe, Voodoo Child, Little Wing and other classics on the Rynek (Wrocław's old market square), bagged the Guinness world guitar record, and then partied some more into the evening - my partner Lucie (pictured) and me with our two amstaffs (Red & Blue, also pictured) very much included. To be fair, while Red and Blue partied hard, they were excused the strumming part, so were not officially counted towards the final total of 7676 active guitars.

Wrocław retains its Guinness record and the unassailable title of the World Capital of the Guitar! If you are a guitar (incl. bass) player and want to join us next year, check out https://heyjoe.pl/summary and the numerous clips on YouTube and Facebook – and bring your guitar and any puppies along in 2023! ��

Today’s loud and multicultural camaraderie included many refugees from Ukraine, as well as other nationals wearing Ukraine t-shirts and emblems in loyalty. While here in Poland we today peacefully celebrated music, one of humankind’s greatest cultural expressions, just across the border, missiles and bombs indiscriminately kill and maim civilians, and degenerate Russian soldiers rape and plunder homes. Our precious freedom is protected from Russia’s savagery and barbarism not by our wafer thin borders, but by the strength of our culture, the bravery of our people, and the solidarity of the NATO alliance.

I’d like to thank the Universe for the sunshine, music, friendship, laughter and security that we enjoyed today. ��

And I pray that Ukraine will quickly repel the barbarian horde and return to peace and unity.

Poland’s commitment to defence shames UK’s shrinking army.

piotr.ney@hotmail.co.uk (Piotr Ney) — Sat, 30 Apr 2022 16:37:30 GMT

Technology will never by itself win future wars, quantity still counts!

[Wrocław, 30 April 2022]

Recent discussions between Poland’s President Andrzej Duda and UK's Prime Minister Boris Johnson over defensive support to Ukraine, and agreements made last November between their respective Defence Ministers, had laid the ground for a significant UK-Poland collaboration on the early introduction of cutting-edge short-range air defence missile systems, NAREW, in Poland. The contract was signed this week. This collaboration will enhance defence innovation in both NATO countries and bolster European security.

NAREW GBAD (ground-based air defence) is based on the Common Anti-Air Modular Missile (CAMM) architecture, shared with UK's Sky Sabre. Supersonic CAMMs are excellent against stealth aircraft and high-speed missiles, even under extreme weather and intense electronic jamming conditions. They can intercept a tennis ball-sized object travelling at several times the speed of sound (look out Djokovic!).

Both countries also plan to share pioneering technologies to develop further GBAD systems, boosting innovation, technology transfer and critical armaments production in Poland.

Defence Under-Secretary James Heappey is also visiting Warsaw to discuss NATO's enhanced Forward Presence (eFP), which deploys four multinational battlegroups in Estonia, Poland, Latvia and Lithuania to guard NATO security.

While British-Polish co-operation, friendship and mutual respect have never been stronger since Polish pilots excelled in the Battle of Britain, an unkind person (i.e. me!) will now spoil this love-fest by reminding Britain that while Poland has committed to increase its armed forces to 250,000 full-time and 50,000 highly trained reservist troops, and increase its defence budget to 3% of GDP, Britain is slashing its forces by 2025 to 73,000, with the Army Reserve at 30,000 troops. Combined, that’s 103,000 very thinly-stretched troops.

While Heappey was quoted in last month's UK Defence Journal that under the Future Soldier programme the Army will modernise to become "fit for purpose to counter the threats of today and the future", this is a deranged and dangerous state of affairs. In war, quantity AND quality both matter!

Come on UK, follow Poland's lead! We are wealthy. At 3.3% share of the global economy, UK has the 5th largest GDP in the world and 28th highest GDP per capita. It is 8th in the world in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP). We CAN afford 3% of our GDP to help protect our people and our NATO allies.

We should at least DOUBLE the current size of our armed forces - as well as invest in its quality - and develop a much larger pool of committed, well-trained reservists. Poland’s commitment to defence shames UK’s shrinking army.

Technology will never by itself win future wars, quantity still counts!

The rise of Comical Sergei

piotr.ney@hotmail.co.uk (Piotr Ney) — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 08:40:02 GMT

Russia's Comical Sergei rattles his vain nuclear sabre

[Wrocław, 27 April 2022]

Remember Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf? Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister definitely does, as he increasingly adopts his laughable Comical Ali act and rattles his vain nuclear sabre in public.

Comical Ali promised that an invasion of Iraq by the allied Gulf coalition, in response to Iraq's assault on Kuwait, would result in the "mother of all battles" and that Americans would "burn in their tanks". Just hours later, elite Iraqi divisions were abandoning their equipment, positions and even clothes in a desperate attempt to escape the allies' advance.

Clips showing "proud Iraqi warriors" sprinting away in sheer panic through the desert dust in their underwear, with some of them dressing up as women or attempting to surrender to US reconnaissance drones in the resultant confusion, can still be found on social media.

Comical Sergei now claims that Western support for Ukraine may trigger WWIII and that the West should be afraid. Hahaha! Bless!

Should Russia place a single soldier, rocket or bullet on NATO territory beyond Ukraine, Russia's military would be - and rightly should be - eliminated. The Russian army of child rapists and pillagers would be last seen sprinting away in their underwear, leaving their equipment, uniforms and even their loot of Ukrainian iphones and washing machines behind.

We should not fear Russia. They should be scared to death of us, of NATO, of the free world! After the arse kicking they are already receiving from brave Ukrainians, Russia's any remaining offensive capability could easily and rapidly be destroyed by NATO.

The stark evidence is right in front of our eyes. After two months of incompetent aggression, their pathetic, corrupt military is losing this war. The truth is that the Russian army rather than being the alleged second best army in the world, has proven to be a poor second best army in Ukraine. Senior commanders are being picked off by Ukrainian snipers. Their flagship is now scraping the bottom of the Black Sea. The Russian army only makes a positive impression on parades in Red Square. It can't compete on a military level in Ukraine and has retreated into primitive bombardment of, and war crimes against, civilians.

Come on, were you really fooled by Russian propaganda, do you really fear this useless, barbaric horde?

Russia couldn't organise any conventional or a nuclear confrontation with NATO. I bet most of their nuclear warheads and Gen 5 weaponry would prove inoperable and the remainder would be intercepted or destroyed at launch.

But in case I am wrong, and being as cooly rational as anyone, if Russia really insists on threatening us with their rusty nukes, I'd happily support a pre-emptive NATO strike to disable their nuclear offensive capability. Let's hammer Russia now, while they are overcommitted in Ukraine!

Better we should be sure than sorry, right Comical Sergei?

Making Russia pay full reparations for its murderous war in Ukraine

piotr.ney@hotmail.co.uk (Piotr Ney) — Mon, 18 Apr 2022 08:31:19 GMT

Russia’s children should be made to repay Putin’s debt for a generation to come.

[Wrocław, 18 April 2022]

International sanctions on Russian commerce should not be eased until all reparations are fully settled with Ukraine. All proceeds from Russia’s strategic revenue streams, such as oil and gas sales, should fall under international governance with the aim to fund the rebuilding of Ukraine and the reimbursement of all indirect costs of Putin's unprovoked war, such as the humanitarian aid given by Poland and the international community to Ukrainian refugees.

It is hard to comprehend the scale of damage already wreaked by Putin since 24 February. In human terms, apart from thousands of civilians and Ukrainian military killed and maimed, over 7.0m persons have been displaced internally and 4.6m abroad. Towns and cities have been reduced to rubble. Many bridges, roads and other elements of critical infrastructure have been totally destroyed. The Centre for Economic Policy Research estimate the cost of repairing this property damage as already up to €500bn ($540bn).

Reparations will of course not only need to cover direct rebuilding costs, but also $billions of punitive damages to compensate survivors for the rapes, torture, maiming and the wrongful deaths of their loved ones.

While rebuilding costs increase daily with Russian bombing and shelling, Ukraine's revenues are rapidly shrinking. Already a third of Ukrainian factories and businesses have been forced to close by the war, with the World Bank estimating that this will impact Ukraine's GDP by some -45% this year.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg and The Brookings Institution recently estimated that some $350 billion of Russian reserves are currently frozen by countries such as France, Germany, Japan and USA. Freezing Russian government assets is not enough. These should immediately and irrecoverably be confiscated, together with all Russian oligarchs' and commercial entities' assets, and directed towards reparations war reparations. It is heartening that an increasing number of Western politicians, including US Attorney General Merrick Garland, now support the idea of assets seized from Russian oligarchs being directly channeled to Ukraine.

Fast tracking Ukraine's membership of EU will make new resources, markets and supply chains available, and it should also help ensure that recovery funds are spent astutely, with local corruption kept in check. While temporary support from the free world will start tackling the rebuilding of Ukraine, it is Russia that needs to ultimately bear the full cost.

When designing the reparations regime, we will need to be conscious of historical precedents, such as 1919’s Treaty of Versailles, which humiliated Germany and became the recruitment banner for the emergent Nazi party. We thus need to agree on a mechanism by which Russia can compensate the world for its aggression in a way that does not alienate future generations and push them into sympathy with nationalist extremist agendas.

Do not feel sorry for ‘normal’ Russians. Many independent polls agree that over 70% of the Russian population supports Putin and the Ukrainian invasion. Even with national TV and radio under Kremlin’s control, Russians interested in the truth can easily source it through digital media or from their diaspora.

It is a lazy evasion of an uncomfortable truth to claim that this is one man’s war. Putin is merely a natural product of a morally bankrupt, imperialist and nihilistic Russian society.

It is Russians – not Putin - who pull the triggers to rain shells, bombs and rockets on civilians. It is Russians – not Putin - who starve and maim children. It is Russians - not Putin - who gang rape Ukrainian women. Therefore it is the imperialist death cult that is today's Russia – not Putin - that the civilised world is at war with. There exists of course a minority of noble and righteous dissident Russians. It is up to them NOW to visibly distance themselves from what Russia has become and loudly declare that these atrocities are committed 'not in my name!' . And it should be up to them later to take over the control of Russia after Putin is defeated and brought to justice.

Global snatch network: Let's learn from Mossad

piotr.ney@hotmail.co.uk (Piotr Ney) — Sun, 17 Apr 2022 14:33:30 GMT

There can be no peace until Putin, his cronies and all Russian war criminals face justice

[Wrocław, 17 April 2022]

As I wrote earlier (‘After Putin’), there can never be any lasting peace until Putin, his cronies and all identified Russian war criminals are tried. Whether it’s through the International Court of Justice or a specially commissioned international court, trying them in absentia may prove to be the relatively easy dimension.

We now need to set up a persistent, distributed and international network of active duty agents and the ‘back-office’ governance of the surveillance, planning and coordination of all activities over the next few years to hunt down and physically apprehend (snatch) these murderers, anywhere in the world, including on Russian territory. Or terminate them in situ when appropriate.

Remember that there is no statute of limitations for genocide or war crimes. These scum should never find peace until death. Let’s learn from Mossad. Fifteen years after the end of WWII, they seized Adolf Eichmann, the patron of the Nazi Holocaust, in Argentina and smuggled him to Israel. He was executed by hanging. After the 1972 Olympic atrocity, Mossad similarly tracked down and assassinated members of Black September one by one, all around the globe.

This is the template we should follow. I am hoping that Mossad, as well as its British and US equivalents, are already coaching the Ukrainian secret services in this area.

YOU COULD ALSO HELP. If you think that you may have some skills, experience or resources to add value, I suggest that you liaise with your local Ukrainian embassy and volunteer your services to this cause. Together, we will track down and bring to justice Russian murderers and defeat Russian’s evil empire.

FREE UKRAINE!

Interview on Polskie Radio 24 (13 March 2022)

piotr.ney@hotmail.co.uk (Piotr Ney) — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 10:04:49 GMT

Putin & Ukraine: Interview with Polskie Radio 24 on 13 March 2022 (in Polish)

This morning, I had an opportunity to speak - in Polish! ;-) - on Polskie Radio 24. We discussed some issues around the brutal invasion of Ukraine and what should happen after it. Here is a link to the recording. As always, I will welcome any feedback and constructive ideas.

Dziś rano miałam okazję mówić - po polsku! �� - w Polskim Radiu 24. Rozmawialiśmy o kilku kwestiach związanych z brutalną inwazją na Ukrainę i o tym, co powinno się po niej wydarzyć. Oto link do nagraniea. Jak zawsze z chęcią przyjmę wszelkie uwagi i konstruktywne pomysły!

Link to the recording / Link do nagrania: https://polskieradio24.pl/130/5925/artykul/2919089

"Polska w awangardzie wolnego świata".

Brytyjski analityk o reakcji Warszawy na atak Rosji na Ukrainę - “Wielka Brytania i Zachód wreszcie zrozumiały, że Polska słusznie znajduje się tak naprawdę w awangardzie wolnego świata i na pierwszej linii obrony przed totalitaryzmem Rosji. To jest jedna pozytywna rzecz, która wynika z wojny Putina - reputacja i powaga Polski znacznie się poprawiły w oczach Zachodu” mówił w Polskim Radiu 24 dr Piotr Ney, brytyjski analityk i ekonomista.

Dr Piotr Ney, Brytyjczyk polskiego pochodzenia, który od niedawna przebywa w naszym kraju, przyznał na antenie Polskiego Radia 24, że jest zdumiony tym, jak Polacy otworzyli się na pomoc uchodźcom z Ukrainy.

"Zawstydził nas sposób, w jaki Polacy pomagają"

“Podziwiam tę serdeczną gościnność Polaków. Nas, na Zachodzie, upokorzył sposób, w jaki zwykli Polacy otworzyli swoje domy dla ponad półtora miliona uchodźców. Teraz w Wielkiej Brytanii próbujemy skopiować to podejście. Do tej pory kojarzyliśmy uchodźców z obozami, a Polska nauczyła nas, że to zwykli obywatele mogą dać schronienie uchodźcom i zintegrować ich ze społeczeństwem tak, żeby mogli pracować, studiować i zachować swoją godność.

Bardzo dziękuję Polakom i Polsce za tę cenną lekcję” powiedział.

Zachód idzie za przykładem Polski

Gość audycji odniósł się również do zabiegów polskiej dyplomacji na arenie międzynarodowej w sprawie nałożenia sankcji na Kreml, za napaść zbrojną wobec Ukrainy. “Jestem pod ogromnym wrażeniem przywództwa w społeczności międzynarodowej, jakie przyjęła Polska. Chodzi mi przede wszystkim o przywództwo wokół formułowania wspólnej odpowiedzi Europy i NATO, zwłaszcza w obszarze sankcji” podkreślił analityk.

“Ludzie, którzy nie tylko dawno ostrzegali nas, na Zachodzie, przed rosyjską agresją, ale również bardzo dobrze rozumieją regionalną historię i geopolityczne wymiary tej wojny. Zachód na pewno słucha teraz Polski” podkreślił.

W ocenie rozmówcy PR 24 głębokość i jakość debaty publicznej w Polsce jest "wyjątkowa". “Myślę o dyskusjach w polskich mediach - wyraźnie widać, że w Polsce jest wielu ekspertów z dużą znajomością Rosji Putina” zaznaczył.

Why the EU is a mainframe in a world of cloud

piotr.ney@hotmail.co.uk (Piotr Ney) — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 16:41:20 GMT

Lessons from a Pandemic: Why the EU is a mainframe in a world of cloud

[London, 14 Jan 2021]

In April 2020, in the first of a series of articles on the covid-19 pandemic, Lessons from a Pandemic , I lamented China’s sadly predictable duplicity and the lack of preparedness and any meaningful response coordination from the White House, the WHO and the EU.

As I then wrote, “the EU has proved to be largely incompetent and impotent at this time of crisis. This is acutely illuminating in this year of Brexit. The EU in fact, acting under China’s diplomatic pressure led by Zhang Ming, China’s envoy to the EU, had been wickedly complicit in delaying and redacting its own report into China’s coronavirus disinformation campaign in fear of damaging trade relations.”

I then contrasted this opaque inertia with the agile ground-up mobilisation of industry and academia, which embraced and accelerated multi-disciplinary innovation through new research paradigms, rapid upscaling and global digital collaboration.

It does not give me any satisfaction to reflect that in these last nine months not much has changed. The White House is now under a different type of siege and has dropped any residual pretence of federal coordination altogether. Having spent months destroying and fabricating evidence, China continues to coerce the wickedly compliant WHO, demanding its investigators absolve it of any blame for originating the pandemic.

Other than booking this largely symbolic jaunt to Wuhan, the WHO remains shamefully AWOL and Brussels has spent more energy on pursuing British fish than lifesaving vaccines for its people. And Bono is nowhere to be seen. As a consequence, despite an unprecedented leap in vaccinology, the world is falling ever deeper into the grip of the deadly pandemic.

Brussels remains as pitifully inept in expediting EU regulatory approvals, as it is in organising the legal framework and delivery logistics of vaccines for its desperate populations. In a behind-the-scenes standoff, the European Commission, eager post-Brexit to showcase to its long suffering taxpayers that it's still relevant, fights fiercely to maintain exclusive control over all vaccine procurement, banning individual nations from sourcing their own supplies.

The result of this EU obstinacy? Post-Brexit UK has vaccinated as many people today as France has managed in total. We have vaccinated six times the cohort of people per 100 of population as Germany or Poland. Desperate Netherlands only got around to their first jab a week ago and have now achieved 0.32 doses per 100 population, just slightly worse than Belgium, but a staggering seventeen times worse than us.

While the bureaucrats argue, local health chiefs are resigning in protest and national politicians grow increasingly terrified as their local death tolls rise. Denmark and others are now attempting to bypass the Commission altogether. Some of my EU friends have been appealing to me to help them come over to London to get vaccinated here.

The Spectator sums it up well, "Vaccine-gate, as it is starting to be known in Germany and elsewhere, is turning into a rerun of the euro crisis. The EU, as so often, wills the ends but then hopelessly fails to put together the means to deliver them. It created a single currency with none of the mechanisms in place to make it work. This time around it has created a health policy, but without the budgets or expertise to deliver."

Free people, freely self-organising within a light-touch governance framework, have now delivered 3 different approved vaccines in the UK. We have administered over 3 million jabs already, with more that 415k of these in England being already the second dose, which maximises immune protection.

Only two weeks after the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, with all its theatre over fish, our ability to succeed outside of the hegemony of EU neocolonialists appears hardly the disaster that they had wished it to be.

In these catastrophic times it would be grossly insensitive of me to come across as a nationalist and I am truly not one, now or ever. It's just that it makes me angry seeing my sisters and brothers across Europe being so tragically betrayed by these supranational institutions that were created supposedly to provide for and protect them.

I have been predicting for over 25 years now that should a major crisis hit Europe, one which required an agile response, the EU would fail ignominiously. The WHO and the EU are both outdated and failed paradigms that should not outlive the pandemic. They are both examples of creaking mainframes in a world of cloud and need scrapping.

Our destiny should not be dictated top-down by failed bureaucracies, but instead delivered bottom-up through innovation, driven by self-organising, lean, agile, diverse and digital collaboration networks.

For me, this is an enduring lesson from this tragic pandemic.

Copyright © 2021 by Piotr Ney. All rights reserved. No part of this article may be published, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author.

A bittersweet welcome for a healthier and wiser New Year

piotr.ney@hotmail.co.uk (Piotr Ney) — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 16:13:55 GMT

Lessons from a Pandemic: A bittersweet welcome for a healthier and wiser New Year

[London, 01 Jan 2021]

While the pandemic still rages and here in the UK some 53,000 new cases were recorded in a single day, yesterday, it’s worth taking a few moments to celebrate.

A few days ago, the UK was the first country in the world to approve the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. Today, a second and home developed vaccine from Oxford-AstraZeneca has already been approved by the MHRA. Other vaccines are on their way.

Through ground-up mobilisation, open collaboration and joint investment of government, industry and academia, and the digitalisation of research, the world has achieved in months, what would usually take many years. It is a breathtaking example of what humankind can achieve when corralled to fight a common cause.

New paradigms in vaccinology directly resulting from this effort will help to protect us better from as yet unknown, future zoonotic viral threats and they should strengthen the standing of collaborative actors such as the Global Virome Project (GVP).

Let’s hope that such rapid innovation, brave investment and societal determination could next be harnessed to more effectively tackle our other global threats, from climate change to systemic poverty.

So while I very much feel the pain and misery of those impacted by the pandemic and mourn the loss of so many valuable lives, I stick to the same optimistic belief that I shared in an article last April , that this tiny virus may help guide us towards a new, better ‘normal’ and a digitally-enriched, safer future.

Here is to a healthier and wiser New Year 2021!

Copyright © 2021 by Piotr Ney. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be published, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author.

Reimagining the enterprise for the digital age

piotr.ney@hotmail.co.uk (Piotr Ney) — Fri, 30 Oct 2020 22:54:34 GMT

Radical Digital: Reimagining the enterprise for the digital age

[London, 23 April 2020]

The transformative potential of emerging digital technology is fast outpacing the ambitions and current implementation capability of most market incumbents in both the private and public sectors. Organisations continue to view digital transformation principally as the digitalising of their existing business paradigms and their existing business-as-usual (BAU) operating models.

There is nothing wrong with this medium-term focus per se. I have myself directed several transformation projects thus tactically defined and have successfully delivered significant business benefits. An ambitious digital shift often does rapidly mobilise the virtuous cycle of improving customer experience and revenue, while reducing service cost.

However, this predominantly tactical focus on improving the margins of an existing business model obscures the bigger picture and often impedes the development of more strategic (yet alone truly visionary) digitally disruptive business paradigms by many firms.

To illustrate with an example, let’s visit the exciting world of general insurance. The first shoots of this industry sprouted more than two thousand years ago, in the days of ancient Babylonian and Chinese traders. The insurance paradigm, which we recognise today, began blooming in Europe in the 17th century. The Great Fire of London in 1666, for example, greatly catalysed the emergence of popular property insurance. But then, since Enlightenment, not much has essentially changed in general insurance.

Sure, instead of using quill and parchment, we write contracts electronically. Underwriting, reinsurance and marketing have become much more sophisticated. Many traditionally manual tasks are now routinely automated. But the basic principles of the insurance market, insurer-(intermediary)-customer relationships and what constitutes an insurance contract have remained pointedly unchallenged for hundreds of years.

The outside-in strategic digital perspective

It would be sensible today to, say, deflect specific customer cohorts to digital self-service channels, and inform their choices through advanced machine learning and gamification, while keeping the underlying transaction logic (process steps, business rules, underwriting, pricing) and the actual end product (the traditional policy) largely unchanged. Meaningful business benefits (improved customer experience and revenue, at reduced service cost) would indeed be realised with manageable business risk and disruption.

Considering the truly transformative potential of digital, such a project illustrates a modest degree of ambition and is likely to deliver largely undifferentiated improvements. Many companies are already well advanced on the smart, digital self-service channel, machine learning and gamification adoption curves and competitors quickly copy any significant innovations. Despite what some self-declared ‘digital evangelists’ claim, tactical digital is an unlikely source of sustainable competitive advantage.

A more strategic and visionary approach to digital has two perspectives. The first is the outside-in strategic digital perspective, which explores emerging digital technologies with the question, “how could this specific enabler significantly transform my business?”. The emphasis here is on the phrase significantly transform, redefining through disruptive innovation, and not just marginally enhancing, critical operational elements. This is a strategic push approach , in that it evaluates the potential net benefit of a digital solution being pushed into the business. For each investment in such a candidate digital disruption domain, a balanced business case needs then to be argued.

An example of this perspective could be, “how could our insurance business benefit from adopting blockchain?”. Encoding (often complex and/or interlinked) insurance contracts as decentralised, distributed and public digital ledgers could deliver the benefits of recording every contract unalterably and in perpetuity and make such contracts accessible instantly, worldwide. It would facilitate the safe, remote collaboration of different workers and intermediaries who are often involved in constructing and selling complex contracts. Blockchain could also deliver significant benefits in areas such as fraud prevention and reinsurance.

On the negative side, for example, the insurer would need convincingly to manage current public perception, which is biased towards the view that blockchain applications, such as Bitcoin, are usually environmentally damaging and unsustainable. I cite a recent headline post from a professional technology discussion forum, “ the consensus is that Bitcoin mining now takes up more electricity than Switzerland and that a single Bitcoin transaction could power a household for a day”. The insurer would thus need to demonstrate that it sources its blocks in an environmentally responsible and sustainable way.

There are of course several other adverse impacts, risks and complexities to strategically adopting current blockchain technology by the insurance industry. I’d be interested in your views on this.

The inside-out strategic digital perspective

The second perspective is the inside-out strategic digital perspective. This attempts to reimagine how, if we were designing our enterprise from scratch, we could harness digital innovation to best serve our customers, our stakeholders and us. Remembering that much orthodox business strategic theory, including Michael Porter’s Five Forces, remains as agonisingly relevant in the digital age as in the industrial age, we need to address some fundamental questions about the evolution or transformation of the enterprise.

Questions such as…

what should our unique, digitally enabled market proposition (offer) be?
what is the optimal, digital-first operating model to deliver this?
how will we then sustain our competitive advantage and profitability?
how will market forces and our ecosystem change (customers, suppliers, partners, distributors, competitors, society, etc.), how could we nimbly and continuously adapt to this and exploit such change to our advantage?

For each such question, we focus on how we could harness digital enablers and solutions to deliver the desired outcome. This is the strategic pull approach , in that it first describes the future vision for the business and only then defines the digital components required to deliver it. For me, this second perspective encompasses three significant advantages.

Firstly, it encourages scrutiny of digital not in terms of pros-and-cons of individual digital applications or innovations (such as blockchain), but holistically. It examines how various technologies could be blended together to deliver each digital transformation and its desired business outcome, whether this outcome is a re-engineered product or a radically restructured front-office.

Secondly, it naturally ideates the digital enablers and solutions that are needed to deliver the desired business outcome, but which may not be available (yet). The enterprise can then evaluate whether these are technically feasible and whether there is a business case for building (alone or in partnership) these desired digital capabilities. It’s important to note that such unique and/or proprietary shortfall applications of digital may prove to be the distinguishing basis for sustainable competitive advantage.

Thirdly, whereas the push approach is naturally biased towards digitally improving existing products and processes, the pull approach, by definition, looks well beyond the current business paradigm to challenge its axioms and entrenched modi operandi, with questions such as:

“what should an insurance contract become?”, e.g. one could consider…
deconstructing traditional policies (typically annual, renewable, non-modular) into customer-configurable, lean and simple microproducts, mixed and matched to the customer’s unique need;
transforming pricing philosophy, by e.g.
replacing the (usually annual) premiums with dynamic (incl. pay-as-you-go) and innovative (incl. non-monetary) fee options;
offering instant, real-time and ATAWAD (anytime, anywhere, any device) access to protection, with context sensitive pricing;
offer ubiquity, i.e. embedding (bundling) protection in/with other products and services, initially these could some obvious convergent offers, such as embedded protection for purchases (after all, few people enjoy buying insurance per se!);
hyperpersonalising the buying experience and the resultant cover – every policy should be unique;
ideating how to address customer needs with non-traditional products or services – e.g. by connecting customers to each other to create supportive social communities, which could share or aggregate protection in specific risk domains and/or collaborate to better manage individual risk;

“how can we transform risk assessment?”, underwriting is crying out for some deep digital transformation, leveraging technologies such as IoT, advanced analytics and rich insight (including, where allowed, analysis based on customer movements, behaviours and social media footprint);

“how can we accelerate our adapting to societal change?”, e.g. as society moves from an ownership to an access (sharing) model, the traditional approach to asset (e.g. car) insurance will need to adapt;

“how do we rapidly evolve our culture and operations to best deliver our future products to our future customers?”, while ensuring that it will prove profitable and sustainable in the digital age, with the added capability to easily plug into emergent digital ecosystems.

Radical Digital Transformation: a summary

Digital transformation should be about deeply challenging what the business could and should be, including how to address existing customer needs in truly innovative and disruptive ways in the age of Economy 4.0. It’s about using an agile approach to develop digital enterprise fitness incrementally, instead of overinvesting in the up-front design of some fixed, future state operating model. It’s also about influencing customer careabouts and behaviours to create new, digitally-enabled blue ocean markets for our business and new cohorts of customers.

In many sectors, it may also be about actively challenging and influencing market standards and the legal, regulatory and compliance frameworks within which the business operates, to make such disruptive industry paradigm shifts feasible. Using blockchain for insurance contracts, an idea I mention above, is just one example of a digital enabler, which is still some way from clearing all the required market, regulatory and legal hurdles, before it could be adopted universally in mainstream general insurance.

Some ambitious start-ups fully appreciate the transformative potential of emerging digital technology and some of these will prove significant market disruptors. Most well-known brands, often burdened with complex legacies and fears of upsetting their existing markets, partners and customers, are reluctant to seriously explore the strategic and truly visionary potential of digital.

This article aims to motivate business leaders to embrace digital innovation as a radical catalyst to fundamentally transform their operating philosophy and market approach. It also argues that some fundamental archetypes of our economy, broadly unchallenged for hundreds of years, such as customer, product, supplier, payment, ownership and the axioms these populate, may now need to be reimagined for our digital age.

The passing of Bill English

piotr.ney@hotmail.co.uk (Piotr Ney) — Mon, 03 Aug 2020 16:12:08 GMT

A sad day for Innovation: the passing of Bill English

[London, 03 August 2020]

Today is a sad day for Innovation. Bill English, the serial inventor, has died aged 91. Together with Doug Engelbart, who himself passed in 2013, Bill led a long running research programme into ‘Augmenting Human Intellect’ at the Stanford Research Institute, before moving to Xerox’ PARC in 1971. Together they made a giant contribution to the usability, and hence the ubiquity, of modern personal computing.

Bill and Doug developed many of the concepts and technologies that we now take for granted, but which at the time were brilliant insights into how the emerging power of computing could be harnessed in creative and intuitive ways to automate and simplify our daily work tasks.

They engineered the first fully working computer mouse as far back as in 1963 (yes, that’s right, in 1963!).

They created modern text editing, with many of the features that we now use every day, such as cut-&-paste .

They developed networked collaboration (remote co-workers sharing and manipulate their screens in real time), document management, video conferencing, networked computing (an early version of the internet, incl. hyperlinks) and last but certainly not least, famously the graphical user interface (which Steve Jobs first saw on a tour of PARC and quickly ‘adopted’ it, together with the mouse, for his early PC).

I teach Innovation Management at business schools, so I am particularly aware of the many brilliant innovators who have shaped our modern industry and society. Women and men who truly transformed our world, and on whose shoulders the likes of Steve Jobs could later stand to make their own names and fortunes. People like Malcom McLean, whose idea of a simple metal box (containerisation) made globalisation (and hence the cost effective development and manufacture of the iPhone) possible.

Yet when asked to name the most significant inventors since the 1950’s, most of my Innovation Management students suggest Steve Jobs. None have to-date sadly ever suggested Malcolm, Bill or Doug.

So next time you use your computer mouse, word processor, Windows, Skype, Zoom or Google, I gently invite you to pause for a moment and reflect with some humility and gratitude on the debt that we all owe to Bill English and Doug Engelbart, and all the other great innovators who have shaped our modern world and who are now far too often reduced to mere footnotes in history.

May they rest in peace.

Towards an environmentally sustainable global energy system

piotr.ney@hotmail.co.uk (Piotr Ney) — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 14:52:54 GMT

Towards an environmentally sustainable global energy system

[London, 10 July 2020]

For the last 35 years I have worked in innovation and technology-enabled transformation. But it is since I had become a father some twelve years ago, that I have become particularly conscious of sustainability and the environmental legacy that we are likely to bequeath to our children.

Today, I’d like to take a few minutes to reflect on the recent exponential acceleration of innovation in the energy industry. Emerging technologies cumulatively now promise to transform this industry and its impact on our fragile planet.

Beware of peak lithium around 3020!

A few days ago, I wrote about the machine learning (ML) driven acceleration of nuclear fusion research . Fusion reactors would be ideal for powering ships and static grid applications (factories, commercial centres, communities) where other RE sources are impractical.

The rapidly declining cost of lithium-ion batteries, which power our electronic devices, EVs and provide back-up storage for our homes and smartgrids, is another obvious example (see diagram). This cost was $1,100/kWh ten years ago and has since nosedived by 87% in real terms to around $150/kWh now. BloombergNEF (BNEF, an energy analysis firm) now predicts battery costs falling below US$100/kWh in 2024 and starting to level off at around US$60/kWh by 2030. Wow!

Exponential learning curve progress in key sustainability technologies is not limited to actual energy generation and storage. It touches most of the end-to-end energy value chain, from raw material recovery to managing by-products and waste. Cue another example.

Both of the technologies I mention above (fusion energy and lithium-ion batteries) seemingly compete for lithium. But this competition is a world away from the genuine fossil fuel competition (and hence the escalating cost) of traditional technologies. Fusion is some four million times more energetic than a chemical reaction, so it only needs a few grams of plasma fuel.

Lithium is easily extracted from brine pools. New technologies promise to vastly increase lithium recovery rates, such as EnergyX’s nanoparticle membrane approach, and the price of lithium has been steadily decreasing. There are sufficient land-based known lithium reserves to power fusion reactors globally for at least the next 1,000 years, before battery producers start worrying. And they have little else to worry about, as the lithium-ion battery market should more than triple in value over the next decade (see diagram).

Fusion typically employs the efficient deuterium-tritium (DT) reaction. Deuterium is distilled from seawater (at ~33g/m3), so it is virtually inexhaustible. Tritium is rare, but can be bred within the fusion reaction itself, through interaction with lithium.

Walking on sunshine

Let’s take another energy generation example – solar. The cost of photovoltaics (PV) is plummeting faster than the most optimistic mainstream industry forecasts dared to predict a decade ago (see diagram). In 2014, the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicted the cost of PV generated energy to average at around $0.05/kWh by 2050. It is only six years later, and we have already reached this cost level. In many geographies, PV has already undercut the cost of traditional fossil fuel electricity generation, that’s even before we factor in the environmental impact.

A solar energy project in the United Arab Emirates (Abu Dhabi Power’s 2GW Al Dhafra installation) is now producing at $0.0135/kWh. While some underemployed coalminers could bicker from the sidelines over the pricing model used (such as the arguable undervaluation of the land used), this is still an astonishing achievement. Most of the world’s population will very soon live in countries where average solar energy prices could reliably be sustained at under $0.01/kWh. Again, wow!

Overall, RE generation in Q1/2020 already accounts for 28% of the world’s electricity supply. Think about it, already more than a quarter of our electricity is Greta-friendly! Coal, for generations the cheapest way of generating electricity, is now struggling to compete. Solar, coupled with other RE elements in community scale smartgrid implementations, is likely to explode now in Africa and the developing world.

Hydrogen is a gas again

And finally in this short piece, let me also celebrate hydrogen’s strong re-emergence as another promising RE vector. In an interesting article this week, the Economist discusses the rapidly improving efficiency and hence the rapidly dropping cost of green (electrolytic) hydrogen production, citing the example of the cost of hydrolysis equipment falling by 40% over the last five years. While hydrogen is not ideal for personal vehicles, because of the cost of the refuelling infrastructure required, its energy density (see diagram) and lack of pollutive emissions (the reaction produces only water) make it ideal for heavy transport – such as trucks, urban transport, trains, construction vehicles, ships.

Sustainably produced hydrogen can also gradually replace natural gas for heating, using the existing gas infrastructure. As the Economist reports, “National Grid reckons the gas-fired boilers which heat most British homes can cope with a mix of 20% hydrogen without modification” and hydrogen-ready boilers, able to burn either natural gas or pure hydrogen, are already being produced. Hydrogen production is also often a smart way of storing surplus RE energy, supplementing batteries and other storage modes.

Whilst we should not rest on our laurels (and to be fair, the tech entrepreneurs driving this progress seldom do!), I am increasingly optimistic that within a generation and for the first time in the history of modern humanity, we will indeed transition to an environmentally sustainable global energy system.

The EU innovation scoreboard 2020

piotr.ney@hotmail.co.uk (Piotr Ney) — Sat, 04 Jul 2020 12:56:42 GMT

UK’s innovation performance and digital leadership post-Brexit

[London, 04 July 2020]

The latest European Innovation Scoreboard was published on 23 June. It shows the UK well ahead of our ex-partners in innovation and entrepreneurship. UK leads the EU average by the relative index (RI) of 121 (EU=100). This means that the UK is 20% more innovative than the rest of the EU, based on a balanced scorecard of academic and industrial metrics.

An even wider gap is shown in entrepreneurial activity. Here it is useful also to compare the UK with France, which is closest to us in terms of size, demographics and industrial profile. In terms of ‘enterprise births’ (10+ employees) such as startups and spinoffs, UK performs four times better than the EU average, and a whopping EIGHT times better than France!

This is supported by UK’s impressive level of VC funding of innovation (IR=188.5) and a highly effective collaborative network of SMEs (the ‘innovative SMEs collaborating with others’ score of IR=267 is two-and-a-half times better than the EU average). UK’s relatively risk tolerant and co-creative culture increasingly promotes disruptive and convergent technologies, and post-Brexit this is likely to accelerate our innovation performance even further ahead of the EU.

Two specific relative weaknesses of the UK are worth commenting on.

The first is in ‘intellectual assets’ (RI=81), such as patent, trademark and design applications.

Here I would challenge the methodology used by the European Commission, or at least the inference some may make from these metrics. IP protection through patenting in a well-established cottage industry in some sectors (say, pharmaceuticals) and keeps an army of IP lawyers content and wealthy. But a patent application is usually a complex, expensive and drawn-out process, which also by definition places your IP into the public domain, and thus immediately available to competitors in unscrupulous countries, which do not enforce international IP law fairly (stand up, China!). It is not appropriate to the many rapid, continuous innovation activities that the UK leads in, such as precision engineering.

For example, there are many globally successful UK firms in the motorsport industry, mainly clustered around the Midlands and Oxfordshire, developing world leading technology and designs for Formula One and other racing categories. They don’t have the time for filing many patents. Instead, their IP is largely process protected, relying on rapid, continuous innovation. By the time their competitors manage to reverse engineer their IP, they would have moved on!

The second reported weakness, ‘broadband penetration’ at RI=78, is indeed frustrating. However, there is light at the end of the tunnel, or more appropriately, glistening in the skies above us. The UK government has just reconfirmed its strategic support for UK’s digital economy by jointly bidding with others for OneWeb’s LEO (low earth orbit) satellite constellation. This will replace EU's Galileo (geo-stationary) PNT system.

If approved, UK taxpayers will pay £400m for 45% of the revived OneWeb 2.0. It is hoped that the UK government will also be smart enough to leverage this investment to reshore OneWeb’s satellite production to the UK. This could be a great boost for our hi-tech manufacturing sector.

OneWeb’s constellation, when completed, promises to provide excellent broadband connectivity across the whole of the UK – ultra high speed and low latency, enabling fast real-time video streaming in full HD. It will prove a huge catalyst to our digital services and rich e-commerce. Also, as it will not share the vulnerabilities of GPS and Galileo to jamming and other attacks, OneWeb’s resilience and scalability make much more sense as the backbone of UK's strategic digital architecture.

So in summary, in terms of innovation performance at least, Brexit has not caused the British economic collapse that the EU predicted.

And we will be even better off if the EU could kindly and rightfully return our £1.2bn investment in Galileo.

Here comes the sun: Is machine learning about to transform our world?

piotr.ney@hotmail.co.uk (Piotr Ney) — Wed, 17 Jun 2020 12:31:48 GMT

Here comes the sun: Is machine learning about to transform our world?

[London, 17 June 2020]

The promise of controlled thermonuclear fusion replacing fossil fuels and fission to power the world has eluded us for decades. An artificial, compact sun here on earth to give us limitless, safe and clean energy, leaving no carbon dioxide or radioactive waste in its wake.

I last worked in nuclear physics research some thirty eight years ago. Since then, I have delivered many innovation and radical transformation projects in business, lately often driven by digital enablers such as artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Claims processing in insurance. Risk management in banking. Hyperpersonalisation of convergent offers in media and telecomm industries. Through these and many other applications of AI, I have helped to improve customer and colleague experience, product innovation and the profitability of companies.

But the true global impact of AI lies beyond making some profitable companies even more profitable. It is proving to be a key weapon in our existential fight against biothreats and climate change.

I have already written about the primacy of AI-driven bioinformatics in tackling covid-19, in areas such as reverse vaccinology, computational predictions of protein structures, and epidemiological modelling (e.g. ‘Lessons from a Pandemic: 1. Digital collaboration and preparedness’ ).

I am now excited to share with you some dispatches from another critical fight, that of tackling climate change. While novel materials and production techniques have all greatly contributed, it is specifically the application of machine learning (ML), a subset of AI, which is currently greatly accelerating the development of commercially viable energy from thermonuclear nuclear fusion.

The sun shone on the Severn

It is April 1982. A British naval task force is sailing to the Falklands. Guinon Bluford becomes NASA’s first African American astronaut. Four-star petrol (remember?) is 36p per litre. Meanwhile on the south bank of the river Severn, a lean teenage punk is toiling on his pre-university research work experience at CEGB’s Berkeley Nuclear Laboratories.

I’d configure banks of autoclaves, monitor various readings and feed these into a creaky mainframe that commanded its own clean room. Our Magnox device at Berkeley was a first generation gas-cooled reactor that used uranium as fuel, with graphite as the moderator and carbon dioxide for cooling. The name referred to the magnesium-aluminium alloy cladding around its fuel rods. The oxidation and spallation of these fuel rods was the subject of my first ever research project and my first ever proper job.

But Magnox reactors were already on the way out. At lunchtime, inbetween the latest news from the Falklands and complaints about the catering, the wise and the good at BNL would sometimes discuss thermonuclear fusion with due reverence. Its spell was addictive. When my then boss assured me that I’d see a commercial fusion reactor on the bank of the river Severn within my lifetime, I had no reason to disbelieve him.

Thermonuclear fusion is simple to explain. Push two atomic nuclei together and, hey presto!, they sometimes fuse to form a larger nucleus, while releasing a huge amount of energy in the process. This is what happens on a massive scale within the cores of stars, including our own sun.

While simple to explain, fusion is incredibly hard and enormously expensive to control on Earth. Pushing nuclei together requires the creation of an electrically-charged gas called plasma, which then needs to be held captive at over 100 million °C and colossal density, typically by a magnetic confinement device, such as a tokamak. In these conditions, electrons leave their shells and form a boiling broth with naked, positively charged nuclei. When the conditions are right, the strong nuclear force between protons from two hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium, overcomes their natural electrostatic repulsion and allows them to fuse, releasing a high energy neutron.

Researchers have produced such controlled fusion reactions for decades. The elusive goal has always been to achieve the reliable, controlled and continuous operation of a sustained fusion chain reaction. And, critically, one which produces net energy. This goal has consistently proven a rolling decade away.

Yet now, something is starting to feel truly different. Both scientists and investors are reporting game-changing progress. Now as they predict first commercial thermonuclear fusion reactors by the end of this decade, it’s without their tongues firmly in cheek or the usual sniggering in the back rows. So what has changed? Certainly not the laws of physics. What has changed is that the massive number crunching required to effectively design, model, test and operate thermonuclear fusion reactors is now made possible by new generation, deep machine learning supercomputing.

Lighting the safe fuse

In the 1990s, the Joint European Torus (JET) tokamak in Oxfordshire delivered 16 million watts of output energy for less than a second. Unfortunately, that still only accounted for only 65% percent of the input energy. Misery, according to the Micawber Principle. However, many reactor tweaks were tested and the international consortium behind JET, armed with new practical experience, went on to form the core of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project.

ITER in Saint-Paul-lès-Durance, southern France, is now the world's largest fusion reactor. Its goal is to produce 500 million watts of power, a commercially viable scale, outputting ten times its input energy (i.e. a Q factor of 10 [i] ), albeit in short bursts. Planned result, happiness!

But the ITER project is not without significant problems. It is now years behind schedule and its build cost has tripled to about $22 billion. As a result, its design had to be simplified. Some scientists now even question whether its ambition to deliver “sustained burn”, a fusion chain reaction that could be kept going indefinitely, is at all possible given its downscaled design.

While ITER splutters on, its successor, DEMO, is already on the drawing board for 2033 and is expected to produce 2,000 million watts output, with 80 million watts of input power (Q=25). And further into the future still, DEMO’s successor, PROTO, originally planned for around 2050, would be the European Commission’s first prototype commercial power station. However, given the recent advances, it is possible that these projects could now be brought forward, or even collapsed into one combined DEMO/PROTO project.

The ITER in southern France, with a brave worker shown for scale.

Thermonuclear fusion is safe and clean. Plasma needs to be tightly contained and controlled for a fusion reaction to occur in the first place. So as soon as an anomaly occurs, the reaction simply stops. Unlike fission reactors, there is no risk of a core meltdown. And unlike fission, fusion does not process radioactive fuel such as enriched uranium, which produces dangerous waste. Fusion is typically fed with hydrogen and lithium [ii] , and produces only helium and some energetic neutrons.

Fusion reactors can also have a relatively small footprint. This makes it feasible for compact fusion reactors (CFRs) to be embedded into city and community scale smart microgrids. They could even be portable. The US Navy is already working on CFRs as potential next generation powerplants for their vessels. It has filed a patent for a fusion device, which instead of superconducting magnets found in traditional fusion reactors, is based on an "accelerated vibration and/or accelerated spin" magnetic containment design. This uses conical dynamic fusors that spin at extremely high speeds to produce a sustained, concentrated magnetic flux to contain the plasma.

Money is pouring into such research. Nearly thirty hi-tech billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are behind Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which funds nuclear fusion and other clean energy innovations. Last year, the UK government confirmed an £200m investment to attain grid electricity generation from fusion by 2040. Scientists at UKAEA’s Culham Centre for Fusion Energy near Oxford are working on a detailed design for the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) to deliver this. This initial funding covers their five year concept design phase.

Advanced materials and high temperature superconductors, have allowed tokamak and stellarator designs to greatly improve. New methods of construction have increased their performance and made their production much more affordable. It is now feasible for private companies to compete in the development of fusion. Indeed, several startups are already working on cheap fusion energy with the aim of delivering to the grid by 2030. The real game changer has been the growing availability of powerful cloud supercomputing combined with sophisticated machine learning.

Daniel Kammen, professor of Energy at UC Berkeley, announced in a recent virtual workshop on Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning, that this transformative computing power has translated the concept of ubiquitous fusion energy from being in "someone else's lifetime to a next-generation project". He added that, "There are now people who are projecting small-trial fusion plants that couldn't have been done before without higher computing."

Modelling the sun

Futurologists at McKinsey predict that AI could add $13trn to the global economy by 2030, comparable to the total national output of China. PwC gives an ever bolder prediction of $16trn. Whatever its economic contribution, AI is revolutionising many aspects of our lives. Machine learning already produces code to recognise faces, understand natural language, steer autonomous vehicles, review your radiology scans, answer your emails and restock your refrigerator. Now it controls thermonuclear fusion here on Earth.

Up to now, the principal limiting factor in fusion reactor design has been its dynamic complexity. Dozens of parameters need to be varied to produce a candidate reactor design, for which predictive simulations then need to be run to model the complex and inherently unstable behaviour of plasma within it. These design and behavioural models often took weeks if not months to produce and validate.

Now, collaborations with leading AI actors are beginning to hugely accelerate this work, reducing such tasks to a few hours. Vancouver-based General Fusion is for example working with Microsoft, while California’s TAE Technologies have teamed up with Alphabet’s DeepMind, who recently publically demonstrated AI’s potential by its system beating one of the world’s best players at Go, the traditional board game. Specialist ML is now central to fusion reactor research.

To clarify, machine learning (ML) is defined as a specific subtype of an AI application. The underlying ML algorithm needs first to be fed with sufficient volume, quality and variety of training data to allow it to develop its internal heuristic.

A pre-configured AI application can, say, control a smart energy grid or a city traffic system. But given exactly the same parameters, the system will in perpetuity make the same interventions. It is only when the application is designed to review the outcome of its interventions and improve, continuously learning and adapting through a feedback cycle, does it become a true ML system. By definition then, not all forms of AI are examples of machine learning.

ML has the inherent ability to identify patterns and correlations, and predict outcomes with rapidly increasing accuracy. It can collate data from a multitude of individual digital sensors in real-time to track the progress of the reaction against its own prediction, continuously refining its algorithm.

Artificial neural network (ANN) computing, inspired by biology, is adaptive and learns to make its own distinctions, without being preset with an extensive task related rule base. It can support the prediction of hugely complex and non-linear reactor behaviour, such as plasma disruptions, with unprecedented accuracy. Actual reactor time and expense are thus saved by simulating many reactor configurations, to identify the most promising one to physically test.

An example of such a deep learning application for modelling plasma disruptions is the Fusion Recurrent Neural Network (FRNN), run by the US Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), Princeton University and Julian Kates-Harbeck, a physics Ph.D. student from Harvard University [iii] . The FRNN application was developed using the Google Tensorflow framework and trained on experimental data from the largest tokamaks in the USA (DIII-D) and the world (Joint European Torus, JET). It has learned to reliably predict deleterious plasma disruption events within 30 milliseconds prior to occurrence, which is sufficient warning to microadjust the reactor configuration and mitigate the disruption effect. It is currently being deployed into ITER.

The FRNN deep learning system demonstrates how hugely complex, high-dimensional data can be predictively modelled in real time, to effect the design and operational adjustments needed to control thermonuclear reactions reliably.

“This research opens a promising new chapter in the effort to bring unlimited energy to Earth,” claims PPPL Director Steve Cowley. “Artificial intelligence is exploding across the sciences and now it’s beginning to contribute to the worldwide quest for fusion power.”

In summary

UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had in October 2018 published its famous Special Report [iv] . It set the global carbon dioxide emissions reduction target of 45% by 2030 to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5°C, and the target of net-zero emissions by 2050.

The covid-19 pandemic has unexpectedly helped in this ambition, but its positive effect on the environment is likely to be short lived. We need a rapid, global decarbonisation of the energy sector. This includes the deployment of wind and solar generation on a massive scale, and the rapid innovation in energy storage solutions.

It could therefore be argued that the $-billions planned as public and private investment in fusion should instead be decanted towards this. Indeed, the struggling ITER is an unhelpful reminder of how elusive commercially viable fusion energy still remains.

Yet I’d like to still believe my old BNL boss. As the quote on the cover of IPCC’s Special Report sagely says, “Pour ce qui est de l’avenir, il ne s’agit pas de le prévoir, mais de le rendre possible“ [v] , or in my loose translation, “As far as the future is concerned, it is not a question of foreseeing it, but of making it possible”. 

The exponential rise in the applied performance of deep machine learning could soon make thermonuclear fusion viable. I may yet live to see that commercial fusion reactor on the bank of the river Severn.

[i] We have by now during the covid-19 pandemic all mastered the R factor in epidemiology, i.e. the reproductive value, or how many people on average will be infected for every one person who has the disease. There is a similarly critical factor in thermonuclear fusion, Q, the fusion energy gain factor, which is the ratio of fusion power produced in the reactor to the input power required to run it. So when Q=1, the energy produced by the fusion reaction exactly equals the input energy required to sustain it. Pay attention at the back!

[ii] Yes, lithium is currently a bottleneck resource, with lithium-ion batteries needed to power most electronic devices and electric vehicles, and to support large grid scale and home battery storage. Current lithium extraction methods in places such as the Salar de Uyuni salt plain in Bolivia, which holds up to 70% of known global lithium reserves, take months and have a recovery performance of only 30%. Thankfully, new technologies are currently being trialled to vastly increase lithium production, such as the Energy Exploration Technologies’ (EnergyX) nanoparticle membrane that has a recovery performance of 90% within days.

[iii] Kates-Harbeck, J., Svyatkovskiy, A., Tang, W., “Predicting disruptive instabilities in controlled fusion plasmas through deep learning” , Nature 568, 17 April 2019

[iv] You can download the IPCC report and other materials from https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/download/

[v] From Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Citadelle, 1948

The new social contract

piotr.ney@hotmail.co.uk (Piotr Ney) — Fri, 15 May 2020 22:01:17 GMT

Lessons from a Pandemic: 3. The new social contract

[London, 15 May 2020]

The tragic global outbreak of covid-19 has already taught us many severe lessons in pandemic preparedness and response. Rapid innovation and product TTM, distributed collaboration, infection modelling, additive manufacturing of personal protective equipment (PPE), artificial intelligence (AI) powered vaccine and anti-viral drug development and clinical trials, sharing of real-time research data, scenario modelling and contact tracing. All of these elements, and many more, harness the power and the universal ubiquity of digital. Digital technology is thus at the heart of our fight against the virus.

Digital is a powerful weapon against the covid-19 pandemic and a technology that is clearly capable of revolutionising our lives (and is doing so already). The pandemic has already shown many new opportunities and improved models of industry and behaviour thanks to digital. In this third article of this series, I argue that its utility is not constrained by available technology, but by its societal acceptance and adoption, and political courage. We have the technology, but are we ready to use it positively and creatively to transform society? Our political structures and the old social contract, which they evolved to support, are likely to prove no longer fit-for-purpose in the post-pandemic, post-Brexit, post-oil, and hopefully post-reckless globalisation, world. This article is a call to action to the British public to help co-create a new, digital age-appropriate social contract!

Indoors while the sun shines

April 2020 in the UK was the sunniest on record. Sadly, most other current records, whether related to the economic crash, workers furloughing or the death toll in peacetime, remain tragic. Most Brits enjoyed little of the sunny outdoors. The public here has proven strikingly compliant to the Government’s lockdown and social distancing guidelines. Yet as the sunny weeks continue, frustration and financial pressures are likely to intensify, and tempt more individuals out of their homes into danger. What then?

The UK’s lockdown exit strategy, a phased approach to reopening workplaces, schools, gyms, services and shops, is still being formulated. As part of the exit deal, we are likely strongly to be encouraged to accept new obligations, such as accepting an increased level of social surveillance, maintaining social distance, wearing masks and regularly submitting to testing.

An instrumental element of any exit strategy from lockdown will be digital technology, such as mobile tracking apps and behavioural modelling. I discuss such specific solutions in more detail in another article in this series. But as we are individually deciding whether or how to comply with the exit strategy, what apps to download, or what information to disclose, it’s worth reminding ourselves that this technology is only useful if it is accepted, trusted and actively adopted in our community. We are about to embark on a perilous social experiment.

Underlying our collective response to covid-19 is our complex social contract, which inter alia reflects the explicit and tacit agreements of individuals to submit some of their freedoms to authority, in exchange for the state’s protection and for the greater good of society.

So how much are we willing to trade our privacy and freedoms for safety and protection of the state? What should the role of government be in such a time of national crisis? What is the optimal balance between directive and persuasive strategies? In a totalitarian country, like China, or in highly collectivist cultures such as Singapore or South Korea, individuals (usually) accept that remote and opaque decisions about their lives and liberties are made outside of their direct influence, and then enforced by their governments. In the liberal democratic tradition, our social contract is complex, nuanced and a product of generations of sensitive negotiation.

This has been the playground for philosophers, politicians and lawyers for hundreds of years. The inherent tension between natural and legal entitlement has been argued over in Europe since ancient times, becoming a keynote of the Enlightenment. In C17th/C18th, the likes of Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, produced seminal discourses that still keep PPE students debating into the early hours (does anyone else remember that pre-pandemic, PPE stood innocently for Philosophy, Politics and Economics?).

The classical liberal approach in Anglophone societies, with the Magna Carta embedded firmly within our DNA, promotes guaranteed property and civil rights, while limiting the powers of government. No sovereign or government is above the rule of law, or should act outside of the strict mandate loaned to them by those whom they govern.

But as Richard Epstein, a professor of law and himself an influential liberal at the Hoover Institute points out, this theory, like most socio-political constructs, does not hold fully in times of national emergencies, such as war, famine or an epidemic [i] . It is not anti-liberal in such circumstances to propose, respectively, general conscription, centralised food rationing and distribution and epidemiological tracking and tracing, all for the public good.

Hobbes, Locke and many others held often contrasting perspectives of human nature, of the nature of morality, and defined their idealised civil society in distinct ways. One common philosophical foundation is that a nation, as per Edmund Burke’s characterisation, is ultimately a moral structure, a group of people with a shared moral code. A nation’s social contract, explicitly defined in constitutions or otherwise, or implicit through tradition and common law as it is in Britain, describes these agreed moral principles.

For a country to prosper, adapting the former Chairman of General Electric Jack Welch’s famous maxim, the social contract needs to be fit-for-purpose for the world as it is, not as it was or as we wish it to be.

I argue that it is currently not fit-for-purpose in today’s digital age, and that the pandemic, as well as other social dynamics and political developments in Britain, such as Brexit, have brought this to a head. The agreed social contract can also only be stable and effective, when it is underpinned by mutual trust between individuals and their government, and crystal clarity of what our civic freedoms and obligations are. It demands unambiguous communication at every level.

If an individual is proud and clear about their place in the society, and trusts its agencies, there is much less need for the traditional command-and-control policies of sticks and carrots to drive compliance and behavioural congruence in the public. A sense of community, so lucidly demonstrated regularly during the pandemic, becomes the driving national energy.

Britain’s (still) relatively high level of trust in our politicians, civil servants and scientific advisers, and our steadfast loyalty to the NHS, has so far underwritten the widespread compliance with the Government’s lockdown and social distancing guidelines. An anti-lockdown protest organised in Trafalgar Square last week attracted just seven (yes, seven) slightly embarrassed activists. Though some more significant rallies are being planned for this weekend, our anti-lockdown revolution to-date can be described as marginal and anaemic.

By contrast, in the USA, a country with over a 1.3 million confirmed coronavirus cases and 80 thousand deaths, armed protesters took to the streets. In Lansing, Michigan, dissenters draped confederate flags, swastikas and nooses inside the state capitol building. Walmart employees across several states have stopped asking customers to wear its freely available PPE in fear of being assaulted. A security guard was tragically shot dead in Michigan because he asked a young woman to leave the store as she was not complying with the governor’s lawful executive order that all customers and employees must wear face coverings inside stores. Even in usually peaceful Hawaii, violent clashes with the police are taking place.

Our Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock, has appealed to the British that social distancing and the wearing a face covering in public are our new civic duties. Brits are likely to comply. In much of today’s America, self-centred individualism Trumps (pun intended) John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, where individuals can do what they will, unless they risk harming others. In social science, the inability of the state to rein in harmful behaviours is the classic issue of moral hazard, where the cost of irresponsible behaviour is largely borne by others. Left unchecked, this encourages increasingly risky behaviours that exponentially can spiral out of control, like the virus itself. Community self-control thus needs to be firmly backed by pragmatic top-down interventions when needed.

Trust should also not become a restraint from criticism where this is due. Public Health England (PHE), for example, has proven itself incompetent in the face of the pandemic. It did not engage adequately either with local authorities and communities, or with the NHS. Its guidance on PPE had been late and confused. In early March, its failure to organise adequate virus testing capacity forced the Government to abandon its testing-and-tracing approach, as adopted successfully by other countries such as South Korea. Many of our most vulnerable were thus removed from hospital beds to care homes without being testing first. This has directly led to many thousands of deaths. Sharon Peacock, its director, when asked later by Greg Clark, the chairman of a House of Commons committee, why PHE had not partnered with private sector laboratories to expand its public testing capacity (as did South Korea) replied merely, “That’s a good question!”.

Similarly, our national loyalty and deep gratitude to, and trust in, our NHS front-line workers, should not prevent us from challenging some of the religious zealotry in many political circles around the NHS as an institution. NHS, as an influential inside observer recently shared with me, sadly continues to be in “bureaucratic shambles”. It needs urgent fixing.

In these drastic times, our society needs to consider drastic measures. There should not be any sacred cows. The social contract is no longer just a philosophical concept to be theoretically debated in student common rooms. It has tragically become a matter of life and death, our collective wellbeing as a society, our empowerment to redefine our social norms and rules, and our ability to effectively leverage digital technology to help us emerge from this pandemic.

No solutions, only trade-offs

Most expect that when there is a clear and present danger of widespread death and suffering, a strong government armed with appropriate and temporary emergency measures should step up and protect us. It is during such existential threats, that Cicero’s maxim “salus populi suprema lex esto” (the welfare of the people should be the supreme law) becomes the mandate.

What is now playing out in our society and the media is a skirmish over a common consensus of what these “appropriate and temporary emergency measures” should be, and for how long these are needed. Liberals are particularly sensitive to Milton Friedman’s observation that “nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program”. They readily point out to numerous precedents.

Let’s first consider appropriate. Few deny that the mandatory lockdown of the entire population, save for very specific exceptions such as front-line workers, has been a great success in ‘flattening the curve’ of infection. It made sense to most as an emergency, short term measure. The bounded rationality of the British public, assailed with so much uncertainty and contradictory advice in time of crisis, prepared them to lend their trust to the Government and allow some of their basic civil liberties to be curtailed. Most people around the world have followed similar guidance from their governments.

Yet such an enforced, rather than voluntary, isolation becomes an illiberal imposition, when individuals judge it to have exceeded the temporary criterion. It disempowers individuals from voluntarily assessing and taking a risk. The personal burden of reduction or elimination of income, limited social interaction, sport and other pleasurable or beneficial activities, for many people now outweighs the risk of them contracting covid-19.

Thomas Sowell famously said that in economics, there are “no solutions, only trade-offs” . Every intervention has a cost, a risk, and an estimated benefit. Politics, and management, is primarily the art (note, not the science!) of balancing these trade-offs.

Digital social platforms and apps have had a questionable track record. Most are aware of the risk of our personal data being hijacked by opaque actors for their nefarious purposes. Our digital footprints can follow us throughout our lifetimes. That joint rolling snap taken during freshers’ week, can disqualify one from a job shortlist in twenty years’ time.

In totalitarian regimes, governments treat personal data as a state asset. They exercise the authority to implement coercive and intrusive policies such as obliging people to wear tracking bracelets or analyse your credit card records to confirm your movements. The ePrivacy Directive and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of data protection and privacy in the digital age, embedded into our law by the Data Protection Act 2018, have gone some way to eliminate many egregious practices and redefined our personal rights here in the UK. But as a society, we understandably remain highly protective of our privacy, and suspicious of the creeping surveillance capitalism so passionately and articulately portrayed by Shoshana Zuboff in her recent magnum opus [ii] .

Many people are conscious that invisible forces are continually trying to modify our preferences and actions. Behavioural economics now firmly steers our daily lives. One of the fathers of libertarian paternalism, the concept of nudging people to make ‘better’ decisions, the economist Richard Thaler from the University of Chicago, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2017. Previously shadowy nudge units have since entered increased public awareness. We are aware of big data mining, customer insight and digital marketing teams of global corporations. We read of similar political units, such as the Behavioural Insights Team, now part of our Cabinet Office. Many of these and of course big data teams in academia, such as Oxford University’s Big Data Institute (BDI), now find themselves in the spotlight of our collective focus on the covid-19 pandemic.

What many people do not realise, is that exemptions from regulatory safeguards during public health emergencies, such as the current pandemic, are already written into EU and national laws. EU governments and institutions have the lawful authority to use individuals’ data for the public good, providing that this is proportionate to the threat and temporary, i.e. this should last no longer than the threat itself. This is rational, even in a liberal democracy. But again, to keep the vox populi onside, any such emergency use of our private data needs to be sensitively communicated, and some broad public consensus first explicitly secured. This is a political, rather than a technological or legal challenge. It is also one critical trade-off that we need to discuss much more overtly as a society. We have yet to begin addressing this seriously in this pandemic.

The dialogue on data protection has to-date been between the tech giants, and the EU politicians, lawmakers and bureaucrats, who are naturally hostile to their growing global influence and power. The public, save for some self-interested pressure groups, have largely been left out of the debate. Cross-industry security, privacy and data protection legislations give Brussels a huge stick to beat the tech giants with and keep them in line. But I argue that it may be time now to consult the public about what the optimal trade-off between privacy and data protection should be. Many people have been severely impacted by the pandemic, and many have lost loved ones to it. An increased level of state intrusion into our lives as a temporary measure, evidently for our safety and wellbeing, is likely to be acceptable by many. We won’t know until we ask.

Many economists argue that a freer sharing of personal data would have a significant economic benefit. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) formally estimates realistic marginal gains of 2.5% of GDP. The resource based view sees data as having distinctive properties that make it an especially attractive competitive asset, whether at corporate or national level, such as its ability to simultaneously support multiple users and that it does not deplete with use. Its aggregation opens up opportunities for more accurate forecasting, modelling and algorithm building, in short for much smarter, evidence-driven public policy and investment.

The industrial society imposed social order through the allocation of patronage, work and resources. The information society, its detractors claim, seeks to impose collective order through monitoring and deeply influencing individual human experience. Zuboff defines this as “a global system of behaviour modification that threatens human nature in twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth”.

Perhaps her claim that civil liberties are being eroded by an increasingly invasive surveillance technology is correct and yesterday’s sci-fi dystopia is indeed becoming our reality. Is this a new normal that we should accept to escape the pandemic or will the cure in the longer term prove more socially destructive than the disease?

Calibrating an exit strategy

To facilitate any sensible exit from lockdown, we need a combination of antigen testing (to show whether you are currently infected) and antibody testing (to show if you’ve had coronavirus in the past, and are thus likely to have developed increased immunity). The former is currently available in the UK only for front-line workers and some high risk people with covid-19 symptoms. The latter is not yet available at all.

The ideal scenario, where everyone can home test themselves instantly on a daily basis in a non-invasive way, analogous to the self-monitoring of blood glucose by diabetics, is likely to be many months away. Saliva sampling, being investigated at Rutgers University in New Jersey and elsewhere, would be even more comfortable than pricking a finger with a lancet to obtain a blood sample for glycaemic control.

Until a reliable vaccine is universally available, a cautious exit strategy from the current lockdown would mandate individuals to self-test themselves every time before leaving home. The results should be automatically synchronised with the movement tracing app. So not only would self-testing give the individual a ‘digital day pass’ to engage safely with the community, but should it prove positive, it would automatically trigger an alarm and automated tracing of all recent close contacts. We are very far from such a simple, closed-loop digital monitoring regime. The tracking and tracing app, which is being trialled on the Isle of Wight, for example, is based on self-reporting of symptoms, which is obviously its Achilles’ heel, as many infected people remain asymptomatic for several days (and many forever).

I will discuss tracking apps and other technologies in more depth in upcoming articles. Here, I am merely raising the issue of what we are likely to accept as part of the post-pandemic social contract. For example, the active and reliable uptake of any tracking solution needs to be over 60% of the population to be useful. Trials will show how this mass-scale prisoner’s dilemma will play out. They may reveal to what extent self-testing, tracking and tracing could be left to individual choice, and what behaviours will need to be commanded by law. Again, we should already be discussing the idea that some impositions on our privacy may need to be temporarily mandated. The Government has so far shied away from this public debate.

To keep it proportional to the threat, the self-test driven digital day pass above could also be made mandatory only before the individual is allowed to enter a high-risk environment, such as a hospital, school, care home or public transport. Trials and public consultation should also propose how this regime should best deal with exceptions, such as some elderly people and others who find themselves unable to self-test or unable to use smartphone apps.

It is obvious that the pandemic would be much more manageable if we had some way of micromonitoring every individual, their symptoms, movements, behaviour and social contexts. The point is that we have! The universal rollout of such monitoring is not constrained by technology, but by the social acceptance of its implications. My simple digital day pass idea would immediately lead to a two-tiered society. Scientifically rational stratifications based on the above attributes, are likely to be overwhelmed by our cultural sensitivities around racism, ageism and other forms of discrimination. No matter how well-intentioned such policies may be, to make them socially tolerable would require an unprejudiced public dialogue and a significant shift in our common interpretation of our British social contract.

A new preparedness

Rahm Emanuel, a former mayor of Chicago and President Obama’s adviser during the 2008 financial crunch, has recently reapplied his Churchillian “never let a crisis go to waste” catchphrase to the covid-19 pandemic. Emanuel said recently on ABC’s This Week on Sunday, “Start planning for the future. This has to be the last pandemic that creates an economic depression. We're going to have more pandemics, but this has to be the last economic depression.”

The world was far too slow and disjointed in its effort against the H1N1 flu outbreak in 2009 and Ebola some five years later. We have not improved much since. We thus need to address many underlying structural weaknesses as a society, if we are to become better prepared for the next global health threat. Most obviously, we need to develop systemic agility to rapidly respond to such threats. This implies putting in place action-ready procedures, resources, decision making processes, communication channels, research and testing facilities and production (drugs, PPE, medical equipment) capacity. The core NHS and other critical entities need to be renewed.

As I already proposed in a previous article, the response structures emerging from covid-19 should persist and be regularly rehearsed for any future pandemic, as well as any nuclear, chemical and bioterrorism threats. In October 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security led a pandemic simulation exercise called Event 201 together with the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This modelled a fictional coronavirus pandemic. They concluded that, “Experts agree that it is only a matter of time before one of these epidemics becomes global - a pandemic with potentially catastrophic consequences.” Our entire society should drill for such eventualities, similar to Japan’s coastal communities rehearsing tsunami preparedness. There is also no reason why individuals should not stock approved PPE and other helpful resources at home. During WWII, most citizens were issued with gas masks.

It is not that the covid-19 pandemic has proven particularly deadly that should trigger us critically to revisit our attitude to, and investment in, national preparedness. In fact, at some 34,000 deaths (at the time of writing) in the UK, covid-19 is not significantly more deadly that some resent outbreaks of winter flu. Allowing for undiagnosed and the asymptomatic carriers, probably 99% of carriers will survive covid-19 disease.

The point is that covid-19 highlights our persistent vulnerability to new viruses and threats. Imagine if the initial reports from China and Italy, which suggested a death rate of up to 15%, similar to the Spanish flu of 1918/1920, held true. As the spread of infection was increasing exponentially, this extrapolated to death rates that would have overwhelmed every healthcare system in the world. The Spanish flu is likely to have infected about one in four of the world’s population and resulted in some 50 million deaths. There is no reason to suppose that our next global zoonotic viral threat could not prove even more virulent.

Increasing availability of sophisticated technology, such as synthetic biology and genome editing, makes deadly pathogen production by state actors or terrorists more likely. This includes engineering existing pathogens, including coronaviruses, more dangerous and even reverse engineering known deadly viruses which thankfully we have defeated, such as smallpox. Blueprints for such nefarious activities are regularly published in scientific literature, and discussed in chat rooms and conferences.

It should be noted that pre-pandemic, biothreat preparedness in many democracies had recently weakened. The Trump administration had recently shut down the National Security Council’s directorate on biodefence, and reduced funding for biosecurity preparedness and the lab capacity needed to test for it. We should now weaponise the crisis to fix this, and make our public health and social care systems, and our emergency and front line services, more robust and resilient.

A new civil society

Across the globe, many autocratic regimes, such as China, Hungary, Russia, Turkey, Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines, have brazenly seized covid-19 as an opportunity, through pseudo-temporary emergency laws and decrees, to grab more power and enforce tighter political control on its citizens. This includes unlimited coercion and surveillance, postponing elections, shutting down critical media and persecuting journalists. Nationalists have singled out some minorities as scapegoats, or even living biohazards, as in the case of India, where the Hindu dominated parliament has disproportionally targeted Muslims with blame for the outbreak. As a result, Muslims are being turned away from some hospitals and are being attacked by mobs on the streets.

Millions of dollars are being corruptly handed over to cronies and friendly entities under the cover of the pandemic response. Even rudimentary checks and balances have been largely suspended in the emergency. Russia and China fund aggressive international disinformation campaigns through the traditional and social media. Covid-19 is an opportune present for corrupt tyrants and despots.

In our liberal and thankfully less corrupt democracy, Georg Hegel’s model of a rational civil society and its underlying order is also now under some serious scrutiny. Liberals maintain that only individuals should assess whether they would prefer a risk of illness to the certainty of lost opportunities and income. Different individuals should make different decisions, based on their own unique circumstances.

Sensible trade-offs between different freedoms and obligations are critical. For example, granting the freedom for individuals to flex lockdown rules needs to be balanced by individuals having the right rigidly to follow these instead. So once a critical mass of people recommence using public transport, individuals need to be protected from being coerced by their employers to do the same, even when they deem this unsafe. Policies around extended furloughing and job protection will need to be appropriately refined, and the public ought to be consulted throughout.

The character of government is also under scrutiny. In terms of logistical leadership, “central planning has failed miserably in this pandemic. The last thing we need is more of it”, according to Professor Philip Booth, Senior Academic Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs, who cites its suboptimal sourcing and distribution of PPE. Indeed, centralised models of command and control are not the most efficient and responsive for managing a fast-evolving pandemic, as I have already argued in my last article. However, it is only at the national level that we currently have the concentrated political power and resources to roll out strategic, structural changes.

So to create a new, safer and prosperous civil society, we now need to force the Government to debate and then agree on how we should distribute decision making, power and resources, and how the modes of engagement from individuals, through their communities, up to the national level and beyond, should pragmatically function. A new, redistributive democratic consensus.

While some may not quite be ready yet to start organising a people’s army and seizing control of the state, liberal revolutionaries need collectively to get off their armchairs and start loudly demanding this. We need to evolve a fresh, innovative governance paradigm, which is fit-for-purpose in today’s digitally-enabled, globalised, interdependent, and hyperconnected world, with all the opportunities and risks that this brings. We should not wait in some vain hope for the Government to lead this work. Carpe diem! A popular movement for renewal, even ultimately public dissent like the 'Extinction Rebellion', should now force this agenda.

In summary

A reinvigorated social contract should encapsulate our vision for a sustainable, prosperous and fair society, and explicitly address the many fundamental challenges that humanity faces such as climate change, our ageing society, creaking institutions, and broken health and financial systems.

Britain is now uniquely positioned to synchronise the Brexit, pandemic response, and environmental strategies, and our post-pandemic economic policy, to drive a coherent vision of a newly independent Britain, with its renewed purpose, clarity of its citizens’ freedoms and obligations, and of Britain’s chosen position in the world. This new social contract needs to be co-created with us, the people, and based on transparent information and mutual trust.

Without this moral, legal and ethical framework empowering Britain to become a more innovative, technology-enabled, productive, resilient and self-sufficient society – as well as more empathetic and sharing – we shall remain unprepared as a society to thrive in the increasingly threatening, digitised and complex world.

i. “Playing Politics With Coronavirus”, Richard A. Epstein, Hoover Institution, 09 March 2020

ii. “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Science”, Shoshana Zuboff, Profile Books, 2019

Which science exactly?

piotr.ney@hotmail.co.uk (Piotr Ney) — Wed, 13 May 2020 22:01:58 GMT

Lessons from a Pandemic: 2. Which science exactly?

[London, 13 May 2020]

I hope that, post pandemic, the lessons learnt from this pandemic will persist and a global, shared architecture of advanced digital competencies is permanently established to support more effective collaboration, innovation and a quicker response to better defeat future pandemics, biothreats and other worldwide catastrophes.

In the previous article, I praised the rapidly self-organising, open and global collaboration of scientists to fast-track therapeutics and vaccines to the market. In this second article of this series, I argue that our Government’s claim that Britain’s centralised response to the pandemic is purely science-led is dangerous nonsense. It shrouds Government policy with a cloak of false legitimacy and it inhibits us from taking individual responsibility for our safety, and from openly debating some critically relevant societal issues and trade-offs.

Beyond the smoke and mirrors

The UK’s lockdown exit strategy, a phased approach to reopening workplaces, schools, gyms, services and shops, is still being formulated. Although the Government admits that we are facing an unknown antagonist, we are assured that each policy step is carefully calibrated in line with latest scientific advice. We are in turn obliged to play our part, such as accepting an increased level of social surveillance, maintaining social distance, wearing PPE or submitting to testing. Yet the claim that our national response to the pandemic is some finely refined scientific endeavour does not hold up to any serious scrutiny.

We are trying to understand and tackle covid-19 through a complex blend of inductive interpretation and hypothetico-deductive scientific methods. The first involves us harvesting as much of the quantitative and qualitative data, which could be significant, as we can. As a researcher myself, I have learnt to always collect a wider-than-first-assumed scope of data, to be on the safe side. Subsequent inductive analysis often shows up surprising patterns and correlations with data sets outside the boundary of what we thought would be the core data. Could covid-19 mortality be linked to an individual’s diet or the weather? Probably not, but let’s throw in the data anyway!

This data is then tagged, coded and structured into meaningful categories and relationships. Insights and sometimes surprising correlations start emerging, and are then validated through further research, for example to determine which correlations are in fact causations. This is a pure grounded theory-driven scientific approach, which was popularised by two sociologists, Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss, and derived from their study of dying hospital patients in 1965.

But we are not exploring covid-19 in a theoretical vacuum. Science already has much experience of disease control and specifically of hundreds of other coronaviruses. These are already a scientifically well-researched family of pathogens, which range from those that cause mild to moderate upper-respiratory tract illnesses, like the common cold, through to recent ones that emerged from animal reservoir spillover events, and can cause acute and widespread illness and death.

SARS coronavirus (SARS-CoV) emerged in 2002, followed by the Middle East (MERS) respiratory syndrome caused by the MERS-CoV coronavirus in 2012. We have sequenced the DNA of covid-19 and now harness the power of bioinformatics, cloud supercomputing and digital collaboration around the world, to mass screen and identify possible antigens. Based on our extant knowledge and experience, scientists can rapidly test hypotheses and focus further research in directions that offer most hope. Hundreds of drugs are being explored or already trialled and more than 4,000 peer-reviewed research articles have already been published this year.

Yet some fundamental questions about covid-19 remain a mystery. According to the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), “We remain pretty much in the dark regarding the nature of immunity, the pathogenesis of disease, optimal diagnostic tests, its transmission pathways and duration, and appropriate prevention, treatment and vaccines”.

Thus we are in the middle of a global research race. Insights from the field, the grounded research data sets, which tell us what is happening in real life, are blended with our existing scientific knowledge and hypotheses, the what should be happening in theory, and comparisons and contrasts between the two analysed.

An example challenge of critical importance to any pandemic response policy, is an understanding of why individuals respond to the covid-19 virus in such vastly different ways. Many presumed correlations are being overturned. Counterintuitively, asthma sufferers do not appear to be among the most vulnerable, even though covid-19 typically causes respiratory tract infection. Even more peculiarly, tobacco smokers seem globally to be considerably safer from severe covid-19 infection, even as their handling and smoking of cigarettes should in theory make them more susceptible to absorbing a higher viral load. There are several possible explanations, a key one being nicotine’s binding to angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) cell-member proteins, which restricts covid-19 from doing the same, thus blocking its access to cells. Nicotine may also help in some patients by helping to limit cytokine storms, hyperactive immune responses.

Terabytes of complex, heterogeneous data are thus being generated and analysed globally. Extensive data mining and AI-powered insight tools churn this data in our shared global cloud 24/7, to identify patterns of infection spread, comorbidities, correlations with demographics, population densities and movements, and thousands of other significant factors.

The core public message is that we collectively need to reduce the R number and "flatten the curve". The magical R is the effective reproduction number, which indicates an infectious disease’s capacity to spread. It simply shows the average number of people that one infected person will in turn infect. Thus if R is kept below 1, the disease will in time peter out in the population, at a rate inversely proportional to R. For example, if R=0.9, it would take four months to drive the number of daily infections from the current 20,000 down to a more manageable 2,000. If R=0.75, it would take just seven weeks. Without a reliable national testing programme to validate it, even Sir Patrick Vallance, UK’s Chief Scientific Advisor, admits that it’s a rough estimate derived from a variety of sometimes conflicting and unreliable data, and mathematical modelling.

Even allowing for its questionable reliability, it may be useful to adopt one clear headline indicator such as the R number to drive behavioural congruence in the public. So far so good. We agree to accept our shared goal. But how do we collectively get there? The Government’s messaging on this is far from clear. Daily media briefings have become a distracting blend of General Melchett style bombast, platitudes, hyperboles, pseudo-scientific concepts and much smoke and mirrors. As Jeremy Warner wryly observed recently in The Telegraph, hardly a Tory-bashing title, what we are seeing from our Government is salesmanship in lieu of leadership. The recent lockdown exit roadmap presented by the Prime Minister (PM) is so full of inconsistencies and logical holes, that one can drive a fleet of ambulances and hearses through it.

Holding the data up to scrutiny

The British public are not given access to any meaningful meta-analysis of what specific scientific data the Government is basing its guidance on. SAGE, together with several other acronyms and individual experts, provides scientific and technical advice to Government, which it is not bound to follow. There are some obvious tensions and gaps between what “the science” advises and what our executive branch then announces and decrees.

The trouble is that we can’t scrutinise these trade-off discussions between the experts, public servants and politicians, as these are happening behind closed doors. SAGE and Cabinet covid-19 briefings are conducted in obsessive secrecy, outside of any possible challenge by Parliament or any peer review by a wider circle of experts and scientists, let alone full public scrutiny.

Jeremy Hunt, the former Health Secretary, said “At fault is a systemic failure caused by the secrecy that surrounds everything that SAGE does”. So why such secrecy? I empathise that many people could be willing to take the Government strictly on trust, but there is an army of people in this country and beyond, me included, who could help to validate the underlying data and the insights and assumptions derived therefrom, and collectively hold the Government accountable.

Well beyond infection and mortality reporting and the R number, the public needs to understand the specific data that justifies the various elements of the pandemic public policy. What specific scientific evidence is there for lifting individual restrictions or recommending specific actions?

Examples there are plenty. The Government has announced that from today, higher fines for people who break social distancing rules will be enforced. Two people from different households in England can meet outdoors, for example in a park, as long as they stay more than 2m apart. Why not three people? Why not 1.5m providing they wear face coverings? It’s reasonable that simple and unambiguous directives may need to be given to those who just want and need these, but a sizeable segment of the population should not be too intellectually stretched if the Government were to share the underlying evidence.

Domestic helpers and childminders are allowed to enter our homes every day, but personal care services, such as hairdressers, will not be allowed to reopen on 1st June, because despite precautions such as disinfecting their work station between clients and using PPE, “there is a higher risk of virus transmission”. What’s the evidence? Garden centres are allowed to re-open in England and Wales, but they are accepting card payments only. Show me the evidence for the additional risk of handling cash. The list goes on.

Employers, unions, including the National Association of Headteachers (NAHT) and the National Education Union (NEU), as well as the public, are demanding clear, scientific published evidence and an explanation of how “the science” supports specific Government advice.

Vague and imprecise slogans such as “stay alert” have been criticised by Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister, and many other politicians of all shades as being meaningless in practice. “People are now justifiably confused”, said Steve Reicher, professor of social psychology at the University of St Andrews, and a behavioural adviser to the Government. Even SAGE reports that “”control the virus” is similarly an empty slogan without an indication of how to do this”. It then advises that, “For government communications to be effective in promoting adherence to guidance and in avoiding confusion, anxiety and distrust, they need to be clear, precise and consistent. This includes being behaviourally specific, i.e. advice as to who needs to do what in what situations, and what should not be done. Advice should be closely linked to action”.

Thank you SAGE, and yes please Boris!

Digital baloney

We are told to trust the guidance because it is science-led and based on reliable and objective evidence. This is baloney. Which science, exactly? Even within the Government’s inner circle, scientists (and remember that these represent a number of disciplines, such as epidemiologists, clinicians, statistical modellers, behavioural and social scientists) disagree on some of the key assumptions and decisions.

The world of science is, and always has been, a cacophonous scramble of competing egos, rival projects, and a constant struggle for prestige and to secure funding and resources. Life sciences particularly are an ongoing dialogue. Scientists explore, hypothesis, criticise the work of others, argue and, thankfully, often do collaborate with likeminded peers. It is natural that, given the wide range of backgrounds and experiences, different cognitive and heuristic biases, different ontological and epistemological perspectives, and their different work contexts (political, academic, funding), sensemaking by scientists even when presented with identical data would be different. Consensus in science advances through dialogue and a lot of conflict, to paraphrase Thomas Huxley, as beautiful hypotheses are regularly slayed by ugly facts.

The observation that while scientific data is universally shared, individual countries (even within the UK!) have embarked on sometimes very different response strategies, is in itself indicative that scientific evidence does not translate directly and rationally to policy making. Take Sweden, which made starkly different predictive assumptions based on the same data and chose not to follow a strict, UK-type lockdown policy. It now has a lower covid-19 death rate than the UK. Although its population density is lower than the UK’s, we still do not fully understand the explanation.

The Government’s response may be evidence-influenced, but it is essentially a political process to arrive at some acceptable, politically expedient consensus. I suspect that the belated rush to UK’s rigid lockdown was a product of trying to make up for the Government’s indecision and critical inaction during the first few weeks of the outbreak, when the infection footprint doubled in size with every three days of political prevarication, as well as its desire to show that it is now taking the pandemic seriously and (unhelpfully in contrast to Sweden) taking some decisive action.

The Government and its advisers find themselves firmly in the cognitive domain of bounded rationality. Rather than hard-evidence grounded and optimal assumptions and decisions, they necessarily make satisfactory ones. It does not help that only around 26 of 650 British MPs have a science degree, a striking 4%. Graham Medley, the chair of one of the critical SAGE subcommittees (SPI-M), has publicly commented on the “policy science gap”, with experts trying to explain key epidemiological concepts to ministers being met with “blank faces”. Our PM has a noble background in Classics. Matt Hancock, Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, studied PPE, as did his predecessor, Jeremy Hunt. In this context, sadly I do not mean that they studied the masks and gowns which are still in such short supply, that the Doctors’ Association (DAUK) are now demanding an open public inquiry to investigate the Government’s failure to provide front-line NHS and care staff with timely, adequate equipment.

It may also not help that at least 16 of the 23 known members of the secretive SAGE are directly employed by the Government and therefore have a clear potential conflict of interest and an ongoing concern over their personal career security.

Public policy is constrained by the complexity of the problem, unreliable data, conflicting scientific inferences, cognitive limitations and the time available to formulate it. It is then additionally and significantly modified by considerations such as its economic and budgetary impact, its fit within the Government’s overall policy agenda, assumptions about how the general public and other stakeholders (Parliament, employers, unions, the media, other countries) are likely to react and a huge dollop of pragmatism, such as how compliance with the prescribed restrictions could effectively be policed or otherwise enforced.

The eventual Government policy is thus a product of secret trade-off discussions and stakeholder consultations, much whiteboard satisficing, and political pragmatism. No wonder that so much smoke and mirrors are needed to present it with a straight face in the media briefings. New acronyms, such as the Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC), are additionally being created to give us an illusion of progress and additional security. And it’s all strictly based on science, trust us!

Enough! I invite our Government to give us the critical data and to trust us, the people, to understand it, its reliability and other evidential limitations, and then use our common sense to make informed decisions, appropriate to our particular circumstances.

The public also understands that as a society we have limited resources and structural limitations. If Britain cannot fully finance a specific intervention, or it would have an unbearable impact on our economy, or we cannot source sufficient kits for a testing-led strategy, because we have offshored much of our life sciences production to other countries and now have to rely on imports, let’s have these discussions in the open. People get it!

Devolution of the response

I also advocate the delegation of covid-19 monitoring and response to local and community levels. Britain could do a lot worse than reimport Thomas Jefferson’s belief in the power of the people when faced with partisan divisions, economic uncertainty, and an external threat. Jefferson, a champion of individual liberty, was a great believer of delegated power. Communities when given accurate information, and adequate resources and support, are best placed to formulate their own responses, which take into account their unique circumstances.

Centralised, top-down planning disempowers individuals. At a time of crisis, it is often simply not responsive, agile and focused enough to control the dynamics, such as the virus spread, on the ground. It doesn’t make much sense imposing exactly the same covid-19 lockdown exit strategy on the Cotswolds as on London, or even individual communities within it. Well informed communities and individuals need to take responsibility for local responses.

This devolution needs to begin by reporting the R number, and other key indicators and trends, at the community level, not as a meaningless national aggregation. The R number is not an actionable insight at the national level. It masks huge geographical, demographical and contextual variations, such as disproportionately high levels of infection in care homes.

Mark Woolhouse, a professor from the University of Edinburgh and a former adviser to Tony Blair’s government during the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak, says of the R number that “it is a very, very crude” indicator. Greg Clark MP, the Chairman of the Science and Technology Select Committee, agrees that the national R number is largely irrelevant. A panel of experts led by Sir David King, the Government’s former Chief Scientific Adviser, set up as an alternative to SAGE, is calling for pandemic modelling and response calibrations to be performed at local levels.

As we enter into the exit phase, this makes perfect sense. Different towns and communities are likely to peak and experience further waves of the pandemic at different times and to different degrees. The UK needs a local R number based approach, within the framework of the Government’s national guidelines, and supported by centrally distributed resources. Yet when challenged to provide regional and contextual R numbers at a recent media briefing, Professor Stephen Powis, the National Medical Director for England, told the press on behalf of the Government that this was not possible. When the PM was asked to publish the scientific evidence and advice by the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer only yesterday in Parliament, Boris adroitly sidestepped the question with a vague “in due course” affirmation.

Which science, which data?

Let’s take data quality as the one of the most obvious indications that policy is far from being science-led. Several leading experts, such as Professor Tim Spector, a genetic epidemiologist at King’s College London, estimate that around two thirds of covid-19 infections are not diagnosed and thence missed from the Government’s statistics. This side of widespread and statistically robust testing of the population, we simply do not know. A leading statistician, Sir David Spiegelhalter from Cambridge University, Professor Peter Horby, chairman of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (one of the several acronyms advising Downing Street), and several other renowned experts, have publically attacked the “extraordinary failure” of the Government to prioritise mass random testing that would give us an understanding of true infection spread and the proportion of asymptomatic carriers.

Without such fundamental facts, any decisions around the exit strategy are based largely on guesswork. Sir David himself estimates that based on an average death rate of 1%, it is possible that already 3.5m people are or have been infected with the virus. Even Jeremy Hunt has been quoted as saying that Britain’s decision to abandon mass community testing in early March, in stark contrast to testing-led containment strategies of say South Korea, will haunt us.

The Government’s tracking and tracing app, which is being trialled on the Isle of Wight, is based on self-reporting of symptoms, as opposed to test results, which implies it will give highly inaccurate results, as many infected can remain asymptomatic for days or even altogether (I will shortly discuss this app and other digital solutions in more detail in another article in this series).

Let’s move on the mathematical modelling that shapes the above (inaccurate and incomplete) data into actionable insights. The Government relies mainly on two predictive modelling teams. The first is from Imperial College London, headed by Professor Neil Ferguson, who has just recently retired from SAGE for, ahem, personal reasons. The second is the Oxford University team, led by its professor of theoretical epidemiology, Sunetra Gupta. Both are conceptually similar, and based methodologically on the same SIR segmentation (susceptible, infected, recovered) of the population. Yet there is a gaping disparity between the scenarios generated by these two models.

This does not surprise me. Such models churn multiple key variables, which are based on informed and validated assumptions, where the scientists can make these, but guesswork in many other cases. A slight modification in these variables does often have a significant impact on the outcome.

I hope that it won’t be ungallant for me to also point out that previous pandemic models produced by the Imperial team subsequently proved to be spectacularly wrong. They predicted up to 136,000 deaths from bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad cow disease. Government intervention largely based on their advice led directly to the largely unnecessary culling of millions of animals, the European Union (EU) in 1996 banning exports of British beef for ten years, and stigmatised Britain’s food safety reputation for a generation. Ferguson’s models later predicted that up to 65,000 people were going to die from swine flu in the UK in 2009, whereas while still grim, the true tally stopped at fewer than 500 deaths.

The Imperial College modelling methodology and underlying assumptions have one thing in common with most of the other models, in that these have never been formally peer reviewed by the scientific community. When Edinburgh University repeatedly ran the Imperial College model, each time with the same input set of data and parameters, the algorithm would produce different results. Why have these mathematical models upon which our lives depend, in a very real sense, not been placed in the public domain? An open source paradigm would allow these models to be scrutinised and improved.

To construct critical public policy, with public health, £-billions of cost to the Treasury, and millions of jobs at stake, on code that has not been externally validated and is allegedly “deeply riddled with bugs”, especially given the poor track records of the team cranking its handle, seems like breathtaking folly. The Government, in its panic to suddenly spring into action, desperately adopted these models as “the science” unquestioningly, and have been using these as a figleaf to justify its policy decisions ever since.

We are aware that even a slight difference in the estimated R number, for example, once multiplied across the whole UK population, will result in dramatically different pandemic profiles. Other key parameters, such as susceptibility (especially in correlation with demographic factors, such as age), infectivity, comorbidities, assumptions around causal pathways and how long those who have recovered from the infection are then protected against subsequent infection, and the reliability of the current throat/nose swab testing, are similarly unclear. A wide range of assumptions for each of these and other factors could be justified by different scientists.

The lack of robustness in predictive modelling is not unique to Britain. Thomas McAndrew, from the Massachusetts University, who monitors covid-19 modelling from various teams across the US, reports that some expert teams admit to their models being up to 80% the result of intuition and personal assumptions of the researchers, rather than auditable and validated evidence.

Having acknowledged the perils of overreliance on just one or two sources, SAGE now has engaged five distinct mathematical modelling teams, collectively named SPI-M, who estimate the national R number. Graham Medley, the chair of SPI-M, has admitted that, “At the moment, we’re having to do it by making educated guesswork and intuition and experience, rather than being able to do it in some semi-formal way”. SAGE then massages these ‘guesstimated’ numbers together to arrive at one headline number to present to the Government.

Some integration of models and metamodeling, at the UK and international levels, is also being currently pursued. A Royal Society initiative led by Professor Mike Cates of Cambridge University is connecting modelling teams across the UK into a collaborative network. This could produce more statistically reliable outcomes through averaging and challenging any egregious outliers, but does not inevitably compensate for poor data quality and untested assumptions.

Be careful what (data) you wish for!

The Government is already wrestling with some significant moral and ethical quandaries, such as how best to allocate and ration currently limited resources, such as PPE and testing kits, to the various cohorts in need. Similar trade-offs will need to be made if we are to flex restrictions for different cohorts of the population.

If science tells us one thing clearly, it is that some segments of people are at much more risk of severe illness and death from a covid-19 infection, compared to others. Thus if the pandemic exit strategy claims to be “science-led”, then logically stratifying the population and imposing differentiated restrictions and obligations, proportional to the risk profile of each cohort, would be a sensible, rational and evidence based policy.

Really? To remind ourselves, covid-19 discriminates in Britain mainly by;

sex (male mortality rates are typically more than 50% greater than for females);
age (the vast majority of deaths have been in people aged over 65 years);
ethnicity (black people in England are nearly twice as likely to die than white people, according to the ONS, even after accounting for age, deprivation, location and underlying health conditions);
wealth (a recent ONS study measured the mortality rate in the most deprived areas of England as 55 deaths per 100k population, compared to 25 deaths per 100k in the least deprived areas); and
obesity (overweight people hospitalised with covid-19 are 40% more likely to die than slimmer patients (it is thought that excess fat cells produce high levels of angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), which assists covid-19 to bind and infect cells).

So if we agree on a sensible, rational and evidence based policy, one that is truly risk and science led, our stratified, phased exit strategy needs to impose selective lockdown restrictions. It will need clearly to discriminate on the basis of sex, age, race, wealth and BMI. And promote smoking.

Good luck Boris with selling that to the British public!

However, political correctness should not restrain the Government from engaging in a sensitive, clear and culturally appropriate way, with these high-risk cohorts to spread awareness of their elevated risk, dispel misinformation, which is particularly rife in some of these communities, and provide such focused support, advice and resources as are required to ensure they are not falling behind the pandemic curve.

The flipside of this perspective is that an individual can justifiably argue that their rights and liberties are unfairly constrained by them being statistically lumped together with higher risk cohorts in a national, one-size-fits-all approach. It is a reasonable point, one that should not be simply dismissed as some reactionary frustration. Any limitation of liberty needs not only to be proportional to the societal benefit, but also proportional to the needs and wants of specific individuals. This implies that, say, young, healthy, white smokers should not be ‘penalised’ because the others, the old, overweight, black non-smokers are disproportionally contributing to keeping the national R number and death rates high.

There are no easy answers. But such ethical, moral and economic arguments are the foundation of our society and we all need to be engaged without prejudice in such uncomfortable, but essential dialogue.

A glimpse into the shadows

“On 4 May 2020 a 13-strong committee convened by former UK government Chief Scientific Adviser Sir David King discussed some aspects of the science behind the UK strategy in a two and a half hour meeting. Leading experts in public health, epidemiology, primary care, virology, mathematical modelling, and social and health policy, raised ideas and issues for consideration which we are pleased to share”. So reads the preamble to SAGE’s “COVID-19: what are the options for the UK?” report published just yesterday. It sets out “recommendations for government based on an open and transparent examination of the scientific evidence”. Better late than never!

Helpfully for the Government, the report shies away from addressing “the clear structural and procedural weaknesses that contributed to the current situation as we expect these to be addressed in a future inquiry” . Phew! Having bought the PM some time then, it then criticises the ambivalence of the Government’s ongoing response, with its primary objectives of “flattening the curve” and ensuring that the NHS front line is not overwhelmed. It calls additionally for an active suppression strategy.

It agrees with my and others’ opinion that national pandemic indicators are useless in practice, and “real time high quality detailed data about the pandemic in each local authority and ward area”, and a devolution of response calibration to communities is needed. It suggests that a devolved social distancing and surveillance policy, based on local prevalence estimates and a special focus on high vulnerability and institutional settings, is likely to more efficacious than a centralised approach and better support real-time policy making. It adds that, “communities and civil society organisations should have a voice, be informed, engaged and participatory in the exit from lockdown”.

The report criticises the Government’s selective and misleading use of data in its smoke and mirrors sessions, and urges all involved to adhere to the Code of Practice for Statistics. Blimey, to think that to-date I always trusted Downing Street to adhere to these as a matter of course! In case you have forgotten its details since you last read it, the Code stipulates trustworthiness (confidence in the people and organisations that produce the data), quality (validated data sources and analytical methods) and value (statistics that directly support our needs for information). “It is vital the public has trust in the integrity and independence of statistics and that those data are accurate, timely and meaningful”, notes the report.

In summary

Until reliable, safe and long-lasting vaccine is universally available (think years, not months), covid-19 is likely to become endemic in Britain, persisting at low levels, with periodic localised breakouts. According to the World Health Organization’s chief scientist, Soumya Swaminathan, it could take “four or five years” to bring covid-19 under control and the pandemic could “potentially get worse”. Even an effective vaccine may prove not to be the ultimate get out of jail free card, as the virus could in the meantime mutate into new and potentially even more deadly strains.

This means that covid-19 will remain a part of our daily lives for the foreseeable future, and it will continue to exert a profound impact on our freedoms, behaviours, jobs and the economy.

For society to subscribe to this new ‘normal’, we urgently need to openly debate the scientific evidence and political trade-offs, which are currently analysed in secrecy. If we understand the projected impacts (economic, social, individual) and benefits of the various lockdown strategies and restrictions, and their scientific justification, we can arrive at some societal consensus, a new social contract.

Disturbing choices will need to be made, such as how many people we are willing to let die to accelerate our exit strategy. The Government saying that its principal motivation during the pandemic is to minimise deaths is glaringly disingenuous. If this was the case, we would remain in full lockdown until the pandemic fully peters out. Every relaxation of restrictions results in incremental deaths. The truth is that for economic, social and a wide range of other reasons, our exit strategy needs to be based on an agreed “acceptable rate of deaths”. What Downing Street considers this to be, is currently the Government’s secret. Such trade-offs need instead to become enshrined in a clear, understood, and explicitly accepted public compact.

Transparency, the placing of evidence and justification of policy decisions under parliamentary and public scrutiny and discussing policy trade-off is a fundamental principle of the social contract that underpins our liberal democracy. A government that avoids such scrutiny under the pretext of being mandated by science, while constraining individual liberties, plays a very dangerous game. Sooner or later, it is likely to be exposed by a public inquiry. In the meantime, it risks burning through much of its political capital and legitimacy. Paul Goodman, writing today in conservativehome.com, already reports of an undertow of doubt about the Government’s competence washing through the Tory party. Ouch! As per Abraham Lincoln’s dictum, “you cannot fool all the people all the time”!

I will specifically discuss the social contract perspective on the Government’s current handling of the pandemic in the next article in this series.

Digital collaboration and preparedness

piotr.ney@hotmail.co.uk (Piotr Ney) — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 21:56:29 GMT

Lessons from a Pandemic: 1. Digital collaboration and preparedness

[London, 30 April 2020]

The tragic global outbreak of covid-19 has already taught us many severe lessons in pandemic preparedness and response. Rapid innovation and product TTM, distributed collaboration, infection modelling, additive manufacturing of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), AI-powered vaccine and anti-viral drug development and clinical trials, sharing of real-time research data, scenario modelling and contact tracing. All of these elements, and many more, harness the power and the universal ubiquity of digital. Digital technology is thus at the heart of our fight against the virus.

In the first article of this series, I discuss how digital technology is powering a positive step-change in global medical collaboration, and the need for our industry and society to establish an effective rapid response capability in time for future pandemics and biothreats.

Ground-up mobilisation, or ‘don’t wait for the politicians!’

SARS-CoV-2, the microscopic virus that causes covid-19, was first reported in Wuhan, a major travel hub in China, in December 2019. It parasitically invades the respiratory tract and already (at the time of writing this article) has resulted in over 230,000 deaths worldwide, with over 26,000 in the UK alone. Borders do not impede its relentless spread and there is yet no proven treatment or vaccine. The WHO officially declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic on 11 March 2020.

Perhaps the most telling revelation of this pandemic is not how quickly covid-19 has spread, China’s sadly predictable duplicity, or most governments’ slow initial reaction, but the lack of any preparedness blueprint and any meaningful global response coordination from the White House. Previous presidents facing epidemiological threats would quickly collar other world leaders to agree a joint, coherent international response. Barack Obama did this during the H1N1 (2009) and Ebola (2014) outbreaks. I do not wish to be political, but Donald Trump’s actions and messages to-date signal an abdication of US leadership in our global fight against the current pandemic.

To be fair to the White House, the WHO has itself failed to add much value or provide clear global coordination. The EU has also proved to be largely incompetent and impotent at this time of crisis. This is acutely illuminating in this year of Brexit. The EU in fact, acting under China’s diplomatic pressure led by Zhang Ming, China’s envoy to the EU, had been wickedly complicit in delaying and redacting its own report into China’s coronavirus disinformation campaign in fear of damaging trade relations. An analyst who contributed to the report, Monika Richter, was quoted in The Times this week, as saying “self-censoring to appease the Chinese Communist Party… will set a terrible precedent and encourage similar coercion in the future”.

As a natural libertarian, I am not unhappy with this catastrophic failure of top down governance and a lack of preparedness by those who are supposed to protect us, even as scientists have for years warned us that a global pandemic was likely. I hope that voters will systematically deal with this in due course through democratic processes. In the meantime, many actors in today’s fight against covid-19, such as scientists, NGOs, healthcare providers and manufacturers, have quickly learnt from this pandemic that they should not wait for government or EU directives. Many private and public entities have self-mobilised, and are pragmatically organising and collaborating across disciplines and borders, whether it is to locally produce PPE kit or repurpose production lines and distribution channels for urgently required medical equipment.

Such mass-scale self-organisation and collaboration would not be possible without the universal brokerage of digital technology and high-speed internet. Most actors currently default to teleworking, using reliable videoconferencing and collaboration tools such as Skype, Zoom, Webex, Microsoft Teams or Slack. Documents and other artefacts are produced efficiently and collaboratively across the globe. Research and statistical data is shared in real time. The outcome has been a much more efficient use of time and resources, a reduction of time-wasting commuting and its environmental impact, and faster decision making (virtual meetings can be organised much faster than physical ones). I sincerely hope that while some regular face-to-face contact may arguably be important for team social cohesion, this new digital workplace ‘normal’ will persist as the default into the future.

Rapid self-organisation and investment

Industry and academia have impressively risen to the challenge, especially here in Britain and the US. New research and innovation, with clear impact pathways, have been fast-tracked to deliver a significant contribution to the understanding and management of the pandemic. This includes rapidly founding multi-disciplinary and collaborative innovation alliances, and the massive upscaling of distributed production of ventilators, PPE, testing kits, antibody therapies and trial vaccines. While some still criticise the UK government’s initially hesitant response, extensive government funding has now been made available for the necessary digital enablers.

Nothing like this has ever been done before. Strategic, multi-$m collaborations typically take years to negotiate, not least because in normal times, intellectual property (IP) rights, licenses and commercial interests need first to be secured by the different parties. Regulatory approval is also typically a laborious and extended process. But these are not normal times. The FDA has already issued emergency approvals for dozens of covid-19 applications and trials. Covid-19 has catalysed the emergence of new models in global cooperation, regulations and investment.

One example is Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation a month ago launching its covid-19 Therapeutic Accelerator, led by the Foundation’s CEO, Mark Suzman and backed by Wellcome and Mastercard. The Accelerator has already secured funding of $125 million to screen a vast number of existing drugs and compounds, which had not been licensed for public use, to test whether they could work on covid-19, and eventually on other diseases.

The Accelerator work, led by the Rega Institute in Belgium, will review some 14,000 compounds sourced from several research and proprietary libraries of pharmaceutical companies, including Merck, Novartis and Pfizer, for efficacy against coronavirus. We thus potentially already could have an effective drug against covid-19. If taken forward post-pandemic, such a digitally-enabled collaboration model is likely to support research on broad-spectrum anti-coronavirus drugs and other panvirals. Libraries of unused drugs, or drugs and vaccines with parallel applications, could be shared and quickly researched with AI-powered analytical tools to identify candidates against new pathogens.

Mark Suzman admits that the current willingness to share proprietary compounds to this degree is “unprecedented”. New, open alliances are springing up like mushrooms after autumn rain. Existing ones are fast refocusing their resources on covid-19. Many are already engaged in salvaging and reformulating encouraging drugs to tackle influenza, coronaviruses, flaviviruses and alphaviruses, such as the federally funded Antiviral Drug Discovery and Development Center (AD3C), initially set up in 2014. The excellently named JEDI (Joint European Disruptive Initiative), funded by AXA Research Fund and Merck, is developing an open source library. On 1 May, it is launching the Billion Molecules against Covid19 Grand Challenge, which aims to screen billions of molecules with blocking interactions relevant to SARS-CoV-2, and rapidly develop treatments.

To illustrate that we could be quite close to an effective therapeutic, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has just announced that Gilead Sciences found positive results from early clinical trials of its antiviral remdesivir. Preliminary results demonstrate that patients given the drug exhibited a 31% faster recovery time from covid-19. This result needs to be taken with some initial caution; a separate, peer-reviewed study published in the Lancet, did not find any positive effect of the drug. Other antivirals, such as APN01 in China and Brilacidin from Innovation Pharmaceuticals, are also being tested.

Digitally enabled research

The rapid analysis of compounds, and indeed most biotechnology research, would not be possible without complex digital solutions. Recent advances in digital biosensors and computational approaches have introduced new monitoring and microscopy techniques. Digital holography has emerged as a powerful alternative to conventional bright-field microscopy. Virus, vaccine and antibody drug research, such as dielectric spectroscopy, and production processes, are underpinned by digital biosensors and complex analytical and modelling software. Biochemistry, molecular biology, medical science and research have all been revolutionised by digital.

The rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of bioinformatics develops complex, convergent approaches and tools to screen and analyse huge and complex sets of biological data. It powers today’s drug and vaccine research. Bioinformatics is critically dependent on the power of digital, and the active collaboration between microbiologists, IT experts, data scientists and mathematicians. Translation research in life sciences, that is applying existing knowledge to new areas, usually demands processing huge volumes of candidate data. Without powerful computers, smart software and mathematical modelling, analysing multiple protein sequences or screening millions of samples manually would simply be impossible.

To fast-track human trials, real-time monitoring and analysis needs to rapidly demonstrate the ongoing efficacy and safety profile of the vaccine or drug. In 2018, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) published technical guidance on ‘Designing and implementing an immunisation information system’ (IIS), covering the design and application of vaccines. Without a standardised, real-time, shared digital IIS platform, which supports rapid risk assessment and decision making, including prioritising interventions, any quick rollout of mass immunisation would be unfeasible and unsafe.

In the spirit of this new, open collaboration, I hope that such best-of-class systems, collaboration platforms and other digital enablers should be freely shared in the future, in the open source tradition and in the same way that proprietary compounds are currently being shared. This would equip every contributor with the best tools to help us collectively defeat covid-19 and future pandemics.

New paradigms in vaccinology

With some 80 vaccines already in train for human testing, new paradigms in vaccinology are emerging. Conventional vaccines teach the immune system to recognise pathogens, usually by introducing an inert or debilitated form of the virus. But there are new approaches to immunisation rapidly being trialled. For example, mRNA vaccines employ genetic code to instruct cells how to mount an immune response. They are a promising emerging alternative to conventional vaccines, because of their high potency, capacity for rapid development and potential for fast, low-cost manufacture and safe administration.

This is an exciting and fast developing area. For example, favipiravir already targets a protein universal to RNA viruses, such as Ebola and Lassa fever. Similarly, cidofovir, a nucleotide analog, has proven efficacious against DNA viruses such as herpes, polyoma, adeno and pox viruses. Several incumbents and start-ups are exploring the promise of mRNA vaccines, which target the messenger RNA to elicit an immune response. The great advantage of mRNA approach is that adapting the vaccine for specific coronavirus variations is rapid. Moderna, a 2010 start-up, has just created mRNA-1273, a candidate covid-19 vaccine, in merely six weeks.

Scientists have also long identified mRNA vaccines as potential immunisations against cancer, but until covid-19 appeared, there wasn’t much investment available into this technology, and how such vaccines could be produced on a massive scale at an affordable price. A tenacious industry rumour suggests that big pharmaceutical companies in US may have been actively suppressing some mRNA research since they have a significant conflict of interest. Why develop compounds that immunise against cancer, when there are huge profits to be made instead from chemotherapy and immune drugs for cancer treatment? Now under renewed scrutiny, hopefully big pharma will prove this rumour wrong and proceed at pace with research and significant investment into mRNA and other emerging technologies, beyond the immediate treatment of covid-19.

Reverse vaccinology, antigen discovery derived from a pathogen’s genome, is another example of an evolving vaccinology approach, critically dependent on the use of bioinformatics, cloud supercomputing and digital collaboration around the world between scientists, to sequence the DNA of the pathogen and identify possible antigens through mass screening.

Prior to the current pandemic, the WHO had already identified eleven diseases as pandemic risks due to their infectivity and lack of treatments. The WHO and other leading actors, such as the Gates Foundation, have typically focused on research against known and present pathogens and outbreaks. This is a reactive paradigm. Traditionally, there has been little focus and funding on preparedness against a future, as yet unidentified pathogen, i.e. a pre-emptive paradigm.

There are some exceptions, most notably the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), a public–private partnership founded in 2017 in the shadow of the earlier Ebola outbreak. With international funding commitments exceeding $650 million, CEPI’s initial focus was on three of the priority diseases on the WHO list; Lassa fever, Nipah and MERS. But it is now pivoting also to research new generations of vaccines against hypothetical pandemics and bioterrorism.

CEPI is coordinating the development of vaccines and aims to produce hundreds of millions of doses available within 12-18 months. It is already working on a fair, needs-based, global allocation system. CEPI’s anti-covid-19 programme is likely to cost some $3 billion. The Therapeutics Accelerator’s programme prioritises the distribution of treatments particularly to emerging economies, deemed most at risk from the pandemic. To produce 100 million doses by the end of 2020, it will need funding of $2.25 billion. Wellcome estimates that at least $8 billion of new funding will be needed for the global response to covid-19 to develop and make treatments universally available.

But to put this breathtakingly substantial investment into perspective, reliable sources quoted in Bloomberg.com estimate the likely cost to the global economy of covid-19 as between $2 trillion and over $4 trillion in lost output, depending on the length of its containment period.

The unknown unknowns

Many prominent scientists have long predicted a global pandemic caused by viral spillover from wild animals to humans. One, Dennis Carroll, set up a research programme under the Obama administration named PREDICT to identify significant zoonoses through biological analysis and predictive modelling. When the USAID founding for this dried up, he went on to create the Global Virome Project (GVP), a collaborative scientific project to discover and prevent yet unknown, future zoonotic viral threats.

In a 2018 paper in Science, Dennis and his team sagely warned us that “outbreaks of novel and deadly viruses highlight global vulnerability to emerging diseases, with many having massive health and economic impacts. Our adaptive toolkit—based largely on vaccines and therapeutics—is often ineffective because countermeasure development can be outpaced by the speed of novel viral emergence and spread”. In the last few weeks, he has gallantly resisted saying, “I told you so!”.

The GVP research highlights that there is likely to be up to 827,000 viruses with the potential to infect people. While most are likely to be benign, many thousands of these could be potentially deadly pathogens, some of which could additionally spread rapidly through human-to-human transmission. Many lethal virus families have already been identified, such as several highly virulent, haemorrhagic fever causing pathogens. Just one of these, Marburg, whose outbreak in Germany and Serbia was thankfully contained, proved to have a fatality ratio of up to nearly 90%.

This challenge is fuelling a welcome refocus of researchers and investment, catalysed by the covid-19 pandemic, from funding profit-conscious responses to specific pathogens such as MERS or SARS-1, to broad-spectrum, panviral drugs and vaccines, in readiness for future pandemics. Effective management of virus genome sequencing work globally requires a digitally enabled collaboration platform and long-term international investment, on the scale probably similar to the Human Genome Project, which had funding from multiple sources and was performed across some twenty universities and research centres in the US, UK, Japan, France, Germany and China.

Many scientists have been warning us of global threats likely to occur in our lifetimes. The response structures emerging from covid-19 should persist and regularly rehearse future pandemics and responses, simulating outbreaks and bioterrorism attacks. Digital technology allows complex scenario and risk modelling, and supports response evaluation and planning.

One of the key takeaways from the covid-19 pandemic, is how badly prepared our governments and societies were for this. We regularly perform drills, so that we know how to safely evacuate buildings in the event of fire. Governments regularly invest $-billions in conventional wargaming and cyber security/warfare. There simply has never been a similar scale of investment on rehearsing and preparing a coherent, rapid response to a sudden pandemic or other biothreats.

Let’s draw lessons from Japan’s tsunami preparedness. Its Meteorological Agency (JMA) employs a dense network of sensors and an information system that gives nationwide tsunami warnings within three minutes. Community level Disaster Preparedness offices continuously educate the population through community awareness and outreach programmes, and response drills. When required, they coordinate evacuations. Given the scale of human and economic destruction that covid-19 has inflicted upon us, surely we need to develop a similar, science-based and socially accepted rapid response capability, and repair or even replace the broken organisations that have so catastrophically failed to protect us, such as the WHO and several structures within the EU.

In summary

Digital technology allows us to rapidly and dynamically reconfigure our global capabilities and resources, as well as engage new paradigms, to tackle sudden discontinuities, such as an unforeseen pandemic. Digitalisation, automation and rapidly evolving information technologies have enabled new, cloud-based collaboration models to tackle such threats with agility. Our digital economy is definitely more resilient and better positioned today to fight a novel global threat, than the hard-coded, physically-oriented and rigid archetypes of previous industrial cycles.

Digital supports scientific research and drug development. It catalyses the seamless, 24/7 global collaboration of multiple, cross-disciplinary actors to fast-track outcomes, through co-creation, productivity and workflow tools. AI and robotics automate and greatly speed up routine tasks and processes. Open data sources, distributed ledger technology (blockchain) and advanced data mining techniques, allow us effectively and safely to share previously inconceivable volumes of clinical evidence and other information. And increasingly, such mass collaboration and data sharing are performed in the cloud, enabling actors who have limited up-front capital budgets or access to advanced computational capacity to readily join in.

Digital biosensors, whether in the lab, clinical trials or symptom tracking in the community, continually report in real-time what is happening. Advanced AI-enabled diagnostics give early warnings of complications. Complex digital modelling tools combine sensor data with numerous other sources to give us insight into emerging developments and help us prioritise interventions. Digital algorithms help us predict outcomes and optimise processes, such as the global distribution of equipment and eventual drugs and vaccines.

Social media, when harnessed positively, is also an all-powerful tool to share accurate information and guidance, dispel misinformation, impart health advice and nudge people towards desired behaviours. Its role needs to be designed into any future rapid response blueprint.

While digital is no doubt the critical backbone to our response to the pandemic, ultimately it is only a technology, a tool in our hands. For it to truly prove its potential and to serve us better in the post-pandemic future, several significant structural and societal hurdles need to be overcome. For this, we need to develop a persistent political will and a new, digital-empathetic social contract, not least in the areas of personal privacy and social media accountability.

I am encouraged by how effectively individuals and enterprises, private and public, have mobilised and established collaborations and networks as a response to covid-19. Rapid government funding, not least here in the UK, and a widespread relaxation of the usual protocols, investment appraisals, legal, regulatory and compliance hurdles, have all greatly supported this.

This new paradigm is unlikely to survive fully beyond this pandemic. People and organisations often have frustratingly short memories. Once the adrenaline rush is over, some funders are likely to dust off their former investment appraisal mechanisms. Regulators are likely to retighten their scrutiny. Politicians will refocus on other priorities, not least the massively damaged economy and rising unemployment, and the next election cycle. We will return to our factories, offices and schools.

Yet covid-19, even in these early weeks, has already taught us some invaluable lessons in what we can jointly achieve leveraging the disruptive power of digital. It has shown us what the new ‘normal’ could look like, and what is possible when we cooperate liberally and effectively on a global scale to tackle common threats, in a smart, distributed, people-centric and environmentally positive way. It has also demonstrated that we need to invest in regularly rehearsing our response to any future pandemics, and as yet undiscovered pathogens.

I optimistically believe that some of this new global paradigm and awareness will persist, and the covid-19 pandemic will help guide us a little way towards a new, better ‘normal’, our digitally-enriched and safer future.

The Utility of Tacit Knowledge in Corporate Renewal

piotr.ney@hotmail.co.uk (Piotr Ney) — Mon, 21 Apr 2014 09:41:59 GMT

A peer reviewed academic article: The Utility of Tacit Knowledge in Corporate Renewal

Corporate renewal programs usually address tangible elements such as the organizational structure, processes and infrastructure, as well as the explicit knowledge of workers through training or coaching. Such programs do not usually address the tacit knowledge of workers. Tacit knowledge, the personal and specialized professional knowledge that individual workers develop to succeed in performing complex roles, is often a significant corporate resource. It can have a positive utility in helping workers adapt quickly to the renewed organization. However, it can also act as a strong constraint to change. This article discusses tacit knowledge within the context of organizational renewal programs, and suggests some practical techniques for positively influencing its utility.

1. Introduction

The corporate response to significant economic or competitive pressure is often a program of internal renewal, designed to refresh core competencies, reduce operating cost and increase effectiveness and competitiveness of the core business. Tangible elements such as the organizational structure, processes and infrastructure, such as IT systems, can be explicitly updated. The explicit knowledge of workers, such as their fluency in operating procedures, can also be tackled through training or coaching, and related artifacts such as manuals or workplace instructions can relatively easily be updated. However, management literature does not satisfactorily discuss how the tacit knowledge of workers should be addressed as part of corporate renewal.

Tacit knowledge, the personal and specialized professional knowledge that an individual worker needs to succeed in performing a complex role, is a significant corporate resource, particularly in innovation-intensive and professional services firms. As corporate renewal usually implements changes to roles and work procedures, the inherent richness and adaptability of tacit knowledge may help workers quickly to acclimatize to the renewed organization and flex their work approach accordingly. However, while being a corporate asset, tacit knowledge can sometimes act as a strong constraint to change both at an individual and group level. For example, cognitive congruence, where individuals within a group will over time converge to a common tacit knowledge domain which then naturally resists change, is often a contributory factor to corporate underperformance. While explicit knowledge can be updated visibly and unambiguously, the process of changing tacit knowledge, and especially the mental models that workers base their behavior and attitudes on, is more complex and much less predictable, visible and controllable.

This article highlights the need for management literature to address this issue and strive towards developing a coherent strategy for controllably managing tacit knowledge shifts during corporate renewal, and in the meantime it suggests some practical techniques, such as storytelling, for positively influencing its utility.

2. The epistemological problem of taxonomizing knowledge

Knowledge is “the most strategically-significant resource of the firm” (Grant, 1996a), has substantial financial value (Brooking, 1997), and has a key role in developing a sustainable competitive advantage (Nonaka, 1994; Stańczyk-Hugiet, 2007, p.28). Unfortunately management literature generally struggles with the very concept of knowledge at the epistemological level. It is largely biased towards a neo-functionalist, taxonomic view of knowledge characterized by the framing of phenomena in terms of dualisms and an assumption that there is a natural tendency to social order and equilibrium (Schultze & Stabell, 2004). While some constructivist scholars consider knowledge in terms of dualities (e.g. Tsoukas, 1996), located in action (Cohen, 1998) and the continuously shaping world of becoming (Kogut & Zander, 1996; Styhre, 2004), even in constructivist discourse there is a regular tendency to deconstruct and taxonomize knowledge.

That epistemological caveat aside, at the individual level, while hard to define with much precision (Badenoch et al, 1994), much academic organizational literature explicitly or implicitly views knowledge in terms of a continuum between explicit knowledge (Polanyi’s (1967) ‘knowing what’), which can be codified and expressed, is easily communicable and sharable, “is reusable in a consistent and repeatable manner” (Snowden, 1999), is non-specific and can be shared (Ambrosini & Bowman, 2001); and tacit knowledge (Nonaka, 1994), which is deeply personal, non-sharable, embedded in culture and shaped by beliefs and metaphors (Polanyi’s (1967) ‘knowing how’). Winter (1987) proposes the characteristic of tacitness itself as an intrinsic variable of knowledge, inversely correlated to its capacity to be codified and abstracted. As Michael Polanyi suggested back in 1962, tacit knowledge is often characterized by knowing things, without being able to explain how, “the kind of knowledge people possess but that they are unable articulate” (Schultze, 2000).

This much referenced explicit-tacit classification has been employed extensively in management literature to elaborate additional knowledge dichotomies such as local-universal, codified-uncodified, canonical-noncanonical and procedural-declarative (Orlikowski, 2002). Several scholars decompose tacit knowledge further into discrete cognitive (i.e. established mental models) and technical (i.e. acquired task know-how) elements (Johnson-Laird, 1983; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995; Baumard, 1999). However, as I have remarked earlier, such classifications tend to reflect a strong taxonomic bias (Tsoukas, 1996) and a lack of confidence in literature to meaningfully challenge some the underlying propositions (Styhre, 2004). Some contributors appear to classify knowledge in deliberately simplistic terms in order to be able in more concise ways promote various strategies and techniques of managing it (e.g. Winter, 1987; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995; Hansen, 1999).

Many scholars also still refuse clearly to acknowledge the essentially inseparable nature of knowledge where tacit and explicit knowledge are mutually constituted (Tsoukas, 1996) and need to be holistically addressed (Boland & Tenkasi, 1995; Davenport & Prusak, 1998). In practical terms, as illustrated by an action research vignette later in this article, this suggests that during corporate renewal corporations should explicitly address the tacit and not just the explicit dimension of workers’ knowledge. This tacit knowledge forms the mental framework which allows workers to organize and interpret the explicit knowledge conveyed to them, such as work procedures, and the two dimensions synthesize into professional intellect (Quinn et al, 1996).

Workplace observations, as illustrated by the vignette, support this mutually constituted view of professional knowledge, it being neither fully explicit nor fully tacit, but a dynamic interplay of the two. Awareness of normative expectations, such as how to behave in a specific customer interaction, is characteristically based on a blend of explicit knowledge (e.g. corporate guidelines and scripts) and tacit knowledge (e.g. judgment derived from previous personal interactions with customers). Pfeffer & Veiga’s (1999) research, for example, demonstrates that in observing or questioning workers, it is impossible in practice to differentiate between their tacit and explicit knowledge components. Even with the full commitment of participants, it would be conceptually impossible for workers to accurately explain their mental processes or the elemental sources of their knowledge. As Brown & Duguid (2000a) observe, “there is a gap between what people think they do, and what they really do. Actual work practices are full of tacit improvisations that the employees who carry them out would have trouble articulating”. Direct observation is also inherently difficult, not least because mental processes themselves are not visible, only the resultant action or outcomes.

3. Renewing the knowledge of workers

In order for a corporate renewal program to embed successfully, and for workers to effectively align with it, workers’ knowledge needs to be addressed holistically and take into account its mutually constituted nature. Management literature provides little clear normative advice of how this should be tackled, and no coherent strategy for shifting and realigning workers’ professional knowledge to the new corporate operating model. Classic schemas that attempt to show knowledge holistically as an interplay between tacit and explicit (e.g. Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995) typically invoke processes such as socialization (from tacit to tacit), externalization (from tacit to explicit), internalization (from explicit to tacit) and combination (from explicit to explicit). However, these schemas do not adequately address the practical and conceptual issues with attempting to shift workers’ tacit knowledge. These include knowledge stickiness which constrains its transmission (Szulanski, 1996), the inability of the human mind to fully and accurately remember retained information (Stein & Ridderstråle, 2001), inherent impossibility to fully articulate tacit knowledge (Schultze, 2000; Brown & Duguid, 2000a), limited absorptive capacity of actors (Cohen & Levinthal, 1990), the situated and context-specific nature of knowledge (Glazer, 1998; Wenger, 1998), and that at the core of any sensemaking are the necessarily polluting processes of reduction and extrapolation (Reed, 1988).

Fundamentally, though, classical schemas of knowledge dynamics do not address the sociocognitive view that “individuals are not just passive perceivers of their environment” (Stein & Ridderstråle, 2001), but actively construct their own meaning from information being received (Weick, 1979; Glazer, 1998), and this in turn depends on the sender, the receiver, and the social context. Because of different cognitive and heuristic biases (Sanchez, 2001), sensemaking by two individuals even when sharing exactly the same experience will produce differences in their resultant knowledge (Walsh, 1988; Crossan et al, 1999).

Corporate training programs can clearly convey explicit knowledge. This could include new work instructions, procedures, scripts, product specifications, business rules, indeed anything that can be articulated and codified. Workers could even be tested afterwards to demonstrate their accurate retention of this knowledge. As the discussion above illustrates however, the process of individual sensemaking moderates both the accurate conveyance of tacit knowledge and the ability to unambiguously test it.

It is not helpful that in management literature, both academic and popular, the treatment of learning and knowledge sharing is often inhibited by its implication that the issue is predominantly that of communicating information. However, information and knowledge are not synonymous (Davenport & Prusak, 1998; Hendriks, 1999; Sanchez, 2001). The former is a neutral collection of data (Glazer, 1998), whereas the latter is “the condition of knowing or understanding something” (Webb, 1998), and the capacity to exercise judgment and draw distinctions (Tsoukas & Vladimirou, 2001). Information becomes knowledge only when it is absorbed and interpreted by one’s mindframe, which in turn it enriches. Information is thus merely the potential for knowledge. As the vignette presented in this article illustrates, it is only through training and management techniques that address the tacit knowledge of workers, and not just convey explicit information, is it possible to help them develop the required capacity for judgment and other professional soft skills.

The confused interchangeability of the terms knowledge and information leads many theoretical contributors into the pitfall of also treating knowledge management as essentially an information technology issue (McDermott, 1999; Akgun et al, 2003), where “much of the literature of ‘knowledge management’ is almost identical in theme and content to that of ‘information management’” (Blosch, 2001), and “approximately 70 per cent of publications on knowledge management so far have been written by information technology specialists who focus on the technical aspects such as database design and knowledge warehousing” (Easterby-Smith et al, 2000). Instead, knowledge should fundamentally be considered a dimension of the “social ecology of an organization” (Gupta & Govindarajan, 2000), the dynamic interaction of the company culture, structure, processes, infrastructure, and people.

Most observers from the social constructionist school emphasize the key role of such social context and situational determinants (DeFillippi & Ornstein, 2003) in the processes of knowledge creation and sharing (e.g. Wenger, 1998; Brown & Duguid, 2000b), underlining that “these transformations in knowledge (between tacit/explicit and personal/organizational) happen through the social interactions in which individuals communicate, share activities, and exchange ideas” (Merali, 2001), and that “we acquire knowledge by participating in a community” (McDermott, 1999). This supports the notion that training or coaching sessions with workers which aim mainly to transfer tacit knowledge need to have a strong interpersonal interaction element within a supportive social context. Techniques such as group discussions, role playing, storytelling and even many of the traditional corporate ‘team building’ exercises are consequently all natural and effective channels for influencing tacit knowledge.

Paul Hendriks (1999) observes that “in a strict sense, knowledge cannot be shared. Knowledge is not like a commodity that can be passed around freely, it is tied to a knowing subject. To learn something from someone else, i.e. to share his or her knowledge, an act of reconstruction is needed”. To share any knowledge, the knowledge giver must first externalize it. This can be done through one or several methods such as direct mentoring, explicit codification, observable action, metaphors or storytelling. The knowledge receiver then needs to internalize this knowledge (Davenport & Prusak, 1998). This involves the integration of the newly acquired knowledge with that already absorbed, and potentially resolving any conflicts and ambiguities between these two sets. These processes, as well as the actual act of transferring the knowledge between giver and receiver, inevitably modify (‘pollute’) the unit of knowledge being shared. Thus, I would agree with Hendriks (1999) that in reality we do not share knowledge, in the sense that a unit of knowledge cannot be passed to another person in an unmodified form, but rather allow the receiver to take an imperfect and personalized impression of the giver’s knowledge.

4. Tacit knowledge in corporate renewal

In many modern organizations, key workers perform knowledge intensive roles and have a relatively broad locus of discretion. Such workers are often team leaders, product designers, engineers, or experts in marketing or research & development. They perform roles that are typically unpredictable in process and/or with an unpredictable outcome (Earl, 1994; Szulanski, 1996; Amar, 2002, p.66; Morawski, 2009, p.40) and are often under full control and autonomy of the actor (Drucker, 1999). It is critical in times of corporate renewal for the organization not only to carry them across successfully to the new operating model, but to engage with them effectively so that they become supporters and ideally champions of this renewal.

Corporations that rely on a largely dictatorial approach to such workers during corporate renewal programs are likely to fail. Literature generally agrees that the nature of such knowledge intensive work intrinsically conflicts with a hierarchical and coercive approach to management. “Knowledge organizations require skills derived from freethinking and unbounded actions of those working for them” (Amar, 2002, p.3), or as Joseph Weiss (1996) similarly observes, “the information-based organization has knowledge workers who are specialists (or players) and who resist command-and-control procedures based on the military model”. Davenport et al (1996) agree: “knowledge workers are likely to resist standard routines; in fact, the level of discretion and autonomy often separates knowledge workers from administrative workers”. “Each doer has a unique way of accomplishing knowledge work” and requires control over the environment within which this work is situated (Amar, 2002, p.66).

According to Alvesson & Sveningsson (2003), “managers must allow much space for knowledge workers, partly because managers know less of what goes on than those large groups of employees holding esoteric expertise, partly because professional norms and occupational cultures make such employees less inclined to subordinate themselves to managerial hierarchies”, which resonates with the widespread notion that workers in knowledge intensive roles need to be largely autonomous and self-managing (Drucker, 1999; Morawski, 2009, p.95), and Blosch’s (2001) summary that “the knowledge-based organization focuses on allowing individuals to learn, experiment and communicate with each other in an atmosphere that is open to change”.

This can prove to be a great asset in corporate renewal, as such workers can quickly self-adapt to the new operating model without much interference from management. Providing the objectives and priorities of corporate renewal are communicated clearly and meaningfully to the workers, they can flex their roles accordingly. Where the need for management interference is accepted, because of the uniqueness of each knowledge worker and their work content, the management approach would need similarly to be unique and appropriate to that individual (Amar, 2002, p.7).

What have not been well articulated in management literature are strategies for effectively engaging with such workers and motivating them to be supporters and champions of change through directly influencing their tacit knowledge where this is required. Where literature cites knowledge management as a component of corporate renewal, as already discussed this is usually from an information management perspective. There is also a lack of specific operational examples of any management of tacit knowledge, and extant literature on this issue remains essentially conceptual (Ambrosini & Bowman, 2001).

While being a corporate asset, tacit knowledge can be a strong constraint to change (Ambrosini & Bowman, 2001; Brown & Duguid, 2001)) and limit competitive flexibility and responsiveness. “Knowledge results from, and reinforces, specific mindsets” (Chakravarthy et al, 2003). While explicit knowledge, such as company guidelines or product specifications, can be updated visibly and unambiguously during corporate renewal, the process of changing tacit knowledge, and especially the mental models that workers base their behavior and attitudes on, is more complex and much less predictable, visible and controllable. Sanchez (2001) similarly discusses the concept of cognitive congruence, where individuals within a group will over time converge to a common tacit knowledge domain of “beliefs, self-concepts and scripts”, which then naturally resists change and can lead to cognitive stasis in work groups.

It is sometimes incorrectly assumed that highly knowledge-intensive corporations (such as research or professional services organizations) are inherently more adaptable and hence more manageable candidates for corporate renewal than traditional process-based ones (such as manufacturers). This notion is indirectly supported by an implicit assumption in most management literature that knowledge is something self-evidently positive, in that the more knowledge workers possess, the ‘better’. This view is difficult to justify on two counts. Firstly, and philosophically, it can be asserted that knowledge “is not necessarily functional, useful, and a generally good thing” (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2001). As any other resource, its utility is directly proportional to its contribution within a domain of action (Tsoukas & Vladimirou, 2001; Vera & Crossan, 2003; Stańczyk-Hugiet, 2007, p.45). In other words, workers’ knowledge is only ‘positive’ if it helps them successfully to perform their roles in line with the needs of the organization (Stańczyk-Hugiet, 2007, p.96) or, in this context, to successfully adapt during corporate renewal. Secondly, there are specific examples where workers “correctly learn that which is incorrect” (Huber, 1991), and their subsequent superficially ‘positive’ knowledge was actually damaging to their effectiveness and performance. This includes the continuation of poor improvisations based on sub-optimal heuristic knowledge.

A corporate renewal program needs therefore to ensure that not only is there a structured approach for aligning workers’ tacit knowledge with the demands of the new operating model, but that any specific elements of this knowledge that are either barriers to change or would negatively impact the effectiveness of the new model are eliminated.

5. Supporting renewal through metaphors and storytelling

Knowledge and language form an indissoluble fusion in that “knowledge is constructed in and through language” (Johnson & Duberley, 2000) and knowledge is predominantly transmitted linguistically through speaking or writing. The granularity of detail the language and its fidelity to the concepts being transmitted has a significant effect on the quality of the knowledge transaction. As Tsoukas & Vladimirou (2001) argue, “when our language is crude and unsophisticated, so are our distinctions and the consequent judgments. The more refined our language, the finer our distinctions”. Literal language, especially written manuals or instructions, has an inherently reductive propensity (Tsoukas, 1991). To transmit abstract knowledge, such as complex ideas and experience with greater effectiveness, techniques such as the use of metaphors and storytelling are often employed in the workplace (Martin et al, 1983; Tsoukas, 1991; Crossan et al, 1999; Gibson & Zellmer-Bruhn, 2001). Vivid and emotionally engaging stories in the workplace can convey what would otherwise be difficult to enunciate (Ambrosini & Bowman, 2001), such as heuristic (Tsoukas & Vladimirou, 2001) and normative information. These also have the added benefit of naturally situating the knowledge transaction within a supportive social context as discussed earlier.

Storytelling is thus a significant element of both organizational socialization and knowledge transfer, and has been discussed as a discrete phenomenon in literature (Brown & Duguid, 2000a). Stories and anecdotes are particularly important to workers in tacit knowledge intensive (and therefore ambiguous) contexts as a method of continuously challenging and reinforcing perceptions of sequentiality (“X happened, which triggered Y”) and causality (“Y happened because I did X”) of actions in a complex working environment. While individual incidents may not be replicable or even directly relevant to other workers, over time, storytelling builds up patterns and cognitive models that help workers better navigate the “bounded rationality” (Cyert & March, 1963) of their work environment.

An important issue related to storytelling is the likely retention or memory of a specific message. “Because stories are more vivid, engaging, entertaining, and easily related to personal experience than rules or directives” (Swap et al, 2001), this creates the danger of stories outliving their currency or value. Often the organizational environment changes and stories that are no longer applicable to the new environment still persist. Such workplace stories need to be ideally replaced by ones more appropriate to the new organization. Empirical data also suggests that there is also a bias towards negative stories (Swap et al, 2001). This resonates with my earlier assertion that knowledge is not always self-evidently positive. A working environment rich in tacit, metaphor and story based knowledge transactions could actually be inherently counterproductive to individuals within it, and constrain corporate renewal.

A strong catalyst for corporate renewal is the establishment of new metaphors and workplace stories that replace previous ones and reinforce the culture and expected norms and behavior of the new operating model. If the corporate renewal program involves training and coaching workers, in addition to conveying explicit knowledge such as new work procedures, management should consider mechanisms of establishing appropriate storytelling that would help to clarify and reinforce new methods of working. Such storytelling should also engage workers emotionally and positively motivate them. The following action research vignette illustrates an example of a structured approach to tackling the tacit knowledge of workers during corporate renewal, and includes a strong element of storytelling.

6. Vignette: A major UK insurance company

I was recently engaged in a significant restructuring of the customer services organization of a major British insurance company. I was directly responsible for several corporate renewal strands, including:

• the re-engineering of key business processes and business rules

• radical organizational restructuring (including establishing new customer response teams)

• migration to telephone-based service (including establishing a call center front office)

• changes to skills and IT/telephony infrastructure to enable telephone-based service

• introduction of workflow-based customer order management system and procedures, and

• fundamental cultural change (case management, customer focus, empowerment, etc.)

This was supported by an intensive training program of all the staff, which was designed to instill the required skills, both hard (e.g. how to operate the new IT and telephony systems) and soft (e.g. how to deal with angry customers). This training was delivered by an external company as a multi-media package over several weeks.

Before the whole customer services organization was trained and migrated to the new operating model, I established a small pilot unit of 30 workers taking live customer calls as per the new operating model. Despite intensive training, it became clear that certain negative elements of the old culture that we wanted to replace, such as some specific behaviors, persisted. This became even more apparent at times of stress, when for example there were long call queues. While the workers mostly adhered to the new work instructions and scripts which they learned during training (explicit knowledge), the optional and improvised elements of their work (tacit knowledge) suffered in quality and often reflected the norms of the old organization.

An example was the recording of customer case notes. In the old operating model communication with customers was primarily in writing, so customer service caseworkers only added marginal notes to the correspondence already in the customer file, and customer interaction was therefore mostly self-evidencing. In the new telephone-based operating model, caseworkers were required not only to annotate key facts from the conversation with the customer, but also use their judgment to decide what other information to record in free format that may be useful in future interactions with the customer or in proposing other products or services to them. A specific ‘wrap-up time’ period was incorporated into the customer service process to facilitate this. However, the quality of these notes was very poor and workers struggled to decide what to record from the sometimes long conversations with customers. Similarly, when faced with customer requests or behavior that had not been directly covered in the formal training program, some caseworkers found it difficult to cope with the task. Even seemingly trivial departures from the ‘normal’ customer interactions covered in training, such as a call from a customer who had a poor command of English, could be a problem for many caseworkers.

As every customer interaction was unique, it would have been impossible to cover every eventuality in training or by instructions or scripts. Instead, we faced the challenge of instilling in the case workers the confidence and judgment that they needed to perform their new roles effectively, for example how to decide what information to record and how to behave when faced with an unusual customer situation.

We tackled this tacit knowledge domain with three techniques:

I. Role playing

We had earlier established a standalone training environment that simulated a call center. Once a week, we then scheduled a short training exercise in which a professional trainer would call a number of workers chosen at random, while the rest of the work group listened in on this. The trainer played the role of a customer and would deliberately choose to be ‘difficult’ or unpredictable. The group afterwards discussed how well the worker coped with the case, what could have been done differently, and what should have been recorded in the case notes.

II. Listening in

Similarly, we decided that during this initial period, each caseworker would spend ten percent of their work time listening in on others’ calls. This was intended as a mechanism both to share best practice and improve soft skills. The two workers had some time allocated at the end of the listening in period to discuss significant calls, and to compare notes that they both made.

III. Storytelling

We also allocated some time at the end of each shift for a group discussion. The team leader was coached in facilitating an exchange of stories and workers were encouraged to describe any particularly interesting, peculiar or indeed difficult customer interactions that they had during the day. Subsequent (and often humorous) discussion not only helped to equip the team to better handle a similar interaction in the future, but also fostered a strong team spirit. It is worth noting that some of these stories have survived as popular workplace anecdotes to this day, and are still often retold to new workers as part of their induction.

The combination of these three techniques proved very successful at changing the attitudes and behaviors of the workers, and improved their soft skills. The caseworkers significantly modified their tacit knowledge to better align it with the demands of the new organization. Also, such tacit knowledge-intensive intragroup interactions helped establish a common best practice, an identifiable team culture and group congruence, and helped to embed the social context to facilitate effective exchange of ideas and experiences in the future. Following this pilot exercise, this approach was incorporated into the training program for the whole customer services organization, and a further program of continuous improvement post corporate renewal.

7. Conclusion

In order to equip workers with the soft skills that they will need to adapt successfully to a new operating model and to ensure that existing knowledge is not itself a barrier to change, corporations should consider techniques that directly influence the tacit knowledge of workers. Typical training programs do not address this, and management literature has not so far presented a coherent strategy. However, proven practical techniques such as storytelling and role playing, which communicate richly heuristic and otherwise not easily articulable information, can be employed as very useful enablers of corporate renewal.

[The full table of references is available on request]

Enhancing Knowledge Dynamics in Organisations

piotr.ney@hotmail.co.uk (Piotr Ney) — Mon, 03 Mar 2014 10:17:54 GMT

A peer reviewed academic article: Enhancing Knowledge Dynamics in Organisations

Steered by an effective governance strategy, knowledge dynamics within a firm can be developed into a valuable competitive capability. Organisational literature to-date has largely failed to set out clearly and holistically how such a knowledge governance strategy should be designed in practice Based on ten principles distilled from literature and practice, this paper aims to present the foundation on which an integrated approach could be developed to meet the specific needs of knowledge-intensive firms.

1. Introducing Knowledge Dynamics

Management involves continually fine-tuning the dynamic capabilities of the firm to successfully compete in its chosen market. This includes the continual adjustment of focus and competencies, and maximising the utility of all corporate resources in line with the firm’s key performance objectives. Competencies may be enhanced incrementally (e.g. through continuous process improvement) as well as radically. Managers usually spend much of their effort addressing the ‘hard’ or tangible performance elements, ones that can be directly monitored and/or easily measured. Internal examples of such elements include the throughput of key business processes, work organisation, worker productivity, product quality, workflow and infrastructure, while external examples include managing the supply chain and contractual obligations with suppliers, distributors and clients. All of this needs additionally to be underpinned by the effective custodianship of what are traditionally called the ‘soft’ or intangible performance elements, such as staff motivation, corporate culture, external relationships and, the focus of this paper, corporate knowledge.

Steered by an effective governance strategy, knowledge dynamics, the velocity of knowledge creation and sharing within the firm, can often be developed into a valuable competitive capability, and is considered fundamental to the survival of most knowledge-intensive organisations. Such a knowledge governance strategy needs to encompass both managing explicit knowledge ¹ ² , which is codified and embedded in products, processes and artefacts, such as documents or patents, and influencing tacit knowledge, the uncodified, professional and individual knowledge held by workers ³ ⁴ . The latter is frequently the most powerful source of competitive advantage and the foundation of a firm’s creativity, innovation and its rapid responsiveness to market opportunities.

Companies classically address explicit knowledge needs through communication and staff education initiatives such as training courses. Such programmes do not usually adequately address the tacit knowledge needs of workers. Individual knowledge workers themselves develop highly personalised know-how in order to succeed in performing complex roles and also help them adapt quickly to the changing needs of the firm. Yet this valuable tacit knowledge is often invisible to management and not something that is (or indeed could be) empirically measured or directly managed.

One of the academic debates over the last decade considered “whether it is knowledge per se or rather knowledge management, which is at the source of a firm’s competitive advantage” ⁵ . It is argued that the competitive value of knowledge needs to be defined as not only as the stock of knowledge held in corporate artefacts or accumulated by individuals within it, but rather a function of this and the “velocity at which such knowledge is shared throughout the organization” ⁶ . I consider this ‘velocity’, the speed and effectiveness of creating and sharing knowledge within the firm, and its antecedents and underlying processes, as dimensions of knowledge dynamics, which focuses not merely on the cognitive potential (the static perspective), but also the velocity and density of actual knowledge transactions within an organisation (the kinetic perspective).

This article discusses some of the key factors that influence knowledge dynamics within the context of effective management of organisations, and from these distils ten practical principles that should help to shape the foundation of an effective knowledge governance strategy. When flexed ⁷ to the needs and priorities of a specific company and sensibly implemented, such a strategy should positively influence knowledge dynamics. My proposed approach ontologically supports the notion of the holistic nature of knowledge ⁷ , and therefore it aims harmoniously to influence both its explicit and tacit dimensions.

The propositions presented in this paper should be accepted as a modest first-pass attempt to normatively synthesise current academic and practical insights, and provide the basis for the collaborative evolution of best practice.

2. Adopting a Position on the Nature of Knowledge

Explicit knowledge resources are by definition tangible, whether or not their value is directly reflected in corporate accounts as intellectual property assets. Tacit knowledge resources are, again by definition, not tangible and cannot directly feature on a balance sheet. Yet this personal and specialised professional knowledge, which individual workers nurture to succeed in performing complex roles, has long been recognised as a significant corporate resource ⁸ ⁹ and a driver of competitive advantage ¹⁰ , particularly in innovation-intensive firms. The effective sharing of tacit knowledge, which is inherently rich and adaptable, catalyses team innovation and the collaborative development of new skills and best practice, enabling knowledge workers to deal more confidently with the complexity and unpredictability of their environment. Exchanging war stories in product development of how technical problems were solved or seemingly impossible deadlines were met, for example, is a classic way in which teams of knowledge workers hone their professional aptitudes, as well as reinforce mutual relationships and build trust. Additionally, opportunities for continuously enhancing tacit knowledge “are prime factors in attracting and maintaining a talented and productive workforce” ¹¹ . It is in the interest of management to ensure that appropriate contexts are in place for such interactions rich in tacit knowledge to occur.

Within the context of knowledge dynamics, tacit knowledge does not exist independently, and it is essentially inseparable from explicit knowledge. For nearly three decades, the prevailing treatment of knowledge within organisational discourse was rooted in Polanyi’s ¹² continuum paradigm. This presented codifiable and objective ‘knowing what’-knowledge at one end and uncodifiable and subjective ‘knowing how’-knowledge at the other. Once these categories became firmly adopted in literature as the explicit and tacit dimensions of knowledge respectively, what had been steadily constructed by scholars on Polanyi’s original epistemological foundation was an expanding taxonomy of knowledge ¹³ largely expressed in continua and dualisms, which typically deconstructed knowledge into increasingly esoteric elements to support specific academic agendas.

This process has produced several subtly different knowledge dichotomies such as Eck’s ¹⁴ ‘post-figurative, configurative and pre-figurative knowledge’, Orlikowski’s ¹⁵ ‘local-universal’, ‘codified-uncodified’, ‘canonical-noncanonical’ and ‘procedural-declarative’, as well as examples of further deconstruction of the widely adopted explicit and tacit categories into increasingly complex subcategories. For example, tacit knowledge at a more granular level has been subcategorised into cognitive and technical domains, defined as established mental models and acquired task know-how respectively ¹⁶ ¹⁷ ¹⁸ , or alternatively into nonepistle, sociocultural, semantic, and sagacious subcategories ¹⁹ .

It is not the objective of this paper to further this epistemological debate or comment on any specific taxonomies. For a knowledge governance strategy to be effective, thankfully it is sufficient and advisable to treat knowledge holistically, accepting that the fundamental nature of knowledge is that tacit and explicit knowledge are mutually constituted ²⁰ . This theoretical position actually revisits Polanyi’s ²¹ original proposition that tacit knowledge is an integral part of an individual’s total knowing. As workplace case studies have shown ²² , professional knowledge is never fully explicit nor fully tacit, but a dynamic interplay of the two. Workers themselves cannot in practice apportion their mental processes between these two domains ²³ . This is why my first proposition is that a management strategy aimed to influence organisational knowledge dynamics needs to holistically and harmoniously address both dimensions ²⁴ ²⁵ , especially that it is tacit knowledge that shapes the sensemaking which allows workers to absorb and interpret the explicit knowledge available to them ²⁶ .

Proposition 1: A knowledge governance strategy needs to take into account the holistic and mutually constituted nature of knowledge, and employ an integrated approach which influences both its explicit and tacit dynamic dimensions.

It is not helpful that case studies in literature tend to focus either on examples of improving the management of explicit knowledge or the tacit, with few convincing examples of action research tackling both in an integrated way. One exception, very relevant to this paper in terms of empirical evidence, but also with the added value of discussing performance outcomes, is Haas & Hansen’s ²⁷ study of sales teams in a management consulting company, which considered both simultaneously and compared their relative contributions to task performance.

3. Knowledge as a Dynamic Capability of the Firm

A level of abstraction above the deconstructionist and taxonomic debate above, knowledge has been presented as perhaps the most valuable corporate resource ²⁸ , and to underline this, some scholars have even paradigmatically adopted a perspective of the firm that views it primarily as a knowledge-creating entity ²⁹ ³⁰ . Knowledge has significant direct financial value ³¹ , and is fundamental to developing a sustainable competitive advantage ³² ³³ ³⁴ . Within the context of this value argument, it may be useful to further distinguish the need for companies to continuously develop general purpose knowledge, which while not unique allows the firm to offer a competitive market proposition by remaining state-of-the art within its industry across its broad market offering, and firm-specific idiosyncratic knowledge which differentiates the company and allows it to overtake its competitors in specific areas ³⁵ . While the former guards against competitive disadvantage, the latter can be source of sustainable competitive advantage, particularly if the idiosyncrasy is deeply situated within its unique firm-specific context, thus making it imperfectly imitable in nature ³⁶ ³⁷

Proposition 2: The strategy should ensure that general purpose knowledge is continually updated to prevent competitive disadvantage, as well as promote specialist and idiosyncratic knowledge in areas where the firm can develop a unique offering.

Despite its increasingly elevated status in management literature, the exact definition of organisational knowledge, let alone that of the discipline of knowledge management, remains elusive. These concepts are often confused with information and information management respectively. However, even the briefest epistemological scrutiny reveals the insight that information and knowledge are not synonymous ³⁸ ³⁹ ⁴⁰ ⁴¹ . Specifically, the former is objective and actor independent, while the latter is subjective, and actor bound. Information, in whatever format or medium of communication, remains a neutral collection of data ⁴² . In contrast, knowledge is an individual’s faculty of knowing or understanding something ⁴³ , and their capacity to exercise judgment and draw distinctions ⁴⁴ . Information may be translated into knowledge by the process of assimilating and reconciling it with existing knowledge held by an individual. New information therefore enriches, or in some cases makes redundant, existing knowledge, and in this context can be characterised as being merely the potential source of knowledge.

As an extension of the epistemological confusion in some organisational literature between the terms knowledge and information, the treatment of the management of these is also blurred. As critically highlighted by several academics ⁴⁵ ⁴⁶ , literature often approaches the concept of knowledge management as in effect an information technology issue. According to Easterby-Smith et al ⁴⁷ “approximately ⁷⁰ per cent of publications on knowledge management so far have been written by information technology specialists who focus on the technical aspects such as database design and knowledge warehousing”. Blosch ⁴⁸ rightly summarises that fundamentally it is people who can have knowledge and not information systems, but similarly observes that “much of the literature of ‘knowledge management’ is almost identical in theme and content to that of ‘information management’”.

Proposition 3: While information systems can have a significant role in supporting and enabling some knowledge processes, knowledge governance is not an IT issue, it is primarily a people issue.

Many leading academic articles in this area ⁴⁹ ⁵⁰ concentrate on an organisational (macro), rather than individual (micro) level of granularity. The dominance of this collective locus of knowledge ⁵¹ has been empirically confirmed by Foss et al ⁵² . Whether such focus on the collective versus individual is justified or not is not an issue for this paper, which in line with its normative aspirations has already declared a holistic bias. I propose that all organisational levels, from the individual to the firm as a whole, as well as the interplay between these, need to be illuminated in practice to gain a meaningful insight into knowledge dynamics and its relationship to organisational outcomes. Choosing exclusively a single level of organisational granularity only allows a single level of abstraction, and hides the vertical (or, more accurately, network) relationships between the levels. In contrast, a multilevel approach allows us to evaluate these relationships and equip us with the understanding necessary to answer questions such as ‘is knowledge creation contingent more on the organisational process or on the attributes of the individual concerned?’. Especially relevant to this paper, moreover, is that at the relatively neglected micro-level, outside of the communities of practice discourse ⁵³ little understanding exists of how physically dispersed members of an organisation, each working within different cognitive, social and working environment contexts, share knowledge and learn from each other ⁵⁴ ⁵⁵ , and how this then aggregates to an organisational outcome. Yet such organisational arrangements are common in many leading knowledge-intensive firms, most notably within the research and service industries.

I share Foss’s ⁵⁶ ontological critique of the methodological collectivism behind any claim that one set of aggregates (the firm’s capabilities) drive another set of aggregates (competitive advantage). This obscures far too many micro-level interactions and correlations to be meaningful. In this particular context, “what is obscured is the issue of how knowledge that ultimately resides on the level of the individuals is somehow integrated through organizational means into organization-level capability, and how this integration results in knowledge being utilized in such a manner that competitive advantage becomes the result” ⁵⁷ . In short, much literature presents theoretical houses of cards that are without solid micro-foundations.

Proposition 4: A knowledge governance strategy needs to influence all levels of the firm – individuals, teams and organisational units, as well as informal networks within the firm – as all of these are interrelated and collectively deliver firm-level knowledge outcomes.

To distance myself from the largely tolerated technology-biased and organisation-level bias of knowledge management ⁵⁸ as discussed above, I have adopted the relatively new multi-disciplinary concept of knowledge governance ⁵⁹ . This inter alia employs a transaction cost economics lens to focus on how the organisational micro-foundations need to be managed to reduce the cost of and increase the benefits from knowledge dynamics. It has been loosely defined as “choosing organizational structures and mechanisms that can influence the processes of using, sharing, integrating, and creating knowledge in preferred directions and towards preferred levels” ⁶⁰ . This introduces another area of intense theoretical debate, namely evaluating the contribution of knowledge to organisational performance.

4. Alignment to Performance and Value

Knowledge transactions are not cost free ⁶¹ ⁶² ⁶³ ⁶⁴ . Knowledge creation and sharing are an investment by the actors involved. Searching and acquiring knowledge similarly require often considerable time and effort. Internal barriers, both perceived and real, hinder knowledge dynamics at all levels within the firm. As Haas & Hansen ⁶⁵ argue, such costs can outweigh the benefits of knowledge transactions and not necessarily improve the task performance within the firm and, by extension, the firm’s overall performance.

There is a shortage of convincing evidence in management literature of proven, empirical correlations between investments in knowledge dynamics and the resultant productivity benefits of workers and teams, outside of narrow contexts such as specific processes like product innovation ⁶⁶ ⁶⁷ . Documented examples of step change improvements to the overall competitiveness of knowledge-intensive firms, which were convincingly the result of knowledge governance initiatives, are conspicuous by their absence.

Thus, while positively influencing improvements to organisational learning generally and intraorganisational knowledge dynamics specifically is commonly regarded as a self-evidently worthy objective ⁶⁸ , and the theoretical link to corporate dynamic capability is often encountered in organisational literature, there are no broadly established benchmarks to support evidence-based forecasts of the likely productivity or quality benefits from investment in knowledge governance.

To further complicate matters, there are also theoretical as well as empirical examples of negative correlations between knowledge dynamics and performance, which management should also be sensitive to. While accepting that this area is currently a promising candidate for future research, van Wijk et al ⁶⁹ for example warn that “too much knowledge transfer might be detrimental to performance”. A key concern is the organisational utility of the knowledge concerned, that is whether it promotes worker behaviour or actions that are supportive of the organisation’s best interests. Unhelpfully in academic treatment, knowledge and learning usually have an implicit positive value, in that “just like culture or intellectual or social capital, they are implicitly assumed to create value and to support corporate objectives” ⁷⁰ .

The notion that knowledge is something self-evidently positive, in that the more knowledge a worker possesses, the ‘better’, is difficult to justify on two counts. Firstly, and philosophically, it can be asserted that knowledge “is not necessarily functional, useful, and a generally good thing” ⁷¹ . As any other resource, its utility is directly proportional to its contribution within a domain of action ⁷² ⁷³ ⁷⁴ . In other words, workers’ knowledge is only ‘positive’ if it helps them successfully to perform their roles in line with the needs of the organisation ⁷⁵ and successfully adapt to the firm’s changing needs and priorities. Secondly, there are specific examples where workers “correctly learn that which is incorrect” ⁷⁶ , and their subsequent superficially positive knowledge actually damage their effectiveness and performance. This includes the continuation of poor improvisations based on sub-optimal heuristic knowledge.

Some tacit knowledge even when initially positive from the firm’s perspective, can in time become a strong constraint to change ⁷⁷ ⁷⁸ , limiting competitive flexibility and responsiveness. “Knowledge results from, and reinforces, specific mindsets” ⁷⁹ . While explicit knowledge, such as company guidelines or product specifications, can be updated visibly and unambiguously by management when needed, the process of updating tacit knowledge, and especially the mental models that workers base their behaviour and judgements on, is more complex and much less predictable, visible and controllable. Sanchez ⁸⁰ similarly discusses the negative aspect of cognitive congruence, where individuals within a group over time converge to a common tacit knowledge domain of “beliefs, self-concepts and scripts”, which then naturally resists change and can lead to cognitive stasis in work groups, and in extreme cases to boycotts, contra-productive opposition and turf wars ⁸¹ .

Returning to positive aspects, as would be expected since this topic has been fashionable both in practice and academic literature for the last twenty years or so, at a theoretical level most senior management teams are already sensitive to the importance of knowledge ⁸² , especially as a theoretical source of the firm’s sustainable competitive advantage and productivity benefits, through for example the efficient re-use of knowledge within the company. However, given the lack of proven empirical correlations and industry benchmarks, these managers unsurprisingly usually struggle to develop robust business cases for investment in knowledge governance, which require that realistic costs and benefits are quantified and justified. In my practical industry experience, such investments by firms often become ‘leaps of faith’. As academia has so far failed to deliver a convincing theoretical foundation, this is not a criticism of management. To minimise investment risk, I usually advise companies to establish some specific investment performance indicators to demonstrate that appropriate improvements are being realised. These performance indicators need to be aligned with the corporate strategy and priorities, and investment should be incremental and contingent on visible improvements of these indicators.

Proposition 5: In practice, investment in knowledge governance improvements is unlikely to be justifiable ex ante by a robust business case. Instead, an incremental investment programme should be considered, supported by appropriate and continually monitored investment performance indicators.

For example, turnover of expert resources is sometimes a particular issue for a company. Improvements in knowledge dynamics are positively correlated to reducing staff attrition of key knowledge workers. Not only do such investments send a powerful political message that the company values the expertise of its workers, stimulating the collaborative development of idiosyncratic knowledge further differentiates the company both internally and externally and acts as organisational ‘glue’ ⁸³ that brings workers closer together, strengthening ties between workers ⁸⁴ and mutual trust ⁸⁵ . These effects not only catalyse knowledge dynamics, but also increase exit cost for staff. Thus, expert staff turnover could be one of the meaningful investment performance indicators for those firms which recognise this as a priority issue.

Unfortunately, this investment evaluation approach needs to be appropriately caveated. Even within such narrow a focus, knowledge dynamics is only one of the many influencing factors. In this example, staff attrition is clearly contingent on many other factors such as management style, company performance, reward mechanisms, prospects of promotion, individual role definitions, goals and objectives, as well as external causes such as market and competitor developments. In evaluating the contribution of any investment in knowledge governance, management would need to distil the relevant contribution of knowledge dynamics from such background noise.

Any analysis of performance impacts should also be sensitive to the differential contribution of some elements of knowledge dynamics, as illustrated by Haas and Hansen’s ⁸⁶ study. Their specific contribution is that “sharing codified knowledge in the form of electronic documents saved time during the task, but did not improve work quality or signal competence to clients. In contrast, sharing personal advice improved work quality and signalled competence, but did not save time”. They conclude that “the main finding of this study is that different types of knowledge affect task performance differently”. This conclusion and their specific example again underline the importance of acquiring an insight into what is happening at the micro-foundation level and then tracing this through to an understanding of how these elements contribute to firm level outcomes.

5. Social and Situational Determinants

An organisation is primarily a social construct, sometimes summarised as a negotiated order ⁸⁷ or, in simpler terms, as a community ⁸⁸ . Sharing this perspective, which is supported by many personal insights in operational practice, I am naturally biased towards a social constructionist paradigm which sees knowledge creation and sharing within a bounded organisational context as being driven primarily by social and situational determinants and playing a role in a working community ⁸⁹ ⁹⁰ ⁹¹ ⁹² ⁹³ . This perspective sees knowledge transactions or learning as situated in practice ⁹⁴ ⁹⁵ ⁹⁶ . This is particularly true of tacit knowledge, which cannot be shared impersonally, for example in the form of an artefact. While it must be reiterated that tacit knowledge is by definition personal and acquired through first-hand experience and action ⁹⁷ , as Merali ⁹⁸ observes, most transformations in knowledge “happen through the social interactions in which individuals communicate, share activities, and exchange ideas”. Designing a knowledge governance strategy needs therefore to reflect the social dimension of this knowledge and focus on aligned processes, such as social interaction and shared practice.

Having already declared allegiance to the notion of the holistic and mutually constituted nature of knowledge, I now propose that unfortunately organisational literature provides little clear normative advice of how this holism should effectively be governed, especially taking into account the social dimension. Classic schemas that attempt to show knowledge holistically as an interplay between tacit and explicit ⁹⁹ typically invoke processes such as socialisation (from tacit to tacit), externalisation (from tacit to explicit), internalisation (from explicit to tacit) and combination (from explicit to explicit). Such a model may be a helpful abstraction in theory building, but to be really useful as a management tool, the vectors need to reflect the magnitudes of knowledge velocity ¹⁰⁰ , which in turn depend on many local factors. These include knowledge stickiness which constrains its transmission ¹⁰¹ , the inability of the human mind to fully and accurately remember retained information ¹⁰² , inherent impossibility to fully articulate tacit knowledge ¹⁰³ ¹⁰⁴ , limited absorptive capacity of actors ¹⁰⁵ , the situated and context-specific nature of knowledge ¹⁰⁶ ¹⁰⁷ , and that at the core of any sensemaking are the necessarily polluting processes of reduction and extrapolation ¹⁰⁸ . In summary, there is a lot more going on at the micro-foundation level than such schemas allow for.

Fundamentally, though, classical schemas of knowledge dynamics usually do not address the sociocognitive perspective that “individuals are not just passive perceivers of their environment” ¹⁰⁹ , but actively construct their own meaning from information being received ¹¹⁰ ¹¹¹ , and this in turn depends on the sender, the receiver, and the social context. Paul Hendriks ¹¹² observes that “in a strict sense, knowledge cannot be shared. Knowledge is not like a commodity that can be passed around freely, it is tied to a knowing subject. To learn something from someone else, i.e. to share his or her knowledge, an act of reconstruction is needed”. Because of different cognitive and heuristic biases ¹¹³ , sensemaking by two individuals even when sharing exactly the same experience will produce differences in their resultant knowledge ¹¹⁴ ¹¹⁵ .

To share any knowledge, the knowledge giver must first externalise it. This can be done through one or several methods such as direct mentoring, explicit codification, observable action, metaphors or storytelling. The knowledge receiver then needs to internalise this knowledge ¹¹⁶ . This involves the integration of the newly acquired knowledge with that already absorbed ¹¹⁷ and potentially resolving any conflicts and ambiguities between these two sets. These processes, as well as the actual act of transferring the knowledge between giver and receiver, inevitably modify (‘pollute’) the unit of knowledge being shared. Thus, I would agree with Hendriks ¹¹⁸ that in reality we do not share knowledge per se, in the sense that a unit of knowledge cannot be passed to another person in an unmodified form, but rather allow the receiver to take an imperfect and personalized impression of the giver’s knowledge. The more complex the knowledge, or the more it conflicts with the receiver’s existing knowledge, the more cognitive negotiation is likely to occur between the giver and receiver.

Knowledge governance strategies that major on corporate education programmes do demonstrably enhance the explicit knowledge of workers, and can be effective partly because objective information is less pollutable. This is a useful approach for cascading new work instructions, procedures, scripts, product specifications, business rules, indeed anything that can be relatively easily codified and articulated. Workers could even be tested afterwards to demonstrate their accurate retention of this knowledge. Though largely dependent on the aptitude of the trainers and the methods employed, such collective programmes are not usually effective at enhancing the tacit knowledge of workers, not least because of the limited opportunities for personal cognitive negotiation between the knowledge giver and receiver and for tailoring the giver’s externalisation technique to the individual receiver. Moreover, as the discussion above illustrates, the process of individual sensemaking moderates both the accurate conveyance of tacit knowledge and the ability to unambiguously test its retention ex post.

Proposition 6: While explicit knowledge dynamics can be tackled through collective programmes, by its nature tacit knowledge needs to be tackled on a personal and individual basis, with an approach which is sensitive to the social and situational context.

The conceptual contrast between collective and individual knowledge distribution has intensively been covered in literature, most frequently in the guise of the decades-long debate of single-loop versus double-loop learning ¹¹⁹ . As Beesley & Cooper ¹²⁰ usefully summarise, “one-way communication, at best, will result in adjustment of existing knowledge structures, and receptivity is limited by the strength of the intent to learn (...) and the subjective interpretation of the receiver”. In contrast, they argue, “double-loop learning (via practical exercises in workshop forums, for example) facilitates mutual understanding as shared communications serve to develop an appreciation of the Other’s world-view and thought processes and then build and broaden their own. Knowledge acquisition then is not an ‘‘all or none’’ state. Elements of the incoming information may be acquired, while others may not. Double-loop learning, or two-way communications maximise the extent to which knowledge is acquired and the integrity of that which is transferred.”

6. Rich Communication and Trust

As I outline above, there is a number of factors that constrain the velocity of intraorganisational knowledge and which management should understand when formulating a knowledge governance strategy. Szulanski ¹²¹ and others popularised the concept of knowledge stickiness, a quality which impairs knowledge dynamics within an organisation. Von Hippel ¹²² defines the “stickiness of a given unit of information in a given instance as the incremental expenditure required to transfer that unit of information to a specified locus in a form usable by a given information seeker”, and in contrast to some scholars who attach an almost exclusive emphasis on the attributes of the knowledge itself ¹²³ , notes that this definition “involves not only attributes of the information itself, but attributes of and choices made by information seekers and information providers”. Significant influence is attached to both the relationship (tie) strength ¹²⁴ and the degree of trust between these actors. Both qualities also directly influence the perceived trustworthiness of the knowledge transaction ¹²⁵ , and the actors’ readiness to share knowledge in the first place ¹²⁶ .

Building on their meta-analytical study of the antecedents and consequences of organisational knowledge dynamics, van Wijk et al ¹²⁷ conclude that “firms seeking to change the extent of knowledge transfer need to focus particularly on developing strong and trustworthy relations, especially within organizational boundaries”.

Proposition 7: Knowledge dynamics is greatly catalysed through the fostering of stronger intracompany relationships and mutual trust.

For companies considering adopting the tie strength of their knowledge workers as a knowledge governance investment performance indicator (see Proposition 5 above), another caveat is due. This is one of many examples of a possible proxy metric which, while potentially accurately indicating the status of the antecedents of effective knowledge dynamics, do not directly measure knowledge dynamics per se. Such proxy metrics, while useful, need to be considered with care. In this example, as Beesley & Cooper ¹²⁸ observe, “social relationships within themselves are a necessary, but insufficient condition for knowledge transfer to take place. Social relationships act as conduits for knowledge transfer to take place, but it is the depth of understanding that transpires through two-way communications among individuals that leads to knowledge transfer.”

Before moving on, having briefly revisited Proposition 5, it is also interesting to note that van Wijk et al’s ¹²⁹ study cited above, while strongly corroborating the largely theoretical yet commonly-adopted hypothesis of a positive correlation between knowledge dynamics and organisational performance, does not attempt to extend this to any predictive model, i.e. an approach for estimating performance outcomes for a given investment in improving knowledge dynamics, or even a quantitative benchmark. As the authors themselves note, “although conceptual and qualitative reviews of the literature on organizational knowledge transfer have been done (...), no study has attempted to summarize the quantitative findings present in the large body of empirical research”. This supports my advice to invest carefully and incrementally.

Having underlined the importance of relationship strength and trust between actors, I now turn to characteristics of the actual communication process between them, as knowledge transaction are primarily communication processes ¹³⁰ . Several scholars cite language as a critical element in any knowledge transaction. To adopt the post-modernist view, it can be argued that knowledge and language are interchangeable in that “knowledge is constructed in and through language” ¹³¹ and does not have a tangible existence outside of sociolinguistic processes. If knowledge is transmitted linguistically (by the spoken or written word), “numerous alterations can and normally do happen” ¹³² , and the degree of its ‘pollution’ (a concept I already touched on above) depends on the fidelity of the language to the concepts being transmitted. As Tsoukas & Vladimirou ¹³³ argue, “when our language is crude and unsophisticated, so are our distinctions and the consequent judgments. The more refined our language, the finer our distinctions”. The spoken word has an inherently reductive propensity ¹³⁴ . To make language more capable of transmitting abstract knowledge, such as complex ideas and experience, with greater fidelity and granularity of detail, metaphors and storytelling are often successfully employed in the workplace ¹³⁵ ¹³⁶ ¹³⁷ ¹³⁸ .

Storytelling is a significant element of organisational socialisation and helps to reinforce relationships and trust in the workplace. Its contribution to this and knowledge dynamics has frequently been discussed as a discrete phenomenon in literature ¹³⁹ . Stories and anecdotes are particularly important to workers in tacit knowledge intensive (and therefore ambiguous) contexts as a method of continuously challenging and reinforcing perceptions of sequentiality (“X happened, which triggered Y”) and causality (“Y happened because I did X”) of actions. While individual incidents may not be replicable or even directly relevant to other workers, over time, storytelling builds up patterns and cognitive models that help workers better navigate the “bounded rationality” ¹⁴⁰ of their work environment. Storytelling and the use of metaphors are particularly rich in heuristic knowledge ¹⁴¹ and normative information, can help express what is not easily articulable ¹⁴² , act as useful abbreviations ¹⁴³ , and are especially effective in fostering intersubjectivity in social networks such as communities of practice ¹⁴⁴ .

Proposition 8: Positive and valid metaphors and storytelling should be employed in a structured way to enrich knowledge transactions, and reinforce relationships and trust.

In the above proposition, I have carefully used the term ‘positive and valid’ in order to underline the need to ensure that these techniques are aligned with the organisational strategy and priorities. Thus workplace metaphors and stories need to be continually updated to ensure their currency and utility. There is an inherent risk of specific messages outliving their positive contribution “because stories are more vivid, engaging, entertaining, and easily related to personal experience than rules or directives” ¹⁴⁵ . Sometimes the organisation changes and stories which are no longer applicable still persist. Empirical data unfortunately also suggests that there tends to be a bias towards negative stories ¹⁴⁶ . This resonates with my earlier assertion that knowledge is not always self-evidently positive. A working environment rich in metaphor and story based tacit knowledge transactions could actually be inherently counterproductive to individuals within it and the firm as a whole.

7. Adopting an Appropriate Culture and Management Style

In most knowledge-intensive organisations, key workers perform complex roles and have a relatively broad locus of discretion. Such workers are often team leaders, product designers, engineers, consultants, or experts in marketing or research & development. They perform roles that are typically unpredictable in process and/or with an unpredictable outcome ¹⁴⁷ ¹⁴⁸ ¹⁴⁹ ¹⁵⁰ and are often under the full control and autonomy of the actor ¹⁵¹ . It is critical that any knowledge governance strategy should reflect this relative autonomy and strive to engage positively with these workers, so rather than feeling that their locus of discretion is coming under increasing threat, they should become supporters and ideally champions of the strategy.

Strategies which rely on a principally dictatorial approach to such workers are likely to fail and instead result in undesired consequences such as increased key staff turnover. Literature generally agrees that the nature of knowledge-intensive work intrinsically conflicts with a hierarchical and coercive approach to management. “Knowledge organizations require skills derived from freethinking and unbounded actions of those working for them” ¹⁵² , or as Joseph Weiss ¹⁵³ similarly observes, “the information-based organization has knowledge workers who are specialists (or players) and who resist command-and-control procedures based on the military model”. Davenport et al ¹⁵⁴ agree: “knowledge workers are likely to resist standard routines; in fact, the level of discretion and autonomy often separates knowledge workers from administrative workers”. “Each doer has a unique way of accomplishing knowledge work” and requires control over the environment within which this work is situated ¹⁵⁵ .

According to Alvesson & Sveningsson ¹⁵⁶ , “managers must allow much space for knowledge workers, partly because managers know less of what goes on than those large groups of employees holding esoteric expertise, partly because professional norms and occupational cultures make such employees less inclined to subordinate themselves to managerial hierarchies”. This resonates with the prevalent notion that whatever the corporate knowledge governance priorities may be, workers in knowledge-intensive roles need to remain largely autonomous and self-managing ¹⁵⁷ ¹⁵⁸ . As Blosch ¹⁵⁹ concludes, “the knowledge-based organization focuses on allowing individuals to learn, experiment and communicate with each other in an atmosphere that is open to change”.

Proposition 9: Knowledge governance needs to be supported by an appropriate management style which fosters a corporate culture which promotes innovation, individual judgement and self-management in its knowledge workers.

Management should therefore focus on embedding suitable environmental enablers that naturally catalyse knowledge dynamics, and I present examples of such enablers in this paper. As managers are constrained from imposing directives and driving the underlying micro-processes directly, the knowledge governance strategy ideally needs to be credibly owned and driven by the workers concerned, and not imposed top-down by management. Within a supportive organisational environment, workers themselves can usually quickly position themselves to tackle new challenges and self-adapt to changing conditions and priorities without much interference from management. Providing the strategy and priorities of the firm are communicated continuously, clearly and convincingly to these workers, they can flex their roles accordingly. Where the need for management interference is accepted, because of the uniqueness of each knowledge worker, their role and their work content, the management approach needs similarly to be unique and tailored to that individual and their situation ¹⁶⁰ .

Delegated ownership of the knowledge governance strategy, however, does not remove the need for visible leadership by top management. In addition to promoting the culture and values supportive of knowledge dynamics, management need to steer and communicate knowledge governance priorities so that these remain continuously aligned with the company’s situation and strategy. The choice of leadership style is very important as this not only directly shapes the firm’s culture, but also needs to be sensitive to the sensitivities and demands of knowledge workers as discussed above. Inappropriate leadership could easily introduce worker resistance and resentment. Proposition 9 suggests that transformational leadership more naturally meets the cultural expectations of knowledge workers as this emphasises “experimentation, risk taking, punctuated change, and multiple alternatives” ¹⁶¹ , although there are likely to be specific situations where elements of knowledge governance will need to be steered with a more transactional leadership style.

Proposition 10: A knowledge governance strategy needs to be visibly owned and driven by the workers themselves and not imposed top-down and directed by senior management. However, it remains incumbent on leaders to clearly establish corporate priorities which should steer this strategy.

Delegated ownership of knowledge governance works best when elements supportive of knowledge dynamics are already fully embedded into the operating model of the firm. Knowledge governance then is not treated as a separate or discrete function that needs explicit supervision, instead effective governance ‘just happens’, emerging as the collective product of the processes, behaviours and judgements of individual knowledge workers, which are all aligned with the clear and accepted priorities set out by the firm’s leadership. Of course, this effect can be supported and where necessary more formalised through performance management, both by fine-tuning corporate metrics to reflect the firm’s knowledge agenda, and by embedding some of the knowledge governance outcomes into the formal performance criteria, and through these even into reward mechanisms, of the workers concerned.

I have witnessed several examples across diverse industries of initially stridently promoted knowledge governance initiatives or programmes failing or being eventually quietly abandoned by management when promised benefits did not readily materialise. Successful examples, by contrast, tended to be the low-key and incremental implementations of knowledge governance elements into the firm’s operating model, gradually embedding these into the roles, processes, and the culture of the firm. Having promoted knowledge governance as a concept and then having set out a number of propositions that should help to shape an effective implementation approach, I accept the gentle irony of my final advice to management not to launch a knowledge governance programme per se.

Proposition 10: A knowledge governance strategy should not be tackled as a discrete and high-visibility change programme. Instead, it should be gradually embedded into the firm’s operating model to become an integral part of the corporate processes, culture and strategy.

8. Conclusion

Leaders in today’s industry are acutely aware of how important a corporate asset knowledge is, and the potential competitive advantage that could be achieved should this be governed in an effective way ¹⁶² . They are also well aware that the issue has recently developed far beyond the domain of IT systems. Yet organisational literature to-date has largely failed to set out clearly and holistically how a knowledge governance strategy should be designed and implemented in practice, and the key underlying principles that need to be factored in during this process.

In this unapologetically normative paper, I have distilled a considerable volume of relevant academic literature and, blending these with my own practical experience of knowledge management, produced ten practical propositions to tackle this need. Firms that choose to implement knowledge governance strategies which adhere to these propositions are likely to enhance their internal knowledge dynamics in an integrated way which holistically tackles explicit and tacit knowledge, involves all levels within the organisation and is sensitive to the cultural expectations of its knowledge workers. This approach should also firmly embed the appropriate knowledge governance micro-foundations within the operating model to ensure that knowledge transactions are naturally aligned with the corporate processes, strategy and priorities.

This article is a modest first-pass attempt at setting out an actionable management theory in this area. I hope that with further theoretical development, backed by a growing body of empirical evidence, we will over time steer our understanding of knowledge governance into the territory of recognised best practice.

[The full table of references is available on request]

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