September 2009

Everyone likes a happy ending and this applies in development work too.  Quite often, we have the tendency to showcase our successes through best practices that are upheld as evidence that a particular approach works. But what about those instances when we may have made some mistakes along the way or failed outright? Humans have a tendency to focus on successes rather than failures.

"This [handling of failure] is difficult for us to do well because we have strong human bias to value successes more than we value failures. In most organizations failure is stigmatized and nobody wants to be associated with it…..Unfortunately this produces some dangerous side-effects. Since improbable failures have high information content, it is important to communicate information about failure quickly and widely throughout the organization. To the extent that we hinder the flow of this information, we will force people to reinvent failures that we have already experienced, and that generates no useful new information."

In his latest post, Tony Lambino makes an interesting argument about pundits and social norms. He says that pundits' comments, for example on statements of public figures, are a manifestation of the social norms of a society. Punditry is a fascinating phenomenon and a recent development in the mass media - and might have changed the media landscape quite significantly.

Pundits discuss current affairs from their own point of view, often together with or in contrast to other pundits. Pundits can be experts, such as academics, but often journalists stylize themselves to be experts on political and other issues. It seems debatable to me whether punditry it is indeed part of the media's role in democracy.

There was an article in the New York Times recently with the title 'What's Really Wrong With Wall Street Pay?'  In the article, the writer discusses a problem world leaders want to do something about but are not sure how. How do you stop compensation packages for bankers and traders in global markets from encouraging them to take the kinds of wild risks that have done so much damage to the global economy?  I wish the leaders the very best of luck in dealing with that one. Success in the endeavor is far from certain...to put it gently.

What caught my eye as I was reading the piece is what the writer says bankers call the "I.B.G-Y.B.G." problem, as in 'I'll be gone and you will be gone'. It is the moral hazard problem. Traders in global markets take incredible risks and recklessly, they collect their bonuses and move on. The firm takes all the risk. Well, it turns out that taxpayers take risks as well, since governments have had to bail out so many banks deemed too big to fail.

Up until very recently I was very sniffy about corporate and government engagement online.  I always figured that the real strength in new media lay in the credibility born from broadcasting the voices of the unheard.  I associated digital engagers using blogs and micro-blogs, social networks and chat forums to be identified with the individual, with community journalists wishing to distance themselves from mainstream media, and with speaking free from constraints of institution or authority.

Until last week in fact, any official blogging from the likes of government ministers would make me shudder and I assumed it was with ignorance that organisations and authorities around the world stumbled into this new digital playground. I sniggered at local authority Tweets and hollow-laughed as government Facebook groups requested my membership.  Then a friend reminded me that my own words (these in fact) appear branded on the website of a rather large organisation – no less than the World Bank.  Ah. Right. And I have to confess I have never been censored and rarely edited by the bank (save for my typos).  I decided to have a conversation with a Digital Diplomacy expert in the hope it would resolve my issues for me.  It did.