I love Joi Ito. I’ve known him for some years now, and I’ve learnt to spend time thinking about what he shares, in person or in print. He has a habit of framing things in ways that teach me, that challenge me.

Kevin Marks is also someone who I have a lot of time for. Known him for years, enjoy working with him. [We worked together at BT, we’re working together at salesforce.com]. He too makes me think. Regularly. Polymaths like him are rare. @accidentallight and @parkparadigm come to mind, two others I’ve had the honour of working with.

So when Kevin recommended-via-tweet something Joi had said which had not hit my radar yet, I had to find out more.

Which led me to this submission by Joi to Steelcase 100. It’s so short I feel I can’t really quote the lot, you should follow the link instead. But the first sentence says it all for me:

One hundred years from now, the role of science and technology will be about becoming part of nature rather than trying to control it.

Becoming part of, rather than trying to control.

In essence, this is what I was trying to say in The Kernel For My Blog, way back in 2005. I was using the words “connected” and “channelled” to try, somewhat clumsily, to describe what Joi has stated so elegantly. By “connected” I meant “being part of” and by “channelled” I meant “being controlled by”. I’m so glad I now have better terms to use.

What Joi says about science and technology for the next 100 years is very meaningful for business over the next 10. Why do I say that?

 

To paraphrase Joi in a different, yet related context:

I think the role of  the enterprise will be about becoming part of the wider community rather than trying to control it.

So much of “business” has been about pursuing efficiency, scale and “exponential growth” at the expense of our customers. We have rewarded those who invent technologies that control our customers in some way. This is clearly not sustainable.

We must understand that we live in a complex system where everything is interrelated and interdependent and that everything we design impacts a larger system.

My dream is that 100 years from now, we will be learning from our customers, integrating with them and using science and technology to bring them into our lives to make everything we do not only zero impact but a positive impact to the natural system that we live in.

That’s what I believe Marc Benioff and the team at salesforce.com are trying to do. That’s what I believe the Social Enterprise is about. And that’s why I work at salesforce.com.

We all have to learn more about becoming part of the complex system we live in, rather than trying to control aspects of it. Mastery is expressed in skill and self-control, not in dominion or domination.

My thanks to Joi and to Kevin for giving me a better frame for my thoughts and beliefs in this context.

 

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