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Acting in Complexity

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What does it mean to say, ’embrace complexity!’. This is something I have been pondering about for a while.

It is the recognition of a new kind if order – something we did not have language for – we also know the grammar of that expression- sometimes it is in visible structures but more often than not the structures are invisible. This is particularly true of human enterprise. It is much like a complex elephant – the kind that six blind men in the Jataka story try to figure out.

The purposeful human enterprise is a special case. When it encounters the real world, it must figure out how to make sense of and respond to this complexity in order to still achieve its purpose.

It needs the grammar and the language so that it can construct an appropriate response. It uses this to construct a model and Cilliers says this model must correspond as closely as possible to the world, but Borges or Foucault say that’s not possible. So, we are somehow condemned to never knowing completely- and yet we must act.

But we are no longer completely ignorant – what we have learnt is rather than command the world and expect it to obey, we invite it to a dance, and through this process, it reveals the balance of its secrets- that is our path to better knowledge. We cannot impose our will but tango and jazz.

The conversation is one that can anticipate and predict how the world will respond to our enquiries and requests.

The world is already engaged in a creative process – our presence must not intervene in its poetry but become co-creative.

The challenge for those that work in the design of new (digital) experiences, is to explore the transformational potential that digitizations harbor. Rather than slap digital onto the enterprise it asks how can one reimagine the enterprise in a fundamentally new way. Maybe develop better responses to some unanswered questions or wicked challenges. What are those?

To begin the process, we must have better knowledge – of what? What are the questions we must have good answers for? What has been worrying us – irrespective of whether a particular design challenge is on our mind. Could we make a strategic difference by considering something beyond the everyday?

Understanding the world is surely necessary, but so is the conception of a response- an enterprise that is a partner in the new creative endeavor- of value, perhaps more strategic!

Design schools do not have a discipline or practice that is analogous to the challenges strategic advisors face. The response is an artifact – the making of design principles.

The world cannot be described in a single way – the creative practitioner engages in a dialog and finds many answers – in that sense the practice is open-ended, but the essence, or the pearls start to reveal and speak the language of complex order. That is something we can learn from creative practitioners – how they pursue for discovery.

You need many probes, and single dives are inadequate- you must probe from many vantages – and many dimensions – like a grid one superimposes to tesselate and construct a whole image (techniques of painting from a photograph) – but it is all in the pursuit of seeking an answer to something – the pursuit of a more important question.

It calls for a deeper persistent engagement- not a one time thing – it is like acupuncture probes, or, constructing a jigsaw puzzle. You cannot do it in one setting.

We need to see new relationships- not the visible ones alone but the invisible ones within their own spaces and across spaces. Structures and flows lead to patterns in outcomes. Both structures and flows are novel.

How do you in your own world probe the unknown? What are your practices? What language and grammar do you use for understanding complexity?

When you see a swarm or beehive – when you see congestion or segregation – what questions arise? Are there analogous situations in your world? A catalog of the wicked.

What practices can you adopt or adapt? How do you construct questions? In the story of the sampling of the elephant in the Indian Jataka fable, and the formation of a fuzzy image. What is fuzzy logic here?

What you will ultimately behold still depends – self reflection and critique will reveal what perspectives inform your pictures of the world. What metaphors are at play? Landscapes and ecosystems.

Others will too. Another conversation- a meta conversation now occurs among our pictures – for we must now together construct yet another meta synthesis – a consensus tempered and informed by our purpose and the pragmatics of its realization. Once again, either we can conquer the landscape and impose on it a path, or invite a living organism to a dance.

Strategic design is about those choices – the degrees of intimacy we want in our relationship with the world – should we continue to act in narrow interests or become custodians of the worlds we inhabit.

The context of the larger Value Creating Complex and our own Value Creating Enterprise within it matter

In the Designed world of new experiences, there is more freedom for the agents – complex phenomena are likely to occur (fluid recombination) – harvesting from those appropriately is what is strategic- to anticipate and be proactive – how does complexity additionally manifest in digital worlds?

I could have used a sub-title for this post – Weaving tapestries – the warp of creative practice and the weft of complex human social worlds

Of the Concept of Value and Generative Ecosystems

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October 15, 2015

The concept of Value is an intriguing one. We are quite familiar with terms such as Value Proposition and have an intuitive understanding of the term Value as well. We often think of it as transactional. As an enterprise we make something, either a product or a service or some combination of the two, with a target client in mind, and to us, it represents the value we create.

This understanding though is rather simplistic and often the reason why some offerings experience great success while others have to wonder why they did not find traction. Perhaps it is time to take a slightly different look at the idea of value and the associated systems.

Value, I argue is better understood as a complex concept with emergent properties. It emerges out of the interaction of and at the intersection of two broad organic systems – a Value Creating System, which is often a single enterprise, and the Value Receiving System, which in common language is usually referred to as the client or the customer. In reality, both Value Creating and Value Receiving Systems are actually complex networks of collaborating and competing entities, which actually quite contributes to their intrigue and charm.

I also like Elke den Ouden’s representation of Value:

I use the term ‘System’ rather deliberately. Thinking of these two entities as systems provides us with interesting perspectives and insights into the nature of the whole value enterprise. It provides us an understanding not only of Value but also what it means to create and introduce new value, topics of great concern in the domain of Innovation.

The notion of Value Receiving Systems is perhaps new, for I have not seen any reference in literature to such an idea. In very simple terms, no target of an offering stands alone, but rather, is embedded in a system, social or socio-technical. Sometimes these systems happen to be another enterprise. Having stated it this way, it seems obvious that indeed we must see the receivers of our value as embedded in systems.

These targeted receivers of value, are multi-faceted and multi-dimensional entities, even though we might be thinking of individuals, and have a complex set of needs, most of which they have a way of satisfying using services within the ecosystem in which they are embedded and operate.

It is important for us as value creators to understand this system or perhaps even many systems, for while the value they receive currently might not be perfect in its individual dimensions, the totality might indeed be quite substantial.

We are therefore challenged with having to understand the architecture of the current Value to begin with, and understand the systems that currently produce and receive it. That Value, even today, we must recognize, is occurring at the intersection of a complex of producing and receiving systems. Unless, this value is substantially dysfunctional, the system will not easily reconfigure to accept a new architecture of Value.

So not only must be have a better solution for a need, but we must be able to displace an incumbent value offering.

I have argued elsewhere, that an offering is always a solution. (I will write another post that describes how I understand offerings as generative design systems). We sometimes hear of people describing this in terms of offerings, products or services, doing a job for the client. I use the term solution, for just like in the case of the term system, it allows us to see the offering as a resolution of a set of intersecting and often contradictory vectors.

It is this perspective of displacing incumbents and introducing something new into a Value Receiving System that are critical ideas for thinking of disruptive innovation and innovation management. When we think of disruptive or radical innovation, that is what we are up against. The more we master these perspectives, the better we will be at being disrupters, for while simple offerings might afford to not invest in such understanding, nobody can nurture ambitions of being disruptors without a deep understanding of their Value Receiving Systems.

The Architecture of Value as an emergent idea and the Architecture and Design of the Value Creating System, follow from this first step.

To Create or not – is no longer the Question

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October 14, 2015

In my previous post, I made an artificial distinction between Value Creating Systems and Value Receiving Systems. That distinction caters to our extant way of looking at the world in terms of enterprises that create value and its customers or receivers.

However, useful as that distinction is for practical purposes, it actually distorts our understanding of the process of value creation. And in fact, in a world of extensively networked extended enterprises, the boundaries of an enterprise are no longer easily distinguishable (Rachel Happe rightly brought up this point in a comment on my earlier post).

A note: Value and its associated generative systems are contextual – the system that creates value for health being different than the one that does so for education, for example. All participants/stakeholder in any ecosystem are active contributors to the value created – and to the extent that they intend to remain viable members of the ecosystem, their contributions need to be at a minimum – positive. Thus all value is co-created by all the participants or stakeholders in the particular ecosystem.

As an enterprise, we often tend to see the process of value creation and delivery coming to an end with a transaction or a little beyond that at most. There is now a substantial body of work that understands that value creation continues way beyond the customer’s contact with the enterprise.

In fact that process, actually begins before the customer even comes in contact with the enterprise and continues over a lifecycle of value well beyond the contact. And during this activity of value creation from the subject’s viewpoint, many stakeholders other not related to the enterprise contribute. One way of thinking about this is that, the subject creates value, whether or not the enterprise exists.

And as my friend and colleague Doug McDavid consistently maintains – all these participants are engaged in the production of services – a view that aligns with the notion of Service-Dominant logic (as against a Goods-Dominant logic view of the world). This is the critical shift in perspective that we need today.

Having understood this, an enterprise has a choice as to the extent it wishes to become an integral part of the co-creating ecosystem – a strategic decision. and one that requires a transformational shift. While in the past, it made sense to remain outside the ecosystem, and therefore have essentially hands-off transactional relationships, as the locus of value creation increasingly moves to the empowered end-user/producer, enterprises must consider becoming a part of and equal partner in the value creating ecosystem.

In all value ecosystems the co-creation of value involves an architecture of value, something I had referred to in my previous post, and a grammar of value construction – a grammar that is available to all stakeholders. This grammar and its associated rules for the construction of value, constitute what I term a ‘design system’. Any participant has access to this system, and they may use its components, grammar and language to construct value as appropriate.

This design system thus serves as a platform empowering all participants. I am using the term platform here in a broader sense than it is used in the context of digital ecosystems. All ecosystems in my description have platforms that specify and coordinate the production of value. This does not preclude the existence of multiple platforms and corresponding design systems.

The enterprise as a participant, that chooses to participate in the ecosystem in order to make a positive value contribution, can also choose to provide leadership, envision an ecosystem of value creation and provide a platform that enables not just one target within the ecosystem, conventionally termed the customer, but recognize all the stakeholder participants and support them all.

This is the other choice enterprises can make – to envision a healthy ecosystem and to choose to be a platform provider.

In summary, value ecosystems include many stakeholders other than the enterprise, who provide services to the ecosystem and together participate in the overall creation of value. An enterprise can choose to be a part of this ecosystem or have a hands-off relationship to the process. Should it become integral to the ecosystem it could also become a platform provider and create the grammar for the language of value creation in the form of a design system.

Innovation Fails Because…

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2014

The widespread interest in innovation is also combined with a sense of frustration. Many studies show that the success rate for innovation initiatives is not very high. Umair Hoque recently conducted an interesting experiment on Fast Company. He asked readers to complete the sentence – “Innovation Fails because…..”

Many people responded and continue to respond – Here are some recent results. The article lists the responses in the form of a running list. That is not very helpful, since I would have preferred to see the patterns, if there were any.

Some time back, I had shared a couple of presentations on Slideshare – “Modes in Innovation”, and “Innovation Praxis”. I decided to evaluate these responses using the frameworks I had proposed. The analysis is in the embedded document here below:

Failure-of-Innovation.docx

The classification of the responses in the various categories is not absolutely perfect or accurate, but it is a fairly good first approximation.

What is interesting to me is how people perceive why innovation fails. A disproportionate number of responses attribute the failure of innovation to issues related to what I would call innovation culture or ‘Practice’ in the terminology of our framework, with some attribution to poorly designed Programs.

What is even more interesting is how many of the other issues that actually contribute to Innovation success, such as proper Framing, Mobilization or Staging are or are not mentioned. There is almost no mention, for example, of the importance of Discovery – assessing what the current conditions are and whether or not the systemic elements that would contribute to success are present.

Culture is indeed one of the most important cause of failure across an enterprise. However, I hesitate to put all the blame on the shoulders of culture. There are many other factors that are necessary to ensure success and it is quite clear from this set of responses that people are not widely aware of what those might be. Some of the people who perhaps should know, such as the authors of these articles and Fast Company, should perhaps structure these responses and provide guidance to people to see how their understanding lacks a total systemic understanding of what innovation is. What use are such surveys otherwise?

Innovation fails because people do not understand its systemic nature and are not aware of the factors that need to be paid attention to in order to make it succeed.

Just how many wearables might we wear?

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2014

I was just looking at a Fast Company article on the new Ditto – a device with the form factor perhaps of a tie clip, that buzzes, kind of in synch with your phone. My first thought was – yet another! How many such devices will there be a place for on our persons?

wearables

I for one cannot imagine not only the proliferation of devices, but more importantly the challenge of managing them physically and integrating them functionally.

I am inclined to think that this has to be a platform play (that is not a new idea!). The eventual winners will be integration platforms that anchor application and sensor ecosystems.

While early versions work with phones and other devices, we should see some form of co-evolution between for example the phone and the wearable platform device – some functions moving from the phone to the device and vice-versa over time.

I have to wonder though, if that end-state vision would discourage entrepreneurs in the field today and those who continue to introduce new devices from venturing into this field. Is the platform a foregone conclusion – or is the future of the wearable as a device on the body still open?

I will allow for many possibilities since we are still fairly early in the evolution of the idea.

Digital Innovation – A Concise Take

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July 24, 2014

This is a very short take on what I think is the essence of digital innovation:

We can now instrument ever smaller parts of the world, make trapped facets and attributes of this world fluid, autonomous, smarter and sometimes even intelligent. We can interconnect our world for meaningful communications, transactions and commerce, and through these interconnections, relate to our humanity and sociality, and reconfigure these relationships in real time and often on the fly, making this world of ours transparent and accessible at all scales, through simple ubiquitous interfaces where the interaction at all touch points complements our being and creates extraordinary experiences.

NewImage

(Image Source: http://bschool.pepperdine.edu/studentblog/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/digital-innovation.jpg)

Now that is a mouthful and more – but that does it for me!

The Social Dynamics of Innovation Networks

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May 29, 2014

I work out of the Cambridge Innovation Center, one of the supposedly largest such places in the world with over 400 startups and early-stage technology companies that collectively claim a couple of billion dollars in funding.

The core idea of such a place is that not only does it make the startup process easier, but the fact that you have so many of these entrepreneurs in a phycial setting that encourages serendipitous encounters and complementary partnerships, actually accelerates the innovation process and likelihood of success.

The idea of creating such places is no longer novel. There are many such places that have sprung-up in Boston itself and more such places are coming up in the US. Frequently visitors from other countries come to learn how to replicate the success of CIC in their own neighborhoods.

(Image: http://noduslabs.com/tag/sociology/ )

The idea that you need physical proximity at all in a world where technology has made it possible for people to work remotely and collaborate with anyone in the world is what is interesting.

A recent report from the University of Twente titled ‘The Social Dynamics of Innovation Networks‘, caught my attention.

…why are governments across the world investing billions of euros in developing ‘innovation campuses’ that are justified precisely on the grounds that they help build up dense inter-personal networks that can help drive innovation processes?

I have been at CIC and other co-working locations before. There was a time when I worked out of offices and not remotely from home. In all those situations, there are a social dynamic that never happened once I increasingly started working from home. Not, that I did not build relationships remotely, but they did not have that opportunity to accidentally bump into each other, sometimes in the presence of a third person, or in the context of a discussion or an artifact.

There is nothing surprising here of course – those chance encounters, did not always spark something, but they laid the ground for a possibility, that sometimes built up over time. On one among many such occassions, all the accumulated tinder of ideas would catch fire and something novel would spring in our minds.

There is much attempt to de-skill, and deconstruct the magic of innovation. There is even talk of an ERP package for Innovation Management. There are certainly aspect of orchestrating large-scale innovation that can indeed be systematized, but underneath them all is this intangible layer that is formed by social relationships, and the unpredictable, unforeseen tipping points that happen through unexpected encounters in social networks.

Maintaining Continuity while Reinventing

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2014

One of the mainfestations of the rapid acceleration and change we are facing these days is that business ideas and concepts become invalid more frequently than ever before.

Strategic innovation is precisely focused on this issue and could also be termed “Business Concept Innovation”.

As one deconstructs the existing business concept and reinvents it to correspond to current and future reality, using new design principles, the question often arises as to – what of the previous business design must one carry forward into the future.

In the quest for agility in the face of contextual change, when all dimensions of business are subject to change, what an enterprise attempts to do, is to maintain the integrity of its identity. This identity is refelcted in its values, mission and embedded in its culture. It is this identity that I believe is the strongest link in the continuity between the past and the future.

Polaroid Images (Fubiz.net)

No other enterprise perhaps indicates the wrenching change it has faced recently than Polaroid. This article in Fast Company, describes how the company managed to pull itself out of a destiny of certain oblivion.

The article clearly illustrates the point I make above. Polaroid ensured that as it found new avenues to redeploy its assets and capabilities in a new context, it also made sure, that its identity, its ‘Brand’, was not compromised.

Great lesson and case here.

The Apple Ecosystem and the Concept of Lock-in

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April 7, 2014

A recent article on cnet discusses Steve Job’s intention to lock-in customers into the Apple Ecosystem.

Steve Jobs

Based on Richard Normann’s work described in his book “Reframing Business“, I have been thinking about the emerging importance of innovating ecosystems of value, reconceiving offerings and value-creation as dynamic processes within living systems.

Ecosystems have many interacting actors that play diverse and complementary roles. Some, such as Apple, play a critical role, that of a keystone, or a Prime Mover, according to the language that Normann uses.

The Prime Mover, orchestrates the system of value, but is not alone in the process of value creation. As much as there are partners, various other stakeholders, including customers as individuals and social groups, participate in this dynamic.

If one looks at the Apple Ecosystem (see image below), this becomes very apparent, that Apple is not the lone player or entity

Apple Ecosystem

(Image courtesy: Judith Vargas)

Here is another image from Time Magazine

Apple Ecosystem

It is clear to me that Apple chose to be a Prime Mover, and had the knowledge and power to shape the ecosystem. The Apple platform is simultaneously an infrastructure, implying a system of proprietary standards, but also a conceptual platform, around which many participants including the users can create value according to their own needs. In the latter sense, it is a Design System, an active offering, that provides a ‘genetic’ code for others to leverage.

Apple’s excellence, among other things, stems from having successfully executed on both levels. It owns the conceptual architecture of this innovating ecosystem, as much as IKEA owns the conceptual architecture of its home design ecosystem.

The alternative is of course an open platform, and there are those, however, so far none have been successful in the same way. Perhaps, there will be another innovating ecosystem in the near future that is based on an open platform. Open systems are very powerful and in the democratized future (Josephine Green of Philips), we will see more of those.

But, whatever be that ecosystem, participating in them is a form of committment – an acceptance of “lock-in”. That is the sense in which Steve Jobs was possibly using the word. In itself that is not a bad thing.

iWatch and Ecosystems

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February 5, 2014

There is much anticipation and excitement around a possible iWatch from Apple.

iWatch and other Wearables

This Fast Company article adds several interesting dimensions to the debate, such as privacy, data security, etc, and whether Apple will become a platform provider for others to build applications on.

Interesting also is the huge focus on personal fitness data and the impact that could have on healthcare.

Wearables are indeed an interesting multi-dimensional opportunity space. The proximity to the wearer’s body and therefore the ability to integrate sensors, the idea of the accessory and its potential for fashion, the notion of an alternate approach to the mobile device – a replacement or an extension of the current mobile device and so on.

There is much happening in this space and it is too early to say how this will shape up. It is indeed interesting to see how much focus there is on lifestyle and fitness. I however, do not yet see a completeness of vision from a user’s perspective.

In this context, I wanted to reflect a little on Apple as a value-provider. I have seen many opinions on Apple and the iWatch – the tenor of most of these seem to be from consumer life-style perspectives – “If you do not give me a gadget that amuses me, you are not much of an innovator!”

By now I think it should be clear to anyone in the technology innovation space, that while Apple engineers and designs beautiful devices, it is much more than a device company. This too has been well-documented – it is often a later entrant and is much more an ecosystem builder rather than just a device vendor.

When it can build a radically different and meaningful ecosystem around home entertainment, it will bring out a TV – when it can reshape the retail experience, it will be there with the entire ecosystem of commerce – not just with a gizmo or a gadget.

Similarly, when the value ecosystem of wearables goes beyond the siloed, health, music, communication worlds into one where it can integrate a meaningful totality for the user, it will introduce the iWatch.

Perhaps in that vision there are technical challenges it has not yet surmounted – but that should not lead us to question its ability to innovate as some ‘gurus’ are eager to do.

The iWatch experience will be centered around a new node in the human digital experience, not some fragmented experience of personal health data, but a seamless integration not only of data with meaning but with the ecosystem of other devices.The issues of data privacy are pertinent but not restricted to Apple alone.

When there is that clarity of an architecture for fluid and seamless integration of experience, and the absolute clarity of a non-superfluous device and a new member of the personal digital ecosystem, there will be an iWatch. In the future this device could cannibalize current incumbents, but it will be done gracefully.

Perhaps that device will indeed create an open platform for others to build applications on. Those applications will again be an important component of the total value proposition.

It is for that completeness of vision that I subscribe to the platform that this company consistently creates. It demands for a larger understanding and comprehension of the idea of design – when you experience it, you know what that is.