Blog 2.0

Written on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 3:38 pm | by benign0

My experience after having worked as a management consultant both within a consulting firm and then as an internal troubleshooter within a former client’s organisation, has led me to one important insight:

Never leave it up to a consultant to come up with a plan of attack for you.

Time and again I’ve seen businesses hire consultants and delegate — lock stock and barrel — the entire problem solving process to them: from problem identification, business solutioneering, needs analysis, all the way to implementation. It’s no wonder that the consulting business is such a lucrative industry. Consultants are often in a unique position to dictate to their clients how much of their services the client needs to purchase. It’s a wonder that the process of hiring consultants routinely escapes the scrutiny of internal auditors.

But then there are the truly switched-on clients. These are consulting clients who possess a crystal clear understanding of how their business works and where they want to take it before they bring the consultants in. These businesses are able to pigeonhole consultants into working on a very specific aspect of their strategy. You get this pigeonhole properly-defined and chucked into the right slot in your “bigger picture” and you are in complete control of your project. No one consultant can pompously presume to be an “overall expert” on your affairs and will therefore never be in a position to put one over you.

The thinking process involved in hiring consultants is not too different from the process we take to electing politicians.

We either:

(a) gamble away our future based on however way a politician would package and pitch a “game plan” to us;

OR,

(b) we do a bit of thinking and come up with a collective view of how we think a politician SHOULD and WILL work for us.

Whenever a consultant hears the words “come up with a solution for us” from his client, guess what?

Ka-ching!

Dollar signs suddenly start flashing and circling around that client’s head. Those words are as good as a signed blank check. Same thing with politicians. You ask them to come up with a game plan for us, and they do precisely that — pull one out of their arses. And we are none the wiser about what we will or will not be getting at the end of all that. Before one invites bids to suppliers to provide a product or service, a tender document usually getsissued first. The Philippine electorate never greeted any election with the equivalent of such a “document” — even in our heads at least. In other words, we don’t really know what we want out of our politicians. So maybe a great alternative to sitting around with mouths open ready to receive and digest the next volley of crap thrown to us by politicians is to get our shit together and come up the framework around which we shall evaluate politicians and their bullshit.

Interestingly enough, we for the most part routinely take pre-packaged “game plans” dished out by politicians and then quibble on the details around their fringes. I believe this approach describes something we might call Blog 1.0. Most schmoes with a blog belong to the Blog 1.0 generation.

I propose that we in FV be pioneers of Blog 2.0.

In Blog 2.0, a blogger initiates rather than reacts. We can take a bit of initiative and develop a crystal clear vision of where we want to see the Philippines in the next five years, AND THEN sick each politician against one another to see how much of OUR game plan they are able to understand and address. We get a clear view of what is and what is not addressed in our framework of what we want rather than a shrink-wrapped spiel of what politicians think we want.

I.T. folk do it all the time. They come up with what is called a requirements traceability matrix. This is basically an itemised/columnar view of a business needs statement which then gets used as a checklist for measuring the quality of bids tendered by the set of vendors being evaluated. The best ones I’ve seen are those that turn unstructured wish lists into coherent and well-structured specifications. This takes a lot of high-quality thinking and most business analysts I’ve worked with actually can’t tell the difference between a wish list and a specifications list if their life depended on it.

In the same way, we the voters in a democratic society need to take control of our thinking process if we truly want to manage our politicians in line with the way they really should be to us — our public servants. We need to manage them like entities bidding for our vote. So we need to be clear about the nature of the services we are looking to buy. We need to be clear about our specifications.

So here’s a question we might want to reflect on: Do we see FV as:

(1) a group of people who would rather quibble around the fringes of whatever bullshit we allow politicians to deliver to us;

OR,

(2) a group of people who’ve got the intellectual horsepower to develop a comprehensive framework around which we can specify what we WILL expect from our politicians?

It depends on whether we can come up with the wherewithal to differentiate ourselves in such a way. Whereas most blogs I see make mere comment on politicians’ bullshit, I see FV as having the potential to reverse this flow of knowledge. We have the potential of changing the status quo — politicians dishing it out to us — to a new dynamic: us dishing stuff out to them.

In the last eight years of my online presence, I’ve seen a few people who applied such Blog 2.0 principles in their early writing. One was a guy who went by the name of ‘Remington870′ in the forum PinoyExchange.com (PEx). I re-published his manifesto “Blue Print for Our Future” back in 2002 after coming across it in this PEx thread. It was an inspiration for my own stab at coming up with a similar framework (my aptly- but generically-titled Solution Framework) which I hoped would evolve into a significant node in my website as new ideas to add to this framework came to me. The only other person with a similar piece of work I am aware of is Cocoy in his 16-part piece “Understanding Nation Building” which he published in his blog Big Mango back in October of 2005 (sorry Cocoy, the new layout in your blog makes it difficult to reference the link to that series of articles). Cocoy, in fact, continues to exhibit the same predisposition to building coherent ideas in his more recent attempt to write an entire Constitution himself.

Of course there are a lot of published books and journals out there that articulate similar manifestos. But the unique thing about developing stuff on-line and publishing it onto the Web on the fly is the ability to harness the power of collaborative development (a model that the Open Source movement have so far demonstrated so successfully). At the same time, we maintain material that is open to public scrutiny — and comment — throughout the development process.

All this of course involves a high-degree of organisation and a reasonable amount of trust among participants. So no hurry. Hey, we’ve been a national failure-to-launch case for the last half a century anyway, so what’s another 50 years, right? :D

In the meantime, this simple video summarises a large chunk of the message of this blog post:

Click here to view

At the very least, we need to:

- not be quick to delegate our thinking to the most popular belief systems and their slogans;

- evaluate our candidates with a critical mind; and,

- be clear on the minimum we should be expecting of our leaders around: Vision, Ability, Knowledge, and Leadership.

The 2010 election is just around the corner. Considering that thinking has never been a noted trait of Pinoys, we should get this exercise started as early as possible.

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About The Author: benign0 is the Webmaster of GetRealPhilippines.COM and has once been described as "one of the most enthusiastic hecklers of the politically-passionate" by a respected journalist.

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Comments

6 Responses to “Blog 2.0”

  1. cvj on September 8th, 2008 10:19 pm

    They say that a Management Consultant is someone who takes your watch so that he can tell you what time it is. Seriously, being from the same industry as you, i can relate to what you have said above. It really makes a big difference if you work with “truly switched-on clients”.

  2. Karl Garcia on September 9th, 2008 8:34 am

    I agree that in house trouble shooters should know more about their own business than their consultants. Not only the trouble shooters,The senior management and the board of directors,as well.But I prefer that the inhouse staff should be the one talking to the senior management and not the consultants.What happens is,the consultants talk to the higherups and that practice has to change.

    For startups, maybe that paradigm can work,but not for established companies.

  3. benign0 on September 9th, 2008 9:38 am

    Trouble with large blue-chip corporations nowadays is that their CEO’s and key senior execs are on 5 year contracts at most. So their outlooks tend to be very short-sighted — just enough time to prop up the share price, earn their bonus, and golden-parachute out and onto their next gig.

    So they don’t really have enough time (or even will) to get to know the gems that sit internally within their own companies and prefer instead to hire a nice peachy global consulting brand to burn their hefty project budget over the next five years.

    Kinda sounds like Pinoy politics, doesn’t it? :D

  4. cvj on September 9th, 2008 2:17 pm

    Over here in Singapore, i see the same thing with short term outlooks and golden parachutes. The senior execs (normally from US, Europe or Australia) are imported (as ‘foreign talent’).

  5. cocoy on September 11th, 2008 6:28 am

    a group of people who’ve got the intellectual horsepower to develop a comprehensive framework around which we can specify what we WILL expect from our politicians?

    been blogging about it for awhile now. hehe.

    like i’ve been blogging before… the good idea comes from outsiders. people who blog, just to name one. but to win the game, you got to get insiders in on the game plan. now that’s tough. the minds you need changing… The Palace does not see beyond their provincial and sometimes i think, imagined troubles.

  6. A society where all the wrong arguments win | Filipino Voices on September 23rd, 2008 11:40 am

    […] devoid of any REAL hope (i.e. the kind of hope that can be substantiated by a well-thought-out game plan that underpins it), it will take a lot of courage to realise that it will only be through huge […]

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