Do we really think we can just bolt some sort of “government 2.0 module” onto steam-era bureaucracies and magically bring them into the 21st Century?

Sure, our governments served us fairly well in the 20th Century, at least in the West. They beat the bad guys in WWII, brought us through the scary Cold War and delivered health and prosperity our grandparents would have found unimaginable.

Not to mention Windows ME.

But times are changing. We’re starting to notice that things don’t work as well as they used to. We’re spending taxpayers’ money bailing out economies only to have bankers suck out more bonuses anyway. Conferences intended to agree on Climate Change action produce… well… nothing concrete. Sydney’s suburban railway network is slower than in the 1920s!

Having invested so much time and money on these institutions, though, we’re reluctant to let them go.

This is the sunk cost fallacy.

The Concorde is the classic example. Long after it must have been clear to the French and British governments that no-one was going to buy this aircraft, they continued investing in it simply because they’d already spent so much and didn’t want to lose those “sunk costs”. Yet those costs were gone, no matter what. To continue spending was irrational.

The same happened in the Vietnam War, where US President Lyndon Johnson kept committing thousands of troops after he’d realised the cause was hopeless and America could not win.

Afghanistan, anyone?

I’ve written before, in Risk, Fear and Paranoia: Perspective, People!, that change is being held back by, well, fear and paranoia. But this morning I stumbled across Umair Haque’s The Builders’ Manifesto. He’s got it in one.

20th century leadership is what’s stopping 21st century prosperity.

The textbook skills of the “leader”, which Haque lists as “persuasion, delegation, coalition” were the very specific skills needed to run the giant, industrial-era organisations.

Here’s the problem in a nutshell. What leaders “lead” are yesterday’s organisations. But yesterday’s organisations — from carmakers, to investment banks, to the healthcare system, to the energy industry, to the Senate itself — are broken. Today’s biggest human challenge isn’t leading broken organisations slightly better. It’s building better organisations in the first place. It isn’t about leadership: it’s about “buildership”, or what I often refer to as Constructivism.

Leadership is the art of becoming, well, a leader. Constructivism, in contrast, is the art of becoming a builder — of new institutions. Like artistic Constructivism rejected “art for art’s sake,” so economic Constructivism rejects leadership for the organisation’s sake — instead of for society’s.

Haque goes on to compare the 20th Century leader and the even older “boss” to his new Builder, starting with Barack Obama.

Keith Olbermann recently took Obama to task for “a lack of leadership”. Yet, on the contrary, Obama’s problem is that he’s too much of a leader — and not enough a Builder. He’s mastered the principles of leadership; the result is politics as usual, instead of political reform.

It’s worth reading Haque’s manifesto in full. But for now, here’s his Ten Principles of Constructivism (contrasted with principles of leadership).

1. The boss drives group members; the leader coaches them. The Builder learns from them.
2. The boss depends upon authority; the leader on good will. The Builder depends on good.
3. The boss inspires fear; the leader inspires enthusiasm. The Builder is inspired — by changing the world.
4. The boss says “I”; the leader says “we”. The Builder says “all” — people, communities, and society.
5. The boss assigns the task, the leader sets the pace. The Builder sees the outcome.
6. The boss says, “Get there on time;” the leader gets there ahead of time. The Builder makes sure “getting there” matters.
7. The boss fixes the blame for the breakdown; the leader fixes the breakdown. The Builder prevents the breakdown.
8. The boss knows how; the leader shows how. The Builder shows why.
9. The boss makes work a drudgery; the leader makes work a game. The Builder organises love, not work.
10. The boss says, “Go;” the leader says, “Let’s go.” The Builder says: “come.”

Over at Johnnie Moore’s Weblog, where I found Haque’s manifesto, commenter “q” says:

While I admire Umair for his perspective, I do not see Umair (or many others) providing any practical solution or guidance for leadership that is uniquely different than much of the other leadership “advice” out there.

I see a vision at the meta-level without any substantial & practical micro-level details. It needs to be put into some real-world context

I must admit I also find some of the Principles creepy. “Organise love, not work?” Yes, we must learn to love Big Brother. Ahem. And some of it seems just a bit too evangelical for my liking.

And yet…

Identifying the problem is a key first step, even if we don’t have the answers yet. And the problem here is that we’re still fiddling with the old gadgetry of governance instead of building new things.

[Photos: British Airways Concorde G-BOAC photographed by Ian Britton at Manchester Aviation Park, 2005. © FreeFoto.com, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. Umain Haque via Harvard Business Review.]

Thank you, Virgin Blue, for sending your “erroneous” email Friday night. You’ve done us a great public service. You’ve exposed a pack of greedy, selfish, shallow tools who deserve to be ridiculed publicly. Thank you.

On Friday evening, Australian airline Virgin Blue sent an email telling some Velocity Rewards members they’d been upgraded to Gold status. But as documented at mUmBRELLA, the email went not just to those entitled to the upgrade but their entire database — including people who’d opted out of email marketing.

Including me because, yes, I’m a Velocity Rewards member.

“That can’t be right,” I thought. “I haven’t flown with Virgin Blue this year.” Then I saw others saying similar things online and I figured the mistake was more widespread. I chuckled, knowing that someone had a bit of a mess to clear up.

Sure enough, three hours later a second email arrived.

Oops! Due to an error you’ve received our previous email by mistake. Please disregard the free upgrade communication as unfortunately you do not qualify for that upgrade.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Mistake. Correction. Apology. That’s the end of the story, yes? Alas no.

Suddenly a whole bunch of people are demanding their Gold status should stay even though, like, they’re not actually entitled to it. People are “upset”. They’re demanding compensation, some even saying they should be compensated with a free flight voucher.

Compensated? Compensated for fucking what, exactly?

Compensated for being too stupid to realise the email was obviously a mistake? Compensated for having a vastly over-inflated sense of entitlement? Compensated for being so much of a consumer-puppet that you validate yourself by bragging about some confected faux-status symbolised by which colour plastic card sits in your wallet and then being embarrassed because, oh sorry, you’re actually still just another cheap-arsed prole after all?

I don’t think that’s Virgin Blue’s fault.

Losers.

Now of course there’s a metric bazillion blog posts and comments banging on about how this is “epic fail” on Virgin Blue’s part and how they’d have handled it so much better and faster. I won’t link to them because it’s too depressing to realise how many instant fucking experts appear after every little glitch is made public.

However I will link to Darryl King’s excellent piece about what he calls Crowd Spanking.

Why is it that the tools of Social Media make tools out of people?

Yes, companies, people and organisations of any sort can and should be open to criticism and correction of poor behaviour. I agree totally. However I don’t agree that Crowd Spanking of everyone that does something wrong is effective nor necessary …

Add some perspective. This is not a corporation that has exposed their staff and customer to asbestos and are denying compensation. It is an upgrade people! …

Before all the Social Media Gurus come up with the 10 things that Virgin Blue could have done better blog posts think through how businesses and people at work live.

Ex-fucking-zactly.

“Epic fail” on Virgin Blue’s part? Bah! Step back a little and think about the full gamut of things which an airline can get wrong and the potential consequences. Up one end, you’ve got mistakes where hundreds of people die in a ball of flame, traumatising their loved ones. Down the other end you’ve got… gosh! A marketing email that was sent to people by mistake.

To the folks who reckon they’d have handled it better and quicker, well, are you really set up to handle such an unusual situation on a Friday night when people have gone to the pub or gone home for the weekend? Personally, I reckon identifying the problem and getting the second email out in three hours isn’t a bad effort — especially when in the meantime there’s, you know, a fucking airline to run!

Well done, Virgin Blue. Well done.

I reckon — and this is just my opinion here — but I reckon we save the Really Big Stick for mistakes which actually matter. Also, stop being such selfish, judgemental little pricks.

[Update 16 October 2009: To illustrate some points I'll be making in the comments, here's a screenshot of the erroneous Velocity Rewards email.]

There’s lots and lots of good material to read here, but I don’t want it to dominate my home page so they’re all over the jump.

• Famous Twits: 50 Celebrities on Twitter | Laurel Papworth: If you’re after “famous people” on Twitter, here’s a good a list as any to start with.
• When Aeroflot Passengers Rejected Their Pilot | Moscow Times: The pilot was drunk. Aeroflot’s reaction? “Meh. He only has to press a button. No problem.” You can’t make this stuff up!
• Facebook, MySpace drive mobile web use | News.com.au: A survey of 500 people by Sweeney Research has shown 31% of Australians access the web via their mobile phone handset. Or, if you prefer, more than two-thirds still don’t.
• P J O’Rourke: How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink: A classic O’Rourke rant from 1986.
• 2nd Annual PR & New Media Summit 2009: There’s a bunch of familiar names presenting at this conference on 3 to 4 March. I doubt I’ll make this one, but you never know.
• Rich man, poor man: study shows body language can indicate socioeconomic status | Physorg.com: A new study in Psychological Science reveals that non-verbal cues can give away a person’s socioeconomic status (SES). Volunteers whose parents were from upper SES backgrounds displayed more disengagement-related behaviors compared to participants from lower SES backgrounds. In addition, when a separate group of observers were shown 60 second clips of the videos, they were able to correctly guess the participants’ SES background, based on their body language.
• So Many iPhone Apps, So Little Time | NYTimes.com: Why the iPhone app store and the Ocarina application in particular represent a whole new wave of software development.
• A Definition Of Piracy In The Digital Age | Link: I’d imagined that the use of the term “piracy” to cover copyright infringement was a recent invention of the music and movie industries. Not so. Rick Welykochy traces it back to 1906.
• Drugs ‘legal in 10 years’ claim | BBC News: The Chief Constable of North Wales reminds us (from just over a year ago) that prohibition doesn’t work. Half of all reported crime is about feeding a drug habit.
• Why telcos should fear Twitter | ZDNet Australia: The short answer is that Twitter can replace SMS with a far more flexible tool. And about time. Telcos have been charging the equivalent of $1 million per gigabyte to send an SMS. It’s a rort.
• How to troubleshoot the POP3 Connector in Windows Small Business Server 2003 | Microsoft: What it says. This article didn’t help me with today’s problem, but it will certainly come in useful.
• Ecstasy ‘no worse than horse riding’ | News.com.au: Professor David Nutt, chairman of the UK Home Office’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), is a scientist and can do the maths. “This attitude raises the critical question of why society tolerates — indeed encourages — certain forms of potentially harmful behaviour but not others such as drug use.”
• Aussies OK pirated software for personal use | CRN Australia: A study commissioned by Microsoft found that almost half of Australians believe it’s OK to use pirated software for personal use. Many can’t tell the difference between genuine and illegal software.
• Give Me Liberty and Give Me Death Search Magazine: American satirist P j O’Rourke writes about his experience of being diagnosed with cancer.
• Your Vision for 2009 | GetUp! Campaign Actions: Political campaigning organisation GetUp! presents the results of its latest survey of members.
• So why is filtering a pointless exercise? | sirchriss: An education technologist outlines why trying to provide a filtered Internet is ultimately self-defeating.
• How Journalism Students Used Twitter to Report on Australian Elections | PBS MediaShift: Former ABC journalist Julie Posetti describes how her students used Twitter to cover Australian elections.
• Politics and Technology Forum: Campaigning Online | Microsoft Events: The second annual Microsoft Politics & Technology Forum is in Canberra on 26 February. I’ll be liveblogging it on this website, and there’ll be a special Stilgherrian Live Road Trip on the way. Details soon. Keynote speaker is Joe Trippi, who’s run several (unsuccessful) Democrat US presidential campaigns, and speakers include Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull and Minister for Finance and Deregulation Lindsay Tanner.
• Why Teens Don’t Twitter | A Meaningful Life: Marc Lehmann’s take on the reason for the (apparent) older demographic profile of Twitter users.
• Text, text, text | Inside Story: Is the energy, liveliness and to-the-pointness of text-messaging already history, asks Richard Johnstone in this article from October 2008.
• Liam Vickery’s Blog: Top Aussies On Twitter: Liam Vickery’s personal choices for the top Australian twitterers. I don’t know Liam, but have seen him about on Twitter.
• Forgive Us Our Debts | newmatilda.com: Is debt really all that bad? In this extract from her new book, Margaret Atwood measures the changing moral weight of debt.
• Entering the Mobile Ecosystem | Silicon Federation: "Would you like to put your brand on a device that customers can't be without, a device they reach for many times a day?" A seminar on creating an iPhone app for your business.
• Spot the difference? | middleclassgirl.com: Whatever happened to TV presenter Naomi Robson?
• Ten Tweets about Twitter | the [non]billable hour: Some rather good tips to getting your head around Twitter.
• Global recession – where did all the money go? | guardian.co.uk: This set of diagrams steps through the different kinds of money, showing why the global financial system is unstable and, effectively, a giant pyramid scheme.
• Of Time and Twitter | Woolly Days: Another nice overview of Twitter’s rise, with an emphasis on journalism. However I suspect that the story of an “all-Twitter newspaper” from Scotland is a hoax.
• Twitter journalism, beyond happenstance | Almighty Link: “When US Airways Flight 1549 made an emergency landing on the Hudson River, a few non-journalists used their investigative instincts and some basic Twitter tools to find details about the news and share it with the world.” This article is another exploring the boundaries of who is and isn’t “doing journalism”.
• More Silliness: Congressman Wants to Ban “Silent” Cell Phone Cameras | Lauren Weinstein’s Blog: There’s a push of sorts in the US to make all phone cameras make a sound when they take a photo. As Weinstein points out, there’s no evidence there’s actually a problem to address, there are many other kinds of camera smaller than phone cameras, and even phone cameras can shoot in video mode — where a continuous sound would ruin the audio recording.
• Twitter | The New Adventures of Mr Stephen Fry: Stephen Fry, who now has 88,000+ followers on Twitter and rising rapidly, explains how he uses Twitter at this incredibly high volume — and requests understanding and a bit of self-help.
• Virtual Assistant – Nicole Hammett Business Support: This website isn’t the most brilliant graphic design (it’s a bit generic), but it builds trust in the business for two simple reasons: It explains clearly what this person does, and the rate card says very clearly what it’ll cost. None of this vague “our rates are competitive” and then asking you for all of your contact details. The only real turn-off for me is the generic stock-photography image of a harried office worker (what value does that add?) when it’d be better to have a photo of Nicole herself.

A milestone in aviation history this week. The Gimli Glider (pictured) made its final flight on Thursday 24 January.

I mentioned this amazing story a few months back. In brief, in 1983 an Air Canada Boeing 767 ran out of fuel at 28,000 feet over Ottawa and the pilots glided it safely to the ground — landing at an old airport which, unbeknownst to the pilot, was not a motor racing circuit. A very, very fine piece of flying indeed.

The aircraft was returned to normal service — there’s nothing a bit of panel-beating can’t fix! — and for the last 24 years has had a normal career.

Hat-tip (and the full story) thanks to Telstar Logistics.

This isn’t a new video, but certainly one I like: a time lapse video of flight patterns over North America as they unfold over the course of a day.

You can clearly see the wave of activity following the time zones east to west as the morning commuter flights do their thing. International flights follow a different drummer.

One of the reasons I like this video is that it reminds us we’re all part of something much, much bigger. In this case it’s the human-made world of aviation, but like the Powers of Ten video, it helps generate a sense of perspective.

Thanks to The Long Now Foundation for the reminder — and follow their blog for many more similar reminders, such as a 35-year time lapse of the Tokyo skyline and some slow art.

I’ll write more about The Long Now Foundation another time.

Some Australian airlines announced record-low $3 airfares this month. But do you really want to travel on an airline where you contribute so little money to pre-flight checks and other maintenance tasks…?

Writing in Crickey last week, Ben Sandilands knocks the nail on the head:

There are claims that substantial numbers of Australian pilots have accepted — or been forced to accept — ‘fatigue management solutions’ that would be criminal if applied to the long-distance truckies on the nation’s highways.

The public sees cancelled flights, and airlines complain about pilots taking “too many sickies”, but one pilots tells Sandilands:

Too few pilots are declaring themselves fatigued in situations where they should emphatically not be permitted to control an airliner, especially if overtaken by those unexpected things, like mechanical failures, or severe weather, or an emergency landing, where the wrong decision is irretrievably wrong.

It’s not much better on the ground where, as one air traffic controller told Crikey this week, people are falling asleep on the job:

Just last week, I was having a busy session about 3am, and I had a few aircraft to ‘hand-off’ to the next sector. Now it just so happens, the next sector is the guy sitting about 20 feet behind me. On every occasion (about 5-10 minutes apart) the controller was sound asleep — to the point where I had to get up, go over and physically wake him up so that I could transfer the aircraft over to him!

I have nothing against the guy — he has more experience than me, but he has already worked the morning shift, and was now into his 14th hour of duty in less than 24 hours, and was already on his ninth shift in the same number of days. Our ‘Fatigue Management System’ says he was fit to be at work. He and I know better.

Of course management spouts the usual reassuring words, like this statement from Airservices Australia:

Safety is Airservices’ primary consideration in everything that we do in our business…

Uhuh. Of course it is.

Tip o’the hat to Boing Boing and The Hippocratic Oaf for the link.