Coevolving Innovations

Over the past few months, you may have noticed some changes in this Coevolving Innovations blog, or the Distractions, Reflections blog. It’s been two years since I wrote “the why and how of establish your web persona“, and “installing and customizing Wordpress on your own domain“.  Those reflected the state-of-the-art in 2007, which is a long time in technology.  To explain these changes, I’ll relate my thinking in three parts:

• 1. What do I want with my web persona?
• 2. How has the technology changed (in ways that I didn’t foresee)?
• 3. What have I done with my web activity?

These topics are described from the viewpoint of an “advanced blogger”.  New technologies emerge continuously, and I try many of them out.  I use some tools that novices find cumbersome, but that’s the way that I continue to learn.

1. What do I want with my web persona?

My first blog entries date back to October 2005, and they’re still available on the web.  In December 2006, I split my professional persona (mostly serious writing) from my photoblogging (easier on the eyes and brain), particularly for readers who subscribe via e-mail rather than using an RSS reader.  During this period, my perspective on my web persona has been constant in three ways:

(a) I want people to find appropriate information about me

In the test of “googling myself”, I’m pretty satisfied that people can find me.  Actually, a searcher will find me in multiple places, and should be able to navigate to his or her specific interest.

(b) I want to post durable content that reflects my personality and style

A major complaint of people who don’t read blogs is that it seems that people blog about their cats, or what they had for lunch.  I try to minimize that.

I do use Twitter and Friendfeed for short commentary, Google Reader Shared Items for popular news, and Diigo and Delicious for social bookmarking.  Since I travel a lot, I use Brightkite to give people some sense of which city I’m in, and Dopplr for which cities where I have travel planned.

On my professional blog, I post content that isn’t appropriate for publishing in journals or ideas that I’m working out.  On my photoblog, I take care to crop and edit each photograph, rather than just uploading snapshots.

(c) I want clear ownership of (and access to) my content

Over the past 28 years, the International Federation for Systems Research has hosted a meeting that has become known as the Fuschl Conversation. The conversation was designed as an “anti-conference” by Bela H. Banathy. Rather than centering on presentations of completed papers, small groups meet in a low-stress setting to engage in generative conversation, creating new knowledge. To focus and energize the conversations, position papers are developed by each individual before the meeting, and proceedings are published following.

For 2008 — my third Fuschl Conversation — I was privileged to spend four days with Gary Metcalf, Jennifer Wilby, Allenna Leonard and Leonie Solomons. Here’s an abstract of our conversation:

For this Fuschl meeting in March 2008, a group was formed based on a call for individuals with experiences in both (a) systems research and practice, and (b) applications in industry, academia and/or public policy. All of the participants in Team 2 have exercised systems thinking applied in the social sciences, both in research/educational contexts and in applied/practice contexts. In the discussion, we shared a rich base of collective experiences working in multiple countries across four continents.

In retrospect, the conversation drew out insights in three areas:

• 1. Where does systems knowledge figure into the practice of social science practitioners?
• 2. How is systems knowledge applied with domain-specific knowledge?
• 3. When are domain-specific issues providing entry points into which systems knowledge becomes valuable?
• 4. How is the nature of systems knowledge coevolving with institutions (public, private, not-for-profit) and technology (wikis, blogs, voice over Internet)?

This report concludes with a reflection on the conversation process itself, in the setting of Fuschl.

A 7-page summary of the conversation is published in the downloadable proceedings of the meeting. As a teaser, here’s an outline.

How is reading blogs different from reading e-mail and using search engines?

Most peers at my age — I’m a later era baby boomer, now called Generation Jones — are comfortable receiving e-mail and using search engines. This population hasn’t yet fully embraced social technologies such as blogs. This is changing slowly. Jeremiah Ohyang, in “How Baby Boomers Use Social Media“, describes that:

• 71% of younger boomers (age 43 to 52) in 2008 were active with social technologies, as compared to 52% in 2007, and
• 65% of older boomers (age 53 to 63) in 2008 were active with social technologies, as compared to 45% in 2007.

A further breakdown of the social technographic of boomers shows a bimodal (i.e. two-bump) distribution.

• The largest bump of boomers (67% and 62%) is readers as “spectators” of blogs and forums — probably arriving at the web site via a bookmark or a search engine.
• Of boomers reading blogs, fewer are “joiners” who maintain a profile on the web, or “collectors” who are receive updates as feeds.
• Contributing content, boomers show a smaller bump as 35% and 34% as “critics” who leave comments on blogs and forums.
• Less than half that number are “creators” who upload and publish primary content, which means bloggers under age 43 outnumber bloggers over age 43 in a ratio of 6-to-1.

What are boomers missing? They may not want to become authors (i.e. “creators” or “critics”). As “collectors”, however, they can become more productive readers. Moving into this segment requires (1) embracing the ethos of a blog reader, (2) adopting tools that streamline reading blogs, and (3) establishing a personal style for tracking content.

Boomers are comfortable with e-mail. E-mail is a person-centric way of receiving information. It’s easy to sort out the importance of content by the sender of the information. The widespread alternative on the Internet is content-centric search. Put some search terms into a browser, and locate information sources. It’s worth remembering, though, that the credibility, reliability and usefulness of web sources is better if you know and/or trust the author(s).

[Side note: I first encountered the idea of person-centric from a tweet by Luis Suarez, leading to an interview of Euan Semple by Joshua-Michele Ross, and then a 2007 interview of Euan Semple by David Weinberger. The person-centric approach is also evident in the Cattail project at IBM Research.]

Moving up to the level of a “collector” takes advantage of web feed technologies such as RSS or Atom. Web feeds enable a person-centric way of receiving information from web syndication, i.e. content made available through publishing on the Internet. A reader can subscribe to individuals from whom he or she wants to read more, and bypass the noise from unwanted search results and junk e-mail. Following the ideas of a trusted colleague is more productive than relying on an anonymous source found with a search engine.

The three behaviours of becoming a “collector” are described below.

(1) Blog readers socially engage with blog writers

Blogs are communications direct from a writer. Marshall McLuhan would probably describe blogs as a “hot medium” as compared to other “cooler” web content. In an April 2008 ACM CHI presentation and paper on “Exploring the Role of the Reader in the Activity of Blogging”, Eric Baumer, Mark Sueyoshi and Bill Tomlinson (all at U.C. Irvine) find that blog readers have characteristic common practices:

In his writing, Jim Spohrer has referred to The Sciences of the Artificial, written by Herbert Simon in 1996 as foundational to a science of services systems. Due to other priorities, I’ve been try to dodge following through into Simon’s book. Such work isn’t without controversies, such as described by Jude Chua Soo Meng in “Donald Schön, Herbert Simon and The Sciences of the Artificial” published in Design Studies in January 2009. Chua writes:

Donald Schön['s] book The Reflective Practitioner (1983) criticized the very technical view of design influenced by logical positivism, and urged design studies to attend to reflection-in-practice. In great part, Schön’s influential criticism was directed at the 1969, 1^st edition of Herbert Simon’s The Sciences of the Artificial.

Chua describes revisions in the 1996 third revision of The Sciences of the Artificial that resolves the issues. This is deeper than I’d like to go.

I have to admit that I didn’t fully understand the use of the word “artificial”. Colloquially, “artificial” can be understood to mean something not genuine or made in imitation. Alternatively, it can be opposed to natural, as something man-made or made with human skill. This second meaning became clearer to me as I was reading Sarasvathy et al. “Designing Organizations that Design Environments”, from Organization Studies 2008:

A science of the artificial (or an artifactual science) studies some subset of human artifacts. [p. 331]

The expression of “artifactual” over “artificial” is significant for me, because it bridges sociological research (i.e. organizations) with man-made things (i.e. technology). This has led me do light reading on some articles in three areas:

• (1) Simon (1996) via Jim Spohrer and Sarasvathy et al.;
• (2) Klaus Krippendorkff’s Trajectory of Artificiality; and
• (3) Jelinek, Romme and Boland’s extension of Krippendorff.

The audiences for these writings are slightly different, so cross-disciplinary interpretations and applications lead different places.

(1) Simon (1996) via Jim Spohrer and Sarasvathy et al.

I was browsing through academic references when I came across a familiar name. Zhichang Zhu published an article “Reform without a Theory: Why Does it Work in China?”, in Organization Studies, 2007. Here’s the first few sentences from the abstract.

The gradualism–radicalism debate on China’s reform is misleading. The reform can alternatively be seen as one without a theory. The question is why a no-theory “strategy” was “selected” by the Chinese elite, “accepted” by the Chinese people and “worked” in the Chinese context.

Since I’m educated in the west, I realized that it’s wrong for me be thinking about social change in China from a western mindset. I first saw Zhu speak in 1998 on the wuli - shili - renli model, and have seen him now and then at various meetings. I still can’t describe the WSR model unaided, and was struck by various phrases in this 2007 paper. Firstly, wuli.

Wuli: Actual Material-Regulative Resources

[....] Hostile to central planning, Mao Zedong advocated a xiao-tu-qun (smallness, localness, comprehensiveness), wuxiao kaihua (”five small flowers” blooming) policy, encouraged commune-brigade enterprises. [....]

By the time of the reform, 80% of the labour force was outside the state sector, living at near-subsistence levels (CRF 2001). When economic liberalization began, non-state sectors could grow rapidly, relying on the flow of labour from agriculture. [....]

Unlike “abandoning the plan” in a planned economy, which would probably produce great disruption, as happened in EEFSU, “abandoning commands” is more likely to produce positive effects, whether the market mechanism or planned control is subsequently adopted. This was what happened in China. [p. 1507]

Secondly, shili.

I was listening to Sam Palmisano’s talk on “A Smarter Planet” as part of the Technology and Foreign Policy discussion at the Council for Foreign Relations — the audio version, because I prefer to not sit at my computer to watch the video. He said that as the world gets “flatter”, smaller and more interconnected, the planet is becoming smarter. Smarter means that …

… digital and physical infrastructures of the world are converging.

Three advances in technology are driving this change.

• The world is becoming instrumented: transistor technology is embedded in the mobile phones of 4 billion mobile subscribers today, and there will be 30 million RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags within 2 years.
• The world is becoming interconnected: the Internet not only means 2 billion people connected person-to-person, but also the ability for instruments / devices to connect machine-to-machine.
• Things are becoming more intelligent: since instrumented devices generate data that can be stored and analyzed, advanced analytics enables intelligence that can be translated into action — with nearly-continual real-time updates streaming from supercomputers.

The talk continued with a discussion about how much waste — in energy, gridlocked traffic, supply chain inefficiencies, unsystemic healthcare, and water usage — in the physical world might be reduced through acting smarter. In the pure information world, financial institutions were able to spread risk, but not track risk, which undermined confidence in the markets.

I follow the ideas coming from IBM more closely than most people. I’ve also had the benefit of studying businesses for three decades(!) in various academic contexts. This has led me to reflect on the conjoined ideas on technology and business that have coevolved with me over the past decade. Some significant themes have included:

• 1. e-business (1997) and sense-and-respond organizations
• 2. On demand business (2003 - 2004) and inter-organizational governance
• 3. Innovation that matters and complex systems (2006) and the science of service systems
• 4. Converging digital and physical infrastructures (2008) and systems modeling language

Formal, historical records of IBM’s directions are clearly documented in annual reports. I’m not an IBM executive, so my academic research is unlikely to impact corporate reports. However, it’s undeniable that my continuing on-the-ground engagements with clients and ongoing conversations with key thinkers inside IBM have shaped the way I see the world. From an academic perspective, I’ve moved closer to Normann (2001) in the view that economic progress is related to technological progress.

The effect of technology is — and always has been — to loosen constraints. As a result of technological development, what was not possible becomes possible. Or what was not economically feasible becomes so. [p. 27]

Each of the four themes are described below. Three themes are historical perspectives. The fourth continues to emerge with my current ongoing research.