Let’s review some basic bozonet theory.
Transmission Congestion
produces imitative practice
When an organization, profession, or activity takes in rapidly a number of new practitioners without a formal course of training, and requires expertise of these practitioners, and these new practitioners come to outnumber the established practitioners, a set of network effects are created. Because there are not enough established practitioners to go around, the new practitioners have to learn by afar, by imitation, or from books, or by going to special courses set up for them, or from each other, or the school of hard knocks. The effect is that they are likely to imitate appearances, accept rationalizations and simplifications as truth, and substitute heuristics for experience. This is the problem of transmission congestion for both expertise and ethos.
Congestion Innovation
transmission failures lead to breaks with established training
Now, this transmission congestion effect is also a source of innovation. Chemists can move into an area of practice and sweep out expert alchemy, physicists can transform stock trading, and investment bankers can move in on fragmented markets with roll up plays. We didn’t say all innovation is happy times for everyone.
The transmission congestion problem becomes a problem for innovation, however, when those coming in don’t have a clue what is going on and struggle to make sense. It is like having construction companies hire, say, bankers to build things, but the bankers have never done it, and rather than listening to an experienced architect or foreman, they just start making it up as they go, imitating the look of buildings they see around. As long as the outside looks like a building, they are home free, if that’s all anyone wants.
All the expertise that would go into making an edifice structurally sound is “red tape” and ‘bureaucracy” to an emerging bozonet. If expertise and the ethos of action are not taught by experts, the practice degrades to imitation and showmanship.
New Normal
the new reduced practice swamps out the established
Another effect of a massive influx of new practitioners is the appearance of a new normal based on frequency and volume. The new practitioners have more problems and are louder about them than established workers. These problems become the visible, public, common sources of discussion.
When academics go to do surveys of the practice, they get bozonet majorities indicating what the issues are. The academics don’t think to ask what opinions might be experienced and insightful. Volume and frequency rule and are taken as measures of normal and passed on to policy makers. The bozonet by this means injects itself into the brains of society.
Nascent Arrogance
untrained nascents become proud and confident
New practitioners without access to expertise overestimate their abilities and see themselves, following the Dunning-Kruger effect, as in general above average. This leads to a kind of arrogance. It is not that new practitioners think of themselves as arrogant. Few do. They merely see themselves as above average. The arrogance bit comes in because there is a mismatch between their skills and their sense of standing. The problem is compounded because in a way, the new practitioners are right–they are not so far off in their expectations if they compare themselves with the new normal. In that mirror, they see how close they are to other practitioners, how the problems are ones that they are all working on.
There are other mirrors, in which they are naive with a lot to learn, but these are not mirrors the bozonet seeks out. These are mirrors that look like threats and mean-spirited criticism and mockery. This blog, say. It’s a good sign of bozonetedness that folks aren’t humble in the face of the new, don’t seek out the mirrors that would suggest deference or humility or requests for assistance, see critique as threat and see metrics as an opportunity to obscure weaknesses.
The rise of a bozonet, in making a new normal, also takes control of the sample for evaluating peformance. The average is a composite of what they see around themselves, and if they don’t see lots of substantive expertise (because it is not available to them, because they can’t recognize it, because they overestimate their own abilities), then they will reasonably assume they are pretty darn good at what they do, all things considered. Humility isn’t something that sparks to mind in the newly above average bozonet.
Expertise as Outlier
the new normal marginalizes the role for established expertise
A further bozonet effect, then, is that established expertise is pressured to adapt to the new normal or is seen increasingly as an outlier, old-fashioned, extra work for nothing, idealistic rather than “pragmatic”. Established experts have problems that are too advanced, that are rare, aren’t well understood, and make it hard to get on with things. In a bozonet, whatever trends as the new normal becomes the thing to adopt to maintain an appearance of cutting edge, order, and plausible deniability. It is therefore necessary to move established expertise to the periphery, where it may be used to do useful work, but only if credit can be ascribed to the bozonet and its adoption of trendy new things.
Moralizing Efficiency
efficiency becomes a primary virtue
By “pragmatic” the bozonet means expeditious self-survival and looking good, rather than, say, gaining sufficient mastery to get the work done that needs to be done, or learning new things every day, testing them, and keeping what works.
If, when a university wants to evaluate its technology transfer program, it proposes to see what most other schools are doing and imitate that, well, that is like consulting the Bozonet Oracle, if the situation involves rapid growth without commensurate assimilation of expertise. The institution will be drawn to the status quo, the new normal, and configure its policies and practices accordingly, so it won’t be the oddball, and gain the apparent benefits of normalizing to a widespread practice. The bozonet creates in this a kind of peer pressure to follow the pack as the path of least administrative effort, and of course we know that least administrative effort means efficiency, and efficiency means accountability for resources, and accountability is being responsible and good and decent.
Creation of a New, Less Productive Set of Problems
problems created by poor practice displace substantive ones
The new normal network effect works to transform the nature of practice. Issues of the new normal come to dominate practice, professional forums, and the practice literature. Only codgers and mavericks dare try to sweep out the tide. If a lot of folks are having a problem with something, well then let’s discuss that. What an established expert has a problem with is an outlier, an advanced topic. “No one would understand”. The treatment of expertise and experience as outliers leads to substantial changes in both the direction and pace of practice. Standards of practice–“best practices”–become aligned with the new normal practices, “simplistic enough a caveman could do it.” Because the new normal lacks expertise, it does not care for rapid change, which would involve learning lots of stuff that, if change isn’t so rapid, isn’t needed. So the pace slows. People look to off the shelf stuff, legacy stuff, form agreements, one way rather than five “to make it easy to manage”. What was once robust and expert becomes banal and half-witted.
A Sophistication Concerning Chronic Shortcomings
new practices become professional requirements
Following on the effects of transmission loss and the new normal, the emerging bozonet also acquires sophistication. By creating a whole new class of problems caused by its incompetence, its fixation on simplistic solutions, its imitation rather than substantive fluency of expert practices, and its lack of interest in adapting, it makes its own problems the new problems of the practice as a whole.
In technology transfer, rather than working to understand the directions of industry and matching university resources to that, a bozonet talks about a “valley of death”, which is largely the application (by imitation) of a challenge in industry in funding new work outside an existing product class, to describe the situation that arises when the bozonet mismatches its marketing of technology to the market. The valley of death is not a natural thing, but the sophisticated name given to a consequence of not being very good at marketing (definition of product, positioning) university research assets. But because the bozonet clings together—it is a social network that serves a function, after all—it cannot even see that the “valley of death” is a problem largely of its own making. The bozonet *is* a valley of death, when it comes to research innovation.
These network effects characterize the rise of a bozonet in an area of practice. When folks talk about “consensus” or “best practices” or “consistency” in these sorts of settings, the words may sound fluffy, but the argument actually is: conform to the bozonet or be called out. Not so fluffy, and not so good for practice.