FU - The Academy Of The Imperfect

Logically thinking, one way to work out which products, ideas, concepts, business plans to back would be to measure them by exception against a record of which ones have failed in the past and why. Like an inverted business school. Eventually, when everyone has logged, Wiki-like, their experiences of failure and corporate calamity, explanations of why they failed and what they would or wouldn’t do if they had their time again, willing wannabes would pay for access to the system to check out if their ideas, products or plans were likely to work out or not. If it was clever enough it could even score ideas for likelihood of success.

Because, frankly, I think it’s rather odd that culturally we restrict professional development and learning to positive role model material. And by doing so we blindly dismiss the value of negative and unsuccessful experiences and anecdotes.

I would guess that a culture which rejects failure has done so because it has instinctively decided that those who have failed have nothing whatsoever to offer because, after all, they are failures. However, this one-way attitude to success/failure means that we are unlikely to ever see losers and failed business gurus doing the global speaking circuit challenging the likes of Tom Peters or Michael Porter. For they would, ironically, have become successful as a result of their failure and the world as we know it would instantly collapse in on itself, obliterated in an instant in a puff of smoke.

Who’s in?

Local Nav

Had an idea the other day. Gadzooks. It was for a really cheap SatNav system that didn’t actually connect up to satellites, but rather you told it where you were and where you wanted to go, and then it would just read out all the all directions and turnings to you in one go, as if you’d stopped and asked a local for directions. For extra cost you could have slightly befuddled directions where it says things like “…then turn left at the pub, no, wait, the pub was knocked down last year, go straight on and then turn left at Tesco’s…” or “….oh I’m sorry, I’m not from the area…” which, remarkably - as I am indeed remarking upon it - seems to be what you get most of the time you ask a stranger for directions. I’m thinking they themselves must have got lost too and have spent so long wandering around that they actually look like locals, you know, looking mildly bewildered whilst carrying a rolled up plastic bag full of dog shit in one hand - this being the only accoutrement you ever seem to see people walking around with these days.

We live on a divided, black and white world where it seems either you walk around endlessly in anoraks with with dog shit in plastic shopping bags with a constant look on your face that suggests that you may be struggling to come to terms with the regret of not paying more attention when you were at school, or you own a car and drive around watching bewildered people with dog shit in rolled up shopping bags. Take me now, lord.

Audiopathy

It occurred to me today, following yesterday’s post, that if it was able to be constructed in a certain way, you could obtain an approximate pyschometric evaluation for an individual based upon the tracks that they assemble into a playlist.

Firstly, you would have to attribute emotional and psychological values to tracks in accordance with a combination of factors such as track name, lyrics and overall emotional feel. Then by running through a playlist, the scoring system could apportion scores to certain elements and attributes and, ultimately, derive an approximate psychological insight into the mood and emotional wellbeing of the person who created the playlist.

I also considered that, depending on the personal circumstances and emotional state of the playlist creator, certain playlists could be qualitatively measured as being more authentic than others. For example, if you asked a person who just just won a million in the lottery to prepare a depressed playlist of twenty songs, you’d likely get a markedly different outcome than if you asked someone else to do the same whilst they were in the middle of an emotional depression or who was in some other way either unsettled or unhappy. I also thought about the prospect that the compilation CD’s you used to see advertised on TV and which went along the lines of Greatest Love Songs Volume 8, Driving Rock, A Woman in Love etc., were possibly compiled by people who were completely emotionally detached from the emotive elements of the theme or subject matter. Like a guy just going through a messy divorce or breakup compiling the greatest love songs for women collection, or the Driving Rock CD being compiled by someone who couldn’t drive. And in this regard, it would seem sensible to believe that subjectivity would appear to be preferable to objectivity.

And so, I can imagine a whole genre of authentically themed playlists that are compiled by people who are provably qualified on the given subject matter or emotional state. Then, using a a highly complex collaborative filtering algorithm that, frankly, I’d detail here if I wasn’t in a such a hurry, people could then punch in their emotional state or even more simply tick some boxes that would characterise their personal emotional context or situation like: Messy Divorce, unemployment, etc. you could then be prescribed a cocktail of songs that would sort your head out.

Oh, what a bind it is to be so clever.