Howzat?! Knowledge and Emergence in Cricket

Anyone that knows me knows that I love the game of Cricket . One of its great fascinations, in particular Test Cricket, is its complexity and so the temptation to find parallels between the game and business is very tempting. But its easy to get carried away with this and to address every business issue with a cricketing metaphor. The current brouhaha around allegations of corrupt practice and spot betting is a case in point. It would be entirely possible to find myriad opportunities to spark a discussion about issues like ethics and CSR, poor regulation by moribund money centred administrators, failure to maintain boundaries – you can see where this might go. The problem with this is that too often the person drawing the parallel can be drawn into extending the similarity to a point where the comparison between sport and business is unsustainable and so meaningless.

But both business and sport, in this case cricket, are it seems to me subject to certain common principles and phenomenon because both involve concern human behaviour and cognition. For example it has been possible for me to apply KM techniques in top level sport – notably rugby - and use some of those same principles back in a business environment. IF we approach it from the point of view of those principles there might be something of value to reflect on. So in that spirit I wanted to just identify two things that struck me as interesting without getting into how the third umpire might be applied in the financial sector.

Firstly I was struck by the demonstration of the necessity and power of human intervention for knowledge disclosure. Let me explain. I am a committed listener to the BBC's Test Match Special . For those that don't know this is a radio commentary of five day test matches. It sounds incredible to the uninitiated but believe me it is not only possible to do but it is absolutely compulsive listening. The format is that the commentator covers the action – such as it is – whilst having a more speculative, ruminative and forensic conversation about the game with an accompanying “expert summariser”. There is also a statistician on hand as well. The result can be funny, thoughtful, provocative even infuriating but always entertaining. The amount of cricketing insight and experience on display at this point is formidable and as an exercise in the disclosure of knowledge of the game it is almost without comparison. So it was fascinating that when the controversial no-balls were actually bowled this team immediately felt something was not quite right in what was a wonderful demonstration of a knowledge disclosure points (KDP). Of course they made no accusations but there was an unease about what had happened based on the evaluation of a complex event by the Mk1 brain and we could, if we so wished use Dave Snowden's excellent ASHEN framework to perhaps better understand how that assessment was done. But to me it was just another example of how human cognition is the best judge of action and risk in a complex environment.

The second interesting point of observation for me – particularly so in an age of Social Media - was the role of the players – past and present – and the supporters in forcing some action. The emergent outrage shown by these parties, expressed typically through quick media distribution, and the aggregate effect of that has already forced some action form a range of groups, politicians administrators etc. who had up to that point begun to fall back on the old “head in sand approach” of “No comment”, “the matter is in police hands”, “cant interfere” etc.

So whilst I am not saying business is cricket or vice versa I am saying we are all subject to similar forces and opportunities that can, if managed and harnessed correctly, can be very beneficial.

Lets hear it for the Banks

There is still a good deal of bank bashing going on at the moment. Excessive profits, excessive bonuses – you know the stuff. However the main criticism being levelled at them at present Fleet St, politicians and society generally is that they are “not lending” most notably to small businesses. Now, far be it for me to defend the banks. I have a well known and very vocal disregard for most of those institutions but….I do think some of this is a bit tough and unfair at present. The reason for my unlikely defence of the banks lies in the idea that maybe, just maybe, they have woken up to what I have been telling them for the last few years. And that is that much of the financial crisis and the exposure of the banks was a result of the failure to understand the nature of knowledge in their business. Could it be that they have finally realised this?

Anyone that has attended one of my “Let me explain KM” presentations for the past few years are familiar with one of the metaphorical examples I use involving banks and my experience of using them over the past 40 years. I use samples of my correspondence with my banks to demonstrate how my relationship with these institutions has changed over that time and how their knowledge of me has declined to a point where it is simply not possible for them to:
a) offer a decent service and more importantly in this context
b) judge my potential as a risk.

In brief I demonstrate how the retail bank has sought to commoditise the relationship and reduce it to a simple transactional based relationship where the aim is to systematise and drive down cost as if the banking industry were some kind of Taylorist dream of simple causality.

My contention is that this is fundamentally un sound as this industry, and our interaction with it is, if I use the Cynefin framework, a Complex relationship. My early correspondence with the bank showed a real bank manager in place at my branch who knew me, knew my circumstances and could make decisions on my credit worthiness and how the bank could build loyalty by responding to me specific and individual needs. Fast forward to a point where I have no branch, the staff there are administrators with little or no autonomy to act, and so are left with blunt un satisfactory and in flexible transactional based interfaces. They don’t know me, can’t offer a service and, most importantly, can’t judge my risk.

The model can be extended to the commercial banks – with systematised lightning fast trading that is not intelligent enough to cope with the unexpected, and credit rating methods that are both flawed mechanistic tools run by organisations with very conflicted business models.

All a recipe for disaster and disaster naturally struck. Add to this an environment where personal debt was outright encouraged to fuel an artificial boom through consumer spend, and a business environment still foolishly wedded to the “wisdom” of running businesses on geared debt it is a potent mix.

Now that these models have been shown to be flawed and frankly dangerous we should hope that one outcome of the financial crisis would be a return to more human cognition in the banks when judging the risk profile of borrowers as a minimum.

But reintroducing a knowledge led environment in a bank – that is to say one routed in the intervention and application of the Mk1 brain - cannot be done quickly. Whilst proper KM practitioners can help here, developing the intuition, heuristics, and experience necessary to make this effective takes time. So perhaps caution being shown on the part of the banks is a good sign. Perhaps they have recognised that caution is a good thing and that they do need to develop more sophisticated approaches and that the process of doing that will take time. Weaning businesses with poor debt demanding business models will take a bit longer, but requirements on the banks to be less exposed and have greater capital seems also to be having an effect.

Reflective learning is all part of KM as well so I could even be encouraged to think that perhaps these mighty “masters of the universe” might have the humility to acknowledge their mistake and learn from it.

Perhaps I am just being naïve. Leopards rarely change their spots but can we not be hopeful that this caution on lending is actually a good sign?