this is the last question in 10 days, it's quite quite sentimental Really? We've gone through everything. Request for we have more I kind of miss these. Well, I'm not going to miss that. My diary but I want this conversation.
You could do a town hall every once in a while I guess, can you?
Yeah, I'm actually thinking about doing a sprint every every two months around around two or three methods of keeping things going. And partly to be honest, I'm getting energy from the conversations and I need that.
Audiences I really am missing audiences. It's like, all my best ideas come from a flip chart in front of a live audience. It's
so So when do you see exploration stopping because last week, we had all of this and I was doing various other bits. And I was doing some trainings and stuff. So I don't get as much.
Now really, we need people now to focus on documenting things. Okay, yeah. And yeah, the whole point about the wiki is and it doesn't stop when people gather ideas, but I need people focused on methods not on assemblies. It's quite a speed with which people have moved to putting different things together and talking about recipes is scary. And the whole point about this is you can assemble different methods in different combinations. So that's kind of like the focus. Right.
I've enjoyed a lot of the resources dance that that people have been posting really enjoy going through those. It's been great.
Now I think it's good. I think we're creating a real community around the wiki on this. So what I'm hoping is some of that will go into concept pieces. So there's spaces on the wiki for that if you look, yeah. So then concepts can be linked with methods. But the way we handle this is to have it's a granularity question, which is key to complexity, right? The minute you produce an assembly, yeah. So I gave this example. So I think Chris, or somebody posted sanyes pie slice, well, that's an assembly. It's not a method. So I can agree or disagree with that. But actually, what we're about now is getting each individual method done so people can put them together in different combinations. But this move immediately into a composite is actually quite dangerous. Okay.
So Dave, if we make complete assets of ourselves when we are writing something on the wiki, are you going to come and save us from now I'll
just be stupid. I'll just revert you.
revert. Sorry.
Yeah, that means I just look at look at what you've done against what was there before and I'll just press one button, then revert it and say take this the top page. Yeah, or I may modify and that's the way Wikis work, right? It's Be bold, you refer to discuss. Okay, so the I mean, from my point of view, it's brilliant. I mean, I've just been arguing about that with my colleagues. I say, you can't develop methods other than the wiki because that way I can supervise them. Because what's historically happened is people take a method, then they create a slide set, then they modify it, and they're modifying EBS corrupted. All right, if you develop it on the wiki, I can just look at every change every morning and see who's changed what I mean, and all of you guys can do the same. You've got access to the wiki, you can look at the wiki every day and see who's changed what. So that keeps you up to date. And it keeps people honest.
So we shouldn't be afraid to lose face.
Now you shouldn't, then you should basically, and I learned this in the early days of wiki, I mean, I, well, I said, even when I got banned from editing the Iran page for three months, right, but I was allowed to contribute constructively to the top page. Rather, this just got banned for a year or two years each. So I considered myself an acceptable war against acceptable sacrifice in the ongoing war against evil, right. But I learned from that a lot of editors blocked because yeah, it's kind of like wiki wiki is run by rules, right? And you learn how it works. I've actually got some really good far right friends in the states don't know who they are just now their IDs. But they play by the rules. So we work together. So if I see they've edited even though I know their political views are apparent, I then double check it because I know they play by the rules. So they want to put anything in which isn't hasn't got reliable third party sources, I
just thought it was necessary to say something in order to get it going.
Now, and I think you start to put things up, alright, man, if you actually look and you see what I'm doing, I am reversing some stuff or changing it or particularly where people are creating new articles were one already exists. So it's kinda like except a bit of savagery if you do that, because you're not checking. But generally, the rule is try and modify what somebody said, rather than just reverted. Yeah. So the other thing is don't don't go and spend three hours making major changes to the article, because then there's just too much there. And the easiest way to handle it is just revert it and see try again. On the other hand, if you do lots of discrete changes, and some can be reverted, and some can be modified, it's easier to track.
You learn how to edit Wikipedia, and you learn by doing. Yeah. And remember the tool pages really badly if not sort of something, open a section on the talk page and say, I'm not sure about this, what do I think I should do? Then people can come in and talk about it. Yeah. Okay, I think we're probably up to max on this. So this is accepted triggers. acceptation is the third stage of the field guide. So it's a SAS that takes out transcend. And the principle of acceptation. The other phrase we use on the field guide is radical repurposing. So under stress, you can't invent things from scratch, you have to find things you already know you're competent at and repurpose them very quickly. And by the way, that's a general pattern of innovation. Brian Arthur wrote a really only written one book called help us. He didn't many papers. But he wrote a really good book on the evolution of technology, which doesn't use the word acceptation, but is all about it. Is it technology actually evolves by things being repurposed. And you can see this in the history. So IBM repurpose, they develop punch card machines, to control industrial machines, and they repurpose them for the for software programmes. And that gave them strategic advantage, right? So anybody else could have got the concept but to develop the capability to do punch cards would have taken longer, whereas IBM already knew how to do it, so they could just move it sideways. And there's a famous five Pfizer case on which you all know in which two Pfizer scientists were meeting at a conference and one discussed a rather interesting side effect they had on a cardiac drug. And guess what we got out of that we got Viagra. Yeah, so lid amide was produces and hallucinogenic. It produced a really negative side effects handicapped children, but it also produced the world's first ever worldwide cure for leprosy. So the ability to see something novel and to repurpose what you've already got is key. And an example I've used a lot because it's real and personal, is I've lost count to the number of things I've learned to repurpose over the years to open beer bottles late at night in a hotel, when there isn't the proper bottle opener. Yeah, we are all tremendously inventive. given a chance right? You're though these problems aren't you put you put in a room and you're given five instruments, and you have to find a way to reuse them. And we're actually all really good at that. Yeah. So man, the other phrase for this is managing serendipity. Yeah. So what you're trying to do is manage a beneficial code ideas. So that means that a subsidiary methods, this knowledge mapping is a key aspect. And that's a separate track. If you don't know what, you know, the right level of granularity, you can't repurpose it. And getting the granularity is right. If you have smaller things that are recombined in novel ways, bigger things weren't. So that's what the action framework and decision mapping about is getting knowledge into a sort of discrete form, so that you can find ways to recombine it. Okay, now, say, just knowing what you know, can help on that. There are physical processes for this. Yeah. And this comes back to the work we did on design thinking. So this is some we worked on for two years. Design is about innovation. And everybody seen the famous Double Diamond, right? Which causes most design professionals to sort of hold their heads with shame, right? They are currently in the commodification stage of the life cycle. So you can now do two days course and gets a difficult. I mean, I my cousin's son is actually an architect, he did four years at Cambridge, got a first class degree. Yeah, did three years in an architectural firm, and then did five years at Harvard and got a distinction. And now he's an architect. He didn't do a two day course and get a certificate. And there's a huge concern on the same design. Is the industrialization a process? Yeah. So what we did is we worked on a couple of things.
One created a two by two matrix. Now, a two by two matrices are useful because they're mainly done to position things. I use two by two matrices to say that idea is really cute, but it only works there. So this does that. So the vertical dimension on this is ethnography, or discovery. And the horizontal direct dimension is ideation or generation and novelty. And the two extremes are expert against distributed. So expert discovery, expert ideation. That's what you see with design firms like your data. will interview people will run workshops will generate ideas will produce good products. Yeah, nothing wrong with that is hugely powerful. But in connecting them terms, it really deals with all the second approach distributed ethnography, expert ideation, otherwise known as mapping unarticulated needs. So this is where you gather stories of people's day to day lives, frustrations, experiences, things that they get bored by things that they think should be different. And then you look at clusters in those narratives. And experts say I know something I could do for this. So rather than asking users what they want, you identify what their problems are. And then you find solutions against that. So that's distributed ethnography expert ideation. And then you get expert ethnography, distributed ideation. So I've got a problem I've defined the problem. I then distribute that to a huge number of people for ideas generation. And look at patterns in the ideas generated and then you get the top right hand box which is you know, in all good two by twos is top right hand box is where the really good stuff happens. Right? is where you get unarticulated needs mapped against distributed ideation. Right now, I'll give you an example of the first time we did one of these which was with Philips Lighting. And Philips, this is an Eindhoven. Eindhoven is not Amsterdam. Never call people in Eindhoven Dutch, because then they'll call you English until you learn the lesson of your ways. All right, it's a different culture. Yeah, Dutch is that bit around Amsterdam. And as they say, in Eindhoven, it's only a matter of a decade before they're actually underwater. And they're talking about things like braid or by the sea that's actually a sort of rather dark humid joke in the Netherlands at the moment because braider is just above the likely folk play. So anyway, they have this idea that lights can be a garden feature, but didn't you know, people bought lights to light their garden or like light paths, but they didn't see light itself as a garden feature. So they look into that. So we pulled in 330. This was a sense maker project, we pulled in 3000 stories over a week from people about their gardens. We didn't ask them about light, we hid aspects of light and shade in the signifier set. So we weren't prompting people for this. And that material, and we asked them to take pictures of their garden, things that they would like in their garden pictures of other people's gardens they liked, it was just an open type capture. Yeah. And then we got the technical staff in Philips to index all of their technologies using the same signifier set. Now, of course, if you're doing knowledge mapping, you're doing this in real time anyway, right. So this was a one serve exercise we use polymorphic signifies them. So they're the same concept, but different language. And then we match the databases together based on the signification. And we got five clusters. And three of those classes went on to become major businesses. Yeah, the one I'm ashamed of, yeah. is a plastic rock, which lights up in the dark in pools and changes colours based on human proximity. This is selling really well in Southeast Asia. It's entirely based on a technology designed to handle lighting and staircases where it will be saturated by flows of urine at half time. Yeah, it's one of those sort of weird things you get when you do this sort of work, right. And nobody would made the connection till we put the two together. So we put them together level of abstraction, and said, What do you think this means? Yeah. And that's kind of like automatic suggestion. So that's an example of database. Right? Now, as you look in the field guide, you say we map the knowledge, we map the problems, we have different teams, we then start to associate what we know with problems, and we suggest things for people to look at.
And that's actually acceptation. What we're also doing, which is the bit you would have had sign NDA clauses for if you're more advanced, I just to the high level, is we use in a sense maker to produce a query, which is kind of like, well, if I knew the answer to this problem, I would index it like this. Or these are really interesting stories that I think may be related to my problem, now based on a high abstraction search, and then that will generate a hermeneutic inquiry into the web. And we'll throw back anything confined on the web, and that will produce things that you didn't expect to see. Yeah, which is very different from, say, a keyword search or an associated pattern. So that that we're going to produce as a tool over the next few weeks. We're doing the first experiments with transport for Wales on that. So high level, that's acceptation. Open for conversation.
It sounds like that last piece is trying to inject surprise into.
Like, its novelty. All right. So it also appeals to curiosity. If you say why are these things linked? People will struggle will actually work to find the linkage. Yeah. Because they know there's some reasons they'll be linked. They don't know what it is. So they'll puzzle it out. Right. So you it's a sort of form of stimulate your curiosity. In that sounds. I guess the challenge there is you're you're when you do that, you're subject to that bias that apophenia of identifying patterns that don't exist in data that, yeah, but that's what we do with the abstraction. So it's not you deciding what the pattern is you've you index your knowledge this way. And people have problems that way. We're associated as at the abstract level. And we're saying why do we think these things are associated, some of them may not be but it will stimulate you to notice novelty. The other interesting thing on this is, is one of the ways we use diaries and lessons learned is to note note minor patterns or minor anomalies. So when things you use diaries for is for people to note anomalies, things, which they didn't expect to see. Yeah, because that's actually where you also get novelty. Yeah, and that's where you may also get an exempted moment. So if you look in the farmer industry, they have hugely elaborate procedures to spot side effects. Because the side effects often create new drugs. And I did a big programme with the Ventus on this. So we were, I was actually one of the best programmes we did. We found new uses, for example, for clora thermophila, which is a fungus site. Right and that that was what we did is we were trying to look Get out of out of Payton products and find ways we can create a novel use which can be patented. Now, and I mean, Bonnie can tell you just how valuable that is to a pharma company, right. And we also have one of the most depressing projects I've done, which we did it on suicide amongst farmworkers. So as I'll tell you the story because it makes a point. So the easiest way to commit suicide is a farm worker is to put a shotgun in your mouth and pull the trigger. And I still remember that went out on number three in the cricket team, we didn't turn up so we went to find him. Yeah. And we walked into his kitchen, he was a farmer, just as he put the shotgun into his mouth and pulled the trigger. I'll never forget that sight. And because we came in, we disturbed him. So he shot the side of his face, and we got the air ambulance out. Yeah. And he's still now our best number three batsmen visitors the plastic side of his face to the incoming bowler. And it puts them off completely. I mean, he's he sort of adjusted to a time. But the worst way of dying is actually to swallow paraquat. Now, if you swallow parrikar, you're going to die in an agonising way over four or five weeks as you drown in your own body fluids. And there's nothing anybody can do about it. So there were campaigns to ban paragraphs. So we we spent a large process looking into this Yeah. And if you don't know it, they put they put stuff into paragraphs, which means you're likely to stick it up if you try and swallow it. So you have to really work to swallow it. And it smells badly. And so what we came and we got through the stories, you know, we basically say, Well, you can't take this stuff accidentally, it's got to be deliberate. And what we found in the stories is there's a whole group of people who want other people to suffer as a result of their suicide. So if you blow your head off with a shotgun, and you won't be around to see them around your bed apologising to you as you suffer an agonising death with Barracuda. And that was actually what we got as a main motivation. I mean, this is quite a depressing project in many ways, right? But what it basically said is, yeah, this Yeah, it's not the joke, which is a problem, because if we get rid of paraquat, they might use neurotoxins, and that's even worse. So the real issue is socialisation of farmers and farmer suicide. And it's not it's not the drought is not the weed killer, which is causing the problem. Yeah, it's actually something some further back stream, and then we looked at methods on that. And again, that's this process of preventing people forming too fast links and causality. Yeah.
I think you're very right about that, as well. One, full disclosure, one of my closest friends committed suicide very deliberately, in a very deliberate way, leaving a note on Valentine's Day. And it was specifically to cause problems with the knock on effect that it caused problems for everyone, not just the person that he was aiming at. So yeah, it's, I can well believe that.
Dave, on the aspect of triggers here is the trigger the mental contrasting, which comes up as a result of showing surfacing those things. Where's the trigger part?
The trigger is human curiosity. I forgotten there's actually something on Sesame industry is why is this thing like another? Yeah. Is it human beings love this sort of stuff is why these things connect it? Yeah, it's not obvious. And we love that. And I think it's like the role of art in human evolution is abstraction for novel connections. So you know, we've evolved to be curious. And so if you anything you can do, which make people curious means they'll get novel discoveries.
But in order to, to to make them curious, you're showing the mental contrast, right, which is based on on those stories,
were to help understand the process. So these user stories were interpreted the same way that you interpreted your knowledge. So why do you think they're linked? Now, why were these two things interpreted in the same way? Yeah, so you're not saying there is a linkage, but you say they were both interpreted in the same way. So there may be a linkage here.
I mean, yeah, there are other ways to do this. So for example, probably the greatest innovation in the history of music is Wagner's introduction of the Tristen code now I'll make a broader point on here. It's so people who don't know their opera right? Tristan code introduces unresolved tension. So the music never resolved the melody never resolved. Yeah, which Ashley and Wagner was the first person to think of that, but it's his last opera, who is using mature craftsman, before he risks the deviation. But by making that change, music was never the same again afterwards. And the other interesting thing is that Wagner wrote three brilliant Italian style operas before he wrote to find out. But because we find Dutchman, he changed opera, you know, with elite motif. everybody forgets the earlier operas, even though they would stand in their own right within the Italian tradition, right? So there is this concept of innovation opens up doors and closes off doors as a path dependency issue. And we've got one of the other ways we do acceptation. This is through simulation. So I'll give you two examples on this. And again, this fits into it. And that's the link method, right? is when I was working with DARPA, I mean, Chris knows this because he's been chatting with us about it. I got, I got DARPA to fund me to run a one day workshop in Richmond with 50. Historians, I think we had about 25 leads and a lot of students to create an alternative History of the United States. It was the South Windsor Civil War. And we had a lot of fun with this. Right. It was great fun. All right. And we the turning point is Lincoln doesn't make slavery illegal. And if you don't know it, that doesn't happen till two years in. Lincoln up to that point, you're saying we'll send the blacks back to Africa? Yes. And he famously says the war is not about slavery. No, but the only way to stop the British and the French for intervening visa, Confederate strategy was to starve the British and the French have gotten so that they would intervene because they knew the British and the French wanted to intervene because they wanted to stop America emerging as a superpower. And that was a South southern strategy. If you want to read about this, Amanda Foreman's book on the Civil War is brilliant, because it's entirely constructed from British and French Embassy records. Yeah, at the time, yeah. So we constructed a history in which Lincoln doesn't play the slavery card, which means he loses the election, which means the sad there's a compromise. Yeah, there's all sorts of fascinating things happen New England, right? becomes a second rate Europe, they always want to be European, but they never quite make it like the Anglo Indians. Your taxes becomes the American Saudi Arabia, a bunch of farmers who got rich, too quick for their own good. And somebody said, well, that happened anyway. Right. California falls, the Mexicans enforce the Japanese in the Pacific Rim strategy, which means Australia forced the Japanese as well. And we had a ball doing this. All right. Canada is a dominant economic power, because you don't get the westward move of battle hardened troops and the Civil War invasion in genocide on Native Americans. So the Native American Canada combination, which actually won the war of 1812 stays together. So Canada holds the central plains. And then by the time we got to Kansas, we were on to solutions involving imbrium. And we got a little bit self indulgent to that point. Now that alternative history was referred last us last year, I'm in about every year or so I actually construct a version of it. And what we do is we find a version of this alternative History of the United States, which matches a current foreign policy situation. And we put managers into that historical situation in a war game and see what how, what solutions they come up with. And because it's disconnected from reality, they come up with ideas they never come up with if they war game, the actual situation. And we have a similar process to service we send it anthropologists who study a company. And then we sit down with scientists who conduct who construct the ecosystems for science fiction writers. And we construct an alien planet which exactly matches the culture of the company we work with. And we land managers in a war game and find out how they find solutions and they find novel solutions they've never otherwise fine.
Now, so by shifting into an abstraction or to a fictional account, counterfactuals a very powerful way to getting people to discover novelty. And by the way, there are a lot of fun if you run the numbers games.
I'm also thinking about the Gary Klein and he Original five curiosity connections, creative desperation, contradictions, etc, which he reduced later to three. But from his logic, it is also triggering something,
right? He is and I think if you look at his pre mortem work, yeah. And he and I have worked pre mortem with future backwards and looked at the, actually in combination, they're more powerful either individually. And by the way, Gary is really keen to work with us on an anthro simulation. I mean, he and I published a couple of papers together, which describe that sort of process.
Any more question, though, going back a bit about what you're saying about creativity under stresses repurposing, exists already, I'm just thinking about some of the innovations. Sadly, during wartime, which do seem to be a bit more than just repurposing something. Now,
it's stress, right? I mean, I've always said the three conditions for innovation are basically stress and perspective shift. You know, I forgot what I'd say nutshell, remember it? All it does take an example or at the famous dambuster stuff, right? They had to fly a plane horizontally across a German reservoir to drop a bouncing bomb. He didn't have the technology. And the famous story on this is two officers were at strip club when they saw the two spotlights on the strip, and they realised they could do that. Yeah, so they can put two stoplights on the aeroplane and have the angle right now they provide the two spots coincided. They knew exactly, they were at the right height. And they had lots of examples that you find a lot of that in warfare, you get massive acceptation. Because the system is stressed and it has limited resources. Remember it starvation, pressure, perspective shift. Then people innovate. So resourcing people for innovation is a mistake. Is the buy Don't be making on startups. You don't you don't over resources startup. Because you actually want people to have to sell new things. If they can't sell new things, they don't co evolve. So they get arrogant. And they assume they've worked out the right solution. Only once they've got something which people are buying, do you find them to scale? Because you need that sort of high level pressure, interaction stress, right? And people are tremendously useful under this. I mean, sound I've been through three startups in my life to in companies where myself. And I've also been through a massive turnaround, right? So for example, you know, data sciences, which is the company, I was one of the 50 management people in the management buyer. And I was one of the five who went to the venture capitalists and told the truth. And the next day, we were the only five left, everybody else got fired. And they brought in a CEO and he reduced all of the senior management team to tears one by one, I still remember he just destroyed my business plans. The guy was brilliant. And then he basically selected six people and told us we didn't have to worry about the future, whatever happened, we would have jobs for our career. And that actually was tremendously powerful because we didn't worry anymore. Yeah. And the company was almost at the point of bankruptcy. And I remember one weekend, we had a real problem with cultural change. And that people were hierarchical. They weren't talking. We weren't getting cross fertilisation. So we gave people an extra days holiday over Easter. So that gave us five days. And we brought in the builders and we said, you know, we're going to have to decontaminate the office because there's nasty bugs here. So nobody wants to come in. And we took away all the walls. We just took away every single wall. And then people came in on the Wednesday and they discovered them, no walls left. And then we monitored who rebuilt the walls with filing cabinets. And those are the managers we fired. Yeah, we created a good HR excuse afterwards. But we had to shed 20% of the staff. And so we basically did use that as a detection technique. Here to find it out. And again, I mean, we have a lot of fun. In those days, we came up with some brilliant ideas, because, you know, we never knew from month to month whether we could pay the wages or not. Yeah, and we were safe. So we knew we were okay. Because we have that, you know, the venture capitalists have bought in Andy and he was going to run it. Yeah. And he was really good at letting I mean, he let me have complete carte blanche to do whatever I wanted. He very famously said your speech Okay. Go and check some spheres And he had other people around you and more structured. And we did a lot of stuff in that days. But you actually find and you find people who regret it. It's not like it was when we were a startup. It's not like the early days. Yeah. And the reason is, is different, and you have to go through the different life cycles. Yeah, the way. It's why I hate that book Lean Startup from it's a truly appalling book. Because the guy goes and studies friends of his who are successful and identifies things they did, and then says, if you do these things, you will be successful. Now we've Dorothy landed, we actually studied the valley in detail. And we also study companies who fail. And I can tell you everything in lean startup, which is associated with companies have failed, companies of companies have succeeded, companies have failed, did exactly the same thing. The difference is you've got a huge number of players, so some of them are bound to succeed is basic statistics.
Now you haven't got a causal link, you just got a pattern. So if you look at max work at Walden, which is brilliant is about how you are how you are intrapreneur. Because entrepreneurs work because there are 1000s of them. And there's mass failure, you can't do that in a company. So you have to do intrapreneurship, which is very different from entrepreneurship. And so there's a whole market around that.
It's really throwing ideas here, because this is one of those methods where there's probably five or six Wikipedia wiki articles to produce and links to other methods. So we link to knowledge match mapping in action. And we link to articles about an articulated deep management, then we say we combine it so there's, this is one of the more complex of the workgroups. Because there are so many things that can link and connect.
Dave, what do you think it would be possible to be a really simplistic here to use a technique like de Bono's thinking hats to put people into a different situation, would that be appropriate? Or would this be just childish?
It's better than just getting people together. But you might as well get people to actually fill out the horoscope and do their astrology charts and then combine on that basis.
Yeah, I was just musing about having a real simple tool. And
yeah, I mean, it's better than nothing. All right. And it's a ritual change. And it causes people to think but it doesn't scale. Yeah. And it doesn't produce radical innovation. People don't become innovative because they put on a different hat. And, and to be honest, the underlying science is really bad. So it's better than nothing, right? It's like, I mean, it's the famous thing where I actually ran a controlled experiment for three months and prove that astrology was more accurate than Myers Briggs in predicting team behaviour. And IBM HR never forgave me for that. They never ever forgave me for it, all right. And they wanted to fire me for it. And Lew said he was very happy for them to fire me, but he will be a witness in my defence, which can like realise, you know, because, I mean, my older psychometric test suggests a nonsense, all they do is, is to give you a way of seeing that you're different from other people. And that's their value. So it doesn't really matter what you do. So you might as well use astrology because then you're not making false claims. So I think what we're trying to do is to innovate at scale. Not in a workshop. And if you look at it, virtually every method we have is about doing things at scale. Yeah, okay, the volume up and using workshops to validate processes, but even then you don't innovate. You don't do it in that way. But yeah, Debian is fine. All right. I mean, it is a good idea. Alright. So we use ritual transformation. So for example, one things I've done quite a lot of, is if you get coders to put on a formal suit before they do testing, they find more errors in their code. And is because you're changing their identity. So you're actually better right in thinking how it's works because it's a ritual act of doing something. And one of the ones I did with British Airways, beach Airways, for example, which we did for a year and I said we won't do this for more than a year is I got an actor in which is the cheapest consultant they've ever got. The actor had no idea what consultants got paid. So he just accepted what was nothing. And he was allowed to go into any meeting and ask any question and say anything to anybody, including board meetings, provided he was just as costume. Yeah, with the three half hours Hadn't the bells and everything? Because he was ridiculous. He could do it. Right. And that is another innovation technique. Yeah, it's it's to create the fool. I mean, IBM actually had this by lou is there I mean that there was kind of like cachet for general managers in having who had the most disruptive Maverick. He was caught my Mavericks better than your Maverick. So I actually became a hotly contested territory between two general managers, because I could upset a downside more people than most other people could in IBM. And there was kudos in how in somebody did that that was actually quite a good mechanism in IBM. And the guy I worked for his rounding error every quarter was quarter of a million dollars. So if Yeah, if there was ever $249,000, he could round it down to zero so we could hide things. And then basically left and Sam came in and Sam removed, made everything transparent. Nobody could take risks. Nobody could hide anything. And that key mechanism and IBM was destroyed. So another way to innovate is literally the gestural. Yeah, the person who asked the question and challenge Oh, holds up a mirror. Yeah. I the one with the allegedly when he was CEO of smithkline, Beecham had really good relationship with him, actually. And we did a lot of work on merger and acquisition. I mean, he was the guy who put smithkline and beach him together, right. And we came up with urist, ik in the in a merger, which is anybody who looks good, should be fired in. Sorry, anybody who looks good in the first year of the merger should be fired. Is there a gameplay? Yeah, they're working out what you want saying they're saying it. And the people who are just getting on with the job you need to do differently. And I created a virtual environment in this was the early version of Second Life, in which Yan had about 15 personality, so he could talk with people who didn't know he was the CEO. Yeah, and that actually worked really well.
But begin on your mentioning scaling acceptation, or accepted practice or accepted? Is that I would say I would assume there is a limit of doing this. In order to keep track on what you're actually doing.
It needs to be punctuated. It's an intervention. Yeah. Now, having said that, if you actually move to continuous capture, so for example, if like we did with the US Army, we press Control reports, yeah, with continuous capture field lessons that you can make acceptive continuous in real time. It doesn't have to be a punctuated process, because you're capturing the x active data indirectly as a result of a more formal process which people find valuable.
And to my mind, a really progressive company would move to continuous capture of experiences and get rid of all reports, reports are a waste of time. They're always retrospective coherence. So for example, when we work in hospitals, if the nurse can take a picture of a patient, write a record and record the patient's story that's much more valuable than updating the medical record at the end of the day. Yeah, that's real time data. Yeah. So as that comes in, I can actually spot problems. And I've got my knowledge assets continuously being recorded and novelty done. So I can constantly throw the databases together and alert senior managers because there's something new emerging. Yeah, and they can pay attention to decide if they go. So you really want the innovative process to be a continuous process, not a punctuated process.
might be an example of that in some of the circles where they write narrative week notes on projects each week. So there isn't deliberately isn't a format. It's a very simple narrative account of what's happened in the week.
We do that by Will you capture stuff as you do it rather than perspective? Yeah, we've introduced high obstruction metadata, which means it's quite, it's not based on keyword link searches. Which means you can take photographs or use voice as well as text. I mean, tax is a real problem, by the way, I call it the tyranny of the explicit, you can write down at most 10% of what you know. Now think about the implications of that for the way the internet works. That we're working with very limited information sets and that's actually quite dangerous.
Sorry to come back to this. But for me acceptation is a is a creative process. And I would suggest that you simply cannot allow everybody to be creative at the same time, you have to confine it somehow, because it's open, so then you you go Berzerk
is by co creativity, and occasional clustering. So everybody is in being creative all the time. But everybody is continuously capturing the experience and you're throwing combinations together and see who picks it up. I mean, human beings by nature, I mean, creativity is a key. Creativity is a consequence of starvation, pressure and perspective shift. You can't make people creative. That's been a fundamental mistake of systems dynamics is the confusion of an emergent property with a causal factor. Yeah. So running creativity programmes and having areas with you know, coloured sofas and toys for kids to play. His car makes you look really good. And it's an investment process, but it won't work. Alright. I actually created Innovation Centre point is that it was a mobile Innovation Centre. It's a workshop process. And what we actually had is we had people working in groups of threes. And we had boards which we could flip over. So literally, we could strip off you know, we have you know, large pet, you know, what, your massive printer paper with machine so we could pull it off, strip it off, put it up, people will brainstorm. We can flip it over, you capture that. So we put people effectively under huge pressure. Yeah, and nothing ever stabilise to what we did one with Richard Branson's team, all right. And we had IBM's team and Richard Branson's team, and we just work the thing together, and they came up with stuff, they would never come up otherwise, because they never got a chance to sit and think. You know, they were constantly under pressure and constantly interacting, and they had starvation of resources and had to come up with novelty. And by the way, that was a time I locked three IBM senior consultants in the library of a Jacobean mansion. And there's less than there because they were trying to stop me running the process business had declined to change their requirement. I still remember that with great fondness. All right, because it was the first floor All right, and they had the the shall we say the flowers under the window, got a degree of ammonia during the day. And we let them out later on that night, and nobody could do anything, because Richard Branson thought it was wonderful. So yeah, I made some enemies, but it was the way it work. Sorry, you, you have to learn this with IBM, the way you deal with bureaucrats, you put them into a position where if they actually punish you for it, they're shamed by the process. That's how you get away with things right. As you did, which have good coverage, just enjoy yourself. It's amazing what you can get away with. But again, what we were doing is, we didn't create a creativity centre with children's games, we actually dealt with real problems. But we constantly move people around and swap them and didn't give them time. And if any of them said, the staff won't accept it, we said leave that one for a minute. And we consulted the staff in the next five minutes and got the results back. So conflict didn't happen. I mean, that takes a lot of setup. But that's actually quite powerful as we're doing.
Have you seen any company that that truly managed to have this real time continuous capturing?
Yo, the only time I've seen it right, and I've done this? is we've made it for humans in warfare.
So that works, right? I mean, if I look at the worker there with West Point, yeah, that was fascinating. If you don't know how I teach just war theory at West Point every year or so. The only people who understand just war theory those of us who are Catholic Marxists in the 70s because we have to justify shooting the capitalist come the revolution. So we went back to Aquinas and developed the theory. So I now teach at West Point using Marxist textbooks. It's one of my great pleasures in life, and they're the brightest students. I know they are really bright. And actually, I'll tell you this, they really worry about killing people. They really worry about it. They're the most ethical group of people I know, because they accept reality and they know the consequences. And they think about it. Whereas the politicians don't. Yeah. But again, I've seen that in warfare, you get it continuously. So one of the issues is how you introduce the same thing within the organisation.
And lastly, the
numbers are actually quite good at this because they cannot do it by accident. Because the stories of accidental discoveries are common across the whole of the pharma sector. Exactly. As a moral to him. Yeah, then other organisations would be. I mean, if you look at it all the major drug discoveries of the last 50 years have been side effects. Yeah, including the current drug regime. Yeah, the current vaccines. Those come from side effects, people noticing something unusual and realising there's a different way of doing something.
Because that's built into the business process. That
should tell you so Jessie, nobody, I have the AstraZeneca vaccine, I digest check, which Oh, God, given I got it, I got yours. Right. If I die, it's your fault. I just wish to make that clear.
Right. It's, I
can't blame Pfizer on me. I've got the
going to the organisation context, right. So how do I think one of the challenges how do we actually create the context for people to be willing to continuously share the narrative? I mean, it can be done, it's one of one of projects, how do we actually make it
you remove the burden?
The way we used it with company commanders in Afghanistan is you can write a patrol report when you get back or you can keep your diary in the field, your choice, you're making compulsory, it was just a damn sight easier to keep stuff in the field. And it was the right to report. Yeah. And the same is true, if you actually look at experimental reporting, you can create tools for experimental reporting, which are actually more effective than writing reports at the end of the day. And you can build signification into that. So is this networks for ordinary purpose you activate for extraordinary need, that's kind of like the key principle here. never asked anybody to do something, which is for your use, not for this. And as a golden, this is the old rule on knowledge management devise years ago, never ask anybody to give you five minutes of their time unless you give them an hour back. So if you want somebody to give you five minutes to do something, which they don't see is important, you've got to give them an hour back somewhere else. Because nobody will say, oh, if I do this, now, it will save me time downstream they've been caught by that too often doesn't work.
That's also the challenge where when we ask people to use the sense maker, for example, they would still see that this is taking, taking my time,
it needs it needs to be a replacement for something which would take them more time. Or it needs to give them information they couldn't get by another means. So that's what we do with entangled trails, is you can find out the stories of people like you. So we actually found with surgeons at the moment, DHS, they don't mind contributing lessons learned if they can find lessons from other people in real time. What they won't do, Bonnie, and this is Yeah, is there well put data in that you gather and write a report? They're not interested in that. And to be honest, that's the problem. I got some people in cognitive edge. Yeah, they liked the concept of gather data, write a report, present a report. But that's not what sensemaking is about.
Tell us a little bit more about this, you know, court jester business, because I think that I would be tempted to try this. And now you've probably find, find volunteers for the
nachi work. So
remember,
remember Phillip Oliver is by total cover. He said Look, he said there's two things you could do. All right, we just been taken over by IBM, which was a bloody nightmare, right? 90% of the Dutch company left in the first two weeks after the IBM takeover. And the British were more polite. So they waited a year then they left the only people who stayed with the guys in the defence sector because they found that IBM is bureaucracy refreshingly progressive, right? I mean, the rest of us who just had enough for I was okay, because I got given a free floating roll. It was quite fascinating was Do whatever you want. We'll pay some money. Now in those days, IBM did that. And I remember Philips saying you can learn to play the politics or just do what you think is right. And I'll give you top cover. Yeah, and that kind of like work. So yeah, that was a role. Right. So I was allowed to. I was a free floating roll. Right now. I proved I could do. I could innovate, right. So I was basically paid a salary and allowed to go to the states and walk around the labs and meet people and talk about things and do things and meet clients. And actually, that was there were about 20 of us, I think. Yeah, anybody hugely valuable role, because we were linkers and connectors and innovators and we have no budget that was actually key. I couldn't do anything unless I could persuade somebody to do it. Yeah, if I had a budget, I wouldn't have had to be as slick as I was in the way I did it. And that's actually equivalent to a gestural, which is less threatening. Yeah.
is actually what tenure was meant to be in universities, but then he got abused because of tenure track. So the principle was, is you don't have to worry about a job anymore. You can do whatever you want. I mean, one things I would do any university and you know, going past subjects, is the main evil University, you could turn out from nowhere and present a thesis. And if you could survive the vivre, you got your PhD. doesn't work anymore. You've now got to go through a five year process and you're going to be brain reined in to a certain type of research. Because, you know, the five star journals and the, you know, if you if you're an extra five star journal, you're like the Roman Catholic Curia. In the 16th century, anybody who doesn't actually agree with you, you just refuse them publication and they end up with a kind of a divinity, the FAA when they lose their jobs? Right, so yeah, this is how do you introduce requisite variety into groups and organisations?
Okay, we'll come up to the top of the hour, guys. Yeah. Any last points or questions anybody wants to raise?
linking to the flexors curves?
Yeah,
if I get your points about that. There are good moments for radical innovation and bad moments.
So this, this is the point I was making in the morning session, right. So basically, at the executive turning point is you want lots of small experiments, you can do really radical things. Yeah, and some will survive it. If you're on the main curve, then your only strategies are hyena strategy. You have to feed off the scraps of the apex predator or feed or find ways to supplement it. So yeah, infectious curves is important on this. And that, by the way, is the next master class. We're currently setting that up at the moment.
Now. Got a couple of couple if I may,
you said three things for innovation, starvation perspective, and something based on pressure and perspective, shift, pressure, the lack of resources, pressure of time, and the ability to see things from a different perspective.
Okay, thank you.
Too much pressure, you get break down his car, like this is an optimal level.
And he also mentioned a matrix earlier on, is
there an example of that somewhere that we
Yeah, if you if you look at design thinking on the blog, you'll find that if you can't find it, email me, and I'll give you the link. Thank you.
Dave, I just want to thank you for this sequence of very inspiring moments for me.
I have really enjoyed it. All right, I'm gonna let the chance of us not doing this, again, is remote because it's given me a huge amount of energy. So thank you guys, as well.
It has been fun.
Yeah. It's been great.
Okay, now, now, guys, we have to move to delivery just to make this clear, right. We're now moving from the exploration phase to delivery. And this is where you have to do the work. All right.
what's what's this week? Right?
Now, okay, so feel free. If you're working, you say, Dave, could you write this or structure it just do that? And I'll pick it up and do it. And there's no problem on that this is a collaborative exercise.
Oops, one one last question for this. I'm not sure. Did you ever hurt logical levels for robot builds?
Now?
I don't think so. It's not triggered any memories,
because there is a sequence, you have that environment, you have processes, you have capabilities. Yes, behaviour. And when you when you unlock. So so the idea of this concept is, when you are in one level, you unlock a lot of for the next level capabilities. For example, when a child says, I can't ride a bicycle, you can put it on the back. When you have, I can't edit them, then you can your unlock capabilities to learn. Yeah,
I find that in principle, I remember when my sister said she had no head for tight sight. I walked out the bristly ridge and didn't tell her about what was gonna happen when she walked around one corner. And she was so angry with me she pursued me up 1000 feet at high speed intend to kill me, right? But she wasn't afraid of heights again. All right. So I you know, that's the way it works. So yeah, I mean, it sent me a link, I have a look at it. I definitely regret
this perhaps gives a freedom on the wiki because this is so powerful. Other dude.
Right links Connect links. So we can always say, well, we're not sure about this, but there's other links so people can do it.