Day: 27 October 2006

Max De Pree. Herman Miller.

The more I find out about the man and the company, the more I am intrigued and even enthralled.

Just take a look at their web site. There’s a little tab that says “What we do”. And when you ‘lift’ that tab, this is what it says:

• We study work and living environments and design and deliver products and services that make these environments work better.

I’ve said it before. If you haven’t done so already, find a copy of Leadership is An Art. And read it. If you can’t find a copy, let me know and I will find you one. I think it’s typical, and very fitting, that when you look up Max De Pree in Wikipedia, you don’t go to an article about him, but about servant leadership. That says it all.

Incidentally, if you’re interested in servant leadership, take a look at the wikipedia entry. There are some useful links there, particularly showing the interplay between opensource principles and servant leadership.

And now for something completely different. Well, not really … while looking for books on Max De Pree, I came across an unusual pamphlet. Titled “A statement of expectations”, it is a lovely little publication, containing the brief provided by De Pree to his architects prior to the building of a new Herman Miller facility in Bath, and a photographic record of how the architects responded to that brief.

It’s a very short brief. And some of the words are very powerful. Here are a few quoted examples:

• The environment should encourage fortuitous encounter and open community.
• The space should be subservient to human activity.
• Commitment to performance for single functions or needs is to be avoided.
• The facility must be able to change with grace, be flexible and non monumental.
• Planning of utilities has to meet the needs we can perceive.
• We wish to create an environment which will welcome all and be open to surprise.

De Pree was really on to something when he spoke of encouraging “fortuitous encounter” and being “open to surprise”. Servant leadership is all about helping others develop, reach and extend their potential. And in order to do that, you must allow for fortuitous encounters and be open to surprise. De Pree felt so strongly about it that, even before writing his books on leadership and on servant leadership, he articulated it in, of all things, a set of instructions to architects. Wow.

Thanks to Clarence Fisher for focusing my mind on this. I think everyone should read Clarence’s recent post on Access Versus Participation; I was reading through the Jenkins paper at the same time, preparing to link and comment, but Clarence has done such a good job that I can save myself the effort.
Education is lifelong. The 11 “skills” Jenkins speaks of relate well to children and to youth; at a level of abstraction they are suitable for looking at adult capabilities as well, for students of all ages. But I can’t help think that we need to work on the list, adapt it and improve it in order to create something similar for Enterprise Capabilities and Competences. We need things like this to help us overcome organisational immune systems. Even if they smack of jargon-du-jour.
So here’s the list, below. See what you think, see what you come up with. I will post my version in a few days time, then we can compare notes via the comments.

• Play— the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving
• Performance— the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery
• Simulation— the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes
• Appropriation— the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content
• Multitasking— the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details.
• Distributed Cognition— the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities
• Collective Intelligence— the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with  others toward a common goal
• Judgment— the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources
• Transmedia Navigation— the ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities
• Networking— the ability to search for,synthesize,and disseminate information
• Negotiation— the ability to travel across diverse communities,discerning and respecting multiple perspectives,and grasping and following alternative norms.

One possible outcome is that we decide that the list is cool, that it doesn’t need editing or mutating. That is an acceptable outcome. One that I would love to see. But I think we’re not there as yet, so we will need random sprinklings of jargon and weaselword and buzzphrase to make it easier for the organisation’s digestive system.

Which reminds me. You have been warned. I’ve been busy writing a series of posts on organisational digestive systems, as opposed to immune systems. How ideas get ingested; how they provide much-needed nutrients; why one man’s meat is another man’s poison; and how idea effluent is dealt with.