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”.

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!

[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.

Working on behalf of a PR firm, Ku24 has developed a system for mapping the spread of news stories across the blogosphere, to support a major retail pitch.

[adapted from an email exchange with Axel at SMLXL]

It’s funny how bottom-up, transformative organisational change is usually portrayed as a gung-ho, networked culture youth thing…

When I worked for (as it then was) Yamatake-Honeywell in Tokyo, we used to go out to places like the Nissan car factories, where the kaizen quality control systems were entirely bottom up — individual guys on the line had almost complete freedom to find ways of improving process, and the organisation had very well organised systems and communities in the corporate hierarchy to make sure that those tweaks and improvements got picked up, assessed and incorporated. But there was no cultural change as a result — the insight of bottom-up improvement had been built-in into the most rigid corporate/cultural hierarchies in the world. The workers on the line were empowered only in that one, specific, process-improvement area. You might think that the same communities of practice would scaffold the collective action of, say, all the welders, who would then get together and form some kind of craft guild->union/mass action structure. But it doesn’t (seem to, I might be wrong!) happen like that in Japan — union activity seems driven from hard-left radicals, rather than bubbling up (like process improvements) from the shop floor…

So I think it’s a mistake to see the bottom-up thing as self-evidently the start of a great wave — it may well be contained within a particular area of activity within a business: which is actually, when I think about it, the cause of my reservations about ‘the IT guys loving blogs’ necessarily being an advance marker of the start of something big organisationally. The IT people love blogs because it’s cool tech, and because knowledge-sharing is part of their world: 90% of 90% of IT jobs is about engineering and problem solving: perfect domains for bloggish collaboration…

On the other hand, and with even less evidence, I still believe the Cluetrain credo, that communication across corporate firewalls (via blogs and so on) can (not will) fundamentally transform the relationship between brands and consumers. Still, that doesn’t mean that for a particular business, at a particular time, there is any clear route to actually using a given technology or strategy to get that scale of cultural change forced through… and although it would be nice to believe that it can really bubble up, I’m not yet convinced (see above). More on this later.

Compressed digital formats (mp3 and its ilk) are expedient: they save storage space and download time.

But there’s something rather disingenuous about MusicMatch — the software accompanying iPod on the Windows platform — misrepresenting 128kbps mp3 as ‘cd quality’!

There is a certain aesthetic to degraded digital audio — classic 12-bit samplers sell at inflated prices on eBay for their ‘authentic hip hop sound’ — but the post-Napster generation is being sold a lie by the music industry about the quality of the music they’re being offered by the ‘legal online music revolution’. It’s certainly quicker to download a compressed music track from the iTunes Music Store than a 16-bit uncompressed soundfile, but shouldn’t consumers be given the choice?

The hidden agenda for the music companies seems to be that uncompressed audio can still be sold as a premium product, and the more the punters accept degraded audio as normal, the higher the margin can be on that premium. Witness the delays on release of SACD and DVD-A decks with digital out: the industry is very paranoid about giving (paying) consumers access to ‘master-quality’ content (and fair-usage rights to copy those tracks to any other format they want). But they’re happy enough to sell distorted mp3s to the kids at a buck each. Depressing.