Assumptions and bad science

1. The Independent recently reported that Australia had been rocked by revelations about lesbian koalas. What intrigued me was that the researchers – who had discovered that their female subjects regularly indulged in lesbian, group sex sessions – said the following:

"Our aim was to determine the extent of differences in the homosexual and heterosexual behaviour of female koalas and thereby to determine the purpose of female homosexual behaviour in the koala."

Now bite me if I’m wrong, but isn’t "determining the purpose of homosexual behaviour" a slightly dodgy aim? I mean, they could start by interviewing subjects with a greater capacity for self-analysis and expression: say, for example, 150 Australian lesbians. I imagine that their answers to the question "What is the purpose of your female homosexual behaviour?" would make interesting reading.

2. "Better-educated suicide bombers are given harder targets and succeed in killing more victims, according to research by American economists," said this weekend’s Observer.

The article continues, saying that the researchers "suggest that, since more educated bombers could earn more in the labour market, they may demand higher-profile targets, with greater potential rewards."

Somehow I doubt that the calculation goes quite like that. It seems to me that our American researchers have applied capitalist market economics to an issue that may not be entirely susceptible to that kind of analysis.
(I also now have an image of the suicide bombers union campaigning for equal rights for putative bombers educated in inner city schools and with poor GCSE results).

All that by way of preamble to the latest from Project Red Stripe. Here my word of the week is ‘gut-rounding’. Google gives me no results for gut-rounding as a term, so I’m pretty confident that Joanna Slykerman coined it yesterday. Unsure about how scientific she need be in allocating the number of people from each of six databases to be invited to submit ideas for the project, she proposed ‘gut-rounding’ the numbers rather than doing a precise, statistical calculation.

Stewart was clear that there was "plenty of room for gut-rounding", though he was on the way home (which is always a good time to ask anyone for a snappy, favourable decision).

For me, gut-rounding has been the habit of a lifetime. I never had any time for the algebraic refinements of sampling and segmenting and testing lists in the heyday of direct mail. But it would never have occurred to me to ask colleagues whether they minded my gut-rounding. Perhaps I’m not the team player I thought I was.

Gut-rounding inevitably has connotations of ground nuts and gut barging, and there’s a sense that the term is just wrong somehow (like signs advertising ‘boarding catteries’, which always distress the ear because it’s expecting ‘batteries’, I think).

But gut-rounding could be an interesting word for this team. They’re now devising necessarily elaborate ways of assessing how good and how innovative a new idea is – so that they can filter out unproductive ideas, sort and rate good ones, and not waste too long on the process of evaluation. (In a similar vein, we’re currently trying to come up with guidelines at Triarchy for when we should give away free copies of our books. My suggestion: "No guidelines; use your judgement.")

RedStripe are looking at benchmarks for innovation and at processes for presenting key ideas/themes to the team, getting feedback, brainstorming, etc. There’s an inevitable tension between the desire to systematise at the outset and the likelihood of some gut-rounding taking place in the heat of the fray as hundreds of ideas arrive (inshallah).

Maybe the eventual book on Project Red Stripe should be about how scientific to be. Or the need to start off scientific in order to break the rules later. I’m thinking of an article for Harvard Business Review, followed by a lucrative, franchise for management consultants. Anyway, I’ve registered gutrounding.com.