November 06, 2006: What's in the Script?

JP Rangaswami seems to be having a good time exploring the analogy between film-making and software development; and I am glad to see that one result of this exploration is the assertion that "the script is central." However, I see this as a point of departure, rather than a conclusion; and the direction in which we must depart is that of a more rigorous epistemological and ontological consideration than those emerging from JP’s efforts to develop his analogy. Most important is that, to invoke my favorite language, we need to honor the fact that a script is fundamentally a dramatistic (rather than scientistic) artifact (which entails the corollary that software development is also more dramatistic than scientistic, that being what JP really means in his related proposition that software is about stories). (Needless to say, neither filmmakers nor most parties involved in software projects, including the customers, are particularly interested in either epistemology or ontology; but we need them to keep our own thoughts in order!) As regular readers should know by now I have decided that Kenneth Burke’s pentad provides a useful grounding for both epistemology and ontology.

Lest anyone think this is just a philosophical exercise in abstraction, I have now performed an initial exercise at putting it into practice. The exercise is based on what is probably now a “classic” case study in the first chapter of the Decision Support Systems text by Keen and Scott Morton. The study concerns a manufacturer of laundry equipment dealing with forecasting sales and then projecting requirements for manufacturing. This case study concerns the “real world” (albeit a bit dated) of decision-making, rather than the world of support software; so, in spite of the fact that it reflects an earlier business era, I find it a good way to focus on those stakeholders who are not fixated on things like software artifacts.

The problem can be cast in the ontological categories of Burke’s framework as follows:

* Acts (what takes place)

o Manufacturing “sells” consumer products to Marketing
o Marketing prepares sales projection
o Manufacturing prepares requirements for manufacturing and inventory
o Marketing-planning manager resolves conflicts between salesforecast and production forecast

* Scenes (situation in which it occurs)

o Negotiating parameters for sales forecast model: Marketing manager ↔ Marketing-planning manager
o Negotiating parameters for production model: Marketing-planning manager ↔ Production manager

* Agents (who)

o Profit centers

. Marketing
. Manufacturing

o Planners

. Marketing-planning manager
. Marketing (sales) manager
. Production manager

* Agencies (means or instruments)

o Sales forecast based on computer model
o Forecast of manufacturing and inventory requirements based on computer model

* Purpose (why)

o Project sales for next twelve months

o Manage production consistent with sales projection

. Work force levels
. Production schedules
. Inventory management

o Define pricing and merchandising strategies

In this framework the key problem comes down to whether or not the agencies are doing a good enough job to facilitate the resolution of conflicts between the sales forecast and the production forecast. To invoke language that JP holds so dear, this involves facilitating conversations that work, where much of the “work” has to do with aligning the agencies to the motives of the agents (in this case both individual and institutional), in order that the negotiation “scenes” are furnished with the necessary information. The punch line is that the dramatistic stance allows us to examine the nature of negotiation through the subjective lens of motivated action, rather than trying to see the world in terms of the objective numbers (whether or not they are visualized in “dashboards”) compiled by the bean counters who drive the enterprise software.

Final disclaimer: This exercise is far from cast in concrete. I just decided it was time to start trumpeting the virtues of Kenneth Burke by anchoring his stuff down to a concrete example. All sincere efforts to refine the details of the exercise will be most welcome!

October 16, 2006 (2): Rhetoric Redux?

I was delighted to see Dominic Sayers' encomium for Edward Tufte on Confused of Calcutta, so I would like to use that opportunity to take things to the next level. I would like to argue that Tufte’s impact goes far deeper than visual literacy. Using Newton Garver’s Preface to a collection of essays by Jacques Derrida as a point of departure, I would claim that Tufte is addressing an issue that goes all the way back to the scholastic trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Our modernist thinking has made great strides in our command of grammar and logic, but it seems to have done so at the expense of our appreciation for rhetoric. Tufte’s appreciation for rhetoric is particularly evident in an interview he gave to Mark Zachry and Charlotte Thralls in which he discussed his book Beautiful Evidence. Furthermore, when we consider the full title of Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative, we see that Tufte has a keen intuition for the literary theory of text types. This has nothing to do with how fonts are designed and used. Rather, it is an effort to classify texts (in the most general sense of the term) into the categories of argumentation, description, exposition, and narrative. Tufte’s recent concern with evidence addresses how his concerns with design impact argumentation, while Envisioning Information makes solid contributions to both description and exposition. I believe that Visual Explanations was his first serious effort in the area of narrative, although he was already addressing narrative in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

The point I am trying to make from my own reading of Tufte is that it is not only visual literacy that is at stake. Rather, it is the full scope of literacy, where rhetoric is as important as grammar and logic and where that rhetoric is exhibited in the text types of argumentation, description, exposition, and narrative, whether the “texts” are traditional documents or PowerPoint presentations. As a matter of fact, rhetoric also comes into play in the conversations we hold; so I believe that we can invoke Tufte when we deal with questions of literacy of “real-time” texts.

September 05, 2006 (1): The Bøyg

A variety of different paths have been leading me to think about the Bøyg. This is an episode of a fight in the Seventh Scene of the Second Act of Ibsen's Peer Gynt play (which does not seem to get performed very much, probably become of the overwhelming demands it makes for production). (Grieg wrote music for the Bøyg scene, but it was not included in either of the suites he later compiled.) According to the script, the Bøyg should be realized as a disembodied voice. In my translation, Peer describes it as follows:

Not dead, not living; all slimy, misty. Not so much as a shape! It's as bad as to battle in a cluster of snarling, half-awakened bears!

As a matter of fact, when Peer tries to lunge at the Bøyg, he succeeds only in cutting himself.

One of the paths that led me to the Bøyg is the current Confused of Calcutta discussion about Wikipedia and "Brickipedia" (i.e. the traditional multivolume print-version of an encyclopedia). I did a free association of Wikipedia with the shapelessness of the Bøyg. (By the way, Wikipedia does not currently have a "Bøyg" entry!) I realize that some may argue with Peer's description, at least to the extent that Wikipedia is living, in contrast to any "dead" printed artifact; but, to my own critical eye, Wikipedia seems to have certain zombie-like qualities (although I would not accuse it of being slimy)!

The important lesson from this scene, though, is the Bøyg's advice to Peer: "Go roundabout!" Peer wounds himself when he tries to confront the Bøyg head-on, ignoring this advice. After that, he is more inclined to listen; and this advice turns out to impact how the rest of the story evolves. My point here is that, where information is concerned, this can also be an important piece of advice. A direct path taken through Wikipedia or Google may take us quickly to the answer to a question; but the context-free nature of that answer may end up cutting us (a bit like the joke about the Swiss Army Knife that has a tool for anything you want to do: the problem is that, when you try to get the tool, you cut yourself on one of the blades)! If there are still people out there trying to distinguish the difference between "information" and "knowledge," I would offer up the claim that, because knowledge is always intimately tied to context, we can only arrive at it by going "roundabout!"

August 23, 2006: Service Science as an Academic Discipline (according to IBM)

A former colleague was kind enough to point me at the Web page for a Symposium on "Services Sciences, Management and Engineering" hosted by the IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory on September 8, 2005. He also pointed out that, if one followed the link to the Japanese content, one could find a PDF version of the presentation given by James Spohrer from IBM Almaden Services Research. My colleague had not know that I had "vented" about my experience at Almaden in March of 2004 in the June 25 entry for this blog. Obviously, I was very curious to see if the story had improved at all since my last encounter with the IBM point of view. Having now reviewed the material, my personal opinion is that there is a lot more content but not a lot of improvement. Obviously, I want to elaborate on this!

Apparently, the first step in declaring a "Service Science" is to come up with a definition for it. This is the first one that was presented to the Symposium audience:

The application of scientific, management, and engineering disciplines to tasks that one organization beneficially performs for and with another (‘services’)

I have to say that I think that describing "services" as "tasks that one organization beneficially performs for and with another" is not a bad idea. I just wish that Spohrer had taken it more seriously. The rest of the slides had a very prescriptive tone, but there seemed to be a tacit assumption that benefit would arises as a side-effect of all the recommendations being prescribed. I think this is not just silly but dangerous. My own experience has led me to the conviction that any enterprise that is serious about being a service provider must assign top priority to looking for new opportunities to provide benefits to the customer. Once you get beyond theory into the realities of practice, this priority trumps the "coproduction of value," a buzz phrase that sounded great the first time I saw it in the Harvard Business Review but has begun to grate on my nerves the more I hear it. Value is the side-effect of understanding where the benefits are, not the other way around.

So how do you understand where the benefits are? The first step is to cultivate the art of customer engagement. However, as I have already observed, our techno-centric fixations with such "solutions" as CRM have done little more than warp our ability to master this art. Thinking in terms of science, management, or engineering seems to have done little more than reduce the customer to an object with requirements to be satisfied. This is the heart of the warped thinking that results: The customer must be engaged as a subject; and, as one understands customer-as-subject, one will understand where the opportunities for benefit are. Understanding is the operative action here (and it should be treated as an action, rather than a result of analysis). This is why my entry about service on June 17 was such a desperate attempt to invoke the lessons that Habermas had to teach about a theoretical foundation for the actions that lead to achieving understanding. Furthermore, the progression from engagement to opportunities for benefit is essential a problem of interpretation. Customer engagement provides the opportunity to "interpret the customer;" but it is also necessary to "interpret the world" that constitutes the customer's context. Now, when Spohrer's presentation finally gets around to proposing a curriculum, the unhappy truth about what is on his slide is that, while all of the subject areas have to do with decision making, none of them have to do with interpreting that "world" in which the decisions have to be made! To use the language I have appropriated from Kenneth Burke, to think of decision making as a strictly scientific problem and to ignore the role that dramatistic thinking and acting plays is dangerous. It is like the blind man who thinks that feeling an elephant's leg is enough to understand the whole elephant.

At this point I should observe that one theme that plays a very heavy role in Spohrer's slides involves the word "innovation." Perhaps this obsession gets at why a research laboratory with its roots in physics and computer science (the way in which the slides introduce IBM Research) will never understand what makes service "work." Yes, innovation is a term in the equation, so to speak; but it is an auxiliary term. A service provider arrives at innovation by focusing on how to get customer engagement and benefit discovery right; and what could be more innovative than identifying an opportunity for benefit that the competition has either ignored or overlooked?

If we do want to talk about where innovation enters the picture, a good place to begin is probably a book by Alain Dumont entitled, Innover dans les service (published, alas, only in French). This is a book of case studies, so there is not much prescription here. On the other hand Dumont at least came up with an inspiring subtitle: De l'évident à l'impensable. In this language one might say that customer engagement begins by "interpreting the evident" and arrives at opportunities for benefit by following the interpretation through to the "unthinkable" (or at least the not-previously-thought). Now, since this book was published in 2001, there probably are no case studies that would still seem "unthinkable;" and, for any of these case studies, it will not be easy to reconstruct the mind-set of what was "evident" at the beginning of the story. Nevertheless, I think Dumont is on to something.

At the end of the day, any business that decides it want to make the shift from providing products to providing services is going to have to recognize that a cultural shift is prerequisite. The real problem with the IBM slides is that they offer an alternative to making that cultural shift, but it is a false alternative. You know how bad things are when you look at that list of 28 disciplines that get "mapped" on slide 8 (pictured above). Note that Education is at the very bottom of the list, yet that is probably the oldest (or second-oldest) service profession in history! I suppose I would even be so arrogant as to proclaim that anyone who does not acknowledge education as the most important service offering in history does not have the foggiest idea of what service really is!

June 30, 2006: Burke's Pentad: How Narrative Communicates

Having posited the assertion that narrative can help us make sense of the complexity of the world, it seems reasonable to ask just how it can do this. What are the structural elements that are examined in the study of narratology? There are a variety of approaches to answering this questions. What I would like to do is examine one approach and show how it relates to a couple of others.

The above diagram illustrates a construct proposed by Kenneth Burke as a framework for the study of motives. As he put it:

What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it?

He called his framework "the five key terms of dramatism;" and it would come to be known as "Burke's pentad." Burke defines his five terms as follows:

In a rounded statement about motives, you must have some word that names the act (names what took place, in thought or deed), and another that names the scene (the background of the act, the situation in which it occurred); also, you must indicate what person or kind of person (agent) performed the act, what means or instruments he used (agency), and the purpose. Men may violently disagree about the purposes behind a given act, or about the character of the person who did it, or how he did it, or in what kind of situation he acted; or they may even insist upon totally different words to name the act itself. But be that as it may, any complete statement about motives will offer some kind of answers to these five questions: what was done (act), when or where it was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency), and why (purpose).

Those familiar with journalism will probably see a "family resemblance" of this framework to the so-called "5W1H" for reporting (who, what, where, when, why, how). 5W1H, however, is actually an abbreviated (by one) version that can be traced by to the scholastics: quis (who), quid (what), ubi (where), quibus auxiliis (by what means), cur (why), quo modo (how), quando (when). The item that the journalism framework dropped was quibus auxiliis, perhaps because it was felt to be an elaboration of "how." This seems to be how Burke feels in comparing the scholastic formula to his pentad:

The "who" is obviously covered by agent. Scene covers the "where" and the "when." the "why" is purpose. "How" and "by what means" fall under agency. All that is left to take care of is act in our terms and "what" in the scholastic formula.

Burke uses this as a justification for examining act in terms of form.

Incidentally, you can find this formula in Aquinas' Summa Theologica, where he attributes it to Cicero (or Tully). I have burned a fair amount of energy in both the physical and digital worlds trying to find this formula in Cicero, and I have still not succeeded. It may very well be of Roman origin, but I have yet to find the source! On the other hand Burke also explores the connection between his five terms and Aristotle's six elements of tragedy (discussed in "Poetics"). Here are Aristotle's six elements with explanatory quotes from Bywater's translation the source text:

1. Plot (muthos): “the combination of the incidents, or things done in the story”
2. Character (êthé): “what makes us ascribe certain qualities to the agents”
3. Thought (dianoia)

   “all they say when proving a particular point or, it may be, enunciating a general truth”
   “we may assume what is said of it in our Art of Rhetoric, as it belongs more properly to that department of inquiry”

4. Diction (lexis)

   the externalization of the internal order of the fable
   “What indeed would be the good of the speaker if things appeared in the required light even apart from anything he says?”
   the word is a component of elocution, which, in turn, is an element of tragedy

5. Melody (mélopoia)
6. Spectacle (opsis)

Aristotle does not say very much about either melody or spectacle. He regards these as having more to do with how the tragedy is performed, as opposed to its actual content.

Here is how Burke brings his pentad elements into alignment with Aristotle:

Plot would correspond to act. Character would correspond to agent (it is "what makes us ascribe certain moral qualities to the agents" [Burke uses a different translation]). Whereas the action is the purpose of the play from the standpoint of the audience, within the play we should probably assign purpose to the third element, Thought (which is shown in all that the characters say "when proving a particular point or … enunciating a general truth"). Since Aristotle himself calls Melody and Diction "the means of imitation," they would obviously fall under agency. The sixth element, Spectacle, he assigns to "manner" (presumably the quo modo of the Latin hexameter quoted above), a kind of modality that we should want to class under scene, although Aristotle's view of it as accessory would seem to make it rather a kind of scenic agency. It was not until modern naturalism in drama that scene gained its full independence, with the "property man" giving the environmental placement that was regularly suggested in Elizabethan drama, for instance, by the use of verbal imagery. Perhaps "Spectacle" had something of the significance we associate with "sheer pageantry." Aristotle says that the Spectacle, though an attraction, "is the least artistic of all the parts, and has least to do with the art of poetry." We can be affected by a tragedy without a public performance at all; and "the getting -up of the Spectacle is more a matter for the costumer than the poet."

So here are three (four, if you count the journalist's formula) different views of how a story communicates; and they all align rather well with each other. Of course making a good story is more than just making sure that all the ingredients are there. The ways in which the storyteller and combine those ingredients and engage them with each other are what makes storytelling an art, rather than a traversal of propositional statements. That art counts for a lot, as Peter Brooks has demonstrated in the chapters of his Reading for the Plot; but that, as they say, is another story!