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BRIEF MUSINGS

I’m preparing to leave town on another trip and find myself overstretched in terms of time but I have to note that Kent’s Imperative had some intriguing posts up ( hat tip to Michael Tanji) , about which I’d like to offer a few comments:

“Life at Google from an outside perspective“

Aside from seeing how uber-techies live and making me nostalgic about past years of reading defector-dissident Soviet bloc lit, I’d like to highlight this passage regarding a KI suggestion to the IC for personnel reform:

“A chance for line level workers to do the kind of intel they want to do (versus the latest crisis they have been thrown into), at least part of the time? Or to contribute to the literature of intelligence? (Modeled along Google’s 20% time.)”

My unqualified guess is that this would increase the productivity and prescience of the IC by roughly the same proportion that expanding private farming helped the Chinese economy under Deng Xiaoping. People typically generate their most valuable insights about those subjects which they are both curious as well as passionate – i.e. earlier in the learning curve than the status of graybeard authority ( once you think you know everything, you tend to stop learning).

The bar to doing this is not a manpower shortage but a middle-management fear of subordinate autonomy. Forcing a talented subordinate to do irrelevant busywork confirms a manager’s authority and power. Autonomous subordinates who do self-directed productive work tend to confirm the irrelevance of middle-management. Few managers have the psychological wherewithal to be adept facilitators, mentors or coaches of gifted employees as an efficient “management” outlook is an inimical perspective to generating creativity and sustaining ” unproductive” exploration.

“Regional versus functional issue accounts“

From a historian’s perspective, a cool post ( perhaps less interesting to others). Some historiography, lots of methodology. Money quote/conclusion:

“As for our opinions on the great divide between the two kinds of houses, we find ourselves veterans of uniquely transnational issues, having been subject to every manner of surge and task force and working group and crisis cell, in the most unusual of niches. We prefer to see small, aggressive, ad-hoc structures comprised of both analysts and operators from a wide range of issues and regional desks with interests and equities in the same target which overlaps their accounts. Only then, by throwing everything against the wall in a structure short lived enough to avoid its own bureaucracy, and disconnected enough to be (at least partially) immune from the day to day politics within a given agency or office, have we found the kind of answers we sought regarding the great questions of process.

We strongly believe such radically unstable and short lived environments are most effective because they are the very manifestation of Schumpeter’s process of creative destruction. It is certainly no way to create a sinecure, nor even to build a long term career path – but it is the best way we have found to generate new and innovative approaches and answers to hard target problems, and to the problems others have not yet begun to identify let alone address.”

Hear, Hear! Very strong agreement in a John Arqilla-esque vein.

It will happen but not until after several more disasters force that kind of transformation or an unusually bold and subtle visionary implements it on the quiet. There is far too much bureaucratic inertia because the vested interests prefer paralysis in which they hold the reins to successful action where they become recognized for the marginalized support staff they really are.

In my turn, if any KI gents happen upon this post, I suggest they look here. From this acorn of an idea, an oak will grow. Mark my words.

THINKING STRATEGICALLY ABOUT STRATEGIC THINKING

Art Hutchinson has had a very stimulating series of posts at Mapping Strategy that cover many topics related to strategic thinking and futurism that I cannot let pass without a high recommendation and brief commetary:

1. “Perils of Prediction: The Elusiveness of Certainty and the Value of ‘Simulated Hindsight’“

Art lauds Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book, “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” and discusses using “simulated hindsight” as a cognitive tool. This is not unlike counterfactual history exercises applied to futurism.

2. “sdrawkcaB gniknihT – Mind Game or Creative Lever?“

Art is concentrating here on reverse order thinking exercises which powerfully disrupt our brain’s natural preference for automaticity in “learned” activities, forcing a rexamination of assumptions in terms of process, sequence and causation. Art also explains why some folks are more equal than others with this technique.

3. “Thinker or Tinker – In Pursuit of Practical Strategy“

Partly a blog dialogue between Art and Dave Snowden on narrative and scenario strategies and Art’s advocacy of modular, interactive scenarios. Art also keys into the creativity/innovation aspect of recognizing and managing possibilities at what in the Medici Effect would be called ” intersections”.

Excellent.

WISE AND STUPID CROWDS, CREATIVITY AND THE IC

So much to try and speed-read through after my brief respite from the blogging treadmill…

One of several posts that caught my eye today was by Steve DeAngelis at ERMB on “Groupthink: Good or Bad?“; not simply because I am a regular reader of Steve’s and of Tom’s but because the premium put upon organizational and individual creativity in the next quarter century will put the high octane in the term ” information economy”. That an “edge” thinker, with the “insider” prominence of Steve, is paying attention to creativity as a subject, bodes well.

[Parenthetical aside: Creativity has two poles. Dr. Richard Florida, whose blog I also enjoy reading, represents analyzing the effects of creativity in the societal and global aggregate. The individual, cognitive processing, aspect of creativity studied by Dr. Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi is equally, important to understand. The two perspectives, in my view, need to be comprehended and integrated for creativity to be properly cultivated, as they are intimately interrelated]

Steve writes:

“When groupthink becomes the dominant paradigm in a business it can crush innovation. Innovators rarely worry about group cohesiveness or getting along. They might not all be clear-eyed pragmatists either. Janis notes that groupthink results in the lack of realistic appraisal of alternative courses of action. Innovators may be willing to take alternative paths but often those courses of action are not very realistic either. Since the invention of the Internet, critics have started to think about and define groupthink differently. They talk about the power of the many to outthink the few. Patti Waldmeir, writing last year in the Financial Times, discussed this other side of groupthink [“Why groupthink is the genius of the internet,” 9 August 2006]. She begins with a short history lesson and a question:

“Friedrich Hayek, liberal philosopher and economist, was born in the 19th century. Did he accidentally predict the genius of the internet? Back in 1973, when not even the average nerd knew about the net, Hayek was writing: ‘Each member of society can have only a small fraction of the knowledge possessed by all and?…?civilisation rests on the fact that we all benefit from knowledge which we do not possess.’ That certainly sounds like a manifesto for blogs and wikis and all the other smart collaborative tools of the information society. Like democracy, they are based on the wonderfully egalitarian notion that even the lowliest among us has something useful to contribute. But can that possibly be true?”

Of course, defining groupthink as “collective wisdom” is far different than defining it as everyone thinking alike. That, however, is how Waldmeir has chosen to define it.”

Interesting. I’m not familiar with Waldmeir but my two cents here is that “groupthink” and “collective wisdom” share the common trait of collectivity but are not otherwise the same cognitive phenomena. The latter, as a market-like function, relies upon the sum of socially atomized interaction; the former is socially integrated interaction, a network or a hierarchy ( or both) which are very different from a market, at least those markets with no or minimal barrier to entry.

The problem with “groupthink” is not the formal or ” official unwritten rule” requirement for everyone to march ideological lockstep. That characteristic is one easily recognized ( and cursed) by those participating within the system which enforces it. For relevant examples, read the historiography of Soviet Studies dealing with ” nomenklatura“, defectors and dissidents from Kravchenko forward, if not earlier. The real dilemma, the cognitive sticking point where the true damage is done, has to due with the institutional variety of what social historian Lawrence Goodwyn termed “the received culture“. Another useful but highly inexact set of terms might be “worldview” or “paradigm”, but writ small.

Any analytical journeymen who values his intellectual integrity is adept at spotting the ritual nonsense of their organization and compensating accordingly. A far more difficult task is self-awarenes in terms of discerning the implicit assumptions in which we have all been inculcated by experience and design. “The wisdom of crowds” functions primarily because anyone is able ( theoretically) to join the crowd at any moment. When that is no longer possible, the crowd grows increasingly stupid as the scenario upon which it is asked to pontificate, broadens and lengthens.

This has implications for America’s intelligence community. The Cold War has left a peculair counterintelligence legacy known as ” the background check”, if you aspire to certain positions in the national security, defense and intelligence communities. It is expensive and redundant and, in many cases, periodic. It served a purpose when the US squared off against the Eastern Bloc. Today, the economic effect of this CI legacy is to slow the velocity of ” new blood” into the IC and particular appointive positions to a crawl, which effectively ” dumbs down” the “crowd”, even in those instances in which the IC managerial hierarchy permits a “crowd” to function. Which, if you are a faithful reader of Haft of the Spear, you realize, ain’t much.

Here’s a wish, from a humble citizen out in flyover country, directed toward the uppermost G-somethings flitting around the new NDI: have someone with both real experience and political juice tackle revitalizing the creativity of the IC analytical process. I say ” process” because I do not see this as a ” people problem” but a bureaucratic one, the analysts have, as a group, good educations and fine brains.

Look for new ways to use them. Vigorously engage outsiders. Make the political case for novelty in methodology to both politicians and the public. Experimentation at this juncture beats cautious perfection.

INFORMATION VELOCITY: KNOWLEDGE OPPORTUNITIES OR WHITE NOISE?

Dave Davison at Thoughts Illustrated posted on Linda Stone, who was featured in the HBR List:Breakthrough Ideas 2007 ( which I picked up from Steve at ERMB) Dave wrote:

“Idea #7 a description by Linda Stone of her extremely apt phrase for our chaotic times: “Continuous Partial Attention (CPA)” .

“This constant checking of handheld electronic devices has become epidemic, and it illustrates what I call ‘continuous partial attention.’ Although continuous partial attention appears to mimic that much discussed behavior, multitasking, it springs from a different impulse. When we multitask, we are trying to be more productive and more efficient, giving equal priority to all the things we do—simultaneously filing or copying papers, talking on the phone, eating lunch, and so forth. Multitasking rarely requires much cognitive processing, because the tasks involved are fairly automatic. Continuous partial attention, by contrast, involves constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing. It’s an adaptive behavior that has emerged over the past two decades, in stride with Web-based and mobile computing, and it connects us to a galaxy of possibilities all day every day. The assumption behind the behavior is that personal bandwidth can match the endless bandwidth technology offers.”

Stone argues that personal bandwidth is not up to the task and, as a result, a backlash to continuous partial attention has already started. She also worries that information overload will burn people out much more quickly as they strain to keep up with an increasing number of information sources all screaming for attention. “

It occured to me from Stone’s use of the term “scanning” that “continuous partial attention” is a behavior that probably has a strong evolutionary base as it would offer obvious survival advantages to early humans who manifested that kind of alert and reactive perception to minor changes in the immediate environment. A behavior that can be relaxed when we are in locales where our need for safety and security are relatively assured norms.

Scanning for information in Continuous Partial attention increases the velocity of information flow to the brain and we would be constantly assessing the value of the given information in terms of “spending” our attention by increasing our focused concentration and going “deeper”. Judiciously practiced, continuous partial attention would yield certain efficiencies in terms of time saved and increased probablity for generating bursts of insight. These would be moments where real learning could potentially take place, opportunities to acquire or, add to, useful knowledge.

The ability to assess information while it is in a dynamic state of flow would appear to be critical. Without that cognitive function establishing the moment for increased attention (and screening out the less valuable flows, the partial attention would come to resemble “white noise” where jumbles of data would represent a stressful, chaotic, environment in which thinking would be more difficult.

Dave is pointing to the development of visualization tools to help bring analytic order to a CPA state. It may be that some day, instead of scrolling through readers or meta-aggregators, we might have montages that we can view and then decide to click an image to read a particular post out of hundreds in just a a second or two; or symbolic ordering systems to classify new posts and articles according to our own criteria. A “visualization before reading” format.

Possibilities abound.

RELATED LINKS:

The Attention Economy And The Net

The Value of Openess in an Attention Economy

Attention Economy

John Hagel

A desktop reference for all visualizers : the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods –Dave Davison

Visual Literacy.org

INTELLIGENCE AND INTELLIGENCES – Zenpundit

Attention vs. Meaning – Dave Davison

MODELS OF CREATIVITY

Steve DeAngelis of the Enterprise Resilience Management Blog had a post on creative thinking on Monday that should resonate with anyone with an engineering or entrepreneurial background where practical “problem solving” was a driver for finding new ideas:

“A New Approach to Innovation“

“….A creative thinker, however, is limited if he or she has little or no expertise. Expertise is, in a word, knowledge — technical, procedural, and intellectual. When creative, knowledgeable thinkers are presented with challenges, innovation is generally the outcome. This is particularly true if the creative thinkers are motivated. Not all motivation is created equal. An inner passion to solve problems generally leads to the most creative solutions.

….To be truly innovative, an idea must be manifested then taken to market where it changes how things are done. The prize approach is one of those vaunted “win-win” situations.”

Read the whole post here.

Nothing wrong with the approach to creative thinking that Steve outlined in his post. It is possibly, given the deomographic research on thinking styles, “hands-on” tinkering may be the dominant form of creative thinking – “ tweaking” already existing ideas or items to discover new uses.

However I do not think it is the only, or even the most productive form of creative thinking available. “Tweaking/tinkering or stochastic innovation by collective incremental advances is a gradualist process best exemplified by say, Thomas Edison or George Washinton Carver in the lab. There is also the route of Nikola Tesla, Leonardo DaVinci or Albert Einstein where breakthroughs arrive after a moment of insight sets a thinker working down an untrodden path.

Insight-based creativity, while more rarely taken to a successful, concrete and productive conclusion ( Steve was correct to highlight motivation or “task persistence” as an aspect of creativity. Productivity is quantifiable) can potentially shift fields by orders of magnitude or even result in revolutionary paradigm shifts. Insight, on a neuronal level is very likely a product of horizontal thinking triggering certain activity in the brain that is recognizable on MRI studies ( at least it seems to correlate).
Horizontal thinking is a skill which can be practiced and for which the environmental conditions can be deliberately organized ( Vertical thinking experts, novelty, diverse stimuli, conceptual depth, time for ” free play” thought exercises and exchange of ideas).

Neither method of creative thinking should be relied upon alone. Nor should creative thinkers abandon critical analysis any more than your right hand should abandon the left. We simply need to become comfortable using all of the cognitive tools in our arsenal.