Georgia Institute of Technology recently launched the Center for Innovation in Local Government, a research center focused on improving the methods and processes of governing and better meeting the needs of citizens. New Kind is proud to collaborate with the Center through Art Seavey, contributing as a Research Associate.

Through the perspective of community governance, communications technology, and the public policy environment, the Center will explore effective ways for local governments to communicate and engage with citizens, revitalize community and develop innovative and effective ways to provide municipal services. CILG pursues the vision of effective governance that encourages a sense of cooperation, trust and understanding among citizens, administrators and elected officials.

Recent work includes studies on virtual community collaboration, municipal Wi-Fi, and the implications of outsourcing municipal services. The Center for Innovation in Local Government is led by James D. White, Ph.D. and Paul M.A. Baker, Ph.D.

In the software development industry the results are in and open source is the winner. As Matt Asay predicts in a recent blog, future dialogues about open source will be less about evangelism and there will be more focus on putting open source into practice.

Which forces us to look, fundamentally, at exactly what we’re putting into practice? Open source software? Or open source itself? What do we mean when we say open source?

At New Kind, we believe that open source is— simply stated—  a beautiful and effective way to scale creative thinking and culture. What is amazing is the rapid acceptance of “open source” beyond software development. Today businesses are looking at open source as a way to create new business models, new management strategies, new marketing, innovation and community-building paradigms.

As we’ve noted before (and will, no doubt continue to note) evangelists in this broader understanding of open source include many of the world’s most influential business thinkers including Gary Hamel, Roger Martin and Tom Peters. Two weeks ago I watched Coke’s VP of Global Branding— David Butler— introduce open source as a powerful branding/design concept to AIGA’s national conference for professional designers. These speakers are not referring to open source software.

But, through the proven success of the open source software development model, in part, they have discovered the competitive power of such creative collaborative, design thinking cultures. And they are advising today’s business leaders to rapidly adopt these new kinds of models across their organizations; internally and externally.

Acceptance will be slow among executives who are just now being introduced to open source creative models. Hamel says they are locked into “archaic beliefs” that must be changed if they are to remain competitive. It took nearly 15 years for the technology acceptance; how long will this take?

The time is now. For organizations where innovation is now a strategic necessity, open source creative cultures are a powerful if frightening alternative to the habitual thinking of analytical-driven, MBA-type cultures. As Martin’s book The Responsibility Virus makes clear, fear is a powerful force that shuts down innovation. Most executives and senior managers have little clue how strongly fear influences their thinking and actions, and the effect that has on the competitive positioning of the organizations they lead.

Open source and design thinking are anecdotes. But there are countless traditional players— individuals and corporations; large and powerful— who have no interest in seeing new competitive threats to their status quo arise. Open source is revolutionary change; landowners seldom start revolutions. These players will not welcome the change open source promises. And they will not play nicely.

Such opposition will look for evidence that open source doesn’t work. To borrow Roger Martin’s language, “reliable” actions will trump more “viable” solutions. When they find ‘reliable’ evidence, they can and will be ruthless adversaries. Open source practitioners must not be naive; evangelism can become a detriment in this environment. Even the Christian Bible (a fair prophet on evangelism) warns, “Faith without works is dead.”

In that context, Matt Asay is correct. Evangelist must begin to play a secondary role to the practitioner. And if Malcolm Gladwell is right, then it takes 10,000 hours for an individual to grasp the nuance and expertise necessary to play that role. That’s a small community of practitioners.

That’s the next challenge for open source.

……………………..

additional resources:

https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/ghost.aspx?ID=/Strategy/Innovation/Innovative_management_A_conversation_between_Gary_Hamel_and_Lowell_Bryan_2065

http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/rogermartin/publications.htm

I was going to write a blog, but just watch this.

The idea of community governance is getting a little more respect these days.  Over the past few decades scholars have studied a host of communities that hold natural resources in common, such as forests or fisheries. We know now, it doesn’t always have to be an either-or of each against all in the market or total government control, but that sometimes an emergent community governance can work to steward resources.

These studies are useful to find what we can learn about how communities work, or  don’t work, and apply it in situations not only where geography is the tying factor, but also in online communities or information goods.  The Nobel committee gave a nod to the field this week awarding Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist at Indiana University, 1/2 of the Nobel Prize in economics.

Prior to her work, there were three generally accepted solutions to overcome Hardin’s tragedy of the commons, where resources accessible by many are over-harvested until it’s too late: 1) put ownership under one roof (monopoly control); 2) in very limited situations have the parties negotiate themselves (Coasian bargaining); or 3) have government step in and set up a system.

Ostrom’s work highlights a middle of the road way, where the market isn’t fully relied on, nor complete government control, but rather an emergent community governance.

This post can’t do justice to a prolific researcher working since her dissertation in 1965, but here are four prominent themes:

1. Self-governance can work Systems are more likely to be successful when the rules and their enforcement come from the community itself.

2. Start small Scaling up to bigger successes is more likely after building momentum from smaller community successes.

3. Best ideas win Resiliency in part comes from good conflict resolution and flexibility to change rules and practices over time to things that work.

4. Facilitate personal interaction Communication and trust are of utmost importance. We gravitate toward trust and reciprocity first, but when burned, don’t quickly return to a state of trust.

Sure, the body of her work focuses on natural resources, where individuals in the community primarily want to extract some value.  More recently, though, Ostrom and others have started to turn toward information goods.

We could look at open source or other forms of open as a sort of reverse common pool resource. Instead of taking things out, we’re concerned about sustaining the inputs, or keeping things going. Open source isn’t free form, but of course it’s by no means perfectly controlled and proprietary.  Forking and poor governance can lead to loss of mindshare and dwindling source.  On the output side, when you start to deal with  access restrictions through copyright, patents, or digital rights management, the differences with Ostrom’s studies aren’t so big.

To be sure, the message is not that these arrangements are easy to come by or always work, but that they do exist and when they work, they work pretty darn well.

Rather than pretend she could formulate, in her words, an institutional panacea that would work everywhere, or give up and cry that everything is a one-off, she sought to build a set of design principles that can inform our understanding of how things work, but still be applied elsewhere.  Ostrom also worked on not just theory development, but extensive field work and case studies, supplemented by controlled laboratory experiments revealing often hidden, but present human behaviors.

This prize and her work are important not just for the content, but also for the shift to an appreciation for economic inquiry centered around humans that actually behave, well, like humans—a more realistic, albeit messier field, as Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University, points out in “The End of Rational Economics.”

For further reading:

Social Science Research Network holds almost 20 free papers

Amazon lists 70 authored or edited titles

When I first entered the corporate world five years ago after nearly twenty years of running my own business, I was definitely a fish out of water. As a direct report to the CEO, I participated in many of the most important conversations taking place in the company. Being a designer, I often had points of view rather different from the other executives sitting around the table. Sometimes, after offering such a point, I would find them looking at me like I was insane.

The last two days I’ve posted blogs based on articles in recent editions of MITSloan Management Review and the Harvard Business Review. I thought I would share a sample of the best quotes from these magazines— today I’ll focus on HBR (JULY/AUG 2009); tomorrow I’ll look at the MITSloan. While these thoughts and research-based ideas may be new to the business world, they are not to the design world.

The Big Shift— Measuring the Forces of Change

“One of the easiest but most powerful ways firms can achieve the performance improvements promised by technology is to jettison management’s distinction between “creative talent” and the rest of the organization. All workers can continually improve the performance by engaging in creative problems solving, often by connecting with peers inside and outside the firm.”

from HBR; July/Aug 2009; “Leadership in the New World”

“An executive team on its own can’t find the best solutions. But leadership can generate more leadership deep in the organization.”

“Embrace disequilibrium— keeping people in a state that creates enough discomfort to induce change, but not so much that they fight, flee, or freeze.”

from HBR; July/Aug 2009; “Strategy in the New World: The 10 Trends You Have to Watch”

“Corporate leaders need to demonstrate to civil society that they understand popular and political concerns related to executive compensation, risk management, board oversight, and the treatment of employees facing layoffs.”

Management models “need to incorporate more-realistic version of human behavior— most likely by drawing on behavior economics, becoming more dynamic, and integrating real-world feedback— and… business leaders need to get better at using them.”

Regulation in the New World: Government in Your Business

“The changes afoot have been on the horizon for some time, thanks to long-term trends such as deepening public distrust of business.”

Shareholders First? Not So Fast…

“Why should past labor (capital) receive so much preference over current labor (employees)?”

“Consider that there are literally scores of recent studies showing the gains in profitability and productivity that companies have made— not by putting investors’ interests first but by implementing high-commitment work practices. These include investing in training, decentralizing decision making, and having pay contingent on organizational, not just individual, performance. Other sources show the benefits companies reap from customer loyalty and high levels of customer satisfaction.”

[DB NOTE: I was struck by the use of "high-commitment" rather that "accountability" in the paragraph above. Machine parts need to be "accountable" but innovative organizations thrive via deep personal commitment. Fodder for a future blog]

Restoring America’s Competitiveness

“Corporate management must overhaul its practices and governance structures so the no longer exaggerate the payoffs and discount the dangers of outsourcing production and cutting investments in R&D.”

“Stop blaming Wall Street for short-term behavior… When companies promise to increase returns quarter after quarter, that’s what Wall Street expects. But when they articulate a credible long-term strategy and demonstrate a capacity to execute that strategy, the capital markets have given them the necessary room to achieve it.”

“Managers would serve their companies more wisely by recognizing that informed judgment is a better guide to making such decisions than an analytical model loaded with arbitrary assumptions. There is no way to take the guesswork out of the process.

“Only be rejuvenating its innovative capabilities can America return to a path of sustainable growth.”

Sane or insane? You decide. More tomorrow…

Yesterday on his Dark Matter Matters blog, my friend Chris Grams respectfully challenged author Seth Godin by asserting that his latest book “Tribes” limited his audience by preaching to the choir.

Grams describes two separate and distinct audiences that could benefit from Godin’s work. Following Roger Martin’s model, one is the ‘validity-minded’ designer audience (his already loyal following, the “choir” if you will).

The other audience, the one who widely panned Godin’s book, is the ’reliability-minded’ business community that needs concrete examples and reliable outcomes. More data. More case studies. More proof.

Grams suggests that Godin could do more to reach out to this group, that he write his next book less for ‘validity-minded’ tribes and more for members of the ‘reliability-minded’ tribe.

Godin, in a comment on the blog post, graciously responded: “The challenge isn’t to preach to the choir. The challenge is to give the choir ideas they can use to spread the word.”

What a wonderful exchange. I’m a big fan of both Chris Grams and Seth Godin. And I appreciate that Godin has defined his role in the mission of spreading the good news.

For thirty years I’ve heard the call for ‘creatives’ to learn to speak the language of business. As Roger Martin advises, it continues to be valuable advice. But it cuts both ways.

What we should not underemphasize is Dr. Martin’s call to the business leaders: Think. Become more like designers. In a world where innovation is truly strategic, creativity is an imperative.

Business leaders need to be open to changing their world view about creative work forces. Recognize and appreciate the differences. Create cultures where creativity flourishes.

Unless they do, they will be left with one bullet to compete— cutting costs. Not very strategic. Good luck on that.