My Finite and Fleeting Lifetime

We all know our days are numbered. Here's a couple of paragraphs on how I've spent the last seven.

Complicated Versus Complex

In a calculated move to suck up to my boss's boss, I volunteered to work on something called "Polivery" (apologies; I will explain later), which is a day-long conference held every year or so, organized by the Ontario government's Cabinet Office, for the purpose of firing up the minds and imaginations of a couple of hundred Ontario public servants.

This year, the event had to be done on the super cheap, which meant most of the speakers were local (no travel costs to reimburse) and most of them generously waived their fee.

The keynote speaker was David Weiss. He's written a book called Innovative Intelligence and he shared some of the concepts in it with the 250 middle-management level bureaucrats gathered. He's a terrific speaker and his talk was full of great stuff, but the part that clung tightest to my forgetful middle-aged brain was the difference he described between complicated problems and complex problems.

Complicated problems have many parts and processes. They need to be simplified and organized. So, building a shoe factory is a complicated problem. The thinking most appropriate for complicated problems is to leverage existing expertise to develop a common solution that simplifies and solves the complicated problem. For the shoe factory, you convene a couple of experts who have built factories before and off you go.

Complex problems are ambiguous, possibly unique, and probably involve a lot of different interests. So, ensuring everyone has a pair of shoes is a complex problem. The approach most appropriate for complex problems requires innovative thinking to deal with the ambiguity, and to gain insight into the complexity. Usually you can't limit the discussion to just a few experts, for the perhaps obvious reason that, since this is a new problem, there likely are no real experts. Instead, you ask the people involved to share their knowledge and perspective and from that discussion, the picture emerges of what the problem actually is. From there, the problem can transform into one that is merely complicated and off you go.

A very common error, said Mr. Weiss, occurs when people treat a complex problem as if it were complicated. He said, "For every complex problem, there is a simple, elegant complicated solution that is dead wrong." 

Dead wrong complicated solutions to complex problems would be along the lines of adding more police to the municipal force to deal with the urban gang problem, or using the rules and concepts of the market to solve the problem of climate change.  

And, At the Very Opposite End of the Spectrum

I have stumbled upon and invited into my life a video game based on the Simpsons called Tapped Out.  This frightful time-sucker has extensive presence on the Internet, with its own Facebook page, a fan page, numerous hack posts and, according to the unreliable source that is the game's creator, millions and millions of players.  

I really can't say more about this because I have to log on to my Springfield and see what's going on.

No actual picture this week, but I hope the many links are diverting and amusing.

Have a great week!

Karen

Oh. Right. "Polivery" is the word you get when you squish "policy" and "delivery" together into one word. I could go into more detail, but why on earth would I do that.