The benefits of disappointment

Annette has some typically sane thoughts about the potential upside of recession.

Order and disorder

Two interesting items from David Smith's excellent daily feed.

If you want to get productive, get disorganised. Simon Caulkin riffs on the theme of A Perfect Mess.

Tim Oren on Burke's Law of Metadynamics:

In the course of the chat, Burke came up with approximately the following statement, which has stayed with me since:

"Systems dump excess energy in the form of structure."

It may not sound like much, but it's rather profound. It essentially says that a system operating in surplus won't stay so, but instead will act to build up its own structure at the expense of the surplus. Looked at the right way, it's a nutshell explanation for the existence of life - an eruption of structure in response to excess solar energy.

Anthropology of YouTube

This is brilliant.

Hat tip: Alan Moore

Emperor's Chess Board

Dave Snowden has a great post on the folly of KM professionals'

running claim that failures such as 9/11 and Katrina are in effect failures of knowledge management. Words like standards are also being bandied about which is always a bad sign and one gets a very real sniff of a bureaucracy in the worst sense of the word

He likens the notion that it's just a question of spotting more connections in the data to the Emperor's glib acceptance of the two-grains-of-rice pitch.

In effect the argument, which is common one in knowledge management, was that the failure was one of not connecting the dots, not realising the significance of key data items early enough. The idea is that we create bigger and bigger databases with more search algorithms, centralise functions, standardise procedures, appoint an obergruppenführer and somehow or other no future errors will be made.

A power shift in networks?

Euan makes a very interesting point:

Contrast this with this and consider where the future lies.

The benefits of rough prototypes

David Smith pointed to this article about innovation at P&G. I think it smacks a little too much of the corporate Kool Aid; I'm just naturally wary of claims about "transformation", especially of human beings. Still, this quote about their experience of co-creating with customers resonates well with me:

Participants get scared using such rough prototypes to elicit consumer feedback at the beginning, but they are won over when they see the benefits of co-creation," says Kotchka. "We have found that the more finished a prototype is, the less feedback people will give you. When you give prospective users something half-finished, they think you don't know the answer. They know you need their help—and really open up.

Insight

Jonah Lehrer has a good article in the New Yorker, The Eureka Hunt (pdf), looking at research on what happens inside our heads when we come up with sudden insights. It seems to suggest it's ok to try, but best not to try too much. Here's a snippet:

The insight process, as sketched by Jung-Beeman and Kounios, is a delicate mental balancing act. At first, the brain lavishes the scarce resource of attention on a single problem. But, once the brain is sufficiently focussed, the cortex needs to relax in order to seek out the more remote association in the right hemisphere, which will provide the insight. “The relaxation phase is crucial,” Jung-Beeman said. “That’s why so many in-sights happen during warm showers.” Another ideal moment for insights, according to the scientists, is the early morning, right after we wake up. The drowsy brain is unwound and disorganized, open to all sorts of unconventional ideas. The right hemisphere is also unusually active... We do some of our best thinking when we’re still half asleep...

(T)he insight process is an act of cognitive deliberation—the brain must be focussed on the task at hand—transformed by accidental, serendipitous connections. We must concentrate, but we must concentrate on letting the mind wander.

I think the challenge is hold space open for ideas to come in the face of organisational pressures to deliver results to a timetable.

Hat tip: David Smith

UPDATE: I liked Earl's riff on this theme:

That's why the Christians begin the bible with "in the beginning there was nothing" rather than, "in the beginning there was a brainstroming session where nothing was too stupid to go on the table".

Not a journey

I had a great meeting yesterday with Jack Martin Leith, who has done more thinking about things like innovation and change and is refreshingly cynical about much conventional thinking about both.

For instance, read his latest post about change metaphors in which he puts the boot into the pervasive idea that change is a journey.

The shortcoming of the journey metaphor is that it tends to limit our ability to create results quickly and easily. The metaphor deludes us into thinking we can make a map for getting from A to B. Armed with this delusional map, we embark on what we imagine will be a hazardous journey. We start to foresee all sorts of road blocks that don’t actually exist. We find ourselves believing the milestones we invented are real, and get anxious when they don’t appear on the horizon.

This is good stuff as I think it's easy to be so future-focussed in discussing change that we are blind to the change happening in front of us right now. And then we lose our sense of agency... which we end up replacing with more anxiety about the future.

For instance: the person in a meeting who chastises people for wandering off brief, and doesn't notice the chilling effect his harsh words have on people's willingness to engage openly in future conversation.

Or the person who brands an experiment a failure without noticing that there were some interesting by-products that could be used for something else.

Check out Jack's list of alternative metaphors for further provocation.