Friend/colleague/associate Hans Le Fever invited me for the second year in a row to talk about The New World to his Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS) MSc. students. A lot of fun, and a very engaging and engaged international group. Started off with the Darwinian Ecosystems material from the Club of Amsterdam evening, then moved on the Old World/New World debate and, after the break, a personal real-life case study in failed technology and business process innovation.

The first part was fun for everyone, because it was about flashy technology, current business models and how incredibly fast things are changing and morphing into glorious weirdness. Lots of laughter, “aha” moments, comments, lots of questions.

The second part was more serious as we explored the reasons why good ideas often die in Old World companies.  It’s not at all about the innovation you have thought up and prototyped and believe is the best thing since sliced bread. It is everything about how you bring the innovation into your organization and to the market. Just because you think that your idea, your baby, is the most beautiful, perfect thing ever invented does not mean that others perceive the same thing as you do. Your baby may in fact be the ugliest thing they have ever seen for any number of reasons.

To be successful in realizing your innovation, we discussed, you have to get your baby past many different stakeholders. Are you scaring stakeholders with your idea? Not because it’s not good but because it impacts them? Have you identified all your stakeholders? Those who can help you and who want you to win? Those who wants you to fail? Why should anybody help you?

Newton’s third law: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.  In organizations: people create change, people constrain change. In the New World: Stakeholders rule, OK!

Food for thought for this next generation of business and technology architects.

From The World After Midnight to New Rules for The New World to change, innovation, project types and leadership, the hour and a half session looked at the Old World to explain the roots of the financial crisis and understand how to move beyond it and thrive in our New World.

Update 14 March: the talk that Nicholas Carr gave at the John Adams institute can be found

I went and saw Nicholas Carr speak about his book, “The Shallows” at the John Adams Institute last week. Carr’s book explores the impact of everything Internet on the human brain and on our behaviors and interactions.

Carr makes an eloquent case that something is happening to brains that are continually “jacked into the ‘Net.”  Are we simply learning how to integrate and order communication and data technologies into our personal and social patterns or, as Carr suggests tongue-in-cheek, are we rendering ourselves stupid through perpetual and compulsive Internet-spawned distractions? In losing our ability to focus on one task for a protracted length of time – and reading in particular – Carr implies that we are blunting deeper thought processes that lead to insights and the creation of knowledge.

Some statistics are dramatic in terms of average screen time versus book page read time, average time spent per web page and email inbox glances per hour. Reconfirmation of the end of books and publishing?  Nancy McKinstry, CEO of Wolters Kluwer and a panelist,  piped up to say no, not so – the Internet is a boon to her business and the world as it provides an agile conduit to ever increasing exabytes of content.

This is a remarkable turnaround in perception for the established publishing industry. Since its arrival on the scene, the Internet has been a source of terror for traditional publishing in all shapes and forms, from content to fulfillment. So I got my money’s worth just from that juxtaposition of ideas.

In a partial rebuke to Carr, there is learning going on if a publishing giant has figured out how to successfully channel part of the Internet information explosion. But I nod my head in personal recognition of the distractions which the Internet brings. I spend a lot of time on-line to, ultimately, my own frustration because there is just so much to sort through and digest. And I don’t want to miss anything. So, I often prefer to get a little of a lot over the Web than a lot of a little, as from a book.

But are our brains actually being rewired to the extent  that we are losing cognitive capability? — maybe we are just learning to adapt our behavior and learning styles to the madness around us. The Web is still in its infancy; the trail of creative destruction and changing digital consumption habits over the past 10 years points more the what we at Pentacle call “The World After Midnight” than a radical change in human neurobiology.

As Mr. Carr says, he doesn’t actually know either. He is just reflecting on his own experiences as someone caught in the throes of the Internet’s birth as opposed to those from the current generation raised on the Web since infancy. I suspect we need to wait before coming to a conclusion.

My theme for the evening was Darwinian ecosystems as applied to business — or, as we call them at Pentacle, Money Making Machines. A quick romp covering the incredible economic longevity of the rock band Aerosmith versus the rock band game Guitar Hero, and the Battle Royale between BlockBuster and Netflix.

My official 15 minutes of air time was dutifully enforced by a repeated technology failure that prevented me from wrapping up my presentation as planned, but the key message still got through: in the New World business ecosystems are forming and collapsing with increasing velocity and a key driver for this phenomenon in products and services is the rapid evolution of consumer preferences. The constant creation of technology wrapped into informatized services has led to equally rapid declines in experiential tolerance.

In other words, consumers get bored much more quickly with the latest and greatest that they have now and want the next latest and greatest faster.

Other speakers covered the evolution of education programs for future designers, the future of hyper-personalized services and the future of the Internet of Things taken from a design perspective.

Eclectic topics, but all connected.

After a break for a half hour mixer with drinks, snacks and conversation, the speakers reconvened as a panel to allow the audience to ask questions on the presentations.

A late dinner with new friends capped the evening. I look forward to my continued involvement with the Club.

2011 has started with a strong demand for Pentacle expertise in Virtual Leadership and Programme Management.

For clients and prospects from Turkey, to Scandinavia, Slovakia,  Belgium and the UK, January and now February have produced a steady drumbeat for New World™ know-how that combines large-scale change with technology.

A signal for pick-up in economic activity? Pent-up demand for something different in a changed world? A need for new ideas to jump ahead?  What is the driver for this convergence? Is it the technology? Is it the new economic landscape after global financial crises?

Robert Hewins, Director for Pentacle Benelux’s Programme Management practice thinks it is all connected:

The Complete (Virtual) Leader

“The main theme we are running across in 2011 is large-scale business change programmes delivered by dispersed teams. Funding for capital-intensive projects is on the rise and companies are trying to reach their goals efficiently given advances in communications and Web 2.0 technologies. ‘Why move our people around all the time’, they ask, ‘if there is a better way that makes sense in terms of efficiency, sustainability and reduced human wear and tear?’

Pentacle was a pioneer in the 1990s both in the design of virtual work and business processes, and in strategy execution through structured programmes and projects. Later, Pentacle designed the Complete Leader series of development programmes that marries essential leadership skills as an integral part of successful change management. Now, clients are asking for guidance, know-how for virtual leadership. That has driven us to combine several of our disciplines into one integrated design called ‘The  Complete (Virtual) Leader’ that connects leader and team behavior and actions with business processes and supporting technology.

The term Virtual Leadership is often used in a manner that implies complexity and something completely new and very difficult for organisations to adopt successfully. That is simply not the case. This New World™ challenge is one of reinforcement of key leadership principles supported by pragmatic tools. Having effective, high-performance networks of dispersed teams in global organisations is a very achievable and indeed a very desirable proposition. Pentacle is working closely with its clients and corporate education partners to bring this message across and it seems that we are getting traction. “

On the web: www.pentaclethevbs.com

About 2 months ago, Toby and his family moved from Amsterdam to Lagos, Nigeria — Toby’s dad is on an international assignment.

RJ misses Toby, Toby misses RJ. We miss his parents, his parents miss Amsterdam and their friends and family. We know that we’ll see each other at Christmas, but that still does not completely fill  the break in the cadence of our previous day-to-day living.

Toby and RJ are physically separated by 3170 miles/5101 kilometers.

Not even as long as 50 years ago, such physical separations between people were the death knell for most relationships; jetting about was not yet in vogue or available to the masses; international phone calls were outrageously expensive and letters could only fill the gaps so far and for so long before contact would become sporadic and then flicker out completely. That’s just the way it was: out of sight, eventually out of mind.

With the rise of the Internet and email, and then later the World Wide Web, an amazing thing started to happen: asynchronous communication with shorter cycle times meant that relationships could remain more “vital” through repeated contacts as people moved from paper to electrons flashing on a screen. Later came real-time voice and video communications, and then finally came the tidal wave of mass communication computing through commoditized, integrated social networking platforms combining mail, IM, voice and video.

With all of these new, interconnected tools and  technologies at our disposal, it is not only possible to maintain relationships, but rekindle long lost ones; it seems that we have finally overcome physical barriers in maintaining our friendships and other relationships. This is all a wonderfully creative amalgam fueled by disruptive technologies and the need for human beings to communicate, to be seen and heard, and to maintain a sense of belonging.

But all of this potential is not limited to us as individuals, friends and families; the implications are far broader. Businesses and organizations are becoming increasingly aware that fundamental change is afoot and that technology is the leading, enabling edge of that change. Clients come to Pentacle with three questions: “how can I make all of this work for me? How do I, my team, my company, work successfully in this increasingly virtual world? Can you tell us what the rules are?”

At Pentacle, we call of this glorious confusion the World After Midnight and in response to our clients’ questions, we teach the 12 New Rules for the New World day in and day out. Working virtually – that is to say, at a distance and through the use of technology and specialized organizational and behavioral rules – is a way of life for Pentacle tutors; we are spread out around the world and sometimes do not see each other physically for months at a time. But we talk to each other frequently as individuals, meet virtually in groups at regular intervals and in doing so maintain our rhythms as a team.

We hear from many of our friends “yes, yes, I hear you…. but in the real world …..” when we propose solutions on how they can get their organizations to embrace and benefit from virtual work practices just as we do — except at greater scale. People see and hear the buzz about these new technologies, but cannot quite see themselves or other people in their organizations actually working that way. They cannot see themselves adapting the technologies in such a manner; they insist that face-to-face meetings, which require huge expenditures of time and money, are the only way to maintain purposeful relationships and “control” over people and resources, and a “grip” on the predictability of their businesses.

Hmmm.

I set up a Skype video call between Toby and RJ last weekend so that they could say hello to each other. They promptly went into a full-scale play date. Virtually. For the next hour, there were no barriers between them. They laughed, they played with their cameras to show different things in their rooms, they screen shared each other playing video games (the bandwidth between the Netherlands and Nigeria is very good); in short, they were present, they were effective and their interaction was natural. Like ducks to water, these children adapted spontaneously to the shift in their environment. They did not hesitate and ponder the implications of how they were interacting; they just did it. They know who they are to each other, they know their shared history and they just picked up where they left off. I spoke to some friends of mine and they have observed the same phenomenon with their kids.

Can we take these kids’ experience as a learning point for ourselves and the organizations we work in and with? I think so.

Communication and information technologies are innovative and forward looking; they are just as much about tomorrow as they are about  today. Our children represent the adaptive tomorrow. I would say that if they can absorb and successfully integrate into their lives what we are throwing at them today – and do so quickly and effectively – then we must be on the right track in proving a fundamental proposition: not only can we work, play and otherwise interact with each other virtually in a meaningful and natural manner, but it would seem that we are biologically and intellectually predisposed to do so. Our children are proving tomorrow’s business and organizational development case today.

The key challenge to realize tomorrow’s benefits today is to unlearn what we think we know works and is possible and instead learn and apply the New Rules just as your children and other young people already have. Just watch them and remember what Eddie says “the future is now, because many of us are already too late.”

In fact, I have invested in these digital social arenas and their friendly suggestions for dressing up my profiles to the nines with pictures, my interests, hobbies, etc, etc., etc. And then I do very little or nothing with them. Why? I know that I am not alone in this – I am compliant to the trend, but I am not always compliant to what is required to maintain the trend. I have built the infrastructure, gussied everything up, and I actually have lots of things to say. So, why am I not doing it?

My mind goes back to my mother who said “a writer writes.”  And there is the rub. Writing can be a chore. Although I write almost ever day, what I write is for communication purposes in daily life, not reflective or critical thinking prose about what is going on in the world after midnight. Eddie Obeng says continually to “not start a blog because once you have set it up you will regret it – you will feel guilty for not updating it and a good blog takes a lot of time.” In short, nothing looks sadder than a blog site with long, lonely gaps between entries.

My interest was piqued in this almost Freakonomics phenomenon of investing time/effort into new world media with no other return than, well, more pain  and so I decided to do a bubble diagram to see if I could come up with an explanation of my own psyche and behavioral habits. Bubble diagrams are a key tool we use at Pentacle to map, understand and explain to others various patterns and causalities of behaviors/outcomes in systems. I used a nice piece of web-enabled freeware called bubbl.us at http://bubbl.us/beta. I spent about 20 minutes putting together the map below (click on picture for full size.) I use the acronym MSN for Mainstream Social Networks.

The green blocks represent elements in a loop or pattern; the yellow blocks are influences to the patterns. There is a specific method to putting this together using causative and deductive reasoning, but that’s for another entry <wink>.

Following the pattern blocks and loops, the main problems, at least for me, are:

1. I continually am exposed to new social media that I am led to believe I have to be a part of to maintain currency. This is the key fallacy for many people, I think, and can be classified under the “not everything that glitters is gold” category. Keeping current to continually evolving social media can be a colossal time eater with no effective reward. In Pentacle terms, this is a non-Money Making Machine, and violates a prime Pentacle directive of “Do Nothing of No Use.”

2. Some social media are more fun than others. I actually have become quite fond of Facebook (as long as I don’t contemplate the evil machinations that lay just below the surface) in its power to connect, reconnect and, more importantly, stimulate. It is a rich environment that is both asynchronously and synchronously interactive. It does not take too much brainpower and, in economic terms, gives a pretty good return for each time investment you make as you are virtually guaranteed  to receive a like, comment or other Pavlovian response to 20% of your contributions. In comparison, blogging is a lonely sport with little feedback to motivate you.

The two patterns above meld into the final pattern:

3. I am not regularly updating all of my MSNs because a) although I feel I must be compliant to MSNs and I spend the time to set myself up (ie., the capital investment), b) the time requirements (ie., running costs) for maintaining all of the MSNs I have set up is too high, so that c) I only update the MSNs that I consider fun or get a direct stimulus from.

So, at the end of the day, although I am registered with LinkedIn, Facebook,  Twitter, MySpace, Classmates.com and have my own blog I only regularly interact with Facebook and LinkedIn as they give me something “tangible” for my time investment. I already consigned my MySpace page to the bit trash heap of history a while ago. Time to rethink the rest of these and either consolidate or eliminate.

Digital social networks and physical social networks share the same fundamental rule: use them or lose them.

For those of you who may have forgotten who he is, or who he is in the first place, Jaime Escalante is the teacher from Bolivia who emigrated to the USA, ending up in a broken down, inner-city public school in East Los Angeles in the mid-1970′s. Escalante’s fame came from his unparalleled feat of turning out from this hostile environment, year after year, increasing numbers of calculus superstars from groups of kids who, according to the conventional wisdom, were alienated, uninterested, uneducated, uninspired and socially and economically disadvantaged.

I read today on the Web that Escalante is in the final stages of cancer and it made me think back to when I first learned about him.

His story and the successes of “his kids” reads like the stuff of fairy tales — a pretty good summary is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante, and a movie was made in the late 1980s, Stand and Deliver; it was really pretty good stuff, something like It’s a Wonderful Life meets Dangerous Minds with a little of Fame thrown in.

With the news of Escalante’s critical illness, these kids – now lawyers, engineers, surgeons, teachers – are coming back to him in droves to help him find peace in his last days, and financial respite from the crushing medical bills that so typify contemporary American life. These alumni are speaking to the media, recalling their experiences with “Kimo”, (from “Kimo Sabe” of The Lone Ranger), the lessons that they learned and still apply to their daily lives,  and highlighting just how critical a good teacher at the right time can be to the arc of one’s life.

Escalante squarely plants his successes with his students to the concept of ganas — the desire to learn. If a teacher can inspire a student to want to learn, to instill ganas, the rest is, for lack of a better phrase, merely academic.

Escalante in response to a question about his students wrote that “THEY UNDERSTOOD THE SIGNIFICANCE OF GANAS, THE GIANT STEP TO SUCCESS. I HAD MANY OPPORTUNITIES IN THIS COUNTRY, BUT THE BEST I FOUND IN EAST L.A. I AM PROUDEST OF MY BRILLIANT STUDENTS.”

At Pentacle, we take our catch phrase of “Fun and Learning” very seriously in a ganas sort of way: we are all teachers who want our clients to succeed in transforming their businesses and themselves — and we know that the best tools, methods and techniques mean nothing if we cannot instill the desire in our clients to learn and apply them. And propagate them in their organizations and in their personal lives.

Much of the resistance to change we encounter in our lives comes from the fear of unlearning what we thought worked, and the fear of  having to work to learn and apply the New Rules of the interconnected technological world we inhabit. Confronted with the unknown, we cling to the known, and damn the consequences for that way of thinking. From impossibly complex projects being run using methodologies and project management software that imply linearity and ease of control, to outdated organizational structures and hierarchies that deny the intricacies of  globalization, we just keep on trying to place round pegs of today into the square holes of what we learned in the past. This is the enduring Gordian knot that Pentacle tries to cut through with Learning to Transform and Fun and Learning.

Pentacle’s theme this year is of Possibilities, Not Opportunities. Escalante’s premises of ganas, fits nicely with this aspiration: if we can inspire to want to learn, and support that desire with methods, determination and hard work, we unlock the ability in ourselves to look beyond what lies directly in front of us. Opportunities are circumstantial and tactical; possibilities are strategic and in the realm of the imagination and knowledge of how the world around us operates. The more we learn and that we see as a result of that learning, the greater the ganas becomes to understand what is happening and what is coming at us.

To develop ganas is to open ourselves to developing our “third eye”. While the situations we find ourselves in do not mirror those that Escalante’s “kids” faced in East L.A., we can use ganas for Learning to Transform just as they did to transcend who and what they were defined to be by others, find possibilities for the future and achieve their goals.

More on the web:

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-escalante7-2010mar07,0,6159259.story

Something has gone wrong with the premise of technology; the promise of faster, better, easier and more productive has gone awry. I feel good after having wrestled with my computers and networks to get them to just talk to each other properly. I don’t feel good because I have achieved something through the use of the tools. Satisfaction comes from having proven to myself once again that my technical skills have overcome the most recent hurdle thrown at me as I try to re-weave my cyberenvironment.

I haven’t actually achieved – at least not yet – anything for my efforts that can be translated to earnings for myself or my company. I am spending time and effectively losing money just to keep up with the electronic world around me.

How many companies are facing the same dilemma but on a far grander and more expensive scale?

At Pentacle, we use the notion of Old World/New World to explain that the pace of change has outstripped our ability to learn how to cope with that change.



I am actually living this on a pretty intense level these days:

• building and upgrading 2 machines to Windows 7 from Vista
• building 2 netbooks for travel
• building new wireless networks in my home to support 15 devices, from iPods to a Wii, to a PSP, to my Mac, to an Internet-connected file server
• connecting to and learning how to work with/within social networking sites
• interconnecting the social networking sites to each other so that something I write on one will be replicated to the others
• creating and working on a blog
• managing existing websites while gearing up for a major refresh of the Pentacle NL website
• integrating my working environment to Pentacle systems and its technology base.

I am doing so much, but feel I have accomplished little — each fight I win with the technology feels rather Pyrrhic and I feel that my real work is piling up as I struggle to get my technology infrastructure stabilized.

I used to make a living from solving technical problems and designing and delivering big systems.  I used to get paid for all of this monkeying about and so I didn’t mind. I rather enjoyed it in a “my work is my hobby” sort of way. I loved spending hours to figure out how to make things sing in unison, put an application or business system together and hand it over to my clients.

But now I am trying to make a living by teaching about how the pace of change in the world is affecting everything a company tries to achieve — from innovation, to programme and project delivery, to providing inspired leadership.  And I am stuck because not all of my tools are working properly yet or, worse, because I have such a broad toolkit, I can’t get everything to work properly together. I am trying to deliver something to myself and spending huge amounts of time on it and not earning a penny. Wow!

It is maddening — not only to me, but many people and organizations that I know and work with. How can we be spending so much time on this stuff and yet reap so little material value out of it?

Back to Old World/New World — another consequence of all of the new technology bombarding us is that we are continually becoming deskilled as one platform/set of tools we have invested in learning suddenly falls by the wayside because something else that is newer and shinier and that promises increased productivity comes along.

So, I am continuously learning just to keep up with new tools that do the exact same thing in purpose than the old ones without giving a net advantage or benefit. Or, worse, I have to relearn something that I haven’t used in a long time because it is still a standard somewhere else. I am not learning in order to create value for myself or others.

Why change to something new if you have to throw away or redo everything that you have painstakingly put together to just get a better look and feel,  or to be fad-compliant?

Pentacle has established 12 Rules for the New World. One of them is: DO NOTHING OF NO USE! If what you are doing or are about to do brings nothing of net value, don’t do it! Break the habit!

The penny has dropped: all of these problems and issues are events that belie a more pernicious pattern of technology for the sake of technology and how the technology is marketed and disseminated and how people and organizations assimilate it.

What is the pattern? What are its drivers? What are its reinforcing mechanisms? How do we break this patttern?

Food for thought until next time….

Why the name “Pentacle = Possibilities”? Because I think we are all sick of the word Opportunity. Opportunities are linear, single-minded entities. Possibilities are nebulous and ill-formed — but far more numerous. Innovation lies in the realm of possibilities. After a disastrous 2008 and 2009, possibilities rings truer as a harbinger of positive things than business opportunities.

I got the theme for this blog from Eddie Obeng’s entries in Pentacle’s New World Times blog, as well as his personal blog.

As I wrote to friends and family on Facebook:

“I’m packing it in with IT and management consulting for a good spell (maybe forever?) and going back to teaching people about thinking of the kind of fish that they need to be taught how to catch and why. As opposed to a consultant telling them… that they need that fish over there because it has disintermediated and synergestic supply chain properties and if you want that fish it will cost you 10 million. Even if it is rotten to the core….”

Happy 2010…