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”.

[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.