THINK INSIDE THE BOX!

 

Clichés, slogans, and latitudes have infiltrated our culture to such an extent that we can no longer think straight.

"There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking." -- Sir Joshua Reynolds. 

We have not taught people to see the "box" in order to "think inside" of it. They are not taught to think at all. They are given steps to use, and then those steps are constantly supplied to them during testing and analysis, so they don't even have to remember them. The ability to analyze a situation and apply pure logic and/or think through the issues relating to the situation and/or researching possible options based on historical information are all missing in the majority of the under-30 crowd. 

 "Leaders are readers" and that if you are not reading at least one book a month, you really are not a true leader. 

We taught our kids to read. And they read a lot. Every one of them is significantly advanced in relation to their peer group.

I recently returned to college. My peers were functionally illiterate in virtually every aspect of their college work.
The teachers who wanted to teach English or literature were incapable of writing a paragraph without multiple errors. We are (and have been) graduating prospective teachers who are functionally illiterate.

These teachers are being taught to teach using "new age" methodologies and "new age" philosophies. This "outside the box" thinking in education has caused us to abandon the teaching philosophies 

 

"How did people think prior to the cliché being born?"Walter Bagehot wrote: ' It is often said that men are ruled by their imagination, but it would be truer to say that they are governed by the weakness of their imagination”.Long time ago, people had skills they learned the hard way by watching, processing and doing. These people were highly motivated since they produced products which were excellent and to the finest quality and so they developed a great pride in that which they were skillful at, and to the extent that, they never stopped thinking and pondering of ways to make the product better and more valuable.  

Perhaps also along came things like the industrial revolution and such like, as man become lazy and started the road down to redundancy, as all the products were now automated and man a mere operator just to mind the machine .

It was no longer necessary for man to think or ponder and so that wonderful gift was lost to all but a few and today we have the illiterate, perhaps not just in the sense of reading, but in life in general

While some sayings may have evolved into clichés however, this shouldn't detract from the essential truth of the sentiment they were originally intended to express.

Companies and communities need leaders with a right-brained biased to assist them to appreciate potential opportunities that may be over the horizon, but they also need leaders who are left-brained dominant to devise and implement the processes that are necessary to reach that destination.

There is no right or wrong in this and in order for any individual to be capable of thinking at all it is obviously better if both sides of his or her brain is fully developed, but then most of us aren't mentally ambidextrous and we naturally lean one way or the other. Similarly with any organization, it is better if its leadership group contains people who both are creative enough to 'think outside the box,' and accountable enough to 'think inside the box'. 

That is how we maintain sufficient balance to ensure we can take full advantage of the good times, while always being prepared for the bad. Successful companies need to be able to encourage the optimists without killing the pessimists and vice-versa.   The one thing that hasn't been considered is that "the box" is constantly moving around. If those who "think outside" of it become successful, they are soon emulated. (A process that becomes faster and faster thanks to technology) 

The box represents structure that contains an input-output process. People who do not wish to be trapped by processes think outside their logic to find better and more effective structures that define better processes. A process pipeline 

focuses thinking on the task at hand, and often cannot see how its outputs affect other processes, to the extent that sometimes thinking is not required to make the process efficient. But being efficient can mean going in the wrong direction, and being not effective.

 

Leading change for improvement needs to rethink what's inside the box, by going outside to restructure the shape of ineffective methods. 

 

 

 

 

 

NETWORKING? ERASING DYSTOPIAN CONSCIOUSNESS?

Some thoughts about networking and internet based on an analysis of Edward Bellamy's Utopia, “Looking Backward”, and Aldous Huxley's Dystopia” Brave New World”.

 

 

There’s always Dystopia if Utopia isn’t available; on a regular basis, in my humble opinion.

 

 

 

“We can now literally "look backwards" at the 20th Century and as we do so, the contrast between Bellamy's utopia and Huxley's dystopia is a useful one to simulate reflection on what went wrong. And, clearly, something very important did go wrong to confound the reasonable hopes of men and women. While they expected that moral and social progress would continue in parallel with technical progress, in reality every forward advance seems to have been accompanied by catastrophes that call into question the very survival of the human race. In Brave New World, the radical overextension of rationalization makes human beings into objects of technique on much the same basis as raw materials or machines. This same view underlies much 20th Century thought, for example, pessimistic social theories such as Max Weber's and the various philosophies of technology influenced by Martin Heidegger.

 

 What is it about networking that has the effect of erasing dystopian consciousness? Instead of the passivity associated with participation in a broadcast audience, the online subject is constantly solicited to "interact" either by making choices or responding to communications. This interactive relationship to the medium and through it to other users appears non-hierarchical and liberating. Like the automobile, that fetish of modernity, the Internet opens rather than closes vistas. But unlike the automobile, the Internet does not merely transport individuals from one location to another; rather, it constitutes a "virtual" world in which the logic of action is participative and individual initiative supported rather than suppressed by technology. This explains the proliferation on the Internet of expressions with the pronoun "my," as in "My Yahoo," "My MP3," and so on. 

 

At this point, a note of caution is in order. The enthusiastic discourse of the Information Highway has become predictable and tedious. It awakens instant and to some extent justified skepticism. It is unlikely that the 21st Century will realize the dream of a perfectly transparent, libertarian society in which everyone can work from their home, publish their own book, choose multiple identities and genders, find a life partner and buy personalized goods at an electronic mall, and complete their college education in their spare time for $49.99. It is reasonable to be suspicious of this vision. After all, someone devises the menus that offer the choices, and then makes money off the users. The choices are thus not really free in either the economic or the political sense. The dystopian critic finds here merely a more refined and disguised incorporation of the individual into the machine.

 The Internet will certainly have an impact on society, but it will not revolutionize everything. It is ludicrous to compare it with the industrial revolution, which pulled nearly everyone off the farm and landed them in a radically different urban environment. My "migration" to virtual space over the last 20 years can hardly be compared with my ancestors' migration from the country to the city. Unless something far more innovative than the Internet comes along, the 21st Century will be continuous with our world, not a radical and disruptive break. The real significance of the Internet lies not in the inauguration of a new era, but in what it reveals about social and technological change at the current level of advance. The issue is not whether the Internet will liberate us, as though a technology had that power, but rather the subtle change in the conditions of public organization and activity introduced by networking. This change had already begun before the rise of the new medium, but intermittently and laboriously. The Internet promises to enhance the ability of the population to intervene in the technical decisions so vital in a society like ours. This has to do with fundamental changes in the structure of democracy under conditions of technological advance. 

 

So long as the population of modern societies is politically defined by traditional spatial districts, its influence on technical life is severely restricted. What can a local community do about the introduction of a technology that crosses all geographical boundaries, for example, a new medicine or a new method for producing food? The "public" which ought in principle to be able to comment on such changes and influence them democratically is not locally defined. It is fragmented into subgroups which follow the lines of specific technical mediations. For the most part it can only act in the technical sphere through those subgroups, whether they are factory or clerical workers, students, patients, soldiers, or grocery shoppers.

 The geographically bounded units of traditional politics may eventually integrate the various technically mediated subgroups through legal or regulatory decisions. But usually where politics in the familiar sense of the term is involved at all, it draws the conclusions of an initial round of struggle that follows the links in technical networks. Unfortunately, all too often the fragmentation of technical publics renders them politically impotent.

 

 

 

The utopian and dystopian visions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were attempts to understand the fate of humanity in a radically new kind of society in which most social relations are technically mediated. The hope that such mediation would enrich humanity while sparing human beings themselves was disappointed. There is no way of extending technical control without it embracing human beings. But what the dystopian failed to understand was that once inside the machine, human beings gained new powers they could and would increasingly use to change the system that dominated them. We can observe the faint beginnings of such a politics of technology today. How far it will be able to develop is less a matter for predictions than for practice. “

 

 

 

“Looking Backward, Looking Forward: Reflections on the 20th Century”

(Andrew Feenberg , Philosophy Department, San Diego State University) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Paradox of Paradigm

Paradox is a statement that seems self-contradictory but expresses possible truth. Also it can be something that is contrary to popular opinion.

Paradigm is something that serves as a model or a pattern.  It can be a set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in an intellectual discipline.

Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996),wrote a ground breaking book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, in which he describes a paradigm as a box in which normal science places all its beliefs, commitments,  until a better paradigm emerges. A paradigm shift is when a new breed of extraordinary scientists choose to jump into that newer, better box.Later, Stephen Covey (1990) wrote about the paradigm shift in the business context.

 We could say it is another name for Change, but a paradigm shift goes much deeper, it is about combining change with the challenging of existing assumptions and innovation.Leaders of cultures recognize that their traditional paradigm is out of date, and perhaps this leads them to assume that a 'paradigm-shift' program will provide the remedy. Culture change is not simply about how you see yourself and others. It is about how the system works, i.e. how we do the work together, rather than how we work together. The paradigm shift is to understand how to act on the organization as a system. However, initiatives which threaten the current operating culture are typically resisted to extinction, and many initiatives simply bear no relation to the economic performance of the organization. The most critical thing to understand about a paradigm is that, in a paradigm shift, everything goes back to zero. What does that mean? It means that whatever made you successful in the old paradigm may not even be necessary in the new paradigm.

And here comes the paradox: The paradox is that changing a culture starts with different thinking about the work.

There are two interesting paradoxes: the decision theory paradox and an Economics paradox: 

Abilene paradox: People can make decisions based not on what they actually want to do, but on what they think that other people want to do, with the result that everybody decides to do something that nobody really want to do, but only what they thought that everybody else wanted to do.

Allais paradox: A change in a possible outcome, which is shared by different alternatives, affects people's choices among those alternatives; in contradiction with expected utility theory (utility is a measure of relative satisfaction).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before shifting paradigms we should see that business in general is filled with instances of paradox. If it would improve performance to do the work differently, how does it mean we should behave? Focusing on behavior without embedding it in a work context creates an entirely new pathology - people try to play a new game. By contrast, focusing on how we work, anchors improvement in things that are real, and opens the door to working on culture, in a way which has relevance and, more importantly, is palpably relevant. This new global world surrounds us with paradox. In order for companies to master paradox they must first identify the opportunity it contains. Some major businesses are developing an e-commerce in order to sell direct, cut costs and eliminate the small businesses. Yet, small businesses represent a very lucrative, high profit margin market for those businesses.Another paradox is the question “Should you hire the best people?” Sometimes hiring the best people could be your downfall (another paradox).

 It all depends on the situation and how you define "best." Should you focus or diversify?” Both, actually (another paradox), diversification can lead to situations where managers ignore the other business lines and pursue their own goals at the expense of company growth as a whole.

 Is paradox the new paradigm?

  Will future business success depend on the ability of managers and leaders to embrace paradox? Will they succeed holding in their minds two contradictory ideas, each of which can be applied when necessary? By embracing paradox, managers will lose the half-truth thinking that ignores the context so pertinent to business decisions. These seeming paradoxes often exist, in the first place, only because we try to apply business rules across all contexts. It is natural that business bears the same tension that pervades everything else in our lives. Economies and ecosystems are filled with examples of competing goals and conflicting ideas that somehow work themselves out to create balance and, in many cases, an optimal situation.

Only when we have understood the paradoxes of business, can we propose a paradigm shift: changing focus could be the key to getting exactly what we were so focused on to begin with.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Paradox of Paradigm

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Paradox is a statement that seems self-contradictory but expresses possible truth. Also it can be something that is contrary to popular opinion.

 

 

 

800x600 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

 Paradigm is something that serves as a model or a pattern.  It can be a set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in an intellectual discipline.

 

 

800x600 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996),wrote a ground breaking book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, in which he describes a paradigm as a box in which normal science places all its beliefs, commitments,  until a better paradigm emerges. A paradigm shift is when a new breed of extraordinary scientists choose to jump into that newer, better box.

 

Later, Stephen Covey (1990) wrote about the paradigm shift in the business context.

 

A paradigm is the conceptual framework upon which we build our world; it is built upon past experiences; if we are not willing to make shifts in our paradigms, we will remain stagnate in our growth; a paradigm shift is a change from one way of thinking to another; it is something that does not happen like self generation it is driven by change.

 

 

800x600 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

We could say it is another name for Change, but a paradigm shift goes much deeper, it is about combining change with the challenging of existing assumptions and innovation.

 

Leaders of cultures recognize that their traditional paradigm is out of date, and perhaps this leads them to assume that a 'paradigm-shift' program will provide the remedy. Culture change is not simply about how you see yourself and others. It is about how the system works, i.e. how we do the work together, rather than how we work together. The paradigm shift is to understand how to act on the organization as a system.

 

 However, initiatives which threaten the current operating culture are typically resisted to extinction, and many initiatives simply bear no relation to the economic performance of the organization.

The most critical thing to understand about a paradigm is that, in a paradigm shift, everything goes back to zero. What does that mean? It means that whatever made you successful in the old paradigm may not even be necessary in the new paradigm.

800x600 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 And here comes the paradox: 800x600 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

The paradox is that changing a culture starts with different thinking about the work.

 

800x600 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

There are two interesting paradoxes: the decision theory paradox and an Economics paradox:

 

800x600 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

Abilene paradox: People can make decisions based not on what they actually want to do, but on what they think that other people want to do, with the result that everybody decides to do something that nobody really want to do, but only what they thought that everybody else wanted to do.

800x600 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

Allais paradox: A change in a possible outcome, which is shared by different alternatives, affects people's choices among those alternatives; in contradiction with expected utility theory (utility is a measure of relative satisfaction).

800x600 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

Before shifting paradigms we should see that business in general is filled with instances of paradox.

 

If it would improve performance to do the work differently, how does it mean we should behave? Focusing on behavior without embedding it in a work context creates an entirely new pathology - people try to play a new game.

 

By contrast, focusing on how we work, anchors improvement in things that are real, and opens the door to working on culture, in a way which has relevance and, more importantly, is palpably relevant.

 

This new global world surrounds us with paradox. In order for companies to master paradox they must first identify the opportunity it contains.

 

Some major businesses are developing an e-commerce in order to sell direct, cut costs and eliminate the small businesses. Yet, small businesses represent a very lucrative, high profit margin market for those businesses.

 

Another paradox is the question “Should you hire the best people?” Sometimes hiring the best people could be your downfall (another paradox).

 

800x600 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

 It all depends on the situation and how you define "best." Should you focus or diversify?” Both, actually (another paradox), diversification can lead to situations where managers ignore the other business lines and pursue their own goals at the expense of company growth as a whole.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

800x600 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

 Is paradox the new paradigm?

 

 Will future business success depend on the ability of managers and leaders to embrace paradox? Will they succeed holding in their minds two contradictory ideas, each of which can be applied when necessary?

 

By embracing paradox, managers will lose the half-truth thinking that ignores the context so pertinent to business decisions. These seeming paradoxes often exist, in the first place, only because we try to apply business rules across all contexts.

 

 It is natural that business bears the same tension that pervades everything else in our lives. Economies and ecosystems are filled with examples of competing goals and conflicting ideas that somehow work themselves out to create balance and, in many cases, an optimal situation.

 

 

800x600 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

Only when we have understood the paradoxes of business, can we propose a paradigm shift: changing focus could be the key to getting exactly what we were so focused on to begin with.

CROWD SOURCING: LET SOMEONE ELSE DO YOUR JOB?

 

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Crowd sourcing can be looked at as an application of the wisdom of crowds concept, in which the knowledge and talents of a group of people is leveraged to create content and solve problems. Crowd sourcing can be broken down in to three categories: creation (like Wikipedia); prediction (like Yahoo! Buzz); and organization (like Google). 

 

 

 

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WHAT IS AT STAKE?

Jeff Howe (June 2006) first proposed the idea of Crowd sourcing.” Whether you believe crowd sourcing is a gimmick, or the next big thing, it’s important to note that the idea is still in its early, some would say idealistic, years. How it was proposed, and what it may become, will be largely based on how it is interpreted

 

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POINTS ON CROWD SOURCING:

An analogy with outsourcing, in which work previously done by company employees is offered to, and performed, by a group of people on the Internet – the news is, the introduction of financial motivation, on the part of people doing the work, who get paid for performance; the company doesn’t make employees from the crowd.

A new capability brought on by the Internet: the ability to work together to a shared goal without the need of company’s infrastructure.

Mass customization and collective customer commitment, are models of crowd sourcing. In mass customization, the crowd is reacting to an open call to design an individual well; in the second, the main focus of participation of crowd is the selection crowd sourcing (product management) task.

 

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MY OWN VIEWS:

TRUTH: Business-to-business brands are or subject to regulatory requirements and need a different approach.

TRUTH AND GOOD: There are many a consumer-focused brands - these would benefit from a totally open creative process.

TRUTH BUT BAD: Many times crowd sourcing projects are evaluated by the quantity not the quality of received submissions.

TRUTH: There are two perspectives (benefit or disadvantage) about crowd sourcing’ concept: engagement of an undefined group, and uninformed execution.

TRUTH AND GOOD: There’s a delicate balance between encouraging participation and surrendering control. Engaging consumers has always been essential for establishing brands.  Of course delivering the process of brand manager to the crowd is another thing altogether.

TRUTH BUT BAD: As it is commonly practiced in the marketing world, crowd sourcing forgoes strategy and outsources execution.

TRUTH: Crowd sourcing works well for large-scale initiatives where gathering data would be otherwise impossible.

TRUTH AND GOOD: One thing is gaining insights into how consumers think about a given brand, but it is not a problem solver.

TRUTH, GOOD OR BAD? The crowd is just another committee that produces results that are incredibly average.

 

 

 

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THE FUTURE AND SOME QUESTIONS:

 Crowd sourcing and its counterpart, co-creation have started to become business strategies, if not actual models.  Diverse companies have aggressively pursued ways in which customers can help create or inspire new products (co-creation). These practices, accelerated by the web and social media, raise all kinds of questions:

Will crowd sourcing and co-creation, actually increase innovation? (Using peoples talent)

Will they reduce the cost of development and design, and along with it, the salaries of people who create for a living?

Will they help in solving those large, unsolvable problems; everything, from healthcare to education, to global warming?

Will they change the traditional relationships between employers and employees?

Are crowd sourcing and co-creation here to stay, or are they simply convenient alternatives to business as usual in a miserable economy?

Even after the global financial crisis comes to an end, the new marketplaces that support crowd sourcing will continue to evolve, offering more engaging company’s efficient and creative ways; the company will look for help in the crowd.

WHY? If businesses can find access to more ideas for less, they will, down economy or not. AND, today’s customers and prospects, actually want a voice and a say, in influencing a brand and its products.