Yesterday I asked for the one word that linked the three books below:
Looks like I managed to get one past all of you. Perhaps, in my zeal to provide you with unGoogleable questions, I came up with one that was too hard. So I’ll make it easier, as I promised I would.
Here’s a fourth member of the set:
What one word, of eight letters, capitalised, connects the four?
I shall wait till next Friday before giving you the answer. Unless, of course, someone gets it earlier.
What one word connects the three books above?
I will wait till 1600 BST tomorrow, Sunday, and observe how people fare. If necessary I will then add a fourth item to the three above to try and make it easier.
Change involves risk. When the change is an innovation the quantum of risk increases. And when the change is an invention the quantum of risk is greater still.
All projects involve risk. People respond to risk differently.
Some people belong to the Zaphod Beeblebrox class: their attitude to risk is to don the appropriate technology, which in Zaphod’s case was the Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses. At the first sign of danger they turn completely opaque.
Some people prefer selective Stockholm Syndrome. They empathise so much with the creators of the original risks that they perceive alternatives as riskier.
Yet others feel safer in the Nanny State. They don’t worry about risk. They have no risk to worry about. They aren’t allowed to take any risks.
A sad state of affairs.
Some of this is caused by blame cultures. I was speaking to Kevin Marks earlier this evening about this and related issues, and he referred me to this Etsy post: Blameless PostMortems and a Just Culture.
Sometimes the cause is even more insidious: wilful blindness, again in a Kevin-referred post.
The trigger for our conversation was a recent video doing the rounds, Eben Moglen at F2C, talking about innovation under austerity.
If you haven’t seen the video, please do so. It’s long, but it’s worth it. You may not agree with all of it, but it’s still worth it.
Youth is often the engine of innovation, particularly affordable innovation. Which, as Eben Moglen points out, is what is needed at a time of austerity.
It is possible to innovate in austerity, but only if the barriers to entry are kept down.
Which means allowing people to hack.
Which causes other problems.
If you allow people to hack, people will hack. And you can’t stop people hacking. Some people want hackability to be turned on and off, to be controllable. That’s not always easy. It is part of the reason why institutional buyers shied away from open source a decade ago, and why they find Android a challenge today. Loss of control. [There’s a more insidious reason, not having anyone to blame and not willing to carry responsibility].
Sometimes the state decides that hacking is unsafe. That people should not be allowed to get under the hood, they might get hurt. Or something like that. So the nanny state encourages unhackability. Lockdowns. Sealed units. Warning: Contains Nuts.
Yet as Eben says innovation at a time like this is absolutely critical. So what do we do?
We need to make hacking safer. Allow the Maker Generation to make mistakes while keeping the consequences of those mistakes at affordable levels. Like open source communities, where gains are socialised and losses are privatised. Like teaching children about safe hacking.
Clay Shirky once remarked that Wikipedia succeeded because the cost of repair was kept at least as low as the cost of damage: the undo button. When the cost of repair exceeds the cost of damage, the consequences are predictable. Chewing gum on sidewalks. Graffiti on walls.
We need to build “undo” functionality into more and more things, so that people can experiment without worry about blame or consequences. We spend a lot of time teaching our children about consequences. Maybe it’s time we spent some of our energy making sure there are no consequences, or at the very least minimising the consequences.
Innovation is our lifeblood. Particularly during difficult economic times, radical innovation is an imperative. For radical innovation to happen, we have to provide the most likely innovators, our youth, with the ability to innovate, unfettered, blame-free, where failure is seen as learning.
Instead, we pass legislation to tell people that peanut butter contains nuts. And we encourage enterprise buyers to take the safe option: as the saying goes, nobody got fired for buying IBM. The names have changed. Microsoft. SAP. Oracle. But the principle’s the same. Take no risks. Avoid change. You will live longer. Even if your company dies as a result.
Addendum: Kevin was writing something in parallel about the “undo” culture, a must-read post: Keep ALL the versions.
Looks like people are struggling with this one. By looking for the unGoogleable I may have made it too difficult.
I asked “Marshall is to Allen as Hercules is to what?” and so far no one has solved it. So let me make it easier and add a clue.
Marshall: Allen as Ono:Winston
A decade ago, soon after becoming Global CIO at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, I started looking into how I could embed what we now call “social software” into the everyday operations of that institution. By that time we were already pioneers in the use of wikis, we were already well established in our use of instant messaging, we had begun quite serious experiments in the use of smart mobile devices at work, so what we were trying to do was to add blogging to our portfolio and bring all the tools together into a more harmonious whole. It was a real privilege to lead that department, we had an amazing array of truly world class talent there. [If you used to work there and you’re reading this, you have no idea how grateful I am for having had that privilege. A fabulous team. And I’m still grateful.]
Andrew McAfee, then at Harvard, chanced upon our work, spent time with us and helped us understand the formal context of what we were discovering. You can read about it in his seminal book Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools For Your Organisation’s Toughest Challenges; or if you prefer to test the water first, you can read the original article he wrote for the MIT Sloan Management Review, Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration.
During those years, I had the opportunity to talk to a lot of people about these emergent tools: friends and colleagues, industry participants, observers, consultants, academics, in fact anyone and everyone who had an opinion. And there were many opinions. [Strange that. You don’t tend to find that everyone has an opinion as to how to treat something on a balance sheet. You don’t tend to find that everyone has an opinion on the meaning of a clause in a contract. But when it comes to IT ….. My name is Legion, for we are Many.]
Anyway, amongst all these varied opinions, one set stood out. That we would fail in our quest to implement social software at the bank because the very names of the tools we used were so “silly”. Proponents of this particular set of opinions felt that life was hard enough when companies had “stupid” made-up names like Google, and that I would face a real uphill battle because I was proposing using trivial-sounding things like “blogs” and “wikis”. After all, this was “work”, not “play”, and people at work had more important things to do than to play.
At that time, I was getting to the point where I was working on a move to a “four-pillar” architecture for enterprise software, something I spoke about in this video of a closed architects meeting in December 2005, and as reported here by old friend Phil Wainewright who was present. We were already committed to publish-subscribe models within the bank, had a sensible bus architecture, and so I was keen to improve the subscribe capability, thinking at the time it would be something along the lines of what Netvibes offered then. Facebook was just emerging, and Twitter hadn’t yet begun. But the principles of back-end publishers and RSS and pub-sub and corporate “social” networks had already been established, Bloomberg Chat had been around for a while, ICQ had been mutated into various forms, we’d been learning off Groove and Jabber, Parlano MindAlign had shown us the art of the possible (before Microsoft trampled all over them). We were ready for bringing all this together.
Part of my energy was being used on something possibly more ambitious, moving the bank away from Microsoft and on to Apple. Project Jobsworth. The reason I have the mail id [email protected] (used to be [email protected]). The reason I call myself @jobsworth on Twitter and in many other digital places. You can read about that project here.
Al-Noor Ramji, my predecessor at the bank, had set many things in train that I could use and extend: a commitment to open source, not just as consumer, but as producer, as contributor: under his leadership, we were early on to Java, committed wholeheartedly to a publish-subscribe mindset and developed what later became OpenAdaptor. The environment was fertile, the talent pool amazing. And the time was right, we needed to innovate to help reduce costs and drive up speed and quality.
None of this was being done because we thought it was fashionable or cool or different. At the time, my influences included John Seely Brown’s Social Life of Information, Steven Johnson’s Emergence, Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, Brian Arthur on Increasing-Returns models, Howard Rheingold on Virtual Communities, (and later Amy-Jo Kim as well) pretty much everything written by Esther Dyson and the editorial team at Release 1.0; and of course The Cluetrain Manifesto. Chris Locke even came and spoke to us in 2000 and in 2001, first in Bangalore and later in London. Later influences include Tom Malone and The Future of Work, Kathy Sierra on everything to do with Creating Passionate Users and Carlota Perez on Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital.
So you can see where our heads were at the time. We believed that we were in a new paradigm, one where digital infrastructure was writing new rules, where the customer was central, where information was social, where activity was emergent, communal and collaborative, where community mattered, where tools were becoming mobile, where software was about patterns, where identity and intellectual property were being redefined by the internet. And based on those beliefs, we thought that work was changing, that the people at work were changing, that the tools of work needed to change.
And those are the kind of reasons why I’m at Salesforce.com today, where I’m chief scientist. [And why I’m a trustee of the Web Science Trust, and why I’m a venture partner at Anthemis.com].
Those are the reasons why I’m looking forward to Cloudforce Social Enterprise Tour London 2012 on May 22nd, which is showing all the signs of becoming the largest single one-day tech event ever.
As with open source, as with information becoming social, as with smart mobile devices, as with the Facebooks and Twitters of this world, the Social Enterprise is no fad.
The Social Enterprise is a consequence. A consequence of customers becoming empowered and discovering how to use their voice. A consequence of Moore’s Law meeting Metcalfe’s Law, and then evolving a further forty years or so. If you want to know about the connected customer, read about it here in the Telegraph or here on CloudBlog.
In a similar context, the blurring of lines between work and play is nothing new. As I found out the hard way using terms like blogs and wikis, people push back on the terms because work is meant to be “serious”. Meant to be. Not is.
Work and play are not mutually exclusive. If you want to get into this, a good place to start is Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi’s Flow. You should also read Pat Kane’s The Play Ethic. And maybe riffle through Michael Schrage’s Serious Play. But it will only scratch the surface.
Which brings me on to today. Today, where the changing work landscape has meant that we need new ways of looking at work, new tools, new processes. Tools and processes that relate to collective and collaborative activity in “real time”, that deal with nonlinear and lumpy processes, that recognise the importance of patterns. Work environments that are distributed and geographically dispersed, with people needing to “shift time and place”. Engaging with empowered, always-on, mobile customers and partners and staff.
I started looking closely at a number of communities to try and learn from them: traders who used to operate in open outcry markets and later shifted to trading floors; traffic and flow controllers, particularly air traffic controllers; network operators (which is why I moved from Dresdner Kleinwort to BT); and gamers.
Yes, gamers.
I thought they had a lot to teach me. And they do.
So I will continue to observe them and learn from them. And see how to apply that learning at work. Which is what I was doing when the term “gamification” intruded on to my radar. I have spoken on the subject a few times, explaining why the lipstick of gamification cannot solve the pig of work, explaining why this sea-change at work is something far more than just the transposition of some game mechanics.
Which makes this Pew Internet report intriguing reading. If you have the time to read this, then I strongly recommend you read this critique by Sebastian Deterding as well. He makes some crucial points, particularly on competition, on generations, and on work/play. I have had the opportunity to meet and to spend time conversing with Sebastian, and would urge those interested in this space to follow him.