PTV: A FUTURE-STATE STORY

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THE
KNOWLEDGE CONSULTANT AS
STORY-GATHERER

THE
KNOWLEDGE CONSULTANT AS
STORY-GATHERER 07/26/2004 02:34 PM

Dave Snowden has a lot of nerve. The founder of the IBM Cynefin Centre doesn't stop at saying that collecting 'best practices' and most other accepted Knowledge Management activities are largely fruitless (he makes an exception for standard practices in highly prescriptive jobs, and proven, authorized practices in high-risk and high-security situations). He is almost as disdainful of many of the idealistic goals of Personal Knowledge Management -- helping front-line workers to do their jobs more simply and effectively and to find experts they can draw on and network with. If the tools to do PKM aren't adequate, he maintains, the answer is to create better tools, not show people how to use deficient ones (and creating tools is IT's job, not KM's). One of the things he thinks KM should be doing is helping management understand and lead their organizations more effectively. Management is, after all, the group paying for organizations' KM activities, and a group that is, in most organizations, far from happy with what KM has delivered. Snowden argues that the best way for KM to help management is to be a kind of 'cultural anthropologist' in the organization you are working in or advising.

One of the ways anthropologists study and understand tribes is by listening to and gathering stories. Analogously, Snowden says, it's important that KM people get out and spend time on the front lines really understanding what the organization's real stories are -- not the ones that appear in the mission statement or the company newsletter, which say what management wishes the company culture was, but the peer-to-peer stories that truly define the organizational culture, drive what people really believe and do and how they act, and make the company, for better and for worse, what it truly is. To gather those stories, you must be as honest as an anthropologist, not try to do it surreptitiously, because people only tell the real stories to people who have gained and earned their trust. Snowden has developed very sophisticated and rigorous processes for doing so, which he details in his 'masterclass' called Using Narrative in Organisational Change,, which you can now buy on CD-ROM.

In Thomas King's book The Truth About Stories, King argues that if you want to change a culture, you need to change its story, because that's all a culture is. I don't know that Snowden would disagree, but he would argue, I think, that changing an organization's real stories is not so easy. That's why mission statements don't work -- they're wishful thinking, myths that management would like to believe everyone buys and is motivated by, but really aren't. If you're in management, he says, you don't change the stories, he says, you understand them, then you act on them, and then you make them your own, retelling them in your own way so that you show the people in the front lines of the organization that you understand the real culture of the organization (and the real problems of front-line workers). In so doing you harness the astonishing power of 'true' stories.

Snowden is acutely aware of the overt class distinctions in Britain that make trust, and hence collecting stories, hard to achieve. While some of us in Europe and North America might argue that our class distinctions are not as formidable barriers as they are in the UK, I think this would be a mistake. Americans, I have observed, make a great effort to pretend that class distinctions don't exist or are permeable, by allowing everyone to use first names, for example, when in fact the hierarchies are at least as strict as they are in the UK. The only real difference is that the determinants and clues of status are subtler -- a bit more tied to wealth and the circles you move in and a bit less pre-determined by heredity. But trust is still deepest peer-to-peer and extremely hard to earn and sustain between management (or their henchman consultants and head-office lackeys) and front-line people. That is perhaps why management is in a constant quandary over decentralizing -- it clearly improves productivity, innovativeness, morale and work effectiveness, but it allows people that management doesn't really trust more control and autonomy, and perhaps even allows them to develop -- heaven forbid -- their own organizational culture. The reality, as Snowden argues, is that management is never in charge of organizational culture, that people behave the way they do partly because they've learned it's the most effective way to do their unique job and partly in their own self-interest, and not because it's in the procedure manual or the role description or aligned with the mission statement or the strategic plan.

Once you have collected the true stories in an unbiased manner (Snowden carefully explains how to remove bias, so you don't get 'fed' just what you want to hear or put your own personal 'spin' on the story), the next step is to act on them. Stories tell management important information about what works, and, more importantly, what doesn't work, in the organization. A lot of stories are about how people have solved problems that management hasn't addressed, or which management has in fact created. These are often very comical or very heroic stories that not only have important messages for management, but illustrate exemplary behaviour that management may not realize it's not rewarding, or actually inhibiting. It is critical, Snowden says, to make sure you understand the stories, and to collect and organize and ponder a lot of stories, before charging in and making changes that misconstrue the organizational culture, impede rather than help, and destroy forever the trust that the story-gatherer built up to capture this critical information.

And finally, once management has acted carefully and conscientiously on the learnings from the stories, they can actually make these stories their own, not by retelling them in the same words and context as they heard them (that would be disingenuous, a form of intellectual property theft), and not by appropriating them and making models and heroes of their protagonists (that could make the poor protagonists look like head office plants), but by conveying the same messages and lessons with stories from their own personal work context. Crafting such stories is a complex, rigorous and skillful process, and explaining this process takes up much of Snowden's 'masterclass' time. There are different types of stories, like fables, myths and viruses, each with a different purpose and different construction (the course provides templates of each). Even more important is the testing of stories by telling and having others retell them until they are perfected. The impact of an executive telling employees a real story about the organization, credibly and powerfully, can be profound, even transformational. Just imagine -- instead of the boss telling his/her people what to do, and evaluating them on his/her perception of their 'performance' in doing so, picture the boss explaining that he/she understood exactly why his/her people were doing what they were doing, and offering constructive ideas on how management could make the employee's job easier and more effective. Management supporting the staff instead of the other way around. Hey, I know it's a 90s idea and is out of fashion again these days, but stories, properly collected and interpreted by trained KM practitioners, can make it possible.

I hope Dave won't object to my sharing one of his stories to illustrate this -- it's hard to write about stories without at least one example. He describes a group of public service utility workers who are subjected to a consultant's efficiency review, which leads to them being given fewer work breaks and being given networked PCs to allow them to save time travelling into the office for paperwork between jobs. What the consultant didn't realize (and what the careful collection of stories finally revealed) was that these workers shared vital information about how to do their jobs properly during these work breaks and office visits, and this information either couldn't (because it's highly contextual and needs conversation to convey effectively) or wouldn't (because of the lack of trust of how stuff posted publicly might be used by management) be captured in databases or messages on their new PCs. So the workers found a surreptitious place for unofficial work breaks and a surreptitious place for 'offline' documentation of information they wanted to share with peers, 'working around' the consultant's well-meaning but wrong-headed and dysfunctional change proposals. [Dave makes this into a long and wonderful story with a brilliant punch line, a resolution in which management finally learns from this mistake and turns it to astonishing advantage, and since I'm not telling a story here, I won't spoil it -- get the CD-ROM to hear the story completely and properly.] But the point is that the organizational culture is what it is, and usually for a good reason, and it's vital to understand that culture by collecting the stories that reveal it, before you try to change processes or behaviour, or the change effort will inevitably fail, as almost every organizational change effort does.

I got out of the KM business last December, and since then I've toyed with the idea of becoming a new-age KM or PKM consultant, but then decided I'd had enough of this well-intentioned but endlessly-struggling discipline. But I recognize that there's still important KM work that could and should be done. While I agree that PKM needs better tools much more than it needs process improvement consulting, I still think there is much promise in Personal Productivity Improvement as an offshoot of KM. And now Dave has convinced me that the exercise of capturing and interpreting and acting on an organization's real stories would be worthwhile, especially for large organizations. But I think calling it Cultural Anthropology or Story-Gathering is a non-starter -- try to sell CEOs something with that woolly a name these days and you'll starve. What could we call it that would be accurate and still compelling to CEOs who don't, yet, get what it's all about?

AT&T --
ANOTHER CORPORATIST HORROR STORY

AT&T --
ANOTHER CORPORATIST HORROR STORY 07/04/2004 12:37 PM

Add AT&T to your Boycott List. This outfit has been running a nationwide phony billing scam, and are now into Enron-and-Bush style denial, blame-passing and damage control. It seems this company sent out over a million phony bills -- most of them non-customers, and then set up a cumbersome, non-responsive and threatening telephone response systems to wear down and intimidate irate victims of the scheme into paying the bills. "A computer failure" has been blamed for the "errors", which in total dwarf, both in size and criminality, anything Martha Stewart did. Several states' Attorneys General have filed suit against AT&T for fraud and deceptive practices, but don't expect to see any AT&T executives in jail.

Bottom line -- If you get a bill from AT&T, whether you're a customer or not -- check it carefully, and if it's part of this fraud, don't pay it, and complain to the BBB, to the state Public Service Commission, to the state Attorney General's Office, and to the FCC. Better still, play it safe -- find a reputable phone company, and then you'll know for sure any bill you get from AT&T is fraudulent. Why is it that legislators are so hot to stamp out spam and Internet porn, but aren't interested in protecting citizens from giant fraudulent predator corporations like AT&T (and criminal polluters like Koch Industries)? Do you think it might be because these corporations pour millions into the legislators' election campaigns?

MY DELL
STORY

MY DELL
STORY 07/30/2004 12:24 PM

I deliberately waited a couple of weeks after my dreadful experience trying to get my new Dell 5150 fixed, partly to calm down and partly to make sure the problem has in fact been fixed. This is a long and convoluted story but because it's embarrassing, and not particularly amusing, I'm not going to tell it in detail. Suffice it to say that it involved:

Four courier trips by two different courier companies delivering parts between my house and the Dell Parts Depot
Four trips by me to a company called Solectron, located North ofToronto, to which Dell subcontracts technical service work
Six lengthy conversations with Dell India, which handles the diagnosis of technical problems for non-corporate customers
Thirty bewildering e-mail messages trying to get answers online, only to be told to RTFM, and then that Canadian non-corporate customers cannot get service by e-mail, and must instead phone Dell India
One infuriating conversation with Dell 'Customer Care', a total oxymoron, with a guy who spoke English with no accent but I have no idea where he was located (he refused to say)

The final diagnosis was that a defective $5 AC adapter shorted out not one, but two motherboards. Total cost to Dell for parts, delivery and labour: about $2,000, and even that is less than the value of my time spent trying to get the problem fixed. My computer was out of service for a week. IF I had been simply instructed to take the PC into Solectron and wait for them to check it out, I would have been in and out in 30 minutes and the cost would have been minimal.

Since I'm copying Dell on this (that is if I can actually find an address of someone in authority to send it to) rather than tell you all the things that they did wrong (and that, acting on their instruction, I did wrong), I'll describe instead how Dell could dramatically improve their customer service processes.

But before I do, I want to be clear about something: The people working at the grassroots level at Dell and its outsourcers are all hard-working, polite people doing their best to do their job. All the fuck-ups (and they were legion) were directly caused by Dell management policies, and can only be rectified by Dell management.

OK. Here's what Dell needs to do to change the 'customer experience' from ghastly, interminable nightmare to quick-and-bearable:

Provide single-point-of-contact for each service issue. Solectron was wonderful -- far more knowledgeable than those disembodied voices at the end of the telephone. The first time I phoned, or e-mailed, with a problem, Solectron should have handled the issue. Yeah, I know Dell doesn't trust their outsourcer not to pad the bill, especially on warrantee work. That's one of the problems with outsourcing.
When you tell the customer to take/send in their computer, tell them to send it all in. I was told by Dell India to take everything out and just send in the shell. This is the lawyers talking, and more distrust of the outsourcer. This is just plain bad policy.
If you're going to use people in India to do diagnostics, for pete's sake trust them. More than half of the very long time that these telephone conversations took was dead air -- while the tech service people apologetically put me repeatedly on hold to get 'permission' to send me a $5 part, or to check with their boss that it was OK for me to take/send in my computer for warrantee service. It's outrageous that customers have to wait on line while employees are treated like children and second-guessed by their superiors.
Educate your people about the individual policies of your outsourcers. Solectron Canada has an in-by-10, out-by-5 same-day repair policy. The people at Dell didn't know about it, and that cost me an extra day.
Give your outsourcers a full supply of repair parts, and let them sell parts retail as well. When the outsourcers have to requisition parts from Dell and then wait for them to come in, that unnecessarily delays customer service. If Dell had the decency to provide loaners to customers who are without their machines more than 24 hours, this might not be so bad. But they don't, so delays just add insult to injury.
Just get rid of 'Customer Care', and provide a proper complaint department instead. The so-called Customer Care department has absolutely no authority to do anything for customers. Their sole job is to explain and apologize for Dell's idiotic policies, including the five above. They are instructed never to give out their full names, and never to give out names, addresses or contact information of anyone higher up in Dell. In other words, these lackeys are paid to run interference, stonewall and prevent aggrieved customers, and customers who have ideas for improvement, from any contact with the people in Dell who could resolve or act on them. Staggering arrogance, disgraceful and classic corporatist contempt for customers. Every customer has the right to complain, in writing, about bad service or bad products. And in the process to copy the regulatory authorities so that if the complaints are frequent, the conduct of the company will be investigated.

Dell just reported record earnings last week. Michael Dell and his fellow executives each raked in over $3 million last year, excluding the huge value of their stock options. Meanwhile, according to Consumer Reports, about one laptop in four has a serious problem in its short shelflife -- that's about 100,000,000 units with at least one important defect. One in twelve has problems in the first month of ownership, and one in eight has a problem that makes the computer completely inoperable -- that's 25,000,000 people per year temporarily unable to do their job while the tech support people fiddle with defects in their employers' products. Customer satisfaction ranks just around 50%, the second lowest ratings of any consumer products the magazine tracks. There is a large increase in complaints about offshored tech support in the past year.

The big seven produce about 200,000,000 new computers each year, which on average end up in landfill sites in four to five years (the fastest growing and one of the most toxic components of our garbage problem). The vast majority are made from shoddy materials in third world countries like China, Malaysia and Singapore, by workers who get paid a few dollars a day, using components that wreak environmental havoc from slipshod and reckless mining and refining techniques. Why bother making a quality product when it will be garbage so soon anyway? And if you work with Microsoft et al, you can guarantee that even if it isn't technically obsolete by the time it falls apart, it will be unable to power the next bloated versions of the software by then anyway. I would have added a point 7 above -- "build a high quality product" -- but even I'm not that naive. My new AC adapter works fine, but still fits loosely in the slot at the back of the machine, and usually falls out when I lift up the machine to put it on my lap. If they built cars this sloppily we'd all be dead.

This is what happens when a company gets big, and is rewarded for 'maximizing profit for shareholders' instead of producing a quality product and providing quality service. It's what happens when a company's management becomes removed, and then isolated, from its customers. It's what happens when an oligopoly of seven companies corners the market and offers essentially identical, mediocre, overpriced products. It's what we get when we fail to hold corporations accountable and responsible for what they do. It's what we get when we accept the corporatist propaganda that the unregulated 'market' will always produce the best possible solution and value for customers, and that government regulation is inherently bad.

We should know better. We should expect better. We deserve better.

A STORY IS
LIKE A GIFT

A STORY IS
LIKE A GIFT 04/19/2004 07:17 PM

I'm currently working on several projects that each require a good story. So I spent most of today researching, and thinking about, what makes a story good. At first I had this chart with two branches, one for 'information value' and the other for 'entertainment value', but it is now in the recycle bin, since while that may be a valid taxonomy of 'good' stories, it is so subjective that it is not a particularly useful one. It doesn't inform you how to go about crafting a good story.

During my brief tenure as moderator of the Association of KnowledgeWork forum last month, we spent some time discussing this issue, guided by Steve Denning, one of the world's justifiably respected authorities on (at least) effective business story-telling. There was, of course, the usual mention of the importance of knowing your audience, and Steve reminded us that in a business context the purpose of most stories is to persuade, to bring about a change of mind, and that most effective business stories have (a) a sympathetic protagonist, with whom the audience can relate, (b) a problem that clearly must be overcome, and (c) a satisfactory resolution to the problem that the story recounts in a brief and straightforward yet compelling way.

Another issue we dealt with during the forum was the astonishing imprecision of language and communication, the myriad different ways that we think and learn and process information, and the fact that we always tend to wildly overestimate how much learning and communication has actually occurred during a presentation, a conference, or a conversation. In many cases the 'value' of such events is therefore intensely personal, and depends more on what each participant thinks was actually accomplished or communicated, than the undoubtedly more modest actual achievement. There is nothing more sobering than objectively debriefing with participants after such an event, and realizing how little was actually understood, and how much was misunderstood. At the same time there is great and earnest desire among audience members that the appropriate communication be received (preferably quickly and with some decent jokes thrown in) -- this is, after all, their investment of time. Just watch how one very enthusiastic audience member (unless obviously a plant or a wacko) can get the rest of the audience paying more attention, and how quickly one hostile audience member, walk-out, or nod-off, can sour the whole audience on the presenter's message. Audiences seem to virtually 'blow in the wind' until they collectively make their mind up about the quality, and essential message, of what they are hearing. I have been in movies that I absolutely loathed, but where the audience, by their laughter, applause or rapt attention, actually caused me to doubt or temper my own judgement.

So a story can be effective, and hence a 'good story', to the teller, and/or, subject to the above-noted tendency for audience groupthink, to each member of the audience, and for very different reasons. It depends entirely on the expectations of each participant, and how each participant uniquely internalizes what they hear and/or say. Is there, then, any common denominator to good stories that the story-teller can draw upon?

I re-read some of my favourite stories, and concluded that a story is like a gift. There is no perfect gift for everyone, but with some attention to the audience, what their expectations are likely to be, some thought on an appropriate choice, and some appropriate and attractive but not extravagant packaging, every gift-giving, and every story-telling, can be successful and effective, and for largely the same reasons.

Good stories, like good gifts, seem to have one or more of five qualities:

Evocative -- they provoke a profound intellectual, emotional, or sensual response.
Transporting -- they 'carry the recipient' to another place, another time, by imagery or memory or resonance
Persuasive -- they cause a fundamental shift in thinking or perception
Memorable -- they leave something behind that the recipient will hold for a long time
Useful -- they make something the recipient needs to do easier, faster, or more pleasurable

While everyone is different, I think the second quality, transporting, is at once the hardest and most rewarding one to achieve in a story. You never want a great story to end. You just want it to go on and on and never run out, and you are once sad and immensely grateful to the story-teller for the 'moving' experience when it does end.

The challenge, of course, is how to imbue these five qualities in a story. That is a challenge I'll have to leave to brighter minds than mine, or at least for another day until I can think about it more. But if you're interested, here's an exercise: Just think about the three or four stories that have affected you most profoundly in your life, and go back and re-read them. Ask yourself which of the above five attributes of these stories made them so valuable to you (and tell me if you think my list is incomplete)! And then see if you can find the magic in the words -- what it is, in the choice of words, the order, the situation, the unfolding of events, that could convert these clumsy and abstract syllables into something so remarkable, so enchanting. I think you'll find that most of the magic comes from inside you, and is the result of the work you do to build the story into something larger than life, something evocative and transporting and persuasive and memorable and even useful.

Which only makes the accomplishment, the wizardy, and the 'gift' of the story-teller even more astonishing.

WRITING OUR
NEW STORY

WRITING OUR
NEW STORY 01/07/2004 01:12 PM

If Thomas King is right, and stories are all we are, then it seems to me we have two choices in life. We can either live the story that others have written for us, or we can write our own story.

The story of our culture, the story others wrote for us, teaches us:

that we are at heart sinful, lazy, untrustworthy, in need of salvation or redemption
that our world is a place of danger, frightening, cruel, brutal, plagued with scarcity and adversity
that we should do what we're told by our betters, and be grateful for what we have
that the world was created for man and man alone, as his dominion
that we should multiply and fill the earth, regardless of the consequences for the rest of life
that we should spend our life working hard and acquiring, because our worth is measured by what we own
that our heroes are fighters, warriors, those who struggle and conquer and overcome
that no matter what we do, god will forgive us and clean up our mess before it gets too bad

There are several novel resources that those of us who find this story unsatisfactory, counter-instinctive, and dangerous, can use to write a different story, a New Story:

Steve Denning, formerly of the World Bank, has a whole archive of storytelling resources, including how to write a 'springboard' story -- one that precipitates change
Creating the 21st Century has an introdu ction to storytelling that explains why storytelling is so powerful
Inner Self, drawing on the work of Daniel Quinn, suggests a setti ng for a new story, almost the antithesis of the adversarial setting in which most of our culture's stories are written
In business the process of writing a Future State Vision is very similar to creating a new story -- envision a possible world, a few years in the future, from the perspective of your 'representative' character, where her/his objectives have been met and her/his problems resolved -- and let the reader fill in the blanks on how the future state was achieved (in other words, invent the possible)
My own earlier post on Why Stories are Subversive has links to several other storytelling resources

Not that we should not be bound by how others say stories should be written. I think we know instinctively how to tell stories. Children start telling stories, to themselves and anyone who will listen, almost as soon as they can talk. And it's only later when they fall victim to the cultural biases that say that a story needs tension, drama, heroism, conflict, resolution, and substantial length. Some of the best stories are joyful, simple and brief.

Economists Peter Jay and Marshall Sahlins have both told stories that have essentially rewritten 'pre-civilization' history, changing our conception of hunter-gatherer cultures from poor, dirty and brutish to affluent, comfortable and carefree. Regardless of their focus, good stories change the way we think and therefore change who we are. They can even show us a new way to live, and hence be transformational.

As I've written often in these pages, I believe the only hope for our world is for some, then many, and finally most of us to walk away from the old culture, the old economy, the old politics, the old business models, the old religions, that are driving us headlong to ecocide, endless war, violence, psychosis, oppression, and physical and imaginative destitution. We can't fight them, change them. But we can create new ones that will undermine and replace them. But to walk away from the old, we need something to walk to. Through stories, we can invent a new world, a new culture, completely different from the one we live in now. Instead of teaching us the eight dreadful lessons bulleted in red above, these new stories could teach us some things almost unimaginatively positive and astonishing, things that we somehow forgot when the existing culture took hold 30 thousand years ago:

that we are magic, perfect, wonderful
that our world is a paradise, and we are inextricably part of it and welcome in it
that we should trust our instincts, and that by listening to the earth we will always know what to do
that the world is a sacred organism of sacred organisms, and that it belongs to all of us and to none of us
that our purpose is to be and to let others be, in balance and in harmony
that we should spend our life experiencing and sharing joy and learning
that we do not need heroes, leaders, hierarchy, order, possessions, property -- earth works perfectly well without them
that we are all responsible for sustaining the balance of the natural world to which we belong

Is it naive to believe we could achieve a world like this? Maybe. Is it contrary to basic human nature? Not at all. Our destructive, acquisitive, fearful modern culture has only been around for a mere 30 thousand years. For three million years before that humans at least behaved as if they believed, for the most part, the green bullets above. I think we know, in our hearts, instinctively, that there is something very wrong with our culture and what it's done to our planet. I think we know that if we really knew what sustains our current culture -- what goes on in prisons, third world child labour camps, slaughterhouses, corporate and political backrooms, torture centres, factory farms, schoolyards, dictatorships, hospitals and asylums and old-age homes, and behind the closed doors of private homes where women and children are beaten and abused -- we could not allow this culture to continue, we could no longer believe its false stories. But in the absence of an alternative, a New Story, we turn away, preferring not to know the terrible truth about our culture.

Imagine that the Nazis had 'won' WW2. Do you think today we would be, most of us, angry and ready to overthrow the Thousand Year Reich? We wouldn't. The opponents would have been exterminated and the rest of us brainwashed to believe that aryans are 'naturally' the master race, and that corporatism (that's what Mussolini called the complete integration of corporate and government power and the suppression of opposition to it via a ruthless police state, before the historians renamed it fascism) was necessary to the order and good government of society. The education system would have taught us, elite and masses alike, stories that reinforced the rightness of this status quo, and ensured our obedience, our subservience to the powerful, our fear of scarcity if we didn't conform, our inability to imagine any other way of living.

Our situation today isn't all that different. Don't believe me? If my Ten Things To Keep You Awake list wasn't enough to convince you, consider this: The most successful story-teller of 2003 (his was the best selling CD of the year), entitled (and there is no irony in the title) Get Rich Or Die Tryin is a guy named 50 Cent. The number two best sellers were a band (can't remember their name) who have made their entire fortune around a new line of sneakers (they have a 20-foor Reebok sneaker that they dance around during their numbers). MTV and MuchMusic have entire programs devoted to which celebrities are currently endorsing which products, including customized six-figure limited edition 'gangsta' vehicles issued by the Big 3 US auto makers. These artists don't care if people download their songs free -- they make their big money on endorsements from Nike and the Gap, who in turn make their real money from third world sweatshops, offshoring American jobs and child and slave labour. Now, guess what the messages of the very powerful stories in these artists' very popular songs are (check out the lyri cs if you doubt me):

money and power and property are the measure of every man
life is brutal and violent and you must be ruthless and competitive to survive or succeed
it's OK to kill, cheat, rob, rape, lie if your victim is even vaguely associated with your 'enemy' -- the end justifies the means
women are chattels, property to be collected for the pleasure of rich and powerful men, for display
god is on the side of the rich and powerful -- why else would they still be alive and have money and power?

Sound a lot like the red bullet list above? Sound like the belief system of some corporate and government leaders you know? Today's best selling artists are bombarding a generation of sadly under-educated kids and uncritical young adults with the fiercest corporatist might-makes-right neocon cultural propaganda since the McCarthy and Nixon Eras, and they're eating it up.

This is why we desperately need new stories. We are running out of time. The defenders of our bankrupt, reckless, out-of-control culture know what they're selling is counter-intuitive, irrational, unethical, but they have everything tied up in its continuance, everything to lose, and they're holding on, throwing all their money and influence at keeping it going, at subverting opposition and attacking other ways of thinking. Our only defence is three million years of instinctive knowledge, and the power of stories. The power to change everything.

OUR
STORY

OUR
STORY 01/07/2004 01:19 PM

It's funny how things come together sometimes. Monday, after posting my advice column on blogging time-savers, and saying the most important thing is to get away from your computer and your reading and get out into the real world and give yourself time to think creatively about what really matters to you personally, I followed my own advice. Chelsea and I went for a long walk. And soon my head was filled with rage about all the things wrong with this world and the ten things that still keep me awake at night. And I wanted to know why they go on, ignored, uncorrected. Things happen the way they do for a good reason, I've always said. You need to understand why all this stuff has happened and continues to happen. Find the root cause, not the symptoms.

People love to read editorials and blogs that rant cleverly, emotionally and articulately, and blame other people for what's wrong. Pointing the finger at others exonerates us, takes the heat off, makes us feel better about ourselves. What's the root cause, and who's to blame?

And then I came back in and read some more of The Truth About Stories, the book I blogged about on Sunday so enthusiastically. And at the end of the book I found my story, perhaps our story, and all the rage I had focused outside was refocused inward, because this story is, at its root, a story of personal failure, cowardice and fear.

Here is what I read:

The truth about stories is that that's all we are. The Nigerian story-teller Ben Okri says that "in a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them. One way or another we are living the stories that are planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted -- knowingly or unknowingly -- in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives."...

In North America, we talk about our environmental [and business] ethic. [We get outraged about incidents like the Exxon Valdez spill and the Enron fraud and demand action]. To listen to the noise generated by these two events, you would have thought that we cared. But in fact, we don't. Not in any ethical way. Oil tankers are supposed to be safe. Financial institutions are supposed to be bastions of integrity. But we do nothing to prevent such disasters from happening again. And when they do, and they surely will, our reaction will be the same, because the story we tell about moments like this is that they shouldn't have happened, that they're someone else's fault,...that there's no way to avoid them completely, that the environment and investor confidence will recover eventually...

The Canadian government closed down the East Coast cod fishery. The cod were already gone, had been going for years, and everyone knew it. The reason was simple. Overfishing. The fishers blamed the government. The government blamed the fishers, everyone blamed the large foreign offshore trawlers, seals, global warming, El Nino, Native people... Could such a thing have been prevented? Of course. So why didn't we prevent it?

The oil industry and our oil-based economy depend for their existence on the ability of geologists to find new fields of oil and our willingness to ignore the obvious, that at some point we're going to run out of oil. This would suggest that reducing energy consumption, curbing the proliferation of cars and multilane highways, and converting to sustainable sources of energy would be our first priorities. But we have no such priorities. We only hope that the exhaustion of the oil supply won't happen in our lifetime.

It's not that we don't care about ethical behaviour, the environment, society. It's just that we care more about our comfort and the things that make us comfortable -- property, prestige, power, appearance, security. And the things that insulate us from the vicissitudes of life. Money, for instance...

The proof of what we truly believe lies in what we do and not what we say. We've created the stories that allow [the ethics of what we do and don't do] to exist and flourish. They didn't come out of nowhere, from another planet. Want a different ethic? Tell a different story...

I weep for the world I've helped to create. A world in which I allow my intelligence and goodwill to be constantly subverted by my pursuit of comfort and pleasure. And because of knowing all of this, it is doubtful that given a second chance to make amends for my despicable behaviour, I would do anything different, for I find it easier to tell myself the story of my failure as a human being, than to have to live the story of making the sustained effort to help.

Our stories are lies. We know they are, but we keep telling them to ourselves and to each other. We keep living them and living in them. Thomas King acknowledges that this, The Truth about Stories, is in itself not a very satisfying story. "No plot. No neat ending. No clever turns of phrase." (The remaining stories in this book have all three, and are remarkable).

We don't want to hear the other stories out there in the real world -- the stories of what goes on inside the walls of abusive homes, factory farms, prisons, workplaces, schools, laboratories and institutions, and which are overtly played out in inner city streets and throw-away third world countries, the endless litany of violence, physical and psychological, personal and institutional, that occurs millions of times per minute throughout our world. These other stories detract from our 'comfort and pleasure'. They threaten to crack open the lies in our own story. That we cannot bear.

So the 'root cause' I was seeking during my walk with Chelsea is the subversion of our culture, this modern culture of negativism, acquisition, paternalism and scarcity whose ubiquitous, tyrannical story leaves everything in the hands of fate, or god, and absolves us of our responsibility and our sins, and fills us with the constant and consuming terror of not having enough. And we know who's to blame: The Man in the Mirror (that song was written, ironically, by a woman).

Our story is unfinished. We could change the ending if we want. Create a better ending. It's all up to us.

[My novel-in-progress will be an attempt to create a new ending, and perhaps a completely new story. I still hope to have it finished by the end of June.]

THE FUTURE
OF BUSINESS

THE FUTURE
OF BUSINESS 01/16/2004 11:01 AM

This article is adapted from a presentation I am making at the World Congress on Intellectual Capital & Innovation at McMaster University later this week.

SVP mockup

I'm going to start this future state vision at the front lines of a typical corporation, and look over the shoulder of a typical knowledge worker in 2015. The company this employee works for no longer has a knowledge centre, in-house researchers or a corporate library. In fact, it has outsourced and shrunk its IT and other infrastructure to zero. It has no in-house overhead, no 'back office'. Everyone on the payroll either sells product or delivers services to customers.

The company learned a valuable lesson in the early 2000s, when it released two commercial software tools to all its staff: instant messaging software, and VoIP global peer-to-peer telephony. These two products, which cost the firm absolutely nothing, quickly became the highest-rated and most-used IT applications in the company, even though staff had received no training in their use. Since that time, the primary technology strategy and KM strategy of the company has, as a result, been to propagate simple, free tools to all staff, and develop no technologies internally. The entire financial system of the global corporation is run by three people, and aside from the company's public e-commerce site there are no centralized repositories or centrally-managed websites. Each employee's laptop now contains the following tools and content:

A simple, personal content management system that allows individual employees to organize all the information they use in their job, publish that information selectively to people inside and outside the company who want to subscribe to it, free or at a price, and likewise subscribe and archive other people's information. This tool is a stripped down version of a weblog. It takes five minutes to learn and connects everyone in the company to everyone else in the business world. The tool is free. It, and all the content it manages, is completely under the control of the employee and, like the laptop on which it sits, is portable when the employee leaves the company.

An expertise finder tool that allows employees to find and contract with experts inside and outside the organization as easily as they find information. It includes a ‘super address book’ that lists, diagrams, automatically harvests and maintains access information for everyone in each of the employee's networks. Like the CMS tool, it was developed by tech hobbyists and is free.

A ‘virtual presence’ tool that provides one-click multimedia access to anyone in each employee's ‘super address book’, and virtual presence at any conference. Used in connection with a rotatable laptop camera and headset, the tool, which comes free with new laptops, simultaneously shows a view of and provides high-quality audio of, the person you're talking or listening to, the document or presentation you're collaborating on, and any sidebar instant messaging conversations you're participating in.

A set of new, easy-to-use productivity tools that enable DIY research, data mining, and one-click canvassing of each employee's networks for peer-to-peer help solving a problem or finding information.

With this powerful, simple suite of tools, knowledge management has become a personal rather than a corporate matter. The company no longer needs centralized infrastructure or content management, or full-time information professionals. KM & IT really have become ‘everyone's job’, and corporations no longer need website development specialists, website managers, content architects, content managers, network coordinators, or database purchasers. Front-line professionals do their own analysis and much of their own research as well. The personal laptop, with its context-rich content selectively and simply made available to others inside and outside the company, has become each individual employee's and independent contractor's proxy, resume, and calling card. And the ‘virtual presence’ and other tools empower each worker to conduct business effectively, collaborate with colleagues and attend meetings anywhere in the world without incurring the time or cost of travel.

Let's step back now from the perspective of the knowledge worker and look at how the business environment for corporations has changed in 2015. In the early 2000s, large corporations that were once hierarchical end-to-end business enterprises began shedding everything that was not deemed ‘core competency’, in some cases to the point where the only things left were business acumen, market knowledge, experience, decision-making ability, brand name, and aggregation skills. This 'hollowing out' allowed multinationals to achieve enormous leverage and margin. It also made them enormously vulnerable and potentially dispensable.

BWE1

As outsourcing accelerated, some small companies discovered how to exploit this very vulnerability. When, for example, they identified North American manufacturers outsourcing domestic production to third world plants in the interest of 'increasing productivity', they went directly to the third world manufacturers, offered them a bit more, and then went directly to the North American retailers, and offered to charge them less. The expensive outsourcers quickly found themselves unnecessary middlemen. Now in 2015, the result is what Doc Searls and Dave Weinberger, two Internet experts, have called a World of Ends -- which in its business application means a disintermediated world where specialized businesses contract directly with each other to bring the benefits of globalization and the free market to consumers. The large corporations, having shed everything they thought was non 'core competency', learned to their chagrin that in the connected, information economy, the value of their core competency was much less than the inflated value of their stock, and they have lost much of their market share to new federations of small entrepreneurial businesses.
BWE3

A number of other factors contributed to the demise of many large multi-national corporations by 2015, and the explosion of a new entrepreneurial economy. As predicted by the economic think-tanks of the early 21st century, and by demographic and cyclical forecasts like Boom Bust and Echo and The Fourth Turning, the economy of 2015 had been further transformed by these events:

The crushing debt load of citizens and governments, especially the turn of the century US government, led to a spike in interest rates and a collapse in the value of Western currencies, stock markets, and housing. As a result, consumers in 2015 are much more careful in their spending and much more price-conscious. Those that can afford to, primarily the baby boom generation, are buying fewer, longer lasting, premium quality goods and keeping them much longer.

The realization that globalization and ‘free’ trade are devastating for Western employment and our environment have led to a backlash against imported goods, the cancellation of free trade agreements, and strong ‘buy local’ campaigns and consumer preferences.

A steady stream of corporate scandals, and the perceived propensity of many large corporations to lie to, threaten and even sue their customers, has severely eroded the value of brand names. Where the youth of 2004 prided themselves on wearing the latest brand clothing, the youth of 2015 pride themselves on wearing clothes they made themselves, using computerized tools attached to their laptops. They're also making much of their own music, movies, software and books, and distributing them to the world for next to no cost, forcing the commercial distributors of entertainment products to slash their prices to stay in business.

A large proportion of the population in 2015 is self-employed, with lower disposable income but more time than the previous generation. As a result they do more of their own home repairs, renovations, landscaping, and even growing their own food. Home and automobile energy conservation have become very fashionable. With the continuation of food scares and a reaction against conditions in factory farms, the proportion of vegetarians in the population has grown rapidly.

Health, more than anything else, is driving the economy, with an older, more health-conscious population. There has been a shift from treatment to prevention of illness, and from reliance on health professionals to self-diagnosis and self-therapy.

As a result of these changes, the economy of 2015 is vastly different in some key ways from the economy of 2004:

	2004	2015
Critical Business Skill	Enterprise Management	New Enterprise Formation
Critical Competitive Advantage	Intellectual Assets & Brand	Agility & Innovation
Hot Topic at Learning Institutions	Outsourcing	Entrepreneurialism 101
What Keeps CEOs Awake	Cost & Risk Management	Reputation

What are the implications of this to those of us in, or looking for, careers in tomorrow's business?

Your networks are critical: Your success will depend on who you know, but not necessarily who you know well. Because of a phenomenon known as 'the strength of weak links', your future employer, employees, customers and business partners are all likely to be two or three degrees of separation away from those you know personally. Who your associates know is probably more important, therefore, than who you know directly.
You need to know how to run a business, from start-up to dissolution. Not the sheltered academic skills of large corporate administration, but the down-and-dirty skills of entrepreneurship, where every decision is make-or-break. Your network can help here, too. You're probably three times as likely to be self-employed or unemployed in 2015, as you are to be an employee of someone else, so you'll need these skills.
You need to be extremely focused on customers and well tuned into customers' needs. Computer databases of compiled customer intelligence will be valuable, but the personal intelligence you can get customers to voluntarily give you access to will be even more valuable. That will require reciprocity and building trust, a difficult challenge in an age of consumer cynicism and concern for privacy.
Your product or service will need to strike a delicate balance between quality, price, durability and upgradability. Customers will demand and expect all of these things, and will be much more careful shoppers than today's. And they'll have a lot more choice and a lot more information for competitive shopping as well. An earned reputation for quality, responsiveness and responsibility, not brand name, will allow you to command a premium price for a premium product. Your company will need to be socially and environmentally responsible, not because corporate charters will have changed, but because citizen and consumer groups will call you to account if you're not.
No industry is going to be immune to these changes and demands. Today's oligopolies will give way to a much more open and diverse competitive environment. The scare that companies like ING Direct have given the banks, discount brokers have given the majors, and small regional carriers have given the debt-ridden big-name airlines, is just a taste of what's to come.

It's always fun to predict the future, and I hope you've found my prognostications interesting. I'd like to thank my weblog readers for helping me qualify these ideas and make this presentation more informative and credible than it might otherwise have been. [Conclusion & Questions].

THINK
GLOBAL, ACT LOCAL: PETER SINGER'S
ONE
WORLD

THINK
GLOBAL, ACT LOCAL: PETER SINGER'S
ONE
WORLD 04/23/2004 09:24 AM

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that I'm opposed to unregulated 'free' trade, very worried about the extraterritoriality of the WTO, NAFTA, Davos and other corporatist captives, strongly opposed to domestic corporations 'offshoring' jobs, using influence with the Bush regime and other right-wing governments to circumvent social and environmental laws and responsibilities, and a great believer in taking the pledge to buy local, and in community self-sufficiency.

At the same time, I'm a strong supporter of the UN and other multi-lateral NGOs, and I believe that we each have a responsibility for the well-being of all the people and creatures of this world. Some readers have said this view is inconsistent, and I wasn't quite sure how to respond to such charges. Fortunately, Peter Singer, in his recent book on global ethics, One World: The Ethics of Globalization, has come to my rescue. Singer sees no inconsistency between strong local autonomy, community, and self-sufficient economies on the one hand, and global responsibility on the other. The book is based on the Dwight Terry lectures at Yale in 2000, but has been updated to incorporate reflection on the events of 9/11 and the appalling Bush social, environmental and economic record.

I'll have more to say next week about Bush's fraudulent and despicable Earth Day media blitz, and the major media's shameless lack of critical evaluation of the utter nonsense that his propaganda machine has been churning out this week on the environment -- newspeak of Orwellian proportions. The first part of Singer's book deals with environmental responsibility, and his prescription for increasing it -- immediate ratification of Kyoto by the US and other holdout countries, and introduction of an emissions trading mechanism to make the realization of Kyoto feasible (subject to the need for some oversight on the disposition of the proceeds of such trading when it involves autocratic governments).

The second part of the book deals with the global economy, and Singer adroitly tears apart the Economist's (and other neocons') naive assertion that economic globalization somehow benefits both rich and poor countries. He then goes on to prescribe a substantial reform of the WTO and the GATT, which could actually lead to more equitable distribution of wealth and more efficient production of economic goods, while safeguarding human rights, labour and the environment. Unfortunately, the multi-national corporations and corporatists who hold sway in the WTO would never tolerate Singer's prescription, since it would entirely divert the benefits of economic globalization from their pockets to those of the world's poor.

The third part of the book deals with international law, and Singer lashes out at Bush for his unconscionable refusal to ratify the International Court of Justice, and for the UN's continued hesitancy to accept a duty (not a right) to intervene in situations of genocide and other humanitarian crises, even within a single nation. Singer is sanguine about the limitations and dangers of 'global government', but supports strengthening the UN to enable it to act as a 'protector of last resort', and including in its mandate the responsibility to supervise elections in all member nations.

The fourth and final part goes back to ethical principles and proposes that countries must, in this world where national boundaries no longer have any logistic meaning, set aside national interest and embrace, once and for all, global interest, impartially. That does not mean cultural homogenization, but imposes a responsibility for the reduction of inequality, both of economic resources and personal rights and freedoms.

Always the pragmatist, Singer concludes by worrying out loud about how the responsibility for a global ethic could be managed:

It is widely believed that a world government would be, at best, an unchecked bureaucratic behemoth that would make the bureaucracy of the EU look lean and efficient. At worst, it would become a global tyranny, unchecked and unchallengeable. These thoughts have to be taken seriously. How to prevent global bodies becoming either dangerous tyrannies or self-aggrandizing bureaucracies, and instead make them effective and responsive to the people whose lives they affect? It is a challenge that should not be beyond the best minds in the fields of political science and public administration.

I'd like to believe that this was possible, because if it isn't, we're in serious trouble. We cannot expect national governments to set aside parochial interests, especially when this entails accepting a responsibility that would, for the richer nations, inevitably lead to a drastic redistribution of wealth to poorer nations and hence a sudden and sharp reduction in, at least, economic living standards (if not necessarily well-being). But as John Ralston Saul has so eloquently argued, larger organizations and institutions, whether public or private, are almost always, and inherently, less efficient, less agile, more resistant to change, more hierarchic, and less transparent than smaller organizations. So the challenge is to achieve the best of both worlds, having organizations of global scope and authority and responsibility, but broken up into sufficiently small, autonomous and dynamic units that they are sensitive, resilient, responsible and responsive to the people and communities they serve. We can only hope that "the best minds in the fields of political science and public administration", wherever they are, are up to the task.

A
PRESCRIPTION FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION -
PART ONE

A
PRESCRIPTION FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION -
PART ONE 04/13/2004 02:25 PM

Four years ago I wrote a well-received paper entitled A Prescription for Business Innovation: Creating Technologies that Solve Basic Human Needs. I've updated it, broken it into three manageable pieces, and present the first part below. The remaining parts will follow on successive Tuesdays.

Introduction: Why I'm Here

My modest objective in this presentation is first, to tell you some new, interesting and useful things about innovation, and, second, to persuade you that innovation is the most important determinant of every business' success, and perhaps even the quality of our lives. I want to convince you that in your business, whether it employs one person or one million, innovation is probably the solution to whatever is currently keeping you awake at night -- whether that be sales growth, cost control, customer satisfaction, employee retention, or maximizing shareholder value.

And if you, like me, spend some of your sleepless hours worrying about things more altruistic than your personal and business success, I want to convince you that innovation is probably also the solution to most of the problems that have befallen our suffering planet, in part because past innovations have created many of these problems.

And finally, if I'm successful in this evangelical task, I want you to leave today not only with renewed hope about the future of your company and our world, but with some new tools to make innovation happen in your business.

I would like to ask you to listen to these ideas with an open mind, suspend briefly your disbelief, and give this your full attention. If this was that easy to explain, someone much smarter than I would have done it years ago.

One: Learning from our past: How Need Drives Innovation

The advent of a new millennium has recently given many business, political and economic thinkers pause to consider what will be, as most put it, the 'Next Big Thing':

A New Economy Forum sponsored by Credit Suisse First Boston attempted to develop a 'synthesis' of leading thinkers' innovation models that might answer that question.
Forward-thinking publications like Fast Company and Wired have presented alternative visions of the future from some extraordinary minds in many different disciplines.
And conferences of world political, social and business leaders like the Davos World Economic Forum try to grapple with the bigger questions of how the holders of power can make the world a better place, while helping out their particular stakeholders in the process.

The catch-phrases of these business-driven thought leadership events are not new: competitive advantage, sustainable development, the connected knowledge economy, globalization, convergence, digitization, moving at the speed of thought. What is new is that there are now three divergent models being used to predict our future, fighting for audience attention (the names assigned to them are mine):

Acceleration Model: The future will be a continuation of the recent past, only much faster
Chaos Model: The future will be utterly unlike the past, driven by radically new and discontinuous events
Evolutionary Model: The future will be, like the past, a continuous series of mostly predictable changes

From the perspective of business innovation this matters because almost everyone agrees that the successful businesses of the future will be complex, adaptive, agile, proactive, and creative -- they will not wait for market demands to change them, but will instead continuously reinvent their companies, anticipate future demands, and make strategic, risky, value-creating investments and decisions, what John Kotter calls Leading Change. In order to do this -- to make intelligent decisions and investments before demand is articulated, to view risk-taking and the creation of future options for action as essential, not foolhardy -- requires at least some consensus about 'where the future is headed'. Selecting one of the above three theories about the future is an important start in doing so.

Technophiles who favour the Acceleration Model tend to be infatuated with artifacts of the last thirty years: more digital, faster, smaller, lighter. Advocates of the Chaos Model, on the other hand, believe there are no rules for our brave new world of the 21st century. Their advice for business and other leaders is to be opportunistic and think short-term.

I lean towards the Evolutionary Model. I believe that using an understanding of the past, with the right perspective, can help businesses anticipate the future with exceptional clarity and probability of success. There are two reasons I hold this belief, and they form the basis for much of the rest of this presentation:

Technology is Not Evil: Technology was, is, and always will be, about improving the quality of human life (though it has had some disastrous, unintended consequences), and
People Change Reluctantly: People change much more slowly than technology, and ultimately won't accept, adopt, or pay for any technology that they aren't yet ready for, or which doesn't fill a real human need.

The report of the 1999 Credit Suisse First Boston New Economy Forum draws together some very powerful innovation models, into a single synthesized model that can be used to explain how technologies have impacted society and civilization since it began about thirty millennia ago:

Fig 1a

Figure One: How Fundamental Needs spawn Innovations & Technologies
(Adapted from Credit Suisse First Boston New Economy Forum 1999 Synthesis)

According to this model, innovations like crop cultivation, the printing press, and the harnessing of solar energy, have always arisen in response to an urgent human need -- overcoming the sudden food scarcity after the Ice Age, bringing literacy to the masses, and solving the energy crisis respectively in these three examples. Technologies are applications of these innovations. The intriguing organic-looking ovals for each technology are also from the Credit Suisse Synthesis, which proposes are technologies are best developed using the following process:

Fig.2a

Figure Two: Development Process for Technologies
(from Credit Suisse First Boston New Economy Forum 1999 Synthesis)

Let's now take a look at this synthesis model in more detail, to test whether it represents the way in which historical innovations have occurred, and then what this might tell us about innovations of the future.

Two: Man's Earliest Innovations: A Brief History of Technology

The first humans to walk on our planet, according to most anthropologists, were not the mighty hunters most of us might picture. In fact we were particularly disadvantaged, lacking both keen senses and a hide adapted to changing climates and weather. As a result, early humans were scavengers, ignominiously surviving off the leftovers of creatures with better innate hunting 'equipment'. In the first scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick & Clarke hypothesize that a carrion bone was the first human tool. Marshall McLuhan explained in his book Understanding Media that this early human was using the bone, this very first tool or technology, as an extension of his hand, giving it strength, reach and durability his hand alone did not have. McLuhan argued that all technologies are extensions of the human body and the human senses, and it is these technologies that have allowed the poor, badly-pelted, sensory-deprived human species to buck Darwin's odds and survive.

So picture our poor shivering proto-human looking among the bones of a wolf's recent meal for new tools beside the greasy bone, and thinking, in true McLuhanesque and 20th century economics terms: 'If the bone as an extension of my hand helps me to compensate for my competitive disadvantage in the hunter-gatherer marketplace, why can I not use other tools similarly? Then, lacking the appropriate scientific training but still intoxicated over his first innovation, he or she comes across a dead wolf and considers the following applications of this technological insight:

If I put the wolf's head on my head, will I gain the wolf's acute senses, wiles and powers? (Not that different from the thinking applied many centuries later by the Ford Motor Company in the naming of cars and design of hood ornaments after various fierce animals)
If I eat the dead wolf, will I gain the wolf's acute senses, wiles and powers? (Many cultures still eat powdered horn and animal genitalia based on this 'logic')
If I strap a live wolf to myself, will the wolf and I become one creature, with both the wolf's senses, wiles and powers and my brilliant and innovative mind?

Of course, the correct answer is (c), which, except for the use of a leash or harness instead of a tight strap, remains one of the most important technologies in our short human history: animal domestication. Interestingly, the development of a non-choking animal harness, and a stirrup for riding larger animals, took centuries, according to a review in the Economist of the last millennium's greatest inventions. What's more, it occurred first in China, possibly enabling their civilization to develop much more quickly than Western civilization, until, for reasons only hinted at in the Economist , China suddenly stopped developing new technologies in the 15th century.

Without animal domestication and crop cultivation, we as a species might well not have survived to come up with newer and more sophisticated innovations like the wheel, paper and the computer.

Three: Six Principles about the Innovation Process

The first humans used precisely the process shown in Figure Two to develop and 'commercialize' the technology applications of the innovations of animal domestication and crop cultivation. It is the same commercialization process taught in business schools today. However, the success of the process is only as good as the idea, the innovation, that lies at its front end. Business schools are actually very good at explaining the recipe, but they, and most educational and business institutions, are absolutely terrible at teaching people how to find the essential new ingredients -- the 'grey matter' at the left side of Figure Two, the ideas & innovations that make the recipe work. The problem isn't a scarcity of good ideas either -- it is the lack of rigour and investment in infrastructure to surface, capture, develop and qualify new ideas prior to commercialization.

Figure Two also recognizes that many innovations and technologies are derived from other innovations and technologies, and often come from applying an idea or a technology from one application domain, or from nature, to an unrelated application domain. The BBC/Discovery program Connections made this point very powerfully, and its author James Burke continues to develop both examples of such non-obvious connections, and exercises to help us learn to discover more -- in essence, to become more innovative. Burke's latest book explains how a problem with the irrigation of Italian gardens led to the invention of the carburetor, for example.

Furthermore, Figure Two acknowledges the importance of the story in the successful commercialization of innovations. It is hard to pick up a business book or attend a business conference these days without being lectured on the importance of story-telling, but the idea is neither new nor complicated: Stories convey the context for the application, they explain how it can be used in the user's or developer's day to day life. Knowledge transfer is an essential precondition to commercialization. The easiest way to transfer knowledge, i.e. to explain or persuade, is to do so in a way that lets the learner internalize what they are hearing i.e. to fit it into their own mental models of how things work. And the simplest way to enable internalization is by telling a story, be it a Utopia or Future State Vision, a parable with a built in lesson, or a simple recounting of processes and events that lets the learner relive the teacher's experience as if it were their own.

From all this we can derive six basic principles about the Innovation Process (again, the names given to them are mine), to add to the two espoused earlier about cultural resistance to innovation:

Need Drives Innovation: Necessity is the mother of invention, and as the fundamental human needs listed in the top row of Figure One above illustrate, the important innovations and technologies of human history have addressed the greatest human needs of their age. Without an urgent human need, a burning platform, a Business Case, there will be no innovation, since the preconditions for it, as John Kotter explains in Leading Change, do not exist. An obvious corollary of this principle is:
Innovation Starts with the Customer: If successful innovations must address an urgent human need, then the front-end of the innovation process should be situated at the point of contact with the humans expressing that need, i.e. the sales and customer service people in businesses, not the R&D laboratory or the marketing department. With some notable exceptions where the need for the innovation was only identified later, innovations coming from R&D tend to be solutions in search of problems, and those coming from Marketing tend to be solutions for which needs need to be artificially created through advertising.
Innovation Drives Technology: The solutions developed by companies' products and services are all technologies that apply one or more innovations.This is equally true of pregnancy test kits, tax preparation software, satellite-and-computer-based learning courses, futures options, automobiles and corn (whether genetically modified or not). So-called 'competitive advantage' comes either from offerings that better satisfy human needs (faster, better, cheaper etc.), or from new technology applications of new innovations that render the old offerings obsolete i.e. 'reinvent' the market. But as much as business would like to turn the model on its head (develop the offering, then use technologies and marketing to create a need for it), real needs like the ones at the top of Figure One cannot be created. They can be recognized, and they can change as more fundamental needs are solved, but they cannot be created. Need drives Innovation and Innovation drives Technology.
Innovations are Interconnected: Innovation is not a mystical creative process, explains Edward de Bono in Serious Creativity. It is a learnable, repeatable process. Great minds and great companies can learn to 'see the connections', provided they don't narrow their scan (across time and across different disciplines of business and thought) too much. Here's a great example of how broad scanning engenders innovation, an example which also shows how many innovations exist in nature awaiting our discovery, if we don't destroy them first:: Scientists have recently discovered that butterfly wings contain no pigment. They are covered by overlapping 'tiles' 50 times thinner than a human hair. Each tile contains multiple layers of cells, separated by air gaps. When the light bounces off the tiles, the layers reflect colors with an iridescent sheen. There is a whole industry of thin-film coatings, whose products are used in everything from spacecraft hulls to anti-counterfeiting devices on paper currency, that may be revolutionized by application of this innovative colouring technology.
Stories Transfer Knowledge: If you want to teach, or if you want to set up a killer database that everyone will contribute to and use, make sure your subject-matter is stories. Distilling stories to 'lessons' destroys the essence of their value by disabling the learner's ability to internalize, digest, and learn from, the contextualized experience of the teacher.
Innovation Requires Discipline & Patience: The strange fish-like organism pictured in Figure Two is the process by which almost all successful ideas are commercialized. It is a journey that, even for most great ideas, is rarely completed. It is essential to have the discipline, patience, and courage to follow this process rigorously.Without such rigour, a great idea can easily be buried by premature skepticism, unscientific criticism, dangerous complacency and fear of risk. The process works.

(Next Tuesday: Part Two: Innovation & Society, and The Structure & Culture of Innovative Organizations (with six additional Innovation Principles to add to the eight above); The Following Tuesday: Part Three: A 15-step Prescription for an Innovative Organization, with some examples.)

THE TEN MOST
UNDER-REPORTED HUMANITARIAN EVENTS OF
2003

THE TEN MOST
UNDER-REPORTED HUMANITARIAN EVENTS OF
2003 02/10/2004 02:48 AM

Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) recently released its list of the ten most under-reported humanitarian events of 2003. The map above shows which countries these events occurred in. Although the MSF site is temporarily down, you can read the complete details of these stories here. The top 10 stories are:

Tens of thousands seek refuge in Chad from wars in Sudan and Central African Republic
Ongoing oppression of civilians, war and dislocation in Chechnya
Tenth year of civil war in Burundi lowers life expectancy to 40, causes massive dislocation
Three million displaced in Columbia, infrastructure destroyed, violence & disease rampant, 'drug war' ruins economy
Daily terror and disease in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo pushes 20-year death toll past three million
Annual death toll from malaria in sub-Saharan Africa reaches two million because $1 treatment is too expensive
Twelve years of violence, displacement, flooding and drought make Somalia the world's most destitute country
Millions of refugees fleeing starvation and terror in North Korea struggle in fear and deprivation in hostile China
'Free' trade agreements deprive millions of AIDS victims in Southern Africa and elsewhere of affordable treatment
War, displacement and lack of medical care produces massive malnutrition in Ivory Coast and Liberia

Why aren't the media covering these stories? None of them is physically close to the West. None of them involves countries with resources of strategic importance to the West. Almost all of them are ongoing, so there is nothing 'new' to report each day. None of the people in these countries has resorted to terrorist attacks against the West to bring attention to our indifference to their plight. And all of them are intractible problems, and therefore issues that those of us in the West would rather not know about.

THE GLOBAL
FOOTPRINT STRESS INDEX

THE GLOBAL
FOOTPRINT STRESS INDEX 12/19/2004 02:54 PM

Global Footprint Stress Index: Extreme (purple, >10), High (orange 3-10), Moderate (yellow 1-3), Low (white <1)

Last month I wrote an article suggesting that a propensity for war-mongering and civil violence, i.e. the tendency to take hasty and extreme action rather than a reasoned and responsible response to a crisis, might be attributable to what Edward Hall describes as population stress, the adrenaline-driven aggressive/panic stress response that all creatures exhibit when their population greatly exceeds sustainable carrying capacity. Hall explains that this is nature's 'last resort' method of bringing the population of the species quickly back into balance with the rest of the ecosystem, when the species fails to manage its own numbers and when opportunistic diseases don't do the trick. Earlier I had calculated< /a> a simple Population Stress Index (PSI), which was computed by multiplying density per arable square mile by population growth rate, and I compared it to an astonishingly similar map by another blogger, Matthew White, showing violent death rate by country.

As I explained in last month's post, the PSI is an imperfect stress index. It does not show the very different levels of consumption and demand on local resources of people in different countries (which has as much to do with sustainability as population). So I have now computed a Footprint Stress Index (FSI), plotted on the map above, which is computed as follows:

First, I calculated the Resource Use Index by taking the aggregate Ecological Footprint (EF) of each country in hectares (the per capita footprint from sources such as the Living Planet Report, times the country's population), and dividing it by the number of habitable hectares of land in the country (I used as a proxy for this the lesser of 80% of total land area and 200% of Oxford's 'arable land area' data). This very useful number indicates the number of times over each country's citizens are using the renewable and sustainable resources available to them. A Resource Use index of 1.0 is sustainable. An index of, say, 5, indicates that to restore the country to sustainability, it needs to do some combination of reducing population and reducing per-capita resource consumption, by a combined 80%. The table below shows some sample Resource Use indices I computed.
Then I multiplied this Resource Use Index by the estimated annual growth rate of the country's aggregate Ecological Footprint. For this, I started with the annual population growth rate as a proxy (the EF studies suggest aggregate footprint and population are growing at roughly the same rate), and then substituted more precise EF growth rate numbers when I could find them online (China's EF is growing much faster than its population, for example).

Resource Use Index: Sample Countries

80 Japan
60 S.Korea
40 Israel, Palestine
35 Switzerland
25 Netherlands, Belgium, UK
16 Germany
13 Ireland, France, Italy, Venezuela
11 US, Columbia, Chile, Sweden

9 China, Philippines
8 Congo
6 World Overall
6 S.Africa, New Zealand
5 Brasil, Iran, Mexico
3 Canada, India, Iraq, Russia
2 Australia, Argentina
1 A few equatorial African nations

Footprint Stress Index: Sample Countries

40+ Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait
30 China
18 Congo
12 Venezuela, Columbia
10 US
8 Chile
6 India, Netherlands, Belgium, Iraq
4.5 World Overall

4.0 Mexico, Iran, UK
3.0 New Zealand, Sweden
2.0 Brasil, Argentina, Japan, France
1.5 Canada, Australia
1.0 S.Korea, Switzerland
0.5 Germany, Italy
0.0 S.Africa, Russia

The US, China, Congo, Colombia, Venezuela, and several Mid-Eastern nations all have FSIs in excess of 10. These are all countries embroiled in war, imperialistic or regional or civil, except for China where dissent is ruthlessly suppressed. These are the countries that are suffering enormous anxiety because not only are they consuming vastly more resources than what they have available domestically, their populations or industrial capacities are also growing rapidly, meaning they will need to find ever more resources outside the country to feed the soaring need.

Japan, South Korea and most European nations have very high Resource Use Indices, but because their populations are growing slowly and because they are mostly very aware of conservation, their EFs are not increasing. As a result, their FSIs are more moderate. Because they all depend so heavily (90% or more) on imports of other countries' natural resources, however, as these resources get depleted and as exporting countries realize how cheaply they are giving them away, these nations' unsustainable resource demands will not be able to be met, and that will drive their Footprint Stress Indices way up. Once these scarcities become endemic, there will no longer be any option to increase resource use, and at that point the Resource Use Index itself will become the Footprint Stress Index.

What will the world be like when dozens of nations, whose economies are using resources at more than ten times the rate they can sustain them from domestic supplies, suddenly find the price of these supplies quadrupling, or that these supplies are not available at any price? Colour all the countries on the left side of the Resource Use Index table above purple on the map at the top of this article and you'll get the idea. We're talking about a world war for increasingly scarce resources. And all of the countries on the right side of that table then become invasion targets.

We all know what we have to do. Immediate massive taxes on resources to finance the development of technologies that conserve or don't require natural resources. Shut-down of corporations that waste resources, that pollute, and that produce non-essential products. An end to subsidies, so that we can begin to realize the true cost of our profligate deficit spending. The pay-down of government debts to reduce the risk of economic collapse when interest and inflation rates spike. Incentives for having no children, or maybe one.

Of course, we have no appetite for these draconian solutions. The corporatist Frankenstein monster is perpetuating the waste and madness that is producing this crisis, and they accept no responsibility for the ultimate Tragedy of the Commons that will hit us with colossal force once we simply run out of resources to consume to keep civilization's engine running. The hydrogen economy simply won't occur fast enough to stave off disaster.

Our best hope is, ironically, that some crisis will shock us into collective action before the real crunch hits. We learned nothing from the oil line-ups a generation ago, but perhaps it is not too late. If the first crisis to hit is manageable, we may be motivated to combine three massive human efforts: Voluntary negative population growth, global large-scale conservation, and an unprecedented investment in innovation and new low-footprint technologies, that could prevent a social, economic and ecological collapse. We survived a Great Depression three quarters of a century ago by exactly this type of huge, collective intervention. That's what we need now. The 'market' isn't going to fix this mess.

NATURAL
ENTERPRISE -- THE ELEVATOR PITCH

NATURAL
ENTERPRISE -- THE ELEVATOR PITCH 07/02/2004 03:04 PM

In last week's post on Assembling the Team for Natural Enterprise* I promised that I would present an Elevator Pitch for such enterprises. Although this post is too long to deliver in an elevator ride, it does explain what Natural Enterprise is and why you might want to set one up or join one.

What is Natural Enterprise?
A form of self-organized, self-managed, community-based business partnership in which two or more people agree to make a living together as collaborators and peers, to strive to attain what each member needs to achieve for his or her personal well-being, to accept substantial responsibility for each other, and to respect and help the community or communities in which the enterprise operates. It is 'natural' because this form of socio-economic activity occurs ubiquitously in hunter-gatherer cultures and in non-human animal cultures.

Why is it different?

	Modern Corporation	Natural Enterprise
Normal formation mechanism	Incorporation then eventually public offering	Self-organization as partnership
Source of initial capital	Large capital infusion from established corporations, capitalists and lenders, in return for substantial control of the business	Organic, from customers
Organizational structure	Hierarchical, centralized, top-down managed	Flat, networked, self-managed
Decision-making process	Executive decree	Unanimous consensus of members
Importance of innovation	Moderate; it is often easier to buy out, or buy off innovative competitors	Critical
Key strengths	Political and economic power; brand presence	Agility; customer proximity
Sales process	Develop product in lab, mass produce, advertise	Identify unmet customer need, develop customized solution, deliver to pre-qualified customers, market virally
Stakeholder priority	(1) Absentee shareholder-investors; (2) executives; (3) creditors	(1) Members; (2) customers; (3) community
Social & environmental responsibility	Subordinate to shareholder profit	Paramount; implicit and explicit
Optimal size	The bigger the better	Small: 5-150 members each with unique skills or knowledge
Primary objective	Profitable growth	Members' well-being

What's the catch?
Natural Enterprise could be to the modern economy what the Internet has become to modern politics and society -- an anti-hierarchal mechanism that democratizes and liberates economic power and opportunity the same way the Internet has democratized and liberated social and political power and opportunity. Both innovations fundamentally threaten established power, authority, 'wisdom' and control, by undermining them and rendering their hierarchies vulnerable and potentially obsolete. Large corporate oligopolies will recognize Natural Enterprises as threats to their power and profitability, and, much as they have responded to labour unions, will attempt to ignore, circumvent, weaken or crush them. For at least a generation, pionering Natural Enterprises, much like the fledgling Internet of the 1980s, will have to be content to play a minor role. Charles Handy envisions this as being like the relationship of the flea to the elephant -- Natural Enterprise will contract mainly with large corporations as suppliers, and will be to some extent dependent on these large corporations' largesse and their increased proclivity for outsourcing, along with the Natural Enterprises' own innovativeness and agility. As Handy says, such uneven contracts will at least be an improvement on the wage-slave employer-employee contracts they supersede. And eventually Natural Enterprises will become so numerous, and specialized and adept in so many industries and aspects of business, that they will start networking and contracting and associating with each other, using the power of the Internet. And much as specialty stores undermined and largely replaced the large, cumbersome, general-purpose department store, Natural Enterprises could ultimately eliminate the need for and replace large, cumbersome corporations. Just as the Internet created a socio-political and information 'World of Ends', where central control and authority are not needed and all value is created at the 'ends', so, too could Natural Enterprise create an economic 'World of Ends' where corporatism, oligopoly and massive size are not needed in economic entities and where all value is created at the 'ends' -- face to face with customers. It's a revolutionary and powerful and liberating idea, but it will take time, patience and energy to bring it about.

How do I set one up?
The Handbook is now being written. The framework is illustrated above. You can learn more about them here.

* What's In a Name? I have used the terms New Collaborative Enterprise, Existential Enterprise (Charles Handy's term), and New Tribal Ventures (Daniel Quinn's term) to describe such enterprises. The 'new' in these terms suggests there are 'old' collaborative enterprises, the term 'existential' has been voted off the island by readers of this blog as too highfalutin' and intimidating a term, and terms like 'tribal' conjure up images of war paint and noble savages. Autopoietic Enterprise (it means self-creating and self-managing) is accurate but unpronounceable and would probably be perceived as pretentious. Readers have suggested the terms 'Natural Enterprise' (Harold Jarche) and 'Organic Enterprise' (Don Dwiggins), which I like because they're simple and descriptive. I like Natural better because its opposite (unnatural) is exactly what the modern corporation is, while the term 'organic' is a bit ambiguous (it means 'related to organs', 'related to organisms', 'carbon-based', and 'instrumental', of which only the second definition is a propos). I' almost decided to keep 'Collaborative' in the term for two reasons: To stress that these enterprises entail more than one person working together (a sole proprietor, to me, does not an enterprise make, even if s/he is a powerful networker -- enterprises are about people making a living together), and because it would allow me to continue using the acronym NCE, which has gained some common parlance over the past year. But in the end, simpler is better, Natural Enterprise is inherently collaborative, and I was taught 'when in doubt, leave it out'. So Natural Enterprise it is -- thanks to Harold for the inspiration.

THE DUTCH
SHOW HOW TO NURTURE
ENTREPRENEURSHIP

THE

PTV: A FUTURE-STATE STORY

PTV: A FUTURE-STATE STORY

This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)

PTV: A FUTURE-STATE STORY

THE KNOWLEDGE CONSULTANT AS STORY-GATHERER

AT&T -- ANOTHER CORPORATIST HORROR STORY

MY DELL STORY

A STORY IS LIKE A GIFT

WRITING OUR NEW STORY

OUR STORY

THE FUTURE OF BUSINESS

THINK GLOBAL, ACT LOCAL: PETER SINGER'S ONE WORLD

A PRESCRIPTION FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION - PART ONE

THE TEN MOST UNDER-REPORTED HUMANITARIAN EVENTS OF 2003

THE GLOBAL FOOTPRINT STRESS INDEX

NATURAL ENTERPRISE -- THE ELEVATOR PITCH

THE DUTCH SHOW HOW TO NURTURE ENTREPRENEURSHIP

PTV: A
FUTURE-STATE STORY

THE
KNOWLEDGE CONSULTANT AS
STORY-GATHERER

AT&T --
ANOTHER CORPORATIST HORROR STORY

MY DELL
STORY

A STORY IS
LIKE A GIFT

WRITING OUR
NEW STORY

OUR
STORY

THE FUTURE
OF BUSINESS

THINK
GLOBAL, ACT LOCAL: PETER SINGER'S
ONE
WORLD

A
PRESCRIPTION FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION -
PART ONE

THE TEN MOST
UNDER-REPORTED HUMANITARIAN EVENTS OF
2003

THE GLOBAL
FOOTPRINT STRESS INDEX

NATURAL
ENTERPRISE -- THE ELEVATOR PITCH

THE DUTCH
SHOW HOW TO NURTURE
ENTREPRENEURSHIP