Technology and Organizations

What do electric planes, home brewed beer, automobiles, and personal computers have in common? They are all innovations with enthusiast organizations to thank for their development.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about “public” innovation labs like Google Labs, PARC Living Laboratory, and IDEO Labs. At the end, I asked:

Each of the above public examples have an organization taking the lead and gaining its own benefit. What if the users took the lead? We see this with the free and open source software collaborations. What about more physical innovations, or cases where the it’s not a joint project, but many people still contribute?

An excerpt of Huggy Rao’s 2008 book Market Rebels and Radical Innovation gave me some great history and insights (video of Prof. Rao talking about book). He points out that automobiles, personal computers, and home brewed beer each had a “hot cause” to arouse emotion and create a community of members, and “cool mobilization” — think jazz “cool” — to signal the identity of members and to sustain their commitment:

• Automobiles had enthusiast organizations with with hot cause goals of shielding owners from legal harassment and solving problems of transportation (this was the late 1800s). The cool mobilization strategies were reliability contests (though some of them seem to have gotten pretty “hot” – women screaming, men stomping on hats…)
• Personal computers had “the tyranny of the central computer” as their hot cause and hobbyist clubs (most famously, the Home Brew Computer Club where the Apple I and many others made their debut) as their cool mobilization.
• Microbrewing and its American Homebrewers Association had the democratization of the production of beer — with the downfall of “industrial beer” (“thin and overcarbonated”) as their hot cause, and home brewing, frequenting brewpubs, and beer festivals as mechanisms for cool mobilization.

I’ve added electric planes to give us thoughts for the future. Electric plane enthusiasts have EAA (Experimental Aircraft Association), the CAFE Foundation, and NASA behind them. While there might not be women screaming and men stomping on hats, there is a $1.5 Million prize “for aircraft that can average at least 100 mph on a 200-mile flight while achieving greater than 200 passenger miles per gallon” – and electric power is likely to play a role. Clearly “green” is hot — and NASA is cool.

But such collaboration isn’t natural or easy. In Steve Gillmor’s recent interview with Ray Ozzie (Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect and creator of Lotus Notes and Groove), Ozzie says about collaboration:

“… people don’t like to work on things that are joint objectives; they like to work on things that are their key — that satisfy their KPIs [key performance indicators], their objectives, not necessarily the joint ones.”

Rao’s “hot” and “cool” (and his deeper analytic links between radical innovation and insurgency) may be the explanation for our examples of collaborative efforts related to these innovations: the causes were so motivating and the social movements so strong that they did (do) help people meet their own objectives.

Photo by rmhermen

The admonition “don’t do math in public” clearly doesn’t apply to modern R&D. While the Lockheed Skunkworks and Apple are known for their secrecy, many organizations now open up their process so that we can all participate. This is more than “open innovation.” This is public, interactive, innovation.

IDEO, Google, PARC, Yahoo! have/had public websites for their “labs”:

• IDEO Labs: “… is a place where we can show bits of what we’re working on, talk about prototyping, and share our excitement over the tools that help us create.”
• Google Labs: “Explore Google’s technology playground”
• PARC Living Laboratory: “In the spirit of open innovation, this is one of the places where PARC scientists and engineers share their prototype web-based services, alpha-stage software downloads, proof-of-concept for various competencies, and collaborative development programs. These are available free to the public for trial and feedback; in turn, we hope to draw on the diverse perspectives the online community will share. We do not currently provide access to inactive projects (e.g., Map Viewer) here.”
• Yahoo! Next: (defunct?) “… is a showcase of some of Yahoo!’s newest and upcoming projects. It is essentially an incubation ground for future Yahoo! technologies in their beta testing phase, and a chance for the Yahoo! community to interact and have a say on how upcoming products are designed and fine tuned. Each prototype can be discussed in its own individual Yahoo! Next forum. The Yahoo! Next website is currently offline for redevelopment” (from Wikipedia.)

These sites provide outsiders with early access to interesting work, and early feedback from enthusiastic followers. To the extent that we are becoming a sharing/collaborative community, these organizations can gain great value and we can participate in the process.

But, how do you make the choice of openness? How do you decide what to be open with and what to keep secret? There is a full range of possibilities (the range of formal arrangements is nicely covered in When is Virtual Virtuous, by Hank Chesbrough and David Teece). They highlight the issues of whether or not the innovation exists, or must be invented; and whether the innovation will be autonomous or systemic to the organization’s goals and processes. Note: you don’t see Google open sourcing their algorithms.

SAP Labs shows a middle ground. They appear to have standard R&D, but with a local and co-innovation flavor:

“The SAP Labs Network leverages SAP’s rich diversity and technical and business expertise to deliver the best software solutions and services in the IT industry.

Located in high-tech centers across the globe, the SAP Labs Network helps SAP engage the local ecosystems and enable co-innovation.

Seen as a local company within a seamless global network, each SAP Labs location increases SAP’s adaptability and agility to rapidly address changing markets and meet evolving customer needs.” (Thanks, @nilofer for the example.)

Here’s a twist: Each of the above public examples have an organization taking the lead and gaining its own benefit. What if the users took the lead? We see this with the free and open source software collaborations. What about more physical innovations, or cases where the it’s not a joint project, but many people still contribute? I have a couple of examples and will do a follow up post — but it would be wonderful if you could share any examples you have. These can be self-organizing (like much of the open source software), facilitated by membership enthusiast organizations, or….

I can’t say there was standing room only at Marissa Mayer’s (VP of Search Products & User Experience) PARC Forum talk “Innovation at Google: The Physics of Data” — because the fire code for the auditorium doesn’t allow standing. They did bring in extra chairs and let the rest watch via TV in the lobby.

So many reasons for the talk to be popular: Google, Innovation at Google, Big Data issues, Marissa’s presentation style (engaging, you feel like your getting a secret tour). I’d gone because of the big data and innovation focus and came away with a better understanding of their process, and how their management style is as empirical as their products.

She opened by explaining the title of the talk. Besides the fact that it sounds cool, Google is on a physics kick with products like: Google Wave, Google Fusion, and their focus on acceleration.

She quickly moved to how data helps them build better products. She gave a clear example in terms of the testing that went into their choice of the shade of blue used in their links (see mention on Gigaom). Another example was how Google Trends can help anyone know if a product is trending up or down to help them think about stocking. Below is a Trend search on Crocs.

The highlight for me was how a culture of data/evidence supports their management. I’d seen Marissa talk about this in a video (below, section starts at 16:28) as “Data is Apolitical.” Evidence-based management (here and here) at a company that builds the tools that let us all organize our evidence.

From the video:

I think that the internal politics inside of Google have remained minimal compared to other corporations of its size because we rely so much on the data and we do so much measurement that you don’t have to worry, will your idea get picked because you’re the favorite, or will someone else’s idea get picked because they’re the favorite or because they have a better relationship with the person who’s the decision maker. The decisions get made based on data, and that really frees people from a lot of those types of concerns.

How can we use big data to make better management decisions? In earlier posts (here and here) I’ve listed a few tools and asked similar questions. Marissa described the power of other Google Tools to help us “understand problems in new ways”:

• Trendalyzer -- animations of trends over time
• Fusion Tables -- largely for researchers -- mashups and embedding of datasets.
• Google Squared -- googling your Google search results (thus squared) or the square that results. Not perfect -- but it is editable (e.g., you can add your own columns).
• And of course their (and everyone else’s) move to manage the real-time web.

What problems can we understand in new ways? How can the exploding amount of data (for example from the US Government) help us manage better?

Some starters: Facilities planning, recruiting, flexible work based on better predictions of business cycles, data mining of employees’ social media content…

Systems Savvy is the ability to grasp the capabilities of a technology and how that technology might be meshed with organizational practice.  People with systems savvy understand that technologies and practices are intertwined — and they know how to make adjustments to both the technology and the practice to effectively weave them together.

Who has systems savvy? I suspect all the readers of this blog have some degree of systems savvy.  However, there are folks whose efforts and thinking make them excellent models for all of us:

• Brian Humphrey, LA Fire Department
• MIT Professor Pattie Mae and Ph.D. Candidate Pranav Mistry
• Tony Hsieh, Zappos
• John Seely Brown, past Chief Scientist at Xerox and past Director of the Palo Alto Research Center

My examples in this blog tend to focus on information technology, but systems savvy also applies to industrial and other technologies.  For example the first person who thought about how farm chemicals might be more safely, cheaply, and effectively applied by “plug-and play” direct connectors (versus farmers having to fill, mix, and refill their spreaders by hand) also had systems savvy.  Technology possibilities provided opportunities for better, safer, practice — but these had to be realized and implemented by people with systems savvy.

Deep technical or organizational expertise is not required for systems savvy.  It’s an appreciation of the possible… which might even be limited by deep expertise if people instead anchor on present uses.

A degree of systems savvy is critical to both technical and organizational designers.  Systems designers (the people that design the technologies we use) with systems savvy can design the technology with “triggers” to help others better understand the possible uses of their technology.  For example, IDEO and Kaiser Permanente co-designed an information board that helps new parents and nurses keep track of the “journey home” following the birth of the baby.  The technology had clearly “flippable” cards (designating whether the step was completed or not), a whiteboard surface and pen, and clearly marked areas for adding information.  The design makes clear that cards can be reordered, should be flipped as steps occur, and provides a clear dashboard of the process.

Your Journey Home Board

Organizational designers with systems savvy can imagine how not-yet invented technologies might help their organizations effectiveness and efficiency, and ask for such technologies to be designed. Hilton Hotels issued a Request for Proposals last year asking for “game” tools to help them show employees how different actions can affect a guest’s mood.  Hilton’s training exec David Kervella saw the value in a particular technology form, but had to get technical experts to help him realize the vision.

My ideas on systems savvy are a work in progress and I would appreciate your comments.  Some earlier stages in this evolution include:

• Systems conductivity (here & here)
• Accidental systems designers
• Mental models of systems

I hope to spend some of my summer interviewing people who have demonstrated systems savvy.  Beside those I note above, who else do you think has systems savvy?  Personal introductions appreciated.