“the desire line — trails worn into a landscape that demonstrate the paths people want to take, not those that were laid down by the designer”
Peter Merholz lays out some great, yet small in volume, thoughts on emergence, the need for nimble design (and adptiveness – be it in terms of business model, technological foundations, user interfaces and “offers”).
And he has some nice closing questions too, food for thought and further analysis …
Identi.ca lately? It’s basically a Twitter clone built upon the Open Source microblogging software laconi.ca (and the OpenMicroBlogging Protokoll too). See Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWrite Web for insights into the potentials, like e.g. “federated microblogging” and distributing load via multiple interoperable installs …
What else? Jay Cross offers us another chapter of Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance: Chapter 4 on Emergence:
Emergence is the key characteristic of complex systems. It is the process by which simple entities self-organize to form something more complex. As training converges with bottom-up self-organizing systems, network effects, and the empowerment of individuals, it morphs into emergent learning.
More on Jay’s book here.
Via Jon Husband I also learned of Niall Cook‘s new book (“Enterprise 2.0 – How Social Software Will Change The Future of Work”), you may download the introduction and the first chapter.:
Will add this to my pile of “books to read” for my consulting business … after I’ve read all of Chris Brogan’s lifehacks for more efficient, effective blogging.
Speaking of productivity, yes, I know – didn’t blog much about and after reboot, but last week was just plain packed – both work and private life (e.g. bought a new car, photos will follow suite when I finally can lay my hands on it).
Eine recht gut besuchte OSMB-Session, “Open Source Workflow Management mit BPEL” mit Gerd Jan Tschöpe von Tarent.
Der Kontext ist es IT-gestützte Geschäftsprozesse schnell wandelbar zu machen, d.h. flexibel an geänderte Gegebenheiten anzupassen.
[...] Service-Orientierten Architekturen stellen Software-Funktionen als Dienste bereit. [...] Komplexe Geschäftsabläufe werden als Verkettungen von Diensten und Interaktionen modelliert.
[...] ad hoc IT-basierte Geschäftsprozesse werden fachlich modelliert und in der Ablaufumgebung ausgeführt.
Vorgestellt wird BPEL bzw. die Erweiterungen, die Tarent umgesetzt hat. Angestrebt wird eine Lösung für den IT-Business-Gap: Die Modellierung soll unabhängig von der technischen Realisierung erfolgen, d.h. auf einer hohen Abstraktionsebene. Die eigentliche Modellierung von Geschäftsprozessen kann dabei mit verschiedenen Tools erfolgen, bspw. mit dem ARIS Toolset.
Der Vortrag war mir etwas zu technisch, ist ja auch nicht direkt mein Kernbusiness und auch nicht meine Kernkompetenz, insofern vertröste ich Interessierte und Insider vorerst auf die Folien (die ich hier verlinken werde, hier sind sie).
Interessant ist die Webseite von tarent, u.a. mit einer Art Glossar, das verschiedene Begriffe aufgreift die mir auch nahe sind …
Ameisen, Archytas von Tarent, Business Process Management, Cluetrain Manifest, Community, Diskurs, Elefant, Emergenz, Evolution, Freeware, Freibier, Freie Software, Freiheit, GNU/Linux, Growing by Reusing, Herrschaftswissen, Interoperabilität, Kommunikation, Lego, Lizenzen, Membran, Metaphysik, Mobile Business, Nachhaltigkeit, Netzwerk, Offene Standards, offene Systeme, Open Business Strategie, OpenOffice, Open Source, Orchestrierung, Passgenauigkeit, Plattform, Qualitätsmanagement, Schwarmintelligenz, Serviceorientierte Architektur, Transparenz, Verantwortung, Verknüpfen, Wissenseffizienz, Quelltext, Zukunftsfähigkeit
Tonight I participated in a book presentation by Rod A. Beckström on The Starfish and the Spider (side event at the Web 2.0 Expo Berlin). He started off with his motivation for writing this book, 9/11. Yes, Al-Quaida is an archetypical network, and mapping this decentralized network is quite a task.
Social Network Analysis shows us that the network of Al-Quaida is really well designed. And the point is that this isn’t an organization, it is an ideology streamlining and leveraging different and distributed islamic terror cells. The strength is in the shared ideas, not in the structure (i.e. processes).
Now an interesting slide, what do Geronimo, Wikipedia, myspace, craigslist, Alcoholics Anonymous, YouTube (and Bin Laden) have in common? They are all decentralized networks, these are not chaos, but a very singular structure.
Starfish can regrow – even from on single leg. It is self-sustaining, it has all it needs in one leg, so if you cut one leg off, it can work out to a starfish again.
Next one is cool, man in red tights, Hernando Cortez, burning the boats after landing. But that’s only the start: He invades the centralized Aztec empire, kills the whole royal family and eradicated the whole capital. Worked quite well, but here’s the catch: This didn’t work with the decentralized Apache society. Even when the Spanish managed to catch the leader it didn’t help – as there was just another leader ready.
if you attack a decentralized network you make it more decentralized and more vicious
Then Rod took us back into today, Napster vs. Big 5-music industry. Really good slide here, showing both the centralization of the industry into the big 5 music companies, and the post napster atomization of P2P-filesharing into KaZaa and even more decentralized networks.
Napster was an easy kill for the music industry, as it relied on central servers. KaZaa, eMule and BitTorrent they don’t rely on this, so it is really hard to get a grip.
Next up is Eric S. Raymond (The cathedral and the bazaar), the hybrid car (Combo special) Toyota Prius. Even when Toyota is a classic centralized company, they managed to put out this car – looks like a spider, acts like a starfish.
Next example: the Tesla electrical sports car (built by geeks). Wholly outsourced production, only R&D+design rests in the middle.
Now we’re going into wiki stuff, he’s introducing TWiki.net, his company that relies on the Twiki open source wiki project. While the company has to be somewhat more centralized than the community, it has got to collaborate with it.
Last, he’s offering some insights into different roles in this coopetitive setting, particularly catalysts (like e.g. Craig Newmark, see my posts here)
A Catalyst’s Tools
Genuine interest in others
Loose connections
Mapping
Desire to help
Passion
Meet people where they are [...]
Emotional intelligence
Trust
Inspiration
Tolerance for ambiguity
Hands off approach
Receding
(via here, there are some excellent notes too)
And even more material and links on these ideas:
Everything’s connected, especially in this little world of business model design thinking.
Both Ralf Beuker and Alex Osterwalder pointed me to this video interview with Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman Business School (publishing a fine journal as well, see e.g. here, for BMID-design-coverage see more here or here).
… where he talks about innovation, management, strategy and holistic, integrative thinking.
Then, today Victor Lombardi announces some new courses he’s planning this summer, like e.g. this one “Using Internet Business Strategy“:
Business strategy for the Internet can be radically different from other industries, as well as more fun and inventive. And creating a sustainable competitive advantage on the Internet can rely more on what we do tactically in design, marketing, and technology. This class will introduce the topic of business strategy and illustrate how Internet strategy is practiced by online and traditional companies. In class we’ll discuss how Internet strategy applies to our particular situations and create our own fictional business by applying a particular strategic method.
While I am all for applying design thinking to business I am reserved about discriminating strategy and “internet strategy”, because I don’t think that there are many offline businesses left. Today all businesses have to cope with contexts that are rapidly shifting, need to adapt continuously, employ innovative ways of innovating etc. …
And that’s not all. Supporting and enhancing productivity with internet-based instruments is both a challenge and an opportunity (as is enterprise 2.0, knowledge management 2.0, etc.). Combining both design thinking and complexity management approaches (building on the principles of connectivity, adaptivity and emergence), is the theoretical underpinning of my consulting work.
Besides, I like Victors approach to teaching and tutoring. Letting participants not only discuss different business models (or particular strategies, structures or capabilities) but helping and coaching them in designing fictional (or real-life case based) business models is in my experience both a cool and a smart way of doing a workshop.
