Category: book riffs

There’s No Way an Algorithm Made This Playlist

Nancy and I were eating at Jolly Good in Melbourne, talking about everything, like we tend to. In the background, the music they were playing was incredible. The first song I noticed was Streets of our town by The Go-betweens, followed by Somebody to Love by Jefferson Airplane, Tin Soldiers by Stiff Little Fingers, with a couple of great songs I’d never heard before mixed in — Italy by Rain Dogs and Magic of Meghan by Dry Cleaning.

When the Dry Cleaning song came on, I said to Nancy “There’s no way an algorithm made this playlist!” All the songs were great, but there was no thread between them. No era, no genre, no single nation of origin (a Spotify favourite). I’ve listened to enough algorithm-generated playlists to be pretty confident that this wasn’t one.

As we were paying our bill, I asked the owner what the music was. Her response: “Oh, it’s playlist our friend Craig put together for us.” See? I told you.

What Pulls it Together?

It reminded me of a great mix tape (props to anyone reading this old enough to remember or to have made one of those!) It also reminded me of when I used to do radio shows. By the time I graduated from college, I had done several thousand hours of radio shows on the campus radio station. Some jazz, some reggae, a very tiny amount of classical (I was never let on again after I started a show I was filling in on an emergency basis by saying “Today we’re doing to take a look at 5th symphonies, starting with Dvorak…”), but mostly I played rock — punk, garage, proto-goth, what eventually became “alternative”, that sort of thing.

At the end of each show, I had a sense of whether or not I thought things went well or not, but I couldn’t explain why. One weird thing that I noticed was that on the days that I thought hadn’t worked well, I had just as many people tell me they liked the show as I did on the days when I thought everything was clicking.

How could that be?

(Me, in the studio a loooooong time ago*)

I’ve only recently come up with a good hypothesis about this, many years after the fact. For most of the people giving me feedback about the shows, the only criteria by which they judged them was “Did I like the songs?” If they did, they told me it was a good show. Fair enough — that’s the whole point of radio, especially if at least one or two of the things they liked were songs they hadn’t heard before.

But to me, great music was a given. I was always in the booth with the monitors on loud, dancing around, and generally making an idiot of myself in private, until I went on mic to announce the songs, when I would make an idiot of myself in public. So it wasn’t the music that was making it work or not work for me. There must be something else.

At the time, I thought it was a sense of flow. I always had an inherent sense afterwards if things had “fit together” in a way that made sense to me. That’s something that has carried over to a lot of things in my job now — lectures, public talks, workshops, and all the different kinds of writing that I do. Part of it was definitely flow.

But there was something else too.

Wholeness

I now think that it was what Christopher Alexander calls wholeness in his books series The Nature of Order. Alexander is best known for his early books that re-thought architecture. A Pattern Language laid out 253 patterns that make buildings and towns more amenable to living full, rewarding lives. The Timeless Way of Building then explains the actual methods to follow to achieve these patterns. This work had enormous influence not just on architecture, but other fields as well, particularly software engineering.

In The Nature of Order, Alexander is even more ambitious. He tries to go one level up to see if there are general rules that generate the 253 patterns that he found in his earlier work. In doing this, he grapples with the intersections between complexity theory, architecture and design, and other big ideas. Like I said, ambitious. And he does find some general rules — fifteen of them, in fact — that generate what he calls wholeness. These are the rules:

Here’s a good blog post that explains each of them with some examples from nature. In thinking about my shows, I actually think that the tacit knowledge bit that I was trying to explain is exactly this – wholeness. It turns out that a number of Alexander’s rules apply to what I thought of as a good show.

Here’s a small example: Rule 9 Contrast. To me, a great show was one that touched on a wide range of genres and eras, different speeds and moods, some loud songs and some quiet ones, and so on. Contrast is really important. And there’s an art to putting together contrast. It’s relatively simple to put together one set that’s fast and loud, while the next one is quiet and calm. That’s good, but it’s even better if you can find a way to blend between these extremes within a set.

Here’s a great example of how you might do this. It’s from my most-listened to songs list from last year**

I love both these songs, but they’re very different. The Agnes Obel song is quiet, slow, and beautiful. The Propagandhi song is, well, none of those. But it starts quietly before it kicks in. So when you play the songs in this order, you can shift from quiet to loud without it being too jarring. Contrast!

There are probably another 8 or so of the rules that I was unconsciously using to pull together a good show. Since reading The Rules of Order, I think that this explains where the good shows were coming from. The rules that were incorporated created patterns that lead to a good show as an emergent outcome. And I think there’s a LOT of value in working out how we can do this more consciously.

Where Does Wholeness Come From?

This isn’t really a post about AI, but I guess in some ways it is, since I started with machine learning algorithms. Christopher Alexander’s work is a good example of doing things that AI can’t do well (at least currently). Once you define the 253 patterns, AI can identify examples that reflect them. Machine learning can identify patterns, and it can cluster ones that appear together frequently (correlation), but the reason that Alexander’s work was a breakthrough was that he identified the patterns using creative thinking, and, more importantly, he made the distinction between patterns that are good, and generative, and those that are bad, and limiting.

That’s based on values. And on thinking based on values.

This is even more true for the work he did in identifying the fifteen rules that generate these patterns. This is in part because these are examples of abductive reasoning – inferring the best explanation for observed data. When you combine abductive reasoning with values-based thinking, you have something that is still uniquely human.

Values, judgement, and inference lead to wholeness, and so do love and care. These are what made my good shows good, and they were there in the Jolly Good playlist too. These are small examples, but Alexander’s are bigger and more important. These examples show how applying simple rules at a local level can lead to good emergent outcomes at a higher level. We can do this in a range of contexts, though it might be particularly important to keep these ideas in mind for the work we do that actually involves AI.

We can ask of any new idea: would making this real increase wholeness, or break it?

*I don’t think that me playing songs from Eternally Yours by the Saints was foreshadowing a move to Brisbane 15 years later, but I guess you never know…

**This is kind of algorithm-driven, but in theory at least, the list is just based on a stack-ranking of the songs I listened to the most, so both of these were in my top 20 last year.

Note: it’s been a few years since I’ve written anything here (thanks to Jason Fox and Nilofer Merchant for the prompts to get back to writing). I do have a number of ideas I’m trying to work out, so I’ll be showing up here a bit more frequently. Your interests may well have changed since my last post, so if you’re getting this via email and it doesn’t resonate, or if you can’t even remember subscribing in the first place, I won’t feel insulted (or even know!) if you hit the unsubscribe link.

31 March 2025
A Conversation is the Smallest Unit of Change

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
-Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

“After I used the term sympoiesis in a grasp for something other than the lures of autopoiesis, Katie King told me about M. Beth Dempster’s Master of Environmental Studies thesis written in 1998, in which she suggested the term sympoieisis for “collectively-produced systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries. Information and control are distributed among components. The systems are evolutionary and have the potential for surprising change.””
-Donna Haraway, Staying With the Trouble

It’s not a stretch to say that people are complex. We are. We are staggeringly complex. Whitman’s idea of the “I” as a container of multitudes is apt, and each of those multitudes is shaped by interactions with others. We become ourselves as parts of sympoietic systems.

The only way we can make ourselves is through making each other. And we always have a choice in how we make others. Do we do it using generative, both/and, mutually thriving stories, thoughts, and language, or do we do it using narcissistic, better-than, zero-sum ideas? The choices we make for how we make others drives who “we” are.

All this might sound a bit abstract, but it’s really important. Think about all of the networks that you belong to, and all of the interactions that make up the culture of these networks. These interactions often fall into patterns, and then might even firm up into protocols.

We have these protocols in all of the groups of which we are members. This can be small groups of just two people – a partner, friend, child, parent, or co-worker. Or even a nemesis! This can be larger groups of people – a family, team, club, or group of friends. If we’re lucky, some of these groups will be crews that help us create new things, and that help us thrive. This can be even larger groups – a clan, congregation, movement, or state.

In all of these different types of groups, we have our protocols for interacting. This is culture. We can view these protocols as constraints, as things that act to control us. And the protocols that we have at the large group level influence how we interact as pairs. If we meet in public, there are protocols for how far apart we stand, which directions we face, whether or not and how we touch each other, what we’re expected to say. And all of these protocols are different for each of our groups. Sometimes subtly different, and sometimes shockingly so.

Even as simple a question as how far apart do we stand when we meet for the first time has very different answers in Stockholm, Manhattan, and Tokyo.

You might say that each of us is the sum total of all of the protocols that we know and can enact in all of the different contexts that we might find ourselves in.

But – and this is very important! – we aren’t just made by protocols. We make them. We make them all the time – creatively, joyfully, sneakily, fearfully. There’s constraint, but there’s also enablement.

And if we don’t like the way one of our larger systems (cultures) is working, the only way to change it is by changing the protocols that we use.

Here’s a practical example. When we were building the ON Program to increase research impact, the core tool was stakeholder interviews. We asked each research team to have in depth conversations with, ideally, at least 100 stakeholders – people that could use their science, one way or another.

This ended up changing a lot of protocols for the researchers, including:
• Who to talk with – added “stakeholders” to the more normal “other researchers.”
• Who talks to stakeholders – changed from “Business Development people” to “everyone on the research team.”
• What do we talk about – changed from “pitching our ideas” to “learning about the needs and desires of the stakeholders.”
• Where do our great ideas come from – added “stakeholders” to the more normal “our team” and “the research literature.”

These changes in protocols ended up changing the emergent outcomes of the research process/culture. One big change is in impact. The number of research-based spinouts from the hundreds of teams that have gone through the program is over ten times higher than what we would normally see from the same number of teams doing business as usual.

This also ended up re-making who the researchers are – they changed too. They are more widely and deeply engaged with their broader network of stakeholders. They feel they have more agency in driving impact from their work. In other words, their culture has changed. Consequently, their impact on the world has also changed.

That’s a business example, but the same things happen as we interact within all of our networks. And so – we’re made by protocols, and we make protocols. We’re made by ourselves, we’re made by others, and we’re made by making each other. It’s why we have the potential for surprising change.

*Note* this post has been influenced by lots of conversations I’ve been having recently with Nilofer Merchant, Jason Fox (and The Coterie), Kim Lam, Joe Lightfoot, Kate Morrison, and Richard Bartlett and Nati Lombardo’s work on Microsolidarity, among many others!

26 September 2020
The Power of Purposeful Innovation

The Herman Miller company became one of the world’s first manufacturers of sustainably-produced furniture almost by accident. Back in the 1950s, as the company became one of the biggest furniture manufacturers in the US selling now iconic designs from Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson, and Alexander Girard. At the time, DJ de Pree, the founder of the company, made a couple of key decisions that still influence the way the firm operates today.

The first is that he believed that the company should make the most of the unique talents held by each of their employees. This is embodied today in their value for inclusion and diversity, which says “We’re all extraordinary.” In practical terms, this value led de Pree and subsequent CEOs to implement a participative management structure within the firm. This meant distributing decision-making authority much further down the corporate power hierarchy than normal. It also involved giving all employees an ownership stake in the company.

These moves support a second company value – ensuring quality. This is done through a unique decision-making structure where many important actions and strategies are initiated by teams of ordinary workers and mid-level managers, who DJ’s son Hugh referred to as Roving Leaders.

The final two company values at Herman Miller are Doing Good Well, which sets corporate targets for community service from the firm’s employees, and We’re All in This Together, which includes a pledge that the company will be an environmental sustainability leader. DJ de Pree said in the 1950s that the company “will be a good corporate neighbor by being a good steward of the environment.” Today, the actions that the firm takes to act on this value are impressive.

It started in the late 1980s, when a small group of Roving Leaders formed to support their shared commitment to environmental sustainability. The group quickly ended up playing a bigger role in the firm than they expected when they discovered a very unsustainable process in building one of their most popular products. Bill Birchard tells the story in his book Merchants of Virtue: Herman Miller and the Making of a Sustainable Company:

Charles and Ray Eames sitting on their classic Lounge Chair & Ottoman

“Rosewood was the object of particular reverence. It adorned the celebrated Eames Lounge Chair a product so loved by designers and high-end furniture buyers that it still sold steadily after 45 years. A cradle of molded rosewood lined with irresistibly soft calfskin cushions, the chair was the company’s signature product. Though [expensive], its appeal luxuriousness, and iconic status – synonymous with Herman Miller – made changing its wood almost unthinkable.”

But the team of Roving Leaders did have to think about it. The rosewood came from trees that were becoming critically endangered in the rapidly dwindling Brazilian rainforest. It took several years, but the Roving Leaders Environmental team convinced first the CEO, then the Board, then the rest of the company that sourcing something other than rosewood was the right thing to do – even if it wasn’t required by legislation or a ban. If you buy an Eames Lounge Chair today from Herman Miller, or any of the other classic Eames designs that use wood, your choices in wood veneer are sustainably harvested cherry or walnut.

When the firm made the switch, they were concerned that it could kill the market for the Eames products. After all, they had been protecting these designs and manufacturing to them faithfully for more than 50 years – authenticity was a big part of what they were selling. The commercial results ended up surprising Herman Miller. Sales went up. A lot.

It turns out that a lot of their customers also care for the environment, and many of them will go out of their way to make sure that their purchases reflect not just style, and comfort, but the value of sustainability as well.

Over the next 25 years, Herman Miller continued to move towards more sustainable manufacturing. The first version of their famous Aeron Office Chair was made from 2/3 recycled materials. The proportion went up substantially in the second version of the Aeron, and this version was also 90% recyclable at the end of its lifespan – Herman Miller had instituted cradle to cradle manufacturing. Other environmental initiatives included eliminating solvent emissions, converting to 100% renewable energy, and the implementation of the Design for the Environment scorecard used to evaluate the sustainability of all of their products.

The drivers of this change were unusual, as Birchard points out:

“Surprisingly, the journey to sustainability at Herman Miller did not take root because a single top manager or the CEO demanded it. At Herman Miller, people like [the Roving Leaders], who worked deep within the organization, desired it. Because the company had a culture of giving its employees the power to make change – an approach it called “participative management” – the change emerged all over. Mid-level leaders, not just hot-shot bosses, led the campaign to bridge the sustainability gap.”

As they’ve done this, this devotion to their organizational values has led to great financial reward for Herman Miller. The company has continued to grow, even surviving the Global Financial Crisis more effectively than their competitors, in large part because they defend their values even more fiercely than the defend the legacy of Charles and Ray Eames.

Mary Parker Follett was one of the world’s first organizational theorists in a business school, and back in the 1920s she wrote:

“Leader and followers are both following the invisible leader – the common purpose. The best executives put this common purpose clearly before their group. While leadership depends on depth of conviction and the power coming therefrom, there must also be the ability to share that conviction with others, the ability to make purpose articulate. And then that common purpose becomes the leader. And I believe that we are coming more and more to act, whatever our theories, on our faith in the power of this invisible leader. Loyalty to the invisible leader gives us the strongest possible bond of union, establishes a sympathy which is not a sentimental but a dynamic sympathy.”

If we are trying to make our organizations more creative, and more innovative, shared purpose is essential. It is this that enables us to operate flatter hierarchies – and this empowerment of lower level employees is a key driver of innovation. Along with cognitive diversity, value-driven business isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s the best way to excel.

Purpose-driven Innovation from Tim Kastelle on Vimeo.

The video is from an online course I made that is currently one of the three that the University of Queensland Business School is offering as close to free as we could make it. I know there’s a lot going on right now, but if you have the bandwidth and desire to build your skills, all three courses are worth checking out.

17 May 2020
Technological Revolutions and the Governance Gap

The Core Problem of Management Today

Sur-veil-lance Cap-i-tal-ism, n. 1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales; 2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification; 3. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history; 4. The foundational framework of a surveillance economy…
Shoshana Zuboff – The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

The problem that Shoshana Zuboff outlines in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is one of governance. As technology races ahead, the norms and institutions that we need to support (or contain) it lag behind.

Scott Brinker frames this problem as Martec’s Law:

Scott Brinker via Neil Perkin

When technology is changing rapidly, the fact that norms, managerial practice, institutions and cultures change at a much different pace creates substantial problems. The disconnect between technological change and organisational change (norms, managerial practice, institutions and culture) can be called a Governance Gap.

Bridging this Governance Gap is one of the core problems of management today.

I’ve used this diagram in classes and lectures, but as I think about it more, I think it’s incomplete. One important missing part is time.

Innovation and Pace Layers

Stewart Brand looks at what makes ecosystems resilient, and builds a model for societies as well in his book The Clock of the Long Now. The system has layers of differing scales, with differing rates of change. Some are shallow and fast, while others are deep and slow. He says:

Consider the differently paced components to be layers. Each layer is functionally different from the others and operates somewhat independently, but each layer influences and responds to the layers closest to it in a way that makes the whole system resilient.
From the fastest layers to the slowest layers in the system, the relationship can be described as follows:
Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.
All durable dynamic systems have this sort of structure. It is what makes them adaptable and robust.
Stewart Brand

The overall system looks like this:

“The fast layers innovate; the slow layers stabilize. The whole combines learning with continuity.”

When you think about it this way, then Martec’s Law makes perfect sense. Of course norms, managerial practice, institutions and cultures change more slowly than technology does – they are all part of the slower pace layers.

When new technologies or new techniques arrive, there are many different versions around as people try to solve the technical problems involved. This is technology operating at the layer of Fashion.

Once the technology becomes relatively stable, a new business model emerges – this is the conversion of the rapid, almost frantic level of innovation going at the Fashion layer into a more stable version at the Commerce layer.

Infrastructure moves even more slowly. If you were an early user of Twitter, you’ll remember the Fail Whale – this popped up every time Twitter’s servers crashed. Up until about ten years ago, just getting enough servers online to support a rapidly growing website was close to impossible. Then, Amazon came up with Amazon Web Services, and other Server-as-a-Service businesses emerged. When this happened, the Infrastructure layer had caught up with the Fashion and Commerce layers.

The problems that Zuboff outlines in her book are the ones that arise when the Governance and Culture layers have not yet adapted to the new business models generated by firms like Google and Facebook. Her book lays out the case for the problems that are being caused by the rapid technological change that is out of synch with innovation in governance – a perfect example of the Governance Gap.

Innovation happens at all of the layers except Nature. Nature is the generator of change to which all the other layers must respond. So what happens when innovation at all of the layers is synchronised? According to Carlota Perez, that’s when we see a Golden Age.

Bubbles and Golden Ages

So here’s how I think we need to use Martec’s Law a bit differently. We need to realise that it’s true over the short term, and it describes the challenge of synchronising change between pace layers.

But if we take a longer-term view, a couple of things become apparent. The first is that technological, or any kind of change, never accelerates exponentially forever. It eventually flattens out – it follows an S Curve.

The second thing is that, as discussed, once change flattens out at one of the faster layers, the slow layers innovate to stabilise, and they catch up.

This process is documented very well by Carlota Perez in her absolutely brilliant book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages. In it, she looks at how major technological revolutions get embedded at the deeper, slower Governance and Cultural layers.

The argument in the book is summarised by this diagram:

Source: Oxfam Blogs

This process is described by Jorge Camacho in a terrific post on the future of design:

Following the so-called “big bang” of each technological revolution, there comes a period of ‘installation’, lasting roughly 20 to 30 years, in which the economy, as it were, explores the new space of possibilities. This is a period of ‘creative destruction’ marked by an increasing concentration of wealth and rising levels of inequality, i.e. a ‘Gilded Age.’ All the capital flowing into the new technologies eventually cause a bubble that bursts into a crisis and recession in the middle of the cycle. This variable period is characterized by high levels of financial speculation. After this turning point, there comes a period of ‘deployment’ in which capital finds its way back into production thus leading to a widespread application of the new techno-economic paradigm in society at large. This is a period of ‘creative construction’: a ‘Golden Age’ characterized not only by sustained growth but also, most importantly, a more equal spreading of the benefits across society.
Jorge Camacho

It’s important to remember, however, that none of this happens automatically. There are no deterministic rules that say “the slower layers always catch up to the faster ones.” We need to actively work to bring that about.

What Should We Do Now?

All this long-term thinking is fine – but right now, today, we have a lot of Governance Gaps to deal with. The technical change curves haven’t been flattening out yet for things such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, cybersecurity, robotics, autonomous vehicles and drones, blockchains, industry 5.0, the internet of things, and augmented and virtual reality.

The fact that some of these have applications are still in the very frothy Fashion layer means that a lot of the ideas around these technologies are just noise. The first thing we need to do is to get better at figuring out for which ones this is true. One clue to look for here is emergent business models – these are a sign that a new technology is starting to coalesce around a dominant design, that may well have some legs.

The second thing to do is to get better at business model innovation. This is the avenue over which new technologies get embedded into the normal function of our existing organisations. If we’re in an industry experiencing change, business model innovation is a core skill.

Finally, it makes sense to think about how to use these new technologies responsibly. It’s been well-documented that when new technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning are used in areas such as hiring and other HR functions, the provision of healthcare, and access to education, there is a strong tendency for the algorithms to reinforce existing social inequalities. At the personal and organisational levels, we must ensure that our use of new technologies decreases existing inequalities rather than increasing them.

At the social level, we can use these technologies and approaches to try to achieve fairer outcomes through work on increasing sustainability in management, or addressing disparities in opportunity. These are the areas that Perez has moved to now, with an emphasis on the role of the state in addressing these issues.

If we think about these issues as we deploy new technologies, and use them responsibly, it makes it much more likely that our organisation’s business model will synch with the deeper, slower layers that will ultimately determine how these technologies will be used over the long run.

And this is crucial, because, over time, slow has all the power.

4 March 2020
Do The Hard Work

I’m not a very good photographer. I love the idea of being a good photographer, but, sadly, I’m not one.

The main reason is that when it comes right down to it, I’m not willing to do the hard work. You need to know about shutter speeds, and apertures, and framing, and all kinds of arcane stuff. And it takes a lot of practice.

Sometimes, I’m tempted to try to skip the work and just try to get better by buying a really nice camera. But that never works.

Me, shot by my friend Ben, who actually has put in the work to be a good photographer.

There are a lot of things like this – where we love the outcome of a process, but hate the process itself. Being fit versus working out, being an author versus writing a book, being innovative versus managing ideas to create value.

I ran across a great example of this in Indi Young’s fantastic book Practical Empathy. Here’s what she says:

Empathy is a noun—a thing. Empathy is an understanding you develop about another person. Empathizing is the use of that under-standing—an action. Empathy is built through the willingness to take time to discover the deep-down thoughts and reactions that make another person tick. It is purposely setting out to comprehend another person’s cognitive and emotional states. Empathy then gives you the ability to try on that person’s perspective—to think and react as she might in a given scenario.
This use of empathy is what most people confuse with empathy itself. People try to act empathetic—to take someone’s perspective, to walk in his shoes—without first taking time to develop empathy. This leap is problematic when it comes to your work. You end up with business decisions based on expectations about how others are reasoning, not based on knowledge.

Empathy is another thing on our list – people often want to act empathetically, but they don’t want to put in the hard work needed to actually build empathy.

This is one of the reasons that most new ideas fail to have impact – we skip the empathy building, and just assume we know what people need. Most of the time, we don’t. And we can’t outsource this – we can’t let someone else build the empathy for us. As Charles Eames said: “Never delegate understanding.”

This is one of the things that bothers me about a lot of the business advice we get – everyone wants efficiency, to reduce friction. But friction can be good! The only way I’ll become a good photographer is to seek out some friction while learning all the stuff I have to learn.

In fact, the only way to build a capability that makes you different is to embrace friction, and do the hard work. There are no secrets to this – we just have to dig in. We need to do the hard work.

Empathy and Why It’s Important from Tim Kastelle on Vimeo.

The video also addresses this idea – it’s part of a Micro-masters that we have made on Corporate Innovation. There are four units in, all four are open for enrolments right now, and you can do it for fun, or for credit. Please check it out.

Of course, if you want to really get the most out of it, you’ll have to do some hard work.

20 January 2019
It Doesn’t Have to Be the Way It Is

Are you happy with the way things are right now?

Probably not, if you’re reading blog posts about innovation. There’s likely something bothering you. It might be something small, or large. If we’re not happy with the status quo, there’s only one thing that will change it – doing something differently. This always starts with an idea.

And not just having an idea – but executing it so that it creates value. That’s innovation.

Where do these ideas come from? Usually, imagination. You have to start by saying “it doesn’t have to be the way it is.” I stole that phrase from the great author Ursula K. Le Guin in her latest book No Time to Spare:

It doesn’t have to be the way it is. That is what fantasy says. It doesn’t say “Anything goes” – that’s irresponsibility, when two and one make five, or forty-seven, or whuddevva, and the story doesn’t “add up,” as we say. Fantasy doesn’t say “Nothing is” – that nihilism. And it doesn’t say, “It ought to be this way” – that’s utopianism, a different enterprise.

It doesn’t have to be the way it is is a playful statement, made in the context of fiction, with no claim to “being real. Yet it is a subversive statement.

Subversion doesn’t suit people who, feeling their adjustment to life has been successful, want things to go on just as they are, or people who need support from authority assuring them that things are as they have to be. Fantasy not only asks “What if things didn’t go on just as they do?” but demonstrates what they might be like if they went otherwise – thus gnawing at the very foundation of the belief that things have to be the way they are.

Upholders and defenders of a status quo, political, social, economic, religious, or literary, may denigrate or diabolize or dismiss imaginative literature, because it is – more than any other kind of writing – subversive by nature.

Like fantasy, innovation is also subversive by nature. That’s partly why innovators often read fantasy and science-fiction (by the way, if you haven’t read them yet, I highly recommend Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu and The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin).

This subversion is important. And often overlooked.

This is why it’s hard for big companies to innovate, even though they have lots of advantages – they have to subvert themselves. If you’re a big company, you’re by definition a big part of the status quo. This makes ideas that subvert the status quo, well, unattractive.

That’s also why some startups work on the edge of what’s legal.

But mainly, it’s why innovators must focus on value creation. New isn’t by definition better. Innovation isn’t always good – we’re not working in deterministic systems. Our new ideas need new business models – ones that focus on value.

It’s also why we need to make sure we’re working on important problems. It might be small ideas and experiments that we try, but our goals should be ambitious. A lot of people talk about changing the world – and innovation does that. But it’s not enough to change the world – we need to make it better.

3 January 2018
Before Tom Peters, before Peter Drucker, we had Mary Parker Follett

What year do you think this quote is from?

There are three ways of dealing with difference: domination, compromise, and integration. By domination only one side gets what it wants; by compromise neither side gets what it wants; by integration we find a way by which both sides may get what they wish.

How about this one?

It has often been thought in the past… that I need be concerned only with doing my part well. It has been taken as self-evident, as a mere matter of arithmetic like 2 and 2 making 4, that if everyone does his best, then all will go well. But one of the most interesting things in the world is that this is not true, although on the face of it it may seem indisputable. Collective responsibility is not something you get by adding up one by one all the different responsibilities. Collective responsibility is not a matter of adding but of interweaving, a matter of the reciprocal modification brought about by the interweaving. It is not a matter of aggregation but of integration.

This?

But there is following. Leader and followers are both following the invisible leader – the common purpose. The best executives put this common purpose clearly before their group. While leadership depends on depth of conviction and the power coming therefrom, there must also be the ability to share that conviction with others, the ability to make purpose articulate. And then that common purpose becomes the leader. And I believe that we are coming more and more to act, whatever our theories, on our faith in the power of this invisible leader. Loyalty to the invisible leader gives us the strongest possible bond of union, establishes a sympathy which is not a sentimental but a dynamic sympathy.

It all sounds pretty contemporary, doesn’t it?

So does this:

You cannot coordinate purpose without developing purpose, it is part of the same process. Some people want to give workmen a share in carrying out the purpose of the plant and do not see that it involves a share in creating the purpose of the plant. A noted teacher of ethics tells us, “A citizen is one who helps to realize the purpose for which this nation exists.” The citizen must also help to make the purpose.

Well, they’re all quotes from Mary Parker Follett – and she said these things in the 1920s. (see Mary Parker Follett: Prophet of Management for more).

But she sounds a whole lot like Tom Peters:

And before him, Peter Drucker, Warren Bennis, Douglas McGregor and many others. As Warren Bennis said about Follett’s Essentials of Leadership:

Just about everything written today about leadership and organizations comes from Mary Parker Follett’s writing and lectures.

This raises two questions. First, if her thinking is so foundational, why isn’t Mary Parker Follett more widely known?

In a good review of a collection of Follett’s writing, Barbara Presley Noble evaluates several possible reasons, including sexism and lack of a formal position of power, then concludes:

And most persuasively, Mr. Drucker and Ms. Kanter both argue that an ideology emphasizing cooperation, negotiation, “constructive conflict” and consensus-making may simply have been out of sync with a world that was either prewar, at war or postwar during much of Miss Follett’s professional life. Politically, the 1930’s and 40’s “were dominated by men and creed that knew the proper use of conflict was to conquer,” Mr. Drucker writes.

Miss Follett never stooped to conquer, believing instead in her more optimistic view of human nature.

While her language is a bit dated (for obvious reasons!), her thinking is still essential. And well worth checking out.

The second question is even bigger: if we’ve been talking about purpose, and inclusivity, and culture, and people first for nearly one hundred years now, why aren’t these ideas more widely accepted in management? After all, as Peters says, it’s not rocket science.

Here’s the key: It’s simple, but not easy.

It’s not easy to practice inclusive management. For example, it’s hard to act this way when everyone else acts hierarchically. Just a few years after Follett was in her prime, John Maynard Keynes said:

Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.

There’s plenty of evidence that inclusive management outperforms conventional approaches, but for some reason, people first and all its implications are still unconventional.

We need to fight through this. Inclusive organisations are better on nearly every performance metric you care to measure – it’s a demonstrably better way to manage. Let’s stop failing conventionally. Wouldn’t you rather start succeeding? We’ve known for one hundred years how to do this – let’s start listening to Mary Parker Follett.

18 December 2017
Here’s Your License to Innovate!

The most common barrier to innovation that I hear about in my classes and talks is “But my boss won’t let me.”

Here’s a solution. Print this out, fill it in, and carry it with you at all times. Problem solved!

Actually, you don’t even need my permission to innovate – you just need permission from yourself. That’s all you’ve ever needed.

I’m working on an Innovation Decoder Ring and Secret Handshake, but for now, this will do.

Please start trying new stuff.

(Idea swiped from How to Be An Explorer of The World by Keri Smith)

12 January 2017
How to Use Polarity Management to Support Innovation
What are Polarities?

When it comes to breathing, if you had to pick one would you prefer to only inhale or only exhale?

The question is, of course, absurd. To live, we must do both. Inhaling and exhaling are opposites, but they work together as part of a system. This is the metaphor that Barry Johnson uses in his book Polarity Management to illustrate what polarities are:

Polarities are interdependent pairs that support a common purpose and one another. They are energy systems in which we live and work.

Here is how the breathing polarity works:

Johnson explains:

I would like you to try a guided experience. Inhale slowly and deeply for 10 seconds, then hold it! If breathing is a problem to be solved by choosing to either inhale or exhale, I have just provided you with a solution by telling you to inhale. Though inhaling is essential and feels good at first, you soon find yourself sinking into the downside of inhaling, filling up with too much carbon dioxide.

Now exhale slowly during the next 10 seconds, then hold it! Notice the relief as you clean out the carbon dioxide. Though exhaling is essential, you soon find yourself sinking into the downside of exhaling with a need for fresh oxygen. Now inhale again and breathe naturally.

You do not solve the exhale/inhale polarity by choosing to either inhale or exhale. You manage it by getting the benefits of each while appreciating the limits of each. It is not a static situation. It is a process—an ongoing flow of shifting emphasis from one to the other and back again. Managing this polarity requires choosing both inhaling and exhaling.

This is an important concept for a few reasons:
- Either/or choices are often false dichotomies – more often they represent opposite poles in a polarity.
- People often view one pole as the way to solve the problem of its opposite.
- To succeed, we need to gain the positive elements of both poles.
In other words, polarity management is a pretty good way to think of organisational ambidexterity for innovation.

Stability and Change

One of the polarities that Johnson uses is stability/change – it looks like this:

One of Johnson’s key ideas is that often people only see the positive aspects of one pole, and the negative aspects of the other. This leads to conflict. When it comes to change, some will only want stability – either because they value the upsides of stability, or fear the downsides of change. Those that want change have similar views from the perspective of their favoured pole.

This leads to fierce arguments between the two camps – but Johnson calls this the One Pole Myth:

Do you know the old truism that our fears are often self-fulfilling prophecies? That is what is going on with this myth. The paradox is that those who are deeply afraid of the downside of change end up experiencing the downside of change. Their fear results in an overemphasis on stability and neglect of the need for the upside of change. The resulting stagnation, if experienced long enough, undermines Loyalty as people wonder if the organization is really going anywhere. There is “Felt” Job Insecurity as people experience the lack of New Perspectives and the lack of New Challenges. Desperation can set in and people who had been Unwilling to Take Risks end up Taking Foolish Risks. The result of fearfully clinging to the Stability pole is first the downside of Stability, then eventually, the downside of Change as well. Nothing breeds chaos like stagnation.

That’s exactly what happens when firms run into the innovator’s dilemma. It is also why being risk-averse actually increases your risk.

Polarity Management for Innovation

The polarities for innovation are similar to those for stability and change – I’ve sketched out a version that compares execution and innovation:

You can see that it is similar to Johnson’s stability-change polarity.

Here is how you can use this idea to support innovation management:
- Use it to engage everyone in the process. One of the blocks that we run into is that there are always some people that resist change of any sort. While you may never win them over, by acknowledging the downsides to both poles, it makes it easier to bring the people that are neutral along with you. Polarity management can be an essential tool for getting a majority of people in an organisation supporting a new innovation initiative – not just the ones that are natural change agents.
- We don’t spend all our time at one pole – healthy organisations fluctuate. People often view fluctuations as failures, but if you understand the necessity of managing both poles, you can see how organisations will naturally spend some time emphasizing one pole, then some time working on the other. This happens with execution and innovation, with centralised and de-centralised decision making, cost effectiveness and excellence, and so on.
- People that seem like blockers add value to the innovation process. Johnson calls blockers “tradition bearers”, and says:
  
  Those tradition bearing make three contributions to the managing of this dilemma: They identify the upside of the present pole, which are things that should be maintained or preserved. They identify the downside of the opposite pole, which are potential problems they want to avoid. They provide the energy necessary to preserve the upside of the present pole and to avoid the downside of the opposite pole.
The key to managing a polarity is to recognize when you are drifting into the negative region of one of the poles and take corrective action as soon as possible.

We can’t spend all our time doing what we do well. As the environment changes, we will become increasingly out-of-step with it requires. This means that we need to spend some time exploring as well. In the same way, though, we can’t spend all of our time looking for new ideas – then we never have the time or skills needed to execute the great ideas that we find.

To win, we have to do both. That’s the very nature of a polarity.

Note: I’d like to thank Kate Morrison and Scott Thomas for feedback that made this post better. Also, you can get a good 14 page pdf summary of Polarity Management written by Barry Johnson through the link here.
29 September 2015
Never Delegate Understanding
What’s the best way to change something? There’s no easy answer to this question – but if we’re trying to design changes in the way our organisations work, we need to have a deep understanding of what’s going on in them.

Design thinking in business is a hot topic right now (see the excellent cover story of the current issue of Harvard Business Review by Tim Brown and Roger Martin for an example). And while there is some great work being done on this topic, we can learn a lot from some older examples too.

In 1940, the Museum of Modern Art wanted to encourage the design of furniture that enhanced the quality of life for people, regardless of wealth or class. They initiated a design contest called“Organic Design in Home Furnishings,” defined as:

A design can be called organic if, within the object as a whole, there is a harmonious relationship between the individual elements as regards structure, material, and purpose.

Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen won the contest with this chair:

This was a high-profile contest, and many people asked Eames and Saarinen what their secret to winning was. Years later, Eames gave the secret away:

This is the trick, I give it to you, you can use it. We looked at the program and divided it into the essential elements, which turned out to be thirty odd. And we proceeded methodically to make one hundred studies of each element. At the end of the hundred studies we tried to get the solution for that element that suited the thing best, and then set that up as a standard below which we would not fall in the final scheme. Then we proceeded to break down all logical combinations of these elements, trying to not erode the quality that we had gained in the best of the hundred single elements; and then we took those elements and began to search for the logical combinations of combinations, and several of such stages before we even began to consider a plan. And at that point, when we felt we’d gone far enough to consider a plan, worked out study after study and on into the other aspects of the detail and the presentation.

It went on, it was sort of a brutal thing, and at the end of this period, it was a two-stage competition and sure enough we were in the second stage. Now you have to start; what do you do? We reorganized all elements, but this time, with a little bit more experience, chose the elements in a different way, (still had about 26, 28, or 30) and proceeded: we made 100 studies of every element; we took every logical group of elements and studied those together in a way that would not fall below the standard that we had set. And went right on down the procedure. And at the end of that time, before the second competition drawings went in, we really wept, it looked so idiotically simple we thought we’d sort of blown the whole bit. And won the competition. This is the secret and you can apply it.

So the trick is: work through 3000 studies of the components of your problem, twice. It might be a trick, but it sure isn’t a shortcut!

Ironically, despite the goals of the contest, the Eames/Saarinen chair couldn’t be successfully manufactured at the time – it was too complex and too expensive. The winning design would have just been a footnote in history, had Eames and Saarinen not both gone on to greater design success.

Eames found this success designing with his wife Ray. They took the failure of the organic chair and delved even more deeply into the problems of design and manufacture. After thousands more experiments and prototypes, they came out with the DCW Chair – which Time Magazine named the Best Design of the 20th Century.

In Eames: Beautiful Details, their granddaughter Carla Hartman describes the process Eames and Saarinen used, and how Charles and Ray applied it:

While this process might sound arduous – or even exaggerated – to some, to the Eameses, it was simply part of the process of “learning by doing.” Whether encountering a new technology, a new material, or a new idea, they explored its constraints deeply themselves before bringing it into the Eames Office where others joined in. Throughout their lives, they adhered to what Eames Demetrios has called an Eamesian Parable: “Never delegate understanding.”

That final point is crucial – never delegate understanding.

This mistake happens a lot. When we buy tools and expect them to fix our problems, we’re delegating understanding. When we design a strategy and expect others to implement it, we’re delegating understanding. When we ignore experiments, iteration and learning and just expect our first ideas to work, we’re delegating understanding.

Charles and Ray took the failure of the organic chair and used the lessons to build one of the most successful and iconic design firms in history. To do this, they had to rethink their starting point:

In our chairs, we have not attempted to solve the problem of how people should sit. Instead, we accept the way people do sit and operate within that framework. – Charles Eames

When we try to design better organisations and better outcomes for people, there are no shortcuts. We have to start with building a deep understanding of how they are now and operate within that framework. We can’t delegate this work – we have to dig in and do it ourselves.

The reward, of course, is that eventually we might see the change that we hope for.

Related articles
30 August 2015
How to Design for Outcomes

It’s always a bit dangerous to be “inspirational.” The problem is that inspiration doesn’t always lead to action – and that’s what we ultimately want.

This is a lesson that Timothy Prestero and his organisation Design that Matters learned painfully.

In 2010, DtM came out with an incubator designed for use in developing countries that won a ton of awards. Their strategy was that they would use the awards and the attention that they generated to inspire manufacturers to make their incubator. Prestero tells the whole story in this excellent TEDx talk:

I first heard about the DtM incubator in Steven Johnson’s TED talk – still one of my favourites. The problems that they were solving were: many premature babies born in less-developed countries die because they are not kept warm enough over the first few weeks. This problem is relatively easily solved with an incubator. However, throughout much of Africa and Asia, the incubators that are available are older ones donated by Western hospitals. They require a great deal of care and maintenance, and without a support infrastructure in place to keep them running, they quickly break – and become useless.

DtM’s solution was brilliant – they made an incubator out of car parts. Because they used parts that are widely available, the unit is easily repairable. And it’s cheap and easy to build.

The solution is so simple, so elegant, that everyone went nuts for it.

Except for manufacturers. Despite all the awards, DtM couldn’t find anyone to build their incubator. So none were ever used.

This is a great example of a common innovation problem: we not only have to solve a customer need, but we also have to do so in a way that makes business sense. Ideas that do both are what Mark Payne calls two-sided solutions in his book How to Kill a Unicorn.

One of the case studies that he talks about is work that his firm did for a bank that was trying to get existing customers to buy more products from them, rather than spreading their banking across multiple banks.

To be successful, the innovation we’re out to create has to thread its way though two needles at once. It has to transcend consumer resistance with a value proposition that makes consolidating assets under one roof both rationally and emotionally attractive. And it also has to thread a second needle, carving its way through the IT system issues, the siloed P&L structure of the different business units, the executive incentives, and the realities of the bank rep on the floor.

The DtM incubator only got through one needle – the user needs. It failed to address the business needs – something that they have corrected with their next product. The Firefly treats infant jaundice, and it is already widely in use.

The difference this time is that instead of designing for inspiration, they designed for outcomes. They didn’t just design for the customer, they also designed for the business. Customer needs and business needs are not mutually exclusive – you can only win if you address both.

Here is how Peter Drucker explains a similar false dichotomy in his classic book Management:

One important advance in the discipline and in the practice of management is that both now embrace entrepreneurship and innovation. A sham fight these days pits “management” against “entrepreneurship” as adversaries, if not as mutually exclusive. That’s like saying that the fingering hand and the bow hand of the violinist are “adversaries” or “mutually exclusive.” Both are always needed and at the same time. And both have to be coordinated and work together. Any existing organization, whether a business, a church, a labor union, or a hospital goes down fast if it does not innovate. Conversely, any new organization, whether a business, a church, a labor union, or a hospital, collapses if it does not manage. Not to innovate is the single largest reason for the decline of existing organizations. Not to know how to manage is the single largest reason for the failure of new ventures.

He’s describing the process you need to come up with two-sided solutions. You need the great new ideas, but you also need the execution skills to pull off the ideas.

This is why business models have parts that focus on both internal processes, and product-market fit – you need to have both. Organisations often focus on just one side or the other. The way to design for outcomes is to address all of the business model canvas, not just one side.

Payne’s book mostly describes working with companies that are using tools like design thinking to support innovation. The flaw that he identifies is that they start looking at the business side too late in the process.

My experience has been more with organisations that look mostly at internal capabilities, and they start thinking about customer needs too late in the process.

In both situations, the solution is to build a discipline that looks at both sides of the problem right from the start.

Prestero’s solution is to keep the outcomes you’re looking for in the front of your mind all the way through the process. Your great ideas are useless if you don’t make them real. If we really want to change the world, we have to focus not just on the change we want, but on the often dreary managerial tasks that must be addressed to realise that change.

29 December 2014
How Should We Organise for the Social Era?

Welcome to the Knowledge Economy

What do organisations do?

For a long time, we’ve thought about them as machines for building things. But there’s good evidence that this is no longer a good way to think about them. Consider this from Alex Pentland’s book Social Physics (page 105, emphasis added):

The social physics view of organizations focuses on patterns of interaction acting as a kind of “idea machine” to carry out the necessary tasks of idea discovery, integration and decision making. Leaders can increase its performance by promoting healthy patterns of interaction within their organizations (including both direct interactions, such as conversations, and indirect interactions, such as overhearing or observing). … Instead, when we think of our organizations as idea-processing machines that harvest and spread ideas primarily through individual interactions, then it is obvious that must establish healthy patterns of idea flow.

Part of this is driven by changes in the tools we have to create, distribute, and receive ideas – all of these activities have become considerably easier over the past twenty years.

Mike Arauz addresses this issue in his post On the Nature of Digital Transformations: 10 Observations – a must-read guide to strategy today. He says:

The scale of the technologically driven changes we’re witnessing is more profound than we even realize. And the oxygen fueling this transformative blaze is information.

While some say that information wants to be free, I like to think that information wants to flow freely. Imagine information as water, and digitization as gravity. The force of digitization pulls information along, often enabling it to run in unpredictable directions, as the information seeks out equilibrium. It must get where it’s going, and you have to try really hard to hold it back.

Even if we’re making physical things, our products are ideas:

“We don’t give a sh*t about hardware, and we don’t do hardware investments,” said Feld, whoseFoundry Group has invested in several hardware companies, including MakerBot Industries, Spheero, and Fitbit. “What we love is software wrapped in plastic.”

Later, Feld moderated his statement, acknowledging that he does care about hardware. But what matters to Foundry, in this case, is whether the company fits into one of its major themes: In this case, human-computer interaction, or the ways in which humans feed data to machines. For that to work, hardware depends on software to help it interface with its human users.

We’re in the knowledge economy now.

Organising for Knowledge

If the primary task of our organisations is to process ideas, and speed is an important part of this, then we need to thing about how our organisations are organised. Hierarchy doesn’t work as well here.

Pentland and Arauz both talk about the importance of designing for networks. This is true both when we look inside our organisations, as well as when we look out. Nilofer Merchant talks about the approach of Citizen University:

But their approach matches what I’ve seen work for innovation teams across companies. It is the “new how”, a collaborative way that shapes ideas to be better, to be stronger, and ultimately become real. To invent the future, we don’t need more ideas, or better words, or directional visions to invent the future. Instead, we need challenge common beliefs and ingrained interests. We need to stop pulling each other down by the tail and instead build up our ideas together.

The knowledge economy brings us into the social era, and we need to build new organisations for this time.

How can we do this? Let’s go back to 1854 to get an idea…

Lessons from the World’s First Org Chart

In a wonderful post, Caitlin Rosenthal discusses the experiences of Daniel McCallum in managing the New York & Erie Railroad. Rosenthal makes several important points in this post. The first is that managing at that time was marked by the necessity of dealing with a huge increase in the amount of available data – in this instance driven by the adoption of the telegraph.

In order to cope with these changes, McCallum had to use a flat organisation. Here is what it looked like:

Here is part of what Rosenthal says about it:

In surprising contrast to today’s top-down organization pyramids, in McCallum’s chart the hierarchy was reversed: authority over day-to-day scheduling and operations went to the divisional superintendents down the line, who oversaw the five branch lines of the railroad. The reasoning: they possessed the best operating data, were closer to the action, and thus were best placed to manage the line’s persistent inefficiencies.

…

Critically, McCallum gained control by giving up control, delegating authority to managers who could use information in real time. He put what we would call the organization’s C-level at the ground level, supporting the railroad, not directing its operations. Following one of McCallum’s key precepts—“a proper division of responsibilities”—authority over day-to-day scheduling went to the divisional superintendents down the line.

These are critical points for making decisions in situations where real-time information is critical. We actually see this pattern recur every time there is a sudden increase in the importance of information in day-to-day management.

Once running railroads became more routine, then the organisations became more hierarchical.

The critical question facing us today is this: when will our operations become more routine again?

There is strong evidence to suggest that the information-driven turbulence that we are experiencing now is here to stay. In the social era, we need to: flatten our organisations, build more inclusive and distributed decision-making processes, and reimagine our organisations as idea-processing machines.

None of this is easy. But doing great work never is – and if we want to thrive in the social era, then we have to figure out how to do great work.

27 October 2014