The future of capitalism...

A couple of things caught my eye this weekend.

Umair Haque - How to Build a Next-Gen Business Now.

Joi Ito - Obsolete Financial Services

Both are quite exciting (though Umair's at times feels a tad portentous) at a time when so many very highly rewarded financial gurus seem to be coming completely unstuck. We're entering a very turbulent period and I'm not sure how things will fall out, but I think a hyperlinked world is going to value very different institutions from the ones we've got now.

(Hat tips: Adriana Lukas and David Smith

Pollard on Open Space

Dave Pollard has a thoughtful and somewhat critical post about Open Space. I see that Jack Martin Leith has offered a few thoughts in response.

First off, declaring my baggage at customs, I'm a frequent user and something of an enthusiast for Open Space. And I know that it's a process that some people find frustrating. Debating its pros and cons can be difficult, as I think it raises tricky questions about what we think facilitation really is... and whether it's something different from control and manipulation or just a well-dressed up version of it or a very watered down and benign rewriting of it.

It seems, if I'm following correctly, that Dave wants a facilitator to be there to support the "mavericks with complex ideas" but also deter the "bullies and manipulators". Frankly, that sounds a tough challenge. Don't these qualities often come as a package?

This same person must also "draw out the wallflowers" - I assume this talented facilitator has the mind-reading skills to spot those defective creatures and not confuse them with, say, those who are paying close attention but feeling reflective; or who are so furious they can barely speak - not wallflowers at all.

Goodness only knows, when I'm facilitating I feel all these urges to take control and have an impact. That's why Open Space is probably good practice for me, as facilitating it requires minimalism.

One plus point for Open Space is that it divides up the "control" among participants, who can make personal choices about who is a bore and who is quietly fascinating, and use their two feet to steer towards or away from them. In my subjective experience, I think Open Space is just about impossible to hijack, because you can only attract volunteers to a conversation.

Of course, there are biases: in order to get your topic on the agenda you have to be vocal or headstrong enough to stand up and pitch it to other participants. And yes, if you don't pitch it well, fewer people may show up. I certainly find that it takes a while for people to "get" that need to take a risk if you want a subject discussed. So yes, I think there is a bias towards those who are willing to make some noise and I'm interested in experiments to counter this.

I also sometimes think the timetable at the start is a bit too much structure - though, again, it's not that hard to overwrite that as a participant by just bagging more than one time slot if you want.

Dave makes some interesting suggestions to improve Open Space but they all seem to assume that the facilitator knows much better than the participants what's good for them AND (even more important) that the participants are so in awe of this person that they will enthusiastically follow his directions (rather than, which I think is much more realistic, pretend to go along and find ways to sabotage them). Of course, even in the minimalism of Open Space you could argue the facilitator is taking charge to some degree.

What's more interesting - and harder to express - is a more fundamental question: do we really believe in the idea of one person leading a group of mere mortals through the wilderness? Or is it more realistic to expect confusion, frustration and mess as well as epiphanies and breakthroughs? And sometimes much more of the former than the latter?

And how do we know the difference between our own personal frustration on the one hand, and the the failure of a system on the other? I'll risk the sweeping generalisation that most of us prefer to opine about systems than look in the mirror and reflect on exactly how we choose to engage with them.

Is the facilitator the expert guiding hand? Or is he perhaps a paradoxical figure who sits in the traditional position of leader and then deliberately fails to lead... but does clearly seem to present and attentive?

I'm aware I'm not doing full justice to Dave's arguments here and I wish I was going to Bowen Island for a real conversation. But feedback welcome.

Purpose

I've just picked up the phrase "communities of purpose" via Mark. Sounds a bit sharper than community of practice. You could say that Open Space revolves around communities of purpose.

Easy?

Leadership? Innovation? Knowledge Sharing? There's so much said about all of these, and much of it of the hand-wringing kind. As I've said before, a lot of those conversations are really about control. So I tend to agree with Dave Snowden when he says:

My general response to people who ask the question How do we get people to share what they know, is If you have to ask the question then you have probably taken the wrong approach. In my experience people generally do want to share, but they may not want to share in the manner prescribed by the corporate KM department. If you ask someone for assistance in the context of real and immediate need it will rarely be refused. As someone to share knowledge in the absence of that need, or in a form or manner determined by a centralised function then it will nearly always be refused.

Me on social media

Tim Kitchin got me to to do a bit of talking head the other day about social media in organisations. Here's the end product:

Scare-cars

I loved Dave's post about the village which took road safety into its own hands. Frustrated by bureaucratic delays to safety measures, they ran a competition to create scare-cars to deter speeding.

Vroom Vroom, VRM?

My friend Adriana is organising a VRM Hub Conference, November 3, London. Here's her Cliff's notes on what VRM is:

VRM stands for Vendor Relationship Management - the ‘flipside’ of Customer Relationship Management. Customers and vendors are in a locked see-saw with one side hugely outweighing the other. Like with a real world see-saw in such position, the fun is spoiled for both. VRM supports creation of tools that equip the individual and minimize the control one party has over another in a relationship. It aims to create a more efficient and balanced relationship between business and their customers, markets and companies, demand and supply.

I've been following some of the discussions around VRM and it strikes me as one of those things with many layers of complexity that might turn out to be jolly important. Reassuringly, lots of mates who I can certify as non-jargon speakers are attending - so I plan to be there in expectation of enlightenment. And possibly mischief.

Engineering serendipity?

Roland Harwood at NESTA wrote about Engineering Serendipity last week and it's been on my mind since then. He's been meeting lots of companies that try to broker relationships between people and their ideas:

With more distributed organisations and specialised knowledge, the need for these type of organisations is increasing, who can organise integrate knowledge and organise innovation between organsisations. And it's organisations like Innocentive, Kluster, Innovaro, The Disrupters, Innovation Arts, WhatIf and CellCentric that all create value by aggregating knowledge and brokering relationships. I’m going to coin a term and acronymn and describe them as an engineering serendipity businesses (ESB), which I also think is the business NESTA Connect is in too.

I think he's put his finger on an interesting paradox here, how can we engineer that which is meant to be fortuitous?

My own two cents is that most efforts I've witnessed in organisations focus way too much on the engineering and have little faith in the accidental. There's too much effort to create "innovation processes" as if this is all very complicated and difficult. I tend to think in terms of opening space, creating a simple container for conversation and let structure emerge and fade as needed.

Norfolk cuts out the middleman

It's been too long since I rolled out the disintermediation dalek but I'm thinking I could make it an award.

If I did, this month's nominee could be South Norfolk Council, for recruiting its next Chief Executive via this ad on YouTube - claiming to have saved £50,000 by cutting out the usual middlemen.

Actually, the video is kinda cheesy but I like that. These days the high-production values and polish of the "professionals" actual reduces credibility - whereas this more homely effort is more engaging. Pity they've disabled embedding though.

Hat tip: Dominic Campbell for tweeting this

Open sourcing banking

BankerVision used to work at Microsoft but he's just stripped his home of all Microsoft devices in favour of Open Source. He's pretty happy about the results. And asks this question:

..if these Generation-C folk can create a better operating system for free than the folks at Redmond with billions to spend on R&D, what might fantastic things might Generation-C do for financial services?

Patti speaks...

Viv and Geoff have done a podcast with Patti Digh, author of the newly minted Life is a Verb.

I'm a big fan of Patti so there's lots in here that I like. Here's what she says about her work doing diversity training (and I think you can insert any abstraction in place of diversity eg leadership, assertiveness etc):

(There's this) incredible longing for people to engage with each other as human beings and yet we constantly put restrictions on that... we constantly say that's not going to happen at work. So there's this abstraction of the idea of diversity

She mocks the T shirts and posters which talk about diversity in the abstract which offer, as she puts it, nothing you can hold onto in moments of stress.

I particularly liked the passage where she talks about using physical games. Language can create big barriers. So working with a university, an action game levelled the playing field between the chancellor and the janitor. As a fan of slow motion samurai, I completely relate to that.

Robust uncertainty

Dave Snowden quotes Lofti Lotfi Zadeh*

As complexity increases, precise statements lose their meaning, and meaningful statements lose their precision

Dave adds this observation:

The difficulty with measurement systems, and the whole MBA/consultancy approach to strategy with its emphasis on analysis at the expense of action is that it fails to recognise complexity and seeks precision at the cost of meaning. This is not to say that analysis is wrong, but the nature and focus of analysis is different.

Earlier this morning I was reflecting on the dilemma of holding uncertainty. One of the pitfalls is that it can often sound like a weak position, losing out in a fight to those offering "solutions" who seem to be certain. I sometimes talk about the need for robust uncertainty - being confident that there is no simple answer.

*I've not heard of Lofti Lotfi, so I googled and see he's a fuzzy logician. UPDATE Sean Murphy adds this link in his comment below.

Simplexity...

Ken Thompson points to this LA Times article by Jeffrey Kluger about simplexity - how apparently inconsequential things can have major effects in systems.

I'm not one for jargon, but I quite like this word simplexity. I'm fascinated by the paradoxical power of the simple and the complex. I think we too often miss it favour of seeing the merely complicated. (More on that in this essay I wrote a few years ago.)

Innovation fatigue

Jack Leith points to Scott Berkun having a go at the myths of innovation. Good stuff, especially how he takes down the notion of the gifted genius having an epiphany in favour of seeing how ideas rise incrementally out a context.

I've been thinking for a while now that an awful lot of talk about innovation seems to reflect a scarcity viewpoint: it's terribly hard; you must have a rigorous process or you'll miss something; you'd better put someone in charge of it or it won't happen; Britain (insert your country here) must become more innovative or else. Yadda Yadda. I prefer to take a more abundant view that innovation happens really easily when we deal with our real needs and passions. Much talk about championing innovation seems to me to involve a lot of chest thumping but not much connection to reality.

Stuff

This story from get richslowly, via beyondrivalry,* resonates with me.

"After I told my friend Amy Jo about our clutter conversation last week, she shared her own thoughts. 'We each have so many interests, and certain things — like books — keep us connected to those interests, or give us the illusion that they do,' she said.

"'But they also clog up our lives and make us less efficient at doing what we are and what we want to do right now. It's hard to let go of the things that we believe represent parts of ourselves, or we hope represent us. In many cases, these things represent who we were or wished to be at one time — not who we are right now.'

Hat tip: Dave Pollard.

* surely an entry for "most pleasing attribution of the year"

Change or control?

They say that change is difficult. Apparently, organisational change is even more fun. Mark links to McKinsey saying "Only a third of transformations of any kind were deemed very or extremely successful."

Apologies for being pedantic but I don't think change is difficult. Control is what's difficult. People and organisations are changing all the time, just not in the ways that some of us want.

I think a lot of boring discussions about "change management" would be more interesting if we looked at what demands are being made for obedience and why they're not being met.

Surfs up

My last post here talked about surfing as a metaphor for faciliation/management. Graham Hill left a comment pointing to this from John Hagel: Innovating on the Edge of Big Waves. I loved the narrative about the surfing experience though I notice feeling a bit wary of some of Hagel's conclusions - can't put my finger on it but just feel that something rather rich and wonderful is being reduced to something merely difficult. (There's a post brewing in my mind about how much talk about innovation seems to operate on the basis of scarcity rather than abundance.)

Hagel references a famous surf break, Mavericks. Funnily enough, this is the one Harrison Owen cites in his forthcoming book, Wave Rider - Leadership for High Performance in a Self-Organizing World. Harrison's posted the opening chapter here. Here's a key para:

The Wave Rider’s secret is a deep awareness of the fundamental self-organizing nature of our world. This awareness may be largely intuitive or very conscious, but the net effect is the capacity to align oneself and one’s work with the primal force of self-organization thereby leveraging its enormous power. Concurrently, the Wave Rider is keenly aware of the limitations of his or her own powers, particularly the power of control. Recognizing the mind boggling complexity of the chaordic forces at play (thank you Dee Hock) the Wave Rider understands that total control, at least of the sort that many seem to seek, is but a fond hope, verging on the delusional.

Hat tip: Jack Martin Leith

WinkiPod

While I was in Australia, I recorded a podcast, pretty much on the spur of the moment, with Geoff Brown and Vic McWaters. We recorded it on a cliff overlooking the WinkiPop surf break nears Bells Beach. It's a typically rambling performance but if you stick with it, we touch on a few interesting facilitation themes. We get into the idea of surfing as a metaphor for it, explained more by this post by Geoff. Listening to it this morning has been a good reminder for me about the importance of not trying too hard and not trying to be a genius.

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