do they call it an epiphany?10/29/2003 12:11 AM In my vicodin state of mind I had a thought that most of the things
that happen in our lives...
Falconer's pre-epiphany
Falconer's pre-epiphany07/11/2004 09:22 AM Timothy Falconer — who has been working on ways to knit people,
pictures and words together for a while now — blogs an
edge-of-an-epiphany idea that somehow we, collectively, are going to
invent new ways to tell stories. Here's what I know so far: there will
be a new art form, a new way to tell our stories, a new way to
entertain and enlighten each other. Its defining characteristic will
be interconnectedness. It won't be sequential, but it won't be
haphazard. It won't be some kind of "you choose the ending" lame-o
branching crap either. It'll be engaging, involving...
A Design Epiphany
A Design Epiphany05/20/2004 07:06 PM Describing Dr. John Maeda’s Simplicity Design Workshop at the MIT
Media Lab, Jessie Scanlon writes in the New York Times, “They
considered examples of simplicity: the iPod for its minimalist form
and intuitive interface … Apple Keynote (rival to PowerPoint) for
its subtle pop-up indicators that help you align and position elements
like a pro … From the first year’s efforts, some tenets of
simplicity have emerged: 1. Heed cultural patterns. The iPod, for
instance, succeeded not just because of its sleek form, but because,
in conjunction with iTunes, it solved so many of the problems of
buying and storing music.” [May 20]
A Design Epiphany: Keep It Simple05/19/2004 06:04 PM A professor has spent eight months putting forward his own one-word
vision of the future: simplicity.
A
synopsis of a recent breakfast meeting with Dave Snowden, head of the
Cynefin Centre and thought leader on complex systems and narrative and
their application in business.
Last week I attended a
breakfast
presentation by Da
ve Snowden
of the Cynefin Centre in Toronto. He provided us with an entertaining
recounting of his disenchantment with traditional consulting and his
realization why most of what management and experts and consultants
try
to do in organizations has no significant, durable impact whatsoever.
As he described his learnings and discoveries about complex adaptive
systems and how pervasive they are in our business and personal lives,
I began to realize that appreciating
enterprises, organizations and systems as (mostly) complex rather than
merely complicated is more than just a basis for re-framing business
methodologies, it is a completely different way of sensing and dealing
with the world. It changes everything. Here are just a few of the extraordinary
paradigm shifts that this reframing provokes:
Complicated World
Complex World
Assumption of order ("research this to find
out if there's a market for it"
Realization of unorder ("let's explore what might happen if we did this")
Importance of aggressiveness and charisma to
"lead the change"
Importance of collaboration and humility to
participate in the evolution
Actions driven by authority-based
direction
Actions based on learnings from
conversations, consensus and freedom to act bounded by personal
responsibility
Top-down hierarchical communication and
knowledge transfer
Peer-to-peer (networked) communication and
knowledge transfer
Military win/lose competitiveness
Natural win/win cooperation and
coexistence
Emphasis on action (making decisions quickly
and 'expertly')
Emphasis on paying attention (making
decisions continuously, improvisationally)
Assumption of rational choice ("tell people
why they should buy X")
Realization of entrained behaviour ("study
people to discover if they might buy X")
Primacy of objective reality ("what's
happening here")
Primacy of perception ("what do people think
is happening here")
Changing the way things are
Understanding why things are the way they
are
Assumption of intention ("why did this
happen")
Realization of meaning ("what do we learn
from this")
Assess causality
Look for pattern and correlation
Focus
Experiment
Leadership is everything
Membership is everything
Strive for stability
Strive for resilience
Exploit weaknesses, opportunities, needs via
speed-to-market
Explore weaknesses, opportunities, needs via
continuous environmental scan
Mechanistic (machine) models of behaviour,
relationship, order, connection
Organic (natural) models of behaviour,
relationship, order, connection
How do we solve the problem
How do we deal with the situation
Set "go-to-market" mission, objectives,
strategies, actions
Understand the market and actors' identities
and influence the attractors and barriers that bring the market to you
Market as rational
Market as emotional
Here are some of the highlights (to me) of his presentation:
Innovation today is driven by networkers, not by
scientists or marketers
Networks are only as good as their
perceived trustworthiness, reciprocity and quality (personal value of
contacts)
'Edge Cultures' like Singapore, New Zealand and
Canada are
using the networked economy to become highly innovative, both because
they can and because they must
Management science is finally
getting more like real
science, through the use of complex adaptive systems theory, cognitive
science, and anthropology etc.
Taylor's mechanistic view of
organizations and markets
dominated management science for a century, and was still evident
recently in the passion for business process reengineering
Senge et al (learning organization, systems dynamics)
challenged the mechanistic aspects but not the hierarchical aspects of
Taylorism (people were still expected to align themselves to the
strategy, not the other way around); DNA and information ecology
metaphors were first used by this group
<>Then knowledge management challenge the Taylorist
model
further (saying people can't be 'reengineered'), but too much of the
initial KM focus was on the futile effort to make tacit knowledge
explicit ("expecting you to learn how to ride a bicycle by reading the
manual"), and because codifying knowledge erases most of its context
("You can teach in three days what it takes three years to write in a
book" (and the context-rich hands-on teaching is more effective)
KM
began to realize that informal networks are far more important than
the
ones on the organization chart, and to realize that the most
innovative
people are under 25 (few preconceptions on how things should be done)
and over 45 (time and perspective to become aware of
alternatives)
Narratives (stories) are the only effective
mechanism for
translating concrete (hands-on) knowledge into abstract (codifiable)
form, and are also very motivating (e.g. power of myths)
KM
has recently spawned a new discipline Narrative Inquiry
to understand through large collections of anecdotes the true nature
of
the market (they catch 'weak signals' that questionnaires and focus
groups etc. miss)
KM has also spawned a new surge in
Non-Hypothesis Based
Research, where direct observation with no preconception is used (a
form of anthropology) to acquire learnings
There is an increasing awareness that dominant
companies
lose their position because their cultural filters blind them to much
real knowledge, as happened to IBM when they passed up early adoption
of the PC and the innovations that led to Sun's and Microsoft's
successes (this is entirely consistent with Lakoff's and Lappe's
framing theories, except it is applied to organizations and management
rather than to individuals)
This use of narrative-based,
Non-Hypothesis Based Research
actually costs less than traditional analytical hypothesis-testing
methods, and produces far more innovation opportunities
Such research can be made even more powerful by the
use of
Alternative Simulations, a technique that involves asking people to
imagine what would have resulted if something happened in history that
didn't really happen, and which allows preconceptions and blind spots
to be overcome, so participants can begin to 'think ahead' from the
patterns found in the true anecdotes that come out of Non-Hypothesis
Based Research
Such thinking is needed to deal with what Dave
calls the
impending "demographic time bomb" (far too few companies are thinking
ahead to the needs of a much older market population)
There is
a big difference between creativity and innovation
-- the latter requires starvation because it entails risk and
unorthodox thinking that are rarely tolerated until there is no
alternative (this is consistent with Christensen's observations about
disruptive innovations, which I wrote
about on Wednesday)
The adoption of complex adaptive systems
theory seems to be
currently strongest in the pharma, telecom, defence and banking
industries
The current focus of this theory is on what Dave
calls
ABIDE: Attractors, Boundaries, Identities, Dissent, and Environment;
its objective is to get executives thinking about how to have an
impact
on complex systems by changing attractors (the people, groups,
qualities and benefits that attract stakeholders) and removing or
changing barriers (the conditions that impede or inhibit stakeholders)
in stakeholders' various personal identities, rather than focusing on
traditional 'complicated' systems approaches like missions, strategies
and objective-setting
Dave uses this story to illustrate why ABIDE works better than
traditional approaches in complex situations::
Imagine organising a birthday
party for a group of young children. Would you agree a set of
learning
objectives with their parents in advance of the party? Would you
create
a project plan for the party with clear milestones and empirical
measures of achievement? Would you start the party with a motivational
video or use PowerPoint slides? No, instead like most parents you
would
create barriers to prevent certain types of behaviours ("the bedrooms
are off-limits"), you would use attractors (party games, toys, videos)
to encourage the formation of beneficial, largely self-forming
identities; you would disrupt negative patterns early to prevent the
party becoming chaotic or necessitating the draconian imposition of
authority. At the end of the party you would know whether it had been
a
success, but you could not define (in other than the most general
terms) what that success would look like in advance.
If you think the example is unfair because it refers to children, just
substitute 'cocktail party' for 'children's party'. The point is that
we see a complex situation as a merely complicated one, we form an
exaggerated sense of our understanding of the system and what could
happen, our knowledge of all the variables and their causal
relationships, and our control over the situation, and so our
behaviour
doesn't 'make sense', sometimes with terrible consequences. In every
situation there are attractors and barriers over which we have some
control and many others over which we have none. So rather than being
presumptuous, making inaccurate assumptions and setting naive
objectives, we should focus on the attractors and barriers we have
some
control of, pay attention to
what's happening, what's possible and what's needed, and improvise
sensibly to optimize the situation. As in the party example above, we
often have a lot more control over the initial conditions than we have over eventual outcomes, and we should
use that to advantage.
I hope to be able to write about some specific business applications
of
this approach soon, and I suspect it will play an important role in
the
design and operation of AHA! The Discovery and Learning Centre.
Epiphany-browser 1.6.2 (Default branch)
Epiphany-browser 1.6.2 (Default branch)04/15/2005 12:19 AM
Epiphany is a GNOME web browser based on the
Mozilla rendering engine. Its goals are
simplicity, standards compliance, and integration
with GNOME.
Changes:
This release fixes a small issue with the location bar, and
adapts to changing Mozilla APIs.
Epiphany-browser 1.6.1 (Default branch)
Epiphany-browser 1.6.1 (Default branch)04/03/2005 03:46 AM
Epiphany is a GNOME web browser based on the
Mozilla rendering engine. Its goals are
simplicity, standards compliance, and integration
with GNOME.
Changes:
This version fixes crashes related to the tabs menu and
window closing, and resolves some minor issues with
typeahead find and the MIME type list.
Epiphany-browser 1.7.1 (Development branch)06/05/2005 11:23 PM
Epiphany is a GNOME web browser based on the
Mozilla rendering engine. Its goals are
simplicity, standards compliance, and integration
with GNOME.
License: GNU General Public License (GPL)
Changes:
This release features integrated Python bindings, and a find toolbar
similar to the one found in Firefox.
Why I chose Firefox over Epiphany for my GNOME desktop
Why I chose Firefox over Epiphany for my GNOME desktop05/17/2004 04:21 AM After all the recent announcements concerning cooperation and
integration between the Mozilla Foundation and the GNOME Foundation, I
decided to compare GNOME's Ephiphany Web browser to Mozilla's Firefox.
I installed Epiphany 1.0.6 and Firefox 0.8 on a Debian "Sarge"
GNU/Linux system. After about a week, I came away feeling that Firefox
is unquestionably the better browser.
Reg reader in Intel Shroud epiphany07/22/2004 04:24 AM Jesus really is inside Grok Description matches for A Starbucksian Epiphany GrokA matches for A Starbucksian Epiphany
A Starbucksian Epiphany
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Epiphany is a GNOME web browser based on the
Mozilla rendering engine. Its goals are
simplicity, standards compliance, and integration
with GNOME.