Leaders Aren't Hoop-Jumpers

The American Scholar has published a speech that William Deresiewicz gave last year at West Point. Entitled "Solitude and Leadership", it has some observations about leadership that are similar to those made by the Hopper brothers in "The Puritan Gift."

I especially liked the following:

• An observation about kids at Yale...seems like this is the implicit goal of all large Western organizations these days...the creation of "excellent sheep."
  
  So what I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve. Any test you gave them, they could pass with flying colors. They were, as one of them put it herself, “excellent sheep.”
• A comparison of Marlow's description of the Central Station manager in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" with the stereotypical hoop-jumping bureaucrat:
  About the 10th time I read that passage, I realized it was a perfect description of the kind of person who tends to prosper in the bureaucratic environment. ..... it was a perfect description of the head of the bureaucracy that I was part of, the chairman of my academic department—who had that exact same smile, like a shark, and that exact same ability to make you uneasy, like you were doing something wrong, only she wasn’t ever going to tell you what. Like the manager ...... the head of my department had no genius for organizing or initiative or even order, no particular learning or intelligence, no distinguishing characteristics at all. Just the ability to keep the routine going ...
• On leadership:
  ...... for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of exper­tise. What we don’t have are leaders. What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.
• On multitasking:
  Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.

I'm a little uneasy about some of the fuzziness in the author's description of solitude...nothing in, nothing out. But, I completely agree that we need time for things to soak in and we need to periodically take some serious time out to consider ideas that have been percolating.

Bill Gates' annual retreat is a bit too structured for me, but anyone who's serious about ideas has to occasionally spend a significant amount of time slowly chewing on core aspects of fundamentals (e.g., assumptions, constraints, coupling, connections, etc) of what matters most.

Nick Carr's upcoming book "The Shallows" looks to be an interesting look at how IT is "making us dumber."

Web OS Speculations

A couple of "must read" takes on the companies, architectures, and business models that will dominate the next wave of IT:

• Charlie Stross on "Why Steve Jobs Hates Flash". I thoroughly enjoyed Stross's "Halting State", so I'm always intrigued by his take on IT
• Tim O'Reilly on the "State of the Internet Operating System" (Part 1, Part 2) - O'Reilly's always worth reading, but these two (long) posts are "must read".

I haven't seen stuff this intriguing since the early Web 2.0 days....

"Thinking Traps" Trap

A couple of recent posts on "Thinking Traps" (Part 1, Part 2) are typical examples of discussions of how cognitive limitations can result in poor decision making.

While an awareness of this sort of thing is good, these discussions almost always focus on (a) specific biases, or (b) processes/heuristics that help compensate for or avoid these biases.

Those of us who design IT-intensive capabilities for expert use need something more substantive: models of how experts make decisions in the real world. Which is why I'm a big fan of Gary Klein's writing (e.g., Data-Frame, Sources of Power).

Techno-Apocalypse

Clay Shirky sparked a fair amount of dialogue about the dangers of what he called "Complex Business Models" in a recent post. This is an important topic that is not discussed enough, so I was happy to see him take a shot at it.

My snap reaction was that he was describing a dynamic that is (a) becoming commonplace, and (b) accelerating. This dynamic consists of the following:

• A concept/technology emerges.
• An almost "one-of-a-kind" capability is built (e.g., IBM's Stretch computer). This capability is tightly coupled internally, and certain aspects of it are not well understood.
• If the capability becomes more available (e.g., cheaper), fault lines in the internally coupling begin to emerge (e.g., plug-compatible peripherals). At this point, variations of the capability are created and adapted to different specific needs/uses (e.g., IBM 360).
• If the capability moves toward a mass market, key coupling fault lines will be institutionalized via de facto or de jure standards, and the capability will be built of interoperable components (e.g., IBM PC).
• Finally, these interoperable components and standards will provide much of the raw material for the creation of a new concept/technology (e.g., what has become the Web), starting the process all over.

The risk Clay discusses is real during the tightly-coupled phase of this dynamic. And, his concerns are becoming increasingly valid as (a) these loops are being traversed faster and faster for IT-intensive capabilities, (b) the interoperable components/standards ecosystem grows at an exponential rate, and (c) the transparency of a capability's structure (which allows critical dependencies to be seen clearly) decreases exponentially, at least during the tightly-coupled phase.

Complicating the Complex

Almost every week I see confusion caused by the lack of a vocabulary that distinguishes between Cynefin's Complicated domain and its Complex domain.

The latest incident was an article entitled "We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint" in the 27 April New York Times. I was walking through the airport that Tuesday morning and was amused to see a familiar diagram above the fold on Page 1.

The article was the latest in a long line of critiques of the use and abuse of PowerPoint, including a dash of McLuhanesque "media is the message" thrown in for good measure. There's not much to add here...though I do find it slightly puzzling that the focus is almost totally on how the tool can/is abused, versus how the tool can/should be used to be effective.

Regardless, the graphic shown is the real story...it's a classic Systems Dynamics concept map that provides a good example of the limitations of trying to create a Complicated map of a Complex context. In defense of those who created it, I suspect that the conversations that went into creating it were valuable. And, as a focal point for an ongoing series of conversations about the social/cultural landscape, it probably has some use.

However, this diagram has inevitably left out key entities and linkages that are (a) rarely active, and (b) extremely important....i.e., it left out linkages that may provide the most leverage in achieving a specific contextually activated goal. If you're familiar with the Cognitive Edge tools and methods, you understand that there's a more effective way to address this kind of need. Unfortunately, most folks still lack the vocabulary to distinguish between the Complicated from the Complex and fail to realize that this "unknown unknown" would significantly increase their ability to effectively characterize a Complex context.

Cultural Perceptions

I ran across an interesting monograph by Christine MacNulty that discusses (among other things) how culture influences perception. A few snap reactions:

• p. 11 - a nice table contrasting how Eastern and Western thinking differs. Dave Snowden often points this out in his talks.
• p. 22 - alludes to a move "away from authoritarian epistemology of medieval religious doctrine"....while this monograph only touches on the emergence of modern science, this seems slightly simplistic. See, for example, Frances Yates' "Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition", Carl Becker's "The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophyers", or Pierre Duhem's "The System of the World."
• p. 26 - places epistemology on a spectrum from authority-based to empirical - seems like a triad with the emotive at a third corner might be a bit more realistic (inspired by Cognitive Edge's patent-pending triadic scale)....I understand the reason for the over-simplification, but it still makes me cringe slightly... :-)

Anyway, it's an intriguing take on cultural analysis. Check it out if you have an interest in this sort of thing.

Business Models, IT, Architecture, Cynefin

Dave Snowden continues to hone his description of business life cycles in a recent presentation and podcast from the Henley KM Forum Conference.

His discussion coheres with thoughts I've be considering recently...how People, Processes, Organizations, and Technology intersect with Cynefin. Here's a few observations:

• It seems that IT-intensive businesses move roughly from Complex to Complicated to Simple in the following sense: an amorphous vision emerges in Complex space where existing knowledge and interoperable resources are "mashed-up" in unexpected ways to explore potential new capabilities. A one-of-a-kind capability is created, which, if it is valuable enough, creates a rough pattern for creating new versions of the capability in Complicated space. If the new capability can find a relatively large market, then a vertically integrated architecture will emerge where the capability begins to segment into interoperable layers. Finally, if the interfaces among the layers become standardized, the overall capability may move into Simple space where each of the layers becomes a submarket with vendors competing to provide components, assembly line integrators allowing end users to "build their own" capability, and the few vendors with critical intellectual property controlling the ecosystem of the new mass market version of the capability.
• An example from the area of computers: IBM's Stretch (Complex, moving into Complicated), IBM System/360 family (Complicated, moving into Simple), and the IBM PC (built from interchangeable parts; quickly became dominated by Intel and Microsoft, and a volatile, competitive, low margin market for almost everything else, including integration of the parts).
• Such a cycle might be seen in physically-intensive industries (e.g., automobiles, guns), but the lack of malleability of a product that is mostly physical (vs. a product that is dominated by information) constrains the evolutionary potential.
• Businesses in Complex space tend toward small high-margin consultancies, innovation groups, and startups. They are exploratory groups that focus on vision, probing, and prototyping.
• Businesses in Complicated space tend toward large medium-margin analytically-oriented organizations that work to bridge the gap between a new capability and the existing ecosystems of People, Processes, Organizations, and Technology. They are exploitative groups that focus on architecting and systems engineering to provide the new capability to users who can afford it. As the vertically integrated capability finds a larger market, it begins to segment horizontally, and the businesses tend to shift toward processes that are less "skunk works" and more "Six Sigma."
• Businesses in Simple space tend to be large low-margin rules-oriented organizations that work to provide a generic capability at the cheapest price possible. They are exploitative groups that focus on predictable process execution. As the capability moves into a mass market, standard interfaces result in submarkets of interoperable components.
• The interoperable components and associated standards eventually float into a Chaotic space where they can be recombined to start a new cycle of Complex-Complicated-Simple.
• The cycle time through C-C-S decreases dramatically wherever a wide range of interoperable components and associated standards appears. At some point, the cycle may be largely Complex-Simple, with little, if any, movement through Complicated.

As I was putting these thoughts together, I reviewed a HBS Working Paper ("The Architecture of Platforms") by Carliss Baldwin and Jason Woodard I had read a year or so ago. My notes in the paper prompted me to look for other presentations by Baldwin. She has a number of them that discuss IT architecture's shift from vertically integrated capabilities to horizontal layers of modules...her "Design Theory and Methods" presentation at L'Ecole de Mines (Oct 2007) has a series of slides on the computer industry from 1979 to 2005 that nicely illustrates the point.

And, Clayton Christensen's latest book, "The Innovator's Prescription", covers similar ground. See this presentation from the Health Information Technology (HIT) Symposium. The voice track helps but is not free (unless your company subscribes to a service which provides this sort of thing).

Finally, it's not just the good guys who understand this dynamic...the agility and adaptability of the bad guys in asymmetric warfare indicates the importance of being able to quickly cycle through Complex to Complicated to Simple...or maybe just cycle quickly between Complex and Simple as communications, command and control, processing, and sensor capabilities are increasingly interoperable, cheap, and pervasive.