Bad 'Models'

No, not clothes models. Models of social, economic and other processes that are really just glorified drawings that could be made by five-year-olds.

What can one actually learn from such a model? Often that 'everything is interconnected' (knew that already), or 'everything is dynamic' (yup got it) or that 'there is a clear sequence of events here' (either obvious or false).

Until I start a real blog to collect these up, I'm going to start here with a doosey from the UK-based 'Consortium for Service Innovation'.

Let me point out some of the key features of the Bad 'Model', expertly implemented in this example:

• absolutely key is the mid-late nineties Microsoft(tm) PowerPoint(tm)(c) cloud shapes - putting them at the top of the diagram really helps users orient the page
  
• awkward stick figures doing 'zany' things EVERYWHERE on the diagram
• random punctuation marks in a 'wacky' font that emphasizes just how fun this all is
• funnels and cones of causality, showing...uhhh...that things that start large can get smaller
  
• you got your arbitrary numbering of 'levels' in there, nice!
  
• arrows connecting almost everything to everything else (note to self: bi-directional arrows are WAY cooler than those boring uni-directional ones)
• the ability to form cool new buzzPHRASES by stringing together the buzzwords already in the diagram, for example "Level 1 Knowledge Base(d) Community Conversations" or how about "Assisted Self-Help Community" - sounds like a retirement village advertisement!
  

And then, just in case part of this isn't clear, they provide a clarifying diagram:

AH, I get it now, KCS captures the collective experience of the support organization! So you mean "our call centre operators type stuff into their computers which we don't delete but rather store for future use".

Source: http://www.serviceinnovation.org/our_work/