I've been enjoying James Gardner's blog, especially since he moved from his bank to the Department of Work and Pensions. I get the sense that with this move he's able to speak more clearly about the issues of supporting innovation in organisations.

His latest post, Innovation Backlash recounts the catch-22 in which Heads of Innovation find themselves.

The innovators have no clout when their diaries don’t have meetings with senior people. They know they can’t “deliver” (they are scared the backlash will take out their projects) so they only commit to things which are small enough not to get noticed. Of course, being small, they are also not worthy of the attention of senior folk, so no meetings get set up.

I wonder if the problem is partly the expectation that people with innovation in their title must drive innovation. That so easily puts them in a bind where they're supposed to be powerful but often in practice aren't. It also may reinforce the notion that innovation is something to be organised from above by specialists, and that it is a grand thing, not the sum of a series of small ones occurring in day-to-day conversation. It becomes Innovation with a capital I.

I fondly remember John Jay's brilliant essay on obliquity. Here's the set up:

Paradoxical as it sounds, goals are more likely to be achieved when pursued indirectly. So the most profitable companies are not the most profit-oriented, and the happiest people are not those who make happiness their main aim. The name of this idea? Obliquity.

Jay focuses particularly on profits, and how companies that ruthlessly pursue them end up losing them. I can't help thinking the same may apply to Innovation.

I somehow think that framing Innovation as an exercise in successfully wielding power is not the right approach. I think networking technologies are allowing a lot of innovations (some you may like, some you may not) to emerge peer-to-peer where the drive is a sense of tribal enthusiasm rather than delivering on a corporate goal. Often the sort of stuff that established hierarchies want to put a stop to... in which case, where does your head of Innovation stand if his aim is get top-level buy-in?

Using this fabulous scene from Casablanca is an exaggerated rhetorical ploy and a shameless oversimplification - but it captures something of what I'm trying to articulate.

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More pith from Paul Graham:

We can all imagine an old-style editor getting a scoop and saying "this will sell a lot of papers!" Cross out that final S and you're describing their business model.

I think he's on the money with this conclusion:

I don't know exactly what the future will look like, but I'm not too worried about it. This sort of change tends to create as many good things as it kills. Indeed, the really interesting question is not what will happen to existing forms, but what new forms will appear.

Hat tip: David Smith

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This resonated with me this morning:

Roethlisberger argues that people who are preoccupied with success ask the wrong question. They ask, “what is the secret of success” when they should be asking, “what prevents me from learning here and now?” To be overly preoccupied with the future is to be inattentive toward the present where learning and growth take place. To walk around asking, “am I a success or a failure” is a silly question in the sense that the closest you can come to answer is to say, everyone is both a success and a failure.

Source:Weick, Karl E. How Projects Lose Meaning: The Dynamics of Renewal. in Renewing Research Practice by R. Stablein and P. Frost (Eds.). Stanford, CA: Stanford. 2004.

Reflecting on this a little more, sometimes it may be better to ask "what am I experiencing now?" and see if the learning emerges from that. I'm in a Zen frame of mind I guess.

Hat tip Bob Sutton, via David Smith.

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That Bob Sutton piece on GM also has a great attack on how the company dishes out free cars as perks. The higher you are in the company, the more attractive the deal. At low levels, you buy your own car and look after it. As you rise, you get a free car but you still have to look after it. Rise further, any you get better freebies and don't have to take care of servicing. As you get near Mount Olympus you get a limo and a driver.

As Bob points out, the higher up the company you go, the less experience you have of what it's like to own a GM car. Crazy.

Bonus link: a previous post inspired by Bob on how easily the smallest amount of power corrupts - as measured in cookie crumbs.

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Jon Husband spotted this story in the Toronto Globe and Mail: Employers sidestep recruiters to tap social media.

An entrepreneur seeking to fill 17 positions asked his employees to share them on Facebook and LinkedIn, and tweet them and encourage re-tweeting. He'll host an open house, expecting a thousand people to show up. His costs will be massively lower than running newspaper ads or forking over commission to a recruitment firm. Not to mention the likelihood of other word-of-mouth opportunities arising, nor the degree to which new faces will be somewhat verified by a social network.

We live in interesting times.

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Michael Ledeen suggests suggests the protest movement in Iran is following the model of the starfish, from the book The Starfish and the Spider.

If you decapitate a spider, it dies, but if you lop off an arm of a starfish, it regenerates. In like manner, despite a massive crackdown from the Iranian regime–thousands of arrests (now termed “kidnappings” by Iranian Tweeters), scores of executions, mass rape and other forms of torture, show trials and stern intimidation from political and military leaders, judges and clerics, the Green Path moves on, with its next publicly announced challenge to the regime set for December 7th. Meanwhile, demonstrations and strikes continue across the country.

Hat tip: Alan Moore and Smartmobs.

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Shawn at Anecdote discusses how emotion often trumps reason in our thinking. He cites research comparing how party loyalists respond to inconsistent statements by politicians. They're much more likely to pounce on inconsistencies by opposition speakers. And neuroscientists who had them wired for the experiment got an insight into what went on:

The brains did register the conflict as an unpleasant emotion but for the political partisans they were able to shutdown that distress quickly through faulty reasoning. But here's the thing. Once the negative emotions turned off, the positive emotions turned on. They weren't just feeling a little better, they were feeling good.

So it seems what we think is often a rationalisation to make us feel more comfortable.

I think I've mentioned this before, but I remember from years ago watching a laborious powerpoint pitch from a famous firm of management consultants. They were doing a change programme for a big company, and the whole theme was "making a compelling case for change". It was entirely rooted in a mindset of argument.

Among its horrors was a little matrix dividing the organisations employees into three levels of sophistication. For each level, the analogy was made to a national newspaper. Thus top management would be addressed like readers of the Financial Times; mid-levels would get Daily Mail treatment; and the rest were set to be addresssed like Sun readers.

So apart from relying over much on "rational" argument it also nakedly reflected a hierarchical notion of how change would take place. Wrong in so many ways.

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An ariticle in Seed magazine forsees a future where we will all be authors.

By 2000, there were 1 million book authors per year. One million authors is a lot, but they are only a tiny fraction, 0.01 percent, of the nearly 7 billion people on Earth. Since 1400, book authorship has grown nearly tenfold in each century. Currently, authorship, including books and new media, is growing nearly tenfold each year. That’s 100 times faster. Authors, once a select minority, will soon be a majority.

Here's how they plot the changes:

They speculate about the implications of this, and I agree that the general impact could be to distribute power more widely and away from small elites. (Though I don't want to get too wide-eyed).

It reminds me of what I wrote four years ago, linking the notion of being an author with that of authority. If more of us become authors of our own experience, that must represent a significant shift in how power is used in the world.

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan

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Sam Deeks writes about leadership and congruence. Makes sense to me.

The problem is a preference for avoiding the discomfort of looking at and considering changing our own behaviour. Unsurprisingly, many leaders prefer to support other people and groups to change rather than work on themselves; those other people, in turn, prefer to help other people change … and so on.

It's an easy trap to fall into. Sam sees two problems arising from this:

The first is that when they avoid exploring the discomfort of change before asking others to, they miss the opportunity to equip themselves with the kind of skills, empathy and understanding that would be invaluable for supporting change in others. The second is that when they don’t work on their own behaviours, leaders lose the ability to lead by example and are perceived as incongruent.

I would add, and I guess Sam would agree, that we must also avoid the trap of just blaming leaders for ineffective change processes. The challenge to be congruent is for everyone.

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Dave Snowden has good post about putting tools in their place. The essence of his argument is this:

If you pick up a tool and it fits your hand its useful, if you have to bio-rengineer your hand to fit the tool something is going badly wrong.

He argues that with new technologies, overenthusiastic early use often forces too much change on the human beings in the system and actually constrains their ability to collaborate. He sees Sharepoint as a case in point. He makes a good case for "modular" technology, where (as I would put it) there are structures or tools, but they are controlled locally rather than centrally. I suppose blogs would be a case in point.

In Improv, people talk a lot about the paradox of structure and freedom. With no structure, there is chaos, with too much structure there's no creativity or life. They are not opposites. This video shows me playing a little improv game in the pub with my friend Jesper Bindslev. I set out a few bits of structure at the start, but what then emerges is improvised within that structure, and (I think) is playful and very human. (Click here for video if you don't see it embedded below.) Having used this activities hundreds of times, I can assure that the outcomes vary wildly from one iteration to the next, but nearly always conform to the rules of thumb set out at the start. However, if people do the activity repeatedly, they naturally start to push against the initial set of rules and/or spontaneously decide to try variations of the game. If you look in the comments when I first posted this clip, someone suggests doing a mindmap collaboratively with similar constraints. It's a small example of our natural desire to adjust structures to support our natural desire to experiment and learn.

Dave elaborates on his theme using a gardening analogy:

With too much structure there is no space for novelty. The dilemma at the moment is that social computing considered overall is a wild flower garden, richly diverse and constantly changing. On the other hand most corporate computing environments are the equivalent of the highly formal gardens of the 17th Century, before they were swept away by the naturalistic movement of the 18th Century.

This reminded me of Rob's excellent post about permaculture, with some very sophisticated examples of highly effective systems that use constraints intelligently to let nature work its full magic whilst meeting our needs for sustanable food.

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A couple of weeks ago, Rick Cecil interviewed me for his blog, Ruzuku. I was pleased to do it because I thought his other interviews there were fascinating - this one with Patti Digh is a favourite of mine.

It was also slightly unnerving as Rick's style encourages a lot of openness and reading his transcription I think he got a fairly unpolished version of me. There's bits I would probably say differently now, but that wouldn't be in the spirit of the piece. And I think it does give some insights into why I do what I do.

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Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide explores committee decision-making as a metaphor for what goes on inisde our minds when we make individual decisions. He gives the example of a New Hampshire newspaper editorial board choosing its preferred candidate in the last Democratic primary. Differing individual preferences end up presented in the newspaper as a unified decision. But the simple presentation belies the underlying dissonance. Our minds work in a similar way: presented with a choice, different bits of the brain fire off differing signals, and somehow out of the conflict a choice is made. Experiments suggest strongly that we then rationalise the choice and deny the internal dissonance, in order to get the comfort of certainty.

It's not easy to make up your mind when your mind consists of so many competing parts. This is why being sure about something can be such a relief. The default state of the brain is indecisive disagreement... certainty imposes consensus on the inner cacophony.. Being certain means you're not worried about being wrong.

Lehrer examines how partisan political supporters unconsciously reinterpret factual information to confirm their prevailing world view, which is why they very rarely change allegiance. He also cites Philip Tetlock's research on the general fallibility of experts. Mark Earls described that here. And Bob Sutton had a good post recently suggesting that, if anything, confidence in self-evaluation tends to correlate with being wrong.

Many people want their meetings to work like this: listen to many opinions and then reach a confident, united decision. I think the danger of such ideals is that they may increase the likelihood of being wrong.

My own hunch is that good teams can function with greater tolerance for dissonance and don't force "positivity" and decisiveness. I also find that when meetings take place within rigid hierarchies, the shadowy need to give the boss something certain (the "measurable, implementable, deliverable") can completely sabotage that kind of high quality functioning.

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I pretty much agree with Cory Doctorow's counterblast to Lord Mandelson's plans to disconnect alleged filesharers: Denying physics won’t save the video stars. Lots of good lines, and this one stood out for me:

It is not the job of government to guarantee that the business model enabled by last year’s technology will go on for ever. If it were, we would have outlawed radio to save vaudeville.

Hat tip: David Smith

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I'm enjoying Jonah Lehrer's How we Decide. I'm currently on the chapter looking at the role of dopamine on our thinking. Getting a hit from dopamine is what gets people addicted to intermittent positive rewards - think fruit machines or World of Warcraft. This makes our thinking quite non-rational, for good or ill.

On the good side, I guess we might consider this bottle bank.

Hat tip: A tweet from Christian Heilmann

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Antony Mayfield links to Google's "mind blowing collection of creative ideas". I just skimmed through, but you could spend days exploring all the web apps listed there.

All this inventive technology is being made available to just about anyone with a web connection. How does it compare for engagement and collaboration with anything inside the firewall of organisations? I've argued before that, over the last few years, the technological advantage has shifted massively away from companies to individuals. I think we may only have scratched the surface of the impact this will have.

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Richard Wiseman researches luck and says:

Personality tests revealed that unlucky people are generally much more tense than lucky people, and research has shown that anxiety disrupts people's ability to notice the unexpected.

Interesting and feels connected to my own little mantra of notice more, change less.

Hat tip: Charles Frith

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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in Good Business: Leadership, Flow and the Making of Meaning says this:

One of the key tasks of management is to create an organization that stimulates the complexity of those who belong to it.

It's so tempting instead to write complicated rules that actually stifle people's complexity. And it's not just management that could do with remembering this, it's all of us.

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New Scientist describes seven questions that keep physicists up at night. I liked this one:

How does complexity happen? From the unpredictable behaviour of financial markets to the rise of life from inert matter, Leo Kadananoff, physicist and applied mathematician at the University of Chicago, finds the most engaging questions deal with the rise of complex systems. Kadanoff worries that particle physicists and cosmologists are missing an important trick if they only focus on the very small and the very large. "We still don't know how ordinary window glass works and keeps it shape," says Kadanoff. "The investigation of familiar things is just as important in the search for understanding." Life itself, he says, will only be truly understood by decoding how simple constituents with simple interactions can lead to complex phenomena.

This reminds me of the richness in human relationships when we slow down enough to see how much we affect each other, simply by being with each other. Most organisational conversations seem to wrestle with grand strategy and delete the lower-status but real stuff that's going on moment-by-moment with those immediately around us.

I also liked the section which explored how the act of observation affects the phenomenon being observed. Especially when put like this:

No one has yet fathomed how the universe seems to know when it is being watched.

Hat tip: Boing Boing

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I've talked a bit recently about the book Us and Them. Getting behind stereotypes has been on my mind lot lately.

So Andrew Sullivan's blog exploration of "whose country" America actually is (continued 2 3 4 5 6) has been fascinating. He's summed it up in a Sunday Times piece: Scratch white America and beneath it is black. There are obvious parallels for those in the UK who've been arguing about whose country Britain is.

In human history there is no purity, only change. There is no stability, only flux. The past always inhabits the present, even as the present tries to distort or co-opt the past in its own myths and dreams. That many white Americans do not even acknowledge or realise how black they are — and that many African-Americans do not grasp how utterly different they have become from those Africans they were forced to leave behind centuries ago — does not alter this reality. In some ways, it deepens it. It is so deep it has become unconscious.

And he continues:

It is a pied kind of beauty, this diversity. And those who wish to simplify it, to reduce it to some biological or racial element that renders us something other than we actually are, are not in any way conservatives. They are fantasists and bigots, deaf to the music true nations make, and the many variations that still make their melodies soar.

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Ethan Zuckerman blogs a talk by Jonah Lehrer at Poptech.

When we’ve got hard problems, we turn them over to experts. That might be the wrong thing to do, Lehrer suggests. … Lehrer ends on this intriguing idea: “Problems are intractable because we didn’t see them from the outside."

Lehrer cites some fascinating research to support this: two groups are given a problem to solve. Their performance is strongly affected by one variable. One group is told the problem comes from people down the corridor, the other group are told it comes from Greece. The From Greece group do much better. Check it out.

Hat tip: David Smith

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