CircaSpecting: People, Tech, and Business

Fear of Flipping the Switch

One of the lessons of life that I’ve been learning lately is that execution does NOT flow naturally from preparation.  Actually, the more you prepare, probably the HARDER it is to move on to DOING.

Here’s what I’m experiencing lately in an interesting little object-lesson called "moving aboard our new sailboat."  The experience is purely personal, but I think it reveals some things about the mind that are 100% applicable to the professional world.

Preparing is sort of a safe little fantasy world.  You tell yourself stories about what is going to happen when you start doing -- the great things that will happen, the ordinary things that will happen, and even the challenging things that will/might happen.  Then you get organized for those things.  You play out those stories in your mind, and you come up with new stories, and you document and buy and stage things to be ready.  But, there is a vast existential chasm between the mental life of these stories and the real life of...well, living.

One of the hooks in preparing that makes it so sticky is similar to the old adage about life: the more you know, the more you realize how little you know.  In planning/preparation, it’s easy to get into the mindset of trying to prepare for everything.  It’s a fool’s errand, but it catches many people in its grasp -- because (1) it seems responsible and (2) it does not actually carry the risk of DOING.

Anyone who has worked in large companies has seen this phenomenon: over-planning, over-preparing -- because you can always justify your preparation as prudent in the face of some bogey-man risk...but REALLy because you are petrified of walking across the threshold from your fantasy world into the real world, because deep down you know that the real world is going to be different from the predictable world of “planning.”

At some point, after you’ve read the manual on switching power sources for the refrigerator
between shore power and generator power, you actually have to ... FLIP SOME SWITCHES AND HOPE YOU DON”T BLOW UP SOMETHING.  You have to crank the generator, which means you have to do a few other things.  You have to route power to places and turn on pumps for heat exchangers and other things.  And, either your plan works and you can have ice cream while at anchor off Saba, or it doesn’t and you are buying lots of expensive new gear.  But, here’s the mindset that matters: 

If I am reasonably smart and reasonably prepared and have a reasonable idea for how to do something, I WANT TO KNOW THAT IT WORKS IN THE REALWORLD...NOW.  You have to reach out and flip some switched -- not stupidly and randomly, but still you have to flip them -- and SEE WHAT HAPPENS. 

Either you will find that you are in fact prepared, or you will find that you were living in Plato’s cave.  From where I sit today, either of these outcomes is superior to admiring shadows on the wall.

 

Of Card Hustlers and Tech Sales

“Let me show you what our product can do with your data.”

Ugh.

Don’t get me wrong, I love data analysis as much as the next guy, and our product has great features for slicing/dicing/ computing/ visualizing data.  But, I cringe when a customer fixates on that sort of demonstration.  Because, as an industry we’ve been doing this computational and spatial and logical manipulation of numbers FOR SEVERAL DECADES.  Let’s just say, as an industry, that we’re 95% of the way “there” -- meaning we’ve achieved a 95% perfect calculator.  Most of what’s new now is nothing more than blinky lights, shiny things....a neat parlor trick.  

So what.

If you want to make a meaningful improvement in your organization’s effectiveness, efficiency, and creativity, you need to look for a 10X improvement in something...or a 100X improvement in something.  

0.05X is just noise.

Whatever is keeping your organization from being more effective, efficient, and creative....IT IS NOT A CALCULATOR PROBLEM.  The solution is not a better tool to allow a user logically, mathematically, or spatially to manipulate her data.

What should we be talking about?  

There is a growing body of recent organizational research demonstrating that three of the biggest issues inhibiting knowledge workers are...

1.) Don’t know what data are already available on the subject, or cannot find it, or cannot understand it

2.) Don’t know who has expertise in the subject, or who is already working on the same subject

3.) Don’t know what’s been tried before, what was experienced, and what was learned

Notice a pattern?  Ignorance.  After 50 years of calculator investment -- LITERALLY TRILLIONS OF $ -- most employees are ignorant: they are unaware of the information assets, human assets, and corporate experience THAT ALREADY EXISTS IN THE ORGANIZATION.  There’s a good argument being made now that the degree of ignorance on these dimensions is something like 99%, which means that there’s a 100X improvement opportunity here.  Sound high?  Consider this: knowledge workers and managers report spending more than 25% of their time -- every day -- searching for information they need.  Every day.  And, here’s the real killer: that’s just the time they spend looking for things they know to look for, things they believe there’s a chance they’ll find, etc.  There’s a radical step-function opportunity in efficiency, effectiveness, and creativity lurking in the knowledge-sharing problem.

So, please, please, please.....stop asking to see what a product can do with your data.  You’re falling for a card-hustler’s hypnotic tricks.  Keep your eye on the frontier of 100X improvement, something that can actually have a noticeable impact on your team’s results: 

1.) Making sure employees can find and understand the data available across the organization

2.) Making sure employees can find and engage expert coworkers across the organization 

3.) Making sure employees can learn from the community’s experiments and experiences

 Once again: it's all about people.

Collaboration and False Friends

My new friend Huguette has been studying up on her English with a book called Vrais Amis et Faux Amis.  In English, that's "true friends and false friends."  Now, this book is not about friendship; it's about words.  Specifically, it's about words that exist in both English and French -- true friends being the situations in which both languages interpret one word the same way, and false friends being those risky situations in which the same letters or sounds have different interpretations by the two cultures.  For instance, "superb" means the same thing in both languages.  But, "car" means this to English-speakers...

...but this to French-speakers.

 

So, it would be easy for me to THINK that I understand Huguette when she uses the word "car," but my mind would be traveling in a different direction from hers…which could create a funny (or not-so-funny) situation later.

This morning, I was thinking about how pervasive this situation is -- even within a single culture.  And, it dawned on me:

DISagreement is not the worst situation in communication.  
MISagreement is.

We are in such a hurry all the time.  A hurry to talk.  A hurry to be heard.  A hurry to move on to the next thing.  A hurry to get something done.  Many times, I REALLY WANT to believe that the other person agrees with me.  So, I am not careful to confirm we have a true agreement, rather than a MISagreement.  It is only later that we must suddenly stop/rewind/redo either one or both partners' resulting work.  

Fortunately, disagreement is also often an illusion.  Yes, fortunately.  You see, I find that most initial appearances of disagreement are such that with a bit of clarification we find that we were simply focused on different parts of the same problem or that we did not have the same information -- and we don't actually disagree in any meaningful way about what needs to be done.

Paradoxically, the fastest way to a truly collaborative outcome is the early appearance of disagreement. 

The early appearance of disagreement usually turns off the automaton-in-a-hurry-to-move-on switch in your brain, slowing you down to focus on what is happening now: this conversation, this partnership, this collaboration needs attention right now to make sure we are in tune -- to avoid MISagreement. 

When you sense one of these situations, I recommend you approach it like the scientific method: test for the alternative hypothesis -- "When you say <insert word>, I interpret that as <insert narrative description or example>.  How are you using the term <insert word>?"  Repeat this until you find the term on which you are disagreeing -- or until you decide that you really, actually disagree.  Either way, it is in your best interest to highlight, isolate, and address misunderstandings and to avoid MISagreements.

While the MISagreement problem certainly happens in spoken communication, I think it is epidemic in written communication like corporate reporting presentations -- especially those that use abbreviated text, bullet points, and illustrations.  In fact, I think we often TRY to make MISagreement happen in our presentations: it requires a great deal of intellectual honesty to use words and images that are intended to avoid MISagreement.  

It is not enough to use words that can mean what you say.  It is essential to use words that cannot mean anything else.

 Even if this means inviting disagreement.  Because I'll take a true disagreement over a false agreement any day of the week.

 

Fusion-powered Idea Machine

I’ve been in a cave working on some new stuff, so when I recently did the gopher-boy thing and stuck my head outside the cave, I saw people asking new questions about enterprise social, collaboration, 2.0, etc.  A few of the questions are still silly, of course; but most of the old questions were silly, so we’re making progress.   

My favorite retirements, the things that people have stopped asking, are:

• Why do we need another collaboration platform if we have Sharepoint?
• What’s the ROI on collaboration?
• Are we going to be using Facebook at work?
• Is this a demographic, generational thing?

Though I am certainly not a representative sample, the questions I am hearing most these days are like this:

• What are the cognitive mechanisms by which collaboration facilitates innovation?
• What atmosphere, processes, and features are needed to support those mechanisms?

Now we’re talking!  It seems that the world has turned a corner in the last year regarding enterprise collaboration.  As my buddy Cam says: we’ve stopped playing defense, and now we’re on offense – trying to do something amazing.

I think these last two questions are important for buyers and vendors alike.  For the former, they provide a framework for selecting products, of course.  But, they also provide a framework for the culture, policy, and process change management support required for any transformational program.  You cannot just plug and play a tool to get long-term organizational change.  For the vendors, these two questions provide a backdrop against which to evaluate product development plans.

 

The Collaboration Fusion Mechanism

Collaboration is not additive, it is multiplicative.  And, there is a cross-product.  This sounds sort of math-geeky, but it’s actually some pretty simple logic – and it provides a very nice scheme for thinking about how 1 + 1 > 2 when it comes to collaboration.  Here is how it works.  

Aside from his/her computational and creative skills, each person in the team brings two things to the party.

E is the explicit knowledge of a person, expressed in his/her artifacts.

T is the tacit knowledge of a person, expressed in his/her intuition.

To keep things relatively simple, let’s focus on a team of two people, a and b, each of whom carries both types of knowledge discussed above.  

a = (Ea + Ta)        b = (Eb + Tb)

When they work together on a problem, sharing both elements of knowledge with each other, some powerful idea cross-products emerge – activating Tacit knowledge in lots of places:

(Ea + Ta) x (Eb + Tb) = EaEb + EaTb + EbTa + TaTb

The first term EaEb is combining artifact-based knowledge. Left brain + left brain.

The middle terms EaTb and EbTa are the intersection of one person’s intuition with another person’s artifacts. Left brain + right brain.

The final term TaTb is the collision of multiple vectors of tacit/intuitive power — it’s the magic that happens when we are both at the whiteboard together.  Right brain + right brain.

One caveat: as discussed in the sidebar above, “activating the Tacit” requires a degree of interactivity, experimentation, adaptation, sampling, etc. that is technologically difficult to deliver in an appealing user experience.

 

Therefore…

Based upon the framework above, here’s a representative list of capabilities your collaboration platform must provide if it is to start the innovation reactor: 

Sharing (EaEb, the first term)

1. Upload, share, link, embed any artifact, data, widget or feed from any source
2. Multi-dimensional organizing  and associating with tags, keywords
3. User-defined relationships and links between artifacts
4. Integrated search engine for all formal and informal knowledge
5. Mesh trust model for fine-grain sharing

Extending (EaTb and EbTa, the middle terms)

1. Rich, evolutionary user profiles including endorsements and expertise
2. Emergent group/room/discussion formation and feedback solicitation
3. Conversations (email, IM, voice, vidcon) associated with artifacts & vice versa
4. Direct commenting, textual annotation, and margin drawing by colleagues
5. Interactive sampling, remixing, derivation from all shared artifact types
6. System recommendations based upon content, tags, and user behavior 

Creating (TaTb, the final term)

1. Private communication channels and pre-publication experimentation spaces
2. Ability for users to synthesize data from any source easily, impulsively
3. Simultaneously co-created digital whiteboards, spreadsheets, documents, charts, presentations, Gantts, etc.

There are lots and lots of other features you could/should consider, but I think the list above stretches your envelope in the right directions. (It stretches mine, anyway; I definitely see some things Lyza needs.)  If you’d like to add some suggestions, please send a comment.  Everyone will benefit from your perspective.

Casting Call

If you are a leader of a growing business, you spend a lot of time recruiting and assimilating new team members.  I hope to share a few ideas in this post to help you get a better return on your efforts.  Most of these ideas fit under this heading: roles, NOT responsibilities.

I hate job descriptions.  Hate.  I am passionate about seeing people flourish to their potential, and IMHO nothing smothers potential like an HR-friendly, legal-approved job description.  The prototypical job description would make Marx chuckle and say "I told you so" -- meaning this description leaves almost nothing to chance, focuses exclusively on the list of specific things for which this person can be judged individually as having done/not, and speaks of the position's manager as one who will tell you what to do, when, and how.  This is not an epic existence.  Far from it.  This is a recipe for total creative shutdown, for dehumanization, for withering, for apathy, for disengagement, for stagnation.  If that's not clear, contrast it with how we learn naturally…as pre-school children, before the institutional machine starts working us over.

Children instinctively live mythically.  "Precision" is sacrificed for a greater degree of suggestion.  Myth is the mode of simultaneous awareness of a complex group of causes and effects. Myth means putting on the audience, putting on one's environment….putting on a whole vesture, a whole time, a Zeit.  People today reject goals.  They want roles -- R-O-L-E-S.  That is, total involvement.  They do not want fragmented, specialized goals or jobs.  Marshall McLuhan

At some risk of inviting critique from the HR and Legal department, here are my 3 simple reasons for ditching "job descriptions" and replacing them with "roles."  

 

#1: Roles are about BEING, rather than DOING.

The hyper-focus on responsibilities is a canker left over from the Smith-to-Taylor industrial days, breaking down tasks into sub-tasks -- and roles into sets of tasks -- ad infinitum.  Great for pin manufacturing.  Not great for the post-modern, post-industrial information economy in which ideas and creativity cut the path to profit.  I know this is cliche, but that's probably because it's true: we are called human BEINGS, not human DOINGS.  When you think about your team, don't do it with an org chart in front of you.  Don't think about tasks and responsibilities.  Rather, approach it as a director of a theatrical production: how would I describe each role on the cast?  If you have not seen a cast summary in a while, go find one on the internet.  It will DEFINITELY NOT talk about tasks, because it's a ROLE.  And, the beautiful thing about roles is….they give the cast member room to improvise, to interpret, to experiment….to grow.  To BE and BECOME.

 

#2: Roles are elastic and relative.

Most job descriptions that focus on responsibility are rigid and isolated.  Given the pace, complexity, and fluidity of the challenges you face each day, can you afford to have your hard-won recruits shackled within rigidly defined individual responsibilities that make the word ME look a lot bigger than the word TEAM?  I think not.  Most of us face challenges that (1) were unanticipated when the job descriptions were written and (2) can only be solved collaboratively -- in relation to other people.  Define and communicate roles in a way that reflects this reality.

 

#3: Role performance must be judged holistically.

To satisfy the HR or Legal guidelines, we create job descriptions from bullet points of easily observable accountabilities for each individual on the team.  But, while the king may prance around proud of this clothing, he's naked -- and everyone knows it this time….the recruits especially.  As discussed in the previous paragraph, the nature of work has morphed significantly in the post-industrial era.  We need to stop pretending that the old accountability model works.  The old list of job responsibilities isn't REALLY what we're using to evaluate people.  Nobody's buying that.  So, we should stop pretending that's how we judge people.  A role is judged holistically and subjectively -- sort of like a…human.

Change the way you think about your team, then change the way you communicate about it.  Think of your team as a cast, yourself as a director.  Eschew silly pretense about tasky job descriptions.  And, you'll find yourself building and retaining a much more creative team. 

We are in the Massage Business

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.  Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions (seeing, hearing, etc).  The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act, the way we perceive the world.  When these ratios change, men change.  The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment.  Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement.  Marshall McLuhan

Somewhere during the last 20 years, we hit a tipping point in man's relationship with technology as media -- active participation became the norm, replacing passive consumption.  It had something to do with mass adoption of video camcorders in the late 80's, email and the internet itself in the late 90's, and later from the very odd source called the online role-playing video game.  Through these sources, we learned to interact with technology, information, and each other in an active, adaptive, unconstrained way.  And, as McLuhan foresaw, this new interaction changed us -- and, I will argue the change opens up a big opportunity for your business.

How different is the internet REALLY as a medium for information?  

Well, um, vastly different.  Consider how one consumes information in the library (if you can remember what that was like).  You search for information clusters (a book) through a rigid category scheme (taxonomy) created and maintained by someone else (librarians), and when you find a cluster (book) you must consume it linearly until its literal, physical end.  If you are lucky, the book includes some footnotes regarding related works, from which you can bridge to other clusters -- when the library has the other book!  Oh, and you typically do it alone, while being told to ssshhhh by the librarian.  It is a process that assumes you are an empty bottle on a conveyor belt, awaiting a spurt of goo to be shot into your head before you move off and make room for the next bottle.  There's very little freedom and interaction in this model.

In contrast, information on the internet is classified organically and redundantly.  It is hyper-related and instantaneously comparable across clusters.  Much of it is user-created and user-administered, particularly the classifications -- which can even be personalized.  And, the form of the medium allows for simultaneous consumption and discussion by multiple parties.  Compared to using the library, this process makes me feel in control, free, creative, and connected -- all of which encourage me to take more risks, to look in odd places, to consider the unique/different/odd/far-out.

Please don't misunderstand me: I do not believe this is a "youth" thing.  Video games, FB, widgets, ipads, youtube, iMovie are changing people -- all the people, young and old -- who use them.  We are all becoming accustomed to a holistic, non-linear, participative, evocative experience with content.  We expect to be involved, active.  We feel a tool or technology is outdated or stifling when it forces us into a rigid, linear, or passive consumption mode.  Like, for instance, Powerpoint.  ug.  Or, how about the monthly revenue results review -- we sit around a table and walk through a scripted presentation by one person following a linear argument. No wonder that people are playing with their iphones under the table.  We have been programmed by our personal information technology media TO WANT TO PARTICIPATE, TO WANT TO ACT.  Unfortunately, our corporate technology media do not reinforce this drive to act.  Yet.

This is where we get to the part about "opportunity."

By fostering active user participation in the medium, Enterprise Collaboration Platforms will translate to greater active participation … IN ACTING.  In other words, people will be reprogrammed FROM waiting for orders TO making things happen.  If I had a dollar for every CEO who has lamented a lack of initiative among employees, I'd be a rich man.  Well, let's do something about that.  Implement a collaboration platform, and cultivate a bias toward chiming in, toward stepping out, toward taking chances, toward experimenting, toward acting.  

Enterprise Collaboration is NOT about chatter; it's about shaping your culture, getting employees active.  It goes beyond improving content, beyond "better information" -- the medium itself will have a profound impact on moving your team from its heels to its toes.

The medium is the massage.  Marshall McLuhan

Dangerous Business, the Future

Improvisation is the way to wonder, and wonder is contagious.  Everyone loves to uncover something amazing, something startling.  And to share it with others.  Human beings' natural state is looking for the wonder in life.  By bringing many disciplines, facts, and people into a single conversation, today's enterprise social software is making idea-fusions possible on a scale never before seen.  This is the atomic age of ideas, the age of idea-fusion.  

The contained, the distinct, the separate -- our Western legacy -- are being replaced by the flowing, the unified, the fused.  When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively (fused), startling discoveries often result.  Marshall McLuhan

There are some startling discoveries being made by combining a little of this with a little of that.  And, the interesting thing is that many of these magic cocktails are being put together by total amateurs.  But, that's not really a surprise.  Experts hate to be startled. Experts have a category for each thing, and each thing is filed in its category. Experts are shorn of wonder as their initiation rite.   It's sort of sad.  But, worse than sad, it is bad.  A bias against wonder saddles experts and everyone around them with an unbearable inertia against progress, against experimentation, against exploration….against anything that produces the startling and wonder-filled….the aha moment.  Why?  

These improvisations and fusions across disciplines are dangerous.  They threaten established ways of seeing the world.  By transcending and blending categories, they threaten categories -- including the categories in which the experts place themselves.  They threaten our strategies and methods.  They threaten…wait…what do they really threaten?   

These improvisational fusions threaten only our bad assumptions, delusions, and pretenses.  They threaten only to break us free from the inertia of tradition and habit and we-can't-remember-why. In that sense, collaboration's cross-disciplinary fusions will, indeed, produce a powerful reaction.  One that will power your organization for years to come.

It is the business of the future to be dangerous.  A N. Whitehead

 

What is Collaborative Intelligence?

I get asked often to define this term of Collaborative Intelligence that we started using a couple of years ago.  As I’ve said on my blog, I am a little wary of labels and categories.  So, I’ll simply convey what I see converging in the real world: Collaborative Intelligence is a set of technologies and techniques helping groups of people apply their collective intelligence toward making good decisions together.

It’s important to remember that every hour of every day at work, every employee is making decisions.  If you are a knowledge worker – actually, even if you hammer rivets or crush rock or solder wires for a paycheck – then the decisions you make are (hopefully) dependent upon something like the following Decision Stack:

• Data:  the set of available facts
• Model: a theory or algorithm about how things work
• Aspiration: preferences, desires, or goals and their rationale
• Compromise: tradeoffs and diplomacy among competing interests

Every little decision we make each day involves this stack. Sometimes certain pieces of the stack are flawed; sometimes they are subconscious; but, all decisions involve these things.  And, every day, all day, we are doing this at work.  “Collaborative Intelligence” is just a short-hand label for what we see when we are working together to make better-informed decisions.  So, it’s about how groups of people (2-n) explore data, models, aspirations, and compromises to help make things better.

 Collaborative Intelligence is not just some new features added to Business Intelligence.  Business Intelligence (BI) is a field of technology that has made great contributions over the last 30 years in the preparation, storage, retrieval, and distribution of facts.  To a meaningful but lesser extent, it has also made contributions in the area of developing  explanatory and predictive models.

Unfortunately, mainstream BI has gotten stuck in a corner in the above diagram, relying on technologies and techniques that are fundamentally centrally-driven, static, data-focused, and impersonal.  This has opened a great door for more grass-roots, participative, people-centric, adaptive, edgy, conversational, and diplomatic tools and techniques, like what we see evolving in the Enterprise 2.0 space.  The grass-roots conversations and activity streams that are the stock-in-trade of Enterprise 2.0 platforms are full of information-scent, Pirolli’s concept of little hints about hidden-but-interesting things.  So, when using those platforms one feels naturally drawn into conversations and topics and investigations, within which one can share additional facts, models, aspirations, and compromises. 

So far, the Enterprise 2.0 tools have not addressed the important BI territory of Data and Models; but, it is only a matter of time until they realize that collaboration without Data and Models is just idle chatter.  It is up to the BI community to realize at the same time, however, that People are essential to the process of applying data to make things better.  I have no doubt we will see the tools and techniques of BI expand along the lines indicated by the arrows in the diagram above, just as the tools and techniques of Enterprise 2.0 expand in the opposite direction.  This convergence will be wonderful for users.

This is what Lyzasoft (and others, like Qlikview for instance) are working on today: blending the two worlds of Collaboration and Business Intelligence, creating products that help people apply their collective intelligence to make better decisions. That’s what I mean by “Collaborative Intelligence.” 

Mysticism, Management, and Cultures of Innovation

I like people who see the world differently.  They are more entertaining, and they are also more helpful -- nudging my brain in novel ways.  One of my most different-seeing friends is a wonderful artist by the name of Joel Swanson.  (http://www.joelswanson.net/)  

At a gallery opening of some of his recent work, Joel highlighted a few wonderfully insightful statements by Sol Lewitt from his book Art-Language, written back in 1969.  While they were originally focused on the creative process of artists, I think they apply well to the high-ambiguity/high-creative process of innovation in general.  I’ll restate them, then I’ll try to explain how I think we can apply them outside the world of art.

1. Rational judgments repeat rational judgments.  
2. When words such as “painting” and “sculpture” are used, they connote a whole tradition and imply a consequent acceptance of this tradition, thus placing limitations on the artist, who would be reluctant to make art that goes beyond these limitations.
3. Irrational judgments lead to new experience.
4. Mystics leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.

It is fitting I think to make a post on mysticism and innovation in a week in which Apple’s market value exceeds Exxon’s as #1 on the planet.  Fitting because there is no logic that could have reached the conclusion to build the mac or itunes/ipod or the ipad or the iphone. You can call it “hunch” or “intuition” or “gut feel” or “inspiration” or “sixth sense” or whatever.  But, you could not have defined or categorized or sized any of these things before they existed.  We simply did not have the words or the analogies or the baseline statistics.  It took a “mystic” leap to see the world differently.

Unfortunately, your company’s culture probably requires all of these definitions and categorizations and estimates BEFORE people will take an idea seriously.  Uh oh.  This could explain why so much “innovation” in many enterprises is little more than a retread or repackaging of the same old stuff.

All of which leads me to the $64,000 question: how does a leader cultivate the right conditions for the emergence of groundbreaking, creative ideas?  I’m no expert, so I’ll just toss out six suggestions for starters.

1. Don’t get into labels and numbers too early in an idea’s life.  Forcing categories and labels and quantification too early will prune all the really new thoughts from the room, because the really new thoughts defy the pre-existing linguistic constructs, categories, numbers, standards, etc.  Our reality shapes our words and categories INITIALLY, but after that the words and categories become the master -- shaping and constraining our ongoing perceptions of a changing reality.
2. RE-think and play with categories and measures....often.  Accept, even encourage it.  OF COURSE, you have to maintain balance here: some applications (KPI/SEC/etc) require stability in categories and measures.  BUT, that’s no reason that you can’t experiment elsewhere with looking at reality differently.  It’s not EITHER/OR.
3. Focus on the person’s CONCEPT of the world/ biz/ product/ process/ competition/ whatever -- not just the numbers or even the conclusions.  Some really great kernels are lurking in powerpoint presentations with ill-advised conclusions or with erroneous arithmetic.  Step back and ask yourself: how is Bob seeing the world, to have focused on this or that in such and such a way?  You don’t have to agree with his conclusions to profit from changing your perspective.
4. Let the grass roots grow under ideas.  When big-wigs adopt an idea formally, all of the suggestions above become REALLY hard to do.
5. Reward conceptualization.  Preserve the conceptualization contribution as distinct from the implementation, because otherwise the implementers get all the glory.
6. Reduce information friction with a collaborative intelligence platform.  Even the best original idea benefits from the refinement and extension of other perspectives.  But, this can happen only if the two potential collaborators can connect.  Use a collaboration platform to maximize the chance of connections b/w a few people who grok the same concept and can extend/ remix/ bend/ share/ extend/ implement it.

The Wave

I just finished the excellent book The Wave by Susan Casey, and this morning a seed from the book sprouted in my mind.  Casey interviews several Hawaiians about the sea and the surf, and they all talk about not the waves (plural) at a place but the wave (singular) at a place.  That is, they (even their ancient ancestors) realized that all of the crests breaking in at a particular spot are the product of a single, unique, stationary entity -- which turns out to be (though perhaps the ancients did not quite understand this part) the topology of the ocean floor at that place.  So, each place has a recurring, known and unique set of behaviors under various circumstances, which is to say a way of responding to energy of swells of various intensities and directions.  The Hawaiians characterize the whole of these behaviors as a persona: the wave at a place has a personality and a name and a reputation, and you have a relationship with it.

So, I was thinking this morning that the Hawaiians’ view of the wave also reveals their view of a person.  They projected onto the wave a concept that they already understood from dealing with each other.  They must have already viewed real men and women as being defined by how each refracts, reflects, absorbs, and amplifies the energy in the swells of life to create smooth or rugged, excellent or scary, tubular or foamy, etc waves for the rest of us.  When life hits Sam from thus-and-such direction, he does this-and-that.  Etc.  I think this is a wonderful way to look at yourself, your life, and your relationships -- personal and professional.

Stuff happens, to paraphrase the bumper sticker.  We all encounter thousands of different swells -- energy of challenges and opportunities and mysteries -- in our lives.  These swells hit us from every imaginable angle and height, so they touch every bend and curve and surface of our character -- revealing a rich and true picture, like a sonogram of our soul.  It is a complex picture, and it bears the truth of improvisation: this is not a staged picture; rather, it is a dynamic test in which we see a person “in play in the real world, not posing or reading a script.”  And, I think this is the truest picture.  Here’s why.

Consider the character of someone you admire.  Describe that character with a few words. Now consider those words, and ask yourself: are they manifest in a static environment (no swells) or in a dynamic environment (impacted with swells)?  If you used words like....trustworthy, caring, strong, diligent, etc....you are describing someone’s behavior in dynamic environments in which life gave that person every opportunity to sell out or ignore or rest or play.  But, this person reacted to those swells by channeling them into something smooth for you.  A nice wave.

Life is not stasis, and we are not static models.  And the swells of life are not interruptions or disruptions to some hypothetical snapshot state: they are the dynamic energy that allows us to reveal ourselves by how we reflect and refract and absorb and amplify those swells for the people around us.  The trick is to learn to channel more types of conditions into clean, smooth, rides -- to avoid producing turmoil and turbulence.  We all have good days and bad days, but that’s not what this is about.  It’s about patterns of behavior and illusions of an the unexamined life.  Take a look at your patterns: what is the character of your wave?

(p.s. --  Your team is a wave, too.  How does it respond to dynamic swells to create a great ride?)