CPH127

Steve provided me with some great links about how to use social software as a foundation for summit/conference/community-building.

One of the links pointed me back to “Wisdom of crowds”. For Surowiecki crowds are often wiser than individuals – under certain conditions:

# Diversity of perspectives
# Independence of individuals within the group
# Decentralization, aka local experience
# Aggregation
# The integration of different views & opinions

Satisfy those conditions and you’ve hopefully cancelled out some of the error involved in all decision making – design processes:

If you ask a large enough group of diverse, independent people to make a prediciton or estimate a probability, and then everage those estimates, the errors of each of them makes in coming up with an answer will cancel themselves out. Each person’s guess, you might say, has two components: information and error. Subtract the error, and you’re left with the information.

Kottke as a nice post about the book.

I read somewhere that the western world’s heritage from Aristoteles and
Descartes has led to the seperation of the true (science), the right
(ethics) and the beatiful (aesthetics) as it was believed that science
didn’t needed the others to gain success.

Maybe this has led to the traditional
organizational structure with divisions and function-based seperation
of people which in turn has led to "chinese walls" between departments and
different knowledge groups.

In order to increase the potential of innovation - isn’t it fair to say that traditional thoughts on how an organization shall organize themselves are obsolete, maybe even counter-productive? Maybe you can get away with a matrix organization where you put down a grid of project groups over a line organization but are T-shaped employees the answer? One issue with the matrix org. as I see it is that you have different cultures competing for the power. The ones paying your wage - the line manager - often end up as the winners and the culture of single-disciplinary islands in the belly of the organization continues even though we meet the others in a project once in a while.

I think we need to re-think the complete structure of organizing ourselves. Function-based division simply does not do it anymore. What do you think? Any ideas on a replacement structure?

• Jump Associates
  (tags: jacob design business innovation consulting)
• Surviving the Ills of Design Fever (BusinessWeek)
  (tags: jacob article design innovation business process)
• Creating Positive Context
  His approach is very interesting - I want to connect with some how
  (tags: customerexperience blog hanshenrik uk usercentric)

Karl Long got it right – I think. He wants us to fail FASTER. Isn’t that the same trying to get hold on the fuzzy front end in traditional development cycles?

Chris Lawer did a presentation few weeks ago – I can recommend his insights very much.

I agree with him when saying:

Co-creation is the process of creating mutual firm and customer value on
an ongoing basis.

He is in the search for companies that may be interested in finding out more about co-creation or is already exploring potential benefits and outcomes – so visit his blog and find out more.

Ambidextrous Magazine

is the design journal of the nascent Stanford d.school. It is a magazine for the wider design community, which includes engineers and ethnographers, psychologists and philosophers. Rather than focusing on promoting product, Ambidextrous exposes the people and processes involved in design.

Ambidextrous is a forum for the cross-disciplinary, cross-market community of people with an academic, professional and personal interest in design. The magazine is geared toward high subscriber participation and interaction. It is expressly designed to be informal, irreverent, and fun to read.

via Machinelake

Just got a hardcopy of the latest issue of Fast Company and found an interesting article about "flow" and the art of work.

The concept of "flow" has been around for a while now and alot of people has talked about it since Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experiences" hit the streets in 1990. Csikszentmihalyi has later on expanded the concept of flow to business and creativity but  it is primarily associated with sports and leisure. The article asks how "flow" could be part of ones working experience and how leaders can achieve "flow" at the office. Some advise on how to do this is presented;

1. Track happiness obsessively. Check up on your co-workers/employees energy levels on a daily basis. A simple 1-5 scale will do. If it’s low - do something.
2. Focus on the personal. To achieve "flow" you need constant feedback. To do this you, simply put, need to care for your co-workers.
3. Set clear expectations. Set goals your employees can achieve. Follow up in detail, once a month, one-on-one.
4. Don’t interrupt. Particularly with creative types, there’s nothing worse than sudden disruption. And I guess, it goes for the rest of us as well

These four points might over-simplify leadership and seem obvious to many including myself. I think that is the reason they are often neglected and forgotten as "the content" of a given project rather then "the process of creating the content" are managed. The result in many cases are that the resulting "content" is not as good as it could have been and alot of teeth has been grinded in the process.

I am not saying that "flow" at the workplace equals innovation and great results or that innovation and great results demand "flow" but I believe they are related in some way.

Do you have any experiences with "flow" and can it be achieved in teamwork?

I’ve been writing about "Open Innovation" before and over the past months I’ve been s“struggling” with thoughts about how to apply OS with the design process. Is it possible, any ideas, cases?

Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar, a wonderful essay about the "bazaar" (AKA "open source") approach to creating cool stuff.  Please do read it, but in case you can’t, here are my favorite bits:

• "…you often don’t really understand the problem until after the first time you implement a solution. The second time, maybe you know enough to do it right. So if you want to get it right, be ready to start over at least once."
• "…I think Linus’ cleverest and most consequential hack was not the construction of the Linux kernel itself, but rather his invention of the Linux development model."
• "Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers."
     
• "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow…  In the cathedral-builder view of programming, bugs and development problems are tricky, insidious, deep phenomena. It takes months of scrutiny by a dedicated few to develop confidence that you’ve winkled them all out. Thus the long release intervals, and the inevitable disappointment when long-awaited releases are not perfect.  In the bazaar view, on the other hand, you assume that bugs are generally shallow phenomena - or, at least, that they turn shallow pretty quick when exposed to a thousand eager co-developers pounding on every single new release. Accordingly you release often in order to get more corrections, and as a beneficial side effect you have less to lose if an occasional botch gets out the door." 
• "Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong." 
• "I think it is not critical that the coordinator be able to originate designs of exceptional brilliance, but it is absolutely critical that the coordinator be able to recognize good design ideas from others."

In relation to handle small pieces - but loosely joined - I think the metaphor is good and applicable, but is it sufficient?

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Industrial Design mainstay, Lunar Design, just announced their new (sort-of) weekly podcast.  Entitled "Lunar’s Icon-o-Cast Podcast,"
they’ll be talking about– you guessed it– design. You can listen via
iTunes or any other podcast receiver, or be a luddite and just download
the MP3’s.

Got it from Core77