“The Story of the Weeping Camel” is the best movie I’ve seen recently. Their description introduces it nicely…
An enchanting tale about a family of herders in Mongolia’s Gobi desert who face a crisis when a mother camel unexpectedly rejects her newborn calf. Uniquely composed of equal parts reality, drama and magic, the movie provides a window into a different way of life and the universal terrain of the heart.
More notes from James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds…
As an example of solving cognition problems, he discusses decision markets like The Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM), which has generally outperformed election polls. Over time, they are also less volatile than polls, changing less dramatically to new information. The IEM is not big or diverse, involving only about 800 people, mostly men from Iowa. It and the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX) work well without much — or any — money at stake. David Pennock found that ‘status and reputation proved incentive enough to encourage serious investment of time and energy in what is, after all, a game.’
Bees in a hive send out scouts who return and do a waggle dance to indicate the quality of nectar they’ve found. The dance attracts a certain number of forager bees according to how intense the dance is. It’s a natural way to distribute the hive’s resources across finding opportunities and pursuing them. The bees scout and explore simultaneously rather than scout, analyze and act.
Overly-homogenous groups, even smart ones, are less able to find good solutions over time than more diverse groups, even if the latter’s overall intelligence is lower. James G. March, an organizational theorist, said that groups that are too much alike find it hard to keep learning, because each member brings less and less new information to the group, and ‘they spend too much time exploiting and not enough time exploring.’ Irving Janis found homogeneous groups are more susceptible to groupthink. Soloman Asch found individuals will deny what they believe is the truth in order to confer with a group (although this is easy to rectify).
Expertise is, in many contexts, overrated. Expertise can be narrowly focused, as Herbert Simon found in his study of chess players. Experts’ judgments are often not consistent with other experts’ judgments , and experts aren’t good at judging the accuracy of their own judgments (exceptions were bridge players and weather forecasters). Wharton professor J. Scott Armstrong’s ‘seer-sucker theory’: ‘No matter how much evidence exists that seers do not exist, suckers will pay for the existence of seers.‘
My colleagues and I realized recently that although designers are (obviously) a primary source of the design thinking at the heart of business design, the proposition that only designers possess the thinking skills required is a little arrogant and even a little separatist. In fact, the most interesting writing on the subject thus far has come from the academic community.
Edward de Bono has argued that our present situation — relying on judgment thinking — began as a matter of ignorance…
Most people, in business and elsewhere, have done very well on judgment thinking. Such people are rarely aware of the need for ‘design thinking’. They find it difficult to conceive that there is a whole other aspect of thinking that is different from judgment thinking. It is not that such people are complacent. It is simply that they do not know that there is another aspect to thinking.
As design thinking enters the business world, I’ll be interested to see the proportion of designers to managers involved.
James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds is the best book I’ve read in a while. In it he forwards a compelling thesis:
If you put together a big enough and diverse enough group of people and ask them to make decisions affecting matters of general interest that group’s decision will, over time, be intellectually superior to the isolated individual no matter how smart or well-informed he is.
This strikes me as a useful tool in the business design toolbox, where constant collaboration with people with a diversity of opinions and from multiple disciplines raises the quality of work.
He addresses three kinds of problems:
And he identifies four conditions that characterize wise crowds:
The rest of the book is dedicated to telling stories that illustrate and explain the above four conditions. More in future posts…
At the Information Architecture Summit there was a strong thread of interest in business and management (my hypothesis for this centers on two trends: the population bell curve places many IAs at an age where they are rapidly moving into management for the first time, and as a discipline IAs have already invented many of the technical skills they need to get that job done). In this environment many were interested in my new-ish company — Management Innovation Group — and appreciated our approach. Our chats started early and ended late and I heard many helpful ideas and skepticism, especially from the wise and thoughtful Jess McMullin. That’s going to fuel many of my future posts here; you’ve been warned.
The approach has been termed Business Design, though that framing of it isn’t entirely satisfactory. My working definition is The application of design thinking to business strategy and operations. I’ll talk more about what I mean by design thinking in future posts, but for now the best description I know is Jeanne Liedtka’s essay Strategy as Design in the Rotman design issue (.pdf), required reading on the subject.
I’m off to Montreal for the information architecture summit and traveling incommunicado, or at least sans powerbook. If you need me, ring.
It’s official, AIfIA is now the The Information Architecture Institute. Dig the new logo and design courtesy James Spahr, designer extraordinaire.
“Be a part of the design thinking movement“
CrashStat maps aren’t going to win any cartographic awards, but they reveal the straight dope. My interpretation: When walking or cycling in New York City, be careful on the avenues, especially Broadway, and don’t step off the curb until you’re ready to cross.
Strategy + Business is a pretty good quarterly. Free registration allows access to the copious archives. Without reading the About page, you might never know it’s published by a consulting firm, Booz Allen.
Roger Martin and the folks at the Rotman School are helping to popularize a model of Integrative Thinking they see in more successful leaders. Summarized, integrative thinkers consistently consider a broader and more diverse set of inputs to be salient to an issue. They work on all those inputs simultaneously — bringing each into focus in turn — rather than consider them in discrete sequences. They perceive indirect casual links among the inputs. And they work creatively to find new solutions, rejecting the tradeoffs that others accept.
Here’s the slides from my recent talk, Can We Run the Company? (.pdf). You’ll have to imagine me waving my arms wildly as you read.
To summarize, if we got into this business to empower people, we can do even more empowering from higher up in the organization. Our skills as designers can be used not just to create artifacts but to help us perform management functions as well. But, even though we’re still using our design skills, we need to stop thinking of ourselves as designers and start thinking of ourselves as leaders.
While some have read the Gillett-Proctor & Gamble merger as leverage against Wal-Mart, James Surowiecki argues it was all about combining innovative like-minds:
A. G. Lafley, the C.E.O. of Procter & Gamble, denied that the acquisition had anything to do with the power of Wal-Mart. When he was pressed, he said, “The power has shifted to the consumer.†This may not be mere talk. In a world where brand names alone don’t confer power, the only way to prosper is to make products that genuinely improve (even if only marginally) on what came before. This is exactly what Gillette and P. & G. have done. Gillette’s razor line is one of the most lucrative businesses in history, mainly because the company has invested billions in technological innovation. This has allowed it to introduce a new razor every few years that costs considerably more than the one it’s replacing. And while historically P. & G. has focussed more on brand-building and marketing, in recent years it has invested heavily in innovation, too. The Swiffer mop and the SpinBrush electric toothbrush may not quite rank up there with penicillin or the Model T, but in the world of consumer products they count as real breakthroughs.
I stumbled across Richard Farson’s site looking for an old HBR article he wrote, and discovered a wealth of excellent thinking, synthesizing ideas on business design, organizational design and designers.
The article from HBR, The Fault-Tolerant Leader (free here), hits on all the important reasons management needs to accept risk in order to innovate. His articles Management by Design and Designers as Leaders are excellent as well.