Technology and Organizations

Wired’s Aug 2010 cover has Will Ferrell in a white skin suit with the title, “The Future That Never Happened.”  I’m going to where the future IS happening (hybrid planes, flying cars, personal electric aircraft, and all): AirVenture.  For the next week or so I will focus on electric aircraft and any other whiz bang innovation I can get a picture of.  I’ll be fighting over 550,000 other enthusiasts through the mud and aircraft noise to see what Boeing, GE, Airbus, NASA, cutting-edge vendors, and 1000s of homebuilders have to offer.

AirVenture is the Experimental Aircraft Association’s annual convention, airshow, and meetup.  From July 26 to Aug 1, 2010, Oshkosh, Wisconsin will be the heart of innovation — as well as the busiest airport (yes, busier than Atlanta given that the OSH control tower can handle over 3,000 flights in 10 hours).  I’m going to leave the Silicon Valley behind and focus on innovations you can get inside.

Electric aircraft had some exposure last year, but 2010 is a major milestone —  GE Aviation is sponsoring the World Symposium on Electric Aircraft as well as the Aviation Learning Center.  I’m looking forward to daily themed forums (search here with keyword: electric) and Friday’s full-day event:

Demo flights are on Sat, but I’ll be on a commercial flight home unless I can find a better ride… hint… hint.

Hope to see you there.  I’ll be wearing shirts with either Santa Clara University or N58PP logos — say, “Hi!”

MIT’s Tom Malone and Wired Magazine’s Clive Thompson have new articles out showing the opportunities we have when we use technology either as a mediator of collective human intelligence or as machine intelligence to add to our own. Malone’s focuses on the opportunities for decentralization within and across organizational designs. Thompson’s speaks to individuals blending their own “smarts with machine smarts” in a form of “cyborgian activity.” Both describe the vast differences people have regarding the underlying values of possible new approaches and the differences in awareness regarding the opportunities. One of my goals in this blog is to acknowledge individual differences in technology and organization understanding and help to create awareness for better organizational design.

MIT’s Tom Malone provided the following in his interview:

So much has been made of the ways that technology has evolved–computation, storage, communication, and now instrumentation—and how it has completely changed what companies can know. As a close observer of all this, do you see executives keeping up?

Well, sure, executives and everybody else knows about the new kinds of technologies that keep popping up. But there’s a key perspective that a lot of people don’t really get yet, which is that these new technologies change the essence of organizations.

To a greater degree than any technologies since those that enabled the Industrial Revolution, we’re now in the midst of a transformation in how businesses are organized. And the changes are not in production technology, but in coordination technology.

Malone credits Mitch Resnick of the MIT Media Lab for the idea of the centralized mindset describing “a set of often unquestioned assumptions about how to organize things, about how to get things done when you’ve got a bunch of people involved.” Malone suggests that most of us are still victims of this mindset and that it limits how we approach ways of organizing.

Clive Thompson, speaking of the results of Kasparov’s freestyle chess tournament where computer, human, or combined teams could compete, “The most brilliant entities on the planet, in other words (at least when it comes to chess), are neither high-end machines nor high-end humans. They’re average-brained people who are really good at blending their smarts with machine smarts.”

Thompson continues:

People who are thrilled by personal technology are the ones who have optimized their process — they know how and when to rely on machine intelligence. They’ve tweaked their Facebook settings… trained up the [artificial intelligence] recommendations they get from Apple’s Genius or TiVo.

And crucially, they also know when to step away from the screen and ignore the clamor of online distractions. The upshot is that they feel smarter, more focused, and more capable. In contrast, those who feel intimidated by online life haven’t hit that sweet spot. They feel the Internet is making them harried and — as Nicholas Carr suggested in The Atlantic — “stupid.”

Both articles end similarly pointing to the need to better understand how to bring technology and human capabilities together. My own work takes on this challenge. For example, Greg Northcraft and I suggest the following in our chapter, Borgs in the Org?:

• We need to be assume that practices and structures will change – technologies change, organizational needs change, the people involved change. Our approaches should change, or at least be reevaluated, in sync.
• We need to grasp organizational realities that may provide or inhibit a particular technology or practice use – organizations have policies about use of technologies within their walls and/or vary in levels of support and availability. Just as we should think about what to take on a trip, we should think about what to take into different technology/organization environments.
• We must understand that systems integration is a life skill – systems design is not just for information technology designers. We have choices about which phone to use, which applications to work with, etc.
• We must have an appreciation for when to integrate technology and when to stick with a tech-lite organizational practice. Learning may be better with the metrics provided by a technology — or using a technology may hide outcomes in a way that reduces our learning. We need to make informed decisions about the best path.

Ironically, we need to learn to weave technology tools, organizational practice, and human capability together to be effective — even though it was the mechanization of weaving that triggered the Luddite anti-technology movement of the early 1800s. The ability to acknowledge the possibilities across the dimensions of technology, organizations, and people, and then weave them into strong and dynamic organizational design is what distinguishes people with Systems Savvy.  Systems Savvy may be the most powerful skill we have in modern organizations.  Systems Savvy allows us to see our opportunities and make effective decisions about technology, organization, and even basic work process.

Chris Anderson (Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine) presents a spectacular cover story on “The New Industrial Revolution.” The teaser reads:

The factory, the investors, the workers — obsolete. In the age of DIY manufacturing, all you need is a garage and a great idea.

He opens with an example of a crowdsourced car:

Local Motors will officially release the Rally Fighter, a $50,000 off-road (but street-legal) racer. The design was crowdsourced, as was the selection of mostly off-the-shelf components, and the final assembly will be done by the customers themselves in local assembly centers as part of a “build experience.” Several more designs are in the pipeline, and the company says it can take a new vehicle from sketch to market in 18 months, about the time it takes Detroit to change the specs on some door trim. Each design is released under a share-friendly Creative Commons license, and customers are encouraged to enhance the designs and produce their own components that they can sell to their peers.

The Rally Fighter is a great example and raises the possibility of crowdsourcing for complicated systems. …but then the article goes into overdrive:

Here’s the history of two decades in one sentence: If the past 10 years have been about discovering post-institutional social models on the Web, then the next 10 years will be about applying them to the real world.

This story is about the next 10 years.

Transformative change happens when industries democratize, when they’re ripped from the sole domain of companies, governments, and other institutions and handed over to regular folks. The Internet democratized publishing, broadcasting, and communications, and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of both participation and participants in everything digital — the long tail of bits.

The article is part economics lesson, part how-to. Chris includes his own story, describing the founding of DIY Drones, a community site focused on amateur Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Within the community, he met like-minded and skilled collaborators and now markets autopilots and other related products. He includes great detail throughout, including tools and production outsourcing links.

Wired Sidebar

We need to get our minds around the possibilities of this new industrial revolution. Chris Anderson and others have focused on D-I-Y (Do It Yourself), but I think it’s more than that. I see this new approach as D-I-O (Do It Ourselves). Each of his examples highlights the value of collaboration. These are not stories of lone inventors (except for his description of professor Bob Kearns’ invention of intermittent windshield wipers — but he apparently goes mad — so much for the lone inventor…).

My own interests are around how to support DIO organization through my teaching and research. In an earlier post, I claimed that “Recruiting, Knowledge, Evaluation, Tools, and Market seem to be five foundational ways Web 2.0 supports innovation.” Now I realize that DIO is more than about just innovation. DIO seems to be providing the foundations for what Anderson calls small batch entrepreneurship (with credit to blogger Jason Kottke). A new industrial revolution. I look forward to your comments as I think out loud.

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For a different take on the value of crowdsourcing, please see Sarah Cove’s (for Wired News) Interview of Douglas Rushkoff What Does Crowdsourcing Really Mean.

Soon: A review of Cory Doctorow’s Makers (free download):

Perry and Lester invent things—seashell robots that make toast, Boogie Woogie Elmo dolls that drive cars. They also invent entirely new economic systems, like the “New Work,” a New Deal for the technological era. Barefoot bankers cross the nation, microinvesting in high-tech communal mini-startups like Perry and Lester’s. Together, they transform the country, and Andrea Fleeks, a journo-turned-blogger, is there to document it.

I agree with Nicholas Thompson. In his Wired article, Too Early to Criticize Obama’s Tech Policy?, he proposes “Not an A. But not a C either” for the grade to give the Obama administration in this first month and a half.

As I noted in an earlier post (also linking to a Wired article), the government is hamstrung by its size, and by a variety of laws meant to provide access and protection to all. Fast prototyping is not as attractive when a mistake is a breach of Federal law and likely to be covered by the national and international press.

I urge us all to give the administration some benefit of the doubt when it comes to technology implementation. However, I also hope our representatives are seriously considering how much of this needs to be specifically covered by law, and whether some of the laws that we have need to be revisited in light of modern technology and its use.

One issue of concern in the new Wired article is where the role of CTO sits. Thompson writes,

The most legitimate complaint so far is that Obama has yet to appoint a CTO. Not only that, but the position appears to have been demoted. The Sunlight Foundation caught an executive order declaring that the CTO will sit in the president’s Domestic Policy Council. That’s better than what some people feared—that the CTO would just be knocked into the Office of Management and Budget—but not nearly as good as people hoped when they had visions of the CTO (Eric Schmidt!? Jeff Bezos?!) sitting in an office down the hall from Obama.

Structure and technology go hand in hand in good organizational design. I’m hoping that we get both a CTO (to guide government technology policy) and a CIO (to guide government technology infrastructure). In the mean time, I’m following the blog, Tech President, described by Thompson as the “best blog for following these issues in depth.”