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.

It must have been late last year that Sean pointed me towards an Economist review of Edward Castronova’s Synthetic Worlds; and yes, I bought it, read it, and it probably influenced my joining Second Life soon after. Not that I’ve done enough in Second Life, I guess First Life time prioritisation is hard enough as it is. But I will, one day; because I think there are things we can use virtual worlds for, things that we may not quite have figured out yet. At present I’m trying to work out whether there is value in using Second Life as part of enterprise induction and talent development. More of that later.

In the meantime, I see that Castronova has moved on. He’s now looking at building a business, using virtual worlds as Petri dishes to experiment with social sciences. Two worlds, virtually populated, identical in all respects. Except one. Any one. But it should be a social science variable. Like macroeconomic factors. Roll the clock forward, see what happens.

In the normal course of events I would have thought that genetic algorithms already allow me to do that. But maybe not, maybe there’s value in having real humans living virtual lives in the experiment. Maybe there’s a blink effect there that gets us to better and faster answers. Still trying to work it out, something about Castronova’s ideas intrigues me. Anyway, it’s nice to see ideas like his floating around the blogosphere, without a patent or a paywall in sight.

Can’t help thinking there are some governments, prime ministers and presidents who could do with spending some time looking at what Castronova’s planning. Or maybe England football and cricket managers.

This is from David Berlind via Doc Searls. Do you know the person who’s lost the iPod that David found?

Which reminds me. I have always wanted to change the way people “procure” software, using blogs. Why can’t I just post “Is there someone out there with something that does this?” and see what happens. Relationship and conversation before transaction. Intention Economy compresses search and transaction costs. I’m sure there are a million reasons why I can’t, but I’ll keep looking into them. And one day….

[An aside: what kind of industry are we? Why do we use terms like procurer and user? ]

Numbing down: The art of playing with numbers in order to make things seem to be what they are not.

I guess many of you, like me, wonder “How did they do that?” when looking at something novel and unusual. It’s good to be curious.

As against this, do you ever wonder “How could they possibly know that?” when you trip over statistical references? I do, and it is a source of frequent frustration for me. We live in an age of spin, and battles are fought not just with words, not just with pictures, but with numbers as well. Presidents and Prime Ministers justify what they do with statistics and polls, and much of what is behind the numbers is complex. That is, if you accept “complex” as a valid synonym for Lies and Damned Lies.

Which is why I’m such a big fan of John Allen Paulos. It’s been many years since I first read Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences. Douglas Hofstadter, when reviewing the book nearly two decades ago, said:

Our society would be unimaginably different if the average person understood the ideas in this marvelous and important little book.

I was hooked from the first anecdote on the first page:

“Two aristocrats are out horseback riding and one challenges the other to see which can come up with the larger number. The second agrees to the contest, concentrates for a few minutes, and proudly announces ‘Three’. The proposer of the game is quiet for half an hour, then finally shrugs and concedes defeat.”

Read it for yourself, it’s worth it.

It is in this context that I’m delighted to see that Anant Rangaswami has started a blog about media and advertising in India, and related matters. He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.

In these days of citizen journalism, much has been written, much has been said, about authenticity and relevance and integrity in blogs and podcasts and video phenomena. Much of the pushback has come from MSM. Anant is someone who really understands what makes the media sector in India tick. The sector is important to all of us, but even more so because the learning he exhibits is in India. The sheer scale of the middle class there, the endless variety they have in the touch spaces between media and entertainment and sport and politics (is there a difference between the last two? I’m no longer sure…).

So welcome, Anant, I look forward to bigger and richer conversations.