"The future of sport is real-time science"

Peter writes ...
This Guardian piece on Mike Forde of Bolton Wanderers is interesting for many reasons. Its central theme is innovation, brought into sharpest focus by the real-time information Sam Allardyce can conjure during a half-time team talk.

But there are many more interesting nuances too. If you want to understand what Beer meant by System 4, you could do well to start with thinking about Mike Forde's work. Also, though I would not claim that this is a skunk works, it does show how innovation relies on structural and cultural separateness.

So, if you don't play by the same rules as everyone else, is that a good or bad thing? In many ways, the early 21st Century is no time to conform! Think disruption, asymmetry, Blue Ocean, and Bolton Wanderers!

A Whole Lot of Spilt Milk

Peter writes...

We could have trained a lot of nurses, paid a lot more to a lot more staff. Never mind. But it does seem like that NHS patients records system just isn't going to work.

Has more money ever been wasted on anything?

In the words of Andrew Rollerson of Fujitsu, “There is a belief that the national programme is somehow going to propel transformation in the NHS simply by delivering an IT system,” he said. “Nothing could be further from the truth. A vacuum, a chasm, is opening up. It was always there.”

I have not found the original text of Rollerson's presentation, but I note that from the press reports that he seems to focus on issues of project management and technology adoption (transformation). Presumably it is safe ground for Fujitsu, a technology supplier to the project, to criticise these aspects.

In this light, maybe he is making informed use of the word "chasm."

It would have been good, but nobody wanted to use it.

Later in this course, the true story of Salford Council, skunk works, and a project that really did work. There wasn't a management consultant in sight.

See also The Lingering Death of the NHS Computer.

PS. You might also be interested in an MBS project we are undertaking. It looks at the conditions that make a public sector organisation amenable to successful engagement with management consultants, and those that ae associated with a negative outcome. Any management consultancy contract is at heart a relationship. You can get relationships more right or more wrong, depending on how you go about them.