Computing Is A Liberal Art, Part 3: Strategies for Reinforcing Loops and the Hive Mind

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Technorati Tags: innovation , systems thinking , complexity science , adaptive , change , learning , Popfly , computing is a liberal art , knowledge , cyborg

Here's a conundrum: if knowledge is personal, how do I benefit from what you "know"?  One, if you help me learn you can reduce the transaction costs for me acquiring that knowledge.  Two, you can be an abstraction layer for me.  That is, I might not gain your knowledge myself, but you might help me gain the use of that knowledge in a practical way.  Of course, we're just talking about you and me, here.  What would this look like if you scaled it up to a few billion people?   Note: this post is third in a series.  See Part 1 and Part 2.    

Reinforcing Loops and the Hive Mind

Probably something like the internet we see starting to emerge.  It's a system evolving in ways not fully anticipated when created as ARPANET almost 40 years ago, but it has become an excellent uber-platform for exposing information.   As systems such as Popfly and other mash-up makers emerge to give non-expert computer users the ability to abstract their knowledge in ways that can be usefully put to work without deep personal understanding, we're seeing what amounts to the development of an automated, callable interface between what each of us personally "knows".  You may see the cyborg theme recurring on this blog for a while, as this is effectively the beginning of a human virtual "hive mind".  As such, it's a human adaptation that is much more than a coping mechanism for the explosive acceleration in information volumes -- it's also simultaneously a key driver of that growth (as transaction costs for employing and aggregating specialist knowledge across domains drops).  In other words, the growth in information volumes is in a reinforcing loop with the fragmentation of information domains and the ability to abstract that information so that it can be usefully aggregated and employed across disciplines without (with less) requirement for personal knowledge. 

Given that this reinforcing loop is one of the primary mechanisms for new information to be created, for coping with the increasing information volumes, and for contributing value to others, understanding the basic fundamental processes and technologies should be required for all people seeking the broad education that liberal arts degrees are designed to certify.  Every bit equally important as math, logic, scientific method, writing, art, and history. 

Returning to the questions unanswered from the first post in this series: How can a person, or a company, be effective in this environment?  I don't pretend to have all the answers, but we've already touched on a couple approaches that mgiht help.  For clarity, I'll consolidate them here.  (And please note: These suggestions implicitly assume that every business' ability to create and contribute value in the world is driven primarily by intellectual property. There - now it's explicit!)

  1. Mitigate the demands for knowing everything by narrowing your domain of expertise and be an expert and leader in an increasingly narrowly defined niche.  Make your knowledge accessible to others by abstracting it in a way that non-specialists can usefully employ it.  In other words, innovate within a domain and be open to collaboration.
  2. Avoid the need to know everything by specializing as a generalist: bring together ideas and experts across niche domains by creating and using abstraction layers to make knowledge functionally useful without requiring deep personal understanding.  Another way to say this: innovate across disciplines instead of within disciplines, and collaborate.
  3. Combine options 1 and 2 above.  Of course, no person or company can really be an expert in each increasingly narrow domain.  But a firm might be expert in a few -- just pick your battles carefully.   This really gets back to the notion of understanding and focusing on your core competive advantage, and leveraging abstraction layers to reduce transaction costs and improve ROI on "best-of-breed" scenarios (collaborate).

P&G's strategy of striving for success by commercializing the innovations of others is an example of one form this could take.  No doubt there are others.  The key things to realize are: (a) we're not in an era when any person or firm can be best in class at everything over a long period of time (if such an era ever existed);(b) reduced transaction, costs thanks to better interoperability and abstraction capabilties -- manifested as collaboration -- reduce the overhead of best-of-breed approaches; and (c) you're ability to create value is dependent on strong collaboration capabilities whether you are a best-of-breeder contributing expertise in narrow domain or an aggregator pulling best-of-breeders together. 

Finally, a few preliminary points of caution about the spiraling information flows and Cyborg hive minds: 

  • If you're not leveraging these trends to your advantage, then you're probably falling behind competitors who are.  The accelerating volume of information, the related pace of change, the human adaptations to these changes, and the strategies for managing in this environment appear to be shaping up as perhaps the most important mega-trend of this generation. 
  • The idea of using the knowledge of others instead of seeking our own knowledge raises important questions of trust that seem to me to be qualitatively different than those we've faced in the past (e.g,. human and non-human identity management vs. "This is a good use of my knowledge").  There are lot's of interesting, still fuzzy tails to this.  For one example, think about the complexities of expanding commercial community driven development to, say, automotive design and engineering....   
  • Be careful not to outpace what consumers will accept.  A breakthrough advance in a niche domain where you or your company is truly expert may be very real, but even so it may not be immediately appreciated by consumers (Newton, anyone?), and related industry (or even internal) players may not be ready to provide support and complementary innovations (also Newton, anyone?).