Quality

We all strive for quality, in our lives, in our relationships, in our products in our services… Quality is all about value.

Values are as diverse as people are. So what does it mean to produce quality products, to provide quality services to your customers? In our modern globalized world we no longer have the luxury of understanding quality only in terms of our own value system. We cannot simply choose one set of values and base our whole production process around that set. What happens if we enter a new market? What happens if something changes in the opinion of customers?  How can you make effective decisions in a world with so many unanswered questions?

First we need to acknowledge the fact that almost every interaction in the modern world means an encounter with a different system of values from our own. This is really what it means to segment your market into different target groups.

Values change, sometimes they change of themselves, and sometimes they change as a consequence of interacting with other value systems. Understanding these dynamics means understanding what drives the changes around. This understanding enables you to achieve your own goals more effectively: you can adjust to the new situation while preserving the value of your offer to clients. In this way you can make change work for you.

Crossing Signals specializes in mapping out the dynamics of the value systems in your context. We employ a unique approach partly based on Robert Quinn’s notion of Competing Values, this makes the insights we provide immediately applicable to both your short and long term strategic goals.

Conflicting values drive change, that wisdom has been with us since antiquity. Now there is a way of making this work for you…

Accountability in Teams

The philosopher Nietzsche often accused his fellow Europeans of acting like pitiful herd animals. His rather negatively framed point being that the majority chooses to subordinate individual choice to the collective voice of the group they belong to. Having put his finger on an important trait of human behavior, Nietzsche focused on its bad side effect; the herds following bad leaders without thinking, letting the leaders kill original thinking in the process. Right he is, but we wouldn’t be doing it without an upside. To belong to and be protected by a group of people instead of going it alone, is what helped us survive the first one hundred thousand years of our existence as Homo Sapiens. It is therefore a very natural thing, even a biological imperative, for us to fit in and conform.

In our business, the effective functioning of teams in an innovative and creative context, we need to direct this behavior to let people fit in while retaining original thinking. An important tool to support our efforts is our collaboration scorecard. The scorecard measures what people value in relation to the context they operate in. It allows us to assign roles to the individuals of a team to let them work into their own and each other’s strengths and maximize team effectiveness. The roles capture the individual’s strengths given the context he or she needs to operate in. For example, the role of ‘coordinator’ is assigned to someone who has a natural inclination to maintain the structure and flow of a system. Someone with this role finds it important to be dependable and reliable, to work according to clear and concise processes and agreements. The role of ‘innovator’ is assigned to someone who likes to facilitate adaptation and change. An innovator sees and conceptualizes needed change; he or she makes change tangible for others in inviting ways. Two very different roles that based on different values have to work together in different ways depending on context. In a business development context, the innovator will have the lead in creating new products and business models, with the coordinator ensuring that innovations are absorbed into the standing organization as efficiently as possible. In a business process redesign context, the coordinator is in the lead, with the innovator coming up with ideas for increasing efficiency.

During the last year, we have collected quite a body of evidence and one interesting pattern keeps emerging. Two roles rarely, if ever, surface as an individual’s dominant role. These ‘unpopular’ roles have to do with enforcing team discipline and providing feedback on the behavior of group members. In other words, they are about accountability; confronting people with the consequences of their actions. It appears that very few people have a natural inclination to take these roles within a team. At first we thought this pattern showed a cultural bias. Since most of our clients are Dutch, we assumed that this avoidance of confrontational behavior is a typical aspect of Dutch culture. In the Netherlands, people embrace a conciliatory style of cooperation, where consensus is an important goal and people’s sensitivities are taken very seriously. This behavior is such an integral part of our culture, that we have introduced a special word for it: the verb “polderen”. As it turns out the emerging pattern is more than just a cultural thing.

Patrick Lencioni is an author and entrepreneur with a longstanding interest in teams and team performance, and he has published several books on the subject. Recent research conducted by his company The Table Group seems to corroborate the pattern we have been observing (here). Team members find it very difficult to confront each other with counter-productive or undesirable behavior (68% of participants identify accountability as a problem in their team). The reality is that people would rather not rock the boat, and this behavior is not limited to the Netherlands. Teams that operate higher up in the organizational hierarchy are even more afflicted by this type off ineffective behavior (80%).

Based on our own experience and the findings of The Table Group we have decided to put an even greater emphasis on the part of our services where we create a context that allows difficult and confrontational forms of feedback. To make sure a team and its individuals are empowered enough to hold themselves accountable for their actions and thereby becoming far more effective. Individual sensitivities are real and play an important role in team processes, and at the same time the team needs to works together in order to achieve a common purpose and create results. To make accountability an integral part of a team’s make up, we will continue to reflect on the differing individual perceptions of the value of results and focus on the integration of these values into a common purpose as the essence of collaboration. It is well worth the effort to invest in improving the openness, mutual understanding and focus of a team in this manner. Isn’t teamwork all about communication after all?

Creative Conflict

We came to the realization recently that the essence of what we are trying to do can be called creative conflict. Our approach to teambuilding is looking for the differences and potential conflicts in the worldviews and value-systems of the team members. We make these differences explicit with our Collaboration Scorecard, this instrument enables us to compose teams that contain the kind of differences and contrast that are helpful within the context in which they operate. The method we use to do problem solving with client teams is a ‘soft system’ application of classical TRIZ. For those readers who are unfamiliar with TRIZ: TRIZ is a theory that describes a systematic way in which to do problem solving (TRIZ is a Russian acronym meaning “theory of inventive problem solving”). Innovation is all about problem solving, which makes TRIZ a very powerful way to do innovation. More on TRIZ, examples and applications can be found at www.xtriz.com.

Recently I had a chance to learn more about this method at a special workshop where we discussed an extension of classical TRIZ called OTSM-TRIZ, which has been used to teach pre-schoolers and elementary school students this method of thinking by developing and playing games. OTSM-TRIZ is another Russian acronym that basically translates into “theory of powerful thinking”. Powerful thinking… it felt like I was doing philosophy again (I was educated as a philosopher, more here. More on this particular workshop here.

This morning we taught another class at the Johan Cruyff University, which is a special program within the Hogeschool van Amsterdam which offers a masters degree in international sports management. We decided to teach the students something about creative conflict, emphasizing the idea that differences are useful provided you have an approach to complex issues and problems. Since the students of the Johan Cruyff University receive the most benefits from ideas and skills that they can apply in concrete ways, we tried to limit the conceptual stuff and spend half the time on practicing the method together with the students.

We first spend some time understanding that different individuals bring different perspectives to a situation, and integrating these perspectives helps you gain a better understanding of where you are and what you want. Then I presented the group with a short overview of the history of dialectics, from Socrates, through Hegel and Marx to Genrich Altshuller (who I consider to be a philosopher). The point was to show them how opposites (contradictions) can help you find breakthrough solutions. In the technological realm the new Samsung Upstage is a good example. The phone has twice the surface of similar models, without an increase in size. The contradiction between wanting a phone with more surface area (for a large screen and enough room for buttons) that is still small enough to function as a cellphone. In other words the phone needed to be big (in terms of surface) and small (in terms of size and weight). The TRIZ trained Samsung engineers created a solution that is both effective and elegant because of its sheer simplicity, and it looks like this.
We spent the last half of the class on working with a specific case, and this was the challenging part. I presented the group with Ajax as the case. Ajax is Amsterdam’s famous Soccer club, and it is facing a number of problems, not in the least with their performance in the competition (Ajax is supposed to be national champion, and it’s not). Some of the basic steps in problem solving using OTSM-TRIZ are identifying the relevant or most interesting parameters, the ‘properties’ of your system, and then proceeding to look for contradictions within this parameters. Conceptually this is rather abstract stuff, and the challenge was to make these concepts meaningful in a practical application. To my surprise, despite the short introduction and the abstract level of the ideas, we were pretty effective at applying the ideas to Ajax. We took some time to identify some relevant parameters, and the students came up with a couple of good ones: the organizational structure, the european context where Ajax is competing against clubs with a lot more resources, the technical level of soccer that is being taught and trained and a few more. We took the first aspect (the organization) and tried to look for the contradiction within that aspect of the whole complex entity that is Ajax. It didn’t take too long to open up some new doors. One of the students mentioned the fact that the professional management of the organization has little affinity with soccer, while the rest of the organization is passionate about soccer. That is somewhat of a contradiction. Just phrasing it in this way led to someone else mentioning that it may still be a good idea to have a professional management, with the rise of professional soccer the (financial) risks have increased, so it is a good idea to have competent decision makers on your staff. Formulating it in this way suggests a solution to the situation that integrates the different aspects, rather than forces one to choose. A simple compromise would be to just fire the management and replace them with former soccer players, and such a compromise may carry a whole new set of problems with it. The real win-win may be in looking at it as a communication problem between the management professionals and the soccer professionals. What is the added value of a professional management? What legitimizes the way the organization is currently run? How can the management professionals show their contribution and value to the rest of the organization and the stakeholders?

In this way we produced some interesting strategic questionsby just applying a limited set of OTSM-TRIZ principles to a complex case, and taking a good 20 minutes investigating the problems with a group of fresh students on an average monday morning. It was an example of really leveraging the different perspectives each of the students brought to the situation, and getting some rapid results using a systematic way to think about your problem.

Solving Problems

For quite some time, we’ve been involved with a network of people, active citizens, who have formed a platform to contribute to changing the way our society and political system works. The platform calls itself De Publieke Zaak.

Political systems are set up to provide stability and are adverse to change, as by logical extension are the decision makers inside these systems. They derive their power from the investment they have made in using the system to become successful. So much so, that the system provides the basis for their power and legitimizes it. Change is therefore not to be expected from inside incumbent political systems. The facts prove this seemingly universal truth time and time again.

Recently I was invited to join a think tank within De Publieke Zaak. This think tank is to contribute to a report on how to change and improve the functioning of the Dutch government. Part of our discussion was in a number of small groups, which was interesting and fun. There was a connection and the sense of a shared goal. Another part was a kind of idea selection process, dictated by a software system that claims to effectively manage and evaluate large amounts of creative input. We were put in cubicles and each of us had to respond to given questions with ideas. This, to me, was a huge disappointment, suddenly the whole interactive and dare I say collaborative spirit was out the window. Like a group of assembly line workers all my fellow Publieke Zaak enthousiasts were busily typing away behind their screens in the confines of their assigned cubicles. It filled me with horror!

The software system dictating my decision process had a paralyzing effect on me, which lasted for a minute or two, after which I got into a reflective mode. I abandoned my given assignment and started doing something else which I found much more useful; increasing my knowledge of post-modern philosophy. The results confirmed my suspicion on the effectiveness of the chosen software supported selection process. One of the facilitators proclaimed proudly that we had generated over 2000 ideas in the session. 2000 different ideas is no solution to any problem. It is in itself a problem, because which idea do you choose, and for what reason? Disappointment filled me from top to toe.

Then things got worse. After the software stuff a debate about the issues was started with three panel members (including former Minister Pieter Winsemius), with little interaction with the audience. The goal of the debate was to find a road to consensus. On 2000 ideas??? This shocked me. It is impossible to think that this can produce anything good, for the simple reason that a debate produces a winner and a loser. In a debate, by definition, someone always loses. One opinion is victorious over another, like a joust or a boxing match. This is the complete and utter opposite of consensus. In consensus you get everybody, no matter how different opinions may be, to share the same view. How can you dismiss the viewpoint of the one who loses the debate, and at the same time try to reach a consensus which includes that viewpoint? It cannot be done. By definition!

My second misgiving is about the desire towards consensus. One of the panel members mentioned how important it is to reach consensus on certain important values. Reach consensus on certain values? Mmmmm. Again, I don’t think this can be done. What makes people unique is the differences in their value systems. Different people, even within the same culture, company or family, have different underlying values. And we at Crossing Signals believe that this is a good thing. These differences are exactly what makes great teams so effective at innovation; they are able to understand their fundamental differences, and use that to gain more insight into the problem at hand, this produces integral and by definition better solutions. When you start generating ideas and in trying to select the right ones, you don’t want consensus, you want diversity. There is also the obvious argument that in a complex environment interests and agendas are so diverse that consensus even on simple issues is simply never reached.

In a discussion with one of the facilitators at the end of the session, he asked me what I would suggest if debate and consensus are so problematic. That was an easy question. It is all about creating dialogue and generating solutions where everybody wins. “Debate” should be substituted with ”dialogue”, where the goal is understanding each other’s differences rather than establishing the illusion of one victorious truth. In a dialogue the differences between people add to the solution instead of subtract from the solution space. Consensus can play a part in getting others to commit to solutions, never in creating solutions. Solutions created on consensus have the benefit of providing the illusion of stability, but they rarely if ever rise above a compromise. And what is the definition of a compromise? A solution that everybody can live with on the short term, but nobody is happy with in the long term.

Same emperor, new clothes

It’s a grey gloomy Tuesday morning in October, and we are on our way to the Dutch bible belt. We are again invited to Cordys’s annual Cordial meeting at Kasteel Vanenburg in Putten; a day full of networking and lots of tech talk on the frontier where technology meets business. Location and catering are again impeccable, and though we can’t escape the feeling that there are less people each year, a good crowd has shown up for this year’s meeting. Last year was all about Service Oriented Architecture, this year the emphasis is on Business Process Management. A different take on essentially the same solution.

Cordys is a Dutch producer of Business Process Management software based on a Service Oriented Architecture. It’s headed by Jan Baan, former CEO of Baan, the ERP software producer that notoriously went bust in the late nineties. He is one of the keynote speakers this morning, and presents us with a history lesson. Baan is eager to show that history has some tough lessons to teach. His vision on business process management software, he confesses, was “naïve” (he uses the word four times) and has taught him lessons that have off course been incorporated in the Cordys solution. Monolithic systems are a thing of the past (take that, Oracle and SAP!), it is about flexibility and has to be human-centric. I will return to the human-centric demand! He seems remarkably open as he speaks of the mistakes of yesterday and the pain of today, he even mentions his time in prison.

It is interesting to see how content driven this guy is. He really sees, understands, and cares about the complexities of his models. Here is a salesman with a passion for the product he’s selling. It’s a rather unique combination, and it’s convincing. The Cordys Suite (an all in one SOA and BPM solution) wraps all of your existing data and applications. It is a solution to a stubborn and expensive problem; legacy software. The solution is flexible, modular, and can be used to design any uniquely structured process without having to give up on existing investments. It really puts the user in charge. Or does it?

After a number of other speakers and plenty of complex diagrams I am struck by a fairly obvious absence of the knowledge worker in all of this. The term ‘human-centric’ is used, but it is being used to refer to tasks that can be set before the user and managed using the system. Tasks are not people! That is what you get with a process oriented approach; a focus on tasks and activities, not on people. The only one addressing the fact that people are event driven and not process driven is Hans van Grieken of Capgemini. I am afraid though that nobody in the room got the difference. We are not driven by having a mobile communication service, we are driven by the phone ringing.

We share Cordys’ vision on the importance of reality driving the software design process, and not the other way around. ICT is a means to an end, and in the end business considerations are what counts. Flexibility is a crucial aspect of the applications of the future. The days when knowledge workers are forced to adapt their preferred way of doing things to the design limitations of their software tools are behind us (and we’re all much better off because of it). Technology should serve not dictate the work process.

Information and communication technology should be and in the future will be as flexible as the whims and desires of the knowledge worker. Our children, the next generation of knowledge workers, are growing up with the internet and mobile technology everywhere. They will have completely different and much higher expectations of the software tools they work with. These technologies will need to provide them with instant information on what they are working on, and instant access to friends, family and other knowledge workers (even those not working for your company). Their social lives will inevitably blend with their business activities. Get used to the idea! There is nothing you can do to stop it! Whether you block Skype, Facebook or MSN, or are open about it will become a reason not to work for you in the future. These new communication tools are how young people gain information and exchange experiences and they expect its myriad possibilities from their future workplace.

These kids will not only be your new workforce, but your customers as well. Most of the process and client knowledge resides in the heads of your current knowledge workers. In our view it is not necessary to make a great effort extracting this knowledge from the knowledge worker in order to feed it into some kind of system. The best thing to do is to facilitate and support the knowledge worker herself, empower her to be flexible about what the software can do so that she is in control of the customer experience and not the system. The system is not as flexible as a human being and will not be so in our lifetime. Help your employees by providing better insight in customer behaviour and the best products they can offer a specific customer, but let them decide based on their experience and customer contact. You are better off training your workforce to trust their instinct then to put them in process driven straight jackets that will make them lose interest, become indifferent to your customer’s needs and burn them out. You may win a couple of thousand euros a year on efficiency, but will loose millions in missed opportunities and reintegration costs for burned out employees.

The Cordys pitch very explicitly addresses issues of control, the main concerns of management, not the knowledge worker. In the end the main motivation behind using the Cordys suite is realizing a steady flow of real-time, up-to-date, reliable information, so that management can control and optimize processes. If you have had SAP experts over at your company, this must sound terribly familiar. Efficiency and management information are still the main selling points. The software primarily addresses and solves problems important to management. Even though the Cordys software has the potential to empower the individual knowledge worker, making them more effective in addition to being efficient, these needs are not addressed. It is a one dimensional approach and shows a top-down, efficiency driven, old school, industrialized perspective on organizations and processes. The globalised world can not be conquered with a one-dimensional approach. The best you can do is prolong your suffering while slowly dying out like the dinosaur you are.

We see the market catching on to a number of important work related trends. ICT systems need to be designed around existing realities and processes, and need to be based on a client focus. Flexibility is key, which is what mass customization means. But it is still wrapped in old-school values. Your knowledge workers need much more control over what the systems can do for them, not just for you as a manager. They are closest to your clients, they have the most valuable knowledge, and ICT solutions should really be planned around their needs. This requires a bottom-up approach next to the top-down approach Cordys promotes. Both are needed and management needs to bring focus to enabling and facilitating next to monitoring and controlling. We see the need for a fundamental change in how organizations are structured, how and where decisions are made, and what it means to be a global knowledge based service provider. Network organization 2.0 anyone?

The Cordys technology responds to some of these needs, yet it is also clear that the Cordys proposition is based on the old paradigm. Power and control in the top and little attention to the needs of people and how to get the most value out of them. There is a lot of work for us to do still…

Behoudziekte

De verbureaucratiseerde mens
in de pluralistische
egalitaire
vergadercultuur
produceert slechts woorden.
Argumenten zonder kracht
die slechts leiden to afleiding
vullen het vacuüm
met leegte.

De sprekers komen tot
beslissingen
die niet leiden
tot actie
niet voortkomen
uit toewijding
noch verbinden
noch inspireren.

Het platgeslagen
van inhoud ontdane
compromis
regeert,
alsof de eeuwige
behoudzucht
ons bestaan
met zin
vervult.

De toekomst wacht
en luistert
en hoort
van ons
slechts onmacht,
vervreemding.
De verdwaalde massa
produceert
een onthand
en roerloos
zwijgen.

Who Am I?

There is a new trend that is becoming increasingly noticeable. The business of change management is taking inspiration, and even incorporating, ideas and concepts from traditions that can properly be designated as spiritual. New Age seems to have matured and is moving into the business arena. Spirituality is an important subject, an aspect of being that deserves attention and cultivation, even though there are quite a lot of diverging opinions on what the latter may imply.

We are not really philosophers at Crossing Signals, although we certainly share philosophy’s love for abstract thought and affection for truth. So, while investigations into the nature of spirituality are not part of our activities, spirituality is part of the reality we live and work in. It is profoundly human and expresses itself in behaviour, communication, symbolism and even attitudes to change.

Spiritual traditions are occupied with an investigation into the nature of the ‘self’ (or the nature of our ‘consciousness’, or the nature of our ‘awareness’) and specifically investigate how the nature of our awareness is related to the universe itself. Not just the mind as a cognitive subject, but the ‘self’ at a ‘deeper’ level. The philosophy of consciousness is an extremely elusive and tenacious subject. It is very easy to produce little more than mystification on the subject, vagueness and obscurity after all are very good places to hide. Since our western society constantly reminds us to be afraid of globalisation, terrorism, global warming, losing our job, et cetera, the possibility of salvation and our own distinct role in this salvation may explain the current popularity of all things spiritual. It is easy to create illusions that appear to be profound, but are not.

Theories of spirituality are theories of the ‘self’; spirituality is about what we really are. It seems to me that this will always be the most profound question: “Who am I?” In coming up with answers to this question we, in the west, have a cultural bias about the self that was expressed strongest by Rene Descartes. “I think therefore I am” means that I am fundamentally a cognitive agent, and as such (and because of it) I am separated from the world around me. Two considerations are crucial here, because this view of the self implies:
• I am the thoughts inside my head and,
• I am separated from the world around me.
One might call this a basic Cartesian dualism. Even in ego-bashing models of transcendence or enlightenment espoused by organizations such as Enlightenext, (see previous post) the idea of an inner self seems crucial. It is called the authentic self and is contrasted with an image of an evil, greedy, arrogant “ego”. Higher consciousness in this model is still MY higher consciousness, and as such these hierarchically structured concepts serve the discriminating tendencies of this school of thought.

Perhaps it was sheer serendipity that exactly in the same week we went to a Club of Amsterdam meeting on the Future of Consciousness I came across the work of cell biologist Bruce Lipton, who has a controversial albeit scientifically corroborated theory. Lipton argues that the regulating mechanism of cells, the mind of a cell, is its skin: the membrane around the cell. To him this is a logical consequence of the fact that cells constantly interact with their environment. Through chemistry, exchanging molecules, through electromagnetism et cetera. All of a cell’s behaviour is directly related to this interaction. Since we are in essence communities of cells, this has implications for us as human beings as well. Relative to cells we are super organisms arising out of the integration and collaboration of the billions of individual cells that form our body, much in the same way as cultures are super organisms produced by the complex interactions and histories of individual humans.

Our cerebral cortex grows out of what is still skin tissue in the early embryo. Lipton’s model suggests that not our brain, but our entire nervous system – distributed as it is throughout our body – and our sensory organs is the basis of our consciousness. This means that there is no centre of awareness; it arises out of millions of sensory and other interactions that go on all the time. Our whole being is controlled by a dynamic balance of constant interactions with our environment. The idea that there is a central director of these experiences and perceptions – an ‘ego’, a seat of consciousness – is just that: an idea, and therefore just as much a part of the constant chaotic dynamic stream of consciousness that is the nature of mind. The idea that each of us has more than one, and sometimes many personalities in his head can be traced back to the work of Sigmund Freud. Our active personality, which is the dominant voice we think of as ‘self’, is subconsciously selected based on its suitability to the given context we are in. Our (re)actions are triggered by the situation around us in ways invisible to us. Psychotics and schizophrenics hear ‘voices’ in their head, and are as such not very different from all of us who are sane. Sanity is just a matter of holding on to the assumption that all the different voices in our head, produced by conflicting wishes, desires and/or frustrations, are one person.

“The mind”, “our consciousness”, “the ego”, all are constructs to attempt to understand ourselves as wholes, as one being, as an individual, as a single personality. But we’re not. We are a set of gates and portals that constantly interact with our environment. We are not IN our context, we ARE our context.

This idea has important implications. I recently read an article by Professor Ganzevoort of the University of Amsterdam’s Business School. He argues that change is impossible on a fundamental level because we have an unchanging essence of self, a ‘soul’. You can change your look and adapt your behaviour, but you can not change the soul, it is your unchanging essence, it is “I”. If we consider the previous paragraph and its conclusion, this ‘unchanging essence’ cannot be real. We need some kind of internal stability in our awareness, and we call it ego, but it’s just a construct. This may be a very scary thought to most of us, but the good news is that if true, change is always possible because it is constantly happening. There is no fundamental obstacle to change. We are creatures of habit who react mechanically in many situations, and thus change seems so difficult to achieve. But real change is possible in every single moment. Change IS the only constant! Fundamental change can happen in seconds. Really excellent teachers, doctors and therapists know this and use this fact to be as effective as they possibly can and thus produce the ‘magic’ they produce. Bandler and Grinder’s original publication on Neuro Linguistic Programming was called “The Structure of Magic”.

This is a powerful insight and one that strengthens our conviction that what you need to understand about change and innovation is the interaction between people and their (social) context. That is exactly what we map with our Collaboration Scorecard, and is the foundation of our understanding of change potential, leadership potential and collaboration potential. This is why we believe it is so important to change the context to enable a group to change, and that is what we do in our workshops. Context is a powerful way to use as leverage as it speaks to us on so many different levels, our perception, our emotion, our intuition, our communication, our sense of connectedness, all of these are powerful aspects of our effort to create and change. This connectivity together with the idea of interaction on multiple levels is the essence of our vision of collaboration.

Dispatches from the Frontier

Heaven and Earth abolish the old and bring about the new,
Then the four seasons complete their changes.
Tang and Wu abolished the old and brought about the new.
They obeyed the will of Heaven
In accord with the wishes of people.
The time and meaning of abolishing the old is truly great!
(I Ching, commentary on Ch. 49)

Crossing Signals was present at The Club of Amsterdam’s annual Summit for the Future, and it provided once more a powerful and intoxicating cocktail of intriguing people and exotic idea. Risk was the central theme to the proceedings, and it provided an effective thread integrating the myriad ideas and opinions brought to the conference. We live in a challenging era, characterized by rapid change and an unprecedented increase in possibilities, not all good. Traditional systems and long established habits are being swept away by wave after wave of novelty. We face ever faster technological change, a stunning rate of increase in complexitystupefying most ordinary citizens, and a rapid dissolution of boundaries: between actual and virtual reality, between countries, continents, cultures, political and economic interests. Add to this a number of worrying and potentially disastrous threats like global warming and an ever increasing gap between rich and poor, and you face a pretty daunting reality, a vision of chaos.
The upheaval created by these chaotic conditions at the beginning of our new millennium is exacerbated by the fact that the institutions and systems currently in place to organize and regulate our global societies are proving to be inept. They are the product of an industrial era that lies behind us. Profit driven multinational entities proclaiming a message of “bigger is better”, who measure value only in dollars, and defer social responsibility to governments, are no longer where it’s at. Innovation and technological breakthroughs are the domain of small specialized companies who exist in a dynamic network of partners where trust and collaboration are the name of the game. Your competitor might be your client tomorrow, your business model may become obsolete overnight (something about which the music industry is in a strong state of denial). Centrally managed control driven hierarchies don’t stand a chance in this new context. We see the reality of this in the fact that the bottom-line of large corporations is all about optimization, profit is produced by outsourcing and cost cutting, and there is an absolute limit to the amount of costs you can cut.

The Life Sciences represent a context where the rapid rate of technological development creates truly complex dilemmas. Ahmed El Sheik presented us with a compelling vision of mankind; its past and its immanent future. “Evolution through Acquisition” expresses the great conceptual leap forward that occurred in some early hominids and that has been driving the development of our primitive ancestors towards Homo Sapiens Sapiens trapped in its current condition. There is something unique about the human ability to acquire external objects and use them as extensions of our own capacities. Certain animals use tools as wellchimpanzees catch termites with a stick, sea otters crack mussels on a small rock they rest on their belly, but this behavior is ad hoc, and the tool is discarded as soon as the goal is reached. Humans don’t discard their tools, we cherish them and keep them around; we develop and improve them; we combine them and integrate them into vast systems capable of tasks that transcend the ability of any biological life form.
Simple tools are extensions of simple functions. We have been developing our tools gradually throughout the evolutionary timeline to fulfill ever more complex functions for us. We invented chariots and swords, sailing ships, gunpowder, taxation, non-linear mathematics and jetfighters. We have now reached a level where even our most complex functions, those related to perception and cognition, are performed by tools and machines external to us. Telescopes extend vision, as do satellites; computers extend our memories and our ability to perform calculations. We exist in a symbiotic relationship with this technology, and this symbiosis is becoming ever more explicit. We have started to integrate technology back into our physical systems: artificial joints, pacemakers, synthetic organs. We are experimenting with integrating electronic circuitry in our neural system. Soon there will be no physical impairment that will not have a technological solution.
As more and more parts of our bodies can be turned into machine; as the symbiosis consolidates itself; what does this mean in terms of who we are? What will happen to Homo Sapiens Sapiens? The moral implications of all this are as yet unclear. As usual technology moves much faster than our theories of ethics, leaving us rather empty handed in the light of these dilemmas. We lacked the time to delve into them, it is a big subject, deserving a conference of its own.
This discussion emphasizes a crucial point. Rapid and complex technological change is not an abstract issue, it is not something that happens far away from your living room in the ivory towers of corporate R&D departments. It is going to affect your own personal integrity, your daily life; it is going to change your human identity, it may mean the end of the human race.
Nietzsche wrote “Man is something that has to be overcome”, but are we willing to give up on physical self? Are we ready for our incarnation as cyborgs? Not science, not ideology, not government, not religion are going to help us answer these questions. Some may find the cyborg vision appealing, entice by a profound expansion of our abilities and the potential to eliminate human suffering. We can become magicians: turn a normal cell phone into a tiny implantable micro system and telepathy is a reality. The risk is of course in the technology itself. All technology is subject to technical failure. When technology is master you reach disaster faster. Who is to judge which changes are good and which are bad?
We have no choice but to reconnect to our own internal compass: our. Each and everyone of us will have to address these fundamental questions and come up with unique and personal answers. This resonates strongly with the appeal to self- empowerment that several speakers emphasized. Futurist Glen Hiemstra told us that one of the greatest threats to a sustainable future is the lack of positive visions for the future. That then is what we need to address here. It is true that incumbent systems overshadow the power of the individual, it is true that many of us feel powerless against these Molochs of established power. Yet the only effective way forward is through a process of reflection that starts with the realization that each individual has the power to change our reality. We ourselves are the center of the new world. We have to stubbornly create this mental image of what we desire, and strengthen our conviction by aligning this vision with our deepest values. Our own personal vision is what will guide us as we start identifying new patterns which are emerging out of the current chaos. Our own values will drive this process.

Risk was the central theme. So what is risk? Risk is not a numbers game about expected ROI within a limited period. Such limited conceptions are dangerous because risk is a matter of perception. A perceived risk is a product of our own personal predilections, a mere bias. We fear the disasters that happened to us in the past, and through our focus on this fear we invite the same disasters to strike us again. We should ignore our obsession with the particulars of our own personal past. The true risk is in engaging the future with the same disposition and the same limited values that have defined our past.

Upside down

Over the past few days I’ve been learning about and playing with new technologies like Mambo and Joomla, in preparation for constructing our own website, which is planned to go live soon. Both mambo and joomla are content management systems (CMS), they are both free software, distributed under the GNU license; in other words: open source. I do not posses the technical skills to navigate myself through a LINUX operating system, and so open source has been somewhat of a philosophical discussion for me. I really like the concept of open source technology; as a way to stimulate innovation, as an example of collaborative networks creating real value, as a political force opposed to proprietary corporate standards, and even for the democratic almost anarchistic implications of the open source movement, but I’ve had very little personal experience with open source technology. Until last week that is, when I became intimately acquainted with Mambo, Joomla and WAMP (the open source server technology that supports the mambo and joomla CMS platforms). The results are impressive. I don’t get too excited about digital technology anymore: I’ve been around computers for too long, but I find myself being very enthousiastic about this stuff. I like it. It is intelligible, it is fun and it works! An interesting paradox has revealed itself however.

I started out with Mambo, but upgraded to Joomla because of a Database bug in the Mambo version I was unable to fix with the help of the appropriate online forum. Joomla is essentially the same technology as mambo, it evolved from it, but it is stable and – as far as I can tell – free of bugs. What Joomla gives you is an elaborate dashboard with which you can manage your website, and it’s very complete. You can add search functionality, dynamic menu’s, login and mail services, forms, news, surveys, RSS feeds… you name it.
Adding such fancy functionality to your website is a matter of pushing a button. I remember when I was working for a large software company a few years ago we would build such content management tools ourselves, and sell them for good money. Now everybody has access to this stuff. What used to be complex – and expensive! – has become remarkably easy. The easy stuff however…

When I got involved in technology I started out as a web designer. Designing and building websites, templates, interactive CD-roms, stuff like that. I am used to having total control over the design surface, and being able to put any element wherever I want it. Almost no creative limitations. The design tools I would use would really empower me in this aspect of my work. Designing was easy. The tools allowed for so much flexibility you could try out numerous ideas quickly, get feedback, make improvements, publish results, all in a matter of literally minutes. It was easy.
With this new CMS technology that has changed. The easy things have become complex. For me to reconfigure an existing template, or create a new one, I need to have detailed information about the software components that make up the webpages in terms of functionality. I need to understand the connotation of the parameters and see what parts of the design are in the template and what parts are taken care of in the style sheet (CSS).

The difficult stuff became easy, the easy stuff has become difficult. What can we learn from this fascinating juxtaposition?
In a world of primitive technology, where functions are not integrated, every step in achieving a goal takes effort, resources and time. In such a world it is crucial to always understand why you are making the effort.
In a world where creating systems with very complex functionalities becomes a matter of clicking some buttons; realizing ideas is easy, fulfilling desires is cheap and we tend to jump right into the process of creating new stuff. Realizing complex functions at the flick of a wrist becomes an automatic drive, with a limitless domain of application: there is always some other function to integrate…

In this context it is easy to forget why we are doing what we’re doing. “Knowledge management” is a discipline in which this folly has been playing a clear role. The vision is muddled, the goal absent. What used to be simple, knowing why you are doing something, even if it was only because someone else told you to do so, is now a complex question. We should realize this. More often than not we tend to pay too little attention to why we are doing what we are doing. And it is crucial to the process. It takes effort to understand the why, to develop the vision, to share it and to start living it. Once you have invested the necessary energy in this initial phase the difficult stuff becomes easy, our knowledge and tools will take care of that. Innovation can be catalised with a structured process, challenges can be met easily, solutions can be discovered in no time at all.

Implementing Trust

We are in the final stages of working with a multidisciplinary research team at the Technical University of Twente in Enschede. Together we are constructing a tool for assessing the value of a collaborative network and its potential to innovate. Enschede is a small provincial town near the German border and actually the place of my birth. Every time we make the trip to meet the students and discuss the progress of the research, something marvelous happens. We reap the benefits of what we created at the very start of their research assignment. Both as a group and as individuals these students have surprised us with their commitment and creativity and impressed us with their ability to collaborate and constructively engage challenges. Even working on Christmas day to reach a dead line.

At our very first meeting we did something we call Socratic Discourse. In a Socratic Discourse we try to have a dialogue on the essence rather than the appearance of whatever subject we choose to treat. A Socratic Discourse about collaboration therefore involves a discussion on personal drives, goals and values. It seeks to achieve mutual understanding of the existing diversity in a group. A diversity that we believe is essential for innovation. Our idea was that such an understanding would help build trust and provide the basis for our kind of collaboration; mutual respect. We were right; apparently even more so then we initially thought.

Building trust is a crucial aspect of any collaborative process, we believe it needs to start as soon as people get together to set themselves to a new task. Being homo sapiens we consider ourselves quite the rational beings, we are, but it is not our primary state. This becomes clear with an issue like trust. You invoke a whole array of subtle and diverse mechanisms for gathering information about what your partners in a dialogue are doing and more importantly why they are doing it. Does what he is saying match what he is doing, do his eyes match his stance, does the timbre of her voice match the importance of her message, is he fidgeting while he is talking, does she dare look me in the eye, etc., etc. So many of these messages are non-verbal, yet we have very fine tuned subconscious mechanisms to discern them, use them in our interaction and use them to decide whether to trust someone or not, without conscious thought and in a split second. Whether we are aware of it or not, our actions are driven by implicit believes, preferences and mechanisms that seemingly have a history and logic of their own. Talking about these believes and seeing them reflected in the eyes and words of others produces a great deal of knowledge of self and provides a greater understanding and respect between the members of a group. It is akin to the process that happens when therapy sessions are successful.

At Crossing Signals we start with the idea that trust is a function of the transparency of our goals (what we want) and our motives (why we want it). This transparency of goals and motives is what we achieve in a Socratic Discourse. We create an open atmosphere by setting the example: showing, not telling, people that it is alright to be vulnerable. We make room for reflection on what each of us contributes. What is there to learn? What is valuable about what you hear the other person saying? What do you recognize? What differences do you experience? How far are you willing to go for the other?

What encourages people to drop their natural defences and open up like this? Trust and reflection! They are a reward in themselves; there is an immediate intangible benefit that comes with reflection and trust. Reflection, gaining greater insight into oneself, is a valuable thing, we instinctively recognize this. The same goes for trust. Operating in an environment of trust is fulfilling, it makes us happy. In addressing fundamental questions in an open atmosphere and by creating space for reflection and acceptance, we have created a way to implement trust. The quality of the relationships between the group members and the collaboration between them are a direct result of this trust. They trust each other, we trust them and they trust us. This reality has created a tremendous amount of value in terms of creativity and results, not to mention the personal growth each member has experienced on many levels during our time together.