Token tales, failure, and more

Four standout books of 2023 offer a nuanced outlook on ageing, failing, thinking and everything in between

Some of the best books of 2023 covered ground that has been in the news for a while but not really been explained to the general reader.

Here are four that stuck in my memory.

Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform by Rachel O’Dwyer

Modern digital economies are driven by extra-monetary compensation such as gift tokens from Amazon, phone credit, game tokens, NFTs, and of course, cryptocurrencies. This is not new in itself — in the 19th century miners were paid with company “scrip” — tokens redeemed only at stores run by the company.  But the scale is now vastly larger.

Ms O’Dwyer describes the contemporary extra-monetary economy, and its rapid evolution, and contextualises it via examples drawn from history. She explores many of the open-ended intriguing questions that arise from tokenisation, and does so in a nuanced way with wit and humour.

What are the implications as online platforms become “banks”? What are the new controls and regulations required as compensation is tied to apps and digital identities? What levers of social control do digital platforms, and authoritarian regimes, develop as citizens go cashless?  What loopholes do scamsters exploit? What happens when the Internet is shut down?

The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskar

Mustafa Suleyman was a founder of DeepMind and vice-president and head of applied AI at Google after Google bought DeepMind. He has also contributed to policy research into using AI for healthcare, and advised the UK government, the Dutch government, and the UN on policy and human rights in this context. With researcher and author Michael Bhaskar, Mr Suleyman focusses on connected technologies that promise to revolutionise how we live and die (maybe after living much longer than we currently do).

One such technology is, of course, AI. Another is synthetic computational biology, which is largely driven by advances in AI. The book outlines the startling new possibilities these technologies may enable.

Alongside crystal-gazing to see the mind-boggling benefits, the book also describes in chilling detail how these technologies could destroy civilisation — and even the planet—if they are not regulated.

Mr Suleyman suggests a comprehensive and complex containment strategy for ring-fencing these technologies to mitigate possible harm while maximising the possible benefits.

How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between by Bent Flyvbjerg with Dan Gardner

Management guru Flyvbjerg and best-selling author Gardner collaborated to produce this deep-dive into decision-making and the planning of big projects. Mr Flyvbjerg created a database of over 16,000 projects and mined it for insights. This led him to the claim that “in total, only 8.5 per cent of projects hit the mark on both cost and time. And a minuscule 0.5 per cent nail cost, time, and benefits.

In a nod to Daniel Kahneman, (who blurbed the book favourably) Mr Flyvbjerg says the ideal way to proceed is to think slowly before acting fast but the opposite is usually how things are done. There are nuggets of wisdom drawn from a wide variety of projects.

Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well by Amy C Edmondson

Avoid failure and fail-fast and-fail-often. Harvard Professor Edmondson explores the dichotomy between these opposed tenets. Her insight is that there are useful failures where we learn something and there are utter disasters. If we can distinguish between the two, we can avoid the latter and gain useful learnings from the former.  Here, she examines failure, its causes, and its epistemology in detail, to develop a framework for judging failures. She uses narratives that draw on her own life, as well as on well-known business case studies, pop culture and history.

Professor Edmondson is the doyen of “team psychological safety”— indeed, she coined the term. Team psychological safety is a shared belief that it’s alright to take risks, express ideas and concerns, ask questions, and, above all, admit mistakes without fear of consequences.

Her work in this area started with her PhD when she was examining teamwork in hospitals. She discovered more effective teams seemed to make more mistakes. Digging deeper into this apparent paradox, she understood that teams actually become more effective when they openly admit mistakes and discuss them. This is also a sound foundation to examine the collective psychological quirks and biases that lead to failures. The book is beautifully written with anecdotes and insights laced with humour.