Colonel Frans Osinga, PhD, who gave a tour de force lecture at Boyd 2007, managed to prevail upon his publisher to sell a paperback version of Science, Strategy and War:The Strategic Theory of John Boyd at a price non-billionaires could afford.
I will be reviewing Science, Strategy and War in December and - tentatively - organizing a roundtable discussion at Chicago Boyz, most likely after Christmas. If you are a blogger, academic or a current or former member of the armed services and are interested in participating, send me an email at zenpundit@hotmail.com.
Labels: 4GW, boyd 2007, ideas, intellectuals, john boyd, military, military history, military reform, science, strategy, theory, war, warriors
¶ 7:05 PM 2 comments
I attended an interdisciplinary-but-history centered conference on Monday that included some presentations by well regarded scholars like David Kyvig and Artemus Ward. However, I was most intrigued by a sociologist who was recounting the evolution of CAPS, which is Chicago's community policing program. In essence, CAPS is COIN doctrine carried out by civil agencies. Anyone who has read John Nagl or David Kilcullen or follows the tenets of the 4GW school, will immediately recognize the premises of CAPS, though my intuition is that the OODA Loop has been much slower with the City of Chicago than it has been even with CENTCOM.
Amusingly, the professor, a younger, urban hipster-type female, reacted with visible anxiety when I pointed out the similarities with counterinsurgency doctrine.
Labels: academia, COIN, historians, ideas, intellectuals, personal
¶ 8:01 PM 8 comments
In Part I. , we looked at John Kao's call for a more innovative America and Howard Gardner's analysis of the mindsets that would be required for creative, innovative endeavors. In Part II. we continue with the analysis of Frans Johansson in The Medici Effect .
Blogfriend Steve DeAngelis of ERMB has referenced The Medici Effect many times in the past two years; in his initial post on Johansson's work, Steve gave a superb summary of the Medici Effect concept:
"In his very interesting book The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures, Frans Johansson talks about the value of creating a space in which people from diverse fields of expertise can get together to exchange ideas. The Medici's, of course, were a wealthy and powerful Italian family who played an important role in the Renaissance. The family's wealth permitted it to support artists, philosophers, theologians, and scientists, whose combined intellect helped burst the historical pall known as the Dark Ages"
Johansson's thesis is that breakthrough innovation is generated most frequently at "the intersection" where two or more different domains meet rather than by predictable, linear, improvements within one field (" directional innovation"). Intersectional opportunities are increasing, Johansson argues due to increased migration, trends toward scientific consilience and ready access to the improved computational tools of the information revolution.
In The Medici Effect, Johansson tackles both cognitive tools as well as social environment that facilitate innovative thinking and productivity. Like Edward DeBono's lateral thinking exercises, Johansson encourages conscious and methodical attempts to find novel, intersectional, combinations of concepts; he points to cultivating an autotelic mindset; reversing one's premises to smash through "associative barriers"; using multiperspectivalism ( agreeing here with Howard Gardner); and defusing the social factors that inhibit organizations from effectively brainstorming. These are all solid suggestions, though most have been made elsewhere as well.
More attention is paid in The Medici Effect to the social environment that is interactive with the innovator in helping to create a climate conducive to synthesis and the generation of insight. moreover, Johansson identifies the creation of a dynamic and stimulating "community"as a critical factor for sustaining an innovation:
"Garfield offer's two reason for Magic's [ a sword & sorcery card game that was a cult hit] success: a prolonged and exciting learning phase and an expanding community of players. Examined closely, you will see that he is talking about the intersection of games and collectibles"
Gaming is itself, a very powerful tool for teaching adaptive thinking skills and for driving the assembly of a " value network" that can be turned toward productive purposes. Indeed, Johannson spends a great deal of time discussing the potential of these networks to function as a two-edged sword in regard to innovation. Moreover, the social and financial organization clustered around the innovator can be determinative in the success of the innovation in a way that is wholly counterintuitive, according to Johansson. Excess support brings restrictions in the form of vested interests from old value networks, stigmatizing failures that are a necessary part of the learning curve and blunting internal motivation with the distracting prospect of extrinsic reward. There is cognitive strength in " staying hungry" and needing to stretch resources with value-added thought ( see Don Vandergriff's Raising the Bar).
What Is To Be Done?:
Looking elsewhere, like The Smithsonian Magazine's "37 under 36 Young Innovators" we see many mining Johansson's intersections or using Gardner's Synthesizing and Creative Minds but these bright folks are social outliers. What we need is re-engineering of institutional cultures and structures, particularly that of our educational system to balance the development of analytical prowess with generative, creative, synthesisizing, capacities. John Hagel recently had a post at Edge Perspectives with a number of sage suggestions for driving innovation:
"Diversity. As Scott Page and others have persuasively suggested, new insight and learning tends to increase with cognitive diversity. This principle highlights the importance of designing institutional arrangements that extend well beyond a single institution, with particular attention to the opportunity to connect to diverse pools of expertise and experience. Diversity can often be enhanced by connecting into spikes – geographic concentrations of talent – and by targeting “brokers” within social networks, creating a multiplier effect in terms of the number of participants that are potentially accessible.
Relationships. It is not enough to have cognitive diversity. By itself, cognitive diversity often breeds misunderstanding and mistrust, seriously limiting the opportunity for people and institutions to learn from each other. Long-term trust based relationships, on the other hand, make it easier to engage in productive friction – the clash of diverse perspectives in ways that produces deep new insight and learning. The challenge is that these kinds of relationships often take a long time to develop and are hard to scale. Innovative institutional arrangements can help to accelerate and scale the formation of these kinds of relationships.
Modularity. When activities are tightly specified and hard-wired together, the opportunities for experimentation and tinkering are very limited. Segmenting people and activities into discrete modules with well-defined interfaces can help to create much more space and opportunity for distributed innovation and learning."
Read the rest here.
In practical terms, what does this mean for schools, corporations, universities and governments ? In my view, "hard-wired" hierarchy with rigid requirements, stiff penalties and centralized decision-making is going to have to be relegated to niches in the future rather than being the dominant form of organization that it is today. Hierarchy, with it's mania for control and accountability, remains useful for transactional delivery systems upon which reputations depend, logistical flows upon which production processes depend and security procedures upon which safety may depend. That being said, hierarchy will have to yield to more lateral, more collegial, more networked, more ecologically oriented models of connectivity where the generation of new ideas represents the lifeblood of an organization.
Hierarchy is Newtonian; Free Scale and Modular Networks are Darwinian. An innovation nation is, by definition, adaptive.
ADDENDUM:
Sir Ken Robinson " Do Schools Kill Creativity?"
Labels: creativity, culture, education, futurism, hierarchy, horizontal thinking, howard gardner, ideas, innovation, insight, intellectuals, metacognition, network theory, networks, synthesis
¶ 8:05 PM 2 comments
My copy of The Mislabeled Child by Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide, that I ordered through work last spring, finally arrived the other day ( Use private sector Amazon.com, the book arrives in a few days. Use an educational bureaucracy and it arrives five months later). I have been looking forward to reading this for some time ( literally).
The Drs. Eide, in addition to being authors, clinicians and researchers, also have two excellent blogs, The Neurolearning Blog and The Classical School Blog, where they share their professional expertise and deep interest in enhancing learning for children, particularly those in outlier populations with special needs. The Eides have been less active in the blogosphere this year but The Neurolearning Blog is one of my few daily "must reads".
It's a moderately thick text with an impressive bibliography for a book written for laymen rather than specialists. I look forward to diving in and learning something new!
Labels: attention, blogroll, book, brain, cognition, creativity, education, eide, ideas, intellectuals, intelligence, metacognition, science, teaching
¶ 6:14 PM 0 comments
My friend Shane Deichman had an important post at Wizards of Oz - a review of Dr. John Kao's new book, Innovation Nation (Kao's site is here). I have not read the book yet but Shane's review of Kao's work struck a chord with my interest in educational reform. We are living in a transformative era but our educational system's paradigm, structures and methodologies are looking dangerously anachronistic. Shane writes, in part:
"He is also a man with a true “long view” – a vision not just for our immediate future, but for this and the next century. In Innovation Nation, Kao describes the evolution of “innovation models” – from individual achievement to today’s “version 4.0” that rapidly adapts best practices across a globally diffuse environment of open architectures and collaboration. America is the “incumbent”, but also seemingly blind to the challenges posed by emergent innovation powers like Singapore, Denmark and Finland.
The book continues with an honest critique of America’s education system, comparing and contrasting our response (in terms of funding, curriculum development, teacher training, school construction, etc.) to Sputnik and President Kennedy’s famous challenge at Rice University in 1962 to today’s sagging U.S. aptitude test scores and lackluster performance in math and science. John compares the high barriers to entry (both literally and figuratively) of our nation’s immigration system to that in global innovation hot spots, along with the perils they bring."
Read the rest here.
What can be done to ramp up American creativity and innovation ? Many things, most of which are outside the scope of this post, but Kao hones in on addressing the fundamentals, which includes our educational system and also our culture ( or rather, our institutional cultures). Together they compose a social platform that will either inhibit or accelerate the rate of innovation in America.
,
Looking at the cognition of creative thinking and innovation.
Two books that might help in re-engineering the culture in the direction that Kao envisions are that of fellow Harvard professor Howard Gardner's Five Minds For the Future and also The Medici Effect by strategic consultant Frans Johansson. While both authors explore individual thinking and the mentalities of organizations, Gardner, a popular guru in the field of educational psychology, emphasizes the former.
Gardner's book explores five "minds" or cognitive approaches that he believes will be important for the 21st century. They are:
"The Disciplinary Mind: the mastery of
major schools of thought, including
science, mathematics, and history, and of
at least one professional craft.
The Synthesizing Mind: the ability to
integrate ideas from different disciplines
or spheres into a coherent whole and to
communicate that integration to others.
The Creating Mind: the capacity to
uncover and clarify new problems,
questions and phenomena.
The Respectful Mind: awareness of and
appreciation for differences among
human beings and human groups.
The Ethical Mind: fulfillment of one's
responsibilities as a worker and as a
citizen."
While the last two are outside of this discussion, the disciplinary mind has been discussed here many times under the auspices of the term "vertical thinking" and Gardner does an excellent job on explaining how that kind of training for subject mastery creates a base for the development or refinement of other kinds of thinking.
Having the disciplinary mind of a vertical thinking expert is particularly complementary to the practice of horizontal thinking, though many experts resist horizontal thinking out of habitual analytical reductionism, the legacy of academic culture or ego, fearing to be seen operating outside one's area of known competence. Gardner likes to make the analogy of an intellectual laser vs. a searchlight in comparing the two.
Gardner, under the influence of Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, divides the cognitive activities of horizontal thinking, into the Synthesizing Mind and the Creative Mind, which would be drawn upon during the process of innovation. Like Csikzentmihalyi, Gardner's definition of creativity is product-oriented and scalar - the results of creative thinking must approach a certain, tangible, magnitude of effect to count - "Big C" creativity, in Gardner's words.
I've never agreed with that distinction. First, it discounts the effect of stochastic tinkering, which are simply creative tweaks on the micro scale that can be very significant, especially when collectively harnessed on a wikinomic/mass collaboration platform. Secondly, the small scale creativity is a necessary developmental step to take, cognitively speaking, before running with grand accomplishments later in life. Even geniuses and polymaths like Isaac Newton and Mozart who demonstrated tremendous creative breakthroughs of a global impact at a relatively young age, went through periods of early, if precocious, experimentation.
Gardner's chapter on synthesis is worth the price of the book alone as he gives it a thorough summative treatment, detailing eight kinds of synthesis that have four components and three kinds of motivations. John Boyd wrote of the process of synthesis as a "dialectical engine"; if so, Gardner would consider metaphors to be the spark plugs of integration and innovation, a valuble tool that helps connect a brain with a "massive modularity" in physiological structure. Gardner considers accomplishment of true interdisciplinarity to be hard but acquisition of "multiperspectivalism" among practitioners to be a realistic goal for synthesis.
Creative Minds, in Gradner's view, are interactive, working within a " social field" that validates their accomplishments but are not confined to the boundaries of a disciplinary field that inhibits most practitioners from discovery or innovation. He is very cautious of " false creativity" or precipitous claims of "creativity" from those jacks-of-all-trades who have yet to master a single domain. Writing on American public schools in the 1980's, Gardner states:
"In schools (and in after school sites) the compelling need was for the achievment of genuine mastery of a recognized discipline: not only was there no need for educators to wave the flag of creativity; it might have been counterproductive to do so. Only through the honing of discipline would genuinely creative options emerge." (Gardner, 85)
Gardner's books are often of an uneven quality of depth. His chapter on the Creative Mind is not nearly as thorough as the one on the Synthesizing Mind ( not surprising as Gardner has not laid out a convincing case, in my view, why the two ought to have been separated in the first place; moreso, by his section on their interrelationship). He does give more practical examples from the corporate world and discuss the potential of online platforms for creativity in terms of a Wikipedia -Britannica continuum.
Innovation depends upon the ability to generate new insights and bring these to practical fruition. Cognitively, our tools would include metaphors, analogies, visualization, consciously systematic lateral thinking in the syle of Edward DeBono and harnessing the powers of intuition and imagination in a conceptually-rich intellectual environment.
End Part I.
Labels: book, cognition, creativity, culture, education, horizontal thinking, ideas, innovation, insight
¶ 12:13 PM 0 comments
Economists have long used the terms Public Good and Private Good to describe categories of valued and useful goods and services with the latter being rivalrous and excludable and the former not. The arrival of information technology and an online culture has birthed a strong intellectual movement in favor of an intermediate, collaborative and robust " creative commons", as promoted by such thinkers as Lawrence Lessig, Howard Rheingold and the authors of Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams (Wikinomics is, incidently, an excellent book. A highly stimulating, must read).
Historically, the intellectual atmosphere available to millions in "the creative commons" of the internet was something available to a rarified and usually economically advantaged, few. Only until very recently, it required a career in a university or at think tanks like RAND to find such an atmosphere. In previous centuries, it was the salons of Paris, London's Royal Society and the courts of the Italian Renaissance that served as hubs for intellectual ferment. American founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush among many others, kept up a voluminous correspondence in order to grasp at the straws of such interaction.
Today, all that is required is a cheap PC and a reliable ISP connection and more brilliant intellects are potentially available for connection to any given individual today than ever before. The magnitude of such interactions are greater than at any time in history and as social networking and Web 2.0 apps, wikis and iPhone type devices become as ubiquitous as email and webpages, this trend is likely to continue upward for decades. Which leads me to ask if these interactions and the forums in which they take place ought not to be considered " cognitive goods" transitioning between those that are public and private?
While intellectual activity can be considered a non-economic pastime or an amusement in the traditional sense economists have contemplated pleasure-seeking activities, cognitive goods are somewhat different. Obviously, these experiences are highly valued by their participants who invest considerable time on intellectual give and take on blogs, wikis and listserv groups, but they do not rise to the category of a financial investment in formal research ( though they could easily lead to that happening). While intangible, cognitive goods are frequently stepping-stones or catalysts to productive economic activity down the road and the creation of new or improvement of existing private or public goods, unlike say, eating a piece of cake, playing volleyball or watching television.
Moreover, the creative commons licensing structure encourages concepts to be kept in play for others to use, adapt and expand at a future date into useful goods or services. Arguably, the case can be made that cognitive goods would serve a transitional, facilitating or storage function for potentially, economically productive, ideas (Tapscott and Williams have an interesting chapter on the forums themselves that they term "ideagoras").
I'm not settled on this concept and I'm interested in hearing reader thoughts, particularly if you are well versed in economics, IP issues or related fields but the floor is open to anyone. Good idea ? Poor? Redundant? Needs more work? What ?
Labels: cognitive goods, economics, futurism, ideas, network theory, web 2.0, wikinomics
¶ 12:11 PM 7 comments
Via Politics In The Zeros (Hat tip), I learn that netwar theorists Dr. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt have revisited their 1999 essay "The Promise of Noopolitik" with an updated postrscript. An excerpt:
"As America’s soft power rises and falls, so do the prospects for noöpolitik. And right now, America’s soft power is unusually questionable. America has long stood for vital ideals — freedom, equality, opportunity. America has also stood for ethical ways of doing things: competing openly and fairly, working in concert with partners, seeking the common good, respecting others’ rights, and resorting to war only after exhausting non–military options. By doing so, America built its legitimacy and credibility as a global power in the twentieth century. But lately, due to assorted sorry matters this decade (some but not all involving the war in Iraq), leaders and publics around the world have become increasingly doubtful that America is deeply dedicated to the ideals and practices it professes. U.S. public diplomacy is on the defensive more than ever before. Oddly, China is said to be more effective at soft–power appeals and techniques "
Labels: brave new war, david ronfeldt, ideas, john arquilla, military, network theory, Politics in the Zeros
¶ 2:53 PM 2 comments
I'm preparing to leave town on another trip and find myself overstretched in terms of time but I have to note that Kent's Imperative had some intriguing posts up ( hat tip to Michael Tanji) , about which I'd like to offer a few comments:
"Life at Google from an outside perspective"
Aside from seeing how uber-techies live and making me nostalgic about past years of reading defector-dissident Soviet bloc lit, I'd like to highlight this passage regarding a KI suggestion to the IC for personnel reform:
"A chance for line level workers to do the kind of intel they want to do (versus the latest crisis they have been thrown into), at least part of the time? Or to contribute to the literature of intelligence? (Modeled along Google’s 20% time.)"
My unqualified guess is that this would increase the productivity and prescience of the IC by roughly the same proportion that expanding private farming helped the Chinese economy under Deng Xiaoping. People typically generate their most valuable insights about those subjects which they are both curious as well as passionate - i.e. earlier in the learning curve than the status of graybeard authority ( once you think you know everything, you tend to stop learning).
The bar to doing this is not a manpower shortage but a middle-management fear of subordinate autonomy. Forcing a talented subordinate to do irrelevant busywork confirms a manager's authority and power. Autonomous subordinates who do self-directed productive work tend to confirm the irrelevance of middle-management. Few managers have the psychological wherewithal to be adept facilitators, mentors or coaches of gifted employees as an efficient "management" outlook is an inimical perspective to generating creativity and sustaining " unproductive" exploration.
"Regional versus functional issue accounts"
From a historian's perspective, a cool post ( perhaps less interesting to others). Some historiography, lots of methodology. Money quote/conclusion:
"As for our opinions on the great divide between the two kinds of houses, we find ourselves veterans of uniquely transnational issues, having been subject to every manner of surge and task force and working group and crisis cell, in the most unusual of niches. We prefer to see small, aggressive, ad-hoc structures comprised of both analysts and operators from a wide range of issues and regional desks with interests and equities in the same target which overlaps their accounts. Only then, by throwing everything against the wall in a structure short lived enough to avoid its own bureaucracy, and disconnected enough to be (at least partially) immune from the day to day politics within a given agency or office, have we found the kind of answers we sought regarding the great questions of process.
We strongly believe such radically unstable and short lived environments are most effective because they are the very manifestation of Schumpeter’s process of creative destruction. It is certainly no way to create a sinecure, nor even to build a long term career path – but it is the best way we have found to generate new and innovative approaches and answers to hard target problems, and to the problems others have not yet begun to identify let alone address."
Hear, Hear! Very strong agreement in a John Arqilla-esque vein.
It will happen but not until after several more disasters force that kind of transformation or an unusually bold and subtle visionary implements it on the quiet. There is far too much bureaucratic inertia because the vested interests prefer paralysis in which they hold the reins to successful action where they become recognized for the marginalized support staff they really are.
In my turn, if any KI gents happen upon this post, I suggest they look here. From this acorn of an idea, an oak will grow. Mark my words.
Labels: analytic, CIA, haft of the spear, IC, ideas, innovation, insight, intelligence, kent's imperative, networks, social networks, synthesis, tanji, theory, visualization
¶ 8:25 PM 3 comments
Dave Davison at Thoughts Illustrated posted on Linda Stone, who was featured in the HBR List:Breakthrough Ideas 2007 ( which I picked up from Steve at ERMB) Dave wrote:
"Idea #7 a description by Linda Stone of her extremely apt phrase for our chaotic times: "Continuous Partial Attention (CPA)" .
I think Linda's phrase ranks right up there with Information Anxiety and Future Shock in drawing our attention to how technology is creating a condition I call "too much stuff - too little time" which gets worse as the dilemma of information overload and attention scarcity continues unabated.
Here's an abstract of Linda's concept of CPA
"This constant checking of handheld electronic devices has become epidemic, and it illustrates what I call 'continuous partial attention.' Although continuous partial attention appears to mimic that much discussed behavior, multitasking, it springs from a different impulse. When we multitask, we are trying to be more productive and more efficient, giving equal priority to all the things we do—simultaneously filing or copying papers, talking on the phone, eating lunch, and so forth. Multitasking rarely requires much cognitive processing, because the tasks involved are fairly automatic. Continuous partial attention, by contrast, involves constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing. It’s an adaptive behavior that has emerged over the past two decades, in stride with Web-based and mobile computing, and it connects us to a galaxy of possibilities all day every day. The assumption behind the behavior is that personal bandwidth can match the endless bandwidth technology offers."
Stone argues that personal bandwidth is not up to the task and, as a result, a backlash to continuous partial attention has already started. She also worries that information overload will burn people out much more quickly as they strain to keep up with an increasing number of information sources all screaming for attention. "
It occured to me from Stone's use of the term "scanning" that "continuous partial attention" is a behavior that probably has a strong evolutionary base as it would offer obvious survival advantages to early humans who manifested that kind of alert and reactive perception to minor changes in the immediate environment. A behavior that can be relaxed when we are in locales where our need for safety and security are relatively assured norms.
Scanning for information in Continuous Partial attention increases the velocity of information flow to the brain and we would be constantly assessing the value of the given information in terms of "spending" our attention by increasing our focused concentration and going "deeper". Judiciously practiced, continuous partial attention would yield certain efficiencies in terms of time saved and increased probablity for generating bursts of insight. These would be moments where real learning could potentially take place, opportunities to acquire or, add to, useful knowledge.
The ability to assess information while it is in a dynamic state of flow would appear to be critical. Without that cognitive function establishing the moment for increased attention (and screening out the less valuable flows, the partial attention would come to resemble "white noise" where jumbles of data would represent a stressful, chaotic, environment in which thinking would be more difficult.
Dave is pointing to the development of visualization tools to help bring analytic order to a CPA state. It may be that some day, instead of scrolling through readers or meta-aggregators, we might have montages that we can view and then decide to click an image to read a particular post out of hundreds in just a a second or two; or symbolic ordering systems to classify new posts and articles according to our own criteria. A "visualization before reading" format.
Possibilities abound.
RELATED LINKS:
The Attention Economy And The Net
The Value of Openess in an Attention Economy
Attention Economy
John Hagel
A desktop reference for all visualizers : the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods -Dave Davison
Visual Literacy.org
INTELLIGENCE AND INTELLIGENCES - Zenpundit
Attention vs. Meaning - Dave DavisonLabels: attention, cognition, davison, ideas, insight, theory, thoughts illustrated, visualization
¶ 2:18 PM 1 comments
Steve DeAngelis at ERMB has two very meaty posts up "HBR 2007 Breakthrough Ideas, Part 1" and "HBR 2007 Breakthrough Ideas, Part 2" based on "The HBR List:Breakthrough Ideas for 2007". Steve gives his insights, links and extensive excerpts on the breakthrough ideas which are:
1. Accidental Influentials
2. Entrepreneurial Japan
3.Brand Magic: Harry Potter Marketing.
4.Algorithms in the Attic
5.The Leader from Hope
6.An Emerging Hotbed of User-Centered Innovation
7.Living With Continuous Partial Attention
8.Borrowing from the PE Playbook
9.When To Sleep On It
10. Here Comes XBRL
11. Innovation and Growth: Size Matters
12. Conflicted Consumers
13. What Sells When Father Knows Best
14. Business in the Nanocosm
15. Act Globally, Think Locally
16. Seeing is Treating
17. The Best Networks Are Really Worknets
18. Why U.S. Healthcare Costs Aren't Too High
19. In Defense of "Ready, Fire, Aim
20. The Folly of Accountabalism
An impressive density of concepts and commentary in just a couple of medium size posts.
Labels: 2007, business, deangelis, ermb, harvard, ideas, networks, open-source
¶ 8:10 PM 1 comments
