Around the Corner

A few weeks ago, in my review of Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control, I contrasted hierarchical command structures with biological systems that are networks of cooperation. In Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web, David Weinberger, co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, examines how the World Wide Web provides the ideal infrastructure for networks of cooperation in today’s global information society.

Those of you who are following the Management Innovators Bookshelf series may have noticed that I skipped ahead to #7 on Gary Hamel’s essential reading list. I think you’ll agree the complementarity between Out of Control and Small Pieces justifies my choice. I’ll return to Hamel’s #3, the Age of Heretics by Art Kleiner later in the series.

Like a reflection in a mirror, Web infrastructure is ideal because it takes the same shape as the networks of cooperation that use it. Both the Web infrastructure and these networks of cooperation self-organize. And if we drew a picture of self organizing systems, whether physical or biological, they would have surprisingly similar shapes. Although we might assume they're random, they are very efficiently organized in a shape called scale-free. And they both look like Figure 1.

Figure 1

Like Kelly, Weinberger is hopeful. As we read in the final chapter of the book, Weinberger writes “The Web will have its deepest effect as an idea. Ideas don’t explode, they subvert. They take their time. And because they change the way we think, they are less visible than a newly paved national highway or the advent of wall sized television screens.” But Weinberger is also worried. He acknowledges disappointments like the dot-com bust, and he also recognizes that the Web can generate unrealistic expectations about the pace of change: “[…] answers can come quickly. The Web is indeed speeding up the pace by enabling ideas to be heard and discussed faster than ever before, but it takes more than a meme, or an idea virus to work through the implications of a change in bedrock concepts. It can take generations to transform our understanding of ourselves and the world.”

Weinberger writes that identity, space, time, perfection, togetherness, knowledge and matter all shape our experience on the web. And that experience defines a networked culture of cooperation whose collective behavior, like Kelly’s bee hive, is adaptive, distributed and organic. The group seems to possess a knowledge that surpasses the individual intelligence of any one member. While at the same time we preserve and even celebrate our individuality on the Web.

The Web is what we make it and we are what it makes us. The Web is a MirrorWorld. And Weinberger’s unified theory of the Web is a reflection of our culture in the Web.

We are Small Pieces, Loosely Joined.

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Last year when I started Around the Corner I promised a place where we could challenge some of our assumptions, explore something new or discover something unknown. Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World by Kevin Kelly is the second in the list of Gary Hamel's essential reading for management innovators. It presents a wonderful opportunity to challenge, explore and discover.

Kelly, previously the founder and Executive Editor of Wired Magazine and member of the Board of the Long Now Foundation, imagines a world for us in which biological principles can help to enable human collaboration. For instance, the typical organizational structure is very hierarchical and top-down driven. But Kelly suggests a beehive model might be informative for our modern knowledge economy. The members of the beehive do not have formal roles and responsibilities, but each member makes a contribution. The beehive as a whole is adaptive, distributed, and organic. Likewise, a spider web is a useful model to describe the interrelated nature of suppliers, employees, customers, and stakeholders in today’s complex organizations. These and other systems in nature don’t generally follow a centralized hierarchy, but instead work through networks of cooperation. In some cases the group seems to possess a kind of knowledge that surpasses the individual intelligence of any one member. Consider migrating geese. None of the flock have made the trip before, yet somehow the flock knows its migration path from hemisphere to hemisphere

Another of Kelly’s key ideas is that complex systems work best when they grow incrementally: “The only way to make a complex system that works is to begin with a simple system that works. Attempts to instantly install highly complex organization without growing it, inevitably lead to failure..... Time is needed to let each part test itself against all the others...."

Out of Control is not a quick read, but it is a thoughtful book that challenges the reader to think about future possibilities. As technology professionals we know from what we experience every day that success requires careful attention to every detail and that progress is slow and most times really quite laborious. Possibilities are endless in Out of Control. It is worth the reading because we're too often led to exclude possibilities rather than wonder what's Around the Corner.

It's on my bookshelf and I hope you have the time to add it to yours!

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Have you ever wondered how and when innovation happens? Can managers demand it? Can we put it in our project plans? Can we just reprioritize it when we get too busy? Although these questions seem rhetorical, each one causes us to ask how and when innovation happens. Is innovation, much like creativity, neither intentional or something we can turn on and off? Does it just happen?

There's no one answer to these questions, but there are patterns we can observe from successful innovation.

Take the opportunity to watch this TED talk by Tim Berners-Lee on The Next Web. In this talk Tim tells the story of how he created what we now know as the World Wide Web. In March of 1989, while a software engineer at CERN, Tim handed Information Management: A Proposal to his supervisor Mark Sendall. Sendall wrote "vague, but exciting" on the paper, put it in his drawer and nothing happened. Eighteen months later Sendall told Tim he could "do it on the side as a sort of a play project." Some twenty years later we know the Web not only as an essential global information and business resource, but also a part of the critical infrastructure on which our national security depends.

This is an interesting enough anecdote, but there's a pattern. During the fall of 1992 at the National Center for Supercomputing (NCSA) Marc Andressen and Eric Bina had enough time available to start a side project based on Tim's work at CERN. The project soon became X Mosaic, the world's first widely available graphical web browser. Within a few years the Mosaic team formed Netscape Communications Corporation which a few years later was acquired by America On Line (AOL) for about $4 billion.

Today, Google recognizes this pattern in its operations plan and it calls the pattern 20-percent time. Engineers are encouraged to spend 20 percent of their time working on projects of their own choosing. Google does not enforce 20 percent time and engineers work on behalf of Google during that time. 20 percent time is so successful that about half of Google's new product launches originate from what engineers create during their 20-percent time.

There's solid evidence that innovation happens when employees have time and opportunity to investigate projects beyond their core duties. That does not mean that managers have lost control, or that employees are not working on behalf of the organization. Not all organizations recognize 20 percent time in their ops plan, but all organizations can create an environment that encourages how and when innovation happens.

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I recently mentioned Gary Hamel's vital work on Moonshots for Management. Moonshots is part of a larger initiative at the Management Lab on Management Innovation. Hamel defines Management Innovation as an organization's ability to effect fundamental changes in its way of working. Recall Hamel's premise that many of today's management principles remain grounded in the industrial era where a large portion of work was physical labor. Today, a much larger percentage of our work is based in knowledge and creativity, resulting in a need to change organizational management processes and adopt more innovative approaches.

Hamel recently published his list of essential reading in Labnotes. I'll share some thoughts on my favorites from the list over the next few posts. Whether you get a chance to read the books, or just have a comment, let me know what you think.

It's no surprise that Follett's Creative Experience is at the top of Hamel's reading list. Today, where national competitiveness and productivity are measured in terms of knowledge and innovation, Follett's analysis of integration, power and experience provide key insights into a highly productive, post industrial workforce.

Follett defines integration as the ability to successfully introduce new information that resolves an an apparent contradiction without inducement, compromise or domination. Successful leaders use integration to reveal common interests among diverse groups or individuals.

Follett contrasts power-with and power-over. Power-over disregards will, purpose and motivation. It can introduce resentment. Power-with naturally follows from the process of integration. It preserves will and purpose. It is sustainable and its origin is in experience. Follett says: "These three are bound together: the unifying, controlling, the sustaining are one. Whenever we are talking of actual power, then, we are talking of something which is generated by circular response [...] It often has tragic consequences when our control attempts to run ahead of our integration."

Follett describes experience as a self sustaining and self renewing process of creativity. Creative experience implies that organizations increase capacity by evoking unity of purpose from richly diverse individuals who respect differences while retaining their identity.

Creative Experience contrasts sharply with Frederick Winslow Taylor's Principles of Scientific Managment. If you're a student of management practice, you'll appreciate that both of these influential texts are available on line. Take a few minutes and compare Chapter 2 of the Principles of Scientific Management with Follett's Creative Experience. And be thankful that today we have a wide variety of opportunities to bring innovation to the workplace, unlike the industrial workers of decades ago who were incentived simply to perform the same task over and over without end.

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As I mentioned in my recent post called The Language of Innovation, Gary Hamel is onto something truly vital with his work on Moonshots for Management. Inspired by the National Academy of Engineering’s Grand Engineering Challenges and the work of the X-Prize Foundation, Hamel and a group of the world’s most recognizable innovators spent two days together last May defining twenty-five make or break challenges for the future of management in the 21st century. Why define these make or break challenges? As Hamel explains, many of today’s management techniques originated in the late 19th century with one specific purpose: train semi-skilled human resources to repeat manual tasks at ever increasing levels of efficiency. Simply put, these management techniques are ill suited to today's organizations which operate not in an industrial, but in a knowledge economy.

So what’s a knowledge economy and why is it important to management techniques? The term knowledge economy was introduced into the mainstream by Peter Drucker in his 1966 book The Effective Executive to differentiate an economy where organizations profit by the labor of employees who worked with their heads, not their hands. Since its introduction the idea of a knowledge economy has become widely accepted. Today the World Bank ranks nations annually in its Knowledge Economy Index according to the four pillars of its Knowledge Assessment Methodology: economic incentive and institutional regime; education and training; innovation and technological adoption; and information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure. As one might suspect, in 2008, eight years after adoption of the Lisbon Strategy, European countries dominated the knowledge index ranking with Denmark at the top. The U.S. currently ranks number 9.

Lawyers, doctors, software engineers, teachers, scientists and public servants are all considered knowledge workers. The twenty-five moonshots Hamel and his colleagues defined speak volumes about how to manage knowledge workers so they can be most effective. Moonshot #2, Fully Embed the Ideas of Community and Citizenship in Management Systems, makes a lot of sense to me. As we all know too well, knowledge is a precious commodity and as professionals we all need and learn from each other. It seems today that things change so rapidly it takes an entire community to master a discipline. As do moonshots #6, Reinvent the Means of Control and #7, Redefine the Work of Leadership. When managing knowledge workers we must transcend the dichotomy between discipline and innovation as mutually exclusive opposites. And if it takes an entire community to master a discipline, leaders must evolve into social-systems architects who enable collaboration and innovation rather than constrain decisions. Moonshot #5, Reduce Fear and Increase Trust as well as #8, Expand and Exploit Diversity, strengthen both the culture and the effectiveness of an organization. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, describes in this conference video how the effectiveness of the Google organization is embedded within its culture. Finally Moonshot #15, Create a Democracy of Information, articulates a very optimistic view of how information technology can empower us all to act on behalf of the entire organization.

These are just a few of my favorites. Please let me know yours. I hope you enjoy challenges as I do. Whether you’re a knowledge worker, a leader or a manager these Moonshots are our challenges together.

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