It’s not about creativity, it’s about curiosity

The critical leverage point for an organization seeking more effective innovation is establishing new attitudes toward curiosity. Industrial organizations were optimized to extract value from tiny doses of curiosity and cannot tolerate larger doses. Today’s organizations require more frequent and intensive invention and innovation, which depends in turn on learning to foster and effectively channel curiosity in greater doses.

The industrial economy was driven off of very small doses of curiosity, carefully controlled and administered. New ideas were the province of either the senior-most leaders in an organization or their specifically designated deputies (industrial engineers, product designers, strategy consultants). Outside of this small cadre, the rest of the organization was charged with pulling on the oars and carrying out the execution of the designs created by this cadre. Industrial organizations are optimized to extract the maximum output from the least curiosity. Moreover, our schools and other social systems are built around throttling curiosity and channeling it into acceptable settings; isolating the most curious from the rest of the system. For those immersed in the industrial mindset, unfettered curiosity is a serious threat that operates at an emotional rather than rational level.

In the knowledge economy invention and innovation take a more central role. Success based on the ability to out-execute the competition is increasingly short-lived. The changing economics of information and communications technologies continue to drive down the costs of execution. They shorten the distance, in both time and money, between idea and execution. They also shorten the distance between innovation and duplication. The need for more systematic and effective invention and innovation is generally acknowledged. Curiosity is the necessary prerequisite and fuel for this invention and innovation.

Alan Kay tells a story of his days at Xerox PARC. The suits from headquarters in Stamford Connecticut had come to Palo Alto to inspect their investment in open-ended research. Alan carefully explained the nature and risks of research; that PARC was conducting experiments, that most experiments failed, but that even failures moved the research forward. The suits nodded politely, allowed as how they understood what Alan had said, and insisted that these experiments be designed to succeed.

Given the degree to which curiosity in most organizations is discouraged and often suppressed, the first task is to carefully reawaken it. Carefully, because too much curiosity will trigger corporate immune responses. Fortunately, despite all the best efforts of our school systems and organizational watch guards, the human animal remains fundamentally curious. We need to give permission for this curiosity to be engaged and protect its first cautious glimmerings.

Here is one place where RSS and blogging have an important, low threat level place inside the organization. Seth Godin captured this succinctly as quoted in Naked Conversations last year:

Not only are bloggers suckers for the remarkable, so are the people who read blogs,” said Godin. “This is the most curious segment of the population, the people who are seeking out the new and the useful. This is the audience that doesn’t need to be interrupted because they are already listening. They are alert, on the lookout for the next big thing. No need to yell. If you’ve invested the time and the energy and the guts to make something remarkable, this audience can’t wait to hear about it.

(Naked Conversations, Chapter 3, Word of Mouth on Steroids, p.40)

Find and encourage those in your organization who are already paying attention to do so a little more systematically. Encourage them to begin to pass along what they are finding to others who might also be interested.

The second task is to start channeling this nascent curiosity toward potentially useful deliverables that can be judged and evaluated. Incorporate an interesting discovery into the next presentation to a customer. Adapt a lesson learned to an improvement process about to launch. Craft a proposal to target a new customer or begin a joint effort with an adjacent department.

Understand that channeling curiosity is a leadership challenge not a management task. Like a parent with an inquisitive toddler, leaders need to allow room for exploration, risk bumps and scrapes (and possibly worse), and intervene only to avert real danger. If they opt to guide exploration into familiar paths, they will get familiar results.

If you are still unsure about the importance of curiosity, recall what Albert Einstein said toward the end of his life:

I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.

 

Learning to balance theory and evidence

I finally got around to taking a peek at this video of Clay Shirky’s presentation at the Supernova 2007 conference in June. It’s relatively short and Shirky is a good speaker. Like Jimmy Guterman, I was particularly taken with Shirky’s observation on AT&T’s reaction to a particular proposal: “They didn’t care that they’d seen it work in practice because they already knew it wouldn’t work in theory.”

How often do you see a theory blind believers to facts? Do you sense that the problem is becoming worse? The relationship between theory and evidence can be quite complex and failing to appreciate those complexities usually spells trouble. My own bias is toward the underlying methods and philosophy of modern science. You always have to be prepared for the ugly facts to kill your beautiful theories (thank you Thomas Huxley).

Clay Shirky, a Shinto Shrine, and the Sentence of the Year

By Jimmy Guterman

If, like me, you were unable to attend Supernova this year and you’re still kicking yourself, you can stop now. Conference organizer (and former Release 1.0 editor) Kevin Werbach has begun posting videos of the proceedings. I’ve only seen one so far, a dizzying presentation by Clay Shirky in which he likens the guardians of a Shinto shrine to the perl community…

Going hands on to get your arms around Enterprise 2.0

I was not able to attend last month’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. I wanted to pick up on something Andrew McAfee had to say during his keynote there, however. Here’s his set up:

I found myself in an uncomfortable position at the end of my short keynote speech during the Enterprise 2.0 conference yesterday. I got through my prepared material and still had about five minutes left in the alloted time. So I had to ad lib.

The idea that occurred to me (from no identifiable source) was to make Enterprise 2.0 personal. I compared where my thinking was a year ago to where it was today, and tried to convey how big a shift had taken place.

[Speaking From the Heart, and off the Top of My Head ]

He goes on to share some of his observations about blogs, social networks, and how organizations are taking up the mix of technologies that fall under the Enterprise 2.0 rubric. For example:

I used to believe that blogs were primarily vehicles for blaring opinions, and that bloggers generally proved Kierkegaard’s great quote that “People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” I now get a large percentage of my daily food for thought from blogs, and write one myself. It’s proved to be an unparalled vehicle for getting ideas out into the world, getting useful feedback on them, and meeting people who are interested in the same things I am.

[Speaking From the Heart, and off the Top of My Head ]

What struck me was the particular importance of hands on knowledge in appreciating the importance of these technologies. The organizational value of these technologies is in how they change the possibilities for productivity and effectiveness of the managerial and executive core. You need to work with them in a substantive way to appreciate what they can do for you. That makes them different from so many other applications of technology in the organization. McAfee has made that investment and has become an effective spokesperson for them. How do we get others in similar positions to invest in the necessary learning?

More insights from Hans Rosling at TED 2007

Someday I will find a way to attend a TED conference. In the meantime, I hugely appreciate that they are making videos of the conference available to mere mortals. Hans Rosling returns for an encore to his 2006 performance (which I blogged about last year about this time) to offer new insights to be gleaned from statistics about health, education, and economic development. You can find Rosling’s presentation video here.

There are a lot of good lessons here including how powerful good data, good software tools,  and good storytelling combined can be.

Knowledge management: the newest battle between the neats and the scruffies

“There are two groups of people, those who divide people into two groups and those who don’t.” –Robert Benchley

Years ago, when I was doing work in the field of AI, I came across one of those binary splits that continues to be useful for my thinking; the split between “neats” and “scruffies.” In the field of AI, the split differentiated between those favoring highly structured, logically precise approaches and those preferred something more along the lines of “whatever works.” Wikipedia offers a nice summary of the debate from that field.

Back in my school days, I think I was a neat (philosophically, not in terms of my room or study skills). When I first delve into new areas I am drawn to those who argue the neat case. As I get older and, I hope, more experienced, however, I find myself increasingly scruffy.

Much of the recent debate in the narrow field of knowledge management can be interpreted as one more recapitulation of the neats vs. scruffies argument. The technologies of blogs, wikis, and social media that collectively comprise the emerging notion of Enterprise 2.0 celebrate scruffiness as the essence of success in knowledge-intensive enterprises. The claim, backed by appropriately messy and sketchy anecdotal evidence, is that a loose set of simple technologies made available to the knowledge workers of an organization can provide an environment in which the organization and its knowledge workers can make more effective use of their collective and individual knowledge capital. Grass roots efforts will yield value where large-scale, centralized, knowledge management initiatives have failed.

Several implications flow from adopting a scruffy point of view. For one, “management” becomes a suspect term. If you can manage at all, you must do so at another level of abstraction. You aren’t managing knowledge; instead you are trying to manage the conditions under which knowledge work takes place and within which valuable knowledge might be created or put to use. At that point, it becomes more productive to think in terms of leadership rather than management; particularly if you subscribe to Colin Powell’s characterization of a leader as someone you’ll follow to discover where they’re going.

Second, you will need to deal with the problems that the neats have created in previous runs at knowledge management without alienating them at the same time. In most large organizations, knowledge management has been characterized as a technology problem or as a analog to financial management; placing it squarely within the purview of the organization’s neatest neats. This is a recipe for disappointment, if not outright failure.

It might possibly be an open question whether knowledge management can be eventually reduced to something as structured as accounting or library science. But it is a lousy place to start. Most organizations aren’t yet mature or sophisticated enough about knowledge work issues and questions to be obsessing about taxonomies or measurement and reward systems for knowledge work. But those are activities that are neat and specifiable and only superficially relevant. They lead to complex efforts to get to the right answer when we would be better served by simpler efforts to make things better.

 

David Weinberger’s latest thoughts on our digital world

  Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, Weinberger, David

In Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger turns his attention to how unexamined assumptions about stuff in the physical world have constrained our attempts to organize information and the opportunities implicit in leaving those constraints behind in a digital world. An excellent storyteller, Weinberger takes us through tales of the Dewey Decimal system, Linnaeus’s taxonomic efforts, the history of UPC bar codes and why neither card catalogs or ISBN numbers shed as much light on Hamlet as we might think. He contrasts these with digital approaches such as Amazon’s multiple and multiplex paths to books you might want to buy, and Flickr’s and Technorati’s choices to create and exploit folksonomies in place of controlled taxonomies. While David occasionally veers a bit too close to his roots as a philosopher, he has assembled a rich and thought-provoking array of materials that warrant your attention. In keeping with his commitment to conversation, David has also created a rich website to ensure that there is a digital counterpart to accompany the physical container.

Weinberger starts by examining what he terms “orders of order.” Rooted in the physical, his first order of order emerges when we make choices about where to put a book on the shelves or how to stack dishes in the kitchen. Physical limits dominate; putting a book on one shelf means that we can’t place it on another, stacking the dishes limits their usefulness if we need to wash them or eat off them.

A library card catalog provides Weinberger’s archetypal example of the second order of order. By abstracting information from the physical object, and introducing a layer of indirection, you overcome some of the limits imposed by the physical object. For example, you can have more than one card catalog entry and file them in multiple places.

Weinberger posits a third order of order that arises in the digital world when the assets we wish to organize and their potential catalogs are both digital. Amazon’s multiple ways to help you find books that they will happily sell you provide his most straightforward examples. There’s no question that Amazon’s user reviews, lists, and recommendations of books to consider have all increased my book buying and reading habits well beyond the risks of browsing the physical shelves of my local bookstore.

On the other hand, I am not entirely convinced that this constitutes something worthy of labeling a new “order of order.” At some level, this revisits Nicholas Negroponte‘s argument of atoms vs bits. Relative to atoms, bits are cheap to manufacture, so we need to learn to start taking advantage of that when we design systems and services.

When I first started designing database systems (some thirty years ago), you might have to plan for 15-20% extra space for the database overhead. For every hundred characters of “real” data that you needed to manage, you’d need an extra 15-20 for indexes and catalogs. As disk space got cheaper and database designers more clever, that ratio flipped. Today, we call it metadata instead of overhead. It’s not unusual for metadata to take up 10 to 100 times the space of the “real” data in many systems. Sometimes this can seem counterintuitive, but I’m not sure that what Weinberger gains by labeling it a distinct order of order is worth the cost.

If you’ve never thought about the interplay between atoms and bits, Weinberger’s book offers useful and interesting new perspectives. If you’ve been immersed in that interplay, you’re likely to become frustrated that he doesn’t push on farther than he does.  On the gripping hand, every author has to make decisions about what ends up in the physical package and what gets left out.

Everything is Miscellaneous frames important questions, provides a wealth of raw materials, and will likely launch a wealth of productive discussions about new design tradeoffs. Weinberger’s focus is on digital services targeted at consumer audiences, which makes Everything is Miscellaneous more accessible to a general audience. The tradeoff is that Weinberger doesn’t have the opportunity to probe more deeply into the implications of his insights for meeting organizational needs. Perhaps he will in his next efforts.

Video: Wikis in Plain English from Lee LeFever

Another excellent and quick tutorial from Lee LeFever.

Video: Wikis in Plain English 

We made this video because wiki web sites are easy to use, but hard to describe. We hope to turn you on to a better way to plan a camping trip, or create the next Wikipedia.

Length: 3 minutes 52 seconds.  

If you’d like to share this video, you can grab the code at Blip.tv or YouTube. A transcript is here and soon we’ll have a subtitled version on DotSub.

Video: Wikis in Plain English

 

MindManager 7 is now available from MindJet

The folks at MindJet officially have launched their latest upgrade to MindManager Pro, now at version 7. Here’s their press release, although you’ll probably find Chuck Frey’s preview comments more useful. I’m still getting used to the Ribbon interface, but that is also the case for Office 2007. If you’re using this tool, you’ll want to upgrade. If you haven’t started mindmapping, today would be a good day to get started.

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Andrew Hinton on Architectures for Conversation

Courtesy of David Weinberger, here is an excellent presentation on information architecture. It is also a good lesson in effective communication/presentation techniques.

What is information architecture? The slide show.

The always enjoyable Andrew Hinton has an insightful, witty, surprising set of slides ‘n’ text that tries to explain not only what Information Architecture is, but why it’s been so hard to explain. Along the way he has things to say about communities vs. communities of practice, how to attract flies, and why Wikipedia is more like an AK-47 than like an M-16. Great stuff, entertainingly and elegantly communicated. [Tags: ]