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.

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)

- Laurence Peter

Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems, Conklin, Jeff

However you’re paying attention to the current external environment — the nightly news, newspapers, blogs, Twitter, or the Daily Show — it’s a grim time. While there is a great deal of noise, there’s not as much light as you might like. Dialogue Mapping, by Jeff Conklin, is one effort to equip us with tools for creating more light. While Conklin started out doing research on software for group decision support that research led him into some unexpected places of organizational dynamics and problem structure. He starts with the notion of "fragmentation" as the barrier to coherent organizational action. He defines fragmentation as "wicked problems x social complexity."

I’m often surprised that the term "wicked problem" hasn’t become more common. The notion and the term have actually been around for decades. Horst Rittel at Berkeley coined the term in a paper, "Issues as Elements of Information Systems," in the 1970s. Rittel identified six criteria that distinguish a particular problem as a wicked one:

1. You don’t understand the problem until you have developed a solution
2. Wicked problems have no stopping rule
3. Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong
4. Every wicked problem is essentially unique and novel
5. Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”
6. Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions

Compare wicked problems with tame problems. A tame problem:

1. Has a well-defined and stable problem statement
2. Has a definite stopping point
3. Has a solution that can be objectively evaluated as right or wrong
4. Belongs to a class of similar problems that are all solved in the same similar way
5. Has solutions that can be easily tried and abandoned
6. Comes with a limited set of alternative solutions

Obviously there are degrees of wickedness/tameness. Nevertheless, the real world of politics, urban planning, health care, business, and a host of other domains is filled with wicked problems, whether we acknowledge them as such or not. All too often, wicked problems go unrecognized as such. If you do recognize a problem as a wicked one, you can choose to attempt to tame it to the point where you might be able to solve it. Some ways to tame a wicked problem include:

• Lock down the problem definition
• Assert that the problem is solved
• Specify objective parameters by which to measure the solution’s success
• Cast the problem as “just like” a previous problem that has been solved
• Give up on trying to get a good solution to the problem
• Declare that there are just a few possible solutions, and focus on selecting from among these options

These are the kinds of problem management strategies frequently seen in organizations. Conklin provides a good case that we and organizations would be better off if we were more explicit and mindful that this is what we were up to. That isn’t always possible and brings us to Conklin’s second element driving fragmentation: social complexity. Independently of the problem features that make them wicked problems, problems also exist in environments of multiple stakeholders with differing worldviews and agendas.

This social complexity increases the challenge of discovering or inventing sufficient shared ground around a problem to make progress toward a resolution or solution. This is where Conklin’s book adds its greatest value by introducing and detailing "Dialogue Mapping," which is a facilitation technique for capturing and displaying discussions of wicked problems in a useful way.

Assume that someone recognizes that we have a wicked problem at hand and persuades the relevant stakeholders to gather to discuss it and develop an approach for moving forward. Assume further that the stakeholders acknowledge that they will need to collaborate in order to develop that approach (I realize that these are actually fairly big assumptions). More often than not, even with all the best of intentions, the meetings will produce lots of frustration and little satisfying progress. Our default practices for managing discussions in meetings can’t accommodate wicked problems, which is one of the reasons we find meetings so frustrating.

"Dialogue Mapping" takes a notation for representing wicked problems, IBIS (short for Issue-Based Information System) and adds facilitation practices suited to the discussions that occur with wicked problems. The IBIS notation was developed by Rittel in his work with wicked problems in the 1970s. It is simple enough to be largely intuitive, yet rich enough to capture conversations about wicked problems in useful and productive ways.

The building blocks of a dialogue map are questions, ideas, arguments for an idea (pros), and arguments against an idea (cons). These simple building blocks, together with what is effectively a pattern language of typical conversational moves, constitute "dialogue mapping." The following is a fragment of a dialogue map that might get captured on a whiteboard in a typical meeting:

While the notation is simple enough, learning to use it on the fly clearly takes some practice. Some starting points for me are using it to process my conventional meeting notes and beginning to use the notation while taking notes on the fly. I’m not yet ready to employ it explicitly in meetings I am facilitating, especially given Conklin’s advice that the technique changes the role of meeting facilitator in some significant ways.

When applied successfully in meeting settings, Conklin argues that dialogue mapping creates a shared representation of the discussion that accomplishes several important things:

1. Allows each individual contributor to have their perspective accurately heard and captured
2. Reduces repetitious contributions by having a dynamic, organized, and visible record of the discussion. Attempts to restate or remake points that have already been made can be short circuited by reference to the map
3. Digressions or attempts to question the premises of a discussion can be simply accommodated as new questions that may not, in fact, fit immediately in the current map tree. They can be addressed as they surface and located appropriately in the map. Or they may be seen as digressions to be addressed briefly and then the discussion can pick up in the main map with little or no loss of progress.

Much of the latter part of the book consists of showing how different conversational "moves" play out in a dialogue map. Assuming you are working with organizations that actually want to tackle wicked problems more productively, understanding these moves is immensely illuminating. Actually, it’s also illuminating if you’re in a setting where the incumbents aren’t terribly interested in the value of shared understanding. In those settings, you might need to keep your dialogue maps to yourself.

There are two software tools that I am aware of designed to support dialogue mapping. One is a tool called Compendium, which grew out of Conklin’s research. It is available as a free download and is built in Java, although it is not currently open source from a licensing point of view. The other is commercial tool called bCisive, developed in Australia by Tim van Gelder and the folks at Austhink. Here’s what a dialogue map in Compendium would look like. This particular map is a meta-map of the dialogue mapping process from 50,000 feet.

As I’ve spent time developing a deeper understanding of wicked problems and dialogue mapping it’s becoming clear that we have more of the former to tackle and we need the tools of the latter to wrestle with them. In this world, decisions don’t come from algorithms or analysis; they emerge from building shared understanding. In this world, to quote Conklin’s conclusion, "the best decision is the one that has the broadest and deepest commitment to making it work." These are the tools we need to become facile with to design those decisions.

The Innovator’s Guide to Growth is the newest installment in a series of books articulating and explicating Prof. Clay Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation. This hands on guide packages some of the insights developed as an outgrowth of the consulting work of Innosight, LLC, the consulting firm founded by Christensen to pursue the practical insights from his research at the Harvard Business School. If innovation is part of your current or prospective job description, this needs to be on your shelf (after you’ve read it, of course).

Christensen’s theories of disruptive innovation appeared first with the publication of The Innovator’s Dilemma in 1997. During the worst excesses of the dotcom boom, every start up business plan including an obligatory head nod to Christensen and an assertion that their business model was truly disruptive. Who doesn’t want to be innovative; ideally disruptively so. Christensen and his colleagues have continued to develop his theories in The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth, Seeing What’s Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change, and now The Innovator’s Guide to Growth.

Christensen distinguishes two forms of innovation — sustaining and disruptive — not in terms of their technological features but in terms of their relationship to markets. The distinction in summarized in the following diagram reproduced from The Innovator’s Guide to Growth.

In essence, Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation flows from recognizing that the pace of technology improvement is generally more rapid than the capacity of users in the market to take advantage of those improvements. This differential is what open possibilities for differing approaches to innovation.

In this market oriented theory of innovation, there are three paths available to organizations interested in articulating potentially disruptive strategies. The first is to identify and target "nonconsumers;" potential consumers for whom existing technologies fail to meet their particular needs. The second is to identify existing customers where existing technologies are more technology than they needs. The final is to investigate potential consumers in terms of what Christensen’s theory describes as "jobs to be done" as a path to defining new products and services to perform these jobs. I must confess that I still find this path the least well articulated aspect of this theory.

Throughout this book, the authors start by recapping the essentials of Christensen’s theoretical arguments and proceed to develop the next level of operational detail it takes 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 many of the next level questions and identified the supporting analyses and design steps you would need to answer and complete. The authors are clearly competent and talented consultants who are willing to share how they manage and do their work. Their hope, of course, is that many of you will conclude that you need their help to do the work. What is nice here, is that they are confident enough in their abilities that they are quite thorough in what they share. 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.

Christensen and his colleagues are continuing to build a rich, systematic, theory of disruptive innovation. With roots in academic research, they are freely sharing their insights and their methods. The Innovator’s Guide to Growth is a solid workbook that will let you develop your own skill at doing disruptive innovation. Of course, the plan by itself won’t eliminate the need to gain the experience for yourself. But it’s a lot better strategy than to have to work everything out from scratch on your own.