Pushback Everyone's seems to be into co-creation and crowdsourcing these days. Here's a lovely reality check for lazy brands who assume too much about what to expect. It's the phenomenon of "yes I'd love for you to collaborate by washing my...

Self-organisation, traffic lights and empathy Recommended viewing for contemplating the power of self-organisation and the hidden costs of top-down control. The best line in the commentary was this: "Road capacity might be limited but empathy is boundless." (If you can't see the embedded videos, click...

Collaboration and status Sometimes I go searching for something in an old post and stumble on other stuff I wrote years ago. This can lead to cringes but occasionally to things I think bear repeating, such as this this reflection on how come...

Empathy and innovation Tim Kastelle has a good post about Empathy and Innovation. I'm fond of talking about "relationships before ideas" and Tim seems to be in similar territory. One of the supposed challenges of innovation is getting ideas to spread and Tim...

Stakeholder engagement sucking Stakeholder Engagement SucksView more presentations from dan mcquillan. I liked Dan McQuillan's Social Engagement Sucks slideshare. (click here if you can't see it above.) Stakeholder engagement is a management cliche in dire need of some shaking up and Dan takes...

Crumbs! So Viv and I are going to run a workshop together on May 13th in Sydney, organised by the excellent Matt Moore (no relation). We're calling it Crumbs! and here's the blurb on Matt's site. I suppose this is the...

Podcast: The tyranny of excellence Update, cue twilight zone theme. Interesting coincidence, here's Hugh's cartoon of the day: Viv McWaters and I are developing a workshop called Crumbs! We look at how creativity is not about big ideas and sudden leaps of insight. It's much...

Communities of practice I went to David Gurteen's Knowledge Cafe last night. It's a mercifully simple and conversational format, much in the style of World Cafe. The theme was the future of communities of practice. I was struck that in some organisations, enthusiasts...

The perils of small worlds I'm still mining Keith Sawyer's Group Genius for insights; the more I re-read it, the more useful and powerful I think his research is. One nuggest he reports is the study done by Brian Uzzi of Northwestern University and Jarrett...

Massively collaborative mathematics Keith Sawyer highlights an article from Nature. It describes how a complex mathematical theorem is solved by massive collaboration, hosted on a blog. Here's a key point that Keith identifies from the piece:For the first time one can see on...

Relationships before ideas From the time we were little children my brother.. and myself lived together, played together, worked together and, in fact, thought together. We usually owned all of our toys in common, talked over our thoughts and aspirations so that nearly...

Incentives, innovation, community I just posted about Umair's suggestion about a mega-version of the netflix prize. I've been involved with some of NESTA's many open innovation projects (here's Roland on one of their latest.) It occurs to me that I and others sometimes...

Born Social Keith Sawyer reports on a new book by Michale Tomasello, Why We Cooperate. Studies of infants suggest that the urge to help others is innate, and not learned. Tomasello’s book presents data showing that infants as young as 18 months...

Innovation with a capital I 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...

High status deadens experience 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...