Makers, Doctorow, Cory

Cory Doctorow is turning into one of my most useful ‘cheats’ in making sense of the ongoing collision between technology and human drives that is today’s world of electronic commerce, social media, enterprise 2.0, and the teeming mix of catchphrases, acronyms, and neologisms cluttering my inbox and browser windows. Doctorow does just the opposite of "teching the tech;" that lazy approach to storytelling of sprinkling random technological terminology into an otherwise ordinary story. Instead he takes a solid understanding of current and near term technology trends, extrapolates them in not just plausible, but defensible directions, and then explores how real people are likely to react and respond to that imagined environment. The result is an absorbing, and sometimes moving, story of our human need to create, connect, and matter.

The core of Makers is the story of two tinkerers, Perry and Lester, driven by the desire to make interesting stuff out of whatever is lying around. In Doctorow’s near future, this includes last year’s kids toys loaded with robotics, speech synthesizers, and multiple sensors discarded for this year’s models. Rip off an idea from an old Keystone cops movie, mix in some open source software and he has you imagining a golf cart maneuvered by half a dozen creatures out of Toy Soldiers. Down one path, this creative energy might lead to radically new models of work. Down another, it might trigger ugly immune responses from a threatened corporate economy and their lawyers. Doctorow explores several of these and other paths. Through it all he keeps us and his story grounded in human scale and human needs and wants.

Along the way, Doctorow generates multiple scenarios of new models of organizing work and likely responses from existing organizations and professions threatened by change. Because of his keen eye for the human reality of his stories, Doctorow’s scenarios are both more plausible and more compelling than similar efforts from pundits and consultants peddling their theories.

From time to time, government agencies and large organizations invite certain kinds of writers to come in and help make sense of the changes on and just over the horizon. These efforts draw an extra share of ridicule from outsiders who assume that the exercise is about predicting specific inventions and innovations. Here, Doctorow offers a stellar example of how the process really works. In a recent essay titled "Radical Presentism" he offers more reflections on how this imagining process works. But you’ll have more fun reading the story itself.

I was pondering this over the weekend and I think I’ve found a way to explain it in a more satisfying way.

Emergent behaviors are unintended consequences that make you happy.

We are social animals that have evolved to operate optimally in small groups (check out Dunbar’s number). As social systems get larger, they exceed our capacity to make accurate inferences and predictions. Complex organizations and political entities represent design solutions that compensate for these limits and allow us to take on tasks and efforts beyond the grasp of small groups. Technology adds to the complexity and increases the capacity of the system at the expense of making the system still more difficult to predict.

‘Unintended consequences’ is a consulting term for ‘oops.’ It’s a belated admission that it’s difficult to predict all the ways in which a system will react to its environment. A typical response is to work more diligently to lock things down, usually by squeezing out opportunities for human judgment and adaptability. This leads to the TSA and zero-tolerance policies that suspend six-year olds.

A better response is to stop treating people like interchangeable components in a machine and start designing with an eye toward integrating human limits and human creativity into our systems. Assume that the new system will produce unexpected results. Focus your design effort more on swinging the balance toward pleasant surprises and less on eliminating surprises altogether.

Link to Daniel Pink’s TED Talk Video

If you’ve been paying any attention at all, his conclusions should come as little surprise. This is simply one more brick in the growing wall of evidence that the fiction of “rational economic man” has long outlived whatever utility it might have had. The evidence boils down to this; if you need creative and original thought out of people, economic incentives don’t work. Creative work comes from internal, self-motivation and requires autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

This is not news. The question that is interesting is whether organizational leaders have finally reached the point where they are prepared to act on this knowledge. If what your organization needs is creative, mindful, independent thought from all quarters and you must finally abandon the pretense that you can elicit that behavior with specific, concrete incentives, then how much harder has your leadership task become? If, to use Pink’s phrase, “sharper sticks and sweeter carrots” won’t work, what will?

The answer comes down to leadership. More specifically, it comes down to the kind of leadership exemplified by Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics. For Russell, leadership was about getting the best out of each of the players on the team more than it was about getting the best out of himself.

• The Silver Lining: Scott Anthony Video Podcast – Chris Flanagan at Business Innovation Factory
• P.I. Podcast: Interview with Scott Anthony – Jeff De Cagna at Principled Innovation
• Finding the silver lining – Josh Kutticherry, futurethinktank

and Boris Pluskowski will wrap it up tomorrow at The Complete Innovator. One excellent fringe benefit of this effort is discovering four new bloggers worth following.

Scott is the President of Innosight, a boutique consulting firm founded by Clay Christensen of the Harvard Business School. I caught up with Scott two weeks ago just after his return from trips to England, Switzerland, and Singapore. Clearly Scott was going to benefit greatly from the virtual aspects of this book tour. You can find my review of The Silver Lining at Constraints and innovation – is there a silver lining? What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation. I’ve also added links to supporting ideas and materials that we referenced during our conversation.

Chunking innovation processes

The Silver Lining advocates breaking the innovation process down into smaller chunks so that you’re not betting on a single roll of the dice. What lessons do you think you’re learning about managing the innovation process?

Scott: If you break things down into enough component pieces, you increase the odds that luck will turn in your favor. And that too goes to the whole notion of having a portfolio. If any one thing doesn’t work out that’s OK because you’ve got something else right behind it.

Now, you can take that to an extreme. You couldn’t take the notion of "let a thousand flowers bloom" inside a company because they can’t manage that kind of complexity but there is something to be said for having eggs in more than one basket.

That’s an interesting observation about the organizational capacity to manage complexity and dealing with the tension between the level of granularity you might like to have vs. the level you’re capable of managing. What about the rhetoric pushing for more market like processes within organizations?

Scott: Even the poster child of the full market approach, Google, is saying ""Hey, something isn’t quite working here. We need to instill a bit more rigor and discipline in these innovation processes. Because while we appear to be great at inventing, we aren’t great at actually innovating and creating an income statement that has more than 3% of our income in something other than search based advertising."

Innovation factories and their limits

How has Innosight’s mix of work shifted from finding and designing individual innovation ideas to putting more structure and discipline around the innovation process?

Scott: Not surprisingly, the mix has shifted toward the latter, although the two are inextricably linked. Five years ago, 80-90% of our work was "I’ve got this ideas, what do I do with it?" or "I don’t have any ideas, can you help me come up with some?" Today,50- 60% of our mix is "I need to build capabilities so this isn’t a one shot deal. How can I create an ‘Innovation Factory’ so I can churn out businesses."

I’m always a bit suspicious of factory analogies around knowledge intensive processes. How have you managed to create disciplined innovation processes without killing real innovation?

Scott: It’s a really delicate balance, There has been academic research that shows that the better organizations get at six sigma kinds of processes, the better they get at incremental innovation and the worse they get at disruptive innovation.

The notion that there is discipline in innovation is absolutely critical. The notion that disruptive innovation can be managed and can be mastered is absolutely critical. But you have to also recognize that it’s an intensely human effort so you cannot treat it the same way as an assembly line. I use those metaphors with some caution inside companies, because I know someone will ask me for the forms to be filled out.

P&G is one of the companies I’ve drawn examples from in the book. I know them and they’ve been very generous in sharing their experiences.That’s one of the sources of tension inside the company. They are a very process focused organization and have great stage-gate capabilities. What we’re telling them is that for some of these things you’ve got to trust the gut and intuition of a human being. If you don’t do that, you’re going to make the wrong decision. Some people are comfortable with that and some people are getting there.

Lessons learned about innovation processes

Have you found methods or practices in the way you deliver your intellectual capital or ways to structure the process and its metrics that have proven particularly effective?

Scott:If you go back to The Innovator’s Guide to Growth, which we published last year, versions of the qualitative measures we talked about in Chapter 6 are proving helpful. These qualitative and light quantitative measures help

The other thing we’ve come to believe is that it’s hard to do disruptive innovation in particular democratically; to be something that works at a grassroots level. Senior leaders either need to create a situation where there’s a great deal of organizational autonomy and people don’t have to go through standard operating procedures, or they’ve got to get personally involved. Otherwise, the efforts just stall out at some point.That was always in the literature, but from the field experience we believe it even more strongly.

Interesting…in other areas, such as the Enterprise 2.0 space that Andrew McAfee describes and the organizational changes triggered by new forms of collaboration technology, you see an argument that the grassroots is the place to start. Is it the particular characteristics of disruptive innovation  that means you’re going to need a level of organizational air cover to succeed?

Scott: I’m absolutely sure that is the case. There’s a classification scheme out there which would make it clear how to handle a particular innovation. It could be fit with the business model, or degree of certainty you have, it could be degree of fit with your current capabilities. It’s certainly clear that there are things that not only can be done at the grassroots, but have to be done at the grassroots to work. But there are other things where if you don’t have the ”grasstops" leading in the right way, it just will not work. You need to have that supportive environment or the grassroots just wither and die.

Isn’t there a third level where you have to have a level of senior leadership engagement beyond the level of simply providing a supportive environment?

Scott:I’ve seen two benefits from this. One, a senior leader can do things that other can’t. A senior leader can route around existing processes in ways that a line manager can’t.

There’s a second thing a senior leader is able to do. Typically senior leaders haven’t got where they are by accident. They got a lot of informed judgment and intuition about industry space. Now, for some people that can lead to them having blinders on, but for others it gives them a tremendously good feel for a market space. That makes them hugely value-added team members, if you can get them to act in that kind of role. They know a lot from their accumulated experience and that allows them to say "that might work, but you need to do it this way" or "we tried this in 1973 and it didn’t work. If we made this change it might work today."

Value of shared frameworks about disruptive innovation 

Isn’t the challenge there to equip senior leaders with a better feel for the underlying intellectual capital? To make sure they’re equipped with the right vocabularies and distinctions so that they don’t short circuit the process with "we tried that in 1973 and it’s not going to work."

Scott: There’s a huge role in all of this in having a common language in order to support the necessary culture change. It’s important to have those common frameworks, those common guides to discussion. The other thing that I really strongly urge senior leaders to do is to make sure they are bringing in different voices to these types of discussions.

It’s very easy to fall into the 73 trap of "we tried that and it’s not going to work." An outside person can say "yes, but it’s now 2009 and these are the three things that are different." You just don’t understand the unstated assumptions you are making until someone states them.

Jobs to be done

I’m struck by how the notion of "jobs to be done" appears to be a centerpiece of your work. It feels a lot like Ted Levitt’s old observation that people don’t buy drills because they like drills but because they need to make a hole somewhere. I’m curious as to what you see as the strengths of that element of your intellectual capital and where you see the limits and edges of that particular idea.

Scott:  "Jobs to be done" isn’t a new notion at all. You can reference Levitt and you can go back to Drucker’s observation that your customer is rarely buying what you think you’re selling. In the world of innovation Dick Foster had pointed out many of the same phenomena in his work in the early 1980s. The hard part in these things and what Christensen did was to get the causal mechanisms and language right. He gave people a language to talk about it and tools to do something with it in a useful way.

That to me is the hard part about the ‘jobs to be done’ notion. The concept is easy. The hard part is what do I actually do with these intuitively appealing stories as a line manager?  Providing that next level down to break this apart into a fundamental problem of a job to be done, some performance metrics to measure how well its being done, the barriers customers face, and some potential new solutions for them is the challenge. I think we’re maybe in the second or third inning of at least nine to go in terms of developing the tools and approaches that can really help people crack the nut on this one.

To be honest, I’ve been surprised about this. I remember back in 2002 when I was working with Clay and he was working on The Innovator’s Solution. In a very early draft of the book, Clay thought that the biggest idea in the book was the notion of jobs to be done. He wanted to call the book "Getting the Innovation Job Done." I told him he was crazy. The idea was too simple and I had to believe that people had already solved this problem.

As I’ve since learned, Clay’s intuitions were right. It’s an elegantly simple idea and not a new one at all. What Clay did was provide a language system and tools to work with the idea in a useful way.
I have to keep reminding myself of what Bob Sutton and Jeff Pfeffer pointed out in The Knowing-Doing Gap. Having the right tool or framework only solves about 5% of the problem. It’s why we exist as an organization. If people could just read books and have the answers to everything, there would be no need for them to hire Innosite, McKinsey, Bain, or any other consulting firm. The knowledge is all out there, but actually doing it inside a large, complicated organization is very challenging.

The Silver Lining is positioned as a case for the strategic value of innovation in economic downturns. It evolves into a reflection on the role of constraints in innovation and on the possibility of successful innovation within large, complex, organizations. Scott Anthony, the author, is a former student and current colleague of Clay Christensen and is President of the boutique consulting firm Innosight. The book was conceived in October of 2008 and the manuscript delivered to HBS Press in January and offers itself as a good example of the value of tight constraints. (Here is the obligatory book website)

The Silver Lining presents a succinct, focused, argument for how to do effective disruptive innovation within existing organizations. This runs contrary to the research conclusions in Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma that linked successful disruptive innovation with new entrants not industry incumbents. The management practices of successful market leaders emphasize the prudent deployment of resources to address clearly understood problems and clearly meaningful opportunities. Those practices are about coloring inside the lines. Disruptive innovation goes beyond just coloring outside the lines to redrawing the lines and creating entirely new pictures.

It’s certainly not fear of new concepts and management theories; executives seem to buy and change them as easily as a new set of clothes. But executives demonstrably favor ideas that involve ways to do what they are currently doing in a more efficient, more effective manner. Systematizing disruptive innovation is a different beast. Senior executives have to think and act in ways that run counter to everything they have done to be successful in their careers. As Putz notes, they must be multi-paradigmatic in how they structure their business model, run their firms, lead their teams, and most difficult of all, see themselves and frame their identity as leaders. Simply put, leaders who want to capture the potential of disruptive innovation need to be "consistently inconsistent" with their teams and themselves, and still hold it all together and deliver results quarter after quarter. (pp 154-155)

She’s just posted an illuminating perspective on her recent experience at an academic conference in Italy that brought together a combination of young Turks and old farts. It’s a reflection on the slow emergence of new habits and behaviors in shared public settings; a look at how and why blackberries, twitter, backchannels, laptops, and iphones might actually be making meetings better for all concerned. Here are just a couple of quick excerpts. Go read the whole thing.

…

There’s no doubt that I barely understood what the speaker was talking about. But during the talk, I had looked up six different concepts he had introduced (thank you Wikipedia), scanned two of the speakers’ papers to try to grok what on earth he was talking about, and used Babelfish to translate the Italian conversations taking place on Twitter and FriendFeed in attempt to understand what was being said. Of course, I had also looked up half the people in the room (including the condescending man next to me) and posted a tweet of my own.

…

Blackberries and laptops are often frowned upon as distraction devices. As a result, few of my colleagues are in the habit of creating backchannels in business meetings. This drives me absolutely bonkers, especially when we’re talking about conference calls. I desperately, desperately want my colleagues to be on IM or IRC or some channel of real-time conversation during meetings. While I will fully admit that there are times when the only thing I have to contribute to such dialogue is snark, there are many more times when I really want clarifications, a quick question answered, or the ability to ask someone in the room to put the mic closer to the speaker without interrupting the speaker in the process.

…

My colleagues aren’t that much older than me but they come from a different set of traditions. They aren’t used to speaking to a room full of blue-glow faces. And they think it’s utterly fascinating that I poll my twitterverse about constructs of fairness while hearing a speaker talk about game theory. Am I learning what the speaker wants me to learn? Perhaps not. But I am learning and thinking and engaging.

…

What will it take for us to see technology as a tool for information enhancement? At the very least, how can we embrace those who learn best when they have an outlet for their questions and thoughts? How I long for being connected to be an acceptable part of engagement.

I want my cyborg life
zephoria
Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:16:26 GMT

Meanwhile, Christensen and his colleagues and collaborators continued to work out the ideas and implications of his emerging theoretical framework. The Innovator’s Dilemma was followed by

• The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth.

  In this book, Christensen begins to lay out how you can take the notions of disruptive innovation and use them to design a reasonable course of action in the absence of the kind of analytical data strategy consultants desire. Disruptive innovations attack either the lower ends of existing markets where there are customers willing to settle for less performance at less cost, or new markets where a new packaging and design of available technologies creates an alternative to non-consumption. The example I found easiest to understand here was Sony’s invention of the portable transistor radio. Compared to vacuum tube radios the first transistor radios were crappy, but good enough for teenagers and others on the go whose alternative was no music at all.

•  Seeing What’s Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change.

  In this third effort to work out the implications of distinguishing between sustaining and disruptive innovation, Christensen and his collaborators shift their attention from individual competitors to industry level analysis. They take their theoretical structures and apply them across several industry settings and ask how those particular industries (education, aviation, health care, semiconductors, and telecommunications) are more or less vulnerable to disruptive innovation strategies. What Christensen and colleagues are doing here is to begin integrating their innovation theories and Porter’s theories of competitive strategy. This is not so much a case of seeing whether their new theoretical hammer can pound strategy nails as it is of whether they are making progress in creating a new and robust toolkit for strategy problems.

• The Innovator’s Guide to Growth: Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work, Anthony, Scott D.

  This volume is written by Scott Anthony and several other collaborators of Christensen who are putting his ideas to work at the consulting firm Innosight. They develop the next level of operational detail to transform strategic insights into execution details. If you’re an organization seeking to develop its own disruptive strategy, the authors here have worked out the next level questions and identified the supporting analyses and design steps you would need to answer and complete. This volume is not a teaser; it’s complete and coherent. You could pretty much take the book as a recipe and use it to develop your project plans. On the other hand, the plans by themselves won’t guarantee that you can assemble a team with the necessary qualifications to execute the plan successfully. The other thing that this book does quite nicely is identify the kinds of organizational support structures and processes that you would want to put in place to institutionalize systematic disruptive innovation.

This core of books would equip you with a robust set of insights and practical techniques to begin thinking about when and where you might attempt to develop and deploy new products, services, and business models in disruptively innovative ways. The one area that is underdeveloped in this framework is that of design. There is an implicit bias in the material that tends to keep design in the "perform magic" category. I believe this is part and parcel of the general execution bias of business literature in general. Design is flaky, creative, stuff and real managers distinguish themselves on execution. But that is a topic for another post. These books belong on your shelf and the ideas belong in your toolkit.

Gary Hamel has been an astute observer of organizations and management for several decades now. For all the reasons that seemed to make sense at the time, this book sat on my shelf for a while before I got to it. Based on the current state of the economy, I suspect a number of executives who could have benefitted from Hamel’s insights also failed to get them in a timely fashion. Hamel’s central thesis is that management is a mature technology and is ripe for disruptive innovation. Although he makes only passing reference to Clay Christensen’s work, there are important points of linkage between these two management thinkers.

The underlying rationale behind management philosophy and practices was largely laid down in the early decades of the twentieth century during the growth and ascendancy of the large multi-divisional industrial organization. In other words, most managers continue to operate with the mindset and practices originally developed to handle the problems encountered by the railroads, GM, IBM, and the other organizations making up the Dow Jones average between 1930 and 1960. While we’ve experienced multiple innovations in products, technologies, services, and strategies, the basics of management have changed little. Here’s how Hamel puts it:

While a suddenly resurrected 1960s-era CEO would undoubtedly be amazed by the flexibility of today’s real-time supply chains, and the ability to provide 24/7 customer service, he or she would find a great many of today’s management rituals little changed from those that governed corporate life a generation or two ago. Hierarchies may have gotten flatter, but they haven’t disappeared. Frontline employees may be smarter and better trained, but they’re still expected to line up obediently behind executive decisions. Lower-level managers are still appointed by more senior managers. Strategy still gets set at the top. And the big calls are still made by people with big titles and even bigger salaries. there may be fewer middle managers on the payroll, but those that remain are doing what managers have always done–setting budgets, assigning tasks, reviewing performance, and cajoling their subordinates to do better. (p. 4)

Hamel sets out to explore what innovation in the practice of management would look like and how organizations and managers might tackle the problems of developing and deploying those innovations. I don’t think he gets all the way there, but the effort is worth following.

The first section of the book lays out the case for management innovation as compared to other forms. the second examines three organizations that Hamel considers worthy exemplars: Whole Foods, W.L. Gore, and Google. The last two section build a framework for how you might start doing managerial innovation within your own organization.

Hamel does a good job of extracting useful insights from the case examples he presents. Hamel’s own preference is for a managerial future that is less hierarchical and less mechanical. At the same time, he wants each of us to commit to doing managerial innovation for ourselves. This leaves him in a bit of a bind. I suspect that Hamel would like to be more prescriptive, but his position forces him to leave the prescription as an exercise for the reader. While I agree with Hamel that both individuals and organizations need to be formulating their own theories of management and experimenting on their own, this is not likely to happen in most organizations and particularly so in the current economic climate. Necessity is not the mother of invention; rather it forces us to cling to the safe and familiar. We need a degree of safety and a degree of slack to do the kinds of thinking and experimenting that will produce meaningful managerial innovations. I fear that may be hard to come by in the current environment; no matter how relevant or necessary.

What you can do in the interim is research and reflection to discover or define opportunities for possible managerial innovations. This book is one excellent starting point, but insufficient on its own.

Is this an agenda worth pursuing? What else would you recommend to move forward?

In an oral culture, what you can think is limited to what you can remember and tell–without visual aids. Oral thinking is linear, additive, redundant, situational, engaged, and conservative. The invention of writing and the emergence of literate cultures allows a new kind of thinking to develop. Literate thinking is subordinate, analytic, objectively distanced, and abstract. It’s the underlying engine of science and the industrial revolution.

Management understands something that those rooted in literate thinking may not. Knowing the right answer analytically has little or nothing to do with whether you can get the organization to accept that answer. What literate thinkers dismiss as "politics" is the essential work of translating and packaging an idea for acceptance and consumption in an oral culture.

The critical step in translating from a literate answer to an oral plan of action is finding a story to hang the answer on. The analysis only engages the mind; moving analysis to action must engage the whole person. Revealing this truth to the analytical minded can be discomforting. It’s equivalent to explaining to an accountant that the key to a Capital Expenditure proposal is theater, not economics. You might want to check out Steve Denning’s book, "The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations," for some good insights into how to craft effective stories inside organizations.

In addition to helping the analytically biased see the value of creating a compelling story, you need to help them see how and why story works differently than analysis. The best stories to drive change are not complex, literary, novels. They are epic poetry; tapping into archetypes and cliché, acknowledging tradition, grounded in the particular. You need to bring them to an understanding of why repetition and "staying on message" is key to shifting an oral culture’s course, not an evil invention of marketing.

Assume you teach the literate types in your analytic organization how to repackage their analyses for consumption. They’ve now learned how to pitch their ideas in ways that will stick in the organization. What might you learn from their literate approach to thought? Is there an opportunity if you can get more of your organization and more of your management operating with literate modes of thinking?

Being able to write things down done permits you to develop an argument that is more complex and sophisticated. On the plus side, this makes rocket science possible. On the negative side, you get lawyers.

On the other hand, if you are operating in an environment whose complexity demands a corresponding complexity in your organizational responses, then encouraging more literate thinking by more members of the organization is a good strategy.

What would such an organization look like compared to today’s dominant oral design? The mere presence of e-mail and an intranet is insufficient. E-mail tends to mirror oral modes of thought, particularly among more senior executives. Intranets tend to be over-controlled and, to the extent they contain examples of literate thinking, are rooted in an organizational culture that strives to confine the literate mind to the role of well-pigeonholed expert. The presence of particular tools, then, isn’t likely to be a good predictor, although their absence might be.

What of possible case examples? A few knowledge management success stories hold hints. Buckman Labs used discussion groups successfully to get greater leverage out of its staff’s knowledge and expertise. Whether this success built on literate modes of thought or simply on better distribution of oral stories is less clear. The successes of some widely distributed software development teams are worth looking at from this perspective.

Although it’s a bit too early to tell, the take up of blogs and wikis inside organizations may be a harbinger of management based on literate thinking skills. They offer an interesting bridge between the oral and the literate by providing a way to capture conversation in a way that makes it visible and, hence, analyzable. As a class of tools, they begin to move institutional memory out of the purely oral and into the realm of literate.

Have you ever wondered what’s behind the conflict between geeks and suits? Sure, they think differently, but what, exactly, does that mean? A Jesuit priest who passed away in 2003 at the age of 90 may hold one interesting clue.

Walter Ong published a slim volume in 1982 titled "Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word" that explored what the differences between oral and literate cultures mean about how we think.

Remember Homer, the blind epic poet credited with "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey"? If we remember anything, it’s something along the lines of someone who managed to memorize and then flawlessly recite book-length poems for his supper.

The real story, which Ong details, is more interesting and more relevant to our organizational world than you might suspect. Homer sits at the boundary between oral culture and the first literate cultures.

In an oral culture, what you can think is limited to what you can remember and tell–without visual aids. Ong’s work shows that oral thinking is linear, additive, redundant, situational, engaged, and conservative. The invention of writing and the emergence of literate cultures allows a new kind of thinking to develop: literate thinking is subordinate, analytic, objectively distanced, and abstract. It’s the underlying engine of science and the industrial revolution.

While this may sound interesting for a college bull session, it’s particularly relevant to organizations. For all their dependence on the industrial revolution, organizations are human institutions first. Management is fundamentally an oral culture and is most comfortable with thought organized that way. Historically, leadership in organizations went to those most facile with the spoken word.

At the opposite extreme, information technology is a quintessentially literate activity with a literate mode of thought. In fact, IT cannot exist without the objective, rational, analytical thinking that literate culture enables.

How does the nature of this divide complicate conversations between IT and management? Can understanding the differing natures of oral and literate thought help us bridge that divide?

Technology professionals have long struggled with getting a complex message across to management. In our honest and unguarded moments, we talk of "dumbing it down for the suits." But the challenge is more subtle than that. We need to repackage the argument to work within the frame of oral thought. The easy part of that is about oratorical and rhetorical technique. The more important challenge is to deal with the deeper elements of oral culture; of being situational, engaged, and conservative. The right abstract answer can’t be understood until it is placed carefully within its context.

What management recognizes in its fundamentally oral mind is that organizations and their inhabitants spend most of their time in oral modes of thought. The oral mind is focused on tradition and stability because of how long it takes to embed a new idea. The techniques of change management that seem so obtuse to the literate, engineering mind are not irrational; they are oral. They are the necessary steps to embed new ideas and practices in oral minds.

Repeating a calculation or an analysis is nonsense in a literate culture. Management objections to an analytical proposal rarely turn on objections to the analysis. Walking through the analysis again at a deeper level of detail will not help. What needs to be done is to craft the oral culture story that will carry the analytical tale. It’s not about dumbing down an argument, it’s about repackaging it to match the fundamental thought processes of the target audience.

That might mean finding the telling anecdote or designating an appropriate hero or champion. Suppose, for example, that your analysis concludes it’s time to move toward document management to manage the files littering a shared drive somewhere or buried as attachments to three-year old e-mails. Analytical statistics on improved productivity won’t do it. A scenario of the "day in the life" of a field sales rep would be better. Best would be a story of the sales manager who can’t find the marked up copy of the last version of the contract.

These human stories are much more than the tricks of the trade of consultants and sales reps. They are recognition that what gets dressed up as the techniques of change management are really a bridge to the oral thinking needed to provoke action.

Seen in this light, what is typically labeled resistance to change is better understood as the necessary time and repetition to embed ideas in an oral environment.