Let's face it: SpaceBook is the new black!

  Hannah showing off her iPhone 
  Originally uploaded by adactio

If creativity is "just connecting things" then let's face it... this maybe a creative B(log)ramble! I have just read Design Sojourn's post entitled Designing Products that will work with Web 2.0 strategies. That got me thinking about using Web 2.0 to allow for distributed design and development of innovative new ways of innovating new products, services and experiences! I looked at O'Reilly's Web 2.0 blog that labelled the second avalanche of web activities as Web 2.0, which got me thinking about the lost chapters in Rich Gold's Plenitude... the 3 Spaces I referred to here. Gold refers to the...

"Desire: To make the world damp. To turn the world into a giant text chat room.

The Desire of ubiquitous computing was to overlay on top of this Wet environment a Damp one. In the middle of a wet meeting you would be able to email a colleague in another room, another building or around the world. In the middle of eating lunch at the company cafeteria with your office mates, one would be able to tap out an email message and send it off to your wife, or husband, or to your boss, or to your rival.


pictures link

 

The Wet would become augmented with the Damp. At any moment you could chat with any one else in a possession of email device."


Photo uploaded by Andre Charland. Used with thanks under CC.


At the millennium, we were facing a tough journey across the competitive landscape. Accelerating avalanches of change -digitisation, globalisation and spiritualisation -were engulfing those who were not agile enough to exploit insights, creativity, innovation and design. In our case the teams making the journey were evolving from local, through regional, to global cross-functional, trans-organisational people distributed in time and space. My insight was that projects went off-course, even if people were originally aligned with the project vision and goals....as new information became available to distributed individuals and there was a delay in interpreting it in a group sense there was alignment drift and actions become discordant with the overall theme. Any software, systems and process that can help increase opportunities for collaboration and minimise vision decay would be worth looking at. Groove Networks had just announced Groove, described as collaboration software for ad-hoc workgroups, but experience had shown that just acquiring a group tool does not mean it will transform the culture of the organisation.

John Burkhadt wrote "....... I hadn't realized how much I depend on Groove now.  It has become fundamental in the way I get work done. 

For example, I work closely with another engineer. I'm constantly sending him messages and chatting.  Often we're in real-time and we'll have a chat window open and we're debugging stuff and dropping new binaries in the space.  We can do so much together so quickly that it becomes natural and the tool is suddenly transparent. I think it got so transparent for me that I took it for granted.

Groove takes some getting used to. And it takes some effort.

Groove is not just technology, but its also centred around people. It takes effort from both fronts. Just because you have some collaboration software doesn't mean you suddenly know how to collaborate online. It takes some practice. But the payoff can be huge. I can't imagine life without Groove..."

We decided to try Groove (this is early 2001) on a distributed project. The operation of the project taught us that tools do not adopt people ... the people adopt the tools and to do that they need absolute clarity on the pain and benefits of adoption. Adoption only brings benefits when people feel that choosing the tool was an enlightened act; using the tool was not too mind bending; exploiting the tool was a very positive experience. Bill Jensen's CLEAR behavioural communication model is a useful starting point for effective thinking and acting... but he suggests that most people will stop using CLEAR after a couple of months!

Certainly using Groove let alone exploiting it turned out to be a challenge that we tried over a long period on a few key projects. We soon realised that Groove is a platform. We could reference documents, do email, instant messaging. We wanted to have a sketching facility to support design activities and found a simple tool that had been created as a plug-in which was useful. NetMeeting as a standalone application was, at that time a challenge as we could not cross corporate firewalls..and it was difficult to keep addresses. However we found that using it as a plug-in gave us Groove security plus a way across firewalls, linking our trans-organisational teams! Another plug-in worked like Skype, and then we embedded ALIAS PortfolioWall. After the tests we determined that clear articulation of potential benefits to the team users was key to getting attention (case studies helped). Web-based training facilitated getting people on board.. flexible tool "add-ining" was useful to enhanced utility as we discovered emerging opportunity. But at the end of the day IT support and senior executive leadership was essential. Where these were not available people lost enthusiasm and project benefits were brushed aside by political correctness... who determines and what triggers individual bonuses? Doesn't mean decisions were wrong (corporate values) but may not be in the interests of creativity, innovation and good design in a changing world. Groove has moved on and is now in Office 2007 as Groove 2007.

In Hyperinnovation Michael Schrage writes:

"As quickly and easily as word-processing programs alter text and spreadsheet software manipulates numbers, these “design processors” enable instant iteration in the pursuit of innovation. As networks link previously disparate parts of the organisation with each other, with key suppliers, and with customers, “design processing networks” create new opportunities for collaborative iteration both between firms and within them. Iterative capital becomes an essential investment for firms managing strategic alliances and supply chains."

Picture uploaded by jared. Used with thanks under CC.

Iterative capital is defined as: "a resource that gives companies the ability to play seriously with more and more versions of various ideas in less and less time." Schrage observes 

“Networked Iterative Capital is like networked financial capital: its velocity and impact increase as it hurtles towards opportunity.”



Picture uploaded by Tim in Sydney. Used with thanks under CC.

But to ensure Iterative Capital is deployed effectively we need to allow the growth of what Tudor Rickards calls Teams from Heaven that have a

Strong platform of understanding,a
Shared vision and live in a
Creative climate; with shared
Ownership of ideas, develop a
Resilience to setbacks and include people who are
Network activators and as a total team...

Learn from experience

So is Web 2.0 the answer.. or part of the answer

if we regard it as the gravitational core.. a platform then we need to be able to operate to expand our user insights by using the iterative capital generative capability of web 2.0 -based philosophies and tools to generate a suite of tools that facilitate and enable the potential for creative teams to form... to coalesce around an insight, idea, concept and make it into a winning experience in terms of how 'things' are done and what 'things' become. We need a SpaceBook that facilitates teams (extended and core) to seriously play and create new things that have value.. that value potential being created by understanding the intersection of need and technology earlier in the process.

Certainly Web 2.0 can be a platform for superior Design and Innovation networks which I have discussed here... whilst this is a basic model it will be populated with knowledgeable detailing which is informed by the interaction of the key organisation's culture internally and externally.... which may be the key to success or failure in the longer term.

Fritjof Capra in The Hidden Connections writes that Culture is created and sustained by a network (form) of communications (process), in which meaning is generated. Culture’s material embodiments (matter) include artefacts, and written matter through which meaning is passed from group to group over time.

To truly exploit the potential of new and emergent tools, technologies and processes people that make up the culture and its organisations must learn to do things differently in order to generate artefacts, written matter, etc. that make new meaning... and this takes time.


Picture uploaded by hal990. Used with thanks under CC.

To facilitate this artefact building we need social interaction and co-ordination; and tools that help the group do the things they need to do. One of the beauties of network-centric tools is that one can observe the activity that takes place and see who is more active, or less active in the chaotic interactions that make up design and innovation and then ask people "Why?" in order to enquire "Why do you spend a lot of time or hardly any time?" Of course it does need to be empathic enquiry in order to learn what is going on rather than direct enquiry which may elicit  reactive group-speak that does not add to the knowledge for action.
So maybe Design Spacebook is what we build; maybe Facebook is the platform. So all we need do is decide what we want to build on it! But we need to remember that to use social systems in an innovative way we need to support not only the processes of networking and negotiation, but also of enabling. Enabling the development of competences around goals and tasks is a leadership skill; deploying leadership enables members to strive to be the right people for the task, doing whatever it takes to achieve!