It’s interesting to see how design, having conquered most of the rest of the world, is now invading management and leadership. But lest one assume that this requires CEOs start behaving all artsy, keep in mind that the qualities of design leadership– the ability to set a clear vision and communicate it; to delegate and inspire; to iterate and learn from failure– were seen as distinctive qualities of Ronald Reagan’s management style. Some highlights from an article written by one of his economic advisors:
Those of us who had the good fortune of working for President Reagan witnessed firsthand the effective management style of an unusually successful chief executive. Here are 10 lessons that I learned from observing him in action.
Lesson 1: Set Clear and Attainable Objectives, albeit Goals that Seem Difficult to Achieve….
Lesson 3: Give Your People Lots of Leeway and Operating Authority…. He did not try to micromanage the decision making within each of our agencies, but he held us accountable for the results. He empowered us to exercise a lot of discretion.
Lesson 6: Communicate Clearly Both Within the Organization and to the Larger Public.
Of course there’s a lot more, but nothing that contradicts the idea that Reagan could be seen as a design-inspired leader. Of course, for someone who had a career as an actor and head of the Screen Actors’ Guild, this probably shouldn’t be a surprise.
One thing that came out of the breakouts is the observation that “Young engineers in China (under 25) love internal blogging (because external dissent is not possible).” An excellent source of information about technology and social trends in China is 88-Bar, a blog run by Jason Li and Jyn Jeffery. Older but still useful is their former blog, Virtual China.
Another very interesting data-point is a recent New York Times article about “human-flesh search engines” in China, which tell us something about the ways the online and real-world communities (or swarms, flocks, or what have you) behave in China:
Human-flesh search engines — renrou sousuo yinqing — have become a Chinese phenomenon: they are a form of online vigilante justice in which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted their wrath. The goal is to get the targets of a search fired from their jobs, shamed in front of their neighbors, run out of town. It’s crowd-sourced detective work, pursued online — with offline results…. The popular meaning is now not just a search by humans but also a search for humans, initially performed online but intended to cause real-world consequences…. Human-flesh searches highlight what people are willing to fight for: the political issues, polarizing events and contested moral standards that are the fault lines of contemporary China.
One of the potential challenges of hyper-sociality is dealing with the potentially vast quantities of information generated by social groups, Tweets about your company, etc.. There are already companies who have developed “listening products” for scouring the Web in real-time for references to you, and more such offerings on the way. But several times people have expressed concerns about information overload, being force-fed information, having to manage attention, etc..
One thing that’s interesting about this discussion is that, in real, complex social environments, we tend not to experience novelty and complexity as “overload:” there may be tens of thousands of people at a baseball game, for example, and an amazing number of things going on, but despite the terabytes of information generated by this environment, I think most of us feel it’s relatively easy to manage attention in this space. This suggests we have a long way to go not just in gathering this information, but in designing the tools and interfaces necessary to make sense of it, and to use it in a (literally) socially graceful way. Companies who want to be hyper-social may find that they only have the senses and responsiveness sufficient to imitate someone with a really bad case of Aspergers.
One good guide for these issues is Richard Harper’s new book, Texture: Human Expression in the Age of Communications Overload. Here’s an overview:
Our workdays are so filled with emails, instant messaging, and RSS feeds that we complain that there’s not enough time to get our actual work done. At home, we are besieged by telephone calls on landlines and cell phones, the beeps that signal text messages, and work emails on our BlackBerrys. It’s too much, we cry (or type) as we update our Facebook pages, compose a blog post, or check to see what Shaquille O’Neal has to say on Twitter. In Texture, Richard Harper asks why we seek out new ways of communicating even as we complain about communication overload.
Harper explores the interplay between technological innovation and socially creative ways of exploiting technology, between our delight in using new forms of communication and our vexation at the burdens this places on us, and connects these to what it means to be human—alive, connected, expressive—today. He describes the mistaken assumptions of developers that “more” is always better—that videophones, for example, are better than handhelds—and argues that users prefer simpler technologies that allow them to create social bonds. Communication is not just the exchange of information. There is a texture to our communicative practices, manifest in the different means we choose to communicate (quick or slow, permanent or ephemeral). The goal, Harper says, should not be to make communication more efficient, but to supplement and enrich the expressive vocabulary of human experience.
One of the things that came up at my table was the question of how American (or Western) this description of Human 1.0 and hyper-sociality are, and how the norms of online behavior are shaped by culture. This, in turn, reminded me of a recent article in Spiegel Online that, I think, warns that of an American future that strains against the “hard-wired human characteristics and reflexes such as reciprocity, fairness, herding and desire for status”. Here’s a taste:
The country has always been a little paranoid, but now it’s also despondent, hopeless and pessimistic. Americans have always believed in the country’s capacity for regeneration, that a new awakening is possible at any time. Now, 63 percent of Americans don’t believe that they will be able to maintain their current standard of living.
And if America is indeed on the downward slope, it will have consequences for the global economy and the political world order.
The fall of America doesn’t have to be a complete collapse — it is, after all, a country that has managed to reinvent itself many times before. But today it’s no longer certain — or even likely — that everything will turn out fine in the end. The United States of 2010 is dysfunctional, but in new ways. The entire interplay of taxes and investments is out of joint because a 16,000-page tax code allows for far too many loopholes and because solidarity is no longer part of the way Americans think. The political system, plagued by lobbyism and stark hatred, is incapable of reaching consistent or even quick decisions.
The piece is well worth reading in its entirety.
So far we’ve talked about hyper-social organizations as being about people. This may seem totally self-evident. I mean, who else is going to be part of a hyper-social organization? Cats? Computer chips?
Well, stay with me. Maybe would be good to broaden our notion of “social” to include non-human actors. Indeed, it may be essential.
There’s a long tradition within science and technology studies (STS) of talking about “actants,” and arguing that you can reasonably look at technological systems as combining human and non-human elements. More recently, Bruce Sterling in his book Shaping Things talks about how rapid prototyping and open source design will flip the traditional relationship between physical objects and their digital representations: while now we think of the digital design as something that helps us produce what really matters, which is the object, in the future we’ll see the information about the object– not just a formal description of its shape and size and how to make it, but information about how it’s been used, who uses it, and how it can be customized– as more valuable than any physical instance of the design. The physical good will be the interface for interacting with the design.
An interesting idea, and one that points to a heightened “sociality of objects,” as Karin Knorr-Cetina puts it. Further, objects will become more social because they’ll be smarter about us, more able to work with us, and more able to work with each other; they’ll further be able to remember information about themselves and their histories, and share it:
Products will become more intelligent thanks to the emergence of pervasive computing. Ever-smaller and more-powerful processors, sensors, and memory are increasing the power of handheld devices like cell phones. Soon, flexible and printable electronics and displays will let us put electronics on clothes and packaging. At the same time, the growth of wireless networks and IPv6 (a new Internet protocol) will give devices greater opportunities to communicate with users and each other, and to cooperate in ways we can only dimly imagine today. These capabilities will also give manufacturers the chance to learn more about how their products are used. In some cases, networked products will report back to manufacturers throughout their lives; in others, products will keep digital diaries that companies can recover in eco-friendly takeback programs. (At least one printer company is quietly gathering data from recycled printer cartridges, and breaking down used printers to look for consistent failure points, causes of breakage, and overengineered areas.)
So if objects can be social in a meaningful way– a way that makes sense in a human context– what could this mean for the future of manufacturing? Here’s how I imagined smart things and smart manufacturing transforming the factory of the future.
So what will the factory of the future be like? It will be aware of how users are reacting to both its latest products and still-under-NDA prototypes, feeding off streams of information coming in from prototypes, recycled units, market-watching software agents, and blogs and discussion boards. It will be able to shift production lines in a matter of days or hours, and will constantly incorporate the latest insights from the lab and the natural world. The combined effects of cascades of information and pressure for constant innovation will turn the factory floor from a space populated only by machine-tenders, into a space in which production and innovation happen simultaneously. The factory will follow a transformation similar to the recording studio. Until the 1950s, music studios were places where groups just made recordings: they were production lines. Then, rock and roll musicians like Buddy Holly and the Beatles turned the studio into a place to write songs, improvise, and experiment with new sonic effects. As Brian Eno put it, the studio became an instrument, a space for creation and experimentation as well as production.
Listening across the three breakout groups, there are a couple questions (or issues) that seem to be common, even if they’re not addressed directly.
- What familiar activity do hyper-social technologies/practices supercharge? What new thing does it enable? We tend to focus more on how these technologies might create novel groups, but they can do a great job layering on top of existing social groups (Facebook started out as a digital version of the college facebook, after all), and we shouldn’t ignore the fact that you can more easily and cheaply reach existing customers using them.
- Tribes as self-aware; potential markets; and for their catalysts, success stories. As Microsoft Research’s Marc Smith once said, if you’re one in a million, there are 750 of you online, and you can all find each other. People who saw themselves as unique (or isolated) are empowered by being members of a group, and being part of the process of creating that group can be a potentially valuable thing. You’re creating a new market, and you’re an established part of it.
- The challenge isn’t in creating communities; it’s in keeping them alive. We tend to think of online community-building as something like real estate development, when it’s something much subtler.
Last night I was talking to one of the conference participants, someone whose enterprise is interested in two big things: automating manufacturing systems, and supporting collaborative innovation. Aren’t these two things completely different, I asked? Normally, you think of these are very distinct. Automating manufacturing involves dealing with well-known processes and materials, and making your process more efficient. Innovation, in contrast, is messy, social, and inefficient.
Well, not exactly. For a long time we’ve thought of them that way, but of course the truth has never been quite that clear. A greater degree of craft work and inventiveness is necessary to make any production line work, and innovation may not be completely predictable, but it’s not entirely random either. What emerged from last night’s conversation is the possibility that the systems that companies have developed to make supply chains faster, or improve PLM, could start to converge with, or generate useful information for, innovation.
One opportunity is in exploiting the creativity of manufacturing partners. There are more than a few companies– in clothing, in particular– who incorporate feedback from producers about design details and finishing. Everyone knows this happens, but it doesn’t seem to quite fall into the category (or rise to the level) of “innovation,” even though it’s a nice example of collaborative innovation. This happens in the interstices of processes, in an ad hoc and immediate way; but there are things you could do to generate more value from it.
Another opportunity is to make the factory floor smarter, and more connected to the market. A few years ago, I wrote an article about the potential impact of new manufacturing technologies on factories. Here’s a taste:
For many people, the word “factory” conjures up images of William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” or Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. They imagine landscapes of machinery, consuming men and raw materials, blackening skies and destroying lives. Whatever they produce, factories are inhuman and unnatural. Certainly such factories still exist; but companies that aren’t trying to win the race to the bottom are taking different paths. The outsourcing movement, and more recent attention to product design, have eclipsed a quiet transformation of the factory from a vast machine into a more knowledge-intensive, even creative, space. In surprising ways, the factory is now following a path blazed by the design studio and modern office: it’s becoming more knowledge-intensive and flexible, even as it grows more tightly connected to markets and suppliers….
Industrial engineers are now looking beyond the production line: Georgia Tech dean William Rouse argues that industrial engineers will design supply chains and entire enterprises, not just factories. Meanwhile, new technologies are moving into the factory floor. Put most simply, they’ll make products more intelligent; make manufacturing more information-intensive; and turn the factory floor into a center for a new kind of knowledge work.
Products will become more intelligent thanks to the emergence of pervasive computing. Ever-smaller and more-powerful processors, sensors, and memory are increasing the power of handheld devices like cell phones. Soon, flexible and printable electronics and displays will let us put electronics on clothes and packaging. At the same time, the growth of wireless networks and IPv6 (a new Internet protocol) will give devices greater opportunities to communicate with users and each other, and to cooperate in ways we can only dimly imagine today. These capabilities will also give manufacturers the chance to learn more about how their products are used. In some cases, networked products will report back to manufacturers throughout their lives; in others, products will keep digital diaries that companies can recover in eco-friendly takeback programs. (At least one printer company is quietly gathering data from recycled printer cartridges, and breaking down used printers to look for consistent failure points, causes of breakage, and overengineered areas.)
Manufacturing, meanwhile, will become more information-intensive thanks to rapid prototyping, which allows engineers to make precise working prototypes from CAD files. Two methods for rapid prototyping (or, alternately, freeform manufacturing or layered manufacturing) have become especially important in the last decade. Both are additive processes, which build up objects one layer at a time, like rows of bricks in a wall; neither requires any tooling, which virtually eliminates the setup times and costs of conventional manufacturing processes. In inkjet manufacturing, an inkjet printer sprays fine beads of plastic or resin instead of ink, eventually building a freestanding structure. In laser sintering, a laser draws the shape of an object in a layer of powder. The laser fuses the powder into a solid; the object is then covered with another layer of powder, and the process is repeated.
While we’ve focused mainly on the external and IT drivers encouraging the growth of hyper-social organizations, it’s also worth noting that there are organizational changes that are pushing it along. During lunch, one of the participants pointed me to another trend pushing organizations to greater openness are changes in hiring, promotion and careers: the rise of what Deloitte VP Cathleen Benko calls “lattice careers.”
New possibilities for when, where and how we work are partly driving this change. For example, 20% of us don’t even go to a traditional office space every day. (Can anyone tell me what range of time the phrase “business hours” refers to anymore?) Technology is a big part of this, fundamentally changing how we interact inside and outside of work. Job tasks are becoming less and less routine, with project-type of work increasing 40-fold over the past two decades or so. Organizations have become 25% flatter, as in fewer levels of hierarchy, over the past 20 years while information flows and spans of management are expanding. As the number of layers contracts, people’s options for moving straight up are more limited.
At the same time, many workers are redefining the very meaning of what success looks like to them. Why? Because they’re more diverse in every sense of the word. Few households fit the “traditional” family structure of dad at work and mom holding things down on the home front. Women now comprise the majority of post-secondary graduates, half the U.S. workforce and are the hands-down primary wage earners 40% of the time. Four generations share the workplace. More experienced workers are relaxing their conservative what-I’m-willing-to-do-for-work attitudes at the same time younger generations are bringing more, shall we say, contemporary expectations to the workplace.
More on the book The Corporate Lattice, which interestingly has been compared to Mary Catherine Bateson’s Composing a Life.
At the risk of looking too self-promoting, I wanted to share a piece I just published in the Los Angeles Times, a review of Steven Johnson’s new book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. Johnson’s books regularly cross the boundaries between science, history, sociology, and organizational and innovation theory, and his latest is no exception.
Johnson claims that biological, cultural, and commercial innovation all share some common properties and generative patterns: they make coral atolls amazingly prolific places, Greenwich Village and bohemian Paris incubators of revolutionary art and music, and the open source software movement a beehive of interesting, robust code. His argument deserves to be read in its entirety, but here’s a brief summary of what the thinks really matters:
A “series of shared properties and patterns recur again and again in unusually fertile environments,” Johnson argues, be they companies, cities or coral reefs. Good ideas, whether expressed as patents or paintings or DNA, flourish in liquid networks stocked with old ideas and physical resources that can be cannibalized, recycled and repurposed. Liquid networks give creative groups the chance to explore the “adjacent possible,” the new functions or capabilities opened up by incremental innovations; discover new uses for old ideas; and explore potentially fruitful errors. Finally, they serve as a proving ground for ideas, making it easier to experiment, fail quickly and cheaply and iterate faster. (Maddeningly, though, it’s not clear how liquid networks select good ideas. In nature, species thrive when they fit their environments; but good ideas aren’t inherently good — they can be counterintuitive and perverse — and Where Good Ideas Come From never quite explains whether markets are better than patrons, or tastemakers better than crowds, at identifying them.)
What emerges is a vision of innovation and ideas that is resolutely social, dynamic and material. Despite its trendiness, Johnson’s perspective is at times wonderfully, subtly contrarian. Ideas don’t spring from the minds of solitary, Galtian geniuses: They may start with smart people, but they’re refined, extended and finished by creative cultures that are shaped by their physical environments. But good ideas also don’t emerge magically from crowdsourcing and promiscuous networking; they’re slow hunches that “fade into view” during years of reflection, tinkering and exploring dead ends. Creative ferment may be accelerated by the Internet, but place still matters. And innovation is driven much less by competition than by obvious and subtle forms of cooperation: Even the most radical-looking invention builds on old ideas and recycled parts.
But go read the whole book. it’s worth it.
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