I live in the future. I don’t mean that in any sort of wacky time-travelling sci-fi sense, but in the sense implied by the William Gibson quip: “The future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.” I live in a world that’s a few years ahead of the mainstream. My friends were the geeks with […]
Intelligent Organizations for the Rest of Us
Beemer and Seppo (and Wes in a separate comment) had the same objection to yesterday’s post, which I’ll summarize as: “What you’re describing will only work for organizations with smart, motivated people which would probably be successful anyway. What about the rest of the organizations in the world who employ normal people?” Admittedly, I was […]
Intelligent organizations
Tobias Lehtipalo asked a really interesting question on the pmclinic list, which essentially was: Can we apply the principles described by Jeff Hawkins’s model of the brain in On Intelligence to organization design? To review, Hawkins suggests that the brain is composed of a set of pattern-recognition layers. Each layer is trained to look for […]
Social meaning
LP’s comment on my Social Objects post made me realize that I needed to clarify what I meant by “social”. My last post drew a bunch of new readers (thanks to Hugh Macleod’s Twitter) and I could see how my position might have been misinterpreted based on that post alone. The crux of the comment […]
Social objects
[author’s note: I wrote most of this post nine months ago, but never got around to finishing it. It seemed an appropriate companion to my recent series of “Social [X]” posts, so I added a couple paragraphs to the end and am posting it.] I was reading a gapingvoid post, and saw this wonderful quote […]
Social technologies
Picking up on yesterday’s post and Seppo’s comment, another topic that has been coming up in my conversations is the idea of “social technology”. This doesn’t mean social software, where technology is applied for social purposes like Facebook or LinkedIn, but instead the idea of creating better social patterns that we can use. In this […]
Social capitalist
I’ve been playing with this idea for a few weeks, and it’s not quite coming together, so I’m going to ramble for a bit and see whether it starts to solidify as I go. It started with a quip I made to a friend last month where I claimed that the winners of the last […]
Intelligence in Google world
In a comment on my strategic intuition post, Seppo asked the interesting question, “How will Google change the way we *think*?” In particular, he notes that sheer accumulation of facts once was a metric of intelligence, but in a world where Google is accessible from our pocket phones, mere facts don’t have the value they […]
Playing the Lost Sport
I’ve been a fan of Jane McGonigal for a few years now, and enjoyed playing her Cruel 2 B Kind game in the Come Out and Play festival two years ago. So when she said she was running another game in this year’s festival, I signed up. The game ties into the Olympics in that […]
Strategic Intuition and Expertise
On Monday night, I went to a talk by William Duggan, a Columbia business school professor who studies strategy, on a concept that he calls strategic intuition. Duggan has written a book on the subject, and has set up a blog to discuss the concept. Duggan started by discussing the differences between expert intuition and […]
