…and now I’m back.

Yes, it’s an interesting time through the UK elections and Eurozone challenges.  Over the next few weeks I aim to pick out some big and small points from these situations.

The first is a tiny point that brought a smile to my face.

It’s a quote from the UK’s currently unelected Prime Minister Grodon Brown, just prior to the election last Thursday:

I’m going to fight for the future until the very last second.”

Okay, it was reported as a soundbite.  Why did I smile?

It’s about specificity.

To say that he’ll “fight for the future until the very last second” suggests that Gordon knew something about the “future” to know when it would end. This means he’s defined the “future” in a way that has an end.

The future doesn’t usually have a “last second” so the speaker needs to make clear the subkect of their statement where the future does have an end.  To help you the context was the future of Britain.  This can have an end which could be, amongst other things:

• The break of Britain into its constituent countries.
• The destruction of Britain, Europe, some chunk of the earth that includes Britain or the destruction of the planet.
• The end of human civilisation so that the concept of ‘Britain’ is lost.

There is another option here.  Gordon could have meant that he would fight to the very last second…of some project or timeframe.  In truth this is more likely and could have been deleted either by Gordon or the press who reported his soundbite.  The probability is that he meant or said:

fight until the very last second…of this election.

It is often important to be precise in your language so that people are clear on what you mean.

This is particularly true when you have authority and responsibility.  Otherwise, in Gordon’s case you might ask what does he know about the future that he’s not letting on?  Or you might just smile as I did, knwoing that the ‘future’, in its entirety, never has a last second, even if Gordon’s no longer PM there’s still a future, there’s still a future even if this planet no longer exists.

All the best,

Keep smiling to the end, or into the future, whichever appeals more!

David

PS: Some of you might be asking about the ‘unelected’ bit in the title.  Well, regardless of the fact that post election Gordon’s still in No.10 Downing Street and continuing as PM, he’s still unelected, right until the very last second, even if the LibDems do an about face and team up with Labour – it’s unlikely Gordon will ever have be an elected PM [and that's just me looking into the future].

Yet, behind these figures it seems Lloyds TSB has bad debt of £24bn, on a turnover [annual total income] of £23.9bn.

What’s going on?

Bad debt is defined as:

Accounts receivable that will likely remain uncollectable and will be written off. [from investorwords]

So in its dealings Lloyds TSB has got into deals where now it is going to [in all probability] write off the equivalent of a years revenue [probably its highest years revenue to date].

According to the BBC article on the issue:

The bank blamed the massive losses on commercial property loans made by Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS), which it took over at the start of last year.

It said these “impairments” were 21% lower in the second half of 2009, and would continue to see a similar rate of improvement throughout this year.

‘Impairments’ sounds like a vast understatement when £24bn is to be written off.  Their shares only fell 5% this morning.

Is this what the financial sector is getting away with?

I say getting away with, because it feels as though people are becoming inured to such problems…even though it is often the tax payer and consumer who end up funding this.  Lloyds TSB [+HBOS] got bailed out to the tune of £17bn in 2008.  Their market capitalisation went from nearly £60bn to £18bn and the government [tax payer] bailout resulted in a share in the bank of about 43.5% [BBC article 19 Oct 2008], yet all the tax payer did was, in effect, allow them to make decisions leading to £24bn in bad debt.

Inured means ‘to habituate to something undesirable, especially by prolonged subjection’.  [freedictionary]

Just to put it into context, the decisions of HBOS/Lloyds TSB that resulted in bad debt of £24bn is the same amount the UK government and local authorities spent on the UK’s transport systems in 2009.

Yes, I realise that it is not necessarily as simple as that.  Perhaps someone from the finance sector will make it more clearly complex for me.  For example: it’s not clear how much the total loan value was and whether the £24bn is a small percentage of the total loan value or not – that would be interesting to know.

The bottom line is that a public listed company whose market capitalisation was £25.5bn in 2008 [HBOS] seems to have gone into loan deals that have gone bad to the tune of £24bn.  A sum equivalent that UK government spends on all UK transport in one year.  A sum not much greater than the tax payer bailout of HBOS/Lloyds TSB.

In terms of human behaviour, the issues that spring to mind include:

• What were the decision making criteria and drivers in providing loans?
• What concepts of risk and risk assessment, and relevant economic context, were used?
• Who were checking these, and ensuring that the loans were appropriate?  [I'd guess people were financially  incentivised for securing loans though that's only a guess].
• The public seem to be inured to such news…what does that mean in terms of influencing change?  Does inertia in a social system mean problems are likely to re-occur? [hint on the 2nd part - yes, it does].
• What is the impact on tax payers of such inurement and of the continuance of the existing system largely unchanged?  [largely unchanged because if you're inured to it the incentive for others to change their behaviours is small].
• When will people come to realise that unless you are part of the solution, you are part of the problem?  Being part of the problem means that you reinforce it passively or actively [being inured to it is passive reinforcement - acceptance].
• What is it within the world of economics and human nature that has got us to this point – where debt of such proportions is accepted, as are the behaviours that lead to it?  If I’ve missed the news, and it’s not accepted what tangibly is happening to ensure it never happens again?

Yours impassioned on a Friday afternoon,

Finn

PS: I realise that if your system is in meltdown then it all spirals out because there is not enough money for people to pay their loans etc at the taxpayer/consumer level.  Yet:

• Tthe UK government, and other nations, shoved money into the system – where has that gone?
• Come to that, where has the original money gone?  [mmm - am I showing a commoners lack of grasp of economics? or is the distribution of that money that is the problem?  or is it that fake money, 'debt', was forming an enormous house of cards?]
• “The UK economy grew by 0.3% in the final three months of last year, faster than previously estimated.”  [BBC: 'UK economic growth revised up to 0.3%']

Just read Matt Slater’s great post on the issue of going into administration for Portsmouth Football Club.  Some of you may not be football fans – that’s not important.  Step beyond the content and look at the human behaviour here:

Self-interest, poor management, living in debt, finding the next sap to take your pain, poor regulation, smaller enterprises or individuals taking the hit, legislation/priorities paying the big players to keep the game going…at the expense of others, all reinforced by a public [fans/consumers] wanting more or accepting the stuff behind the scenes because you don’t feel it’s your responsibility, or you don’t feel you can affect it.

If you’ve read some of my other posts you might recognise these same themes cropping up time and again.  Is that because I am tuned into them, or because they are fundamental human patterns [albeit in certain situations]?

Not that I bothered to write about the banking situation and credit crunch much.

Take another situation, RBS bank, from the BBC today:

Royal Bank of Scotland announces £3.6bn of losses

RBS says its results would have been better if it had paid bigger bonuses

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has announced losses for 2009 of £3.6bn ($5.5bn), after struggling with billions of pounds of bad loans.

Mr Hester told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme RBS had lost out by not paying bigger bonuses.

“We’ve had a small experiment in this respect… some of our best-performing people have been leaving in their thousands,” he said.

“The people who left us last year, I believe, would have increased our profits by up to a billion pounds beyond the ones that we’ve got.”

So the Chief Executive believes that by not paying more to ‘players’ they lost out.

This sounds not dissimilar to Portsmouth Football Club – if they can’t pay the fees/wages for top notch players they’ll not win.  Whilst the bank has been bailed out by the taxpayer, PFC is unlikely to be.

PFC had a history of finding the next person to shoulder the debt, until it’s got to the point where there may be no other ‘idiots’ as Matt Slater refers to them.

Yes, part of RBS is profitable [investment banking I'd guess - those staff up for the big bonuses], so I’m sure are parts of PFC [the bar perhaps, maybe the shop].

Yet aren’t the patterns pretty similar?

What does this tell us about both human behaviour and the culture of modern countries as there are lots of other examples of this.

All the best,

Finn

PS: Do such circumstances warrant compliance with those who ‘demand’ a big salary/fee for their services?  Or is such behaviour just feeding the problem?

For regular readers, you’ll know I did a series of posts using the MPs’ expenses to consider social patterns of behaviour.  The docudrama [for want of a better description] ‘On Expenses’ written by Tony Saint, tells the story [some bits are fictional, a lot is factual] of Heather Brookes five year efforts to get transparency on the way parliament spent taxpayers money.

Her efforts lead to the leaks to The Daily Telegraph that occupied the UK for a large chunk of last year.  In spite of protestations from MPs early on, and comments of ‘oh, it’s nothing’ and the like – bear in mind that criminal proceedings are being brought against four MPs and that is in consideration of expenses that do not include the flipping of second homes.

All the best,

David

PS: I enjoyed it having kept an eye on the whole panoply of articles and commentaries at the time, and it has a quirky side to it, probably constrained by the limitation to 1 hour.  It would have been great to have had something longer and possibly more black comedy which I’m sure would have been possible without further creation of stuff – perhaps even including some of the challenges such as the Speakers own expenses issues which were only briefly alluded to.

PPS: It could also have played a little more on the possible pressure brought to bear on staff to pass expenses or comply with MP requests – eg: those MPs who re-submitted expenses more than once in an endeavour to get them signed off.

I said that I’d let you know what is responsible for this pace of life.  A pace of life that is often felt to be quickening and increasingly ’stressful’.  A pace of life that brings to mind that old phrase:

Stop the world I want to get off.

Humans are responsible for the pace of life, and the increasing pace of life.  It is the responsibility and contribution of no-one and nothing bar yourselves.  And it is humans that maintain and feed that pace of life.

You could say that the ‘pace of life’ is an emergent property of the human system.

So if humans are responsible for it why don’t we slow it down to something more conducive to a good, fulfilling and less stressful life:

• Where you can relax and not feel pressured to work all the hours in the week?
• Where you can be more connected with and feel positive about your community, and the wonders of the natural world?
• Where you feel more fulfilled with less materialism, without drugs without reliance on technology?
• Where

Well, then we’d be less materialistic, less vulnerable to be sold to, less caught up in the cycle of reliance on escapes.

The inference is that it’s like a race, you either keep up or lose.  Yet you know that is not true.  You can choose not to race and be successful in different ways.  The more people who actively step out of the race, the more likely it will come to an end.  Yet those who benefit from you being in the race will endeavour to persuade you that you must stay in it, they will endeavour to put in place mechanisms that keep you in the race.

Yes, I’ve taken a grand stage to discuss a pattern that occurs commonly.  It is about people feeling that their lifestyle is the best and taking whatever steps to ensure its continuance, regardless of whether it is good, or not, for others.  For many of those that take such steps they fervently believe that the lifestyle they lead, or advocate, is best for others.  For some of them they do not care for others they deem ‘below them, and are more concerned for the continuance of a lifestyle they feel they deserve, and, were they to know it, a lifestyle that has come to define them.

So, the pace of life may not be your choice, yet you are, in all probability, making choices that reinforce the current, and increasing, pace of life.  If stress and ill-health are a consequence of this pace of life…then they are part of your choice.  The question is whether you now which to continue to pursue it.

Finn

PS:  In this race, you can ease off without stepping out.  Yet ease off sufficiently and encourage others to do so.  Then it will have more of an impact on your life [another beautiful little pattern about socialised creatures - including humans, including you!]

As I speak it’s snowing here, and the garden is bathed in white.  It brings to mind the saying ‘pure as the driven snow’ which seems to have been a metaphor used by Shakespeare in various plays.

Well, you may have read some of my prior posts on MPs and expenses.  This is just a little update on the actual number asked/told to pay back some monies.

Currently there are 646 MPs in the UK parliament.

Back in May 2009 I asked what proportion you felt might be actively milking the system, or breaking the law.

My guess, though I didn’t let you know [my apologies] was that 60% would be cited or 10%.

Firstly why the disparate guesses?

Two reasons:

1. Either the reality will come out, with a firmness that addresses all passive and active misuse [passive being 'going with the crowd'].
2. Or, there will be a desire to minimise the impact and hit the major offenders hard to show where the line must be drawn.

These really just are a reflection of some easy categorisation:

• Actively broken the law/rules.
• Actively milked the system.
• Passively used the system [gone with the crowd believing it to be okay].
• Passively not used the system [didn't need to].
• Actively not used the system as others are [owing to own interpretation and personal values].

My guess was that either just the first of these categories or the first three would be cited [and my guesses were 10% and 60% for those categories [rule of thumb based on a few models that are a little too many to go into here].

Anyway the number of MPs asked/told to pay back expenses is, according to Daily Express sources in the House of Commons [UK parliament] over 400!

400 MPs told to hand back their dodgy expenses [article by Macer Hall on 04-Jan-2010].

Commons sources revealed that the total number of letters being sent out in an attempt to recoup taxpayers’ cash is more than double the amount previously thought.

The double is, I suspect, because it is difficult to differentiate between categories of active and passive milking of the system.  Drawing the line between these two is about finding out intent and that will be very difficult when the consequence of admitting intent to milk a system are job and status loss, and possible legal action.

Anyway, my 60% guess is not far off.  646 x 0.6 = 387.6, so 388.

Just for those who like to check estimate error.  400 – 388 = 12, or about a 3% error – more than acceptable.

So it’s one example of the value of looking for patterns, the ability to see how they can predict behaviour.

Made my day on the pattern side of things…though deeply disappointing in terms of the policy making ability and values of MPs and the Parliamentary systems over which they have total control.

Let’s hope the clear out of this is now swift and relatively cheap to the taxpayer, who’s footing the bill for all this stuff and its resolution.

All the very best, and relax, it’s all just human behaviour!

David

PS: Late last year launched a companion site at www.redfilbert.com, more on this soon…

Do governments and industry really want to create a sustainable world? The answer must be

no.  Truly.

Why is this the case?

Well, consider the design of goods, they are generally not designed to last: the encouragement is to spend money ever more quickly.

I have a Toyota Yaris.  On a dealer service [34000miles] I got a ‘recommended’ replace split anti-roll bar [ARB] bushes.  The price £190.

I explored the web and found a discussion about ARB and that because of the way they are fitted it is likely they will be split.  Also there were suggestions that Toyota [and for this read many producers] will economise on the bush material to cut manufacturing costs, knowing they may get some in-warranty replacements and then they’ll get replacements outside warranty for most of which they get more money.  The bushes, it seems cost in the region of £30-40 so the rest is labour and profit.

With the car trade in the state it’s in, or any other sector, there may be a tendency to want to drive for more income now.

By using a lesser material [if that's the case] they encourage the use of more raw materials knowing that the initial bushes won’t last very long.  They then use more raw materials on the replacements as well as more energy, and create more waste.  All in the name of money.

These run counter to sustainability where they could use better quality from the start that could last much longer.

So Toyota don’t feel left out – the same was true of nylon hosiery post-war.  They found they could create hosiery that would last a long time – yet it was not, for them, commercially good, so they created built-in obsolescence – the concept is rife in commerce.  Hosiery that snags and ladders, so that you have to replace it.

Or they use the fashion excuse so that you feel obliged to buy the next trend.  Once two seasons are bought into why not four…then you’ll feel you have to buy more, and then the media get involved to help put pressure on you to buy the next best thing – even the so called environmentally sound people are doing it – buy green, buy more green, buy the latest fashion green.

Industry, fashion and the media all want to make money, and they rely on trends, your developed vulnerability and obsolescence to ensure that you keep buying what they are selling.

These people really don’t want sustainability because it means less sales and potentially less income.

Can you see Microsoft releasing Office 2010 and supporting it for 15 years without launching a replacement?  Can you see Sony Ericcson launching new phones every ten years rather than every few months?  Can you see Lloyds TSB sticking with the same products for ten years without adding in the new extra plus plus account?

They even invest in and encourage research to find the next tweak to guarantee they’ve got something new to persuade you you need to buy more.

Sustainability and the much vaunted pace of life is…for the next post,

Finn

PS:  Shout about it when you feel you’re being screwed with poor quality when they claim it’s good.  Don’t accept it when your car starts falling apart after four years, or when the manufacturer says after a year that you shouldn’t expectit to last longer.

Take a chill pill, keep you stuff for an extra season or couple of years.  Find an alternative supplier or trader and give them the money instead [often less].  Get second hand.

Relax…

‘Foundations of Relaxation: Discover balance and set yourself up for life’ ebook:

Maybe pigs fly.

There will be those that say war is a route to peace.  Peace on whose terms?  The winner?  If so why not re-name it the Nobel Prize for the country or person with the knockout punch or the Nobel Prize for the person with the most power.

And if it is said that the prize was given for the potential to reduce the threat of nuclear war how does that stack up if so-called conventional wars are engaged in?

So what they seem to be saying is peace can be through both reducing conflict and increasing conflict in order to win.

Ah, now this is clearer – it is the Nobel Prize for the Winner, however you win, unless of course you should’ve been the loser, because everyone knows no-one from the Taliban will get the prize.

Aded to which, Mr Obama gratefully accepted said prize even whilst humbly(?) stating that no doubt there are others more worthy.  Why not show some real steel, be magnanimous, decline and nominate one of them.

Or perhaps the world has so little in the way of peace that Mrs Miggins at number 42 might not be seen to be worthy even if she’s brought peace to a little neighbourhood through engagement, reconciliation, vision and non-violence [go figure - peace without violence or threat!  You know that might be a novel concept given the Nobel committees take on it].

All the very best, remember that to get a peaceful neighbourhood or peace at work, tell them you’ll not be blowing the place up, but you will be getting the boys round!

Yours,

Finn

a camel is a horse designed by committee.”

In an idle moment [or are you and I just procrastinating - escaping some other activity or chore?!] I’d like to briefly explore this quote because I used to use it a lot in work contexts.

First let’s explore its possible origin, the quote is attributed to:

• Unknown.
• Ancient proverb.
• 1958, Sir Alec Issigonis [designer of the classic Mini car] in Vogue magazine.
• University of Wisconsin philosophy professor Lester Hunt.
• 1952, Proceedings Regular Meeting, Ohio Valley Transportation Advisory Board, Pacific Northwest Advisory Board, pg. 24:

  A camel is a horse designed by a committee, so we hope that this committee will—and I think it will—function appropriately.

• 1975, The Professional Geographer: The Journal of the Association of American Geographers, v.27 1975, pg. 132:

  If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, what is a materials policy statement prepared by seven study teams?

ASIDE:  Interesting how many assign the quote to Sir Alec, even though there are earlier examples of its use.  This is a minor indication of the power of belief over evidence [the 1952 citation above precedes Sir Alec by 6 years].  Most seem to suggest it is more of an ‘ancient proverb’.  Perhaps this is just a hint of the desire for attribution to an individual, rather than acceptance a old community maxim.

What about the meaning?

In wiktionary.org the entry says:

An expression critical of committees—or by analogy, group decision-making—by emphasizing the ineffectiveness of incorporating too many conflicting opinions into a single project. In this figure of speech, the distinguishing features of a camel, such as its humps and poor temperament, are taken to be the deformities that resulted from its poor design.

Alternately is wikipedia’s entry on design by committee:

Design by committee is a term referring to a style of design and its resultant output when a group of entities comes together to produce something (often the design of technological systems or standards), particularly in the presence of poor and incompetent leadership. The defining characteristics of “design by committee” are needless complexity, internal inconsistency, logical flaws, banality, and the lack of a unifying vision.

The term is especially common in technical parlance, and legitimates the need and general acceptance of a unique systems architect. Often, when software is designed by a committee, the original motivation, specifications and technical criteria take a backseat and poor choices may be made merely to appease the egos of several individual committee members. Such products and standards end up doing too many things or having parts that fit together poorly (because the entities who produced those parts were unaware of each other’s requirements for a good fit).

The term is also common in automotive parlance for poorly designed or unpopular cars.

A more succinct comment is from Andre Rabold at Liquid Media:

The camel/horse quote (no disparagement to camels meant, of course) perfectly captures the problem when too many people have input into a product.

Sadly these are all making presumptions.  They assume one or more of the following in the quote:

A camel is a horse designed by a committee.”

• …the committee has a brief – otherwise where did the horse issue come from.
• …that the brief is to design a horse.
• …that committees are always leaderless – otherwise this generalisation is flawed.
• …that a committee can never have shared vision.
• …that the brief was not about a specification to resolve a problem.
• …that a committee is always dysfunctional.
• …that the committee went against the brief owing to its dysfunction, or…
• …that the committee decided the brief was incomplete or poor.

Okay I hope you get the idea. There are lots of assumptions to get to the meanings defined in wikipedia and other such places – including the common current use of the proverb.

The source is unclear for this quote.  It also lacks context within the quote itself.  So you have no solid basis for interpretation within the quote itself.  People have attributed their own meaning based on their own context or on the context which has become associated with the quote over time.  Such user defined context has reinforced a perception of the quote which is not truly there in the quote itself.

Let me make this a bit clearer.  I’ll take a totally different perspective, derived from some of the assumptions noted above.  Hopefully you’ll feel you can step into this perspective too and see the quote through different eyes.

Let’s consider what the quote means when a group of merchants who’d travelled from Europe/Asia, or even better for you to imagine, the Mongol hordes as the reached the extent of their empire on the boundary of ancient Arabia.

On reaching the edge of Arabia the Mongols faced a problem.  Their familiarity with horses was great in terrain where horses thrived, where there was a ready supply of, in particular, water.  In the desert sands their horses would have suffered from dehydration and would not have performed as they desired in battle.

So [for the sake of this story] imagine Genghis Khan gathering a group of warriors and elders and saying:

For us to progress further we need something like a horse but better equipped for this environment.

Okay, I’m paraphrasing and zipping through a great story to illustrate a point in interpretation.  This ‘committee’ following extensive research, a few slugs of airag [fermented mare's milk drunk by the Mongols even today] and sleep, they realise that the camel is the equivalent.  It does the job, is much better suited to the environment [perhaps a bit more moody as a result], and solves their needs.

ie: A camel is a horse ‘designed’ by a committee who have been breifed to find the equivalent of a horse for desert conditions.

In this interpretation the role of the committee is shown in a good light.

ASIDE: I did find one interpretation that haphazardly touched on this – really through saying the ‘customer’ brief might not be good and the committee might come up with better [by accident or intent].

Now you might say my logic is flawed because that’s not what the saying means.  I’ll just refer you back to the proliferation of sites who say Sir Alec Issigonis was the source in 1958.  He wasn’t according to the cited evidence.  The evidence is that the quote existed prior to that.  Because you believe your interpretation doesn’t make it a good interpretation, just that your interpretation means something to you.

Ask yourself the question: how do you design a camel – an animal really well adapted to its environment without having a start point of something you know?

You’ll find that those who face a problem rarely describe the solution with a name, because if they had the solution there wouldn’t be a problem.  They usually say:

I want something like that [X], but not that [X]“.

They identify something similar to what they feel is the solution, though isn’t enough of a solution.

In my illustration work I regularly meet clients who can show me some stuff or describe something they’re looking for roughly.  They can’t produce it.  Then I produce my first estimate and they either say ‘Yes!’ or ‘Yes, but could you change the…a bit?’

If you’ve ever done any interior decorating or watched the endless home improvement shows on TV, people are often asked to create an ideas board of cuttings with photos, colours, fabrics etc that evoke the sort of decor they feel they want.  They rarely come up with the exact solution.

Mmm.

Okay, you may be harking back to the committee bit – stating that that is the focus.  Well, yes it could be.  Yet how the quote look if it were anything else?

A camel is a horse designed by…

• …a designer.
• …someone.
• …God(s).
• …a person.
• …Uncle Ahmed.
• …Martha Stewart.
• …a group brainstorming and inductive reasoning experience.
• …a meeting of elders.

The first few are not as catchy or meaningful [except perhaps the God(s) one for those of a religious leaning].  The proverb would probably not have occured and certainly not lasted.  Try it out on someone – use one of the first few here and there’ll probably ask you what on earth you mean.

Now, if the saying is an ancient proverb, the last statement is quite likely.  It is likely that people would pass their problems to a group of senior or acknowledged wise people.  It is easy to move to a proverb or saying: “to get around the dry desert environment a camel is a horse designed by a meeting of wise people.”

This makes much more positive sense, because it is evidenceable in terms of logical evolution.  Otherwise, if you wish to knock committees why isn’t the quote: “a fish is a horse designed by a committee.”  ie: exaggerate the daftness and pain of committees, since that’s the most commonly cited interpretation.  Or use a better saying that is explicit in meaning such as:

Too many cooks spoil the broth.”

The current common interpretation of our camel proverb is really saying: “a group of nominated people make a right bodge of any task you give them.”  Or perhaps: “a group of nominated people come up with stuff that isn’t expected…or desired.”

In each case the proverb is so much weaker than the ‘cooks/broth’ metaphor.

Why could this interpretation of committees being pretty useless exist in your minds?

Well, how many of you live in wonderful functional communities with a clear and respected group of elders or wise people who guide your community in the agreed direction and pass on their learning in an orderly way to those chosen to succeed them?

Good, right…in the modern, techno-industrial commercialised, internet world practically none.

What is critical here is your frame of reference for interpretation.  Let’s make this clear: if all you’ve ever experienced is bureaucracy, corruption, dysfunction of course a committee to you means failed outcomes, wasted time and money [in the UK unelected quangos - jobs for the boys], and  stupid systems and laws that don’t resolve the problem even though, on their own, they might have some internal logic.

ie: your interpretation of the quote is severely influenced by your existing experience of the world.  The meaning has been lost over time, and interpretation of a non-explicit saying has been translated over the years to better suit peoples’ experiences of the world.

As to the saying in its current interpretation, such use presents some subtle challenges or problems, it:

• Subtly disparages the camel [in the case of the definitions cited above there's nothing subtle about the disparagement]…
• …and thus places an interpretation on those who value the camel in their lives.
• Predisposes you to have a negative perception on all group decisions, unless, one might suggest, they agree with you.
• Predisposes you against authorities [absolutely valid when it's dysfunctional though not necessarily helpful to a solution or to those that are helpful].
• Doesn’t make the most of the disaffection for, or dysfunction of, committees – if that was important you’d use the cook/broth or pick an object far removed from a horse, or expand the saying to provide more salient context that highlights the problem as being fairly and squarely the committee.
• Doesn’t focus on the leadership and vision issues at all.  These are merely peoples’ interpretations.  A committee can have avery clear shared vision and leadership.  So this is a poor way to illustrate such problems.

There is also a certain irony, in that you are complicit in the problem by allowing yourself to be governed by committee after committee, and some of you even to be members of them whether at work, school or as parents or community members.  Why are you involved if ‘committees’ are implicitly bad?  Better you than someone else?  Or just a way to socialise or occupy life until death?

[Pause for thought].

Much better would be an interpretation of committees [when aligned, focused and well-structured] of being able to resolve social and organisational problems – then it reinforces te value of collaborative working – which is proven to add greater value.

Mmm, wow!

…and there goes another chunk of your life and mine…hopefully enlightened and resolved.

All the best, I’m off to trace down some airag and a group of wise people and making sure we have a patent agent to hand!

Finn

PS:  My take on it, even after years of use in the negative interpretation:  I sense that the saying is one that is positive, and that over time in an increasingly complex and dysfunctional society the interpretation has been twisted from the original because the original context is scarce, unrecognised or unexperienced.

I didn’t realise characters could be counted indifferent ways.  Surely:

characters

…is 10 characters whether you look at it from the left or right or upside down.  No doubt there’s some reasonable explanation that is not immediately transparent or adjustable to the user [in this case me].  Perhaps they don’t mean the same thing when they say characters, or there’s a typo error in the programming in terms of the max or something.

This is what, in stress terms, is called a daily hassle.  Something which should not occur.  An error, or a miscommunication, that, presuming innocence on whosoever’s part, frustrates a third party [you or me], adding to the hindrances of getting through the day.

So how do you deal with it?  Contemplate blaming the ‘offending’ parties?  Those who created these conflicting [and thus 'poor' designs].   Dream of exercising retribution?  Comply with whichever seems to be blocking progress [in this case the rejector lulu.com], which reinforces their position whether or not it’s right or wrong?  Spend more of your precious time looking for an alternative?  Pull your already thinning hair out [mine's thinnning even if yours is full and rlowing!]?  Swear?  Go and have a cup of tea?  and scotch or a glass of wine or two?  Pray for a simpler life?  Leave it?

It’s that old chestnut of a phrase:

The straw that broke the camel’s back.”

It’s those daily hassles that tend to increase in an increasingly large, complex and misaligned organisation, society or world.

Mmm.

No wonder the more ‘advanced’ nations tend to have higher stress [only one factor of course].

Finn

PS: I complied to lulu.com [even though I trust Word ’s count, and rationalised it as pragmatism as I’d like to get through some other stuff before the end of the day and my hair’s very short so it’s hard to pull out!

PPS:

On the lulu.com site the 1024 characters could be incorrectly set.  You see, the error message you get is:

The description cannot be more than 1024 characters. Please shorten your description.

Just by the form is a help button.  When revealed, the first sentence is:

The description is a brief synopsis (max 1000 characters) for your book’s item page.

In complying with lulu.com, whatever their criteria, the text was rejected when Word had a character count of 982, and accepted on my next attempt of 968.

Maybe, unlike me, they didn’t do lots of maths at school, or perhaps it was back to the camel:

a camel is a horse designed by committee.”

The quote that is taken to mean once there are too many folk involved the design is not what was asked for…more on the next post [a different take on it.

PPPS:  Look out for my upcoming book on stress and relaxation – I’ll let you know once I’ve checked it’s fine on lulu.com!