Organisational versus Network Secrecy – Limits to the Wikileaks Model

I attended two fascinating public lectures yesterday, one on America's international relations in the lead-up to 9/11 and the other on animal welfare law, the second of which was delivered by a particularly powerful presenter. I'm no animal lover, but the principle that people can use ill-formed laws to argue that they're acting acceptably (equating acting legally with acting acceptably) when what the laws allow is really intolerable was intriguing.

Neither of these areas are that familiar to me, but there were a few messages from the first that I can't help reflect on. The session was also serving as a book launch, for “Strategic Shortfall – The Somalia Syndrome and the March to 9/11,” and the author's main thesis (as far as I understood it) was that the event was not nearly as much of a turning point as was publicised and that a number of individuals within the US government and intelligence communities were particularly concerned about a growing threat from Al-Qaeda for years (particularly since the US's pull out of Somalia in 1993) leading up to it (including former president Bill Clinton), but that entrenched skepticism that a non-state actor could possibly be a threat to the United States prevented many in the Bush administration from taking it as seriously as they should have. Their unwillingness to recognise the interconnected nature of the world we live in, and how it could facilitate the kind of coordination for such an attack in such an informal way.

After all the recent attention to Julian Assange and Wikileaks, I can't help but wonder how this all relates. I strongly believe in the power of systems like Wikileaks to shape the world in a positive way, but given the power of more informal clusters to coordinate events, we can't ignore its limitations either.

Because whereas organisations have to expend large amounts of effort (and thus capital) to conceal the information that they do, secrecy is a built-in part of the networks that these smaller groups use to direct their actions. Systems like Wikileaks have the power to unearth the artificial secrecy of large corporations and governments, but how can they hope to keep track of these highly-motivated but distributed agents using these networks that can leave so few traces?

I think a useful way to look at information is on two axes – transparency, and accessibility.

	Transparent	Opaque
Accessible	This is the main kind of information published by sources like Wikileaks. Once you have it it's easy to broadcast to the world.	The example that comes to mind here is the Enron case, where there was an enormous amount of revealing financial data publicly available, but you need Ph.D.'s to decipher it for the rest of us.
Inaccessible	Knowledge communicated by motivated but distributed agents, taking advantage of networks for the secrecy they can provide. This would be easily interpreted by people, if only it was available to them. Wikileaks powerless here.	By its very nature, no examples assert themselves, but this is the most potentially threatening kind of information. It really speaks to the importance of not locking up the ability to interpret kinds of information in a single institution.

Of course, these axes are over a continuous spectrum; I've specified the endpoints. The problem along the accessibility dimension is lack of whistleblowers; along transparency, it's interpreters. The Wikileaks model will always require journalistic volunteers, perhaps to procure, but mostly to interpret information. Here the main difficulty will be finding volunteers that have the skill to make important information – which may depend on a large amount of training or extensive knowledge to understand – accessible to a broader audience. The more opaque the information is, the more difficult it is to find interpreters.

It's worth elaborating that 'opaque' need not mean 'digitally encrypted,' as the Enron case demonstrates. I use it to mean 'requiring knowledge or expertise not common among all those who would share interest in the information were they able to make sense of it.'

Things like personal medical records are things we would like to only be accessible to ourselves and our doctors when needed, and (unless you understand medicine) typically require their expertise to distill for us.

While I recognise the disparity between perceived and actual likelihood of terror events due to the popular media, we can't deny that it's only getting easier for the embittered few to ruin everything for the rest of us.

Selling Your Sole Fillets

[A talk I delivered at my last TM meeting, the assignment being 'Research Your Topic' - it went over very well. ]

Credibility. Backing up my ideas with those of others I've researched. That's what this whole talk is supposed to be about, right?

Then surely, the worst thing I could do to establish my own credibility would be to question that of my sources, right?

Yeah, absolutely, no doubt about it. Eh, oh well. I'll accept that handicap. Questioning my sources, brazenness, we're off to a great start.

Yet I think that's entirely the right attitude to the kind of question I've asked. How do you succeed in business? Given the different responses to this question, and how contradictory they can be, there's only one clear answer.

No-one knows.

Let's be clear what I'm not saying here. I have no doubt business schools teach some valuable lessons, and I'm not questioning the talent of people like Richard Branson, or Donald Trump.

It's just that these people aren't following a script.

The best ice-hockey players like Wayne Gretzky don't go where the puck is, they only care where it's going to be. Physics can tell you where it's going to be, but you can drill someone on F = d/dt(mv) all day and it probably won't make them a better sportsperson very quickly. What do great businesses need to follow? What people want.

Aha! Market research! Focus groups!

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What who wants?

Well, consumers, obviously, right? Sure, but that's forgetting the other side of the coin. The producers – whoever they are, employees, volunteers, yourself. Fledging businesses often have a technically-minded person at the helm, too often overly focused on the consumers and what they're creating for them, that they neglect the very fabric of their business; the people in it and how they're organised.

As far as Psychology has come, it can't predict people as well as Physics can a puck. Great businesses can't tell the future any better than others – what do they have to teach us?

It's easy to think of expert athletes or entrepreneurs, or mature businesses as these troves of accumulated knowledge, but there's more beneath the surface. They know their limitations, they've seen their past performance and know how to compensate for their weaknesses – as individuals and as teams. This awareness is rarely conveyed or appreciated. Perhaps because they take it for granted, it doesn't apply to others, or even if it is communicated, others don't realise its importance.

Know thyself. I don't follow the bible much, but Jesus was on to something there.

We don't change much as individuals, but the world we live in is becoming more and more complex. Are our businesses shifting with it? McDonalds is famous for its business model, which is as finely tuned as any of its burgers. Most of its employees are only there to turn the cranks in the machine. Its standardised system is what has made it so successful.

Is this mechanistic, impersonal structure relevant to our modern technical world?

Look at Google's famous 20% time, where 20% of their engineer's time can be spent doing whatever they want, however they want. Half of their new products come out of this – such as GMail, or Google News. Or the so-called Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE, where people aren't kept to schedules, only results – coming to work when they want, and optionally attending meetings, has almost across-the-board resulted in increased productivity, worker satisfaction, and decreased turnover.

Maybe we haven't appreciated people enough. Conventional wisdom has been that financial rewards are an effective way of motivating people to do great work.

Nearly 40 years of research flies in the face of these beliefs. For example, studies funded by the Federal Reserve Bank in the United States found that for tasks requiring “even rudimentary cognitive skill,” larger rewards “led to poorer performance.”

Rewards have the effect of narrowly focusing the mind. For the requirements of factory-like chores, narrow focus works wonders, but in tasks requiring out-of-the-box thinking typical of the modern era it actually does harm.

Traditional management is fine if you want compliance, but if you want engagement, self-direction is the way to go. Intrinsic motivators, like autonomy – directing our own actions – and purpose – the feeling that what we're doing matters. Hey, even road-kill picker-uppers whistle on the job.

Surely both McDonalds and Google have lessons to teach us, but their difference speaks to a larger principle: There is no sure path to success in business. Questioning not just what they've done, but why they've done it, seems a good place to start though.