Let Us Go Boldly Into the Present (text version) :: Michael Edson

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See also the powerpoint and video versions of this presentation

Michael Edson

Director, Web and New Media Strategy

Smithsonian Institution, Office of the CIO

Washington, D.C.

Version 1.0

September 2011 [Updated April 6, 2012]

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Michael Edson, Let Us Go Boldly Into the Present…9/6/2011 4/6/2012

[NOTE: I'm not really following any particular style guide for citations and links—

just winging it, mostly to make the ideas more shareable. M.P.E 9/23/2011]

“Come, let us go boldly into the present, my brothers and sisters.”

A little preamble. I tweet at @mpedson.

This deck will soon be on slideshare along with a directory—a bestiary—of every

other idea I've thought of and worked on in the last few years at

http://www.slideshare.net/edsonm.

Many of you are familiar with the work we've been doing with the Smithsonian

Commons and the Smithsonian Commons prototype, and all that is online at this

trailhead: http://www.si.edu/commons/prototype, and on the public wiki on which

we created and continue to refine the Smithsonian’s Web and New Media Strategy,

http://smithsonian-webstrategy.wikispaces.com.

Note that I'm not a policy maker at the Smithsonian. I'm not an official

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http://smithsonian-webstrategy.wikispaces.com/

http://twitter.com/#!/mpedson


spokesperson. I don’t have a budget or a staff. I have a business card that says

Director of Web and New Media Strategy. You are all duly warned—I'm not an

official spokesperson of the Smithsonian Institution or its wholly owned

subsidiaries.

[slide sequence, excerpt from William Gibson’s “Zero History.”]

A reading…

“But now he saw, however briefly but with peculiar clarity, an aerial penguin cross

the intersection ahead of him.

"Something wholly penguin-shaped, apparently four or five feet long, from beak-tip

to trailing feet, and made, it seemed, of mercury. A penguin wrapped in fluid mirror,

reflecting a bit of neon from the street below. Swimming. Moving as a penguin

moves underwater, but through the Latin Quarter air, at just above the height of

second-story windows. Moving down the center of the street that crossed the one he

walked on. So that it was revealed only as it crossed the intersection. Swimming.

Propelling itself, in a gracefully determined but efficient fashion, with its quicksilver

flippers. Then a bicycle crossed, on the street, going in the opposite direction.

“Did you see that?” Milgrim asked the cyclist…

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This spring I was asked to give a talk as part of a lecture series at the Cincinnati

Contemporary Arts Center. The series was titled "Where do we go from here?" and I

thought that to do any justice to that idea of where you go from here you first had to

get down and think about where "here" was to begin with. And I think "here" isn't

where it used to be. Where is here?

If you lived in Southern Europe 32,000 years ago you might have made paintings

like this. These paintings were made during a period of artistic and cultural

continuity that probably lasted 25,000 years. 1,000 generations. Imagine that.

Imagine being 10,000 years into that. You could look forward to another 15,000

years of relatively unchanging "here." [See Judith Thurman's Letter from Southern

France: First Impressions: What does the world's oldest art say about us? The New

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Yorker, June 28, 2008.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/23/080623fa_fact_thurman]

Contrast this with what Sir Ted Robinson had to say at the summary keynote of the

TED conference about our current, fleeting notion of "here."

"…Education is meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp. If you think of

it, children starting school this year [2006] will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a

clue, despite all the expertise that's been on parade over the last 4 days, what the

world will look like in 5 years time, and yet we're meant to be educating them for it.

So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary. "

["Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity"

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html, filmed

February 2006.]

And then, in "where do we go from here," there's that word go. What is go all about?

I think go is all about the future—and what is the future but a bunch of stuff that

hasn't happened yet? …The future is stuff that hasn't happened yet…Or is it? (That's

the question I want to bear down on today, and I want to think about what it means

for us.)

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http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/23/080623fa_fact_thurman


This "here" and "go" stuff isn't just idle philosophy. Understanding here and go

really matters.

I've been doing digital strategy for a few years now and I used to think that it was

the strategist's job, his or her function, to be a seer—a fortune teller who through

magical powers and privileged knowledge could rub a crystal ball and tell a story

about how the future would turn out that could help organizations, businesses,

museums, libraries, archives, government—know what to do, now, so that the

future would turn out in a happy way for them.

Somewhere I heard the expression that "software is language that does work." (I’ve

been looking for a citation for this on and off for months. If anybody can help me

track down the person who originally said this I’m offering a bounty.) It's really

true! If you've ever written software it's almost magical: you type the right words on

your computer and hit "enter" and the code runs and your database grows, websites

launch, the flaps on an airplane wing go up and down. It's an amazing feeling.

I feel the same way about strategy—strategy is language that does work. It's a tool

that people use to decide what to do, and what not to do, every day. Strategy should

tell a story about life, about work, and about the world around us. Strategy should

help people understand the world they're in and where it’s headed. Strategy should

help people develop a narrative about change, and create compelling mental images

that help prioritize tactical opportunities. Strategy is all about relevance to real

people doing real work. So this pensive reflection about where go and here are is not

navel gazing or pointless philosophy—it's directly relevant to the task at hand, the

task of helping people and organizations do their jobs.

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This was 1997. I knew that the future was going to be different because the day-to-

day technology experience of the present was only partly formed. It was kind of

crappy.

This is a stack of U.S. Robotics dial-up modems, circa 1997. That's the way half the

people in the US who were online got online in 1997.1

Remember that? Remember the floppy disks that sometimes came with those

modems? That was a horrible experience. And I knew that the future, somewhere

down the road, would have to be different because accessing the Internet through a

1997 dial-up modem was so unfulfilling.

As an aside, I've noticed a pattern in presentations where technology people talk

about the future…Usually a wise person is standing on the stage and they show a

slide with a date at the top and a T.F.O. at the bottom of the slide—a Technology 6


Fetish Object. So the date is some number of years ago and the T.F.O. is kids sitting

around watching a black-and-white television or using 8-track tape players, or some

other piece of technology from our youth that has comically aged in the past 10 or

20 years…

Here's another date and T.F.O. combination.

This was the first digital camera I ever used, a Quicktake 200 from Apple.2 Anybody

here ever own one of these things? What a nightmare. With all due respect to what

must have been some remarkable engineering for the time, as a user—you hoped—

you prayed on bended knee that the future would turn out differently because this

was such a monstrosity—such a kludge of the physical laws of nature. I used that

one too on the right—an earlier model with no way to manually focus, zoom, or

preview images. It stored eight photos at 640x480. I'm going to break out in hives

just thinking about this era of digital photography.

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Here's 1997 Geocities. It was awesome in its own way, I could create my own

personal website—but didn't we hope it would get better? If you used it then,

couldn't you sense that it would, should, and could get better?

Windows 97. I still, to this day, feel naked unless I have a DOS boot disk in my bag as

a security blanket so I know I can boot a Windows 97 machine if the OS gets

corrupted.

Remember this? The dreaded Blue Screen of Death. If you used Windows 97, every

once in a while your screen would go blank and then turn into this dump of memory

addresses and useless error codes, then you'd have to reboot and hope it didn't

happen again. Good times!

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[Brief digression on the Blue Screen of Death, for the sake of nostalgia and comic

relief. See BSOD gallery at http://www.techmynd.com/50-plus-blue-screen-of-

death-displays-in-public/ ]

But the general idea here is that in 1997, when we were thinking about digital

strategy, digital preservation, technology—how to do the right thing the next day we

came to work—the future seemed a long way away. We knew it would come, but it

felt distant and abstract. There was a gap there, between the present and the future,

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http://www.techmynd.com/50-plus-blue-screen-of-death-displays-in-public/

http://www.techmynd.com/50-plus-blue-screen-of-death-displays-in-public/


and the tool we used in business and government and organizations to span that gap

was called strategy.

In the last year or two I've participated in lot of digital strategy planning workshops

—some for household brands and cultural institutions that everyone has heard of

and some for small, obscure groups. And the question that is invariably being asked

in these workshops is how are we going to figure out the future?

There's a kabuki like form that these workshops often take.

There's usually a Big Conference Room. This picture is not a workshop I was at, it's

something I grabbed off of Flickr—but this, the body language and the furnishings

and attire and accoutrements, represents the archetype. There's a room, and a guy

or gal at the front of the room, and whiteboards and projectors and sometimes those

mega sized post-it notes. And the body language is usually the person standing at

the front waving their arms around going "Blah! Blah! Blah! Digital strategy! Future!

Blah! Blah! Blah! It's 2012! We've got to do more…" and they invoke the name of the

flavor of the week—the Strategy Fetish Object, or S.F.O. It might be a blog, Twitter or

Facebook accounts, crowdsourcing, a mobile app.

Usually the conversation is focused on the superficial aspects of these disruptive

things. One or two people in the room are thinking about the deep significance—the

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challenges to established priorities and values that the S.F.O's represent, but

everyone else around the room is translating the conversation into the broadcast

idiom. Broadcast. Broadcast. Broadcast.

Broadcast. Push. We do stuff and we use the Internet to deliver it with increasing

volume at a passive and grateful audience—or an audience that is only superficially

involved in any meaningful way—just like the 20th century. And wasn't that great?

We did a lot of great stuff in the 20th century.

So the digital strategy people are saying "Future! Future!" and the people around the

table are saying "Yeah, we get it. Broadcast but cheaper and with a bigger

megaphone." Broadcast. Broadcast. Broadcast. The water bottles on the tables are

even saying broadcast. The water bottles—and here I'm getting to the crux of it—

the water bottles are translating what we've got to do today into the organizational

physics of the last epoch. We're downsampling the message into a familiar idiom,

and because of that the real opportunities available to us in the present moment are

slipping away.

Let me give you a specific example.

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This is from a strategy workshop I participated in at a major museum in the

Northern hemisphere last year. (Don't try to guess what museum this is from—

you'll get it wrong!)

This is the mission of the museum:

"Become the preeminent place for engagement and dialogue about national identity

and the accomplishment and experience of citizens."

That's a great mission—a great vision!

At the workshop, one of the initiatives proposed to fulfill that mission was,

"Build an online collection of 10 million portraits of citizens and their stories,

created and uploaded without official curation by members of the public. Build a

community around this initiative to fuel engagement with national history,

biography, and artistic creativity." 12


That's a pretty strong and compelling project!

After 90 minutes of meeting in a room like the conference room I showed a few

slides back, brainstorming together and working with post-it notes and on white

boards, this was the project that was eventually adopted: "Do a website about family

portraits."

This is indicative of what's happening in that strategy room, all over the world, again

and again and again.

And we should know better. If you've been paying attention the last ten years or so,

what you need to know now to solve the problem—the disconnect—that's

happening in these strategy workshops has been broadly known and written about.

It's been an open secret.

Five to ten years ago, Howard Rheingold, Lawrence Lessig, Tim O'Reilly, Don

Tapscott and Anthony Williams, and even the editors of Time Magazine observed

the world around us and told us true things about what was happening.

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Smart Mobs

Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution was printed and put

on bookstore shelves in 2002. I've been re-reading it, carrying it around in my bag,

on-and-off, for years, and Rheingold nailed it. He nailed the moment we're in now, 9

years ago—actually 11 years ago. He talks about collective action without central

authority, crowdsourcing, the rise of cheap and ubiquitous mobile platforms, the

global knowledge commons, the fact that most of the world will interact with the

World Wide Web through a mobile device—all very firmly established a decade ago.

The introduction to Smart Mobs, titled "How to recognize the future when it lands

on you," begins,

"The first signs of the next shift began to reveal themselves to me on a spring

afternoon in the year 2000. That was when I began to notice people on the streets of

Tokyo staring at their mobile phones instead of talking to them. The sight of this

behavior, now commonplace in much of the world, triggered a sensation I had

experienced a few times before—the instant recognition that a technology is going

to change my life in ways I can scarcely imagine."

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[Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, Cambridge, MA.

Perseus. 2002. Page xi]

The Future of Ideas

Lawrence Lessig's The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected

World also was published in 2002. I'm going to read a brief quote, and as I do keep

in mind that this is two years before Facebook was founded and four years before

Twitter launched.

"The open and neutral platform of the Internet has spurred hundreds of companies

to develop new ways for individuals to interact. E-mail was the start; but most of the

messages that now build contact are the flashes of chat in groups or between

individuals—as spouses (and others) live at separate places of work with a single

window open to each other through an instant messenger. Groups form easily to

discuss any issue imaginable; public debate is enabled by removing perhaps the

most significant cost of human interaction— synchronicity. I can add to your

conversation tonight; you can follow it up tomorrow; someone else, the day after.

And this is just the beginning, as the technology will only get better."

[Lessig, Lawrence, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected

World Random House, NY 2002. P. 10]

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What is Web 2.0?

Tim O'Reilly wrote "What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the

Next Generation of Software" in 2005. I've carried around a dozen of copies of it

over the years. I've put it on every laptop and mobile device I've ever owned. I've

handed it out to people on the street and begged them to read it. Many people who

should have read it, haven't, and many who have haven't shown that they've thought

hard enough about the central assertions of the 2.0 design pattern that Tim O'Reilly

laid out six years ago,

1. The long tail

2. Data is the next Intel Inside

3. Users add value

4. Network effects by default

5. Some rights reserved

6. The perpetual beta

7. Cooperate, don't control

8. Software above the level of a single device

These ideas—these assertions about what is and isn't important were not formed in

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2005 in an isolated act of intellectual prowess. They came through brainstorming

and reflection and practical knowledge of the things that worked and didn't work

following the crash of the dot-com bubble in 2001.

[Tim O'Reilly, What is Web 2.0? September 30, 2005.

http://oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html?page=1. Accessed

7/21/2011]

Wikinomics

From "Wikinomics" by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, first published in

"Smart companies are encouraging, rather than fighting, the heaving growth of

massive online communities—many of which emerged from the fringes of the Web

to attract tens of millions of participants overnight. Even ardent competitors are

collaborating on path-vreaking scientific initiatives that accelerate discovery in their

industries. Indeed as a growing number of firms see the benefits of mass

collaboration, this new way of organizing will eventually displace the traditional

corporate structures as the economy's primary engine of wealth creation."

[Tapscott, Don and Williams, Anthony D. Wikinomics. USA: Penguin, 2006. page 1]

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"You" were Time Magazine's person of the year in 2006.

Doesn't that seem like a long time ago? The cover said,

"December 25, 2006. Person of the Year. You. Yes, you. You control the Information

Age. Welcome to your world."

An excerpt from the article demonstrates that Time's writers understood just how

much the tables had turned from broadcast to co-authorship and co-ownership of

production—back in 2006!

“And we [by which they mean the collective we, all of us] didn’t just watch, we also

worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and

reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our

candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered

bombing runs and built open-source software.”

I remember seeing that issue on the newsstand and thinking "Yes, change will get

easier now that Time has validated these ideas."

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There's a new sheriff in town. Or new sheriffs, plural. And, actually, my whole point

is that they're not that new. They're old, and we should be able to recognize them

and act upon them by now.

1. The Long Tail. Chris Anderson's assertions about the immense power of digitally

connected niche audiences.

2. Joy's Law—Bill Joy was the co-founder of Sun Microsystems and he famously

quipped that "no matter what business you're in, most of the smart people work for

someone else." 3

3. Cognitive Surplus

Cognitive Surplus—this is a new book by Clay Shirky, [Shirky, Clay, Cognitive

Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in the Digital Age, Penguin, 2010] but Clay has a

magical way of recognizing established phenomena in the world around us and

weaving them together into new ideas about what's really happening. Clay says

"Imagine treating the time of the world's educated citizenry as an aggregate, a kind

of cognitive surplus." [Kindle edition, location 146] What could we do? Clay asserts

that there are a trillion hours of free time in the educated, Internet connected world

that can be harnessed for societal good. This idea got my attention right away as an

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employee of an organization whose mission is "the increase and diffusion of

knowledge." (Clay notes that as a point-of-reference American watch over two

hundred billion hours of TV annually - - enough human thought-hours to create two

thousand complete Wikipedias, every year. [Kindle edition, location 175]

Network Effects—I can't talk enough about network effects. I've had those two

words written on the whiteboard in my office for years. Tim O'Reilly laid it out for

me in 2005 and I'm still learning how to explain it to people.

Moore's Law, which addresses the increase in the number of transistors you can fit

onto a silicon chip and therefore the accelerating speed and memory (and falling

costs) of computers. Acceleration means compounding increases of speed and

storage. If I've done my math correctly, in 12 years the iPhone will probably be

1,706 times more powerful than the computer I'm using today to show these slides.

That's a supercomputer in your pocket for a couple of hundred bucks, Internet

connected, and loaded with all kinds of cheap and interesting sensors: cameras,

thermometers, accelerometers, altimeters, GPS. And 12 years is nothing, no time at

all. I've got bottles of wine in my fridge that have been there for 12 years. 12 years

will go by in a flash and most of us aren't thinking hard enough about the impact

that these mobile devices will have. (The last 12 years sure went by in a flash.)

Kathy Sierra, a hero of mine, has been telling people that in the old epoch, the

relationship between brands or organizations and the public was follow me, buy my

product, because I'm great. Now, she says, the proposition is follow me, buy my

product because I help you to be great. Kathy tweeted "I'm your user. I'm supposed

to be the protagonist. I'm on a hero's journey. Your company should be the

mentor/helpful sidekick. Not an orc." [@kathysierra, November 5, 2009. Sierra's

Web site is Creating Passionate Users, http://headrush.typepad.com/ ]

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These are not terribly new ideas. Not if you've been paying attention the last few

years.

Note this pointer.com interview with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales about the

Associated Press's new website strategy. The strategy, called “Protect, Point, Pay,"

describes how AP is going to compete with Wikipedia as “a focal point for discovery

of authoritative sources of news.” [Jimmy Wales; AP's 'Landing Pages' a good, if Late,

Idea, Steve Myers, published 11/15/2011,

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/99432/jimmy-wales-aps-

landing-pages-a-good-if-late-idea/ Accessed 7/21/2011]

Wales says,

"Nothing in this strategy couldn't have been written by someone actually savvy in

Internet culture 5 years ago."

Ouch.

So 5 years ago, looking at that list I just pulled out, we knew stuff pretty firmly about

the physics of organizations, the physics of creating value in society, that most of our

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organizations haven't actualized yet. We've been cautious bystanders to a certain

degree.

And around the time I was working on the "Where do we go from here?" talk and

thinking about "now" and the disconnect between the now we've know about for

years and the so-called future, and I came across an interview with William Gibson,

the author of Zero History—the source of the flying penguin passage that I read a

few minutes ago.

Gibson said,

"I think that when I was first reading science fiction, which would have been in the

late 1950’s, the consensual 'now' was 3 or 4 years long, and with 3 or 4 years of

relatively unchanging 'now' a writer of science fiction had the space in which to

erect something..."

Gibson continues,

"With that long a ‘now’ you could build a relatively big structure before that now

hauled itself into the future that made your big structure obsolete. But today, now

can feel like a news cycle. It’s like the now is too narrow to allow for that big a

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construct. We have too many wildcards in play with regard to our future to casually

erect believable futures beyond a few years."

[ Transcribed from the blog post "Audio from last night's live event with William

Gibson and Cory." Cory Doctorow, 10/5/2011,

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/10/05/audio-from-last-nigh.html, accessed

7/21/2011. Another important perspective on Gibson's relationship with 'now' is

Network Realism: William Gibson and new forms of Fiction, 10/25/2010, James

Bridle, booktwo.org/notebook/network-realism/, accessed 7/21/2011]

The penguins are real.

Poking around a little more I found out that the penguins are real.

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[video: Festo – AirPenguin, http://youtu.be/jPGgl5VH5go]

So the science fiction penguins, the world-building that I got seduced by through

William Gibson's Zero History, is real. It's not science fiction. It's real, now.

The flying penguins are a metaphor for all this change that has arrived, from the

future, into the present, without most of us noticing.

These futures that our visionaries thought about and wrote books about years ago

(which, given publishing lead times really means that in many cases these ideas

were developed years before the publication dates) are real now.

A few years ago organizations were wringing their hands about participating in sites

like Facebook and YouTube and Twitter—"Will it dilute the brand? Isn't it just a

bunch of people sharing pictures of their cats?" Are we really still in doubt about the

business value of these sites now? No.

This future that we're supposed to be planning for and gradually, slowly, positioning

for is now. The distance between now and the future has compressed to almost

nothing. It's as if a big part of the future has broken off of the rest of the future, like

an iceberg, and crashed into us.

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And for most of our organizations, the future doesn't matter as much as it once did.

Most of us have been slow out of the blocks. And there's so much business value—

and I use business with a lower case "b"—there's so much value, shared value, to be

had just by following the dynamics and basic physics of digital culture now that I

just don’t think our organizations need to be having terribly lofty ideas about the

future. This notional future. It's really just opening our eyes and looking at what's

happening all around us in the present. And to paraphrase William Gibson, the

present is far more interesting—far more interesting—than most of our

organizations have noticed. [In the interview cited above, Gibson talks about how

interesting the present is and how "most writers haven't noticed yet."]

So, really, the call to action is not lofty ideas about the future, it’s Come, Let Us Go

Boldly Into the Present. 25


I’m probably on this stage because of the work we’ve done—me with many of my

colleagues across the Institution, some of you in this room and others outside the

Smithsonian—on what the “increase and diffusion of knowledge” (the Smithsonian’s

mission—the mission of the world’s largest museum and research complex) means

in the digital age. We created—we called into being a digital strategy that many of

you have read and it says sensible things about what we should do now. It has three

themes, eight goals, and 54 concrete, plain English tactical recommendations. You

can read it in about 20 minutes on the public wiki that was the platform for the

strategy creation process and on which the strategy continues to live and breathe.

We positioned something called the Smithsonian Commons as the centerpiece of the

strategy. We describe the Smithsonian Commons as a new part of our digital

presence (not just “website”—‘digital presence’) dedicated to stimulating learning,

creation, and innovation (not just doing it ourselves, but creating a platform, the

preconditions, that help other people get it done) through open access to

Smithsonian research, collections, communities, and expertise (not just research,

not just collections. Not just communities. Not just expertise, but all of these things

—together).

And all those things are lovely and great.

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And now we’re trying to figure out how to make them happen…now.

How do we realize these goals? It’s still the right strategy, even though it’s a couple

of years old. It’s the right set of ideas.

And here’s where the rubber (of this talk) hits the road.

[Updated 5 patterns slides]

Here’s what I’ve noticed—here’s the design pattern I’ve observed—the things that

help me think, in a practical way, about how our organizations can take advantage of

this amazing present moment.

[To-Do - - work in XP, agile thinking about doing stuff now and doing stuff that

matters]

And you'll notice that among these patterns is not, innovate. Please stop innovating

—I beg you. I'm not talking about failing fast, risk taking, or collaboration. I think

many of these words are used as tokens for something else—something deeper and

more profound that we often don't get around to discussing or understanding at

sufficient depth. And the cart is often put before the horse: inputs are confused with

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outputs. We shouldn't wake up in the morning and say "we've got to innovate

more." We should wake up in the morning and commit ourselves to trying to

accomplish some tangible good in society. Some goal. Some win. And we should

measure our progress towards those goals every single day. If we find we need more

innovation, collaboration, risk taking or failure to meet those goals then we should

by any and all means remove obstacles to those things happening, but they are not

goals in and of themselves. We don't innovate for innovation's sake: we innovate to

accomplish meaningful goals.

[As a point-of-reference, see Forget Innovation, a report from the Finnish innovation

fund Sitra: http://www.sitra.fi/julkaisu/2011/forget-innovation]

Pattern 1, The extraterrestrial space auditor.

Don’t ask me what this image is all about. I found it through a Flickr search on

“extraterrestrial.”

I’ve found it very helpful over the last couple of years to invoke the image—the

construct—of an extraterrestrial space auditor. Imagine that a whirring, buzzing,

hovering spaceship comes down through the atmosphere and out comes an alien. A

kind of Martian CPA ninja. And the job of this extraterrestrial space auditor is to

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http://www.sitra.fi/julkaisu/2011/forget-innovation


compare the mission of your organization, your business, your agency, with your

collective actions—what you’re doing. What you’re doing now. Are you using the

best tools and methods to accomplish your mission. Are you doing it—whatever “it”

is—now?

The extraterrestrial space auditor is objective. He/she/it doesn’t care about your

organizations legacy commitments, your history, your funding woes or HR problems

or, frankly, any complaints or excuses. They don’t have to get along with anybody,

they’re from out of town—waayyyy out of town—and they’re not going to come to

your staff picnic or schmooze with your CEO. They are a baddass of objectivity.

And this image is a way of tricking yourself into thinking clearly about what you’re

doing. (I started my adult life as a visual artist, and I always found the hardest part

of being an artist was getting rid of my own preconceptions and biases when I

walked up to a canvas.)

Scott Berkun, in the Myths of Innovation (O'Reilly Media, 2010), notes that the

British navy, "at the peak of their dominance in the 17th century," took 150 years to

adopt a proven remedy for scurvy [p. 57]. The extraterrestrial space auditor would

have noticed the generations of stricken sailors and called the Admiralty on it.

At random, on a whim, I looked up the mission of the Ford Foundation. The mission

of the Ford Foundation is: “The Ford Foundation supports visionary leaders and

organizations on the frontlines of social change worldwide.” [Ford Foundation

Mission. http://www.fordfoundation.org/about-us/mission, accessed 7/20/2011]

Awesome mission. Extraterrestrial space auditor says “Wow, that’s an awesome

mission. Let’s take a look.”

29

http://www.fordfoundation.org/about-us/mission


Show me your books.

Show me your business processes.

Let me talk with your staff.

Let me talk with your audiences.

Let me see what kinds of meetings you have. Where do you spend your time? How

do you measure your effort towards these lofty goals? What gets in the way? Who do

you serve? Who don’t you serve?

What resources does the Ford Foundation have at its disposal?

Who are the visionary leaders? Where do they work? Are they worldwide? What do

they do? How are they helped?

Not "how does grant program X work" but "are you using the best tools on the

planet to 'support visionary leaders and organizations on the frontlines of social

change worldwide.'"

So without the baggage of the last epoch, are you exhibiting the kinds of behavior

one would expect to see from an organization with your mission? Are you still, only,

broadcasting?

Are you printing new copies of Encyclopedia Britannica when you should be adding

articles to Wikipedia?

Last year, Marc Andreessen told old media companies that they needed to burn their

boats—they needed to commit totally to a digital future rather than clinging to

legacy business assumptions. [Andreessen's Advice To Old Media: "Burn The Boats."

By Erik Schonfeld, Tech Crunch, 3/6/2010

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/06/andreessen-media-burn-boats/ ]

30

http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/06/andreessen-media-burn-boats/


2. On ramps and loading docks.

These days I think more about infrastructure and execution in terms of on ramps

and loading docks: ways to get people and resources in and out of organizations. It's

not that I think basic, traditional IT execution isn't important, I just think there's a

lot of untapped opportunity in thinking a little differently about it.

Digitization pioneer and map collector David Rumsy once advised a museum I was

working for to (and I paraphrase) “do what you can, and really do it, but understand

that you’re never going to be able to do everything yourself”—no matter how big or

powerful your organization is—and the trick is to enlist the help of others to create

outcomes you all care about. As we talked about earlier, this idea has been on the

table for a while.

Imagine a highway with one entrance and one exit. It's an expressway, very good for

moving people and goods from point A to point B efficiently—but only good for that,

and nothing else. Imagine a huge factory built in a concrete bunker with only one

entrance and exit for people (employees only) and one loading dock for materials.

Very secure and controllable, but with obvious challenges to scale and versatility.

This is the way a lot of our IT services are created, and it's the typical of the way that

most organizations think about IT and New Media.

31


Tim O'Reilly said that "A platform beats an application anytime," [See What is Web

2.0 at http://www.oreilly.de/artikel/web20.html] and in relation to the On Ramps

and Loading Docks design pattern it's important to think expansively about what

constitutes a platform. On ramps and loading docks are about investing in the

foundations of a strong network, in the broadest sense of the word, rather than the

capacity to crank out more widgets. It's about making sure you have enough desks

for interns and volunteers, that there's sufficient training, that standards and

leadership are in place to work with new kinds of partners. That people are listening

to audiences and customers and doing things they need and care about. About

building the capacity to move ideas and goods between the organization and its

customers, partners, or beneficiaries quickly, knowingly, and efficiently. It's

read/write across the corporation.

3. Edge to Core32

http://www.oreilly.de/artikel/web20.html


The Smithsonian Web and New Media Strategy explicitly says that we’re in an edge

innovation environment—it’s like the prime directive of the strategy.4 The strategy

says that the best work happens when you have the public (from third graders to

Nobel laureates), collections or research data, subject matter experts, and some

degree of technology/production expertise close together. And that doesn’t happen

in administrative offices, it happens at the edges of the Institution. Think about a

border habitat. Border habitats—boundaries or edges between ecosystems are very

productive places.

But, just letting a thousand wildflowers bloom in the wilderness is not enough. Edge

to core is the process by which you identify interesting, small, bootstrapped

innovations and support them, bring them into the center of the organization where

they can scale, and so your innovators don’t have to bear the burden of sustaining

every single bit of their projects for time immemorial and so newcomers can adopt

and build on their work.

Organizations undergoing change often have a lot of small, isolated, experiments

going on, some of which can be quite successful. Without strong edge-to-core

processes, each of those experiments will succeed only as a one-off. It's hard for

them to scale or be replicated, it's hard for the organization to learn from what

worked and what didn't—to develop best practices—and it's hard for new

innovations to become the infrastructure for whatever comes next.

To illustrate this phenomenon of innovations gradually becoming infrastructure,

Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet in American Life project, has observed that

you don't walk into hotel ballroom and say (paraphrased) "Hey, this room is 'on

electricity. That's amazing!'"5 It's unremarkable because the technology, once new,

33


has through a variety of change processes become a reliable part of our

infrastructure.

New innovations can become part of the core IT stack quite quickly. When I helped

start the Smithsonian's first blog back in 2005 I had to write long memos and go to

meetings to argue about why the Smithsonian needed a blog. Blogging was novel

and new to us but I argued that a blog was just a serial publication with certain

conventions about voice and formatting, and that in a few years time everyone

would expect blogging to be an unremarkable facet of the web. Like hyperlinks and

bookmarks, blogging would go from edge to core, from exotic and hard to being just

another part of the IT stack. We long ago decided that our curators wouldn't have to

shovel their own coal to heat their offices, that we would provide them with heat

and computers and fax machines and electricity as part of the core organizational

services stack.

If edge innovation is happening in an organization—and with free and easy IT and

social media tools available in the cloud, it almost always is—edge to core needs to

be a core capability.

[NOTE: I've included two #4's in this document. Sometimes I use one: sometimes I

use the other. I'll mark them below as 4.1 and 4.2]

34


4.1, The organizational immune system

I think most organizations are unaware—show little self-awareness—of the

behaviors that come with innovation and rapid, transformational change. Many

organizations say they want innovation and transformational change, but the more I

talk with innovators and the more I can recognize the disconnects between the

rhetoric and the reality.

Peter Drucker, already a revered business management guru, wrote about this

phenomenon as early as 1985. In Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and

Principles (New York, Harper & Row), he observed " “Management tends to believe

that anything that has lasted for a fair amount

of time must be normal and go on forever. Anything that contradicts what we have

come to consider a law of nature is then rejected as unsound.”" (p 38)

Scott Berkun in the Myths of Innovation observes that "Professional management

was born from the desire to optimize and control, not to lead waves of change."

(And I present this to you, with all humility, as someone who has been a

professional manager for the last decade.)

Berkun further observes that few managers are trained to recognize and nurture the

disruptive and often half-baked knocks on their door. It’s not a question of

intelligence or intention, it’s a willingness to re-evaluate management’s purpose.

(Both Berkun points are made on page 100.)

35


4.2. Focus on the mission

It sounds trite when I say it that way. Obvious. But after talking with, I don't know—

80 or 90 organizations in the last two years I've noticed that the organizations that

are not…suffering…in their pursuit of worth in this epoch are the organizations that

are confident and clear about the outcomes they want in society. They know what

impact they want to have on different groups of people.

I'm fortunate to work for an organization with a stupendous mission: the increase

and diffusion of knowledge. And in our strategy, under this mission, we say that

"Four challenges provide an overarching strategic framework for Smithsonian

programs and operations."6 They are,

Unlocking the mysteries of the universe

Understanding and sustaining a biodiverse planet

Valuing world cultures

Understanding the American Experience

These are indeed four Grand Challenges. And we say in our strategy document, that

"together, they will influence how the Institution directs our resources and focuses

our energies."

36


This is the strategy of an organization that wants to have an impact in the world.

This is strategy that does "does work"—that tells you what's important and what's

not, that helps us do our jobs.

This is a picture from a strategy workshop I was at at the National WWII Museum in

New Orleans, Louisiana. Those people know the job they're doing in society. They're

extremely passionate about it. Their director says (paraphrase) "Every day, every

week, we have WWII veterans in our museum distraught at how little their

grandchildren know about WWII—the conflict that changed the world. Sixty-five

million people died in that war and our grandchildren don't know anything about it.

You need to help them know and remember."

So I get the sense that the 200-plus staff of this museum get up every day and have

their Weaties and try to succeed in that mission and they don't really care so much

—they have their biases and their expertise, things they're already good at—but

they're fairly agnostic about the tools, and refreshingly open minded about using

new media in unconventional ways to achieve their goals.

Organizations with a clear sense of the impact they want to have on society are not

struggling as much organizations that are wishy-washy (less clear) about the job

they're supposed to do.

37


5. Place the bet

Within most organizations the staff know what they need to do. The leaders know

what they need to do. Everyone knows, but they're often hesitant, they're waiting.

And now, with this compressed, fast "now" - - it's all about execution. About doing.

I'll leave you with this. A January, 2011 Tom Friedman op-ed in the New York Times

called Serious in Singapore [1/29/2011,

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/opinion/30friedman.html, accessed

7/25/2011].

Mr. Friedman talks about visiting a fifth grade classroom in Singapore and being

gobsmacked by what he felt was a highly innovative CSI-like forensic DNA activity in

a fifth grade classroom. He was floored. And when he went to the principal and 38

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/opinion/30friedman.html


asked how did you know to do this? What minister of Education put this program in

place? He was told that they had created this program because they had a great

science teacher and they knew that Singapore was "making a big push to expand its

biotech industries and thought it would be good to push her students in the same

direction early."

After this encounter Friedman concluded that there were three things going on in

this principal's head that made this innovative fifth grade science activity possible:

She knew what world she was living in, she knew the role that her country wanted

to play in that world, and therefore she knew what kinds of things should be going

on, day-to-day, in the classroom.

I think that's the trick now for the stewards of our memory institutions—it's the

trick of keeping those three things together, at the same time, in working memory.

1. What is the world I am living in

2. What impact does my organization want to have in that world

3. And therefore, that third thing becomes pretty easy, what should we do—today

That's all I've got. Thank you.

Postscript

1. This talk is focused on getting us to act upon the amazing potential of the present

moment. That being said, make no mistake about it—I do still think the future is

important. But if we're really going to think about the future, if we're really going to

try to figure it out we're going to have to work a lot harder at it than we are now. I

think that the future, even ten or twenty years out, is going to get deeply weird. It's

going to challenge us, as a species, in ways that we've not had to confront in our long

evolution. Just the advent of advanced DIY biotech and technologically augmented

39


human life—things we can already see happening—are going to stress the

functioning of our society and institutions in ways we can not quite imagine. If we

want to venture into this world we're going to need to invest a large amount of

serious time and energy and talent. It won't be for the faint of heart.

2. In the context of organizational change it's worth mentioning a saying I've

borrowed from the Social Entrepreneurship movement,

Think big,

Start small,

Move fast.

40

1 "Do modems still matter?" May 29, 2006, from the blog Coding Horror,

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/05/do-modems-still-matter.html. Accessed 7/29/2011 2 The Quicktake camera line was discontinued in 1997. See references at Apple QuickTake,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_QuickTake., Accessed 8/3/20113 Joy's Law is frequently referenced in business and strategy contexts without academic source attribution. A

suitable primary reference seems to be Lakhani KR, Panetta JA, "The Principles of Distributed Innovation," 2007,

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1021034. 4 Smithsonian Web and New Media Strategy, Theme 3: Balance Autonomy and Control, http://smithsonian-

webstrategy.wikispaces.com/Strategy+--+Themes#balance. Accessed 7/29/2011.5 Heard by the author at the Foresee Results Citizen Satisfaction Summit, Washington, D.C. 2006. 6 Page 3, Strategic Plan: Inspiring Generations Through Knowledge and Discovery. Smithsonian Institution, Fiscal

Years 2010-2015. http://www.si.edu/Content/Pdf/About/SI_Strategic_Plan_2010-2015.pdf. Accessed 8/3/2011

http://www.si.edu/Content/Pdf/About/SI_Strategic_Plan_2010-2015.pdf.%20Accessed%208/3/2011

http://smithsonian-webstrategy.wikispaces.com/Strategy+--+Themes#balance

http://smithsonian-webstrategy.wikispaces.com/Strategy+--+Themes#balance

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1021034

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_QuickTake

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