Promoting Collaborative Innovation at MIX
by Bill Ives
The Management Innovation eXchange (MIX) is “an open innovation project aimed at reinventing management for the 21st century. The premise: while “modern” management is one of humankind’s most important inventions, it is now a mature technology that must be reinvented for a new age.” I am impressed with their efforts and recently joined the MIX site. It is free to sign up.
MIX leaders include: Gary Hamel, Michele Zanini, Polly LaBarre, and David Sims, and others. I had lunch with Michele after the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston and he filled me in on some of what they are doing.
Here is the MIX Manifesto: “What law decrees that our organizations have to be bureaucratic, inertial and politicized, or that life within them has to be disempowering, dispiriting and often downright boring? No law we know of. So why not build organizations that are as resilient, inventive, inspiring and socially responsible, as the people who work within them? Why not, indeed. This is the mission of the MIX.” I can certainly support this effort.
They refer to this effort as Management 2.0. Consistent with Enterprise 2.0, MIX is using an open innovation model to collect and share ideas to support their mission. Operating under the principle that innovation is a social process they are building a community to support their goals. To encourage sharing at MIX, “every effort will be made on the MIX to ensure that every valuable contribution is recognized, and every contribution fairly credited.” This is a smart practice. They ask that all participants follow these guidelines, be: contrarian, concise, concrete, constructive, collaborative, and colorful. Part of the color side is to encourage more interesting profiles by participants.
One of the MIX initiatives is the Harvard Business Review/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation. In the first leg of contest (which runs from May 25 through July 18), they are seeking the “most progressive practices and disruptive ideas that illustrate how the governing principles and tools of the Web can make our organizations more adaptable, innovative, inspiring, and accountable.” There are two types of entries: an instructive case study (a Story) or an experimental design (a Hack). The goals is to show how Web 2.0 values (including transparency, collaboration, meritocracy, openness, community and self-determination) can help overcome the design limits of Management 1.0—and help to create Management 2.0.
Here is an excellent blog post by Polly LaBarre, How to Hack Management: A Practical Guide to High-Impact Disruption and Storytelling, that illustrates what they are looking for in the M-Prize but the advice goes beyond this initiative to provide guidance for any new management effort. Polly asks if the idea is: deep, bold, human, clear, and social.
Here is a sample hack, The Deliberatorium, by Martin Klein, Principal Research Scientist at MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. It is s “a software tool designed to help organizations better harvest the knowledge and incorporate the perspectives of their members to identify solutions for complex problems, avoiding the dysfunctional behaviors (such as noise, disorganized content, and polarization) that other social media often produce when applied to challenging topics.” It provides better treading of conversations that offers useful maps of conversation to enable to harvesting of broader input into management decisions.
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