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January 26, 2007
Disruptive Innovation in the Garden of Good and Evil
21st century cultural inflections have a funny way of surfacing through business. On the way to Enron, white-collar crime ("Success means never having to say you got caught") eclipsed bit-headedness to sprout the dreaded Y2K. And at this point, in the breadbasket of the world, more people in America work at Starbucks than on farms. In the wake of these shifts, almost completely overlooked has been what may prove to be the biggest inflection point of all -- the ascendancy of jibber jabber over mumbo jumo.
For more than a century, mumbo jumbo has been a staple of corporate and political thinking, establishing some of the key beachheads on which blockheads could land en masse to seize the day. The old school combined jumbo and mumbo with power, relying on confidence in wrapping things that don't really go together with things that only briefly make sense, and forcefully delivering them. Most prominent in election campaigns and I.T. vendor marketing, mumbo jumbo remains a headliner; but the polls show that fewer and fewer people buy it each year.
In its place, the new dynamic of jibber jabber relies on something other than power to create the liberating stupidity navigated by ersatz leaders. The effective combination of jabber and jibber relies on persistence, not power, to numb its audience into cooperation -- by bundling an indifferently unwavering delivery of a party line, any party line, to a captive audience.
For the purveyor, jibber jabber ultimately craves the strategic advantage of being the only game in town, which can make it pretty mean sometimes; and yet, the polls show that public tolerance for this meanness has never been greater -- except of course regarding broadcast network television programming. Viewers routinely say "Up Yours!" to the programmers, and they've come to enjoy saying it.
Ironically, for the victim, er...consumer, of jibber jabber, a nostalgia for simplicity might be the key to its rise: the relief of having only three channels, in black and white, instead of 600 in color. Or of having parents who will use "because I said so". No wonder jibber jabber is so important in the commodity market for consulting, where the invoice is increasingly about having a decision on time when anxiety is too high about not having the time to decide. That is, there is an actual need for jibber jabber, akin to over-the-counter self-medication for insecurity.
Otherwise, reflecting on your own experience, you'll observe that jibber jabber is most often seemingly free, and it often becomes annoying only when you suddenly realize that you don't have to listen to it, and you change the channel or end the date. Thanks to telemarketing, we can learn from experience to actively shun jibber jabber -- both by blocking it and hanging up; but it doesn't really bother us that we know it will just show up somewhere else.
Finally though, having the trickery of mumbo jumbo's chutzpah lose out to the neurotic frontin' of jibber jabber's dogma is both disturbing and fun -- the aesthetic of horror movies and recreational psychotherapy... It's not really clear why we'd want things this way. But objectively noting the change as a sign of the times, there it is.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 3:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 21, 2007
ROI and The Rush Job
or, The Productivity of Production
Years ago, the only way to get custom-printed photos on a rush basis was either with a LOT of money -- or NOT a lot, through a pretty darn good photographer friend, emphasis on the friend. Smelling an opportunity, and not pld enough to eschew self-abuse, I broke into a really crowded field of commercial photographers by offering the unthinkable: "fast, cheap, or pretty: pick any three." For six months, I didn't charge premium or "rush" prices: I just didn't sleep, and I custom-printed photos for delivery by rush deadlines.
Don't try this trick at home! It jump-started my business, but the six months cost me a couple of years of longevity that Science says I won't get back. A negative ROI. In general, production organizations know this could happen to them, too, and they sanely stick to the rules: "fast, cheap or pretty; pick any TWO."
The problem is that customers sometimes don't care about the rules, especially if the customers hold the production organization captive. A typical example of this is an IT organization in a corporate setting. Although it seems irrational, IT routinely has to solve the dilemma of offering all three outcomes.
Susan Conway, in her article Keeping the Think Factory Humming in Optimize Magazine's January issue, actually offers a fairly straightforward idea -- that getting cheaper (through tools) allows more effort to getting faster (reducing cycle time) and thus becoming prettier (through enabling continuous improvement of quality). Running in that direction, from tools up to quality, there is an increasing "enablement" applied layer after layer to the circumstances that must generate value from production.
Although she calls that value "efficiency", it is both more than and different from that; and the deceptive linearity of her run-up doesn't point at how those layers, or links in the chain, actually get connected: namely, simultaneously, not sequentially. It's not the "links" themselves that make the difference, it's the connections between them that do -- the linkage.
For clarifying why this is true, an important reference to have is Goldratt's Theory of Constraints -- in which the notion of a weak link is explored as an effect, not as a cause. We make the link weak by what we do around it; it is not inherently so. Likewise, we make the link stronger. This prevents us from taking the "linking" effort for granted. More to my point, it calls out the simultaneity that must be addressed: all the links matter at the same time...
Let's take that idea to heart. As a producer, how do you do Fast, Cheap and Pretty all at once?
We might make a new Pontiac Solstice, which shows that it can be done. But the usual situation is that each target characteristic can influence the production differently and even dominantly versus the others; so it matters that we know what their co-existence really demands.
Typically, we feel that we already know what each individual characteristic is about, but how about their combinations?
For example, what's an exemplary instance of Fast plus Pretty? How about Muhammed Ali's left jab. Effectiveness, wrought from precision, which was wrought from discipline, which was wrought from training. It's the precision that is its key distinction -- the organizing principle that creates the linkage, and its value, between Fast and Pretty.
And away we go:
Fast + Pretty? the left jab. Precision is the secret. Relies on discipline (from the training).
Pretty + Cheap? the sari. Elegance is the result. Exploits pattern (from the technique for folding or wrapping).
Cheap + Fast? the omelette. Balanced to the occasion. Leverages the facility (of a standing "factory" -- the hot skillet).
In other words, if we knew we needed both fast and pretty, "precision" is a good aspect to pursue, and to get there, we're going to need the discipline of having been trained into consistency. And whether wrapping a sari, or doing math equations or calligraphy, the elegance of "less is more" relies on drawing the optimal pattern through technique. What about that omelette? Balanced, neither too much nor not enough for the appetite, you grow it quickly from very little, on the already hot pan. While that pan is hot, you just keep crankin' 'em out.
But back to bigger work, what is production up against? The point is to get one deliverable from combining all three characteristics. Like that incredible car from Pontiac. The prerequisite is you'll have to be organized to pull it off.
This illustration calls out the three key constraints in managing the connections of the production -- design, controls, and sources. They are fit and related amongst the initial objectives to be met.
For example, when we talk about "sourcing", we're concerned with the scale of production that we need from the process, and how much that is going to cost. We'll source production from a factory that gives us the desired economy of scale from its process.
The model also looks more directly at what we think each initial characteristic feature is, here more carefully identified. For example, "pretty" typically means that the production output has high compliance to specifications. Or when we say "fast", what we're usually talking about is how quickly the product can be provided every time it is requested.
And earlier, the path to noticing standardization was from training that creates "discipline". But now that we've noticed standardization and its place as a principle, we can recognize and include other key influences that are related to it, such as policies.
Pulling these constraints and principles more to the foreground, the following picture shows how Archestra's ActiveROI model similarly organizes management in IT production organizations to drive productivity for the business it supports. As seen here, ActiveROI describes the systemic relationship of the constraints of design, controls and sources through implementation of architecture (design), portfolios (sources), and policies (controls). Investing in this systemic management practice puts the organization on the footing for not just efficiency (a small piece of the puzzle) but for holistic generation of business value.
[See more on ActiveROI by searching Archestra. ActiveROI, originated by Malcolm Ryder and commercially developed at Renovance LLP, pops up in various disguises in your Google or Yahoo search results, but it should not be confused with marketing companies, other persons, or machine intelligence projects that like the name so much they use it too. For updates to the model, and for a list of its authorized promoters, search the Archestra archives exclusively, and/or contact M. Ryder at Archestra.]
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 11:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 17, 2007
Capitalist Tools in the Garden of Good and Evil
Jan 15, 2007 -- Malcolmation, Inc. finally announced today the commercial release of the iMalcolm -- a fully interactive, nearly all-weather, First Life device that can automatically respond to audio or visual stimuli across a vast range of distances and situations including art, greed, work, envy, sports, sloth, thrift, etc., etc.
The rechargeable iMalcolm runs on bioenergy and can go a full 40 hours without new fuel, although its built-in monitoring system will make it complain with increasing persistence after the first 24, and old fuel seems to do the trick, too.
The iMalcolm is probably not for everyone; to begin with, its protective covers are often much more expensive than expected if durable, despite the huge array of available styles. Without the covers, the device is often fully functional but not entirely practical in many environments. And it lacks the now-customary out-of-the-box Chicklets aesthetic that a well-known market leader has pushed to the front of almost every product line. Furthermore, steady users of iMalcolm say that it is probably more interesting than it is reliable.
Yet many say that having an iMalcolm around is almost as good as hanging out with a completely sentient person.
Malcolmation's product managers claim that the original idea for the iMalcolm cropped up in the 1950's but that it took nearly all the time until now for a critical mass of consumers to care enough about the current feature mix.
"Well," they said, "plenty of users have cared, actually; but not enough, until now, to be sure we should keep the name."
Fired-up senior management at Malcolmation also claim that by the time they have to defend the rights to the name, their full family of peer devices including iKiki, iCampbell and iXia will already be in circulation as well. They're even passing out shirts and cartes-des-visite to the first 3000 new users, that say "iKnow Who iAm"
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 5:57 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 15, 2007
Critical Mass on the Critical Path
In his comments on the Archestra article "Why Change Is So Hard", Sid Kemp of QTI, Inc. picks up the beat on how to campaign a change. His description highlights the idea of transitioning between different stable states: the periods before the change and after it. A seven-element program that Sid outlines is a case methodology for "covering the bases" that the Archestra matrix on individual attitudes presented in the original article.
Where it comes to covering these bases, Sid's comment calls out something of more pointed interest to think about -- i.e., that an individual exerts influence on other individuals in a way that leverages the current state of things into a sufficient level of steadiness for a change to be either "accomplished" or "prevented". In other words, the individual can disproportionately contribute to a critical degree of momentum or inertia.
Good call. Furthermore, that has very obvious implications for the idea of "leadership"... It's a given that a group involved in a change will typically feature, within the group, different functional roles in the composition of the "to be" steady state. Not everyone will have the same kind of influence, and the new equilibrium will not ask them to -- neither in the composition activity nor in the final composition structure. In effect, amongst the group of individuals involved, would-be leaders may need to adopt the change differently from would-be followers, and so forth. Along with that, some individuals may experience a change in role due to the move from before to after the adoption campaign. Following suit, have we as change managers identified the leaders and followers on the "momentum" side, separately from the leaders and followers on the "inertia" side? (By the way: we'll note here, for future consideration, that change leaders and change agents are not the same role, even though they may both be played by the same individual. But how about when the agent is not a leader?)
This lets us revisit a "truth" that we've both observed and experienced, which is that in some occasions, "success" is not pretty. It goes without saying that becoming different is not necessarily becoming better, so a proposed change has to carry with it a presumptive confidence that its objective is an outcome that has more value than does the status quo. This is exactly why one of the quadrants in the Archestra matrix is "appreciation" -- it includes the same sense that we convey when we say, as an objective measurement, that anything else has "appreciated". The change proposal argues that the value will be there; the question is, will the individual say "I'll buy that..."??
When the proposed change is an executive goal, those individuals that don't buy that may in a different sense "buy it" : they may become either targeted damage or collateral damage, clearing the way for transition.
But if these individuals are still deemed important as resources to the future state, then managing these resources is a risk management activity within the campaign for change. At minimum, the individual's role must be proposed.
Attention to this issue had been developed methodologically during 2000-2002 by the consulting group Fulcrum Management, whose principals Howard G. Hastings, David A. Messineo, and yours truly M. Ryder offered Change Assessments using the analytic cycle Requirements-Risks-Resources-Approvals to reality check the top-down alignment of objectives and commitments in change.
It is on this point of "alignment" that Sid Kemp's comments on populations being "systems" carry weight. Additional specific light on this alignment problem is cast quite strongly since 2004 by Jonathan Becher in his work with Pilot Software, Inc. in Operational Performance Management. Kemp likewise offers work on the "leverage points" of alignment through his current offerings, under other labels, at QTI, Inc. Neil Russell-Jones puts out "The Managing Change Pocketbook" at www.pocketbook.co.uk, containing a fairly classical approach that we can see mapping to this issue. And (if you are still reading this!), similar efforts in your own sphere of activity are likely familiar to you under various other programs and entities you can name.
So what?
In further articles at Archestra, we'll maintain an opportunity to show how these different offerings reiterate the attitudes matrix from "Why Change Is So Hard", and how they help to explain the criticality of the individual's adoption to the design for change. Naturally, if we find that the matrix is broken, we'll change it...
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 7:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 13, 2007
Why Change is So Hard
"People change; populations evolve."
The success of a proposed change will naturally depend on whether a critical mass of the necessary participants play along well. As change managers, we naturally prioritize that struggle at the top of the ToDo list.
But when it comes to having a proposed change adopted in the first place, it's not about groupthink. The difficulty begins with the predisposition that individuals have towards the evident idea of the change. Regardless of what the exact idea of the change is supposed to be, the process of adopting the change begins with what people think it is about -- and this will invoke their varying individual attitudes.
Attitude is when one's position is dominated by one's predisposition. It's what allows a guy who needs eight ounces in his glass to decide to call only four ounces either "half full" or "half empty"... Change provokes attitude-sensitive comparisons. Then, the comparison seeks "credibility", an effect which is always part objectivity and part validity.
What we should do is assume that the individual's initial position is always from a personal comfort zone, and that a change challenges it. In particular, starting from the individual's comfort with the "subjectively similar" (as in both the already adopted and the already familiar), the move that Change asks for is to a full appreciation of the "objectively different". This isn't about being easy or hard; it's about being sure to cover the bases.
To cause this move to take place, two key techniques are needed:
- Examples move the subjective perception to an objective certainty.
- Logic extends validity to the unfamiliar or different.
In practice, one can find these techniques utilized in the most common leading tools for influencing performance-related change, such as the Balanced Scorecard. While many differences exist between such tools, they share a reliance on the ability to present a logical "validity" model of causal relationships, along with definitions of elements that allow measurement to provide feedback as "objective" proof.
To summarize the range of attitudes that can exist, and their relative positions, the picture below maps the territory that is to be crossed in bringing about adoption of a change. The axes cross-reference point-of-view against the appearance of the proposed change -- which creates quadrants of positions. In the central area, key words representing the pre-disposition of the individual are placed in each quadrant. The words in the corner of each quadrant label the working evaluation of the prospects for adoption, which the proposer can expect. In the center of each quadrant, the individual's position is indicated. An extremely important principle illustrated is that while making a proposal either preferable or acceptable is probably necessary, it is insufficient to make it adoptable. (This usually turns out to be true because adoption requires creating opportunity, versus constraints and risks, in ways that preference or acceptance alone does not accomplish. Neither preference nor acceptance necessarily amounts to commitment. And while together they only maximize the likelihood, separately they rarely carry enough weight against constraints and risks.)
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 1:42 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 2, 2007
Role Your Own
Note to Sun Microsystems: now, the network is the producer.
Increasingly we read that the new books of importance will be written collaboratively and, in fact, will be Wiki-ed.
Aside from inciting thoughts about the demise of Books 2.0 (remember when Scrolls 3.0 was crushed by Books 1.0?), what are we to make of this?
Well, blending what we generally think about wikis and books, this news presumably heralds the rebirth of the Collective Wisdom.
Or not.
Proof? It was fairly predictable that Wikipedia's own founder would eventually rate it a failure. But it wasn't because people couldn't use it; it was because it was mis-used.
If the "open to all" offering of the production approach is merely a free-for-all, then all bets are off. To understand what is most likely to happen, someone who cares will need to know and cultivate what the real profile of the group effort ought to be, as detectable by the terms of the framework here. In the simplest terms, one should be able to put an "X" in the boxes that distinguish the nature and objectives of the group effort, and leave the other boxes empty, and tell everyone the same story:
Otherwise, one of two things will likely take over-- .the fatigue of herding cats, or the natural inclination towards entropy.
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By the way, due to laziness and working solo, "we" took a really long time with this article, during which Infoworld coincidentally arrived with a more conventional but important review of Wikis. Click it up now, or come back to it afterwards, as you like.
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I.
For the general populace in-the-know, things are still new enough so that when one says "wiki" it likely means the real branded thing -- dubya3 dot wikisomething dot xyz. But already, we can safely say "wiki" the way we say "kleenex".
It's what happens with all perfect products: we didn't know we needed it until we got it, and now we can't live without it -- so we talk about it in an absolute or archetypal sense, and, we don't use upper case.
In saying "wiki", most people already could, and might as well, really mean any of fifty different but similar online-powered production collectives -- whether fragrance free, textured, twin ply or whatever -- instead of only authentic Wikispots. For most people, the obscure technical diffentiations of the exact underlying brand of technology are unimportant: the main attraction is always the same -- functional collaboration. Collaboration is hot.
What we still have to worry about, though, is that "functional" part -- the part that gets wisdom out of the collective. Understanding the nature of the collective is more work than many care to worry about. Working together has never been more convenient; but is it a community, a workshop, a studio, an archive, a marketplace, or what? In other words, how is the collective managed?
As for the big rebirth, let's curb our enthusiam... It isn't proven yet that wiki wisdom is superior to any predecessors - it simply collects a hell of a lot faster.
II.
That might be cool, but inevitable or indispensable?
Nahh. This is an option or tactic, not a sure thing. Being online facilitates a higher speed of cooperation, but if you don't know where you're going, it doesn't matter how fast you get there. As for being indispensable, if you don't know any happy people who do not use and do not need a wiki, then you should get a bigger life than the one you have.
If you want to be a contributor yourself, though, life is good; wikis make donating easy. Now, that irresistable urge to share is covered.
Still, we can't assume that the effort to contribute to the production will wind up making the final product important. Now it's more convenient than ever to make bad stuff as well as good stuff. Meanwhile, getting a lot of bad stuff will make the novelty of this production wear thin really fast -- leaving it not much more important than anything before it.
Easy donations are just the starting line. If this is really going to work, then somehow the good stuff has to come about because of the way that the donations get handled.
Beyond the hype, the real story of the online collective is about the open-invitation supply chain versus a discriminating value chain -- when open-sourcing and authority mix in production.
III.
Deep within the cloudy buzz of collaboration, open-sourcing is the great (we believe) new extension of production mechanics. But great for whom? The null hypothesis isn't that open-sourcing is magically delicious, but that adult supervision creates collaboration from open-sourcing -- when collaboration has some specified advantage for the supervisors. It doesn't just happen by itself.
Probably the most generic form of collaboration is the workshop. Collaborative workshops, whether for making books or something else, are not new. The online part isn't even new. (Remember Compuserve?) But since we don't need collaboration to make a book, and we don't need a workshop to make a book, what the online collaborative workshop actually does of importance is bring is a workshop discipline to all comers.
IV.
Challenging that, one of the most popular supply-side notions of a collaboration is inclusiveness: the idea that anyone who can pass muster can contribute their labor to the works. While this has normally resulted, actually, in an advantage (cost) for the main producer, what's greasing the wheels on lots of the new online stuff is on the contributor side. Namely, thanks to the tools, there's not much muster to pass. For skeptics, this threatens the ambition for quality. But on the other hand, some thinkers propose the distinction "peer-production" as a way to indicate a "flatness" or absence of excessive hierarchy in the natural diversity of production roles. Is this stance a breeze of creative enlightenment, or merely political correctness? You be the judge.
Another, older spin on this flatness is the idea that the membership of a collaboration is a community gently floating in "equal rights". But that equality really applies to the benefits, not to the producing: it isn't equal opportunity. Community-based production is usually not "peer". Why not? Remember that when the producer is "the community", the community typically embraces a wide variety of roles in the production to be sure it gets what it wants, some supervisory (or "leader") and some not.
V.
With a product like a book, we also get the connotation of an outcome having quality -- here attributed to concentration of the kind from a studio. In a collaborative "studio", getting from the labor to the works -- from the acts to the results -- is not just a collaboration. It really is a study, whether it's collaborative or not. The ongoing study itself is the main point of the studio. Not a product, but a process.
Facing that fact, we'll frankly note that some people study better than others, and that the attraction of "innovation" is not necessarily a given objective of the studio. We bring this up because it might be that many people find innovation sexy and studying not sexy -- leaving an online studio with a couple of inhibitors that push many early enthusiasts into the trough of disillusionment after the initial blush of procedural simplicity. Production is not easy, whether there are hierarchies or not.
Meanwhile, even for studios that are targeting innovation, neither is collective production usually "flat" -- otherwise, we'd only need to post the old Suggestion Box, and cool things would just sprout from it into realization. (Instead, our experience is littered with stymied suggestion boxes, probably outnumbered only by dormant "collaborative" websites).
Normally, delivering value features some complexity, which confronts the ersatz participant seeking the warmth of collaborative inclusion. For example, the ongoing effort conducted by a collaborative studio typically has a topic -- like "ferrous glass" or "business-IT alignment" (or perhaps even "How To Make A Book") -- and the topic will immediately triage at least some potential participants. Then, beyond self-selection away from or towards the topic, there is generally some authority conducting a further ultimate triage. Why is this authority there? Well, for example, the benefit of participation in a studio is aimed at promoting the value of its topic; and where participation is not seen to be promoting the value of the topic, that participation gets weeded out.
VI.
As a great benefit of online contributions, exploration for "supply" is scaled up by orders of magnitude without extra cost. But if the the collective takes on any responsibility for generating groupwide benefits, then it must decide whether it wants to find value in whatever suppy it receives, or instead wants to vet the supply for its fitness to a predetermined value. That is, the responsibility of the collective is still to convert the supply into value.
Call that governance or go-to-market, the basic problem is the same.
What's interesting is that to be a community, the collective has to declare a self-interested group need for one or both of them, or else it has little claim to actually being a community. This is the authority of the community. It begins to make the gap between participation and importance fairly explicit, and weaker participants fall into the gap.
Yet these Darwinian consequences are not even the interesting part. They miss the bigger point and breakthrough of the collaborative environment. Namely, who needs community, anyway? What we really want is not community but that underlying production network, and this difference is now much more explicit due to wikis.
VII.
Having something like Wikipedia lose credibility (and thus fail it's mission) is disappointing. But the story might not be over yet, anyway. A general difference in the collectives that wikis foster is between collectives pursuing connoisseurship (quality) versus ones pursuing entrepreneurship, and a switch in direction is not out of the question.
In the case where an "online collective" commits itself to defining new value from its available content supply, the most common cycle of events is that someone in its communications network proposes the value, and the rapidly expanding acknowledgement of it creates a demand that can be met by the incredibly rapid supply of uninhibited contributors (suppliers) in the same network. And when membership in the collective does not require prequalification, the communications network expands exponentially. What isn't predetermined is who will come up with the good idea. For the source of the idea, if everyone has to agree on who has the "good" idea, it's a problem. But if the idea can simply find its own audience, then for the source it's pure opportunity.
So, for example, is there a particular need for, or interest in, Valentine's Day jokes for divorcees? Let's find out, in an online production network. The cover story here is not that these particular jokes might become a success or not, nor that the network should get seriously focused on divorcees or holidays or jokes, but instead that anyone in the network could come up with it and trigger its pursuit. Anyone in the network can now be not just a source but a producer. What's needed from the network is its natural ability to grow itself, and the ease that it offers the individual in finding a hospitable sector.
This doesn't mean that everyone should be a producer, and certainly it doesn't mean that most will be any good at it. But now the opportunity is there.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 2:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack