Month: June 2013

Friday Reading #25

Another working week draws to a close and it has been a pretty good one. I started a little Fintech roundup.  I am however struggling with some other writing at the moment so this Friday Reading has come as a welcome break. On the positive side things are moving along nicely with the War Cards project and next week scanning of them will take place. This is a nice little milestone and then the project can really begin and we can actually make something. I rarely get to make things and I am also not very good at it which is a constant source of disappointment.

To turn that round into joy this weeks roundup begins with an interview with Anne Holiday who has produced some lovely little films about some people that are very good at making. Read and watch. Other things that I liked this week include a great piece on making little ideas out of big ones, old ideas being better than new ones, a couple of articles on fiction as a driver for new ideas, can too much collaboration be detrimental and can spaces be designed to promote the greatest form of collaboration, Sex. Finally there is a wonderful oral history of one of the greatest banking films of all time, Trading Places. To begin we have a lovely letter from Dorothy Parker to her publisher when she was struggling with writers block. I might just send this letter to my boss.

 

I cant look you in the voice

 

The Makers of Things

What do you think the message of the series is, what story were you trying to tell with the films? If anything, it’s that we’re all makers of things. Sounds a bit cliched but the title The Makers of Things just came from something Norman said. He said that even when he was 14 and had a shed in his parents’ garden he made sawdust. I like the idea that whatever your discipline, your chosen material or intention, you can make stuff.

 

The Little, Big Idea

When you’ve got a Big Idea, you’re always thinking about it, and if you focus on just making that first step, you’re maximising on that passion and energy. It’s pointless trying to do a Big Idea when you’re not passionate about it, and the main problem I see with the “write it all down, spend a year getting lots of documents together” model is that your passion isn’t going to be in it. It’s a formula for making sure that you’re tired of it before you’ve even spoken to any users.

 

Old Ideas Are Better Than The Idea You Just Thought Of

Some ideas are stacked up on shelves because, for one reason or another, they’re just bad. Others are set aside because, while they might be good, they’re either really hard to execute or the team isn’t ready to pursue them. Or maybe the timing isn’t right or the person who had the idea doesn’t know how to convince others of its merit. Regardless, once an idea begins to age, it can be difficult to tell whether it has potential. All old ideas are then sullied with the bad-idea funk and people forget how promising those good ideas once were. After a while, it’s hard to tell them apart.

 

An Introduction To Infrastructure Fiction

The first assumption that needs to die: that infrastructure enables designed objects. As the old saying goes, the problem is that it’s not even wrong; it’s just one-sided. The relationship between infrastructure and designed objects is duplex, a synthesis. The multiplication of designed objects, of tools and machines and appliances, both necessitated and enabled the construction of infrastructure, which in turn enabled a further proliferation and multiplication of appliances.

 

Better Made Up:The Mutual Influence of Science Fiction and Innovation

Buzz Aldrin, who really did stand on the moon, recently offered a transporter to Mars to a Radio Four programme asking for donations to an imaginary museum. It was received as the first way to ‘hitch a ride into space’… ‘since science fiction’. Aldrin, who has criticized NASA’s priorities, who seeks a Mars programme, and who has been engaged in work on a Mars Cycler, intended this fictional gift to be a real world intervention. Science Fiction and Science ‘fact’ – science and technology innovation, policy, public knowledge, investment – are not two separate realities but are two entangled and overlapping fields.

 

Too much collaboration is hurting worker productivity

In the last few years, increased collaboration is both intentional, encouraged by managers intent on fostering innovation and shared resources, and unintentional, partly the result of corporate cutbacks in office space during the recession. Much of the reduced space affected collaboration areas, which pushed conversations and collaboration into the general work spaces, said Hoskins. “Everything was squeezed” and so workers felt less able to focus, the Gensler survey of 2,035 knowledge workers shows.

 

Room for sex

The sudden proliferation in the 2000s of National Lottery-funded public spaces in the UK seemed to be rooted in a longing to return to Edwardian times, with all the attendant anxieties about sex and class. This longing was abundantly clear in Foster and Partners’ redevelopment of Trafalgar Square (2003): a magnificent architectural project, but one that limited human behaviour to the polite promenade. Perel’s understanding of the limits of civility, from a sexual point of view, helped me to form a powerful critique of architecture. In sum, architecture was principally about order; sex was not.

 

It’s The 30-Year Anniversary Of The Greatest Wall Street Movie Ever Made: Here’s The Story Behind It

JOHN LANDIS: The script was developed for Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor. And when I was sent the script, Richard Pryor, unfortunately, had his accident where he burnt himself rather badly, and they sent it to me and said, ‘What do you think?’

‘48 Hours’ hadn’t come out yet, but they’d previewed it, and Eddie Murphy had previewed very well, and they thought, ‘Ah this kid’s going to be a star,’ So they said, ‘What do you think about Eddie Murphy playing the Billy Ray Valentine part?’ And I of course said, ‘Who’s Eddie Murphy?’

 

Was that a good bunch of little links? If you enjoyed them then why not subscribe via email if you don’t already or try subscribing to an RSS feed for more posts. Have a brilliant weekend.

Why doesn’t Richard Branson buy Bank Simple?

Random thought of the day. What if Richard Branson, the owner of Virgin Bank (old Northern Rock) bought Portland based neo bank (Bank) Simple? I am intrigued to see how well Simple do now they are out of Beta. I think they currently have around 20,000 customers in the US and are starting to push for more. I selfishly wonder if they would get greater traction faster in the UK? Like the US bands that struggled for an audience in the vastness of the US yet came over here and did a few festivals and are now mega stars (how the hell The Killers managed that I will never know) In the US there are several thousand banks, here we only have about five. Simple could clean up over here in the retail market. Of course I suspect they will do very well in the US I just want a proper digitally minded bank in the UK to shake things up a bit.

Why Branson?

Well he has loads of cash and owns a bank that provides almost all retail banking services (no current accounts just yet but that would be perfect to launch with Simple) yet they seem to be focused on a branch based model. What if they really went for it digitally? Take the fight to those big banks in cyberspace and not on the high street. Come on Richard give it a go. Not sure Josh and Shamir will be up for it but $100 million and a few trips to your private island should sort it. Might be a nightmare integration process with those dusty old back end systems but no pain no gain yeah? Just a thought.

The Adjacent Possible In Large Multinational Corporations (Part 3 of 3)

This is the third and final part in a series of posts on the adjacent possible.  I recommend starting with the first and second posts to get more context on the ideas and the adjacent possible

 

6. The adjacent possible on the inside versus what is available on the outside

As someone whose job it is to look outside the organisation for new and interesting technologies and trends it can be very challenging to try and bring those things back into an organisation that might be a few generational steps behind, like trying to sell Maglev rail tracks to George Stephenson. Sometimes the harsh and frustrating reality is that you need to understand how many steps behind an organisation is, to know where the line of adjacency is.

This in itself can grow to be a major problem. The less an organisation looks outside and studies the evolution of technology over time the greater the technical debt can become and what is adjacent and possible falls further and further behind.

There are also the internal attitudes to innovation in general. Most organisations would say they are innovative and want to be leading fields but inside there might be a more cautious attitude or even admittance that they are a fast follower. Now I hate that term but I realise sometimes it is a good way to be, the first out of the gates is not always the winner but that attitude spreads like a weed and strangles people’s attitude to risk and may prevent them ever trying something new no matter how adjacent to organisational reality it is.

There is also an education and a publishing issue, as outlined in the previous section. Most people do not know what the capabilities of a large organisation are and they also don’t know how an idea goes from their head to getting made.  It seems far from possible for most, me included.

 

7. Team building exercise

“It was probably one of the greatest research teams ever pulled together on a problem,” Walter Brattain would later say. When he first reviewed the list of who would be working with silicon and germanium in the new solid-state group with Shockley at Murray Hill—roughly every month, the Labs’ staff received typed organizational charts of their department’s personnel—Brattain read it over twice. There isn’t an S.O.B. in the group, he thought to himself, pleased with the prospect of joining in. Then after a minute he had a second thought: Maybe I’m the S.O.B. in the group.  Jon Gertner – The Idea Factory

Can you increase the chance of discovery, invention and evolution by mixing together different elements? Diverse and cross skilled expert teams should be able to create and unlock greater numbers of ideas faster, although variety is certainly more desirable than speed. It is not as easy to try and force these things but experimenting with different groups of people is certainly worth trying. At the previously mentioned Bell Labs they handpicked teams to work on specific problems and challenges. They had a mix of theorists and experimenters, ideas men and makers working together. Personality types also played a big part as outlined in the quote.

This form of team design maybe considered for short term projects and challenges but not so much on longer term investigations or research. Build an interesting team of people and give them a set of challenges and some freedom to simply ask ‘what if’?

 

8. Freedom to experiment

“The point of this kind of experimentation was to provide a free environment for “the operation of genius.” His point was that genius would undoubtedly improve the company’s operations just as ordinary engineering could. But genius was not predictable. You had to give it room to assert itself.” Jon Gertner – The Idea Factory

Conversations will lead to other opportunities, they will progress ideas but only so far. Jumping from words spoken or on a screen to a tangible prototype, product or service for most can be a very difficult leap to make. The large organisation will have ‘siloed’ and gated most processes to prevent people just going off and making new things and rightly so in most cases. The enterprise is a huge machine full of cogs. It has fixed outputs and they must run like clockwork. Slack must be built into the machine though, spaces to converse, build and play outside or adjacent to the main machinery. The closer the play and experimentation can be to the main machine the better for making these experiments as realistic as possible and also increasing the speed with which they can be put in front of customers. Ideally the experiments themselves should be with customers.

Our internal microblogging platform, uBlog, is a small experimental system that has more than proved the concept of this simple way of increasing adjacency. We were lucky enough to find some equipment we could build and host it on. Most people don’t have that luxury let alone the knowledge of what they would need or even how to ask for it. Making it simpler for people to experiment is an imperative.

Part of that simplification is making tools and ingredients available for people to use and build with. The Application Programming Interface is becoming the default means of building digital things quickly in the real world but most organisations do not have a rich set of these just yet. That should be the aim though, exposing services in a smart enough way internally, with a view to moving it externally, can give those with the ability and desire to make a huge increase in adjacency. Those developers who have worked on a single system their whole life may have always harboured a ‘what if we could do that with system X’? A system they had never touched before. APIs allow them to scratch ‘the what if’ itch.

Most large complex organisations will be good at doing large complex things. The processes and checks built up over time will account for these types of projects. Experiments however need to be quick, easy, dirty and cheap. If you wanted to test a new idea or barely working service with a handful of customers how long would it take? Do the processes designed for the large and complex make it impossible to try out the small and simple? These are key things to fix to give people the freedom to experiment.

There is an interesting quote from a talk by Stuart Kauffman, a theoretical biologist and I believe the first person to use the term adjacent possible

“There is a chance that there are general laws. I’ve thought about four of them. […] And the fourth concerns the idea of the adjacent possible. It just may be the case that biospheres on average keep expanding into the adjacent possible. By doing so they increase the diversity of what can happen next. It may be that biospheres, as a secular trend, maximize the rate of exploration of the adjacent possible. If they did it too fast, they would destroy their own internal organization, so there may be internal gating mechanisms. This is why I call this an average secular trend, since they explore the adjacent possible as fast as they can get away with it.” Stuart Kauffman

And this is what it is all about. Making it so people can explore the adjacent possible as quickly as is possible, keep within the rules to stop them from going too far and too fast but all the while the aim is to find out the what if. Learn from the experiment, publish it widely, discuss it deeply, and move onto the next one. See what is possible tomorrow.

 

Conclusion

These eight theories over three posts are just the starting point of my ideas on this topic. It is clearly a huge subject and there are many angles I have surely not covered. Hopefully people will be willing to share and publish their own ideas and feedback to help build upon the work I have done.

For me the key to the adjacent possible is networks. Allowing easy connections to be made between people, problems, information, answers, ideas etc., is a must. Simplifying the steps required for a person to ask a question, find an answer/person, propose solutions, make a thing and most importantly do this in public will bring a greater level of adjacent possibility to an organisation.

There are many variables to improving the chances of great ideas getting out of people’s heads and getting closer to reality. There are many more than I have listed above. The two things to solve that will bring the greatest benefit in the shortest time are make it easier for conversations and connections to be made and build things that will give people freedom to experiment.

You can’t necessarily force all these elements together and expect magic. You just need to create a fertile environment and nurture people and see what they create. Feed the curious mind, enable the skilled maker and let the theorists test out those long held theories. These are my ideas on how to encourage the adjacent possible.

 

I highly recommend the following books which I have quoted throughout

Where Good Ideas Come From by Stephen B. Johnson

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the great age of American innovation by Jon Gertner

 

And here are a few related articles on the subject.

http://chrismonaghan.org/2012/01/creativity-and-the-adjacent-possibl/

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kauffman03/kauffman_index.html

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703989304575503730101860838.html

http://www.businessreimagined.org/where-good-ideas-come-from-the-adjacent-possible/

FintechBot Roundup Week 25 – 2013

I am going to have a go at a weekly roundup of the key fintech news which has been collected by my little Twitter bot.  It will hopefully be good way of me staying on top of what is going on in this area, it is kind of my job after all, and may also prove useful to others. Here goes…

The Bitcoin story continues to fascinate. It is clearly a very disruptive thing (not sure what it is to be honest…it is so much more than just a crypto currency). As the traditional world of banks and governments struggle to also understand it they try and control it with the rules and regulations of today when it is clearly a product of tomorrow and a world they cannot conceive. The largest Bitcoin exchange, Mt Gox, this week ‘temporarily’ halted US Dollar withdrawals. The company said this had nothing to do with pressure from US banks or Homeland Security following the incident where Mt Gox accounts at Wells Fargo were frozen last month. Getting money out of the new systems involve linking into the old. This is clearly causing a lot of friction. The IRS are now said too be taking an active interest in Bitcoin. The state of California has issued a cease and desist order on the Bitcoin foundation. It’s all kicking off. Wired summarised all this friction nicely.

This reluctance may be fed by the sense that Bitcoin poses a threat to the banking industry. Anyone can transfer Bitcoins anywhere for free and that could put a dent in some banking transaction processing fees.

It is not all bad news for Bitcoin. Stanford University have just released a startup engineering class which has a module on building your own Bitcoin business. New rails that are easier to build on mean we will see some creative uses of the Bitcoin network for a little while yet. Brilliant.

There were other interesting news items last week that had nothing to do with Bitcoin. Stripe is one of the most interesting payments companies at the moment. They are making payments a simple commodity for use with their brilliant st of APIs. They announced some nice numbers around their new payments payout tech (allowing split  payments to multiple accounts). Stripe are gunning for PayPal and it seems that some of the founders of that company don’t care, as they are big investors in Stripe too.

PayPal are an impressive tech company in their own right and this week they shared some details of their impressive sounding internal PaaS setup. Meanwhile they were also confident of getting a Chinese payments license. Talking of China, China Merchants Bank have launched banking capability inside WeChat. Instead of SMS control for basic functions e.g. balance request, they can now be requested via the popular social messaging network.

Barclays launched an interesting sounding QR code payments addition to Pingit, which they have called Buyit…I can see where they are going with this branding (heard rumours about a product called Cloudit).

This Vine demo of mobile payment method Paddle is slick.

While there was no direct payments related announcement by Apple at the recent iOS 7 launch there were a few payments like features, AirDrop, iCloud Keychain etc. there were however a number of payment related patents filed. This Quora thread has a great roundup featuring iWallet and some nice biometric features.

Chris Skinner wrote a nice feature on a new digital bank initiative/rebranding/positioning thing mBank by Bre Bank in Poland. It looks lovely. Although the name makes me think of the awful Hanson song.

There was an interesting Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) by someone that was a concierge for Amex’s infamous black cards.

We had a gentleman who called quite frequently asking for a massage parlor in Las Vegas or New York that would “feel really good”, and “make his day”. The client knew we legally could not recommend or handle escort or rub and tug locations, but he kept trying to get someone to do it for him. One poor girl, was relatively new, had no idea what this guys deal was. So she spent a good hour researching really nice spas in both locations that had a high customer rating.

The UK TV on demand regulator, apparently there is one, has called for a block on payments to certain pornographic sites including something called PornHub, which is apparently the 23rd most visited site in the UK. It is effectively calling for a payments blacklist…which would be interesting to say the least.

The trailer for the new Martin Scorcese and Leonardo Di Caprio film The Wolf Of Wall Street looks brilliant. You can buy hollowed out coins to store microsd cards and pretend you are a spy. This week I saw a machine that encodes, chips and embosses credit/debit cards. I have never seen one before and it was great.

There you go. First little fintech round up done. Let’s see if I can keep this up.

Friday Reading #24

It has been one of those weeks that seems to have passed in the blink of an eye. I must have been busy or just very ignorant. I went to London for a pretty good banking conference run by the nice people at Anthemis. I met a very nice and helpful lady for a chat about the War Cards. I got a new broom. It has been all go. No real theme or big subjects for this weeks readings. Some stuff on the Ultramundane, blunders, PRISM, simplicity, not just any innovation but M&S innovation, raising the bar, the Internet of actual things and words. I published two parts of a long post I wrote about the adjacent possible in large multinational corporations. I also include a picture and a link to a description of an Owl Theremin because it made me smile this week.

 

Owl Theremin

Ultramundane

Goods were no longer good, they were incredible. They didn’t just perform, they over-performed. Ours is the age of the ultramundane. Far from meaning what it sounds like it means (i.e. very boring), “ultramundane” refers to the otherworldly. Ultramundane products are both banal and yet too good for this world.

 

Blunders of Genius: interesting errors by Darwin, Pauling, and Einstein

When James Joyce wrote in Ulysses: “A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery,” he meant the first part of the statement to be provocative. History has shown us that even some of the greatest scientific luminaries, towering figures such as the naturalist Charles Darwin, the twice-Nobel-Laureate chemist Linus Pauling, and the embodiment of genius — Albert Einstein — have made some serious blunders.

 

Secret to PRISM: Even bigger data seisure

So much data was changing hands that one former Microsoft employee recalls that the engineers were anxious about whether the company should cooperate. Inside Microsoft, some called it “Hoovering” — not after the vacuum cleaner, but after J. Edgar Hoover, the first FBI director, who gathered dirt on countless Americans.

 

How To Improve Any Service By Simplifying It

Offering simplicity within a complex domain is likely to be so appreciated and valued by customers that it ends up being perceived as a luxury. That may surprise some marketers who make the common mistake of thinking that in order to position a brand as a “luxury” alternative, you must provide customers with more features, perks, and options; luxury, in this context, is equated with “excess.

 

Innovation, M&S and Plan A

…innovation is not something finite and separate from the rest of the business: it’s the means by which it propels itself towards its chosen destination, in this case full sustainability. Getting to A is what the job has become, and it doesn’t end. Innovation of this hard-nosed, business-led kind is the very opposite of brainstorming or trying to come up with world-shaking ideas in a vacuum. Instead it is about getting crystal clear on what matters to stakeholders and where outcomes must change to deliver new value to them.

 

Raising The Bar

We constantly talk about “raising the bar”. The phrase in itself, so well accepted that we seldom consider its meaning. We all need to raise the bar and then we ail have sorted all of the issues that we have in society. Once the bar is raised all will be well. Children will be educated, the unemployed will become employed, families will become more functional and businesses more community  minded. The bar has been raised and thus we will respond with vim and vigour and our collective efforts will see us prevail.

 

The Internet Of Actual things

 “This is a delicious fruity Pinot Grigio,” the bottle will tell you via its embedded e-ink screens, front and back. “Excellent with chicken and salad. Should you be drinking mid-week? Please turn me around to view messages from sponsors specifically chosen to match your interesting lifestyle. Enjoy your wine!”

 

Words

We’ve become obsessed with fancy designs, responsive layouts, and scripts that do magical things. But the most powerful tool on the web is still words. I wrote these words, and you’re reading them: that’s magical.

 

‘Bonus’ link written by me

 

The Adjacent Possible In Large Multinational Corporations

In a large multinational organisation it becomes ever more difficult for the right minds to know one another exist let alone converse or meet in person. In organisations over a certain size the chances that someone somewhere in the world is coming up with similar ideas to someone else are high. How do you connect those ideas? How do you connect those experiments?  The technical problems, progressions or failures in one team, in one building, in one country, in one region could be as much a secret to someone six desks away let alone six time zones.

 

Hope these links made your brain work. Go on and subscribe via email if you don’t already or try an endangered RSS feed for more posts. Have a lovely weekend.

The adjacent possible in large mutlinational corporations (Part 2 of 3)

This is the second part in a series of posts on the adjacent possible. I recommend starting with part one to get more context on my thinking about the adjacent possible as well as the first two ideas on this subject.

 

3. The culture is the air people, and therefore ideas, breathe

The rules for the use of collaboration tools mentioned above will be endemic to certain types of corporate culture. The surrounding atmosphere that people live and breathe in their office will have the largest impact on any attempts to encourage people to investigate and test the adjacent possible. Some people will wait for permission to be given or even ordered but for real experimentation to flourish it must become just an accepted part of the working day. It does not have to be something fully formed like Google’s mythical 20% time but just an acceptance that people can feed their curiosity and have the freedom to experiment at the boundaries.

Initiatives like 20% time i.e. a day a week to work on whatever you want as long as it benefits the company and is something new or innovative, is of course worthwhile but single initiatives however varied can become a burden over time as they grow into complex processes that are open to a few capable and perseverant folk. Like most things in large complex organisations they also grow large and complex. It is important to try these kinds of processes but they cannot be the sole measure of whether a company is innovative. They do of course contribute to the overall culture of the organisation showing that innovation will be rewarded.

The question I ask is how is easy would it be for two people from different departments to decide to spend a day or two working on something non-standard and then share or publish what they had done to the rest of the organisation. Rigid objectives, budget lines, timesheets all these important resource recording and directing mechanisms are required for the machine to run but they can certainly get in the way of anything outside the norm making the previous scenario feel almost impossible. ‘Sorry mate can’t help you unless you have a budget line I can record my time against’ ‘We can’t show this anyone as <insert stereotypical perceived innovation blocking department here> will kill us’ and conversations of this type make it feel like making anything new and different is almost impossible. People are often so overloaded with work because the resource allocation for an individual developer will probably be 110-120%. Having an environment and atmosphere that provides time and freedom for these ad hoc collaborations and provides a vehicle to share them with the organisation will be as conducive to the overall culture as any best idea competition.

 

4. Spaces designed for collision and cultivation

And what of the physical spaces we work in? Are they designed for collaboration as well? There are many studies and design articles on the changing workplace and building to ensure peoples paths cross often ensuring potential for cross pollination of ideas. I am currently reading a brilliant book about Bell Labs, the legendary research facilities of AT&T that created all manner of things including the solid state resistor that changed the face of electronics. Their labs were built to ensure people would bump into one another.

“By intention, everyone would be in one another’s way. Members of the technical staff would often have both laboratories and small offices—but these might be in different corridors, therefore making it necessary to walk between the two, and all but assuring a chance encounter or two with a colleague during the commute. By the same token, the long corridor for the wing that would house many of the physics researchers was intentionally made to be seven hundred feet in length. It was so long that to look down it from one end was to see the other end disappear at a vanishing point. Traveling its length without encountering a number of acquaintances, problems, diversions, and ideas would be almost impossible. Then again, that was the point.” Jon Gertner – The Idea Factory

Other companies have designed offices for these kinds of interactions and collaborations. Steve Jobs made sure Pixar had a huge atrium that every department had to pass through. Zappos also went with a similar approach when they redesigned an existing office building, closing off several previous routes into the office to force people through central areas. In addition they also built in flexible office walls and non-fixed desks, complete with ceiling level cabling so it is easier to unplug, enabling individuals and teams to move and morph into new spaces and configurations. Do offices in great big vertical towers only go to highlight rigid vertical structures and hierarchies that are not designed to mix? Hot desking as a concept is ok but do teams still sit with each other as a matter of course and is moving around the organisation really encouraged?

Another element of office design and usage that I think certainly helps is using the walls. The walls in most offices are either covered in wretched wallpaper, beige paint or the occasional wall decal or worse still motivational posters. These walls could and should be used to display work, to show progress, to highlight problems so that people who are passing can take a look. Well implemented agile development processes will get users to create physical representations of tasks and jobs using pen and paper and some means of fixing them to the wall. Publishing activity, showing progress, making the ‘working out’ visible to those physically near or just passing is a great form of advertising what a team actually does.

In an old post about cultivating hunches I suggested putting whiteboards on the back of toilet doors. It is about thinking more of how we use the spaces we occupy and work in over and above just somewhere to sit in front of a screen and a keyboard.

 

5. Publish by default – no more secrets

No more secrets, make things public by default, creating a culture of sharing can only increase adjacency; the importance of this sharing cannot be underestimated. Build basic description and communications into plans and working practices of the projects being undertaken around the world. Not just the dry status reports but well written descriptions of the trials and tribulations of a project/product as it ebbs and flows through its natural lifecycle. The publishing and therefore sharing of this information is the key to having a healthy flow of knowledge and potential adjacencies to be investigated by others.

I have stated before that I am a big fan of the UK’s Government Digital Service Team and they have built into their service delivery manual the concept of blogging progress frequently and freely. This recent example talking about the work involved to improve search is an excellent example of sharing, writing and publishing.  Project teams sharing their progress, failures, processes, changes and successes in a pace accessible by all (maybe even outside the organisation) would be a very valuable source of information.

The default setting of most teams in organisations seems to be private. Our team often get asked if we can build other teams their own microblog and we usually say no. Use the same one everyone else does. They invariably decline. There needs to be a move away from this unwillingness to work in public. Without the act of publishing the organisation does not maximise the value of what it already, knows and tries and achieve.

 

This is the end of part two. The final part is available here.

The adjacent possible in large multinational corporations (Part 1 of 3)

Soup. Primordial soup. The chemical and biological mixture and its environmental surroundings that gave us the planet we know and love/destroy today. The monomers turned into polymers which turned into life through a series of reactions and transformations made possible by the surrounding atmosphere and components. Life as we know it became possible because of what was around to interact and react with. The initial molecules that are formed then have a new set of reactions and collisions available to them and on it goes. This is known as ‘the adjacent possible’.

It was brought to my attention by the author Stephen B. Johnson in his book ‘Where Good Ideas Come From’ and it has stuck with me. I have been wondering for quite some time about the adjacent possible inside a large multinational corporation.

 

This post is my attempt to unpack and write down some thoughts on this subject. I think there are a few key areas for consideration in improving the organisational environment for the adjacent possible. I have considered the following eight ideas.

  1. Make conversations and connections easier – Can enterprise collaboration tools solve geographic location problems and make it easier to share ideas and solutions.
  2. The rules are only as good as the tools – don’t strangle attempts to collaborate by restricting people so much that they are afraid to get involved.
  3. The culture is the air people breathe – The air an organisation breathes contributes greatly to its health. If it is oppressive then experimentation will not flourish
  4. Spaces designed for collision and cultivation – The adjacent possible must be cultivated in the real world not just on screen, how working environment design affects this.
  5. Publish by default – No more secrets. Hiding away the success, progress, and failures of every team in an organisation restricts knowledge and collaboration opportunities.
  6. The adjacent possible on the inside versus what is available outside – it is so easy to look outside and see lots of shiny new technologies and wish they were available but what is available today inside and are they adjacent to the outside?
  7. Team building exercise – A small team of A grade people should beat a bigger team of B grade people. Experiment with the mixture of teams on certain types of projects and challenges.
  8. Freedom to experiment – How easy is it to take an idea beyond a few words or a scribbled diagram? The easier it is to move ideas forward the more time people will be willing to invest.

These eight ideas will be covered in three post which will be published over the next seven days.

 

What is the adjacent possible and why is it so important?

In the context used in Stephen B. Johnson’s book the adjacent possible refers to the ideas and inventions that are possible at a set period in time. You can’t go from the steam engines to electric trains in a single leap. A series of events, skills, tools and materials need to have occurred/been invented/existed for progress and innovation to occur. Examples given in the book include the invention of the newborn child incubator being created by an obstetrician who had seen hatchlings at the Paris Zoo warmed under a lamp. Conversely, the complexity involved in modern day incubators meant that donating them to 3rd world countries was a waste of time as they would invariably break and are not easily repairable leading to the design of incubators made of abundant resources i.e. car parts, made so simply that if you can change a headlight you can fix them.

The inspiration of an idea, the ability through skills and materials available to experiment and make are key to innovative breakthroughs. Johnson says;

“Good ideas […] are, inevitably, constrained by the parts and skills that surround them. We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are works of bricolage; they’re built out of that detritus. We take the ideas we’ve inherited or that we’ve stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape.”

The organisation must design for stumbling, make it easier for people to come across these ideas and the people that care about them, and then make it simpler to jigger them into something more tangible and defined.

Johnson gives the example of coral reefs displaying such rich diversity in a very small area in terms of the vast empty oceans. What set of ecosystem components causes this to happen and can they be designed or at the very least enhanced or experimented with?

In a large multinational organisation it becomes ever more difficult for the right minds to know one another exist let alone converse or meet in person. In organisations over a certain size the chances that someone somewhere in the world is coming up with similar ideas to someone else are high. How do you connect those ideas? How do you connect those experiments?  The technical problems, progressions or failures in one team, in one building, in one country, in one region could be as much a secret to someone six desks away let alone six time zones.

‘The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore those boundaries. Each new combination ushers new combinations into the adjacent possible’

The following sections are my thoughts on how to enhance large organisations to allow maximum adjacent possibilities.

 

1. Making conversations and connections easier – enterprise collaboration tools

The problems associated with this distance between people and knowledge is the challenge being addressed by the enterprise 2.0/social business/collaboration technology vendors today and it is a worthy challenge. The technical element of this problem is fairly well understood. Let me search for colleagues in my organisation who have ’hot new technology’ in their job title, or have blogged about a topic you are interested in etc. etc. this is the techno utopian dream to enabling ’collaboration’ and I can’t wait for it to arrive but the technology is only part of the battle. I worry that these enterprise class collaboration platforms are too unwieldy, trying to do too much. Would a smaller suite of simpler tools be more effective? Can the two worlds coexist with user identity to bring them together?

Our team, in conjunction with others, run a small microblog. It is a proof of concept system designed just to do one thing well. It does not try to do everything just a simple yet powerful stream of 500 character text messages. It is a platform for public conversation at its heart and that is where the greatest value is derived. It simply allows asynchronous adjacency across time zones.

The users of the system have come up with a small call for help in the form of the #uBlogHelpMe hashtag. Replies will come in from all over the globe with ideas, suggestions and solutions and it is always a great thing to see. Studies have shown that microblogging, externally in the form of Twitter, has reduced the six degrees of separation to much nearer four.  Microblogging is not for everyone, it is not the solution to all of an enterprises collaboration problems but it is a damn good start.  It is a single place for public discourse and connection and reduces the distance between people and ideas and so few large organisations have that capability. The tools outside are often much more fully formed and I personally have made connections with other staff members from my organisation that I would never met via any other means.

I assume most large organisations have some sort of idea suggestion scheme, whether they involve writing an idea on a piece of paper and posting it in a fake letter box or some nice collaborative idea gathering/voting platform. We use IdeaJam as a platform for gathering, voting and commenting on and linking ideas. One recent example showed a colleague in Mexico reaching out to someone in China who had a similar idea and to explore working together. The more out in the public the ideas the better for all, the ability to have conversations around these ideas even better still.

I wonder how many companies also use the platforms to capture problems and questions. There are hundreds of ideas out there but we sometimes ignore the actual capturing of problems. If you could fix one thing is a powerful question…the normal worry is that you would be inundated with questions about pay rises. The fact is most people just want a place to ask a question, to get help with a problem. Therein lays a great source of innovation potential, both the problems requested but also the network of people that build up around those problems and communities.

 

2. The tools are only as good as the rules

“When people believe in boundaries, they become part of them.”
Don Cherry

The tools are only as good as the users though. They are also only as useful as the rules/culture allow. For some managers collaboration tools like this are seen as play and not work yet if someone sat in front of an email client all day they would be seen as busy.

This set of unwritten rules damages the collaboration culture execs say they want. Posting on chat forums/blogs etc. just like speaking up in public, is challenging for most due to fears about their ideas being mocked, have they said the right thing, are they wasting people’s time etc. This culture makes it difficult. There are some good studies on why people lurk rather than post in communities such as this one by Ridings, Gefen and Arinze

Of course there must be some rules, to avoid the rise of undesirable behaviours and to keep people within the law but they must not prevent the use of the tool entirely through fear. Those that do not understand the tools are usually the ones most afraid of them and it has been the same for many technological advances designed to improve communication within large companies.  Telephones, email, instant messaging and internet access have all been greeted with howls of derision by certain parties claiming all work will cease. Some will misuse the tools they have in any working environment. Some will use rope to help them scale the heights; another may use it to hang themselves. The outside world created these technologies for a multitude of reason and while there may be negatives they are usually far outweighed by the positives of connecting people more easily.

 

This is the end of part one. Part two is here, the final part is here.

Friday Reading #23

What a technology fuelled week it was and we learned so much. Microsoft have seriously misunderstood their target market i.e. gamers, with their insistence on the always online always watching never share or sell any games ever again approach. Sony (a company with an awful record of non-standard formats and DRM hell) in response pulled off one of the marketing masterstrokes of the year. Jony Ive went from design ubergod to soundly mocked loser the minute he dare enter the artistic realm of digital interaction design and show off his flat and gradient obsessed buttons. The scariest powerpoint in the world showed what we all knew about the US spying on everything and everyone and that the NSA need to hire some designers. It is that subject we begin with this week. A classic and timeless piece from Bruce Schneier on the The Eternal Value of Privacy and a fantastic piece of writing by James Bridle on The Politics of the New aesthetic. His own words on what NA means and what he is trying to think through about how technology and humans exist together in society today and in the future. There were two other good pieces this week by James and on James that you should also read. One of the great thinkers/makers/artists of our time. Other selections this week include Stef Lewandowski on creating everyday, a Microsoft intern writes the greatest critique of large enterprises I have ever read, can robots evolve, the constant cry for attention and the teen who stole Half Life 2.

 

 The Eternal Value of Privacy

Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, “If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.” Watch someone long enough, and you’ll find something to arrest — or just blackmail — with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies — whoever they happen to be at the time.

 

The Politics of the New aesthetic

I believe that much of the weak commentary on the New Aesthetic is a direct result of a weak technological literacy in the arts, and the critical discourse that springs from it. It is also representative of a far wider critical and popular failure to engage fully with technology in its construction, operation and affect. Since at least the introduction of the VCR – perhaps the first truly domesticated computational object – it seems there has been a concerted, societal rejection of technical understanding, wherein the attitude that “I don’t understand this and therefore don’t like this and therefore I will not investigate this” is ascendant and lauded.

 

Create something every day

There’s a beautiful Japanese concept that deals with entropy, and accepts it as not just a part of life, but something to be viewed as a form of beauty – wabi-sabi. We spend our lives trying to push back against the force of entropy – arranging things, making patterns out of objects, designing processes for how things happen, sometimes just attempting to keep things the way they are for a little while. Wabi-sabi is an acceptance of the inevitable decline of order and that the imperfection and fleetingness of things is to be celebrated, not mourned.

 

8 months in Microsoft, I learned these

Expect no documentation in corporations. I have seen the knowledge inside the company is mostly transferred by talking and hands-on sessions. Some parts of knowledge base generated are only emailed and not saved anywhere permanent. This is not how the information flows in the digital world. There are certain people, if they got hit by a bus, nobody can pick up their work or code. And it is okay. If this would have been my own company there would be tons of wiki pages.

 

Robot Evolution

…the MANIAC (‘Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator, and Computer’). The acronym was apt: one of the computer’s first tasks in 1952 was to advance the human potential for wild destruction by helping to develop the hydrogen bomb. But within that same machine, sharing run-time with calculations for annihilation, a new sort of numeric organism was taking shape. Like flu viruses, they multiplied, mutated, competed and entered into parasitic relationships. And they evolved, in seconds.

 

How Not To Be Alone

Most of our communication technologies began as diminished substitutes for an impossible activity. We couldn’t always see one another face to face, so the telephone made it possible to keep in touch at a distance. One is not always home, so the answering machine made a kind of interaction possible without the person being near his phone. Online communication originated as a substitute for telephonic communication, which was considered, for whatever reasons, too burdensome or inconvenient. And then texting, which facilitated yet faster, and more mobile, messaging. These inventions were not created to be improvements upon face-to-face communication, but a declension of acceptable, if diminished, substitutes for it.

But then a funny thing happened: we began to prefer the diminished substitutes.

The Boy Who Stole Half-Life 2

At 6am on 7th May 2004, Axel Gembe awoke in the small German town of Schönau im Schwarzwald to find his bed surrounded by police officers. Automatic weapons were pointing at his head and the words “Get out of bed. Do not touch the keyboard” were ringing in his ears.

Gembe knew why they were there. But, bleary-eyed, he asked anyway.

“You are being charged with hacking into Valve Corporation’s network, stealing the videogame Half-Life 2, leaking it onto the internet and causing damages in excess of $250 million,” came the reply. “Get dressed.”

 

Hope you enjoyed it this week. Feel free to subscribe via email if you do not already or try some RSS for full blog goodness i.e. about an extra 6 posts a year. Bye.

Fun blockers

*OVERWROUGHT METAPHOR AHEAD* When I was younger I used to love skateboarding. I was rubbish at it but am still interested in it (and I am excellent at EA Skate and Tony Hawks on the Xbox). The sport has clearly grown in this country and in my home city of Sheffield there are even a few skate parks now. A few special spaces where these activities are permitted and encouraged. I have also started to see the rise of anti-skating measures such as grind blockers.

Fun Blockers

Grind blockers are brackets that installed on surfaces to prevent skaters grinding or sliding their board on them. From the picture above they may not look like much but to other people they are cold heartless prevention measures.  The owners of the property will say they are to prevent damage or to protect skaters from hurting themselves and not that they prevent the skaters trying to sue the owner of the property when they break their ankles or them preventing teenagers hanging around.

Millhouses Grind

I can see both sides to these arguments but as a skater at heart I think they are primarily a device for stopping fun, creativity and interactivity. People that see a piece of civic infrastructure in a completely different way and that can facilitate the creation or usage of those things the builder / owner never dreamed of.  There are many things inside major organisations that have been ruined with virtual versions of these grind/fun stoppers. Whether they be arcane rules that say you shall not use that piece of code for any other than its intended use, you can’t embed that thing from outside into this page inside, you can’t plug anything non-standard into this network or you can’t use that data elsewhere. Yes there are good reasons for these things but they must prevent a lot of fun, creativity and interactivity. If you want a more innovative culture maybe it is time to break off some of the fun blockers.

Friday Reading #22

I am actually writing this on a Thursday as on the Friday that this, hopefully, auto posts I will be heading down to Bath for a friend’s stag do. I will probably be in no fit state to use a keyboard by about 5pm, which is like most working days actually. This week and last I have actually been trying to use a keyboard more and start writing some stuff. I posted a grumpy thing about why I don’t like future branches and I have two other big posts currently squabbling for my constantly flitting attention. One of those is about the adjacent possible in big organisations. How easy is it to make things happen and what can you change about the organisational environment to help. Hopefully I will get that written sometime this year. Meanwhile the first post of ten looks at why innovation thrives in cities and touches on some of the very things I have been thinking about a bit recently. My other choices for this week include why your ideas get turned down (a feeling I know too well), electric cars, worthless coders, no screen design, robot brands, when Wall Street came to London, Burroughs & Bowie and seminal 90s computer games TV show Gamesmaster. What more could you want? How about a picture of a Google Glass wearing Robert Scoble, Jared Lanier, Jeremy Paxman all inside some sort of virtual reality Florentine chapel. Weirdest bit of TV this week by far.

Newsnight

I have no idea what is going on. Photo by Antimega

 

Why innovation thrives in cities

What the new work shows, Pentland says, is that “a lot of the things that people have been arguing about for centuries are not actually things that need explaining. They just come from the basic pattern of social networks.”

 

Why Your Great Ideas Get Turned Down

For a work to be truly creative, it has to depart from the status quo at some point. That departure makes many people uncomfortable. Despite our oft-stated desire for more creativity, we also hold a stronger desire for certainty and structure. When that certainty is challenged, a bias against creativity develops.

 

Plug Vs Pump

Even without a Supercharger network, EVs are actually much easier to refuel than gas-powered cars, precisely because the “scale and infrastructure” problems were solved by the electrical grid a hundred years ago. Once consumers get used to the charge-at-home ritual, the pilgrimage to the gas station will very quickly feel as inconvenient as rewinding the VHS tape and driving it back to Blockbuster.

 

Are coders worth it? 

I have a friend who’s a mechanical engineer. He used to build airplane engines for General Electric, and now he’s trying to develop a smarter pill bottle to improve compliance for AIDS and cancer patients. He works out of a start-up ‘incubator’, in an office space shared with dozens of web companies. He doesn’t have a lot of patience for them. ‘I’m fucking sick of it,’ he told me, ‘all they talk about is colours.’

 

Designing the No-Screen Experience

The point is that the Web (and, for that matter, the Internet) does *not* depend on screens for interaction. Sure, they are one, currently very major, way of interacting with electronic media, but they are not the only way – witness Apple’s Siri, whose primary interface is through voice. Even if that example is slightly spurious, it is undeniable that screens are not a pre-requisite for interfacing with the Internet or Web.

 

The Human Paradox

Leila Takayama’s Friendly Machines is a perspective on why we get frustrated with the limited capabilities of robots. She argues that we need to stop being obsessed with trying to make human-like robots and instead spend our efforts making robots that are more human-friendly in their form, behavior and function. Human-friendly rather than human-like. A subtle but important distinction. Now this might be a stretch but you could replace the word “robots” in the above with “brands”.

 

The Way They Live Now

Within a decade half the graduates of Oxford and Cambridge were trying to forget whatever they’d been taught about how to live their lives and were remaking themselves in the image of Wall Street. Monty Python was able to survive many things, but Goldman Sachs wasn’t one of them.

 

Beat Godfather Meets Glitter Mainman 

Burroughs: I dream a great deal, and then because I am a light sleeper, I will wake up and jot down just a few words and they will always bring the whole idea back to me.

Bowie: I keep a tape recorder by the bed and then if anything comes I just say it into the tape recorder. As for my inspiration, I haven’t changed my views much since I was about 12 really, I’ve just got a 12-year-old mentality.

 

GamesMaster: The Inside Story

“I’m not interested in fuelling that fire,” says Diamond, when I ask him about the feud. “The way I treated Dave on screen is not something I am particularly proud of. It was perilously close to bullying. As much as we felt Dave was being a dick, with this whole Games Animal thing and thinking the wheel was square before he got his hands on it – I think we humiliated the guy. Yes, at the time, he was a dick. But jeez, no one was a bigger dick during the 90s than me.”

 

More again at a similar time next week. You can subscribe via email and if you did you would have got this a whole day early this week. Can you imagine that?