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Web Crossing Brainstorm plug-in aids team problem-solvingWeb Crossing Brainstorm plug-in aids
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 In previous articles I've described the Innovation Process of gurus like Clay Christensen and Peter Drucker (and my own), and a process for tapping the Wisdom of Crowds. Since then, I've talked to several business leaders about these processes, and they suggested I integrate them together to create a Creative Problem-Solving Process. The diagram above is the first draft of this CPS process. It appears there may be as many as 12 steps in the process involved in solving problems or making critical decisions, whether in a business context or a broader social context. In most cases, many of these steps are side-stepped or short-circuited, often because the problem-solvers or decision-makers think they already have the information or perspective that doing them would provide. Perhaps this is why so many unimaginative solutions are developed and so many bad decisions are made? The process of solving problems, when it's undertaken thoroughly, can involve three different forms of interactivity (conversation, collaboration and canvassing), in engaging the energies of three different aggregations of people (individuals, teams, and 'crowds'). The following table summarizes the 12 steps, and the interactivity, methods, deliverables and some facilitation tools for each:
Applying the process to a business problem: Nash Instruments makes digital thermometers and other medical instruments for hospitals. They manufacture in Mississippi, taking advantage of low labour costs, but foreign competitors manufacturing in China have undercut them. The company is on the verge of bankruptcy, and 300 employees are depending on Nash's ingenuity to reinvent their company to save their jobs. So we start by teaching the core Solution Team of Nash the process, and creativity techniques so they can imagine a successful future for their company, not limited to incremental improvements. Then, with the Solution Team, we canvass customers and end-users of the company's products and other similar instruments, and find out what untapped needs they have. We also study trends in the market, and scan across other industries, science, technologies, and nature, to surface new developments that might be adapted or applied to Nash's products, processes, platforms, technologies, supply chain or distribution channels, core competencies, customer experience, brand, service or community wrap-arounds, or business model. Perhaps we discover that what customers are most unhappy with is the poor quality, ambiguity and reliability of these instruments -- and that what customers want aren't cheaper instruments, but simpler, more durable, more accurate ones. That they are buying the cheap ones made in China only because none of them differentiate themselves in other ways. The third step is to analyze the root causes of the company's current predicament. We know from the previous step that price really isn't the differentiating factor that's hurting the company's sales, but why isn't the company, with its skilled, domestic workforce, able to produce a better product? And are there other aspects to the undifferentiated 'customer experience', such as service quality? Or a distribution or marketing problem? Or lack of product diversity or innovation? Suppose we discover that the root problems are that the company has compromised on materials quality to try to reduce cost, that it's slow to exploit new technologies, and that it has developed a reputation for unresponsive service. Once we know this, we refine the Solution Team, and develop the plan and timeline for solving the root problems.and meeting the untapped customer needs. Then we conduct Thinking-the-Customer-Ahead sessions, using an iterative 'what-if' process to enable some of Nash's most forward-thinking customers and potential customers to understand where their businesses, and instrumentation needs, are headed, which in turn allows Nash to craft a Future State Vision that satisfies those needs. Maybe we discover that the future of medical instrumentation is wireless, that displays are going to have to be flatter and sharper, that measurements in several medical technologies will need to be two orders of magnitude more precise, and that in some cases the tools will become so sophisticated that the instrument manufacturer will have to become part of the virtual medical team, on call 24/7 to assist in interpretation of the results. And then we reach out to the larger constituency, all current and potential customers and end-users, articulating the promise that Nash could deliver and fomenting dissatisfaction with the status quo, creating a sense of urgency in the minds of customers and end-users, articulating the unmet need, and also creating that sense of urgency in Nash's own people. Next we do the creative work of inventing or reinventing products, processes, platforms, technologies, channels, brands, and even business models, and growing the core competencies needed to deliver on them. But we don't put all our eggs in one basket: We develop a suite of alternative solutions. And then we use the Wisdom of Crowds process to present them to the 'crowd', as large a group of existing and potential customers and users and employees as possible, and use the crowd's collective intelligence to help us select the best of these alternatives before taking them to market. Nash's reputation is a problem -- trying to go upscale with a new generation of sophisticated, precise instruments will be a marketing nightmare. maybe a whole new division with a new name is needed? And should the company try to overcome its employees' near-total ignorance of how hospitals use its instruments, so they can offer virtual interpretation, or leave this niche to others? And should it overhaul its supply chain in favour of better-quality material suppliers, or even bring production of these materials in-house and cut out the middleman? Now, with the confidence that we have the optimal solutions, we can design working prototypes of these solutions, and we can collaboratively run parallel experiments with different implementations of these solutions, failing fast and inexpensively to winnow out the implementations that don't work in practice. How would wireless instruments avoid interference with, and from, other medical technologies in the operating room and on the patient's night-table. What different techniques can be used to increase read-out precision without a commensurate increase in equipment cost? And when medical instruments need to be made in two 'flavours', one for sophisticated hospital use and the other for patients to self-diagnose and self-monitor, how do the price points differ and how should functionality and ease-of-use be traded off? Should Nash even be in both markets? And then the implementations that succeed must pass the final hurdle, another collaborative process that encourages skeptical, critical thinking people in the organization to challenge whether this solution really is optimal, and unearth landmines and other problems the developers may not have thought about. Maybe the designers didn't consider that baby-boomer patients' eyes are weakening and the display in a new consumer product just isn't large enough? Or that one of the new suppliers of a critical material is in financial difficulty? Once the solutions have passed this final test, they're ready for launch. The launch of dramatically new products, processes and technologies is a difficult process, and if not done properly and quickly can make an enormously promising innovation into a production or market failure. The launch needs careful project management, using a rigorous, tightly-controlled, one-step-at-a-time process. It's all common sense. The reason it is so rarely used is that few organizations have the competencies to do more than two or three of the 12 steps effectively. I've worked on all 12 steps at one point or another in my career, and they are not easy to master, but when they're done well, they yield astonishing results. The answer, I think, isn't just to bring in consultants to facilitate the process and then breeze out again. Advisers need to teach businesspeople how to do this for themselves, and then steward them through the process a couple of times to ensure they follow it properly. In a world where innovation will soon again be recognized as the only sustainable competitive business advantage, learning this process may the most important education for tomorrow's business leaders. And there's no reason to believe this same process couldn't be used to effectively address broader social, economic and environmental problems as well. I'll explore that in a future article. |
I'm at Brainstorm 2004 which should be fun. It's my favorite conference of each year. I'm going to be taking notes and will encourage anyone else here wants to use the space to put notes on the Brai nstorms 2004 page on my new public SocialText wiki. I'll also be hanging out on #brainstorm on Freenode on IRC.
Comment - TrackBackDavi d Kirkpatrick, the man behind Brainstorm said I could blog this event. Rockin'! I'll post some of the notes from my wiki over here too.
Comment - TrackBackMichael Eisner is on a panel now at Brainstorm 2004. He was asked if he regretted not distributing Fahrenheit 9/11. He said no. Disney is not partisan and the movie was clearly political. Disney is an entertainment company. He said Rupert Murdoch said no for a completely different reason. Murdoch said he hated Moore and liked Bush. That's not why Disney didn't distribute the film.
When asked whether he liked the movie, Eisner said he loved it. It was like going to a rock concert. It was entertaining, hilarious. He loved it in a non-political way.
Comment - TrackBack
Cameron Sinclair, the man who co-founded a very interesting
organization called Architecture for
Humanity, is mo-pho-blogging Fortune Magazine's
Brainstorm
Conference. Here's a Link to the
blog.Bill Joy
I think there will be a crisis or catastrophic event that will take our attention away from terror or war and as a positive response may redefine our focus of the century.
A global pandemic/epidemic - the positive response: New found respect for natural systems and focus on health.
Environmental tip. A phase change with a irreversible climate change - the positive response: Understanding balance with natural systems.
Over self-consumption like the oil supply - the positive response: Might help wastefulness and make it a century of efficiency.
Comment - TrackBackSome good quotes from Wesley Clark...
Wesley Clark: The responsibility of Abu Ghraib does not lie in the men and women in the armed forces. It lies in with the commander and chief.
Q: Why isn't the administration being held accountable for this?
Wesley Clark: They will be held accountable in the elections.
--
Wesley Clark: You can't win the war on terror by killing terrorists. You have to cut of the recruitment. It doesn't involve killing people.
Comment - TrackBackBjorn Lomborg
What if hospitals only dealt with patients who made the most fuss. That's what it seems like we do with global resource allocation for global problems. Why don't we prioritize? What if we had an extra$ 50Bn to allocate. What would you spend it on?
HIV aids?
Schools?
Climate age?
Malnutrition?
W need rational basis on our spending.
The Copenhagen Consensus was a group of leading economists who got together to try to prioritize based on best information available.
What we would do:
1- Prevent HIV - $27Bn will save 29M lives
2- Micronutrients - $13Bn will help more than 1/2 the world
3- Free Trade - would create more than $2000Bn / yr
4- Treat Malaria - $12Bn could come back 10X or more
What we wouldn't do?
Kyoto (global warming) is not a good use of money
Focus on high benefit projects.
We now have the list. We have to get the rest of the world on board.
Comment - TrackBackAshraf Ghani is Afghanistan's finance minister. He was interviewed by David Kirkpatrick
Here are my notes.
Q: What's at stake in Afghanistan.
A: Positive and negative. Freedom from terror and freedom from drugs. Afghanistan can easily be turned into a mafia state. Afghan heroin has made it to California.
We have on our borders some of the largest energy producing states as well as nuclear states. The stability of Afghanistan could help stabilize this region.
Even people who's homes were accidentally bombed by Americans still welcome American soldiers. This is different than the rest of the Middle East.
We've been a trading people for a couple of thousand years. We thrive in networks, but not in hierarchies.
Q: Give us an update. The US media says Afghanistan is in quasi chaos.
A: Quasi chaos is quasi progress. US is not known for depth or understanding. They don't take push-back. They don't engage in debate.
Can't type fast enough, but he's giving a update on all of the great progress they are making.
Progress is good, but problem is expectations. Bush and Blair got up and promised a miracle.
70% of our people live under $1 a day. How do you convince people $1B is a small amount of money.
I'm not going to chase foreign aid and I want to get out of foreign aid in 10 years.
$1 of foreign investment is worth $5-$10 in foreign aid.
Kofi Anan is a great leader but the UN system doesn't work. There are lessons from Afghanistan that can help other countries.
Q: What is the prospect that you can get a grip on the drug mafia in Afghanistan.
A: They told me I had 0.1% chance of success. Cotton will not compete with poppy, but the T-Shirt will.
Poppy is a male crop. Women are not involved in the cultivation of poppy. What a family looks for is its overall income. How do we connect the women to the market. The management skills to get them to the value change.
Every drug producing center of Afghanistan is a center of cotton production. Tax incentives for textile companies would help. Security for textile cities.
Seasonal labor is the weak point of the drug industry.
They need to be given an assurance that things will get better.
It took Thailand 10 years. Afghanistan doesn't have 10 years because it could be taken over by the mafia before that.
Q: Moving companies to Afghanistan could help deal with this mafia issue which is putting the world at risk. They aren't coming because they are afraid?
A: July of 2002, there wasn't a single mobile phone in Kabul. Now my mobile phone from Afghanistan works here. The US spends $11B / yr security in Afghanistan. Security is not about spending money on military. It's about jobs.
Afghanistan is growing quickly. If it could be given a push....
Q: Are you optimistic long term with relationship between the region and the US.
A: The classic age of Islam needs to be understood. We didn't go through the medieval period. This is a confident culture. The extremists exist because of lack of open debate and dialog and this is because of the cold war. Most muslims are moderate. Go to muslim countries. You'll find people like you. We are in clashes. We are not focused enough on solutions.
I'll turn it around. Can you function without the Middle East? Can you exist without oil from the Middle East? If you can't exist without us, we need to focus on solutions.
The risk to my life is about 95% which is worth the risk of saving the millions of people of Afghanistan. I was educated by the people and it was a price I was willing to pay.
Q: You talked about the drug mafia but not about warlords? What do you do with the rest of the country where you can't protect people from the warlords.
A: The ministry of finance is collecting from every corner of the country and we have influence across the country. We need to look at diverse sources of power.
Up until now, monopoly of violence was the source of power. Rules are also power. These people are afraid. Human rights prosecution, etc. They are afraid. We haven't addressed these issues. 80% of Afghanistan has always been self-policed. Need to enhance the social capital of the regions. Communities that ensure security should get reconstruction assistance. Getting free of drugs should provide more assistance.
The answer is about understanding cold self-interest. We've rebuilt the country a hundred times in the past. We'll rebuild. But the rest of the world has to understand the issues to provide help.
Q: Are the terrorists working with the drug mafia.
A: Drug money is easy fast money. $4B in Afghanistan, $40B outside of Afghanistan. The ability for this to do harm is huge.
Comment - TrackBackThere are two main schools of thought concerning comment spam: the optimists and the defeatists. Optimists believe that comment spam can be beaten with technology; defeatists (maybe I should call them pessimists) believe that comments are as doomed as email and we're all going to hell in a hand basket.
I fall squarely in to the techno-optimist category. Back in September I started blacklisting domains linked to from spam comments, defending against return visits from spammers and allowing others to syndicate my block list to run on their own site. Then in October I tweaked my comment system to eliminate PageRank from links in comments, making spamming for search engine optimisation a futile exercise. Of course, this measure only works if spammers realise it's there (I know at least one has) which is why I'm personally very happy to see that the latest release of Moveable Type has adopted the technique - to mixed reviews from the MT community.
There have been a whole bunch of other technological innovations over the past few months. Sam Ruby has implemented throttling to ban people who post three consecutive comments, and has some great ideas about guarding against strangers. Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist makes the blacklisting concept available to a wide audience. Meanwhile, James Seng's MT-Bayesian introduces trainable spam filters adapted from the fight against email spam.
So those are the solutions so far; the critical question is whether they work. The amount of spam I've been getting has definitely decreased, but as I run a completely custom blogging system I'm safe from the automated scripts that target more widespread systems - other sites make easier targets. Now that the less ethical search engine optimisers have started to catch on to the potential of comment spam to improve their PageRank the amount of spam can only increase. Some bloggers have already started to disable comments entirely (thankfully Dan turned them back on again shortly afterwards), setting a worrying precedent for the elimination two way interactions comments allow between bloggers and non-bloggers.
I'll put it in writing now: I will never disable comments on this blog. In the past few months the comments here have proved far more interesting and valuable than my actual posts, and I really appreciate the quality of the discussions that have arisen here. I will take whatever steps are necessary to keep this a useful environment for discussion.
Many people have hailed user registration as the ultimate solution to spam. It isn't, because the value of PageRank is just too high - and writing a script to automatically create accounts (even with email confirmation required) is child's play to anyone who is competent in an internet-aware scripting language. Even accessibility-impeding captchas are no defence against spammers who can afford to employ cheap labour to defeat them - and with search engine rankings as critical as they are there's no shortage of spam dollars.
With those ruled out, let's look at the remaining solutions:
Without links, comment spam has no purpose. To eliminate spam, eliminate links. Redirecting them through a PageRank killer already achieves this, but proves too subtle for spammers intent on spreading their links as widely as they can. Too truly eliminate spam, strip out links and anything that even looks like a URL and force the spammer to preview their carefully crafted advertisement before hitting submit. Seeing as hyperlinks are the single most important feature of the web this may seem draconian - and indeed it is. But on a site that serves more as a discussion forum than a farm and where the alternative to killing links is killing comments entirely this could be the saving factor.
For most blogs however links are an essential part of the discourse - I certainly wouldn't want to disable them here. Now only do they add huge value to the discussions, but more importantly they act as a "signature" for many commenters - knowing a comment is by "Dan" is far less useful than knowing that it's by Dan from www.simplebits.com.
Draconian measures such as the above wouldn't be necessary if spammers would wise up to the fact that their carefully crafted missives were having no effect on their precious PageRank. The real challenge then is to make anti-PageRank measures obvious to even the most brain-addled viagra peddlers. I've taken the first step towards this by turning on compulsory previewing for comments, which should have the added benefit of reminding legitimate commenters to use paragraph tags. I'll be working on ways of making the anti PageRank measures more obvious over the next few days, as and when work permits.
I've seen people argue that depriving legitimate commenters of PageRank is a poor compromise. I disagree: if the only cost of eliminating the incentive to spam is the loss of some Google ego then I see it as a price well worth paying. Of course, I say that as someone who's already built up their Google ego but at the end of the day it's my blog, my rules. One solution I've considered is creating a whitelist of sites that frequent commenters use in their signatures, causing them to be displayed without a redirect.
Comment spam is a solvable problem. Furthermore, blogging about comment spamming is almost as dull as blogging about blogging. Let's hurry up and solve it so we can go back to blogging about cats.
lokitorrent.com
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Here's some serious substantial non-infringing use of P2P. I bought the DVD and watched Outfoxed. Definitely worth buying the DVD, but being able to download and use the interviews from the documentary is a great contribution to the commons. It will be interesting to see how people remix this stuff. Comment - TrackBacktorrentocracy - blogOutfoxed Torrent (torrentocracy exclusive)In working with Lawrence Lessig, Robert Greenwald has agreed to release the interviews within Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism under a Creative Commons non-commercial license (press release). This means that among the rights now granted, interviews balancing out the fair journalism of Fox News can freely be used as anyone sees fit. To see the full movie, you can purchase the Outfoxed DVD or check it out in theaters.
Torrentocracy (along with archive.org) has exclusive initial access to distribute these interviews in their digital form due to the work undertaken to promote a TV-connected, public domain, internet based media distribution network. The torrent file to start your Outfoxed download can be found at http://www.torrentocracy.com/files/torrents/outfoxed_intervie ws.torrent. For more information on how to use bit torrent peer-to-peer filesharing to download this, go here. If you were a Torrentocracy user, you could already be downloading Outfoxed to your television.
Thanks to Jim and Ado for setting up the BitTorrent tracker. Here is a torrent for Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture talk in Helsinki that I blogged about earlier.
UPDATE: Please standby. It doesn't seem to be working.
Comment - TrackBackThanks to Dave over at Scripting News for the link. The already easy process of downloading files via BitTorrent has just gotten easier. [Downhill Battle]
Your big article on M.I.A over the weekend reminded me that I had downloaded a mix mp3 shortly after the Tsunami disaster comprised exclusivly of Sri Lankan hip-hop. I can't remember where I originally found the mix (boomselection, maybe?) so I just made a .torrent. 58.4 Meg mp3 mix by Dr. Auratheft.Link
Previously:
M.I.A. is, well, MIA; and
MIA for intergalactic overlord
Torrentocracy has announced a free BitTorrent hosting service for Creative
Commons licensed content: Prodigem.
Download one of the beta torrents currently available. Send an email to Torrentocracy creator Gary Lerhaupt to request an upload account.
Update: Download all of the Duke Law School Arts Project Moving Image Contest finalists via one torrent at prodigem.
Hey, Hollywood! Can you feel the future slipping through your fingers? Do you understand how badly you've screwed up? You took a perfectly serviceable situation - a nice, centralized system for the distribution of media, and, through your own greed and shortsightedness, are giving birth to a system of digital distribution that you'll never, ever be able to defeat. In your avarice and arrogance you ignored the obvious: you should have cut a deal with SuprNova.org. In partnership you could have found a way to manage the disruptive change that's already well underway. Instead, you have repeated the mistakes made by the recording industry, chapter and verse. And thus you have spelled your own doom.Link (via waxy)It's said that the best sequels are just like the original, only bigger and louder. Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for one hell of a crash. This baby is now fully out of control.
Download: The Paper (pdf) | The
RegisterUsed BitTorrent a little bit when it first came out and was a bit underwhelmed. It didn’t work, there weren’t a lot of places to find files, etc.
I decided to take another look at it when a designer friend of mine was telling me that he has the latest version of every single piece of design software on his Mac compliments of bit torrent (yes, I know it’s wrong… not the point I’m trying to make, the point is coming :-).
Part I: I installed bit torrent and immediately noticed an amazing new trend (prob. not new to all of you) of people posting dozens of albums in one RAR file for download. Huge file sizes in the 500 to 4,000 meg size range. The last season of seven seasons of Southpark, every Nirvanna album and here is another file with every Howard Stern radio show from March in one file.
In one click you grab one really well organized, clean and deep sets of files—scary.
Part II: A couple of month ago I got the Gateway Connected DVD player. For $195 it connects via WiFi to my desktop and I can hit the My Music or My Videos button on the remote control and pull up those directories on my hard drive (in the other room).
Part III: Today I moved into my new apartment in Santa Monica and was faced with the standard $100 month cable/dish bill and I’m thinking “dang, I only watch less then a half dozen TV shows and they are all here on bit torrent… maybe I should save the $1,200 a year and just download the shows and watch them via my Gateway Connected DVD player?”
The Point/Question: How soon before you’ll be able-with one click-download every prime-time TV show or last year’s top 500 CDs in one click?!
(Note: This is not a trick question, I have yet to find a file containing that much content—however, I did find a file with last weeks top 100 singles that someone put together in one nice package).
[The Digital Music Weblog]Download the Windows XP Service Pack 2: The guys who were doing Microsoft a favor by pushing Service Pack 2 via Bit Torrent got slapped down by Redmond.
Microsoft sent DMCA takedown notices to our two webhosts, one of which was just linking to a torrent file on another server. We've stood up to these kinds of legal threats before (see the Grey Tuesday protests), but we decided not to bother this time, because we started this site primarily as a demonstration and to that end it's already been a huge success.
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View: Full Article @ The Register View: Avalanche Whitepaperorbdesign.net/bt
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The Downhill Battle torrents for Eyes on the Prize have gone away, but there is still a mirror of them available. Please consider using the mirror to get your own copies and host a party of your own.
At 8pm on February 8th we will celebrate the struggle and triumph of the civil rights movement with screenings of Eyes on the Prize Part 1: Awakenings. Eyes on the Prize is the most renowned civil rights documentary of all time; for many people, it is how they first learned about the Civil Rights Movement (more about the film). But this film has not been available on video or television for the past 10 years simply because of expired copyright licenses. We cannot allow copyright red tape to keep this film from the public any longer. So today we are making digital versions of the film available for download. Join us in building a new mass audience for this film: organize or attend a screening in your city, town, school or home on February 8th.Link
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