Claims
Andrews claimed that they were caused in large part by the failure for active professionals within and across different organizations, or even within the same organization to communicate laterally (failure of lateral communication leading to unintended or unforeseen and often highly undesirable interactions and consequences. It was claimed this often led to the Relevance Paradox, whereby individuals, not being aware of the relevance of certain information (often relating to unwanted effects in domains outside that individuals knowledge) did not seek the information which could have avoided them making a costly error.
It was claimed that informal lateral communication, in informal IRGs have in the past mitigated or prevented many potential disasters before they happen by throwing up potential unintended consequences early on by informal Interlock research.
IRGs were intended to speed up and automate these pre-existing informal processes by resolving the Relevance Paradox the transmission of tacit knowledge and the synchronization of language across different specialties, disciplines, organisations, and departments; something central media and purely hierarchical organizations it was argued cannot readily do.
An examples cited of the failure of lateral communication to create coherent world views interlock diagram from which coherent policy and actions can emerge was the then and still occurring extraordinary and not widely appreciated fact that the UK and the USA (with the strange exception of New York city,) wastes heat from power stations equal to and able to replace the entire usage of natural gas for heating, unlike in say Denmark, Russia and Finland, an amazing example of Hierarchical incompetence given present fears of imminent energy shortages.
Other examples cited were the construction of large dams, where frequently the increased value of the water and power is more than offset by the extra cost of chemical fertilizer (needed due to loss of seasonal silting, the use of any power to create that fertilizer, the creation of disease epidemics e.g. Schistosomiasis ( see Charnock, Anne (1980) Taking Bilharziasis out of the irrigation equation. New Civil Engineer, 7 August) and the loss of food production downstream due to traditional fishing grounds based on the loss of silts previously deposited in the deltas.
Another aspect dealt with in the book "The IRG Solution - hierarchical incompetence and how to overcome it" was the problem of universal languages and referencing systems and the effect of jargon on insulating specialist groups, and preventing inter departmental, inter organizational communication and collective world view development. Specialist get stuck in sub worlds partly due to the isolation brought about by the specialist languages and associated thought processes they develop, making outsiders difficult to hear, understand or take seriously.
There is not and cannot be, any universal language and categorization systems understood and used by all, and attempts to define and build them inevitably lead to massive problems of disambiguation. The IRG approach to this, was that at least initially, if individuals laterally communicated across boundaries then human IRGists would develop cross boundary languages - this is after all how language continuously develops largely through dialogue.(Language development is quintessentially an informal process of the development of tacit knowledge) By extension, the IRG impersonator software would simply do the same thing - an incoming article from a remote system, would have keywords automatically attached local to the domain it was now in, thus solving the language disconnect and cataloguing problem.
Whilst the Internet, discussion groups, blogs, email have to some extent tacked some of the issue raised in the various articles / books written around the IRG concept, by no means all.
For example Google queries still only returns you the information you think you need - you can still be the victim of the relevance paradox.
Systems like Google, and Wikipedia, superb for what they do, do not tackle the language aspect - users simply have to know exactly the words they are looking for on Google, or Wikipedia - otherwise they can only locate information they want with difficulty.
Email on its own, still tends to predominantly promote internal communications, not across boundaries.
Information Routing Groups are related to the notion of and predates the Collaboratory and are much more general.
Modern actually existing versions of IRGs are for example Linkedin which operates on precisely the principles laid out in "The IRG Solution" and the Claverton Energy Group, currently assembling a global energy solution diagram.
- http://www.claverton-energy.com/energy-experts-wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
Read more about this topic: Information Routing Group
Famous quotes containing the word claims:
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