Maps for real life

I know a guy who has moved his family to Italy, so his children would grow up with a bit of culture in them. The driver was his increasing belief that his kids were evolving into something he’d like to shoo off his lawn.

And no, he’s not of Italian descent and neither is his wife. He just thought spending a couple of years in Europe would do the family a world of good. He occasionally posts online to Tumblr, with a blog called “Shit I Learned – things you pick up on the way”. I like the title, because it reflects how I feel about my journey.

One of the things I reckon I have learned along the way is that the closer a solution maps to real life, the fewer problems you find you have.

I use this as a guide for when coming up with solutions. Whenever a process or proposed solution starts to feel a bit too abstract or too complex or too removed from people’s actual motivations, I ask myself: ‘What’s really happening here? Is this how real life works? Are the general steps the same, and the motivations and goals aligned?’

For instance, on one of our Flinders Pacific projects, we get bonuses paid on our assessment of what is the likely outcome of our marketing efforts, both at one and three years in the future. The bonus gets paid today, but the auditing of our performance won’t happen for several years – by which time we are likely to be long gone. Unsurprisingly, I don’t complain.

However, this belief in arrangements being more effective and robust when they “map to real life” made me excited when I heard about some arrangements in the innovation area in Finland. Göran Roos, who’s currently in Australia, is the chair of VTT, which is a bit like Finland’s version of the CSIRO.

It employs about 3,000 researchers to come up with cool ideas in a variety of domains. The VTT’s underlying purpose is one I find highly attractive. Its objective is to come up with technical innovations to improve the competitive performance of Finnish industry.

But the bit I love – the bit that maps to real life so much better than our arrangements – is that performance is not judged by government ministers or their staff. It is judged by Finnish industry – its customers! Who better to assess your performance than the customer?

Despite the fact we consider ourselves a clever country, it makes me wish our government had learned this along the way. CSIRO, NICTA, the CRCs and, in fact, any government-funded research agency would surely benefit from being judged by its customers.