Museums of the future, future memories, retrospectives and change

In his book The Living Company Arie de Geus suggests the role of planning, particularly scenario planning, is to create memories of the future. By under taking the planning exercise we conceive of how the world may look different, we prepare our brains for a future that is not simply a repeat of tomorrow. The actual plan isn’t so important, the important thing is we’ve imagined and visited a world that is different.

This last weekend’s FT has an interesting piece on the increasing world urbanisation, particularly in India and China - here is the link. What caught my eye was mention of China’s museums of the future. This is the second time I’ve heard of these museums which display the designs and plans for the cities China is building and extending.

Future museums strike me as a great way to create future memories. The idea that I can go and see how things may, or should, be in the future is brilliant. Perhaps they even have people on hand so I can ask questions of. Of course I don’t now if the Chinese planners are explicitly trying to create future memories or if they have read Arie de Geus but that’s not really the point.

When people are faced with change, whether is be new buildings, a new environment, or a changed work environment, maybe new processes they are naturally inquisitive. If their questions can’t be answered they start to hypothesis and make things up - they create their own future memories. Since they don’t know their hypothesises are right they have doubt. Doubt about the future, and some possibly negative hypothesis creates fear.

Now your change efforts are facing an up hill battle, fear and doubt have entered the scene and different people have different ideas about what the future should look like, so, when the future does arrive they respond to it differently rather than consistently.

Creating future memories is one way to overcome these problems. Future memories can help remove the doubt, uncertainty, fear and help build a shared understanding of what the future will look like and how we should act when it arrives.

So far I know of several ways of creating future memories:

• Shared planning, specifically scenario planning - hence why I don’t like planners being a separate cadre
  
• Future museums, like in China
  
• Process miniatures, like the XP Game, these allow people to rehearse a future process in a small way.
  

A think the right sort of training can also help if it is interactive and allows people to rehearse future events. I’ll leave this hanging as I don’t know the magic ingredients for such training.

At the risk of sounding paradoxical I think one area were future memories might be able to help is with project retrospectives. I’m a big fan of these, I think they make sense and can really help your project teams learn and improve.

However, one of the problems I hear about with retrospectives is that teams undertaken them but then don’t follow through on their results. For example, during the retrospective the team identifies a problem and suggest a solution, everyone in the room agrees to do it. But outside the room, the next day, nothing actually changes. The team carries on as before.

I wonder if, after the retrospective, after identifying problems and solutions the team can somehow create a future memory of itself doing this. Maybe the team could build a model of the change, or maybe role-play the change. The idea would be to have team members understand and practice the change to remove doubt, uncertainty and misunderstandings.

Perhaps we need to pair retrospectives with future-spectives.

PDAs, the future of Palm? – and my Palm LifeDrive

I’ve been using PDAs for about 12 years now, I started on a Psion 3a, then a 3c, then I moved to a Series 5, didn’t like that and moved back to a 3mx and finished on a Revo. As you can tell I love the things, the 3mx is still my favorite PDA but it was obvious at the time that it needed to move forward. The Revo should have been that move but it had two flaws: a poor case design and persistent battery problems.

In the end Psion got out of the market. Another British IT company that couldn’t crack the US market (the US OEM deal was too little too late) and consequently couldn’t compete worldwide. The company still survives and through Symbian the software is competing worldwide on phones not PDAs.

Anyway, I still like PDAs and I can’t imagine life without them. So, four years ago, when it became clear what was happening to Psion I jumped to Palm. The hardware was good but the software lacked functionality, still, it was a good product and I used it. However, it never quite merged into my life the way the Psion did – this may well have been changes to my lifestyle.

A couple of months ago I came to the conclusion I needed to do something about my aging Palm – the case was cracking. So I looked at the Palm website and go hooked on the idea of a LifeDrive.

I’ve had it over a month now and I have to say I’m disappointed with it.

In theory the LifeDrive is a great idea. Its a Palm PDA, and its an iPod (4Gb hard disk), its a voice recorder and a portable web terminal (Wifi and Bluetooth onboard). Sure it does all these things, but it doesn’t do anything really well. The PDA software (diary, address book, etc.) hasn’t really moved forward in 4 years; the music software is difficult to use and only seems to want to play 3 tunes before you have to do something; the voice record isn’t a patch on my Sony SX-56 and the Wifi takes for every to get a connection – and half the time tries to connect the wrong network.

So I’m disappointed with the LifeDrive. I probably should have done more research and maybe I should have jumped ship to a Microsoft based product.

But there is a bigger question: just what is Palm playing at?

Failing to move your software forward and poor products are not a route to success. Then I read that they have product delays coming up.

This goes back to their decision to split hardware (Palm) from (Palm Source) software and concentrate on the hardware. Which actually sounds like the Handspring strategy from a few years back. Remember Handspring? The Palm spin off that produced PDA’s using Palm OS. In fact, one could say that Palm has become Handspring. (Maybe not surprising as Palm actually bought Handspring about 4 years ago.)

In the early days of PDAs - and I should know, I was a summer intern at Distributed Information Processing, DIP, the guys who developed the Atari Portfolio – it made sense for hardware and software to be together because they evolved together. So we had the Apple Newton, Psion, Palm, DIP, Poqet and so on who produced hardware and software.

When the market matured it made sense to split, and specifically get out of hardware. So Psion spun out Symbian, Palm created PalmSource and HP, Dell and everyone else started using Microsoft Windows CE/Pocket/whatever. Nothing really surprising there, the same pattern happened with microcomputers (i.e. the machines before PCs) were we had TRS-80, Sinclair’s, etc. etc. each of which had its own software for its own hardware. And the same pattern is playing out in phones as manufactures increasingly use standard platforms from Symbian, Microsoft, Nokia and others.

(It is interesting to think of other devices were this split could happen next. Already there are signs of it happening in the TV and set-top box market, what about cars? There is a lot of software in them these days, or kitchen appliances?)

(And Apple are the exception, they never split hardware and software. Arguably they should have done and some reports say they may still have some kind of play lined up.)

Palm have done well to survive this long but don’t think they’ve got much of a future. They are a small hardware player in a large market, they can’t innovate (or even update) through software and their products seem to lack focus. They’ve done well to survive this long but I don’t think they can continue.

People tell me that PDAs are a bad sector to be in. The convergence of phone and PDA will leave one winner: the phone. But, having used PDAs and phones for so long I think there will always be a niche for PDAs that do things phones don’t, or are unsuitable for - like running my wine database. Unfortunately I’ve not seen a PDA product that is suitable. Maybe this is just me, maybe I’m in a minority of one.

Book review: Thinking beyond lean (Cusumano & Nobeoka)

I originally read Thinking Beyond Lean (1998) over four years ago, it was good at the time and its still good. A few weeks ago I picked up the book to check something and decided it was worth a re-read. Four years ago I didn’t know as much as I do now about lean production and lean product development so I thought it would be worth another look.

The book is a study of how car companies develop their products, and specifically, how they reuse the designs to product additional products, e.g. the Ford Mondeo in Europe is the Ford Contura in America and a Jaguar something in both places. Of course, as you might guess from the title Toyota is the pace setter in this field as in so much else.

I did write about the book after my first reading and still agree with what I said then, there is good advice here we can apply to software development.

The book is interesting for two reasons. First it is an interesting insight into product development at some very companies. Second it looks at the subject of reuse in a context of multi-project management.

Make no mistake, the car industry has problems reusing its designs. Reuse is difficult. The overriding lesson is: reuse doesn’t just happen, you have to arrange for it to happen.

Cusumano and Nokeoka do identify four models of reuse, or rather four models of design, three of which are reuse and I think its worth naming them here:

• New build: design something new from the start, even if you could reuse something there are good reasons why you might do this.
  
• Concurrent: two or more projects running concurrently developing new products, usually one is the lead project
  
• Sequential: design something new, leave it alone for a while then try to reuse it for a new product.
  
• Design modification: design something new, leave it alone for a bit then come back and tweak the design for a new version.
  

Four years ago I thought these models were useful in describing software development and I still do. However, the software industry doesn’t think like that. We have four models of our own:

• Framework: we create a project that has no objective but to create a platform for others to reuse. Usually these projects are expensive and often they fail.
  
• Reuse will just happen: made famous by the OO movement, the idea is that if programmers write “objects” (later components, now SOA components) then somehow they will be usable by others.
  
• Cut-and-paste: probably the most widely used; our own version of design modification.
  
• Packaged: we buy something someone else has written and work with it through an API.
  

I think only the last of these can really be claim to be a success.

There are lots of reasons why a reuse attempt can fail but mostly they boil down to organization. So, to make reuse happen you need to get the organization right - we’re back to Conway’s Law!

But there are other reasons, e.g. accounting. If project B is six months behind A and reuses their designs then who pays the bill, A or B?

And reuse may not always be a good thing. If you are competing on innovation then continually reusing your existing products may stop you creating innovations. It may also stop you from producing distinctive products - one of the problems Volkswagen had when it got very aggressive about platform sharing.

Yet another problem, not mentioned in the book, is your product life cycle: if all your products use they same platform then they will all age at the same pace and will all need replacing at the same time. So, just when your cash flow is low (because all your products are old) you will need to spend a lot replacing them.

I think the main difference in reading the book four years ago and today is my own scepticism about reuse. Four years ago I still believed we in the software industry could do it, all we needed was the right approach. Now I’m not sure. I think the level of complexity in software is so great trying to product something for reuse isn’t worth the effort in most cases.

That said, if the software industry is to make any headway here we need to take on the issues and lessons described in Thinking Beyond Lean .

Skills shortage in India

Anyone who believes that all IT and technology jobs in Europe and America are doomed to move to India and China should make sure they read today’s FT. According to this report India may graduate 3 million engineers a year but only 25% are suitable for the IT industry and then only 10% are employable. Staff churn is high and good staff are able to command high salaries - so eroding the price advantage.

Meanwhile, China has a shortage of managers and has to import people from abroad.

I’ve mentioned this point before, in December last year and I still stand by it. I really want to see India (and China) develop, and I don’t have much time for the doom merchants who think IT in the west is doomed, just, I don’t think the hype matches the facts.

On the other hand, the UK could be its own worst enemy on this. According to a recent report the UK is not training enough IT people. And part of the problem is the “all our jobs are going to India" hype!

The part I find most worrying is not the idea that big British firms won’t be able to find IT staff, I think they will. Big existing firms will be able to train their own people, import staff or send work overseas. But, more and more innovation has an IT (specifically software) element and if we don’t have the software engineers available these innovations aren’t going to go anywhere.

In the short run this is probably good new for me and others in the IT industry today. Jobs will remain plentiful. In the longer run, if it remains difficult to hire staff firms will just give up and find other ways of accomplishing their objectives without using any IT staff in the UK.

LinkedIn: good thing? Bad thing?

I’ve got an account on LinkedIn, and I’ve got a whole bunch of connections. If you don’t know LinkedIn it is a social network site with a work focus - believe the hype and you’ll find your next job through it. Once you’ve signed up you can add your “connections” and see who links to who, kind of. (I'm also on OpenBC but I've not spent so much time developing my profile and connections there.)

Based on the old theory that you find jobs and opportunities through who-you-know and who-knows-you then this should be a great success. In reality I don’t think it is ever going to substitute for real networking - and real networking is something I should do more of but is so time consuming.

Yes I’ve had a couple of enquiries through LinkedIn, more often to do with whether I can help someone else rather than if they can help me. There are jobs listed but as usual they are mostly fronted by recruiters/agents so they are as useless as any others.

If your interested here is my link


So, why do I play with it? Why do I keep adding contacts? In part, despite my rational above I still imagine it could put me in contact with someone useful.

Part of it is also slightly narcissistic - my network is bigger than your network.

Some of it is also to do with tracking people, although I suppose I should use Plaxo for that. It is supposed to be an online address book but allowing you to update people’s contacts books automatically when you change address. Plaxo’s never really grabbed my interest, and for a while it was Microsoft centric so it wouldn’t interface to my Thunderbird mail.

Also, I don't know if LinkedIn (and similar) will change our world but they might. I would like to understand how this stuff works and the consequences so I think its worth using . Just the same reason as I blog, to understand this stuff it helps to be involved with it.

But I think most of my LinkedIn interest is down right curiosity: Who connects with who? Who else is out there? What are these people doing?

What’s interesting is that something has changed recently. Not with LinkedIn but in people’s perception of this site. I don’t use it much but every so often I invite a bunch of people to connect. People who are already on LinkedIn usually say “Yes” quickly, those who aren’t might join but most just let it pass, I respect that and don’t bug them.

But, last time I sent out some invites, two months ago I think, people started to say: “Why are you asking me?” One friend at Microsoft told me it’s against company policy. Other people queried the nature of the system. I’ve just done another round of invites and I’ve got one or two similar responses. Is this some kind of mock-friendship? Asking people you don’t know that well to “connect” to you?

Could it be that LinkedIn is maxed out? Those who will join have joined, those who haven’t won’t. Are people fed up with social-networking? Or just more protective of their privacy?

Where is the line between people you know and will recommend to others and people you won’t? LinkedIn allows you to “endorse” other people but what happens when you don’t feel you can endorse someone? You risk upsetting them, a new and novel way to loose friends.

So far LinkedIn has been a bit of fun but it raising more and more questions for me.

Maybe thats just the engineer in me, engineers don't like networking; asking someone for a job is embarrassing, little do they know this is how the rest of the business world works.

Post EuroPLoP

I was at EuroPLoP in Bavaria most of last week. I returned mentally fired up with lots of ideas and new thoughts but physically shattered - too many late nights and beer. That makes it sound unhealthy but EuroPLoP is kind of healthy for me because I go lake swimming and take lots of saunas.

My paper, Patters for Technology Companies was reviewed in a workshop were I got a lot of very positive comments. The main thing is I need to split this one paper into two, one with the pattern theory and one patterns. I knew I should do this before hand but for some reason I didn’t....

I’ve been thinking that this would draw a line under my business patterns but right now I’m not sure. Part of me feels I’ve taken it about as far as I can, other people need to continue the work but there are still a couple of loose ends, a few requests for more patterns and theory from the workshop. Then this morning I spotted another pattern in the FT....

I also ran a focus group at EuroPLoP on the “Social Economic forces effecting software architecture”. This was a follow up to Conway’s Law group I ran last year - also with Lise Hvatum. This group wasn’t as deep as the previous one but I still got some insights and I’ll write them up before too long.

Finally at EuroPLoP I did face-to-face, one-on-one shepherding for a paper. This is the best type of shepherding. Practicalities mean that most shepherding is done over e-mail but when you get to do it face-to-face it is great. Its also were I see the greatest similarities to business coaching. Trouble is, you just don’t have enough time.

I had some really great conversations at EuroPLoP too. Particularly with James Noble (who an interesting take on Extreme Programming and problems with customer role, and his theories on PostModern Programing.).

The big surprise at the conference was the news from Indian. Some people from the patterns community have been out there and have been talking to Indian academics and practitioners about creating an Indian patterns conference. It seems likely that this will happen next year. To start with it won’t be a PLoP conference because a) it sounds like there are too many people and b) we first need to seed pattern writing.

That, in a nutshell, was EuroPLoP. Already I can’t wait till next year!

The last thing your people need is your strategy

Shortly after taking over IBM Lou Gerstner famously said “The last thing this company needs is a vision.” In an era when businesses men often seem to compete with each other for “vision” this was a brave thing to say – particularly for a technical company. I’ve been thinking about that comment for the last week.

Some years ago I was a developer at a small software company in South London. A few months after I joined they hired a Software Development Manager and charged him with sorting out developement. One of the games I’ve played with myself over the years since then is to ask myself: “In his position what would I do?” – in other words, what would my vision, my strategy be.

Last week two people I know were in the position of taking over a existing group, and my advice to them, well, the last thing you need for your new team is a vision. Sure you need your own strategy for taking over the team but beyond that I don’t think you should have a strategy.

I’d better explain myself...

If I come in with a fully formed vision for my new team, particularly if I spell it out in PowerPoint slides then it is my vision. This might be great if I’m trying to persuade investors to put money into my company, or trying to find like minded people to join me on the quest but when the people are in place it does nothing to get their buy in or address the real problem.

When you take over an existing team there are existing problems, organizational issues and a lot of history. If you come in with a vision you don’t take any of these into account. Sure, being new is a great position to be in, you have a fresh pair of eyes, you can see what others can’t because your not mired in the thick of it. But, your going to need these people to deliver something.

So, you walk into your new team, give them your PowerPoint, and talk them through what you are going to do. Your communicating your vision, your strategy, not theirs. Your task, as you have defined it, is to get your people to execute your strategy. You have to explain the strategy, they will interpret it, they may not have exactly the same interpretation as you, will you ask them to play it back? Or will you assume they got it? And if they don’t quite get it? Will you explain it again, and again until they do, or will you listen to their comments and change?

And once they do understand it your going to have to ensure they do it. You now have a policing action on your hands – make sure they do what you want. (Fortunately management have tool for this, its called MBO – Management By Objective.)

So I don’t think this is a good idea. I do have an alternative, I’ll outline it here, I’ve done most of it although, to be honest, I’ve never done it in the kind of systematic way I’m laying it out here – but then I’ve never laid it out like this before.

First don’t do anything. Listen, watch, learn. Look around you. See what people are doing, specifically see what your team are doing.

Second, expand this into a longer investigation phase. Talk to the team, talk to them one-on-one, talk to their customers, their suppliers and any other interested stakeholders. Find what all these people think of the team, what they should be doing, what they are doing, and how they are performing.

Do you observations for a while, at least a month but maybe as long as three months.

Next get the team together. Find out what they problems they see collectively. Find out what they see as their overall goal. Now this could be tricky, hopefully what they are doing and what they think they are doing matches up with what the other stakeholders think. If they don’t your going to have to correct that, but I think in the broadest sense there will be something everyone can agree on.

Now work back. Get the team to collectively agree on what they should be doing to solve the problems. Don’t tackle all the problems, if possible throw some of them away, i.e. just don’t do them if you don’t have to. Remember people can only focus on so many things so don’t pick too many.

Once the group is in agreement it will probably help to work with everyone one-on-one to find out how they see the team, the aims and their responsibilities.

At no stage should you attempt to tell them a vision or a strategy. Let them work it out. These are bright people – if they aren’t why are they working for you? They are going to be far more motivated when they create the strategy and vision then when you tell them it.

Don’t worry that what they come up with isn’t what you expected, what others want or were the company is heading. You can correct this over time if you find a problem, the trick is to expose your team to the wider picture, make them aware of what the corporate strategy is, give them examples of were it is working and then help your team work back to change what they do.

I honestly believe that when bright people know where everyone is heading and are allowed to work things out for themselves they will a) get it right, b) be very motivated to do it, c) you’ll get a better answer because you used more brains and got collective action.

This may mean eating some humble pie and you don’t get to play with PowerPoint. The point is: it is not your ideas that are important, it is the team’s ideas. It is not important for you to have a big idea, it is important for you to help the team, and the people in it have big ideas.

Do it right and you will get a strategy and vision, and it will be a truely shared vision.

Blog slow down

Since returning from holiday I’ve been blogging less - some might argue this is a good thing. I’ve always tried to aim for about one blog entry a week, I think so far this year my average has been closer to two, so yes, I probably should slow down.

So, don’t worry, I’m still here, I still intend to keep blogging but I’m happy to do it at a slower pace - hopefully less quantity more quality.

Several forces are conspiring here to slow me down. First is EuroPLoP is just a couple of weeks away. At EuroPLoP we review writers papers, we tell writers what we think of their work. This means that you have to read a lot of papers before you get to the conference - I’ve read two, I’ve got another four to go.

Again this year I’m running a focus group with Lise Hvatum. This will build on last years successful focus group on Conway's Law and will discuss how social forces effect software architecture.

And just for fun, I’m the Focus Group chair at EuroPLoP this year, so a little more work there too.

The second force that is at play is my book. Regular readers will have heard occasional mention of this from time to time, well, I’ve decided to go for it and attempt to write a book. Actually, this book has been in development to some degree for the last two or three years. With the publication of Pattern Languages of Program Design 5 (yes, the physical copies arrived, hurray! I can hold it in my hands!) I’ve been enthused some more to finish this project.

I actually gave a friend some of the more recently written, unedited, chapters and got some really good feedback so that has given me more impetuses. And finally, when I look at all the material I have I can see that I’m damn close!

I’ve already approached one publisher and I’m waiting for my feedback, I’m trying to see rejection as a good thing, it will help me focus what I do next - but I’m hoping for acceptance!

As if this weren’t enough I’ve got a bunch of other things going on in my life just now which I won’t discuss in a blog.

So, dear reader, I hope you don’t mind if I slow down my blogging just a little bit.

Book review: The Search (Battelle)

While I was in Russia I got to do a lot of reading, in fact, I started The Search (John Battelle, 2005) on the plan to Moscow and finished it a week later on the flight back to London.

This is one of those books that got a lot of publicity last year, silly thing is, the anti-hype person inside of me tends to automatically avoid books that get a lot of hype. So, it wasn’t until one of my colleagues at work, Julian, suggested I read this book that I actually bought a copy, then it took me a couple of months to actually find time to read it. Now I have I’m glad I did and I need to say thank-you to Julian - perhaps in future I shouldn’t avoid books because they get a lot of hype.

The book has two themes, the first is the history, creation and growth of Google, in that it is a book in the mould of Start-up (Jerry Kaplan, 1994) - although its not the insiders view Kaplan gives and which makes that book worth reading.

Second it is a history of internet search, which is itself the history of one part of the internet story from 1995 through to 2005. Here the book is more like Robert Cringley’s Accidental Empires (1992) - another book worth reading.

I suppose Battelle could have written two books, one for each subject and just referenced the other. In parts you do get the feeling you are reading alternating chapters of two books but on the whole this approach works. You can’t really talk about Google without talking about Alta-Vista, Gopher, Yahoo and such, and neither can you talk about search without talking about Google so on balance I’m glad he put the two together.

Battelle thinks search is important, and he thinks search will (is) change the world. His argument runs like this: there is a mass of information on the internet, but if you can’t find it is fairly pointless. Therefore, search is key to leveraging all this information. This puts search, and search companies, in a key position to control the internet.

Although the book doesn’t specifically talk of Web 2.0 it does talk about a key part of Web 2.0 and therefore makes you think a lot about how the web is changing and were it might be going. For this reason alone its a good read and I recommend it. And by telling the Google story alongside this the book is a compelling read.

One of the thing the book has made me think about is the Quaero project. For the first time I understand why the European Union is getting involved in search. OK, I understand why, I understand we might consider search a public good, we might want to avoid the control Google, Yahoo or MSN could hold but as of yet I’m yet to see why we should spend public money on a problem the private sector is actively solving.

One footnote of reservation. Battelle almost exclusively talks about internet search, and his arguments are based on internet search. Unfortunately this does miss a big part of the search story and future, that of Internal search, search within the corporation. So there is no discussion of Autonomy, Verity or FAST. This is market that is important and is going to change in the near future, Oracle have just entered and Microsoft have stated an intention to enter. It would have been nice to see a chapter on this but the book still works without it.

So, in conclusion, The Search is worth reading, whether you are interested in technology, business or just the web in general.

Making sense of Russia

One of the things I try and do in this blog is make sense of the world around me. In fact, I think most of what most of do in life is to try to make sense of the world around us. Making sense of the world is a driver to learning and change.

I spent all of last week in Russia - I won’t go into why, those who know me know why, those who don’t, well....

A couple of days in Moscow then on to Siberia, Novosibirsk and Akademgorodok to be exact. And before you ask, no it wasn’t cold, it was hot actually, 30C a lot of the time.

So, I spent the week trying to make sense of Russia. It is tempting to try and understand Russia as America. Two old adversaries have a lot in common, the vastness of the countries being the most obvious but Russia is not another America and it doesn’t make sense to try and understand it as such.

Its also tempting to compare Russia with European like France, Germany, Britain. Indeed, Russia is a European country, and it shares a common history with Europe, it was Russia that defeated Germany and before that France - on both occasions allied to Britain. True, many Russians, maybe most, consider themselves Europeans but Russia is also different from other European countries - no other European country has a Pacific coast.

Russia has always been different to European and American nations. And in the twentieth century it cut itself off from many developments there. While the forces of markets and standardisation mean that Germany, France and Britain increasing look alike, an in turn look like America, Russia was cut off from this. Consequently it is different.

And as an outside it is always tempting to view a country as “wrong” or broken. Supposedly one of the signs of culture shock is thinking things are broken. Each country has its own forces and priorities. Russia may be different but sometimes these are for the better.

Take for example airport screening. Same metal detectors, same procedure, but there are two baskets for your belongings. This confused me but is actually better. One is just for shoes. After all, shoes are dirty things, why put them in the same basket as a coat?

From a technology point of view Russia is really interesting. It industrialised later and then cut itself off from development and created its own versions of technology o we have Tupolev instead of Boeings. That makes it interesting; some technology is better, some not so good.

It is only 15 short years since Russia re-engaged but in places it looks very, well Western. I think it was William Gibson who said “The future has arrived, its just unevenly spread around.” You could say something similar of Russia. Some places, some shops, restaurants, houses wouldn’t look out of place in London, New York or Paris. But its not consistent, elsewhere you find stark evidence of old-Russia. I think Russia will always look different to western eyes, if only because they use a different alphabet.

On the whole I’m hopeful for Russia. It has its problems - not least the current Government. To be fair, they have a difficult job to do, what worries me is not so much what this Government does but that it is laying foundations that a future administration could abuse.

Still I had a couple of positive experiences. Twice I encountered Russian officialdom. If you believe the press then bribes should have been exchanges. On one occasion the official was reasonable, played by the rules and the situation was resolved as well as it could be and now bribes were asked for or paid. On the second the person concerned stood up to an official who was over stepping the mark and who then backed down.

Perhaps Russia has turned a corner here, or perhaps the western press are just wrong.

Finally, nobody I was with and nobody I saw drank vodka. At least among the people I was with, young, successful - the new middle class - beer was the drink of choice.

I’ve made a little bit of progress in understanding Russia but like the country itself there is much more to explore and make sense of.