A Christmas Message

Christmas Days always seem to start strangely, and today is no exception.

It's 5am in Crozon, Brittany, North-Western France. I've been at least half awake since 3, and have moved from a fairly uncomfortable bed to a luxurious sofa. I read the first few pages of “Ray Charles: Man and Music” by Michael Lydon, sleepily became stuck on an image of the flatlands of Northern Florida, and then decided to give up and just listen to the ticking of the grandfather clock. I decided to see where the ticking took me.

By daytime, the room I am in is dominated by its south-facing sea view, a captivating and ever-changing panorama of skies and cloud formations, rocks, sea and shorelines that are one minute bathed in sunshine and the next minute cast into gothic silhouette. Stand outside after dark, and your eye is drawn upwards to the stars, especially after about 10.30pm when the streetlights are switched off and the backcloth of millions upon millions of distant stars show up behind the few prominent ones that townies like me can usually see. The dominant sound is the sea, washing back and forth on a pebbly beach about half a mile away, plus the occasional calls of owls having a pow-wow across trees or chimneys above and behind.

But right now, all of that is barred by the window shutters, and if I opened them I'd wake the rest of this sleeping house. I'm acutely aware of the darkness outside, but I can't actually see it. It's like I'm inside an envelope. I know where the opening is and how to open it, and what's outside it, but it's the wrong moment to break out, so instead I have to to focus on what's inside.

Despite the comfort of the sofa and the large pile of Christmas presents in front of me, it's the ticking of this clock that now completely commands the room. It's an impressive old thing, made of probably oak or walnut, and it ticks once a second with a very even rhythm. You know how the sound of some ticking clocks are affected by the weight of the hands, so that as the second hand is dragged up from 7 to 11 it becomes a grudging shuffle, 11 to 1 is all quiet before it stumbles down to 5 like someone running down a hill and struggling to maintain their balance, and finally loitering around 6 and gasping for a rest before the next ascent? Well, there's none of that. This clock just ticks. A slight up note on one tick and a drop on the next, but that might even be a trick of my ears. There are subtler shifts in rhythm. Sometimes I can picture heavy feet pounding up stone steps to a citadel, and occasionally there's something more rounded, like a chain of railway navvies passing blocks or bolts from one person to the next and making neat piles at the end. Yet no matter how long I listen, and how much imagery I try to conjure, the overwhelming sense is that time is just carrying on, at its own pace, totally disinterested in me or anyone else, and I'm helpless to try and tame it.

I start to ask myself questions and to try and play with this inexorable rhythm. Can I synchronise my breathing to it? Not really, I end up breathing too slow or too fast, can't quite get a natural pace. If I could get my heartbeat to fall into line, would it take the 60bpm of a resting athlete or the 120bpm of an incessant pop song? 60 is divisible by three, so why can I only hear these ticks in twos or fours?

Finally, after two hours of listening closely, I've picked up a new sound. In the interval between each tick, as the pendulum turns for its next swing, there's a faint sort of tailing off, slightly lazy or apologetic, like some threads on frayed jeans dragging behind the shoes of someone meandering along a quiet road. Its at odds with the clipped, 'very British' rigour of the rest of the ticking, and in a way I feel like I've found a way in, a chink in its armour. Gradually I realise that I've already conjured several different scenes out of this clock, and with patience it could give me more. Maybe there's something colonial about it: the way that settlers and civil servants in far-flung places tried to assert the reassuring rhythms of their homeland, and usually ended up with something slightly out of kilter. As though, perhaps, the unerring tick of the trusty grandfather clock, uncrated after a month at sea and put up reverently in office or drawing room, just ends up exposing the fact that everything around it will ultimately refuse to conform to its imposed order.

I've time for a coffee and some more about Ray Charles, before the family wakes up and Christmas begins. And before the clock's purposeful walk is drowned out by the chaotic dance of voices, pots and pans, plates and glasses, ripping of giftwrap and post-prandial snoring.

Happy Christmas.

Moving Target: Proceed with Caution.

I'm currently bidding for two pieces of work that both involve facilitating aspects of strategic planning. This puts my brain into a very specific gear, where I contemplate what good strategic planning actually entails and, in particular, why strategies are so rarely implemented properly.

I suggest that a major reason for lack of implementation is not paying attention to moving targets.

I'm often fascinated by the way in which driving a car offers lots of analogies for thinking about how life works. This is particularly odd when you consider for how short a phase of civilisation people have been driving cars, and therefore how alien it ought to be to our psyche in evolutionary terms.

Today I was driving my car in the busy morning traffic. Some people of an environmentalist bent will immediately think me a fool for even contemplating such a time and energy-wasting endeavour but, like most other people, I have a complex and self-fulfilling justification for doing it. I should add that I don't do it very often.

Anyway, part of my journey was on a fairly busy stretch of motorway, and I entertained myself by observing patterns in the traffic around me. What I noticed was that when I concentrated on vehicles much further ahead - say 10 or so vehicles ahead, I actually drove a little more slowly. I think there may have been several reasons for this. Maybe I was responding more to the average speed of the traffic, rather than to the ebb and flow of roadspeed of the vehicles immediately around me. Maybe I was noticing when cars a long way in front began to slow down, and slowing down accordingly, rather than only reacting when the car directly in front slowed. Maybe I was setting my speed on the basis of seeing a couple of hundred metres in front, and then instinctively slowing if my view was impeded by nearer traffic.

You can see where I'm heading. It occurred to me that perhaps we instinctively anticipate hazards and adjust our behaviour accordingly, but if we shorten our time horizon we don't allow for hazards that are beyond it. In a car, if we are only staring at the back of the car in front, the only hazard we anticipate is that that particular car will do something we need to react to, whereas if we look in front of that car we can begin to assess what that driver is responding to.

When we do strategic planning, we tend to look to a point in the future and see it as a fixed point in time: we are trying to achieve a series of goals by the time we get there. But then we draw our timeline and identify obstacles and interim targets along the way, and tend - instinctively perhaps - to try and tackle each one in turn, as we get to it. While we concentrate on the nearest target, we're not watching what is happening to the subsequent ones.

Of course, what is happening is that those further away obstacles and targets are moving and morphing, being influenced by the decisions we're taking (or not taking) now, and the people who are monitoring what is happening further into the future are not the same people who are responding to immediate challenges.So by the time decision-makers have formulated what to do about the most immediate challenge, the nature of the subsequent challenges has altered, and the strategy is already on its way to redundancy.

Therefore, making sustainable strategies implementable means we need to bear three things in mind:

1) We are always working towards moving targets, not fixed ones, which means we need to be alert for movement;

2) Future targets move not only due to changes beyond our control, which we can't predict, but also because the decisions we're taking now are shaping the future all the time;

3) If we focus our gaze on the more distant, longer-term goals, the nearer ones are likely to be less challenging, whereas if we concentrate on the nearer, shorter-term goals, the distant ones may well be more challenging than they are now.

AW.

The Unlikelihood Principle

This week I have been helping some friends insulate their house. It is an old, solid-walled, terraced house, and we are aiming to achieve energy performance not too far from that of a modern house by fitting insulated panels to the inside of the outside walls. The construction is basically 50mm of rigid, foil-backed insulation board plus a layer of normal plasterboard, ready for redecorating.

Now, the standard size of an insulation board or plasterboard sheet is 2.4m by 1.2m, and up until today (when these materials arrive) my main concern had been getting these sheets up the narrow stairs. However, today is very, very windy, and now I'm much more worried about actually getting them into the house in the first place. This recalls Venturi's Law*, that windspeed is directly proportion to the surface area of the material you are attempting to carry. Practical applications include design of racing yachts, and not choosing to transport sheet building materials on windy days.

I have lived in traditionally windy cities - Sheffield and Newcastle - for most of the last 20 years, and I know that even in such cities there are probably only about 10 or 15 days per year when it is genuinely, seriously windy. That means on any given day there is about a 1 in 24 chance of high wind. I would guesstimate that I carry sheet materials outdoors only about 4 times a year, so on any day there is a 1 in 91.25 chance that I'll be carrying a sheet of plasterboard across the street. Therefore, if I stuck a pin in the calendar on, say, 4th February, the chances that I'd find myself carrying plasterboard in high winds on that day would be 1 in 2,190. That would mean only one day in every six years would I encounter this unfortunate coincidence. However, anecdotal evidence contradicts this, since I'm pretty sure it's windy almost every time I try to carry something.

I'm not paranoid and I don't believe I'm being singled out. I first noticed the phenomenon when carrying architectural models from home to university in Newcastle, where the flimsy polystyrene versions of my designs were always destined for some destructive weather-testing before a tutorial. Since moving to Sheffield I have often noticed other architecture students putting their models through the same testing processes.

This got me to thinking: supposing I'm not a victim of Venturi's Law, but of something altogether more insidious: unfortunate unlikelihood. That's to say, the less likely it is that I'm doing something, the more likely it is that something unlikely will happen at that moment. The evidence for the existence of this phenomenon is strong. If you use a train every day, it will occasionally be late; if you use it once a year, it is almost bound to be late that day. If you cycle every day, you will occasionally get wet; if you cycle once a month, you are certain to get caught in a monsoon. If you eat oysters every day, you may get a bad one and be sick once every couple of years; if you eat oysters only on Christmas Eve, you will inevitably spend Christmas Day feeling very poorly and vowing never to eat oysters again. If you drink alcohol every day you might have five nasty hangovers during the course of a year, and maybe one evening to be embarrassed about; if you only drink on bank holidays, you'll still have five nasty hangovers per year, and at least three causes to be ashamed of yourself.

The question is, is it possible to harness this force of nature, this convergence of statistical fragility with anecdotal certainty, and turn into something positive and useful? Does fortunate unlikelihood also work? For example, let's say I currently spend 1 day in every 10 days looking for new business, and actually win a commission once every 90 days. Now supposing I only spent 1 day in 90 looking for new business, is it more or less likely that my marketing efforts would pay off? Or, if my friend Filbert asked 10 women to marry him, would he be more or less likely to get a positive response than if he only asked one woman?

I suspect the only way to answer these questions is by empirical experimentation, but there is certainly a direct application to research methods. A good example is the kind of questionnaires used in transport or retail research, which begin, "How often do you use this service/shop, all the time, often, or rarely?" Conventionally, the subsequent answers of frequent customers will be considered more significant, because their repeated patronage makes them more valuable customers. However, the law of unlikelihood dictates that the customers who use the service/shop very rarely are much more likely to have 'outlier' experiences - good or bad - and therefore focusing the research on those occasion patrons will enable more detailed study of how, and why, things might go spectacularly right or wrong for any given patron on any given visit.

A closing conundrum: my grandmother always used to speed up the arrival of a bus by lighting a cigarette. She probably smoked about 10 cigarettes a day, and used the principle that a bus was more likely to arrive if it was interrupting a smoke by doing so. It often worked, but not always. Given that I've smoked fewer than 10 cigarettes in 37 years, it is almost infinitely unlikely that I would light up whilst waiting for a bus, so I couldn't actually use a cigarette to summon a bus without destroying the unlikelihood of my doing so. On the other hand, a chain smoker would always be smoking when the bus arrived, but his decision to smoke would have no effect on the bus's arrival. Therefore, does the greatest overall power lie in actions that are only moderately unlikely?

AW.

*Note: Venturi's Law is different from, though not wholly unrelated to, the Venturi Effect. The main difference is that the latter actually exists.