Creation Nets
Posted on July 20, 2006
Filed Under Content Co-Creation |
The early 21st century is breakout time for people who have spent their lives straightjacketed by information technology. Yes, kids use Bebo and MySpace but the rest of us who endured the previous generation of management by IT tools are looking for a bit of biography feel-good too.
The story begins with copier repair man. The copier repair man arrived in the form of a classic study by John Seeley-Brown at Xerox, now self-nominated Chief of Confusion and champion, along with a few others of Open Innovation.
Copier repair man is symbol, not quite a Superman, for how we create what we know, socially. Seeley-Brown’s department at Xerox saved $30 million annually for Xerox by finding ways for copier repair men to communicate with each other. Back then corporations were persuaded by copier repair man’s sucess to return some power to staff in the field, by using IT systems to help people communicate knowledge (note, it was not intended to rebuild social networks which was back then a step too far).
Twenty years later look who’s communicating! Even six year olds have social networks.
Still we shouldn’t forget where the original social software ideas came from because it will help us understand where they will go.
New technology has created significant isolation. I spend hours sat at my desk whereas twenty years ago I would be out on the streets with a camera crew or arranging interviews and heading off to the plane.
I now do e-mail interviews, never getting to look into the eyes of the person I am reporting on. I can’t afford a story to go down once I’ve set off to explore it, so my priorities are saving time and money by not traveling, and making sure a story works somehow - though I won’t say any how.
Journalism used to be part of a vast social network that tied together the rising executive, the entrepreneur, the maverick, the rock musician, and the reader, viewers, punter. News organisations were a kind of glue, and often the maverick documentary that went into the gutter is what brought the dispossssed back into the network of social networks.
Such institutional network maintanance is dying out. The fallacy is we don’t play that role any more because we’ve been challenged by new media. Yet the papers I work for are very, very profitable.
And the last film I made was for the BBC, which is the richest media organisation on the planet. There is no current, topical challenge to many, many media organisations, though. The threats lie in the future, though some are making a mess of thepresent.
In place of the work that used to get done there’s now a lot of make-do. And where it’s headed I suspect with the concurrent arrival of social software, is that younger people are now growing up disenchanted with the idea of authority - well we’ve all been there but never has our sense of rebellion been so well served by technology - unable to see a networking or cohesive role for a morally driven section of society called journalists, film makers or documentary producers.
I suspect the process of poor craftsmanship, disillusion and the dispersal of authority is the same everywhere. Who has the luxury these days of following their conscience and making sure a job is done thoroughly, properly and for the right reasons? And who won’t turn to the group for reassurance?
So while companies around the world might be puzzling over open innovation and wondering how to incorporate the torrent of creativity that’s around us, those in the creative professions are in retreat and those in the workforce are disillusioned.
I recently interviewed an old system adminstrator who got out - he now blogs, writes for a few websites and the odd newspaper. Boy, is he happy. He’s learning a craft, just as the craft is in morph mode, just as the rules are being refashioned. It is exhilarating.
Among the copier repair crews of Xerox twenty years ago Seeley-Brown found that most mechanics out there in the field found work-arounds. Copier’s are notoriously unpredictable and repair manuals were not much good at illuminating the unpredictable.
Mechanics are a bit like open source software writers. They come from a tradition where the solution is something they want to own. Their kudos lies in working outside the manual. And typically they would pass on tips and tricks when they met in the canteen. Workflow that has them out on the road permanently precluded kudos and solution sharing.
What happens in more formal knowledge environments like newspapers and television is that the lack of contact persuades us we can just as well compensate by extending our own assumptions to cover the gaps.
Routinely I’ve found when my own assumptions are allowed to roam, I get things wrong. In notorious incidents in Britain and America journalists n the 1990s and early 2000s were found to be making stories up.
Right now I think we have to get used to the idea that the knowledge that matters comes from the maelstrom, from whatever floats in chaos. It’s the option that’s left after making a few mistakes.
I think meanwhile we’re reinventing what used to be called an apprentice system when centuries or at least decades of experience were distilled into an unofficial manual.
The emerging “manual” can be seen in entrepreneurism where for a decade now pioneers have been fashioning a new way to innovate in the way we build companies.
It can be seen in some areas of new media where, for example on MixCast, the hip-hop and dance scenes are entering a kind of mainstream and earning global kudos for innovative forms of urban dissent, documentary, fashion and sport.
Or on college campuses where young people are reshaping the rules of public performance.
And of course podcasts and vidcasts reinvent the manual for radio and television.
These are in fact all creation nets as defined by Henry Chesborough and quoted by Seeley Brown. They have their roots in open source software but that’ a spirit thats now wandering and proliferating.
My reservations about companies taking on open innovation is that the bunch of free spirits who are the real creatives in their milieu want to own the kudos rights and distribution that comes from innovating; and the fact that creation nets have transformation as their goal (transformation of a power structure, a value proposition, a content formula, and a rulebook).
Couple it to the growing evidence that value is created collaboratively and you have the formula for a transformation in corporate values, a new rule book for how companies relate to their staff.
Apply this to a creative organisation such as the BBC, which is busy trying to transform itself, and you see some lessons. The organisation of the future needs to take a view of what can be known as something that is fuzzy, emerges into the light and then disappears.
The external connectivity of organisations has to broaden; size is the enemy, structure need to be broken up or at least loosened; rather than think about relocating departments they needs to think about dislocating into many looser networks that can share the badge; they can’t talk about one set of values because increasingly we need to acknowledge many sets of values; they need to redistribute kudos power. Is there a word for what needs to happen? Democratising the organisation might be it.
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