Innovation

Innovation

We are the media, now what?

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One of the potential downsides of a network society is that deception, especially by those with power over the communications platforms, will become all-too-common. John Pilger takes a look at this, focusing much of the blame on professional journalists in War by media and the triumph of propaganda.

Why has so much journalism succumbed to propaganda? Why are censorship and distortion standard practice? Why is the BBC so often a mouthpiece of rapacious power? Why do the New York Times and the Washington Post deceive their readers?

Why are young journalists not taught to understand media agendas and to challenge the high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the essence of so much of what’s called the mainstream media is not information, but power?

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the democratic advantage

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Three billion people around the world are now connected with ubiquitous digital technologies that keep improving. They also keep getting cheaper. History shows  that technology can be an enabler of democracy. Distributed communications subvert gatekeepers. John Gilmore said that, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” As networks become the new companies, we may be moving toward a more democratic future of work, with authority distributed throughout the network. One significant counter to this trend is the emergence of platform capitalism.

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Innovation is a network activity

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In business, attention is paid to innovative individuals, especially those who go on to become captains of industry. But of more importance is the ability of the network (society, organization, company) to stay connected to its collective knowledge in order to keep innovating. Just think how quickly an organization would lose its collective knowledge if people did not share their knowledge. What about an entire society?

You start out with two genetically well-intermixed peoples. Tasmania’s actually connected to mainland Australia so it’s just a peninsula. Then about 10,000 years ago, the environment changes, it gets warmer and the Bass Strait floods, so this cuts off Tasmania from the rest of Australia, and it’s at that point that they begin to have this technological downturn. You can show that this is the kind of thing you’d expect if societies are like brains in the sense that they store information as a group and that when someone learns, they’re learning from the most successful member, and that information is being passed from different communities, and the larger the population, the more different minds you have working on the problem.

If your number of minds working on the problem gets small enough, you can actually begin to lose information. There’s a steady state level of information that depends on the size of your population and the interconnectedness. It also depends on the innovativeness of your individuals, but that has a relatively small effect compared to the effect of being well interconnected and having a large population. —How Culture Drove Human Evolution

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An update on jobs

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Nesta, a UK-based innovation charity, recently looked at jobs and automation, in the article, Creativity versus Robots. I have summarized some of their findings, and added my own perspective, with an image showing how standardized work is decreasing while creative work is increasing in the job market. Overall, we are seeing an increasing percentage of creative jobs in the workforce. But this is not a zero-sum game, as many jobs are getting automated and disappearing. If nothing is done, there will be severe societal repercussions.

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Visualization for Understanding

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The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17
The Blue Marble

When NASA released the photograph of the earth as seen from space, known as the blue marble, it gave new impetus to the environmental movement, showing our planet as a small dot in a black void. Seeing is believing. Visualization can be a very powerful tool in sharing complex knowledge. The visualization of social network analysis (SNA) can give us significant new perspectives, not available from looking at a series of data points. For instance, Valdis Krebs examined data on the trust levels of various news sources around the world and how these were perceived by ideological groups.

The data table originally provided by PEW Research Center tell part of the story, but the SNA conducted by Valdis clearly shows how conservative media are completely separate from all other media. A similar study of pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian news outlets showed that only one was trusted by both sides, but Haaretz.com is getting squeezed by taking a moderate position. Seeing this polarization may help to understand it.

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reflecting on reflection

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Missing from most workplaces today is any time for reflection. Even events that are designed to promote learning, like the ubiquitous professional conference, ignore time for reflection. In these discrete time-based events, there is little time for reflection. Presenters hold back their knowledge in order to ‘deliver’ it just before the big official presentation. This presentation is followed by some immediate questions, discussions, and a quick break. Then it’s off to see the next presentation. Reflection, if it occurs, comes much later, and usually after the participants have gone home. It’s the same at work.

It seems that most of us are in a hurry today, and I meet few people who have read even a few good books lately and have had the time to reflect upon them. Fewer still have taken the time to digest new ideas and discuss their learning with others. There is always a need to balance action and reflection, but the latter seems to be losing out in many of our workplaces.

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not all innovation is disruptive

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Given all the talk about disruptive innovation lately, I thought I’d dust off several posts I have written on the subject and update them.

In the book McLuhan for Managers, the authors provide a lens for managers and owners to make business decisions primarily using McLuhan’s laws of media to understand the changes that are possible with any medium. According to co-author Derrick de Kerckhove, the tetradic laws of media state that every medium (or technology in the broader sense of the word) has four major effects:

  1. extends a human property (the car extends the foot);
  2. obsolesces the previous medium by turning it into a sport or an form of art (the automobile turns horses and carriages into sports);
  3. retrieves a much older medium that was obsolesced before (the automobile brings back the shining armour of the chevalier);
  4. flips or reverses its properties into the opposite effect when pushed to its limits (the automobile, when there are too many of them, create traffic jams, that is total paralysis)

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Make Work More Human

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2013: The Incredibly Shrinking American Middle Class — Bill Moyers

2013: Five Myths about Canada’s Middle Class — Globe & Mail

2013: RIP: The Middle Class — Salon

2013: The Next Middle Class — Harold Jarche

2014: The Middle Class is Steadily Eroding — New York Times

The titles above indicate a shift in the economy and many of our assumptions about the nature of work, at least in my part of the world. There are many definitions of what middle class means, but for me it is the class of people who are experienced, trained or educated yet still have to work to earn a living. Where I grew up, many of our parents were immigrants who all had jobs. We were lucky. School did not require fees and most extracurricular activities were free. Many things have changed since then.

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The creative surplus

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The shift from consuming broadcast media to creating interactive media may be engaging a new generation in a new way. Just think of all the hours that used to be spent watching TV can now be used to generate ideas – some good and many bad – but they are being generated on an enormous scale. Just look at YouTube. This is what Clay Shirky calls the cognitive surplus.

Now take this idea one step further and think of all the time wasted in the typical workplace just consuming – listening at meetings; reading directives, waiting for someone to make a decision; commuting; etc. Imagine what could happen if an entire organization decides to tap into its collective cognitive surplus. Very soon, the organization may have no choice.

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Innovation catalysts

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Domino’s Pizza, a global quick-service restaurant company, understands that workers must be active and engaged in their own learning and development. As described in Introducing PKM to a Corporate Audience, Domino’s learned that “PKM makes learning a real-time activity within the flow of work” but also that “the company needs to clarify what people are allowed and expected to do in terms of learning during the workday.” In addition, information services, and IT security need to be consulted. The job of L&D is to familiarize busy professionals with new tools and realistic examples of how to use PKM at work.

Domino’s focused on helping people in leadership roles to develop PKM practices. This is a good approach as it improves the chances of spreading these habits throughout the enterprise. While the Seek > Sense > Share framework may be simple, it takes time and practice to become a habit. A pragmatic approach for some companies would be to support workers who are already practicing some aspect of PKM. Two identifiable groups are Connectors and Experts.

Connectors are people with many relationships who find it easy to talk to people. The challenge for the organization is to use these skills to improve knowledge-sharing. Connectors can be identified through observation, interviews, or social network analysis. To become knowledge catalysts, connectors need to have good curation skills. They have to know how to add value to knowledge and discern when, where, and with whom to share.

Experts have deep knowledge on a subject but many lack the skills to synthesize what they know in order to share it with a broader audience. It is critical that experts share their knowledge so the organization can make better decisions. This is a leadership responsibility that companies like Domino’s understand. Expertise in a closed room is of little use in a connected enterprise. Experts need to develop skills in working out loud and other sense-making practices. Connectors can help them but first there has to be something to share. Getting experts to share in a meaningful way can take time but first it requires a supportive environment and some basic skills.

If an organization wants to get meaningful results by adopting PKM practices, but does not see how this can be implemented throughout the organization, then an initial pilot should identify two groups: Connectors and Experts. Help these people improve their PKM skills. Get Connectors to add value and be more discerning. Get Experts to simplify in order to share. It will take time and practice but the benefits will be an organization that can use more of its knowledge to make better decisions. More Catalysts in the enterprise may also significantly improve innovation because innovation is inextricably linked to both networks and learning.

PKM innovation catalystRelated post: PKM Roles