The Genius of the Groups

Washington University's Keith Sawyer has written a book called Group Genius about innovation. It's different from many (of the 100 zillion) innovation publications in that it's founded in research. As it would turn out, the research shows that collaboration is a successful path to innovation.

Check out a podcast from the author here.

He sights two key (and hopefully very obvious) benefits to collaborating for innovation.

1. Creative Combination - bringing together multiple ideas from multiple perspectives gets unexpected and valuable mash-ups of concepts.


2. Power of Collaboration - people are more creative with other people around.

What fundamentals of meeting do we need to consider to nurture these components of successful innovative collaboration? I would think that encouraging the surfacing of many ideas and a thoughtful approach to reviewing how they could be creatively combined is part of it for #1. For #2; get the people interacting!

As you can see from the podcast, Sawyer doesn't seem the most charismatic or compelling guy. If collaboration and/or collective intelligence is an interest of yours, you likely won't learn anything new either. Still, it's nice to have some reaffirming data and research.

If collaboration is a good way to innovate, and every organization thinks that innovation needs to be a core competency, then surely working to make sure that effective collaboration is a core competency is also at the forefront of leader's minds. Right?

Dominating Strategic Planning

There is just so much that can go wrong in a strategic planning meeting.

I posted earlier about mechanism design (read here), and how an imbalance in levels of understanding can impact outcomes. In a meeting, we'd usually consider this to be gaps in mastery of the content and subject matter at hand. But in a strategic planning meeting, outcomes can also be warped to the detriment of an organization by different levels of understanding of process and format as well. Those less familiar with strategic planning often don't contribute as much as they should. Those more familiar can abuse their familiarity.

A few other of the innumerable people centric challenges in strategic planning meetings:

• Motivations - Everyone has their interests besides the greater good.
• Imposing personalities - Moderators can help, but if that one person that really wants to be heard and really doesn't want others to be heard wants it bad enough, they can ruin any meeting.
• Excessively passive personalities - Those who think their discomfort speaking in a group is a card that trumps any obligation to contribute.
• Over facilitation - A facilitator or moderator that is too driven by or attached to their process can blindly suffocate conversation; which is the lifeblood of any good meeting.
• Politickers - The answers and directions are clear in their mind. The objective is making everyone else see it so clearly... by nearly any means necessary.

I could go on, and really want to. But I won't right now. I'm trying to limit my word count.

What are some big ones I'm missing here?

Surface Computing

Check out this clip about a table or wall surface that is a computer monitor... and touch-screen interface. Very cool.

It allows for the typical touch-screen functionality, but with the ability to merge files more readily, and it even interacts with other devices. For example, you could rest a camera right on the flat surface, and extract files from it and add files to it by dragging and dropping.

This kind of visibility and tactility is very important for some people. Naturally, I'm thinking of applications in a collaborative meeting setting. Imagine people working with the information on a screen rather than just reading it on a PowerPoint slide as someone dictates. People could really be operating with the literal big picture, and manipulating it and co-creating a visual model with the depth of files and links. Sounds great to me.

Similar things are happening at Autodesk. Autodesk fellow, innovation authority, Viz Biz author (coming soon, hopefully), visualization master, and one of the more interesting guys I've met; Tom Wujec, displays the Touch Wall here.

Collaborative technologies won't be complete until they enable powerful visual and tactile interface options. Any examples of this happening effectively, augmented by cool technology or not?

Visualization

People have been buying into Dan Pink's whole brain philosophy, but I'm not sure that I see too many people living it (and can't make too many claims myself). Hopefully in time the traction will turn into observable results.

Tufte is a household name, and I can think of few people that wouldn't agree that we could use new ways of observing and consuming data.

Still, presentations are dominated by PowerPoint. PowerPoints are dominated by text. When is the massive shift going to take place? How much longer must we endure? I don't have any answers, but I do have the coolest resource to provide some ideas on how to visualize datasets and other. I love this site.

Expect to see many more postings about visualizing and analyzing social networks, value networks, and other interrelated complex action.

Super Crunching

Just cracked the new Ian Ayres book Super Crunchers. Interesting, if a bit oversimplified in the early chapters. In the tradition of a Freakonomics, Ayres is an economist looking at the mathematical/statistical explanations of things. In the early chapters, there seems to be a case made for the logic of numbers over (or as opposed to) the value of insights or intuition.

For example, it's implied that wine tasters are obsolete in the first 10 years of bottling, whereas a rain scarcity and high temperature formula is a great indicator. And seemingly, it is. But does that make the wine tasters obsolete in this phase? I think that's what the book is missing so far. The need to mesh insights with statistical evidence. Hopefully that's where the book is going.

We've all seen Six Sigma (aka "Six Stigma") and other systems of metrics gamed, abused, or simply overused. Is there a good system for integrating metrics with insights? Is there an organization out there that's doing anything remarkable with storytelling and econometrics?

Damn Thing

I just posted a blog, and for some reason it's been relegated to April the 16th. Check it out here.

Farbeit from me to complain about a blog host that I pay nothing for, and contributed nothing to the design of, but there are things that get under my skin. Where's the balance between expectations and gratitude with open source applications like this? Some complaining is necessary to make the applications get to where they need to be, but there should be some protocol around appreciation.

Everyone bitches about Wikipedia all the time, but it's a great resource. Without the squeaky wheels, it wouldn't be so great. Where's the happy medium?

The Impending Knife!

Actually, it's not a knife at all, as I understand... but tomorrow I go in for some very minor surgery. A bit of the old knee arthroscopy. It's no big deal. I'm not too worried about the procedure or anesthesia, but the aftermath troubles me.

I like to be active, and even bop around quite a bit in an average conversation. I feel like this is going to limit what is my personality. It's going to limit how I operate right now. There are aspects of the way I operate right now that I really like.

I'm hoping this won't affect the blog too much. Excuse any quasi-coherent postings over the next few days.

The Dominant Sims

Interesting article here from today's NY Times. Apparently "The Sims" video game franchise has sold 100 million copies, making the $4B franchise one of the biggest pop cult phenomenons going.

This article attributes much of the success of the game to the Second Life aspect; the exploration of different expressions of oneself, or what is sometimes referred to as the "what-if" recesses of ones personality.

It seems funny that so many people are so interested in behaving in a way that is different or perhaps contrary to what they wish to portray regularly, or than what others have come to expect. How can a meeting setting appeal to this urge and satisfy this desire? Is there a benefit? I would think that offering some kind of networking tool composed of avatars or anonymous decision support function would harness the collective wisdom of individuals... and all of their personas. Perhaps offering a richer and more candid range of inputs.

The Categorization Paradox

Working with groups to generate ideas, feedback, or objectives can be very stimulating, and prolific. I like to use an anonymous Decision Support tool in this phase, so everybody can contribute on a level playing field and without inhibition. The amount of ideas you can gather in a short period of time is tremendous. But then cold hand of complexity grabs hold...


Often times at this point there are a good many duplicate ideas, contradictory ideas, and ideas that are not very good or relevant. How can a group weed through these? There is such a wide range of opinions here. Here are a few that are hap-hazardly arranged in order of what I think to be least useful to most useful down at the bottom, commentary in italics:

• An expert - either an external consultant or internal authority - makes sense of the inputs and decides what the bigger picture is from their vantage point. The danger of bias skewing results is enormous, and this doesn't capitalize on collective intelligence, obviously.
• The group just takes the entire list of ideas and begins forming action plans with these in a self organizing manner. Inefficient, and just because an idea has been generated, does not a worthwhile idea constitute.
• The group tries to synthesize the information by looking for emergent themes, and sorting the ideas into the categories that they fit under. This can be done with the regular flip chart and post-it approach. Takes a lot of time. Once ideas are categorized, they are still physically dispersed, so there is often the need for some re-recording.
• The group tries to synthesize the information by looking for emergent themes, and sorting the ideas into the categories that they fit under within a decision support tool. Still takes considerable time, and can be a little painful. One way around this is to use a tool where people can list ideas and categorize in advance of the meeting. The categories are determined then by an algorithm being applied to the suggestions of the participants. One tool that does that is Open Source Decision.

Full disclosure: I'll be working with Open Source Decision and its proprietor Dan McLinden for a June meeting, and friend, mentor, and facilitator Rich McLaughlin on its implementation.

I think categorization is a necessary evil, but would love to prove myself wrong. Any good ideas to circumvent the step without compromising the sensible flow of information?

Podcasting: Collaborative Media?

I will be doing some podcasts with Interactive Communications Specialist Mike Young from the CIMIT Convening Program next week. CIMIT is doing some cool research in the field of convening and meeting design, and is definitely pushing the envelope with collaborative technology in healthcare. They're getting surgeons and other people that have such limited time to experiment with blogs, podcasts, and most recently Adobe Connect. It's an impressive feat to change cultures of this stature and get this caliber of group to adapt.


Myself and others in my organization work closely and share many thoughts with the CIMIT people; Mike and Lynn Osborn, most regularly. Mike will be in Canada next week and I'm very excited to take advantage of his expertise in film and media. We'll work on a few podcasts, and I'll be sure to post them here. In addition to his mastery of film, Mike can offer a lot of ideas and feedback on the content and subject matter, being that he's fully engaged in the world of convening.


Where does the podcast fit in to the collaborative picture? As with blogs, they're often considered a one-to-many monolithic medium. Fair enough. They usually are. But whether or not they are collaborative in their design, they can definitely support the collaborative process. It's almost an expectation these days that a great conference will have a forum rich in podcasts for attendees to check in on in advance, and a place to revisit presentations afterwards. And they can have a collaborative structure or ecosystem. Like a YouTube, some meeting pages or wikis allow any member post videos of their own.


Is the podcast collaborative? Is it a benefit to the meeting process, or is it one person gaming the audience?

Know Your Audience

A recent Harris interactive poll indicates that most people don't like that the ads on the websites they see are customized to their browsing/networking/purchasing and other habits.

What the hell?

Do these responders realize that the alternative is random advertisement? I love the idea that the browsing experience is customized/personalized to the user. Imagine a Google where the returns you get aren't just the regular algorithmic results that represent the oft gamed priority selection of, well, everybody? I know that Wikipedia mastermind Jimbo Wales is thinking of this exactly, which you can read all about in a great if somewhat dated article from Fast Company here.

It's not just for search. Personalization and customization are coming, and it's a good thing. A team of us have been working on building a presentation strategies workshop (not presentation skills; you can learn posture and projection somewhere else), and among the core considerations is to know your audience. How can you communicate effectively to a person or group that you don't know?

Who wants generic? Having no boundaries on what info you're exposed to sounds appealing, but the current delivery and consumption on most of these things is a masses-created intelligent design. As long as they're not over-policed, these systems work.

The supposed reasoning here for people not liking the customized browsing is that there's a "creepy factor" (that's right: creepy factor) surrounding the notion that Big Brother is out there minding your patterns and actions and distributing and reacting to that information. Read more in the Globe's article here. This kind of irrational fear is what will get things over-policed.

Emergent Media and Emerging Minds

The Emergent Media Center at Burlington Vermont's Champlain College is one of the more innovative programs at one of the most entrepreneurial schools I have ever seen.

Champlain is a relatively small school in a relatively small town. I had the great pleasure of visiting there last December with some colleagues and experts in education to have a meeting devoted to expanding the appeal and effectiveness of the National History Club using emergent media. Before joining President Dave Finney and some faculty for dinner, I was given a tour of the campus.

The classrooms were designed to meet the specifications of professors. The school seeks out entrepreneurial students, and they even have a BYOB (bring your own business) program that only accepts proven entrepreneurs. There is a real community feeling throughout, as well. That's what amazes me most about the place. Of all the gadgetry and forward thinkery; the people there are focused on people, and explore gaming and other technologies as a part of a much bigger purpose...

At John Abele's Game Change Summit at The Kingbridge Centre last year, several of the faculty and students from Champlain joined us, and ran demos and offered presentations. I had the chance to speak with one of the students (Tony!) who was demonstrating World of Warcraft. It was incredible to learn how this game that so many stigmatize as antisocial actually empowered this bright guy to become a better communicator and collaborator. In this safe environment, he developed his skills as a leader by rallying others to accomplish missions. More on MMORPG's later - the point is that Champlain knows what emergent media can do, and they're advancing the field and advancing the people who will advance it further than we can imagine.

I strongly endorse the EMC blog authored by friend, colleague, altogether great person and leading researcher in the field; Ann DeMarle.

Restructuring

I have been speaking with and working with several organizations lately that are looking at restructuring their organizations or departments. A sensitive issue at best, and an impossible task at worst.

Following the mantra (or is it a cliche?) of "if you want me on board for the landing, you'd better have me on board for the takeoff", we've been experimenting with visually co-creating the future structure of a group with all of the stakeholders. Almost like a Value Networks NetMap exercise. Here's a few of the lessons we've learned:

• Prepare the group for some difficult discussion. Lay out the rules of engagement and encourage people to resist defending their position.
• Avoid using names and identities. Refer to roles.
• Using a tool or method that enables anonymous and candid collection of suggestions for altering current structure can be a good way of breaching the tough issues. Accepting inputs as questions is a good way to avoid threatening. Decision support technology can be a good option.
• Having a visual to follow is critical for some people to process and contribute effectively. The tactility of populating or organizing the visual is also a necessity for some. I hope I don't have to include that this visual is not an org-chart. How people deliver value and interact with other roles is not a matter of who they report to.

There are those that would say that attempts like this at restructuring and reorganizing are futile. People self organize and they way they arrange themselves in roles cannot be engineered, as it is an organic process.

I don't absolutely dispute this, but maintain that this is a collaborative and "facilitated organic" catalytic process.

Here Comes Everybody's Failures

In his new book Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky explores a lot of the same kinds of web 2.0 phenomena that we've seen in Wikinomics and countless other books and sources. Wikinomics is a classic, but Shirky's works has a bit of a different spin that may be of interest.

Shirky looks at the social implications of groups of people coming together with the support of technology. An interesting notion (one of many) that he explores is the impact of user generated inititiatives on the perception of failure.

As web 2.0 applications hit the web and user-base running, much of the filtering and fine-tuning happens after they are in the public eye. Incomplete, sometimes bare products are introduced into the marketplace, and willing nerds (I make no apologies for the term, as I myself am a nerd and therefor have free license to label thusly) join the beta cause and experiment. Given their feedback and even their charitable coding and other efforts to refine their own experience, the product evolves to match the user's desirable outcome.

This has become the standard process, so the many failed intermediate applications that lead to a successful 2.0 application are accepted by the masses as necessary steps. We need those failures to achieve something we want.

Hopefully this mentality is a pervasive one and expands beyond the 2.0 space. Although that is a great place for it, it would be ideal if in meetings, work, and learning environments we were able to tolerate and even appreciate failures as a necessary function of progress.

It's been argued by cognitive science experts that humans are better able to learn from failures than from successes, which is where a lot of business authors focus their attention. What is the greatest learning you've mobilized from a personal success, and what's the greatest you've taken from a personal failure?

The Origin of The Origin of Species

The Royal Ontario Museum is currently featuring an exhibit on the great Charles Darwin called "Darwin: The Evolution Revolution". There was a lot of interesting information there, but all in the form of words (essentially you are there to read a novel that has been blown up and placed on walls instead of the regularly consumed book form). The artifacts were mostly things like facsimiles of letters that had been written to or from Darwin.

I'm not sure that museums really do it for me. There's nothing that could be more interesting than Darwin's contributions, but as I'd remarked following the experience... I don't feel any closer to Darwin than I did before the exhibit. Most of what I read I had read before, but that's fine. I expected to experience the evolution revolution. Likely an expectations problem rather than a delivery problem, but a reality of meetings and all experiences, regardless.

To draw a parallel between the theory of evolution and meetings, I would start with the selection process that finds individuals invited to meetings or not. It's a flawed process that can't isn't worth finch dung compared to natures example. It's usually the usual suspects that garner invitation (those that are closest to the issue) and the squeakiest wheels (those that bitch the most if their not invited). Nature shows that an ecosystem relies on diversity for success. We need to always consider diversity when strategically selecting meeting participants.

To draw what I consider to be an interesting parallel between the world's reaction to the theory and meetings, I would start with the defense. Darwin did little to refute the challenges from religous, scientific, and other factions. It was strong supporting voices from others in the scientific community that rallied to defend the Origin of Species. Likewise, the most successful and accepted notions presented in meetings are often the ones that are advocated by people besides the proposing party. Unfortunately, the real master politickers have mastered this phenomenon, and plant seeds for other people to carry out their bidding before the meeting begins.

A monkey riding on a donkey. That was worth the admission.

Elderly Spanish Fellow

Paleontologists in Spain have unearthed evidence of human ancestory in Spain from 1.3 million years ago. The remains indicate that humans occupied Europe about 500,000 years earlier than what has been accepted until now. As discoveries like this mount, we will get a clearer picture of how our species evolved, and sustained.

Part of what sustained the sapient hominid was their (is our?) tribal orientation. Whether it be eradicating competing homo-erectus subsets, slaughtering a wooly mammoth, or more generatively; developing methods to grow food instead of gathering it, hominids functioned in tribes to accomplish feats necessary to their survival.

Communication advances like the advent of language would have seen a punctuated spike in the gradual evolution of our ability to collaborate effectively. I wonder how the internet and would compare on that timeline? It's important that we look at what biological and physiological traits have helped us to get where we are in terms of collaboration, as well as looking at creating and leveraging technologies to supplement collaboration. This Spanish guy might show us the path to some answers.

More on evolution real soon...

Commuter's Collaboration

There's a new GPS device out there called "Dash". CNN had a spot on it, that you can watch here. The idea is that the GPS communicates with other GPS's from other cars in the network. The Dash tracks traffic by tracking all of the Dash's that are out and about. Moreover, it can alert drivers to their relative proximity to things you may be looking for, like products. You get a little notice if you are in the region where something you've keyed in is available.

Of course, this network depends on many subscribers to the network to be successful. If only 1% of cars have the Dash, then there's probably too few signals to get an accurate picture of the traffic situation. This gets me thinking a lot about critical mass issues with social networks, wikis, and other collaborative places, but that's for another post. For today, we'll look at a more literal parallel in a conferencing environment.

There are all kinds of gizmos like nTAG that house participant profiles, and beep or do other obnoxious things to let their possessor's know when there's somebody approaching that shares an interest or offers expertise in an area of need. This is all well and good, but it seems that this function could be done by cell phones in the near enough future, and probably is already although I'm unaware of it. It would be nice if phones could be more easily used as polling devices as a replacement for Audience Response keypads.

Any cool devices you'd like to share? Better still, what's the best collaborative use you've seen for a mundane technology, like a cell phone?