In the 19th century, navies all over the world experimented to find the new model for the capital ship.

Like most organizations today who are trying to find the new model for the enterprise in the pub media context, so steel, steam and big guns meant that the wooden capital ship had to go.

So over the century, designers added these new features in a piecemeal fashion – wooden hulls were replaced by iron and then steel. Sails were reduced and then fully replaced by steam – reciprocating engines by turbines. Gun size increased. Turrets were introduced.

The ship on the left in the image above was the great capital ship of its time – about 1876 – it was called the Inflexible – no pun intended. It’s captain was Jackie Fisher who went on the be the First Sea Lord who commission Dreadnought – the ship on the right in about 1906.

Inflexible looked modern. It had all the new bits in some form – like many Pub Media stations or organizations. It had a Facebook account, Twitter, a blog etc.

But in reality Inflexible was not modern at all.

Here is HMS Victory in 1805 at the Battles of Trafalgar. Why Inflexible was not modern was that while she had all the new stuff – she was a prisoner of the culture of the Nelsonic tradition.

The core of her mindset set was that war was an heroic activity where the main point was to get as close as possible - many times touching the enemy and to use training and discipline to pour it on. Part of this culture demanded that the officer corps were men of character – read class was the key.

What Fisher saw that made Dreadnought so much a disrupter is that it had at the core of its design an entirely new mindset.

Battle was to be done at a distance – miles apart. All the smaller guns of Inflexible meant for close engagement could be disposed of. The key relationship was different. Dreadnought could sink the entire German fleet at the time on its own!

Secondly, engineering and technical ability was more important than class. Fisher set in motion events in officer recruitment and training that would open up the service to people who could offer this.

I fear that most organizations are doing an Inflexible. They pride themselves that they have all the bells and whistles but they have not put it all together AND they have not made the organizational changes to make the new WHOLE work as en entity.

But KETC in St Louis is building its Dreadnought now – building a new organization based on the values and the technology that changes the core relationship with the people outside and the people inside.

The Nine Network is the Dreadnought – a physical realization of all the new relationships and tools of the new.

More than a plan – the Nine Network will be ready in March 2010.

So what is in this room and why?

• Community News Pro - KETC is one of a handful of any Pub TV stations with a “News” function. The Beacon is a group of professional journalists – many from the Post Dispatch – who have come together into a network and who share premises with KETC. The Beacon have been recognized by the Knight Foundation as a key pioneer. They are also the only Pub TV partner who are using Public Insight Journalism. The Beacon represent the future of post newspaper local news.
• The Community itself – You see here the Community Room – KETC has pioneered convening the community to come together and to thus get stronger in dealing with pressing issues. The Facing the Mortgage Crisis Project not only helped bring together a wide range of St Louis Community organizations such as the United way and Beyond Housing but also helped nearly 70 other stations in 30 plus of the worst hit cities do the same in their cities. Meeting face to face with community organizations has become commonplace. Our Community Room is more than just a meeting room – it is a fully equipped media room. KETC has given the communities of St Louis a voice and a place to come together. Intractable issues such as diabetes, education, jobs etc can all be worked at here at the ground level.
• The Nine Network – A working “school” that helps the community get the skills to broaden their voice and power. The space just up from the Beacon is the Nine Network space. Here KETC will train interns and young St Louisans how use the new media to tell stories – for it is not just knowing how to use the tools but how to use them to effect that is the key. The focus of the Nine Network is not to teach the skills on their own but to use projects such as stories on St Louis, News items for the Beacon. The “students” will be like Midshipmen of the RN back in the time of Trafalgar – treated like grow ups with real jobs to do that help the whole “ship”. All the online world of KETC and the sweet spot where the online world AND TV come together will come from this full integration of the On Air and the On Line world.
• New Values of Community First - The Nine has TV, Web Video, Community and Journalism all in one space all feeding off and supporting each other. Most importantly the POV is to listen first to the community and to bring the community into everything that we do. This more than any other part of the Nine is the most important. Just as for Dreadnought – distance and technical skill were the values shift. The Nine, like the Dreadnought, brings it all together in one human space.

Classes will begin in January.

With the launch of the Nine Network’s physical space – KETC – will have a de facto new organization that does the Dreadnought – that embodies the new culture and that brings all the new and the old TOGETHER!

Watch this space as more is on its way.

A Wisdom of Crowds tactic being adopted by the new administration … interesting idea, we’ll see how it plays out.

.

.

Obama Crowdsources Daily Ideas with Citizen’s Briefing Book

I just learned from Leverage’s Mike Walsh that Obama will receive a briefing from the top voted ideas that were submitted by the American people each evening see Change.Force.com (a play off) . This method of keeping in direct communication by ‘listening’ to the citizens leans on voting style technology similar to Dell’s Ideastorm. My colleague Josh Bernoff will be pleased, as he requested this feature a few months ago.

You’ll need to login and register (I suspect they can use IP addresses to determine point of origin within US) in order to confirm location but that’s not completely accurate. How can Obama extend this further? Make a similar site for all other nations to submit ideas for foreign policy. This doesn’t come without challenges of course, the system could be gamed, and there’s no promise he’ll make changes based on our feedback, we’ll see.

I talk to the executives of the world’s largest brands, after Obama won the election, I get a lot less push back –it’s rare I have to have discussions now about the validity of social technologies.

Of course, social technologies still come with risk, but for some reason this feels really good, we’re all a bit more connected and the internet helps to bring us together.

.

I’m not surprised.  if I were the leader of an organisation, I would just get on with it, as it seems clear to me that the permanent and ubiquitous presence of the Web in our lives is creating what is effectively a new sociology of expectation, namely of at least having a voice and to some degree being "heard" by hierarchical leaders in our societies’ institutions.

A culture continues to grow, informed by a "two-way flow of power and authority, based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results"

Powered by Qumana

CBS put all their eggs in Katie’s salary and now are thinking of leaving news. ABC spend half the debate on stuff that doesn’t matter. We now know that most of the experts called in to advise us about the war were on the payroll of the Pentagon.

News is becoming entertainment or has often been bought just when we all need to be informed.

How can we get a sense of how these issues, or any issue, really affects us?

I interviewed Michael Skoler of American Public Media to find out how he is using new technology to draw on the real experience of over 50,000 citizens to ground their news at a price that they can afford. His project is called Public Insight Journalism and may be part of the foundation of a more relevant way of offering news.

Over 55,000 people are in the network and are tapped for their experience – how are gas prices affecting your life rather than what do you feel about rising gas prices.

This network is facilitated by a new kind of journalist and by a new kind of social software that keeps the system healthy.

The experiment is now 5 years old and has gone beyond the experiment into the operational and is now starting to spread.

What do you think about the news today? Do you think this may help?

This is a slice of time last night on my Twitter. I am watching TV but I have my iTouch in my lap. When the ads come on, I mute the set and go back to my Twitter feed. here I have a real friend – not a Fake Friend – Andy Carvin covering the South Carolina Primary. I also have a Twitter friend worrying about how to cope with teen boys – her son is out late.

As Andy twittered his coverage, others that I know, pitched in too.

This was not strangers talking to strangers but Friends Talking to Friends – much much much much warmer.

Add the back channel of a parent asking for help about how to cope with your teens being out late and this is an entirely new Media Experience.

I am inside a system – inside a system that is deeply human and that I feel a part of.

BPPDiner – the Twitter inner circle for Bryant Park Project is also adding this warmth to the show. Already we are seeing program ideas being discussed in real time with the listener. Over the weekend even contact is still there between the crew and each other and their inner group.

My intuition is shouting out that somehting that I don’t fully understand yet is happening that will turn out to be momentous.

In the 20th century, we saw the rise of “scientific” management, but still, organizations continued to look like pyramids — with a few individuals on top, and the rest at the bottom.

Will Enterprise 2.0 flatten the pyramid, once and for all? Gary Hamel is Visiting Professor of Strategic and International Management at the London Business School says that the Web may finally be sweeping away the rigid hierarchies and replacing them with truly participative and collaborative networks.

Here’s how he says it can happen:

Encourage more corporate democracy: Before, employees further down the food chain rarely had their views heard. Hamel urges organizations to use blogs to unleash the same “citizen media” forces within organizations as is happening across the Internet at large.

Unleash formerly hidden creativity. As Hamel puts it: “Make no mistake, your company is filled with video bloggers, mixers, hackers, mashers, tuners, and podcasters. The question is what is your company doing to help all of these ingenious people become fully empowered business innovators?”

Non-traditional funding for new innovation. Hamel notes the rise of non-traditional lenders, enabled through social markets, which potentially can create more funding options for employees eager to experiment with new ideas. Imagine, he says, a company in which managers and employees “was given permission to invest up to 55% of their discretionary resources in any idea, anywhere across the company that they deemed attractive. Suddenly, internal entrepreneurs would have the chance to appeal to dozens of potential ‘angel investors.’

Internal market for decision making. “The Web is a great tool for collating the views of hundreds—or even thousands—of individuals and has spawned a wide variety of ‘opinion markets,’” Hamel says. Suppose “your company created an internal ‘market for judgment’ that aggregated the views of a broad cross section of employees with the goal of establishing the odds that a particular project will meet its intended return. For every big new project, employees would have the chance to buy a security that would pay out only if the initiative achieved a predetermined rate of return.” Such online markets already exist for predicting the outcome of world events and elections.

Liquid power. “An ideal management system would be one in which power was automatically redistributed when environmental changes devalued executive knowledge and competence,” Hamel says. “You may find it hard to imagine an organization in which authority is a fluid commodity, flowing smoothly toward leaders who add value and away from those who don’t, yet this is how the Web works today. In the online world, power and influence are the product of de facto leadership, rather than de jure appointments. Hierarchies get built from the bottom-up, rather than from the top down.”

[photopress:world_war_1_recruiting_poster.jpg,full,centered]

My own bias is that I want to be connected to people that know a lot about things that are important to me. Knowing what my friends had for breakfast is important – one of the reasons I like Twitter. But I still value expertise.

The web enables me to get connected to individuals who really do know a lot. For instance, the man who runs the music department at Nicholas Hoare’s Book Shop in Toronto is a genius who seems to know everything about serious music – I would love to have him talk online about what he knows and to be available to host a chat.