Demanding Change

Notes on the Value of Culture

2010-01-06T16:24:00.000Z

Following my previous post Meeting of Minds, about the cost of meetings and of the "meeting culture", @j4ngis asked "Would you also consider value of meeting culture?"

There is a more general discussion of culture to be had here. Culture is often blamed when things don't go according to a rational managerial ethos. As Oscar Berg blogged yesterday, Did you ever hear anyone shout "culture failure!"?

But an organization without culture - well, it just wouldn't be an organization at all. Culture is what gives an organization its identity - it is a kind of deeper structure that protects the organization from incoherence, instability and inconsequentiality. Culture tells us how an abstract business model is embodied in a particular organization.

Arjo Klamer identifies several ways of talking about the value of culture. In an anthropological sense,

"‘culture’ ... refers to the shared values, stories and aspirations that distinguish one group of people from another (think of a community, an organization, an ethnic group, a nation or a continent). The economic value of culture would be the economic contribution that those shared values make. As the sociologist Max Weber famously argued, the culture of Calvinism may have contributed to the rise of capitalism and the economic growth that came with it. A particular culture may improve economic performance or hinder it. A culture of distrust can seriously hamper the market process. A culture of consensus, such as exists in Japan and the Netherlands, can stifle entrepreneurship but may also be responsible for stability in the event of crisis." [Value of Culture (pdf)]

Edgar Schein identifies three levels of organizational culture - behaviour and artefacts, values, and assumptions and beliefs. [See Wikipedia. See also notes by Ted Nellen.] We can use the VPEC-T lens to unpack and identify these different elements.

An organization has various mechanisms to prevent random changes to the way-we-do-things. Much of the time, these mechanisms are accepted uncritically as part of normal management control - like an immune system that prevents the organization being taken over by destructive memes. @AndreaMeyer calls these mechanisms corporate antibodies. However, when managers themselves want to change things, these mechanisms turn out to be inconvenient obstaces, whose aggregate effect is to suppress innovation.

Vincent Kenny and Philip Boxer describe culture as follows.

"Anyone who works in businesses will have encountered the notion of culture, and the incredible extent to which a culture lives on in a way which defies anyone's attempts to bring about change. It is not only a question of dealing with the issue of anxiety as an individual issue - the whole fabric of the organisation seems to be caught up in the conservation of identity however much change individuals may make." [Economy of Discourses, 1990]

Kenny and Boxer go on to talk about "the levels of extreme inflexibility and 'stuckness' which we witness in large companies" and ask "how can we explain the increasing degrees of rigidity and loss of power for self-transformation evident in the invariant identities and cultures of organisations?"

The reason why leaders struggle with culture is because there is a creative tension or asymmetry between culture and identity on the one hand, and viability (or effectiveness or survival) on the other hand. This is a critical element of the Asymmetric Design lens, which Philip Boxer describes in When is a stratification not a universal hierarchy? (See also the sociological distinction between structure and agency.) This provides a rigorous framework for reasoning about complex structural change.

Coming back to @j4ngis's question - what is the value of the meeting culture - I guess the key question here is what other cultures (more flexible, less bureaucratic, or whatever) we'd be comparing it with, in what context. What function does this culture serve in the context of this particular organization, and how does it affect the strategic outcomes and energy profile of the organization?

Passive Adoption

2009-12-21T17:06:00.000Z

@oscarberg writes "Adoption of new practices and systems has always been about the people, but making adoption optional makes it even more so".

One common pattern of adopting an innovation (whether technology or practice) is when people just go through the motions for the sake of compliance - superficial adoption without real commitment.

So real (committed, authentic) adoption is always optional. You can force people to adopt something superficially, but enthusiasm and commitment can never be mandatory.

This is why, in the context of change management, the concept of "resistance" is more complicated than people usually admit. Lack of resistance isn't necessarily a good sign; it may merely indicate that people have worked out how to comply superficially with the innovation without actually making any meaningful change. Or even that they have seen a way to divert the innovation to their own selfish advantage. Whereas real commitment is often preceded by a serious engagement with the substance of the innovation, which over-impatient managers may experience as resistance.

From Knowledge to Strategic Advantage

2009-12-15T23:19:00.000Z

@jhagel asks Are Your Sources of Strategic Advantage Eroding? and points out how strategic advantage can be eroded if knowledge stocks are allowed to depreciate. Thus maintaining strategic advantage depends on intelligent processing of rich and diverse knowledge flows.

1 The first requirement is access to good knowledge flows. Hagel describes this as a positional advantage, but I think it is more accurate to describe this as a relational advantage - it is about our strategic relationships with sources of knowledge.

2. The second requirement is an ability to make sense of these knowledge flows. On the one hand, this means filtering and ranking, to avoid getting overwhelmed or spreading resources too thinly; but on the other hand, it is important to remain alert to weak signals that might suggest a change in direction.

3. Generating and leveraging knowledge (especially tacit knowledge) depends on trust-based relationships with knowledge-flow participants, both inside our own organizations and across our ecosystems. We need to engage (enable + encourage + empower) people into a learning process that is focused on "challenging performance issues".

4. Communicating and disseminating new capability-based knowledge through the organization (and out into the ecosystem) becomes the critical metacapability.

Hagel claims that "This new form of strategic advantage benefits from network effects and increasing returns." Now it may well be true that, under favourable circumstances, the more these knowledge flows and metacapabilities are exercised the more robust they become. However, this is not a classic network effect, and it is by no means certain that the positive feedback loops will outweigh the negative feedback loops. One limiting factor is organizational torque, defined by @liman as "when an organization fosters grass-roots collaboration externally, but has a resistant internal structure/philosophy". In other words, some modes of organizational change twist the organization out of the control of its legacy leadership.

Venturesome Consumption

2009-10-28T11:15:00.000Z

Chris Potts pointed me to the work of Amar Bhidé, which raises some interesting and important questions for innovation and organization change in general, and for EA in particular.

Venturesome Consumption, Innovation and Globalization (pdf)
Paper for a Joint Conference of CESifo and the Center on Capitalism and Society
“Perspectives on the Performance of the Continent’s Economies”
Venice, 21 - 22 July 2006
by Amar Bhidé

1. Absorptive capacity. I think this concept is important both for inter-enterprise innovation (adoption of new business models, practices and technologies by the enterprise as a whole) and intra-enterprise innovation (diffusion of new systems and processes across the organization). Within Lenscraft, this is covered by the Adoption Engineering lens.

2. Productivity and competitive advantage. There is an important question about how innovation generates value, and for whom. If all players in a competitive industry adopt (are forced to adopt) the same innovation, then none of them may gain any net value, but all of them may avoid losing value. Arguably the customers are the beneficiaries, but this is not a straightforward calculation. For example, customers benefit more than banks from the ubiquity of ATMs, although this is hard to quantify, and with other technologies it may be difficult to demonstrate any customer benefit at all. On a Marxian argument, although technology can produce a short-term improvement in profit in an industry, the longer-term effect on profit is downwards, in which case it would be puzzling why monopolies would ever bother. (Indeed, in some utilities, the pressure for technological innovation seems to come largely from the regulators.) The Marxian argument about the falling rate of profit isn't universally applicable, but it behoves champions of innovation within organizations to understand where it does and doesn't apply.

3. ROI. The first two points are not addressed in the bog-standard business case, and the ROI is often grossly over-estimated, based on extremely naive assumptions. A proper joined-up systems analysis would expose the weaknesses here. This relates to what Bhidé calls Knightian uncertainty.

4. Resourceful problem solving. The users have an active role in producing what I have called the "technology-in-use". This also links to the work of Erik von Hippel.
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~rxv/orgmgt/ob8.pdf

5. Barriers to innovation and diffusion. Bhidé is interested in national borders; some of us may be more interested in organizational boundaries (both external and internal). But the word "barriers" is an inadequate metaphor - in reality there is a landscape with uphill and downhill contours, making some paths easier and quicker than others, but few paths are completely impassable.

6. One of the consequences of this analysis is that we should be modelling the internal and external flows of knowledge and ideas, as a critical element of a business model. To some extent this is already done in industries like pharma, but these flows largely focus on product development knowledge and don't provide a more general picture.

7. Overall, an important plea for the demand side of innovation to be taken as seriously as the supply side. I completely agree with this.

A Better Instrument?

2009-10-24T11:49:00.001+01:00

A poor workman blames his tools. Sometimes an amateur musician imagines that he would produce a better sound with a more expensive instrument. Sometimes an amateur photographer imagines that she would produce better pictures with a more expensive camera.

The trouble is that most violinists would be unable to make much difference in sound between a cheap violin and a Stradivarius. The finest violin is not worth much in the hands of an average violinist, or (for that matter) in a room with poor acoustics.

A violin student needs a reasonably good violin, but cannot take advantage of a fantastically good violin. My mother, who is a violin teacher, often sees students (or their parents) wasting their money on expensive instruments. Far better to concentrate on practice, improving technique rather than seeking excuses.

Conversely, an excellent musician can often make a great sound from an average instrument. When I was younger, I had a cello that I played very badly. One day, a friend who was a top student at the Royal Academy of Music played someone on my cello. It sounded fantastic. For a few days later, I thought I could still hear her sound resonating in the instrument when I tried to play.

It is certainly the case that some instruments are better than others, but the relationship between the instrument and the sound produced depends on a lot of other factors - the musician, the music played, the acoustics.

***

What are the lessons of this for any kind of systems innovation? If we think of a system innovation as an instrument (in other words, a means to an end), then it is clear that the outcome is not solely dependent on the technical quality of the instrument, but depends mostly on how the instrument is used by an individual or organization. A fool with a tool is still a fool. Calculating the "business case" for acquiring a better instrument depends on predicting how effectively and expertly the instrument is going to be used. See my paper Reasoning about systems and their properties.

Sometimes the adoption of a new instrument by an organization involves expert consultants, who are the first users of the instrument within the organization. This may produce short-term results, and their use may "resonate" for a while, but this effect may not endure, unless the organization practices conscientiously.

Do you have any examples of this? Please contribute comments.

Understanding Technology

2009-08-28T12:47:00.000+01:00

Many people talk about "technology" as if this word needed no definition or explanation. They imagine there is a clear boundary between "technology" and other stuff, and they perhaps also imagine that all technology-literate people have a common view as to where this boundary sits.

For example, I have recently been following a debate between Andrew McAfee (originator of the term "Enterprise 2.0") and several other bloggers, including Tom Graves and Oscar Berg. They complain that McAfee's definition of the term focuses on the software devices rather than on the emerging working practices (possibly supported by these software devices).

Both McAfee and his critics appear to use the word "technology" to refer to the software devices independently of their use. McAfee refers to something he wrote a couple of years back entitled It’s Not Not About the Technology, in which he criticizes two different versions of the statement "It's not about the technology". He argues that it is dangerous to ignore the details of a given piece of technology, and I presume he is referring to the software device. Berg complains that McAfee's definition is technology-centric, and McAfee's response is that his definition refers to people AND technology, from which I infer that he accepts a notion of "technology" that doesn't include people-using-technology.

This is an extremely common view of technology, but it is also highly problematic, as social critics of technology have long argued. Lewis Mumford preferred to talk about Technics, and Albert Borgmann has produced an extremely well-argued analysis of what he calls the Device Paradigm.

In my own work on technology adoption, I have always placed equal emphasis on assimilation (tuning the devices to fit the organization) and accommodation (tuning the organization to fit the devices). (The concepts of assimilation and accommodation come from Piaget via Leonard-Barton.) I don't find it helpful to think of software existing in some purely abstract shrink-wrapped world independently of being used, and I draw a more nuanced notion of technology and its development from sociologists such as Latour and Bijker.

In his latest post A comment to McAfee's "A Defining Moment", Oscar cites some statistics on social media and asks "How much would you attribute to technology for this development, and how much to human attitudes and behavior?"

But this question only makes sense on the assumption that we can cleanly separate "technology" from "human attitudes and behaviour", and I challenge this assumption. Graham Hill quotes an extreme example of how technology is inextricably intertwined with human attitudes and behaviour. "The mobile phone is the most personal of devices. It's like entering the customers bedroom. So brands need to be very sexy!" In other words, the mobile phone is not just a "piece of technology", it is a socially constructed artefact, what Latour calls a "black box".

By the way, I don't agree with everything written by Bijker, Borgmann, Latour and Mumford, and I don't expect you to either. But I wish more people had read them, and I wish more people were prepared to think a bit more deeply about the nature of technology.

Here's another example. In New Swimming World Records: Technology or Training?, Carlos Gershenson classified fancy swimsuits as "technology" but better techniques and understanding of fluid dynamics as "training", points out that different policies (regulations) apply to the two categories, and (rightly) asks where to draw the boundary?

Redesigning the Banana

2009-07-19T09:43:00.000+01:00

(#innovation for @chrislawer @GrahamHill )

Dave McCoy asks: Who is the process owner of opening a banana? Not humans, obviously. Dave points out that monkeys have a more efficient method.

But here's my answer. The process owner for banana-opening is obviously the banana tree. The process goal is to trick the primate into supporting the propagation objectives of the tree. That’s why the banana skin is designed just so.

Humans and monkeys are both primates. In this particular case, the process owner (e.g. banana tree) probably doesn’t need to differentiate between different species of process user. The banana tree has spent a lot longer evolving the banana skin than various primates have spent working out how to open it, or how to use it for comic effect.

Who is really the process owner? Perhaps this is the kind of question that doesn't have a single correct answer. We can almost always put any given system or process into an alternative frame, thus making sense of things in multiple ways.

So that provides a context for Chris's question How to innovate the banana , which quotes a story from the Boston Globe Yes we have one banana (March 7 2007). Innovation for whom? Design for whom?

Graham thinks the answer is straightforward:

"Innovation is ultimately only for one group of people - Customers. You should have target customers for innovation in mind. They may be new customers. Otherwise you are just guessing. Current, potential, even former customers. Innovation always has some customers in mind. By definition."

But when I ask "innovation for whom", it's partly because I don't know who exactly the customers are. I also don't think that the customers for an innovation to a service are necessarily the same as the customers for the service itself. Process or production innovations may be invisible to the customer - they are often focused on improving the outcome for the process owner.

Checkland's CATWOE lens makes a clear distinction between actor, customer and owner. From the perspective of the fruit tree, the primate that eats the fruit is both a customer (receiving a gift from the tree) and also an actor within the system (dumping the seeds together with a small deposit of fertilizer in a suitable location).

However, when humans try to innovate, they usually reframe the system so that human interests and values are uppermost. The interests of the fruit (to produce more fruit trees) are subordinated to the interests of the supermarkets (to produce commodities with long shelf-life). From a human supply chain perspective, apples are better than pears because they stay fresh longer. See my previous post Comparing Apples and Pears.

Thinking about the stakeholders for the banana redesign project puts me in mind of a well-known example of syntactic ambiguity (attributed to Groucho Marx): "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana." Framing a system is a bit like parsing a sentence - often there is more than one meaningful answer.

One of the things that interests me most about this kind of systems thinking debate is how people think they know which perspective to choose.

Innovation Cliche and Self-Help

2009-05-28T08:27:00.001+01:00

@jamestodhunter asks if anyone else sees the irony in the notion that the same old tired quotes keep getting trotted out in tweets on innovation?

It's not just on Twitter. Blogs and articles and books and workshops on innovation often recycle the same old ideas, the same old advice. And it's not just innovation-speak that is often dull. Creativity-speak can also be tediously predictable. People who are genuinely creative and innovative aren't necessarily very good at explaining how it's done, and may prefer to get on with being creative and innovative rather than talking about it.

In any bookshop, you can usually find several books on innovation and creativity in the "business" shelves, just as you can find several books on parenting skills and sexual technique in the "psychology" section. My own belief is that it's probably okay to read one or two of these, because they might contain some useful information as well as common sense; but if you read too many, there's a problem, because they're all basically saying the same thing. (Or so I imagine.) If you aren't able or willing to find the answer from the first book, then you are unlikely to get the answer from the tenth either.

If you want to get better at something, don't read books about it, go and practise it. If you must read books, choose books about something completely different: novels or fairy stories or ancient myth, biographies of explorers and scientists and mystics, and be inspired.

Fairy Tale Logic

2009-05-14T10:14:00.000+01:00

Peter Evans-Greenwood makes some interesting points in response to my post on Three Wishes, but I don't agree with his interpretation of fairy tale logic as incomplete and inconsistent. As I see it, fairy tales follow a rigorous logic that produces an inevitable outcome. (From Freud to Lacan and Matte Blanco, psychoanalysts have explored the strange but inevitable logic of dreams and the unconscious.)

It is this logic that makes fairy tales so powerful, not merely as entertainment but as rich sources of metaphor. See Magic Fairy Tales as Source for Interface Metaphors

Magic follows strict rules. J.K. Rowling put a great deal of effort into creating an internally consistent magical world for Harry Potter and his friends to inhabit; although some minor logical anomalies do appear, these are trivial compared to the main elements of magic upon which the plot relies. And within the context of the Rapunzel story, climbing hair is consistent and makes perfect sense.

Now here's the relevance of this for consultants working with organizations. When we look at families or organizations from the outside we may say "that behaviour doesn't make sense", but for the people inside the family or organization the behaviour seems perfectly logical or inevitable or both.

In order to intervene usefully into such situations, the therapist or consultant needs to be in touch both with the external logic (this doesn't make sense) and with the internal logic (this is inevitable, this is how we do things).

(I read somewhere that in post-war Britain, American management consultants had some advantage over British management consultants. At that time, one of the biggest perceived issues was something called "Industrial Relations" - in other words, conflict and distrust between management and labour. Whereas British consultants were constrained by their perceived background, American consultants were outside the British class system, could pretend to know nothing about the role of the trade union in British politics, and could ask dumb but necessary questions.)

Dysfunctional organizations may sometimes be logically incomplete or inconsistent. But more often they are obsessively complete and consistent. (J.K. Rowling paints a disturbingly plausible satire of government in the Ministry of Magic - see Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy). We can learn a lot from the structure of magic.

Three Wishes

2009-05-13T10:12:00.000+01:00

RT @j4ngis "I wish I had more wishes" Not seen this in any of the classic fairy tales. Yet so obvious?

Another excellent and stimulating Tweet from Anders Jangbrand. When my sons were too small to appreciate the inflexible logic of fairy tales, they used to ask similar questions. Can't we have more wishes? Can't we have some kind of blanket security wish (nothing-bad-ever-happens)? In other words, can we trick the good fairy into granting more than the story intends? Can intelligence divert the inevitability of the story?

From the perspective of creativity and innovation, questions like these count as thinking "outside the box". The fairy tale describes a closed world (box) in which only certain kinds of wishes are valid: like desires, they need to be concrete and specific. In the context of a fairy story, general-purpose or open-ended wishes would be too vague and abstract, would lack the necessary psychological force and might suggest moral weakness as well (avarice or greed). In fairy stories, character always triumphs over intelligence, and the selfishly or cleverly deployed wish typically rebounds in unexpected ways.

Technology promises a similar escape from the limitations of the physical world. Mary Catherine Bateson, in her brilliant essay The Revenge of the Good Fairy (originally published in the Whole Earth Review), shows how simplistic technological projects are doomed to find failure, and puts in a plea for ambivalence.

"Ambivalence is the mirrorimage within the person of certain characteristics of hierarchically organized systems, where the individual is a subsystem in some larger system. When the individual wishes too efficiently, he may disrupt the larger system-- and his entire wish-mechanism may have evolved to push against environmental constraints, but not to succeed. When the individual who has matured under these circumstances finds himself suddenly able to make wishes come true, he may subvert that possibility. Phrasing it rather differently, we could say that ambivalence is not only a neurotic residue of childhood but a form of wisdom, a memory of what it is to be a part of a larger whole. Kierkegaard once said, "purity is to will one thing,' but it seems possible that a divided will is the beginning of wisdom."

The moral of the fairy story is be careful what you wish for, and do not try to be too clever. Innovation may entail thinking outside the box - but it also entails deep appreciation and respect for the logic of the box.

The Universe at the End of the Restaurant

2009-04-20T13:52:00.000+01:00

When we eat in restaurants, there is often a clear difference between the quality of the food and the quality of the service. The quality of the food may be dependent on the processes in the kitchen, as well as the quality and freshness of the raw materials, but our enjoyment of good food can be spoiled by poor service, which usually means a poorly designed process.

I found an Australian report about innovation in the restaurant industry (Submission to the Cutler Review by Restaurant & Catering Australia, pdf, April 2008), from which I picked out the following points.

The majority of the innovation is product innovation and therefore does not lead to significant productivity improvements.
The genesis of a new process should still be seen by a business as a competitive advantage. The development of these processes, however, requires a critical mass of thought that is often not evident in a small business.
The critical mass of funds required to change a process often means that innovation only occurs in small businesses when they change hands.

Obviously one form of innovation is to change the menu or introduce new items - in other words product innovation. For example, Nigel Green describes how his local pub was Thinking Adaptive and Adoptive over Fish & Chips - applying Cynefin to make sense of weak signals from regular customers.

A poorly designed process doesn't only reduce customer satisfaction. If it increases the length of time customers wait at tables for service, then it reduces the number of customers that can be accommodated in a session. Process innovation may therefore have a bigger impact on the business viability of a restaurant than product innovation.

Furthermore, the kind of bloggers I read generally have more to say about process management than cooking. So I have got a few contrasting examples here.

In my earlier post Agility and Variation, I described the frustration of David J Anderson's Sushi Lunch. Anderson was taken to a restaurant in Japan where the food was excellent but the process was broken. Anderson being a follower of Goldratt's Theory of Constraints, he diagnosed the problem in terms of a poor division of responsibility, although I took the opportunity to point out that the case also provided a counter-example to his usual line on eliminating variation.

Now for two more successful process examples. David Wertheimer describes Process innovation at Moe's (a Mexican restaurant) while in Process Improvement and the Chaat Cafe, Chris Bird talks about the stages of innovation in his favourite Indian restaurant, and throws in a brief mention of VPEC-T.

For those who like abstraction, all these restaurants have the same basic requirements. But what is interesting about these cases is that they are all different - a wide variety of problems and issues. I am also struck by the variety of problem-solving and other methods that are suggested - Cynefin, Theory of Constraints, VPEC-T.

Open for Business Innovation?

2009-04-19T10:46:00.000+01:00

My neighbour and good friend runs a successful bakery around the corner, and has opened a couple more bakeries a few miles away. I was trying to give him some ideas for business improvement.

My best idea was to install a BakerTweet system, which posts messages to Twitter whenever warm bread comes out of the oven. I think this is a brilliant idea, and I already wrote about it in my other blog (IT Innovation at Small Bakery).

But my friend is sceptical. How can I convince him to try?

Cherish the thing, beware the word

2009-03-05T19:14:00.000Z

"The more a document contains the term 'innovation', the less likely I am to take it seriously", tweeted Mike Beasley (via A Jangbrand).

Many words are only used when the ideas they represent are absent. When there is genuine trust or empowerment or creativity, you don't find people talking much about Trust and Empowerment and Creativity.

So we may sometimes infer the absence of the thing (real innovation) from the overuse of the word (the term "Innovation").

What other concepts does this apply to? Please add a comment below or tweet me.

Ungrounded Technology

2008-10-31T17:19:00.000Z

In my post on Shifting Paradigms and Disruptive Technology, I asked

Why on earth would technologists wish to claim that their favourite innovation is a "disruptive technology", let alone a "paradigm shift"?

I now have a follow-up question. Why on earth would technologists wish to claim that their favourite innovation is "completely new"?

In his Note to Vendors on the Church-Turing Thesis, Steve Jones points out that this claim is generally false.

"No it isn't, it's an evolution of something, it might be a clever idea but it's not going to be a completely and utterly new solution that no-one in the whole world has ever done anything like it before."

Quite so. For my part, when I hear sales people making these claims, I just hope they don't know what they are talking about. If the innovation really were completely new, now that would be scary.

Do you want to fly in a plane whose engine design departs from all old-fashioned ideas about engine design, whose wings are constructed from a completely new and untested material, and whose software architecture doesn't use any recognized patterns? No, I thought not.

If I am presenting a technological innovation to a management audience, for every manager who is excited about the novelty of the innovation, there are at least three who are cautious. How do you know it's going to work? How many organizations are already using this? What is the largest and most complex implementation to date? Do you have any metrics?

Why would you trust an innovation if you couldn't trace the engineering history behind it?

Shifting Paradigms and Disruptive Technology

2008-09-04T17:36:00.000+01:00

Why on earth would technologists wish to claim that their favourite innovation is a "disruptive technology", let alone a "paradigm shift"?

Disruptive technologies are like awkward adolescents - rude, unreliable, difficult. As Tim O'Reilly pointed out several years ago

"Disruptive technologies are often not "better" when they start out -- in fact, they are often worse. Case in point: the PC. It wasn't better than the mainframe or minicomputer. It was a toy. Similarly, the WWW was far less capable than proprietary CD-ROM hypertext systems, and far less capable than desktop apps. And developers of both derided it as slow, ungainly, and ineffective. This is a typical response to disruptive technologies." [Lunchtime Keynote at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, May 8, 2002]

More examples from the IT world: relational databases, object orientation, anything by Christopher Alexander.

Paradigm shifts are even worse. In science, the new paradigm is supposed to be incommensurable with the old one. As Paul Feyerabend pointed out, even the basic concepts have to be reinterpreted to fit the new paradigm. So if something is easy to understand and quick to adopt, then it probably isn't a paradigm shift. [For a quick introduction, see Steven Shaviro on Against Method.] Bruno Latour's sociological take on science and technology is probably more relevant than Kuhn/Popper/Feyerabend/Lakatos these days, but even his account doesn't exactly encourage us to overuse these terms.

I guess we aren't supposed to take these terms literally. Randall C. Willis, the Executive Editor of Drug Discovery News, reckons the presence of these two terms is a dead giveaway for unfounded hype. His article Hopped up on Hype (October 2005) presently ranks top in an internet search for "paradigm shift disruptive technology".

Presently coming second, somewhat to my surprise, is the piece that made me put aside my other work to write something here - a blogpost called Event Servers, A Disruptive Technology by one Perren Walker of Oracle, extolling the virtues of Event Servers in general and Oracle's Event Server in particular. I arrived at this piece via Opher Etzion of IBM, who responded with a piece called On Event Processing as a paradigm shift.

Opher make the paradigm shift sounds like an exercise in navigating through some topological space - avoiding barriers and finding new avenues. I certainly agree that this is a good source of metaphors for change management, including technology change management.

But why call it a paradigm shift? What's so cool about paradigm shifts, and why are vendors boasting of the disruptive qualities of their products?

Tractor Pulling

2008-04-17T18:35:00.000+01:00

Phyl Speser blogs some reflections on tractor pulling as an example of disruptive technology change. But how much does tractor pulling really tell us about technology change in other contexts?

In a sporting context, technology change is subject to enormous constraints. Most of the technologies that would really disrupt sports (such as remote controlled baseball bats and performance enhancing drugs) are regarded as cheating and therefore disallowed. So what's left? Are we to regard the switch from wooden tennis rackets and skis and racing boats to carbon fibre as disruptive? Or the introduction of electronic line judges and video replays? Or air travel, which allows Russian tennis hopefuls to train in Florida?

In some sports, technical innovations to the equipment have allowed improvements in performance. But modern sports are so highly regulated that the opposite is also possible. For example, the javelin was redesigned (respecified) in 1984 to reduce the distances thrown [source: Wikipedia].

The technology that has disrupted the sporting world the most is surely television, having hugely increased the earning potential of top sportsmen and introduced a significant secondary economy of coaches and commentators and so on. Many sports have been forced to abandon the glorification of "amateur" status.

To understand the role of technology in any system, it matters how you frame the system. There are lots of aspects of technology change that we cannot understand without including economic factors within the system - stuff like "the means of production" and "the relations of production".

The curious thing about tractor pulling as a sport is that it takes the tractor away from its normal economic function. Of course that's true of many other sports as well. The original function of the javelin was catching and killing food. The original function of the marathon was long-distance communication; the technology innovation that separates the modern runner from the ancient Greek messenger Pheidippides is that we no longer need to run 42 kilometres to carry news, we run to raise money for our pet charity. Or something.

Invented Here?

2008-03-20T23:15:00.000Z

A news story describes a technological problem

Racing to Gain Edge On Multicore Chips (WSJ March 17 2008)

Two major technology companies and two American universities are researching the problem

Intel Press Announcement (March 18 2008)
Microsoft Press Announcement (March 18 2008)
Savas Parastatidis blog

But it seems the problem has already been solved, according to a couple of bloggers.

This is precisely the problem that Threading Building Blocks is designed to address (Kevin Farnham)
The Aleri CEP engine is just such a programming tool (Aleri CEP Blog)

Research and development is so fragmented these days, it is certainly possible that a solution already exists in some obscure corner. And large expensive research projects may not be good at producing small and simple solutions. So it is possible that Intel and Microsoft are wasting their research dollars.

But on the other hand, there are too many people - especially in software engineering - who have no real understanding of size. Small and simple solutions don't always scale. So it is just possible that Intel and Microsoft do know what they are doing after all.

Technological Perfecta 2

2008-01-21T22:41:00.000Z

Following my post on Technological Perfecta on my SOA blog, Tim Bass and Opher Etzion have continued the discussion on Orthogonal Blogging at the SOA Horse Races. Tim writes:

"End users rarely build “SOAs” “EDAs” or CEPs”. End users have IT budgets to solve business problems with the most cost effective technology they can find; and they do not care (if they have a clue) what cute three letter acronyms have been created by analysts to describe momentum in the software market."

Tim's argument here is not about SOA or any other TLA (three letter acronym), but about software innovation in general.

But is anybody asking end-users to build SOAs? To my mind, it is the vendors that are building SOA; they are hoping that their customers will use SOA and related technologies to solve business problems.

But why would anyone want to use new technologies, if the old technologies were adequate? Underlying Tim's post are some fairly fundamental challenges about software innovation.

1. Why should anyone innovate? In particular, why should any individual or organization adopt new software technologies or otherwise change the way they use software to solve business problems?

2. Who should innovate? Should the adoption of new software technologies be visible to developers and end-users, or should it managed by a specialist team of technical architects (either in the organization or in some external supplier) who make sure that everything is transparently efficient and effective for everyone else.

3. When should people innovate? Does it make sense to get in early, or should people emulate the Japanese businessman quoted by Tim: "What we care about are mature technologies with solid reference clients and proven implementations."

4. How should people innovate? Small incremental steps, one technology at a time? Or sweeping changes, adopting an entirely new development paradigm in a single leap? How many simultaneous innovations can an organization cope with, and can (should) this capacity for change be increased?

5. And finally, given that there are so many new technologies to choose from: Which innovations, in which combinations?

To my mind, a strategy for software innovation is not about choosing specific software products, or even classes of software product - it is about managing these five critical questions over time. Specific TLAs will come and go, and software industry analysts will try to create meaningful maps of a complicated and constantly shifting TLA landscape, but there will always be a need for innovation. Won't there?

Guerilla

2008-01-21T11:12:00.000Z

Nicholas Negroponte obviously thought he could get some cheap publicity for his One Laptop Per Child project by comparing it with terrorism. [BBC News, original video], triggering derision from Fake Steve Jobs and Adam Shostack.

NN: "... up to now we have been more like a terrorist group, threatening to do something and making big claims ..."

FSJ: "Seriously, who does this guy's PR? ... I sort of imagine them all sitting there cringing every time he starts to speak."

Successful technology projects (and for that matter successful terrorist campaigns) often adopt so-called guerrilla tactics, based on low-cost organization and surprise attack. Furthermore, technology champions often see themselves as some kind of revolutionary vanguard or avant-guard - several paces in front of the early adopters. But to confuse these metaphors with terrorism is either carelessly or hopelessly muddled.

Change of Address

2008-01-20T11:50:00.000Z

I am moving this blog to Blogspot. If it works properly, all existing posts should be copied across. Archive copies will remain here on my personal website, but will not be updated.

The new location of the blog will be technologychangemanagement.blogspot.com.

If you are subscribed to this blog, please make sure that you are using the feedburner feed, as this will be redirected automatically. feeds.feedburner.com/InnovationMatters

Depending on your feed settings, you may receive repeated notification of updated posts when the blog moves. Please bear with me during this move. Normal service will be resumed etc etc.

Karlheinz Stockhausen

2007-12-12T18:05:00.000Z

Stockhausen died last week. I lent my copy of Stimmung to my son's teacher, who played it to the class today.

In 1995, BBC Radio 3 facilitated an exchange between Stockhausen and several young composers. Stockhausen listened to some of music from each composer, and provided some comments and suggestions. In particular, he thought there was too much repetition.

One of the composers, Daniel Pemberton, responded thus: "I know what he means about loops though; that’s because I haven’t got much equipment."

Oh dear, poor Danny. As I pointed out in my earlier post Art and the Enterprise, Stockhausen and his contemporaries didn't exactly have much equipment either. Sometimes innovators have to build their own tools, or forage their own materials, before they can create what they want to create. And sometimes that turns out to be an essential part of the creative process.

Stockhausen is a major figure in twentieth century culture - reviled by those who hate the avant guard on principle, but admired by some of the most popular figures in twentieth century pop music - from Miles Davis to Herbie Hancock, from the Beatles to Pink Floyd, and from Frank Zappa to Sonic Youth.

Ninety-nine percent perspiration.

Sources: Advice to Clever Children (The Wire, November 1995)
Wikipedia: Karlheinz Stockhausen

Classifying Innovation

2007-10-10T10:38:00.000+01:00

Masood Mortazavi (Sun Microsystems) quotes a distinction from Thomas Hughes between radical and conservative inventions.

"The system-originating inventions can be labeled radical, the system-improving ones conservative." Thomas P. Hughes (2004), American Genesis: A Century of Inventions and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970

Masood claims Java (originally developed by Sun Microsystems) as a radical invention. But what exactly is the system that Java has created? (Obviously we're not just talking here about software systems written in Java - otherwise every minor programming language would count as a radical invention.) Does it mean something like "ecosystem"? And does one's view of this system depend on one's position - inside the Java world or outside?

Perhaps it's noteworthy that I can talk about a Java "world" at all. Perhaps this means that the Java world itself is "The System" for the purposes of Hughes' definition.

But I think the existence of "Systems" or "Worlds" in this sense is pretty subjective. I'd prefer to interpret Hughes' distinction as a spectrum (some inventions are more/less radical than others) rather than a rigid classification.

But there is another more fundamental problem with Hughes' classification, which is that it appears to confuse invention with innovation. There is often a huge gap (mental as well as temporal) between the invention of a device and the emergence of an innovation. The world of recorded music may be traced back to the invention of the gramophone; the world of telecommunications may be traced back to the invention of the telegraph or telephone; but the emergence of these worlds cannot be attributed solely to the invention of the device. Some of the inventions that powered the industrial revolution (including the steam engine, invented by Hero of Alexandria) were known to the ancients, who regarded them as toys and failed to appreciate their radical potential. The iPod doesn't get a Nobel Prize, despite the protestations of Fake Steve Jobs.

As for Java, I'd prefer to regard it as an innovative synthesis of earlier inventions. Object-oriented languages were invented in the 1960s (I learned Simula at college in the 1970s), but the OO world really only emerged in the late 1980s.

So I think the radical/conservative distinction applies better to innovations than to inventions.

There is of course a further problem - the later innovation distorts our perceptions of the earlier invention. It is now practically impossible to view the ancient steam engine without associating it with what it became nearly two thousand years later. Key inventions are disputed (telephone, television, calculus), and the invention itself becomes a social construction.

Which means the classification of inventions and/or innovations becomes an act of interpretation (hermeneutics). Does labelling something as "radical" tell us anything useful, or is it like ranking Reubens above Ingres?

Clockspeed and Competition

2007-10-02T13:16:00.000+01:00

Innovation is supposed to grant competitive advantage, among other things. So we might expect the rate of innovation in a given sector to be linked to the degree of competition. (Setting aside for a moment the difficulties in measuring either of these objectively.)

In my very first post on this blog, Technology and Competition, I referred to the Marxian notion that technology is linked to a falling rate of profit, in which case it would make sense for monopolies to resist new technology. I found some support for this idea in a commentary about the Microsoft anti-trust case from the Economist magazine.

Even the advocates of accelerating technological change acknowledge the relevance of competitive forces. In his post Is the Pace of Business Really Increasing? Dave Bayless makes this point when discussing Charles Fine's notion of Clockspeed.

"The barriers to entry to the commercial aircraft and computer operating systems businesses, for example, slow industry clockspeed dramatically."

There are two contrary ways of viewing this. One is to describe technological change as primarily a technological phenomenon, which can then be influenced by secondary socioeconomic factors (e.g. increased by competition and decreased by monopoly). The other is to describe technological change as a social construction, where socioeconomic forces can make technologically trivial changes seem economically important.

Red Queen Effect 2

2007-10-02T11:33:00.000+01:00

Dave Bayless has responded to Critiques of the Red Queen Model, including my comments on this blog (Red Queen Effect, see also Rates of Evolution).

Dave chooses to define innovation as "launching new products". Both John Hagel and I believe that there are other kinds of innovation that are important. But I have a more fundamental concern with Dave's definition - if I don't know exactly what counts as a "new product", then I don't know how to count them. If this year's model has a slightly faster chip than last year's model, or a brushed aluminium case, does that count as a "new product"? Let's say the iPod is a new product, but is the iPhone really a new product, or just a fancy redesign of an old product?

Lots of people in product development have a vested interest in labelling everything as "new improved". Pharma companies spend a small fortune looking for variations on existing drugs, so they can get patent protection for the "new" formula. But if you take these descriptions at face value, you get a fundamentally distorted view of the underlying technology change.

This is why I think we need a rigorous model of technology change, which handles some of the complications I raise in my previous blog entries.

Rates of Evolution

2007-09-03T15:00:00.000+01:00

Post reformatted to remove unwanted white space

A fascinating paper by Philip D. Gingerich, shows how the observed rate of evolutionary change (measured in darwins), varies hugely according to the measurement context. (See table at foot of this post). In other words, the observed rate of biological evolution appears to be proportional to the proximity of scientists. Does a similar phenomenon apply to technological evolution?

(Note: I am not assuming that technological evolution is the same as biological evolution - merely that looking at one domain may prompt some interesting and important questions for the other domain.)

I have always been wary of the common belief that technological change is accelerating. I think this belief derives from a combination of proximity, selectivity and distorted perception. I think we can sometimes be disproportionately impressed by the glamour of recent technology, and misled by the commercially-driven measures of intellectual property (such as volumes of patent activity and product releases).

But consider these questions:

Did the lightbulb or bicycle change more
between the years 1880-1900?
or between the years 1980-2000?
Did the computer change more
from 1950 to 1970?
from 1980 to 2000?

It is certainly true that there have been huge numbers of small modifications to devices such as lightbulbs, bicycles and computers since 1980. There has also been a proliferation of variations and mutations. But will any of this innovation be remembered in fifty years time? From a historical perspective, this kind of detailed technological refinement (or even hyperactivity) may seem rather less significant than the initial burst of technical creativity when the device was taking shape in the first place.

Notes

Context	Timescale of Observations	Observed Rate of Change
Laboratory	1.5 - 10 years	60,000 darwins
Colonization studies	70 - 300 years	400 darwins
Post-pleistocene mammels	1,000 - 10,000 years	4 darwins
Fossil record	Millions of years	0.1 darwins

Philip D. Gingerich, Rates of Evolution: Effects of Time and Temporal Scaling. Science 14 October 1983: Vol. 222. no. 4620, pp. 159 - 161