Australia's fascination with standardisation is hindering innovation

 Photo by: Vmenkov CC BY-SA 3.0

The worst thing that ever happened to Australian innovation was the lack of standardisation in rail gauges. Ever since then, Australia's fascination with standardisation has pervaded almost every aspect of life, but in particular, innovation.

In recent times, the fascination with standardisation has been played out in federal politics. Whenever there is a perceived problem, all power is given to the feds to fix the ad hoc measures employed by the states.

The fascination with standardisation can be observed in healthcare, education (in particular, the National Curriculum), the NBN, road rules, industrial relations, and more recently, research.

For some time, numerous reports have outlined the extent of innovation lagging in Australia, for example:

• SMH 2 July 2012
• CRCA 15 May 2012
• The Age 19 January 2012
• The Australian 8 September 2011
• ABC Business Breakfast 4 August 2003

Numerous reasons for the lack of innovation are espoused, but one area is rarely considered: standardisation.

I blame the railways debacle for Australia's fascination with standardisation. But in an era of increasing diversity and consumer choice, this fascination actually hinders innovation.

Try and do something different in Australia: if it doesn't fit in with the standard way of doing things, it is not allowed. Try do something new in the bureaucracy and see how that goes, too. Put simply, you are not allowed to do anything that may affect the standard. Indeed, it may be that standards are developed, based on outmoded ideas, which actively prohibit innovation.

Take for instance the federal government's rhetoric about teleworking, but then try to work from home. Mannheim (writing in the Canberra Times today) hit the nail on the head:

..."the attitude of employers and middle managers" was a major hindrance... I hear often of managers who refuse to allow staff to work from home, citing their inability to monitor performance. (If a manager can't assess an employee's performance by their work, they're probably unfit to manage.)

What is the standard here? If you can see the employee, then they will magically be productive?

But standardisation is also about making everything the same. Australian policy-makers have long adopted a mechanical view of the world: a belief that you can indeed control innovation.

Imagine prescribing procedures for the late Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg to make them innovate more or faster, or punishing Michelangelo or Da Vinci until they become more creative? Or telling them how to innovate - the very concept is absurd.

But that is how it is done here in Australia: chaos and conflict are to be avoided so leaders can remain "relaxed and comfortable". The strangest thing is that this has a negative impact on the future, and future generations will have to pay for the apathy of leaders in business, government and higher education today.

There are three possible outcomes from attempts to influence people: commitment, compliance and resistance. For too long in Australia, policies and other interventions have focused on ensuring compliance and punishing resistance.

Auditing performance of outcomes is one thing, but auditing performance based on prescribed procedures is quite another. The smart employee will either look for a vocation where their ability to introduce new ways of doing business will be valued, or worse, simply resign themselves to complying with the standard. On the other hand, punishing resistance only teaches people not to buck the system. Only encouraging and rewarding outcomes will ensure commitment, especially where "standardisation" is not the outcome being sought.

It's true that the railway system in Australia was a major stuff-up. But should our view of the world be framed by the response to a mistake made over 150 years ago?

Our fascination with standardisation may have served us well in the past, but if we really want to innovate, we need to adopt a systems view of the world. Put simply, this means that one can disturb a living system, but not direct it. 

In the meantime, leaders who insist on forcing employees to work within the confines of their fascination with standards should expect nothing more than compliance; and consequently, absolutely no change in Australia's lagging innovation.

Book Notes: "The Professor" by Charlotte Brontë

The Professor by Charlotte Brontë

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Whenever the introduction to a classic suggests that I read the novel before I read the introduction, I shall do so. I was a little disappointed that my view of the novel was shaped by the introduction, nonetheless, this was my first Brontë novel so I am sure to recover! I found the story to be like a first-person biography (as opposed to an auto-biography), and indeed that was intended. Tainted as my view was by the introduction, I could not help but notice the effeminate nature of the protagonist, although I cannot be sure if this was a result of knowing beforehand that which I would not have taken into account without the introduction. An interesting feature is the pace of the climax - a long slow, undulating yet gentle slope upwards until a climax that engulfs a decade in a moment, only to stroll along the precipice with no real danger of excitement; yet an abrupt end that lingers tantalisingly so with even the introduction's gossipy lack of deference a pleasant enough experience.



View all my reviews

Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan: Technological leap-frogging, fact or fiction?

It is commonly assumed that less-developed countries, which may not necessarily be constrained by years of investment in fixed-line infrastructure, can overcome the ‘digital divide’ by simply ‘leap-frogging’ ahead of developed countries by deploying less expensive wireless infrastructure. 

However, research by Howard (2007: 136) suggests that the instances of this occurring are rare. For example, during the period 1995 to 2005, only five countries (which were already wealthy) managed to ‘leap-frog’ some of the global communications technology leaders.

Yet during a recent follow-up research field-trip to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, I was surprised to learn that the take-up of mobile technology in the Kingdom had achieved more than 100% penetration since my last field-trip in late 2009.

Howard (2007) did not include Jordan in his study, yet the Kingdom is clearly leap-frogging well before achieving maturity in the fixed-line market.

Indeed, fixed-line subscribers in Jordan declined from 10.84% of the population in 2006 to 6.79% in 2011, while mobile subscriptions had increased from 76.61% in 2006 to 119.75% in 2011 (Source: Jordanian Department of Statistics 2012).

Admittedly, some 39% of Jordanian mobile subscribers have more than one mobile subscription, so the digital divide persists.

At the same time, Jordan's telecoms market is the second most competitive in the Arab world.

In my research, I am interested in how institutions help or hinder the deployment of communications technologies. Jordan provides a unique case study as this developing nation's telecommunications industry is clearly getting on with the job.

Although many industry players appear frustrated by the quality of service role the TRC has adopted, the regulatory framework is certainly not hindering the take-up of mobile telephony.

Similarly, household access to Internet services has more than doubled from 15.6% in 2007 to 35.4% in 2011.

While much research focuses on competition as a major enabler of communications technology penetration, I am curious as to whether Jordan's laissez-faire approach to the coordination of networks in favour of market intervention via a quality of service role is responsible in large part for the stellar performance in communications technology penetration.

Compared with Australia's slow deployment of the expensive National Broadband Network, one thing is clear: Jordan is doing something right.

References:

Howard, P.N. (2007). Testing the Leap-Frog Hypothesis: The impact of existing infrastructure and telecommunications policy on the global digital divide, Information, Communication & Society, 10(2): 133-157. 

Book Notes: "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber & Other Stories" by Ernest Hemingway

The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber & Other Stories by Ernest Hemingway

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The thought of safari is horrible, but in the context of the times, Hemingway writes of courage and cowardice in the way that appears to all of us in the midnight hour. The ability to move the reader in such a short story is remarkable.



View all my reviews

Social media but a speed-hump on the old-fashioned institutional trajectory

Until recently, social media promised to facilitate greater policy participation, enable greater user-generated content, and generally bring about the benefits of a digital economy. But none of this has happened and for the most part it has returned to business as usual.

How does a disruptive technology fail to disrupt? Simple. Key industry players and institutional frameworks coincide to ensure that new technologies do not become disruptive in the long term. There may be a moment or two when amateur experimenters get the jump on big business and government, but it doesn't take long until the existing system either changes the rules or subsumes the new technology into existing business models or government institutions.

Pay-TV provides a case in point and the story is captured eloquently by Paul Barry in his 2008 book The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer Uncut. In Australia, Steve Cosser's attempt to capture the pay-TV market in Sydney and Melbourne using microwave systems caught big business and the federal government off-guard. Both business and the feds believed that microwave was an inferior technology. However, the US was using it to great effect and Cosser was on the ball. To cut a long story short, Packer intervened with Cosser's content providers and Keating intervened to prevent Cosser from getting the jump on satellite, ending the government's professed stance on technological neutrality.

Similarly in the US, pay-TV promised a business model free from advertising where users simply paid for the content they watched, rather than having programs interrupted by advertising. However, Winston (1998: 320) outlines how the new technology was soon absorbed by the old ways:

Americans now pay twice, through advertisements and subscriptions, what they used to pay for only once. This has been done in obedience to the 'law' of the suppression of radical potential whereby the new technology over a period of fifty years has been absorbed by the institutional structures of the old. This process has not only reduced cable's, and (probably) DBS's, disruptive potential, it also ensured that those same structures will remain profitable. Although taken over and somewhat battered and by no means inured to the consequences of myopic managements, nevertheless all the major American broadcasting players are still in place.

What does this have to do with social media? Go to Google and search "facebook regulation", then narrow the search to "news". It is immediately obvious that Facebook's disruptive capacity is under attack, globally, from multiple angles: privacy, alcohol advertising, education, security, the law... the list goes on.

In light of the challenges presented to popular social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, it is little wonder that social media has failed to live up to what it promised just a few short years ago.

Admittedly, I embraced social media and tried to implement its use in my teaching, but institutional barriers exist even to simple things such as the use of e-textbooks - these are still under attack from those who do not wish to use them, contracts that stipulate hard copies must be provided to libraries, and a delivery system  that makes it difficult for libraries to provide e-texts instead of hard copy books. To make matters worse, government measures of research output specifically exclude publications produced in online-only formats - only commercial publishers count. So much for sustainable publishing practices and making new knowledge readily available to the public.

Importantly, social media does not exist in a political or institutional vacuum - so the disruptive capacity of  new media has more or less ended now that big businesses and governments have caught up. History suggests that this is inevitable, and it will take more than the technological capacity coinciding with a social revolution to realise the potential social media promised but has not delivered. 

I lament the passing of the promise of change, I really do. But in light of the power of institutions, I think the focus on technology and social movements alone is not the path to an enlightened digital revolution. Indeed, it hasn't worked at all.

From now on I intend to examine in more detail how institutional arrangements help or hinder the realisation of the benefits of a digital economy. My only hope is that this time I will be wise enough to know the difference.