systems

The guys at Cognitive Edge seem to be on a roll with all the video's they're creating!  The latest one to be released is of Dave Snowden retelling one of the very first (and best) analogies I heard him use to explain the difference between ordered and unordered approaches.

Enjoy!

I came across a billboard with this statement last week.  It's part of a marketing campaign for one of the short term insurers. 

When I read it, my first thought was that this is probably one of the silliest statements I've seen in a while, but after thinking about it, I realised that someone who doesn't look at life through a complexity lense may think that it's rather clever.

So why do I have a problem with it?  Well, first off, I'm not sure you can ever really have foresight.  Certainly not when dealing with the type of complexities that insurers would typically deal with.  I'm sure there are many predictions that can be made by actuaries and the like based on complex statistics that I'd rather not want to think about, but even those are vulnerable to the inherent unpredictability of complex systems. 

Many people are familiar with the story of the Grameen bank.  Its founder (Mohammad Yunus) recently won a Nobel Peace prize for his pionering work in micro-credit and poverty alleviation.  In essence, what he did was to set up a self-regulating lending system.  Before the Grameen bank came into being it was virtually impossible for a poor person in Bangladesh to obtain credit.  Because of extremely poor debt repayment rates, banks found that the cost of lending made it not worth their while to lend money to the poor.  This is largely due to their approach of designing increasingly complex credit scoring systems in order to decrease their risk.