Category Archives: Web 2.0

An interesting view of IP issues

happy by Pink Sherbet Photography
Potential Confusion Avoided – rPath Video:
[Via Common Craft – Explanations In Plain English –]

Yesterday, we posted about a video by a company called rPath with the title “Cloud Computing in Plain English.” Read about it here.

The blog post came as a result of our unsuccessful efforts over six months to illustrate to rPath that their video, because of the combination of the “in Plain English” title and use of paper-cut outs on a whiteboard, was a source of confusion for Common Craft customers. Because rPath insisted on using legal means to communicate their stance, we chose to take a different route that didn’t involve lawyers.  We simply asked our fans to help us reduce confusion.

Over the course of the last 24 hours, we’ve learned a lot. First, let me say that we couldn’t have imagined the level of your response. We are very lucky to have people around us who feel passionately about helping us protect our brand. Within a couple of hours of the blog post, the message to rPath was clear and as you’ll see below, we have reached a resolution.  We thank you.

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So here we have an established organization with a very easily identified image having to deal with a new company using the same approach, possibly causing confusion amongst clients. This is what trademark is supposed to deal with. But in some cases, the look and feel of the approach is also important. In the old days this might have taken a lot of lawyers and money to resolve.

Instead of having to deal with lawyers and pay them lots of money, the community responded to a request for help. It was able to deal with an organization who threatened the health of the community.

Because of the openness and transparency of the Internet, the community took action that allowed everyone else to see what was going on. It then resulted in an accommodation that works for everyone.

All without paying lawyers. While this approach might not work everywhere or every time, it is a nice demonstration of how a connected community can deal with some IP issues.

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Facilitated change

change by seanmcgrath
Winds Of Change:
[Via Chuck’s Blog]

I really enjoy meeting customers. However, not every customer interaction is sunshine and lollipops.

Sometimes, the interactions can be tense at the beginning, but result in an extremely productive discussion.

I had one of those today, and — as I thought about it — I realized I’m starting to see this particular situation more often. It’s a harbinger of things to come.

It Started Out Rough

During a typical briefing, I’m usually asked to lead off the big technology strategy discussion. It’s usually 45 minutes of private cloud / VCE material, with plenty of time for discussion and debate.

Most of the time, it goes very well. Today, it didn’t.

About 3 minutes after I got started, I could tell by the body language that something was seriously wrong. After 5 minutes, the customer intervened.

They were polite, but firm. They didn’t want to hear about technology, or strategy, or anything like that.

They wanted to know how they were going to transform their organization.

Thus starts a nice post about change in an organization, how it happens and the process to accomplish it. More and more companies do not want to know what software to use. They want to know how to leverage their social network for change, making it easier to innovate.

They recognize that for things to work, the culture must change. But cultures are hard to change. So having an understanding of how people adopt a new idea and how it permeates an organization is critical for making the change successful.

I’ve mentioned the 5 steps people go through as they adopt an innovation. The speed that individuals move through these 5 steps places them into one of 5 groups.

And all of this works inside a human social network that must be used in order to accomplish change.

We started by sharing that communications — to all your stakeholders — is a do-or-die mission when contemplating significant organizational change. So much so that we’ve seen IT organizations appoint a communications professional (aka the marketing type) to engage and persuade people across a variety of functions.

I’d consider that a “best practice”, with one caveat. There are a lot of marketing people who know how to do nice newsletters and websites, but really don’t have much of a voice. Find a marketing person with a strong voice, and isn’t afraid of using it.

Yes, I know it sounds ludicrous that an IT organization would hire a marketing professional (don’t we have enough of those running around?) but they’d already considered this proposition on their own — we just confirmed their suspicions.

And, it logically follows that if you’re going to accelerate organizational change, you’re going to be doing a lot of communicating, and that can be a specialized skill.

First you have to engage individuals. Awareness and interest are the first two steps for anyone to pass through as they adopt an change in routine. Effective communication – marketing – is critical. Because the people you want to engage first, the innovators and early adopters, will also be the ones looking most to listen, if the message is presented properly. They are often the most aware and the most interested.

Then the next steps, evaluation and trial can be examined.

There seems to be two generic approaches to getting people to use new infrastructure and processes.

One is the classic “let’s move everything to the new world” approach. Big lists, complex plans, daunting obstacles, unknown risks — this stuff is very hard on the brain. You set yourself up for people to resist.

There are some situations where there is no other viable option, but — in many cases — there’s an incremental approach that has more to do with social engineering than project management. And I have personal experience that it works very well indeed.

Consider building the shiny new thing on a small scale — maybe a small, internal private cloud. Or, perhaps, a new self-service operational process. Anything at all that represents a significant departure from traditional approaches — it really doesn’t matter.

Put some cool people on it. Give it a nice internal brand. Use terms like “pilot” or “proof of concept” to keep people from jumping off cliffs. Communicate widely what you’re doing and why. Make it look like fun, rather than work.

When it’s ready, invite people to try it out. Enlist internal champions to provide coaching and feedback. Ask various executives to give the project a mention in their forums.

If these people like what they see, they’ll tell others, who will be curious as well. Communicate frequently, openly and transparently to anyone who’ll listen or read.

The shiny new thing will attract the innovators, who are always attracted by novelty. And the cool ones are simply another way of describing early adopters. Early adopters are critical for moving an innovation through a community because they are often the important leaders that will be listened to.

The majority of people will only adopt something new when advised to by someone they know and trust in the community. It turns out that early adopters fit this position because they have often had ideas that made everyone’s life easier. They have been successful harnringers of change before to the community. So they are listened to.

The sooner early adopters are on board, the faster things will change as they tell others.

There are many progressive IT organizations that embrace change. And there are more than a few who tend to resist any change whatsoever. This was a big concern for this particular customer.

It’s one thing to convince the business to look at IT differently. It’s another thing entirely to convince IT to look at IT differently. This somewhat paradoxical behavior is not unique to IT people: I’ve seen it in HR, legal, manufacturing, engineering, sales, etc., e.g. everyone has to change but me!

There’s a variety of techniques I’ve seen IT leaders use to combat this problem — rooting out the ringleaders, constant and patient communication, incentive and recognition programs — even bringing a small crew of managed services contractors to show how things *could* be done.

Frankly speaking, there’s nothing specific to IT in this discussion — the same techniques work for any organizational leader to bring the function along to a new world view. The simple approach is to acknowledge it’s a problem, and have a plan to deal with it.

There will always be laggards, those who change very slowly. By keeping communications open and transparent, some of these can be moved over. But there should be recognition that 100% satisfaction is unlikely.

So, find the innovators and early adopters. Move them to your side and help them change the system.

Some of the most impressive IT change agents I’ve met are networking experts.

If your mind immediately went to protocol stacks, you missed the point — these people are social animals. They build relationships across the organization in a variety of places, and they build relationships outside their company, hopefully with people who are doing much the same thing as they are doing.

The best change artists are connected to a very highly linked social network. These include the early adopters who not only have connections inside the community but many outside as well. They are looking for changes that will make their life easier. They are the easiest to get to adopt change, as long as the change is meaningful to their life and work.

Recognizing where people fall along the innovation curve, how rapidly they move through the 5 steps, is critical for making change happen. Find the innovators and early adopters. Give them the tools to help market the change, thus making the change happen from the demand of the community rather than as a mandate from above.

Facilitated change can permit a community to adopt innovations faster and become more productive while being less disrupted.

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The failure is the process

stairs by seier+seier+seier
Lessons Learned — Why the Failure of Systems Thinking Should Inform the Future of Design Thinking:
[Via Manage by Designing]

“You never learn by doing something right ‘cause you already know how to do it. You only learn from making mistakes and correcting them.”
Russell Ackoff
Design and “design thinking” is gaining recognition as an important integrative concept in management practice and education. But it will fail to have a lasting impact, unless we learn from the mistakes of earlier, related ideas. For instance, “system thinking”, which shares many of the conceptual foundations of “design thinking”, promised to be a powerful guide to management practice, but it has never achieved the success its proponents hoped for. If systems thinking had been successful in gaining a foothold in management education over the last half of the 20th century, there would be no manage by designing movement, or calls for integrative or design thinking.

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This is a very interesting discussion. It seems to me the problem is not with systems thinking but with the attempt to create a defined process for it. Human nature includes trying to grasp innovation by naming it. In many cases, old fashioned hierarchical approaches are being use to try and fold systems thinking into them.

But hierarchy is really orthogonal to systems thinking. Systems approaches are bottom up. The group defines it. Processes are top down. The leader/teacher defines it. I am not surprised that people who go to meetings to be taught by leaders what systems thinking is and the process to implement it do not get it at all.

I recently spent two days at a workshop with around a dozen architects and managers. The facilitator was one of Russ Ackoff’s former colleagues at the Wharton School. It is a reflection of what has become of systems thinking that it took most of the two days for the facilitator to explicate all that he thought we needed to know before we could begin either critiquing or applying the ideas In addition to obvious material on the nature of systems, we learned about chaos theory, living systems theory, Santiago theories, the four foundations of systems methodology (holistic thinking, operational thinking, interactive design, and socio-cultural models), five systems principles (openness, emergent properties, multi-dimensionality, counter-intuitiveness, and purposefulness), the five interactive dimensions of social systems (wealth, beauty, power, value and knowledge) and the related five dimensions of an organization (throughput processes, membership, decision, conflict management, and measurement), the elements of a throughput system (time, cost flexibility, quality, measurement, diagnostic, improvement and redesign), the nature of holistic thinking and iteration, the laws of complexity, loops and feedback, and more.

All of this was presented as foundational knowledge that was necessary before we could get to what it was that brought most of us (or at least me) to this particular workshop — designing for human interaction. In addition to the number of frameworks and ideas, and the density of the interconnections among them, there was a strong normative quality to the material and its presentation. “If one hopes to make any progress at all,” we were told, “you need to both understand and accept these related ideas.”

Systems approaches are not a series of bullet points. They are approaches for using human social networks to solve complex problems. It may not be useful for accountants but it can be critical for researchers.

It is not a set of bullet points. People do not simply change to a new approach because someone else says to or has a bunch of fancy names. I’ve mentioned what is necessary. The post also recognizes this.

These requirements are at odds with how we tend to acquire new knowledge. Rather than accepting a new idea because we must, we like to try it out. A new skill is most likely to interest us if it contributes to both short-term and long-term learning objectives. And the easier it is to try out parts of a theory, the more likely we are to jump in.


Systems thinking works when people learn and adopt an approach, not when they are told the steps involved. And they have to recognize that it has short term benefits.

Use a bottom up approach. Find the early adopters and get them on board. Work the adoption curve and you will have much more success. That should be the lessoned learned.

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Disengagement is necessary for innovation adoption

Eartly Adoption: Not Just For Tech?:
[Via Amy Sample Ward’s Version of NPTech]


There is a great post from Louis Gray that I’ve been thinking about lately with an interesting view of 5 Major Stages of early adopter behavior.
The Five Stages of Early Adopter Behavior include:
Discovery, QA and Spreading the Word
Promotion and Collaboration
Mainstream Use and Engagement
Sense of Entitlement, Nitpicking and Reduced Use
Migration to Something New, Call to Move Followers

You can read the full descriptions of the 5 Stages here.
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I’ve discussed early adopter behavior before. The first few steps compress the normal 5 step process everyone goes through in adopting a new innovation – awareness, interest, evaluation, trial and adoption. Entitlement and migration describe something else – some of the early stages of adopting a new innovation require the rejection of the previous one.

This is also behavior seen by innovators. Innovators love something new and even after adopting a new innovation are often looking for the next best thing. But almost anyone who adopts a new innovation must break away from the old one.

It may well be a different process for the innovators/early adopters than for the rest of the group, the early and late majorities. Most people are informed about what choices to make by early adopters/innovators. These people do not generally discover new innovations and will adopt what others tell them to. They rely on key influential members of the community to inform them about new innovations.

Innovators and early adopters, on the other hand, rely on outside influences and their own personal knowledge to inform themselves about adopting an innovation. They do not simply change because someone told them to. So they may have more personally invested in an innovation and may have to do some emotional disengagement from a previous innovation in order to begin the process of adopting a new one. They essentially have to go through a re-evaluation process in order to move on.

Finding faults with the old makes it easier to move on to the joys of the new. I would expect that the initial stages of adopting, such as awareness, overlap with the latter stages of disengagement. I would also expect that innovators are more likely to cobble together problems with the old in order to justify moving on to the new, moving through the re-evaluation period as fast as they move through the other 5.

For early adopters, evaluation is their hallmark, so I would expect re-evaluation would also be important to them. They would spend some time on this ‘process, more carefully weighing the benefits of a new innovation with the disadvantages of the old.

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Innovation in a time of abundance

hourglass
by John-Morgan
The Role Of Abundance In Innovation:
[Via Techdirt]

A few weeks back, Dennis wrote about a recent Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker about innovation, but I was just shown another article from the same issue, by Adam Gropnik, which may be even more interesting. Gopnik points to evidence challenging the idea that “necessity is the mother of invention,” by noting that more innovation seems to occur in times of abundance, rather than times of hardship. The idea is that in times of hardship you’re just focused on getting through the day. You don’t have time to experiment and try to improve things — you make do with what you have. It’s in times of plenty that people finally have time to mess around and experiment, invent and then innovate.

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It takes free time to be innovative. If one is under a lot of time pressure, one’s focus is not on experimenting with new ways to do things. The focus is on completing the job. There is no time to waste on experimenting or dealing with the many failures that true innovation presents before success.

That is why the most innovative organizations permit a set amount of time to be spent on anything.

When I worked at Immunex, you could devote a set percentage of your time to a project of your own choosing. You did not even have to tell your boss what it was. You only had to justify it when you had spent a reasonable amount of time working on it. This helped foster a sense that you had spare time, even if you did not use it.

Now, often really innovative things come into being when there are constraints. That is, money or resources are limited so a new approach has to be used. But in these cases, time is not the real limiting step.

If you want to have a innovative organization, then there must be time allowed for innovation development, meaning a lot of things will fail. That means the time pressures must be abated somewhat. One way to help is to use online tools to enhance the workflow, permitting time to be rescued from inefficient processes.

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Not just non-profits

The Second Coming of the Online Community Manager:
[Via NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network –]

Flickr Photo: varnentFlickr Photo: varnent
Your job isn’t going to exist in a few years, and it ain’t the economy’s fault. Blame it on social media.

If you’re implementing social media smartly at your organization, you already know it raises more issues for nonprofits than it solves. Chief among them: who does it? If social media is about individuals conversing authentically with a community, who’s in charge of the conversation?

You’ll find most people responsible for social media in marketing departments. But shouldn’t program staff be involved, as well? How about leadership?

I’m fascinated by the ways social media is changing how organizations structure themselves — and in particular, how social media is redefining job titles in our sector. To whit: the second coming of the online community manager.

ReadWriteWeb has a new report out, “The Read Write Web Guide to Community Management“, that marks the ascension of the online community manager (2.0). They do a great job summarizing exactly why the role is so challenging:

The job is part customer service, part marketing, part public relations, and part web savvy. Some of the skills required are timeless and some are very new and unique to the web.

Yeah, what they said.

We used to organize our jobs by who we were talking at: people with problems (customer service), the population we want to engage (marketing), the media (pr). Now, we don’t have the luxury of simply talking AT people. Those same people are talking to us, and each other.

We all need someone to be part of that conversation.

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It may be important for both non-profits and for-profits to have one person whose job entails servicing an online community. This person serves as a focal point both for the outside community and for the organization’s community.

But it can not only be that person who is involved. There need to be others helping create a vibrant community that models a human social network in the digital realm. It is very hard for just one person to be responsible for ALL online social interactions. In many cases, their personal voice becomes the voice of the group, which may not be a very useful thing for diverse organizations.

There need to at least be guest ‘speakers’ from all parts of the group, adding their own voice to help balance things out and provide a much richer ‘voice’ to the outside world. The online community manager must also evangelize the technology to those on the inside, getting them to participate. By doing so a much stronger community can be created.

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Adopting an idea

I happened to read this article from the Center for American Progress about the different groups found in polls about global warming. and was immediatley taken with the numbers. Here is the relevant figure I wish to discuss.

figure 1

I’ve read a lot about how new ideas and innovations work their way through a population (here are some handy examples). What struck me was the these percentages are actually almost exactly the numbers one would expect to see for any innovation or idea moving its way through a society. Read the whole report . Seldom does a survey’s report find people falling into similar ‘types’ seen that full scale research efforts also identified.

Look at the numbers – 18%, 33%, 19%, 12%, 11% and 7%. I’ve mentioned several times before the different groups that are found as an innovation or as new idea diffuses through a community. There has been a lot of work that indicates that there are 5 groups present as a community adopts a new idea:

  • innovators
  • early adopters
  • early majority
  • late majority
  • laggards

From the work of Beal, Rogers and Bohlen (and the Wikipedia page), the distribution of each of these types in a population follows a bell curve,

doption of innovations

Now look at the numbers from the global warming survey.They fit pretty well into these categories. Just another item to demonstrate how acceptance of a novel idea or innovation breaks down.

This can also give us hints about how far we are along the process of adoption of the innovation

If one looks at the cumulative adoption of an innovation in a community, it follows an S-shaped curve, as seen in the original paper from Ryan and Gross from the 30s:

diffusion of an innovation

This same sort of curve is seen again and again. It does not matter whether the innovation is a new hybrid corn or a new drug. It appears that this type of adoption is very dependent on human social networks. Each group informs itself based on what the previous group knows (i.e. the group to the left).

For example, the innovators tend to be highly connected with many sources of information from outside a community, acting to bring that information into a group from outside and determine whether the idea the innovators are playing with has any real use. The early adopters act as a bridge from the innovators and the rest of the community, usually adding their own input and serving as opinion leaders on new innovations.

The 68% in the middle are deferential to the opinions of people that they trust. They usually need explicit approval from leaders in their community before adopting a new innovation.So, the early middle adopt a new innovation when the early adopters do while the late majority waits until the early middle does. The laggards serve as a check on the entire group to make sure the community does not get overly excited by the innovators and their shiny new toys.

There is, then, a pretty defined path to adoption of new innovations and ideas in a community. So, where are we with regard to progressing along this curve for climate change? Well, the curve starts with 0% adoption of the innovation and progresses to 100% (or close to it), so we are obviously some place along the curve.

Examination of the curve above shows that once the early adopters and innovators have made the change (that is, when about 16% are onboard), then the rate of adoption increases tremendously, almost going exponential, as the majority in the middle rapidly begin adopting the change.

Well, we now have more than the 16% on board with global warming, so we should expect rapid change. I think that is exactly what we are seeing.

In fact, the early majority is really moving close to where the early adopters/innovators are, with even some of the laggards getting on board. Ten years ago, there was a lot of doubt that climate change was even happening. Now look at the distribution:

figure 2

Almost everyone is above ‘Don’t know” and the various ‘global warming is not happening’ choices. We are making progress. And I suspect we are well along the part of the curve signaling rapid change in people’s views.

The debate is really not going to be if global warming is happening but what to do about it, an entirely new sort of debate. And some of the debating points appear to already have been decided. For instance, carbon dioxide as a pollutant:

figure 19

or increasing fuel efficiency, something Obama just announced:

figure 20

Both of these show significant support throughout the population. In contrast, there are also some ideas that are still in the very early stages with even the early adopters unsure if they should take up the innovation:

figure 22

All in all, a great report illustrating the standard process as new ideas percolate through a population. We are well through the stages of acceptance of global warming and making good progress on what to do about it.

Just remember, once the early adopters/innovatoers have taken a position on a new innovation or idea, then change usually happens quite rapidly. So, identifying who those early opinion makers are and educating them can increase the rate of diffusion of the innovation quite a lot.

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An op-ed I wrote

xconomy

I have an article published online at the Xconomy Forum called
Biotech Needs Charity, and Profit Motive, To Flourish.

It discusses the possible role of non-profit research institutions in Seattle in new drug development. It also mentions a new corporate entity called an L3C that could have some impact in this area. This permits an entirely new focus of research to occur on diseases that might not have the profit potential needed by current approaches.

I first heard about an L3C at an Idea Club that dealt with green microfinancing supported by the Sustainable Path Foundation, whose board I am on. Idea Club is a monthly forum where anyone who has an interest in the topic can attend and enter a conversation.

It is designed to be very open with little of the hierarchy seen in normal lecture-audience presentation. In last month’s meeting, someone mentioned L2C as a possible approach here in the US rather than microfinancing. None of us had heard of an L3C before so I quickly looked it up.

I realized immediately how it would inform my ideas about an article and my op-ed is the result.

So much of the health needs of our world are unattended because of the cost of development of new therapeutics. This means that only very highly profitable drugs can be developed, those with market sizes in the billions.

The non-profit research institutions in the Seattle area are working from over $2 billion in grants on several different diseases, many of which will never produce the profit needed for commercial development.

An L3C, or similar, gives them the ability to develop drugs that do not have the high profit requirements of current drugs being developed and expands the universe of approaches for finding new breakthrough therapeutics.

Essentially, the current model of near term, high profits would remain, as well as the very long term, low/no profit model of the non-profit research organizations. There would be the addition of a new model, a longer term, modest profit company, that could work on drugs that remain out of reach for current funding opportunities.

This might open up a whole new realm of therapeutics for our sick.

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