Category: Four pillars

I had the pleasure of meeting Tom Malone shortly after he’d published The Future Of Work, at Supernova 2004 (thanks to JD Lasica for the coverage), where we were both speaking. [If you’re interested in what a 21st century firm will really look like, you must read Tom’s book, especially in conjunction with that of John Roberts, The Modern Firm.]

Last Friday, Tom, along with a few others, kicked off a large-scale experiment. Called We Are Smarter Than Me, it brings together MIT, Wharton, Pearson and Shared Insights, seeking to confront and confound a particular paradox. In their own words:

• A few books have recently been written on this topic, but they all fail to confront one central paradox. While they extol the power of communities, they were each written by only one person. We’re putting this paradox to the test by inviting hundreds of thousands of authors to contribute to this “network book” using today’s technologies.

We’ve had experiments where people have collaborated on books online before (Dan Gillmor’s We The Media comes to mind) but I’ve never seen anything of this scale. I understand that over 1.5 million invitations have been sent out; no I did not get one of them :-) but that did not deter me from signing up. Check it out for yourself, barriers to participation are remarkably low. Which is a good thing.
Currently I’m just lurking, taking a look at what’s happening, as the structure and content of the book morphs around me lazily. Insane, like a smoke-ring day when the wind blows. Soon I will figure out where and how I want to participate. Follow the links to We Are Smarter if you want to know more.
I’m also intrigued by something else about the cultures forming in this giant Petri dish. I’ve always believed in a simple rule-of-thumb about opensource communities:

• For every 1000 people who join a community:
• 920 are lurkers, passive observers
• 60 are watchers, active observers capable and willing to kibitz
• 15 are activists, actually doing something
• …and 5 are hyperactive, passionate about what they’re doing, almost to a point of obsession

I shall watch with interest as the numbers grow, to see how close my rule of thumb is to reality. Any views out there, or shall I start a prediction market on this?

One final thing. One of the trends the book is meant to pick out is that of microfinance. I wonder. I just wonder. Take the network book and attach it to network funding, make it available on-demand whenever, wherever, however. I wonder.

For those who remember where this conversation started, I used the term Four Pillars to describe search, publishing, conversation and fulfilment, and asserted that it was only a matter of time before enterprise software consisted of these four “pillars” and not much else. If you weren’t around at the start, reading this and this might help you. I’ve probably written a hundred posts on the subject as well, dealing with different facets and aspects of Four Pillars. [And, once I’ve finished cleaning up the categories and tags, you might even be able to find them!].

But in the meantime. I was doing my usual waltzing over the blogosphere, and got to this post by Dave Winer via Doc Searls. [Ever since I got myself a decent RSS aggregator, netvibes, I seem to do this often. Read person A and move from there to a story by person B before I’ve got to person B’s blog. Does that happen to you as well?]

Anyway, there is much I have to thank Dave and Doc for. There’s a crucial four-pillars point being made in what they say. And for now I want to call it The Wren Gap.

Let me explain. There’s a Guildhall in Windsor, the town where I live. This is what it looks like:

There were guildhalls in Windsor before this one. And there will probably be guildhalls in Windsor after this one, it’s a Guildhally kind of place. This particular Guildhall was built in the late 17th century and, following the death of the original architect, the work was continued by Sir Chriptopher Wren.  And at this stage let me pass you on to Wikipedia:

• The story is widely told that the borough Council demanded that Wren should insert additional columns within the covered area, in order to support the weight of the heavy building above; Wren, however, was adamant that these were not necessary. Eventually the council insisted and, in due course, the extra supporting columns were built, but Wren made them slightly short, so that they do not quite touch the ceiling, hence proving his claim that they are not necessary! Whatever the truth of this story, it is undeniable that, to this day, there is a small gap between the columns and the ceiling.

And so the Wren Gap was born, as shown below:

And so to the point of this post. Dave Winer, in the post that Doc referred me to, has this to say:

• Many years ago, when the Internet was still the domain of geeks, researchers and college students, the smart folks often said that the opportunities for new software companies were over, it simply required too much scale to compete in an industry dominated by Lotus, Microsoft and Ashton-Tate. Now it’s clear how ridiculous that was, even though it was correct. The next layer comes on not by building on the old layer (a trick, the guy you’re building on will eat your lunch), or re-doing what they did (what the naysayers correctly say you can’t do), but by starting from a different place and building something new, and so different that the old guys don’t understand it and don’t feel threatened by it.

My italics. My emphases.

The councillors of today want us to connect to the old layer. We need to understand this. They want us to connect to the old layer. We don’t need to, but they want us to.

The way they want us to connect to the old layer is often via that terrible space variously called DRM and IPR and licences; these badly-thought-out things form the cement and mortar they so badly need.

We need to be wise, wise like Wren. And create Wren gaps everywhere. Opensource software, open SDKs and frameworks, open communities, open licensing, all this is here and now. And we can use them to create the Wren gaps.

People, you will be told that your edifices will not stand up unless you connect to the old layers.

Balderdash and piffle. Time for Wren gaps.

A coda. I loved this story from Cory at BoingBoing, but via Smart Mobs: another example of my reading feed A before feed B.

Tagging things as DefectiveByDesign, using the tag tools provided by the retailer. Oh frabjous day.

[Note: Portions of the Wren story have appeared in an earlier post, but I felt it was appropriate to repeat it and expand upon it.]

A few months ago, I asked for feedback as to how I could improve this blog. I got a bunch of comments back, some visible, some as e-mail to me, some verbal. They seemed to fall into four main groups:

• (a) Could I include a mini-glossary of terms I regularly use, such as Because Of Rather than With? I found it quite hard to compile a list of terms in the first place, but have made some progress. You should see a glossary show up soon.
• (b) Could I simplify my “categories” and actually use them rather than pretend (?!)  This too I am doing, I have now gone for a new and shorter list of categories, and right now I’m working through each post to recategorise one at a time.
• (c) Could I bring back LibraryThing and Quotes and CoComment? I will, as soon as I’ve done (a) and (b)
• (d) Could I make the blogroll shorter or at the very least easier to follow? I hope I’ve done this already.

As you can see this is a work in progress. If you have any other comments or suggestions, please pass them on and I will do my best to incorporate them. I personally wanted to increase the graphic content, to make accessibility easier, to find ways to translate the blog into other languages and to change the look and feel. But that’s not what the comments told me.

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.