Is Average Our New Aspiration?

This morning - I started to read the latest Substack from

Grant Duncan PhD

.

The piece (Wellbeing at School) was subtitled ‘New Zealand: Educational Inequality in a High-performing System` (my bold).

I confess, that is as far as I got and had to save the article into my Readwise for another time … not least because Substack estimated my reading time of the article as being north of 30 minutes.

I will get to it, and am unlikely to disagree with much, because I generally agree with the what Grant writes. BUT - if you’ve been keeping up, you will know that back in May I announced that I was out of the business of filling up your inbox for the sake of it, rather focussing on ‘real’ things. This is one such occasion.

To be clear - this piece is NOT about Grant’s article - ‘just’ the catalyst.

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It is that phrase ‘High-performing Systems’ that caught the eyeball, snapped the synapses and took me back to Substack’s ‘edit page’.

ChatGPT-4 : Make an image that reflects High-performing Systems

The image is AI generated, and when ChatGPT responded added this explanation;

Here’s the image representing a high-performing system. It features interconnected gears and digital circuits, symbolizing efficiency, integration, and cutting-edge innovation. The design conveys a sense of dynamic and organized peak performance.

I also asked ChatGPT 4o … ‘What is a High-performing system’. The long answer is here, but this is the phrase that leapt out to me ..

a well-organized and efficient framework or setup that consistently delivers optimal results.

.. “consistently delivers optimal results”.

IMHO - a phrase packed with nuance and potential misunderstanding.

• what results?

• compared to?

• over what period of time?

• with which sample?

• in which margins of error?

Over on the web I tried again, and a veritable raft of pages and links that all provide various takes on how you manage and measure - but not so much regarding what it is - outside of essentially comparing humanity to machines - which goes all the way back to that image.

All to say there is a LOT of words about High Performing-systems out there (many of the words reminded me of the old Eric Morecambe sketch with Andre Previn - I cued it to pick up at the right point, s0 you don’t have to wade through the first 10 minutes - though it remains a classic FIFTY years later.)

Bottom line, we seem to be good at

• describing a ‘High Performing-system’ and

• claiming to be a ‘High Performing-system’.

BUT, not so much as to what that really means, other than drawing parallels to machines - a human trait that I personally find worrying. {But that’s not a new thing. (the drawing parallels and my worry 😵‍💫} )

Marshall McLuhan wrote how technology at a point in time is often reflected in how we try to understand ourselves, observing further that as technology evolves, we adopt the language of the ‘Technology du Jour’ to describe ourselves.

Words like ‘input’, ‘feedback’, ‘processing and ‘output’ emerge from technology in the Information Age. ‘Driven’, ‘under pressure’. ‘powerhouse’ and ‘gears turning’ from the ‘Age of Steam’. More more recently our vocabulary sees us describing ourselves as ‘data driven’ or if we are running through a process systematically and step-by-step we might be thinking ‘algorithmically and education is no longer sufficient - our ‘(deep) learning’ must be ‘always on’.

So when I read about High Performance-systems in the work place, my mind does drift over to ‘High Performance Computing’ where ‘specialist computers allow us to manage massive amounts of data - fast - extremely fast to solve very hard problems’.

Meanwhile, momentarily back to my research - I finally arrived at Gaping Void (don’t ask why I didn’t start there!), where my friends had an entire page devoted to ‘Culture Design For High Performance’. Unlike so much that was about there, they seemed to me to have the best handle on what is going on.

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Two Thoughts

ONE] Last year I published ‘The Dawn Of Mediocre Computing’. I think the title is self explanatory and builds on work by

Venkatesh Rao

. The core point is that it used to be that ‘the machine’ had to be the best to shine. LLMs meanwhile only need to be better than average.

TWO] Machines are very good at doing certain things very well. Humans are not machines, yet we insist on measuring ourselves against them. Over and over. I wonder if Picasso was a ‘High Performer’? Was George Braque less so?

Man With Guitar - George Braque

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Back To Kiwi Education

To be fair - I have no idea if New Zealand’s Education System should be described as ‘High Performing’ - but this article from the end of last year at best argues that the Kiwi Education system is ‘around’ ‘Average’ - compared to other OECD countries - but again - best? In what way? With what measures? Compared to?

My Take

I am a big believer in understanding Human Performance, though I am often disappointed by how we think about it and generally it’s not getting better. For most people, the machines are in charge of whether you get a job and then again if you get keep it. (Look up ATS if you don’t believe me). And the ‘keeping part’ is increasingly nothing to do with you or what you do as much as a whole raft of parameters that you don’t have control over.

Moreover, you stand a much improved chance of getting that job if you essentially tune your job application with SEO like keywords and phrases - that appeal to the machine. To me - it’s a lazy, inefficient way to recruit and is yet another misguided attempt by corporations to minimize their reliance on people because the machine is soooooo good. Right?

A question … If the machine is so good at finding and recommending the best people for your organization - why are they so bad at finding and recommending a good movie, book or shirt for you when you are trying to buy something?

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But - Good News❗️.. there are flashes of lights 💡 in the landscape that give me hope. In fact there is a particularly bright light out there. I’ll tell you about it another time.