I have been away. Yes, and for a reason. I was watching the world turmoil on the sidelines. Lots of things have changed and have happened around the world to cause this turmoil that I was watching. The turmoil continues at home and overseas, unabated. On one side of the spectrum I see financial turmoil and the other side social turmoil. Dynamics of the world operation has changed. Lots of things that are being done the way they were being done are ready for disruption.
Why am I saying this? There are institutions formed in 20th century don’t seem to understand the 21st century settings. When the world connects, what has been presumed to be the norm is no more a norm.
Let me take an example of a company founded in 1800s. The one in news recently is Standard & Poor founded in 1860 by HV Poor merging with Standard Statistics in 1941 to become Standard & Poor and acquired by McGraw-Hill in 1961. It decided to change the rating of US borrowings from AAA to AA+ based on the political debate on raising the debt ceiling for borrowing by US government.
I am viewing this from the point of view of a company possibly grounded by the philosophy of stability in assigning the ratings. In my opinion, the congress, the senate and the president had all different views on what is needed to get the debt ceiling raised. There was no question about the need felt by all to raise the debt ceiling. Of course, what deemed to be a bi-partisan is now a tri-partisan with tea party members making enough noise.
It is fair to assume that President feels the needs at national levels and the members of both houses feel at regional or local level. If that is so, true democracy is all about a support structure existing to support the national interests as deemed necessary by the President. Why so? The answer is simple. The President’s office got filled in by a person who proposed the changes at national level to the people and got elected to the office. But the offices occupied by the members of both the houses did not get elected by the nation. So far, this is all obvious. But what is not obvious is the spirit that it becomes necessary for those offices which got filled in with regional interests to support the national interests of the people by supporting the office of the President.
Did that happen recently on the issue of raising the debt ceiling? Yes. Did that happen behind closed doors? No. Was the process in a state of constant flux and turmoil? Yes.
Welcome to the nature of processes in the 21st century. We can see, hear, feel the progress made at each and every step of the way. In 20th century, this process was not that visible. Only the results of the process were often seen, heard and felt. This is a marked difference in which the regions, the nations and the worlds are going to exist in the 21st century.
When this is going to be the norm, then why this should be seen as different from norm that was based on 20th century grounding to judge it as a turmoil? From that point of view of 21st century, when Standard & Poor announced that their ratings downgrade was based on this political turmoil, I felt that it was funny for such a reputed company to miss the valuable 21st century learning that they would not have otherwise missed if they had embraced the philosophies of COL rather than the grounding philosophies of 20th century.
Now we need to take a look at these questions from the 21st century perspective to find answers. What Standard & Poor did – was it based out of a fake learning? What the houses did fake work – as the question of need was never questioned, but the process almost became dysfunctional? Will the economy that gets molded by such fake learning and fake workings will be fake too?
My definition of Fake, whether it is right or wrong, is no progress. Technology has got a hand in it, but to a lesser extent. That’s because technology took birth to drive the work towards efficiency, but then the over-specialization in technology is now making the real work recede to the background creating what I call fake work.
It is not so just because of technology, but because of how technology has affected all areas of our lives – sometimes inexplicably. Some of the activities I see around are fake – fake because there is no progress. The knowledge has become more complex and the only way to make it simpler is to subdivide the knowledge into manageable pieces. Once you embark on that process, there is no end on how deep you can go. Those sub-divided work will evolve into specializations to become over-specialized over a period of time. Even though the knowledge is one, because of dividing it into million pieces, the process of subdivision has created new activities pushing the prioritizing, scheduling, monitoring those subdivided knowledge into forefront. All these processes are becoming increasingly visible and complex through technology, even though the end result of the overarching process is same whether you have 20th century or 21st century perspective. You may call them overheads of subdivided work, but I call them fake work when they do not achieve the end result or take more time and resources to achieve the end result.
Sometimes we complain them as information overload, sometimes we complain them technology overload, and some other time as process overload. Nowadays, I keep hearing them as analytics overload or BI overload. Whatever you call them, I see them from a perspective of progress or waste. If there is more information than necessary, then it amounts to overkill and going overboard is wasting something – time, resources or energy, and, any waste than necessary amounts to fake – may it be learning, may it be work or may it be economy.