Johnnie Moore

Badgers and the joy of complexity

Johnnie Moore

Johnnie Moore

I’m Johnnie Moore, and I help people work better together

Great article in today’s Independent. The government decided to take action to stop the spread of TB among cattle. They found that badgers were to blame for spreading it.

So they ordered a badger cull. Luckily they decided to do a limited trial first.

In some areas the cull got 80% of the badgers – which you might think would lead to a reduction in catle TB. Wrong! The rate actually rose by over 20% everywhere they tried it.

Turns out that culling badgers to this degree so disrupted their social system that the survivors went roaming around – thus driving up the spread of the disease and confounding the expert scientists.

To its credit, the government has stopped the experiment in its tracks.

Good news for badgers. I like these stories that illustrate how complex systems can defy expectations; it’s all too easy to come up with neat “scientific” models for things that aren’t that neat in reality.

Share Post

More Posts

Conversational leadership

David Gurteen tweeted this interesting article (pdf): Conversational Leadership: Thinking together for a change It makes a lot of sense to me pushing for a

Scaling or evolving?

This post really interests me: Innovation for Development: Scaling Up or Evolving? As they complete some pilot experiments in development work the authors recognise that

Jersey

I’ve just given a presentation on Beyond Branding in Jersey. It was fun to take ideas that have been percolating for months and give them

More on what is marketing…

Jennifer Rice continues our rolling dialogue about what marketing’s job is. I appreciate Jen for keeping a good thoughtful exploration going. David Foster at PhotonCourier

Chautauqua

I’ll be taking part in the Chautauqua online discussion of Beyond Branding, from 15th to 29th February. Fellow authors Denzil Meyers, Chris Macrae, Julie Anixter

Microsoft’s embarassing metadata

Found via Richard Gayle is Strike that Out Sam. This is a cheeky exploitation of the fact that Microsoft Word documents retain the fingerprints of

Iranian Blog

On a tip from David Weinberger I’ve been reading the blog written by the Vice President of Iran. I recommend you take a look. It’s

More Updates

Emotional debt

Releasing the hidden costs of pent up frustrations

Aliveness

Finding the aliveness below the surface of stuck

Johnnie Moore

Unhurried Update

I’ve been hosting Unhurried Conversations here in Cambridge for more than two years now. Here’s a post from a few months back describing the approach. It continues to be a

Johnnie Moore

More bottom up intelligence

… and into the gap between corporate telephone mazes and our desire just to talk to a human being, slips this smart offering: A database of how to short-circuit all

Johnnie Moore

Talk is Action

I’ve blogged before my concerns about the idea that action is superior to talk. I can understand people getting frustrated when conversations seem to loop in circles that don’t lead

Johnnie Moore

links for 2010-04-17

Chris Corrigan » To free the innocent Chris describes what sounds like an amazing gathering of those finally released as innocent after decades in jail. "I was struck today how