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…

things built from nothing;
crowds,

objects themselves.

things made from mirrors;
light locked.

or, one of Cid Corman’s:

What’s heaped too
high
spills

Emptiness
just
fills.

[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 digital immigrants consider our (media-saturated post-modern) physicality as the ‘real’ world. For today’s young digital natives, their transmedial realities — the elseware of MySpace, Second Life and the rest — are equally valid. Unlike many, we don’t think they’re escaping from, or denying ‘real’ reality: they’ve just internalised the precept that all reality is socially constructed, and vanished off into someware more fun, of their own making. And why not?

Their generation is busily — knowingly — creating their own be-ing. The rest of us, in denial, still privilege a ‘genuine’ reality, while all the time, we are also moving (not retreating or escaping, but simply moving — inexorably), into digitally-mediated realities (The-World-According-To-Google is as much a virtuality as Second Life) where the temptation of easy self-selecting tribalism leads to ever-reducing direct contact with others’ world views — and thus a weakened shared ontology of the World.

At least the kids acknowledge their departure. The rest of us media-immersed first-worlders could do to be more honest about the future we’re making. Forget a ‘Clash of Cultures’ — cultural evolution far outpaces the biological kind, and is equally senseless and free-floating: we’re not heading onward-and-upwards towards some glorious technotopian dawn, we’re setting course towards a fundamental schism with the reality experienced by the rest of our species.

Without a common ontology — an origin story of the metaverse of divergent cultural shards — we no longer have a shared basis for debate, resistance or synthesis; let alone understanding, or reconciliation. This contemporary chaos of dysculturation jettisons dialectic: the paths of our private realities may start separate and parallel, but we fear those tracks will soon diverge, leading off into ever more isolating futures.

We no longer talk, but damned if we aren’t in love with tools for Social Network Analysis, ‘reality’ content, all such proxies for actual engagement: touching from a distance, further all the time.

Good things with sound. My Etymotic ER4s died (after how many years of solid use?) — sent them off to the US for repair and the nice people at Etymotic simply replaced them with the current version. They sound excellent, and the new anti-microphonic cables are much better than the original ones. Much walking around London with downloads from Thinner’s archive on scene.org as background.

Also, managed to get a pair of ex-demo Vivid B1s. The equally nice people at Vivid even reconditioned them by replacing all the drivers before shipping them. And they sound amazing. Shame that they’re so ugly (sometimes form-follows-function doesn’t make for loveliness), but in this case, it really doesn’t matter…