A few years ago I started developing what I call the “open conceptual enterprise.” The idea is that we need to rethink our basic assumptions about business not just in the context of different kinds of businesses but in the context of all types of human enterprise. By “enterprise” I mean the general impulse to [...]
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business models,
change,
collaboration,
enterprise,
enterprise modeling,
entrepreneurship,
google,
org theory,
organizational culture,
organizations,
philosophy of enterprise,
purpose,
social entrepreneurship,
web
This is my first post following ChangeCamp London (there will likely be one or two more) in which I’m suggesting points for probable improvement: mostly things I actively promoted through the planning process, and which I hope to see emphasized more in the future. This post argues for the need to be open throughout the process. [...]
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changecamp,
changecamp london,
crowdsourcing,
events,
groups,
motivation,
open government,
openness,
organizations,
planning,
psychology,
sociology,
strategy
A recent tweet reminded me of Clay Shirky’s excellent observation: Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. Kevin Kelly called it The Shirky Principle, using the example of unions to illustrate: Unions were a brilliant solution to the problem of capital management which tended to exploit uncapitalized workers. But [...]
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change,
clay shirky,
generativity,
ideas,
institutions,
kevin kelly,
organizations,
relationships,
relevance,
theories,
trust,
will to relevance
Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on something they know little about—to set strategies. And yet, companies won’t experiment to find evidence of the right way forward. Quote from Dan Ariely’s column in the Harvard Business Review, [...]
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behavioural economics,
design,
design thinking,
experiments,
future,
management,
mindsets,
organizations,
pragmatism
Literally! Out of all the things buzzing in my head for a “new decade” post, the idea I want to highlight most is the increasing importance of making stuff. It’s been germinating in my mind via MakerCulture in the Making by UWO + Ryerson’s online journalism classes. Last week it was crystalized by Umair Haque’s “Builders’ Manifesto” [...]
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00's,
goals,
happiness,
history,
institutions,
makers,
motivation,
organizations,
progress,
think21st
The natural inclination right now for geeks of a certain type is to start dreaming up new standards bodies, or how they can participate in the Open Web Foundation to make a Super Awesome Twitter API Evolution Committee. Here’s my recommendation: Don’t. Don’t do any of that shit, and don’t run off to make membership [...]
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bureaucracies,
collaboration,
copenhagen,
design thinking,
designers' ego,
generativity,
innovation,
open innovation,
organizations,
planning,
rapid prototyping,
think21st,
twitter,
twitter api
Continued from the social uncertainty principle post, using the analogy of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Like virtually all of the ideas I’m describing in this series, the social uncertainty principle is a heuristic for observing ideas-in-action and overcoming fallacies that affect them. Specifically it’s a rule of thumb for working out a balance between ideas that [...]
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epistemology,
information,
intuition,
knowledge,
management,
methods,
organizations,
social uncertainty,
statistics,
think21st,
uncertainty,
uncertainty principle
Part of a new series I’m starting to explore social, creative, and economic opportunities specific to London Ontario. Recently I posted about the benefits of educating citizens to think like journalists. Since then I found a lot of great examples of a collaborative approach to journalism — not just between professionals and amateurs, but between [...]
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cities,
collaboration,
conversation,
cooperation,
journalism,
news,
opportunity,
organizations,
social media,
web
After the Google Wave announcement in May I went in to work all excited to share the awesomeness with my colleagues — one of whom caught me off-guard by asking, “Ok, so what good is that?“ My first thought was, “Hmmm, obviously I didn’t stress how awesome it’s going to be.” Then I realized maybe we’re [...]
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customer service,
daniel goleman,
google,
google wave,
henry chesbrough,
innovation,
jeff jarvis,
learning organizations,
open innovation,
openness,
organizations,
process,
service,
service design,
social media,
social web,
technology,
transparency,
wave,
web,
zappos
by OpenConceptual on 07-22-2009
in concepts
As maybe one of the most marked turns in the history of mainstream military strategy, Thomas Friedman quotes a US officer in Afghanistan saying, “We don’t count enemy killed in action anymore.” Friedman elaborates: Early in both Iraq and Afghanistan our troops did body counts, à la Vietnam. But the big change came when the officers [...]
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afghanistan,
amazon,
customer service,
employee relations,
military,
military strategy,
organizational culture,
organizations,
relationship centred medicine,
relationships,
strategy,
zappos
by OpenConceptual on 07-15-2009
in concepts
Jeff Jarvis has been “thinking a lot about this lately: the need to risk and fail and not hold perfection as the standard of success.” That’s a ‘perfect’ jump-off to introduce an important concept I’m trying to promote: generativity: instead of evaluating things on how well they accord with preconceived models and assumptions, let’s evaluate [...]
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competence,
cultural evolution,
evolution,
failure,
finance crisis,
generativity,
institutions,
love of learning,
new economics,
organizations,
physics,
pragmatism,
quantum theory,
randomness,
science,
success
by OpenConceptual on 07-12-2009
in mission
Just sort of a brainstorm here, following up on some of my relatively more youthful attempts to outline what this is all about: Draft Enterprise Model The Practice of Theory The other day I jotted down a few points — trying to distill the underlying mission of this amorphous enterprise. It has a few different [...]
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accountability,
articulation,
beta,
business,
change,
civics,
decision-making,
decisions,
design thinking,
digitization,
government,
information,
objectivity,
open,
open government,
open source,
openness,
org theory,
organizations,
participation,
politics,
pragmatism,
social web,
society,
transparency,
volunteering,
web
