The ever-stimulating Grant McCracken recently posted some good insight on our obsessive privileging of innovation. His framing is that innovation isn’t the management challenge: it’s dynamism, to which innovation is a response.

The problem is to make the entire organization more adaptable, and to learn the secrets of dynamism management. (CEO note to self: Buy copies of Virginia Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress for everyone.) A mere skunk works won’t do it, not when every function and hire now needs rethinking and retooling.

He leads on from this, to Google’s employment strategies in pursuit of ‘future-ready’ employees:

What Google wants is someone who is both really good a programming or systems design, say, AND have a deep and abiding interest in, say, the biology of Brazilian rain forest. (Least case, we are talking about people with a diversity of deep interests. More dramatically, we are talking about people with quite different identities.) Why? Because there is no substitute for someone who thinks about things from an entirely different point of view.

This is an advantage that begets an advantage. Once someone has mastered one additional identity (or deep interest) it is easier to master new identities in the same way (and perhaps for the same reason) that knowing one additional language makes it master more languages. The candidate has learned to learn. And this means that the candidate has solve the very pattern recognition that the corporation will need to prosper in a newly dynamic marketplace. (The corporation is now a little like a star ship headed for many galaxies, each of which has new scientific and social puzzles to work out.)

All good stuff, and nicely general enough that he avoids the narrow open-innovation-focus ranting we can succumb to here all too easily. I readily admit that most businesses won’t (and shouldn’t!) outsource process to the cloud — but they can certainly try and employ people with a demonstrated ability at pattern learning… maybe appraisals should start asking people to block-out a pattern language for their worklife strategies…

[Towards a credo for any business serious about engaging with and transforming through networked technologies. The overarching thought is that the adoption of such tools drives attention, knowledge and skills out into the World, not in into neat 'managed' silos within the business]

1. Everything you do is being done better elsewhere. Get used to it.

   What does that leave? What you have: talent, brand, reputation, your social networks. What you are: elegant, charming, engaged. Generous.

2. Outsource the rest to the Cloud. (You will need to find someone with the skills to manage this process).
3. Audit yourself: do you understand your reputation, your brand?
4. Map your social networks.
5. Employ hackers. They were here first. They know the rules. But employ hackers who share your values and talents: generous hackers. Elegant, charming. Engaged. You may learn from them how to share.
6. (Re-)Focus the effort you spend on process onto improvement and adaption, not on invention. Learn the craft skills of the networked society: to stitch and glue, patch and fold together others’ excellence into your own fabric. To give back to the commons for the common good. You will find opportunities for real innovation & creative excellence along the way. Seize them and use the skills and connections you’ve developed to exploit the possibilities you see.
7. Invention will come, but it will arise where there’s a real value to it, and you will find you have at hand the tools to invent speedily and well, and access to other hands which will help in the task.
8. Think in interfaces, as much as in functions. The power of the hand is in the relations between the fingers, not in their individual strength.
9. Befriend tall giants, with strong shoulders. Climb bravely. Stand tall. See further.
10. Fail gracefully. Not all should be lost because one plan (or all of them until now) didn’t work out. “Try. Fail. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”.

Or, to put it elsewise:

1675: “If I have seen further [than certain other men] it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”

2007: Once you see the value of giants, it’s a small step to notice that some giants are taller than others. The tallest giants are networked communities — and they are legion. Social media is the fastest way to get access up on those shoulders, head in the Cloud. Up where the new things happen.

So, the theory is that dark energy, through some anti-gravitic effect, is the reason, maybe, that our Universe keeps expanding, rather than collapsing into itself. Maybe.

Anyway: hold that thought. Business zeitgeist in London over the last few months has been all about ‘getting to grips’ with social media as knowledge-management tool. Bright shiny lights going off over management heads across the city — if Wikipedia works so well in the real world, why not do it here: get all that tacit knowledge bedded in using tried-and-tested collaborative co-creation tools. I’m all for it. But I doubt that most management teams are anticipate the impact that skilling up with social media, if it really catches on in their business, might have on that business. Turn people onto these tools or, more particularly, onto the value and reward of participatory co-creation, by all means. But don’t affect surprise when you realise that their attention has turned outward, across your firewalls, into the 99.9999999% of the world where most of the things they care about — and 99.9999999% of the expertise that could assist them in their work — already lies. Social media isn’t about collapsing your business’s knowledge resources into a tight knot of hot intellectual property: it’s about joining the vast swirling galaxies of shared effort, collaborative problem-solving, open innovation. On the shoulders of the tallest giants. In the Cloud.

The hackers have known this for years — but it’s only the Web 2.0-era intersection of hacker culture and second-wave digital entrepreneurship that’s exposed the rest of us to the dark energy-like expansionary effect of Wikis, open content, co-creation. First time around, management could read ClueTrain and pay lip service to its manifestos. This time around, business is opening the door to the tools, without still understanding their effect, if they’re actually embraced. There’s a reason they’re called disruptive technologies, people…

We were lucky to get some time with Henry Jenkins to discuss his new book — full transcript over at BigShinyThing…

Daniel Dennett on memes and our mediated realities, in his recent book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon:

…it seems best to include all these replicators [computer virii and online scams/social engineering] under the rubric of memes, noting that some of them make only indirect use of human vectors, and hence are only indirectly elements of human culture. We are beginning to see this porous boundary crossed in the other direction as well: it used to be true that the differential replication of such classic memes as songs, poems and recipes depended on their winning the competition for residence in human brains, but now that a multitude of search engines on the Web have interposed themselves between authors and their (human) audiences, competing with one another for reputation as high-quality sources of cultural items, significant fitness differences between memes can accumulate independently of any human appreciation or cognizance at all. The day may soon come when a cleverly turned phrase in a book gets indexed by many search engines, and thereupon enters the language as a new cliché, without anybody human having read the book.

[My emphasis]

Indeed. And more generally, the many weirdnesses of words, halt-footed bearers of heavy memes that they are, when processed through dumb tech. From some of our recent work, it’s become very clear that issues around search engines and memes will loom large into our near future — one of the challenges for anyone trying to track the spread and evolution of (human-generated) memes online is the attempt to identify the current lexical correlates of a particular meme, and to understand how and when that lexical structure changes over time as the meme itself mutates. It’s a hard problem — something like building a parse tree for a Gerald Manley Hopkins poem, maybe (recommended reading: Lexical Ambiguity in Poetry). Only over time. Harder.

And for those of us in the communications business — in the absence of real automated semantic analysis — there’s the challenge of trying to instrument our messages with trackable terms or phrases which survive intact as the messages themselves spread and mutate in the (human and digital) wilds.

Early days. Having just read both Dennett and Hamlet’s Mill on holiday, it’s pretty clear that for true memetic (not simply lexical) invariance over time, we need to engineer myth. Then build search engines which interrogate mythic structures.

It’s all getting a bit Snow Crash. Whatever. Count me in.

One to explore later: during the 90s, there was much excitement and hype about the idea of keeping a business to its core competencies — small and lean — and developing strong alliances with other businesses to flesh out the offering. In the post-stratified, networked world of today, surely businesses should be thinking past such rigidity! From our learnings with social network structures, there is much strength in weak ties — relationships which aren’t constantly reinforced, or core to our activities, but which can be called on dynamically as and when required to achieve some specific goal. Out with Alliance! In with Dalliance!

Evidently there’s a nice new ‘theory object’ neologism for the class of things of which Documents With Tails are members: blogjects.

Thanks for Stephen for reminding me to read that paper.

[We've been kicking this around for a while -- interested to see what you all think.]

In any corporate workgroup environment — and even more so in asynchronous, loosely coupled networks of workgroups, it’s a nightmare trying to maintain oversight of project-related workflow. Attempts at solution generally try to impose a systems structure which straightjackets process, or which stamps out nuance and ingenuity.

At the worst — and all too often — this can result in what we call a diorama intranet: the metaphor relating to those awful museum displays of ‘life on the veldt’, wherein, to illustrate the lives of wild creatures, those same creatures are hunted down, shot, stuffed, and arranged, thousands of miles from their homes, into ‘lifelike’ tableaux. Documents in a diorama intranet have similarly been hunted down in the working environment where they are part of a dynamic process, tagged, bagged, and placed carefully on view in some other place where it’s an effort to access them, and where they are immediately out of context, out of date, and generally meaningless.

In the real world, we all know documents have legs — the ‘current final final approved’ version of the pitch might well be on someone’s desktop, rather than on the server ‘where it should be’. The challenge is in tracking the little devils down to whatever digital corner they’re hiding in, digging them out, and then tagging them so they can go back out into the wild and get on with their digital lives — being modified, shared, presented — while still being trackable and accessible by others when needed.

We’re believers in the small pieces, loosely joined approach — if we acknowledge that documents are lively members of a dynamic ecosystem, that they have legs, and that they’re hard to herd, then logically we should be more interested in having a way to grab hold of their tails when we need to know what’s going on, than in stuffing them and mounting them in the glass display case of some convoluted intranet.

Lately, we’ve been playing with simple ways of doing just that — and the prototype we’ve got couldn’t be more simple — implementing a simple trackback in MS Office documents via an open source XML-RPC stack, some VBA code, and using a WordPress-based blog as the central tracking mechanism, which gives us for free all manner of slicing, dicing and aggregation goodness on the reporting side.

Currently, it works like this: when users create a document, they are prompted to fill in as much metadata as possible — client, project, author, and so on. Then at each save- or close-point, the save dialogue box includes the option of ‘reporting back’ the document status to the central blog — where status can be as simple as ‘change’/'milestone’/'signed off’ — with the last adding a write lock so the document can’t be changed further. The data sent back to the blog can be as simple as the document status, or as in-depth as the entire document contents. At first check-in, each document is assigned a unique code and an individual post on the blog. This makes it very easy for glanceable updates on project status, for example. Crucially, it also informs without interrupting workflow, and keeps people in the knowledge loop — if someone wants the actual document, it’s not sitting stale and stuffed in an intranet: they have to contact the last modifier themselves, which potentially gives them access to other tacit knowledge, or at least initiates a conversation. Better all round.

Of course there are flaws in this — what of modifications done offline? What of documents which get deleted? And so on. We’re working on that. At the moment, we’re more interested in the feeling of what happens working like this, as opposed to the central command-and-control of rigid workflow systems and/or diorama intranets. More on this soon.

In the roar of Spring, transmutations… [Charles Olson]

We could be wrong (wouldn’t be the first time!), but after much coffee, we think we’ve glimpsed the mechanism via which the new dotcoms plan to rule the world. To work towards our conjecture, we need to start with a little network theory and a spangle of geometry.

Nothing too painful, we promise.

Step by step, then:

1. The Web is not the Internet
   The Web is one thing built using the Internet. Post 1994, and pre-prevasive broadband, the Web was the set of protocols through which most people have experienced internetworking. But it’s just one kind of experience possible through internetworked media — chances are your cable TV is delivered over what is effectively an Internet spur run by your provider, and that doesn’t involve the Web at all. That’s important: our final conjecture applies to any media which can be distributed digitally.
2. Networks (Can) Grow Exponentially
   Here in the UK it’s almost Spring — take a look at anything deciduous outside your window and examine the structure of branches — root to trunk to branch to twig: one trunk and a few birfurcating levels of branching and there’s room, come Spring, for those twigs, together, to support thousands, tens of thousands of leaves, which fill space and present an enormous surface area to suck up light and nutrients. Hold that image: a seemingly inert structure of branches suddenly bursting with ways to capture energy.
3. The Surface of a Network Can Fill a Hyperbolic Plane
   Imagine trying to draw the Internet on paper. A few branches out from wherever you start, there are simply too many sub-branchings to fit on the paper — networks (can) grow faster than the surface available on a flat sheet of paper grows.One way to represent networks has been to project them not onto a flat sheet of paper, but onto a hyperbolic plane — a ‘Non-Eucledian‘ geometry in which space expands the further you move out across it, unlike the flat (Eucledian) space we’re used to. There’s a lovely introduction to hyperbolic planes — and some crocheted models, over at Cabinet magazine, but for now, imagine:

   One way of understanding it is that it’s the geometric opposite of the sphere. On a sphere, the surface curves in on itself and is closed. A hyperbolic plane is a surface on which the space curves away from itself at every point.

   So, on a hyperbolic plane, which expands exponentially out from wherever you start, there’s exponentially more space to draw the roots and leaves of a fast-branching network, like the Internet.

   Why does this matter — the Internet is virtual: it’s a configuration of things, not a space-occupying thing in itself, right? Surely the space-filling challenges of drawing it are only challenges for anyone stupid or bored enough to try? The Internet itself doesn’t take up any space!

   Wrong. It matters. Look out that window again — think of naked branches and twigs as you see them now, in Winter, as the Internet. What matters is that, come Spring, buds burst with life, and the whole space defined by the network of branches and twigs is suddenly green with purpose: to absorb energy. The potential inherent in the structure of the network (branches) bursts into exponentially space-filling reality when the nodes (leaves) suddenly occupy real space to a real purpose.

4. CONJECTURE: Dotcom 2.0 Makes For A Hyperbolic Media Surface
   See where we’re going? We believe that the Dotcom 2.0 pioneers have seen the (virtual, spaceless, inert) structure of the Internet, which has grown over the past decade through the success of the Web, as the dormant, Winter version of a hyperbolic media surface, which, come some dawn, will burst into Spring. And when it does, the leaves of media sprouting from the lifeless branches of the virtual network will fill a very particular space — that of our attention, via the very real, space filling agency of computer, TV, mobile phone screens, ePaper, video games: the full range of interfaces for digital content.
5. If the Conjecture is True, Traditional [Flat] Media is Doomed
   How does that work? As we’ve pointed out before, the generous gifting of cool tools to the community by Google, Flickr and the like generally provide for the originators of the tools to claim a little space for media on any resulting innovations. Think of each of these tiny presences, each tiny media presence — be they used for ads, video, whatever — as taking up an incremental attentional space. Like a leaf, these individual spaces might seem insignificant — but in totality constitute a vast new, hyperbolic media surface which will eclipse the reach of any traditional flat media.

So how has this escaped notice? We think first, because the Dotcom 2.0 Spring is as yet still a potentiality, though close to fruition. Second, to learn a little from the geometers: locally, a hyperbolic plane appears flat. From any particular perspective — that of TV, the blogosphere, whatever — the nascent new media surface appears to be an incremental threat: a PVR technology here, a streaming Video-on-Demand service there. It only when you look at the shape of the new media threat that the sheer audacious scale of what Dotcom 2.0 may do to media is apparent. It’s not an order-of-magnitude bigger in potentiality than traditional media, its an order of scale: exponential rather than linear growth.

Actually, we didn’t need to bring in the bit about hyperbolic space at all — the space-filling should be terrifying in itself to anyone used to buying attention programme-by-programme, or channel-by-channel. But the idea of this strategy requiring space which itself has to grow to accomodate the channel is an easy way to visualise the magnitude of the threat!

[See also the stuff we've been writing at BigShinyThing recently... ]