On errors we fry

Yesterday I was asked by The Conversation to write an article about CSIRO’s new Chairman (sic) (you’d think it’d be a Chair by now).

I said ‘no’ on the basis that I couldn’t think of anything positive to say about the appointment of a former branch salesman and professional oligarch manager to such a role, and also because the CEO is a friend.

As far as I know this is my first ever effort at conscious self-censoring in my latter day writing ‘career’.

I don’t feel too bad about it to be honest. It’s just a thing.

And as I said to the people at The Conversation, it hardly matters anyway; the most likely scenario at CSIRO is that:

1. They will try to make changes yet again – this time they will go for more ‘high-tech’ and less ‘science’, more ‘start-up’ and less ‘corporate contracts’, and more China and less anywhere else
2. There will be a restructure or two – they have been having these continuously since 1987. So no change there
3. They will lose another 500 staff every 18 months on average through budget cuts, as they have been for a decade
4. The residual scientific staff will become more hostile and despondent, if that is possible, especially since their scientific disciplines, on the whole, won’t be wanted
5. Just about all the press coming out of head office will be super positive with a focus on beating up the odd success

To be clear, this is the most likely scenario but the probability function is very broad. To you lay people this means that the chances of any specific prediction becoming a reality is very low; the one above is simple the slightly more likely amongst a bunch of unlikely scenarios.

As I said to Larry, no matter what type of organisation I was tasked with building I wouldn’t start from where CSIRO is today. I suppose that in itself is an interesting challenge for the executive and the board.

But I wonder if they even understand the scope of the challenge? I guess not from what I know.

But then this is Australia, and no one seems to notice or care whether government funded exercises are successful or not. So why should they at CSIRO be any different?

There is a scenario where they stop doing any scientific or technical work altogether and spend their entire budget on media and public relations.

Apart from doing the usual boring press releases they could build interactive tech museums in all the major cities, create reality TV shows like the Shark Tank, license their brand to all sorts of consumer products (CSIRO-approved etc), license the brand and all of their residual tech (on an non-exclusive basis) to start-ups for a teensy-insy equity stake (so they can claim any unlikely start-up successes), set up post office franchises selling kids collectibles, maybe take over one of the dud universities and create the CSIRO Institute of Technology, and the list goes on.

I suspect that this would actually work. Our economy lives on services (70% of our GDP) and media, so why not take the organization right into the guts of main stream society?