Let Us Go Boldly Into the Present (text version) :: Michael Edson

Presentation notes with links and citations
See also the powerpoint and video versions of this presentation

Michael Edson
Director, Web and New Media Strategy
Smithsonian Institution, Office of the CIO
Washington, D.C.

Version 1.0
September 2011 [Updated April 6, 2012]
1

Michael Edson, Let Us Go Boldly Into the Present…9/6/2011 4/6/2012

[NOTE: I'm not really following any particular style guide for citations and links—
just winging it, mostly to make the ideas more shareable. M.P.E 9/23/2011]

“Come, let us go boldly into the present, my brothers and sisters.”

A little preamble. I tweet at @mpedson.

This deck will soon be on slideshare along with a directory—a bestiary—of every
other idea I've thought of and worked on in the last few years at
http://www.slideshare.net/edsonm.

Many of you are familiar with the work we've been doing with the Smithsonian
Commons and the Smithsonian Commons prototype, and all that is online at this
trailhead: http://www.si.edu/commons/prototype, and on the public wiki on which
we created and continue to refine the Smithsonian’s Web and New Media Strategy,
http://smithsonian-webstrategy.wikispaces.com.

Note that I'm not a policy maker at the Smithsonian. I'm not an official

1


spokesperson. I don’t have a budget or a staff. I have a business card that says
Director of Web and New Media Strategy. You are all duly warned—I'm not an
official spokesperson of the Smithsonian Institution or its wholly owned
subsidiaries.

[slide sequence, excerpt from William Gibson’s “Zero History.”]

A reading…

“But now he saw, however briefly but with peculiar clarity, an aerial penguin cross
the intersection ahead of him.

"Something wholly penguin-shaped, apparently four or five feet long, from beak-tip
to trailing feet, and made, it seemed, of mercury. A penguin wrapped in fluid mirror,
reflecting a bit of neon from the street below. Swimming. Moving as a penguin
moves underwater, but through the Latin Quarter air, at just above the height of
second-story windows. Moving down the center of the street that crossed the one he
walked on. So that it was revealed only as it crossed the intersection. Swimming.
Propelling itself, in a gracefully determined but efficient fashion, with its quicksilver
flippers. Then a bicycle crossed, on the street, going in the opposite direction.

“Did you see that?” Milgrim asked the cyclist…

2


This spring I was asked to give a talk as part of a lecture series at the Cincinnati
Contemporary Arts Center. The series was titled "Where do we go from here?" and I
thought that to do any justice to that idea of where you go from here you first had to
get down and think about where "here" was to begin with. And I think "here" isn't
where it used to be. Where is here?

If you lived in Southern Europe 32,000 years ago you might have made paintings
like this. These paintings were made during a period of artistic and cultural
continuity that probably lasted 25,000 years. 1,000 generations. Imagine that.
Imagine being 10,000 years into that. You could look forward to another 15,000
years of relatively unchanging "here." [See Judith Thurman's Letter from Southern
France: First Impressions: What does the world's oldest art say about us? The New

3


Yorker, June 28, 2008.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/23/080623fa_fact_thurman]

Contrast this with what Sir Ted Robinson had to say at the summary keynote of the
TED conference about our current, fleeting notion of "here."
"…Education is meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp. If you think of
it, children starting school this year [2006] will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a
clue, despite all the expertise that's been on parade over the last 4 days, what the
world will look like in 5 years time, and yet we're meant to be educating them for it.
So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary. "

["Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity"
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html, filmed
February 2006.]

And then, in "where do we go from here," there's that word go. What is go all about?
I think go is all about the future—and what is the future but a bunch of stuff that
hasn't happened yet? …The future is stuff that hasn't happened yet…Or is it? (That's
the question I want to bear down on today, and I want to think about what it means
for us.)

4


This "here" and "go" stuff isn't just idle philosophy. Understanding here and go
really matters.

I've been doing digital strategy for a few years now and I used to think that it was
the strategist's job, his or her function, to be a seer—a fortune teller who through
magical powers and privileged knowledge could rub a crystal ball and tell a story
about how the future would turn out that could help organizations, businesses,
museums, libraries, archives, government—know what to do, now, so that the
future would turn out in a happy way for them.

Somewhere I heard the expression that "software is language that does work." (I’ve
been looking for a citation for this on and off for months. If anybody can help me
track down the person who originally said this I’m offering a bounty.) It's really
true! If you've ever written software it's almost magical: you type the right words on
your computer and hit "enter" and the code runs and your database grows, websites
launch, the flaps on an airplane wing go up and down. It's an amazing feeling.

I feel the same way about strategy—strategy is language that does work. It's a tool
that people use to decide what to do, and what not to do, every day. Strategy should
tell a story about life, about work, and about the world around us. Strategy should
help people understand the world they're in and where it’s headed. Strategy should
help people develop a narrative about change, and create compelling mental images
that help prioritize tactical opportunities. Strategy is all about relevance to real
people doing real work. So this pensive reflection about where go and here are is not
navel gazing or pointless philosophy—it's directly relevant to the task at hand, the
task of helping people and organizations do their jobs.

5


This was 1997. I knew that the future was going to be different because the day-to-
day technology experience of the present was only partly formed. It was kind of
crappy.

This is a stack of U.S. Robotics dial-up modems, circa 1997. That's the way half the
people in the US who were online got online in 1997.1

Remember that? Remember the floppy disks that sometimes came with those
modems? That was a horrible experience. And I knew that the future, somewhere
down the road, would have to be different because accessing the Internet through a
1997 dial-up modem was so unfulfilling.

As an aside, I've noticed a pattern in presentations where technology people talk
about the future…Usually a wise person is standing on the stage and they show a
slide with a date at the top and a T.F.O. at the bottom of the slide—a Technology
6


Fetish Object. So the date is some number of years ago and the T.F.O. is kids sitting
around watching a black-and-white television or using 8-track tape players, or some
other piece of technology from our youth that has comically aged in the past 10 or
20 years…

Here's another date and T.F.O. combination.
This was the first digital camera I ever used, a Quicktake 200 from Apple.2 Anybody
here ever own one of these things? What a nightmare. With all due respect to what
must have been some remarkable engineering for the time, as a user—you hoped—
you prayed on bended knee that the future would turn out differently because this
was such a monstrosity—such a kludge of the physical laws of nature. I used that
one too on the right—an earlier model with no way to manually focus, zoom, or
preview images. It stored eight photos at 640x480. I'm going to break out in hives
just thinking about this era of digital photography.

7


Here's 1997 Geocities. It was awesome in its own way, I could create my own
personal website—but didn't we hope it would get better? If you used it then,
couldn't you sense that it would, should, and could get better?

Windows 97. I still, to this day, feel naked unless I have a DOS boot disk in my bag as
a security blanket so I know I can boot a Windows 97 machine if the OS gets
corrupted.

Remember this? The dreaded Blue Screen of Death. If you used Windows 97, every
once in a while your screen would go blank and then turn into this dump of memory
addresses and useless error codes, then you'd have to reboot and hope it didn't
happen again. Good times!

8


[Brief digression on the Blue Screen of Death, for the sake of nostalgia and comic
relief. See BSOD gallery at http://www.techmynd.com/50-plus-blue-screen-of-
death-displays-in-public/ ]

But the general idea here is that in 1997, when we were thinking about digital
strategy, digital preservation, technology—how to do the right thing the next day we
came to work—the future seemed a long way away. We knew it would come, but it
felt distant and abstract. There was a gap there, between the present and the future,

9


and the tool we used in business and government and organizations to span that gap
was called strategy.

In the last year or two I've participated in lot of digital strategy planning
workshops—some for household brands and cultural institutions that everyone has
heard of and some for small, obscure groups. And the question that is invariably
being asked in these workshops is how are we going to figure out the future?

There's a kabuki like form that these workshops often take.
There's usually a Big Conference Room. This picture is not a workshop I was at, it's
something I grabbed off of Flickr—but this, the body language and the furnishings
and attire and accoutrements, represents the archetype. There's a room, and a guy
or gal at the front of the room, and whiteboards and projectors and sometimes those
mega sized post-it notes. And the body language is usually the person standing at
the front waving their arms around going "Blah! Blah! Blah! Digital strategy! Future!
Blah! Blah! Blah! It's 2012! We've got to do more…" and they invoke the name of the
flavor of the week—the Strategy Fetish Object, or S.F.O. It might be a blog, Twitter or
Facebook accounts, crowdsourcing, a mobile app.

Usually the conversation is focused on the superficial aspects of these disruptive
things. One or two people in the room are thinking about the deep significance—the

10


challenges to established priorities and values that the S.F.O's represent, but
everyone else around the room is translating the conversation into the broadcast
idiom. Broadcast. Broadcast. Broadcast.

Broadcast. Push. We do stuff and we use the Internet to deliver it with increasing
volume at a passive and grateful audience—or an audience that is only superficially
involved in any meaningful way—just like the 20th century. And wasn't that great?
We did a lot of great stuff in the 20th century.

So the digital strategy people are saying "Future! Future!" and the people around the
table are saying "Yeah, we get it. Broadcast but cheaper and with a bigger
megaphone." Broadcast. Broadcast. Broadcast. The water bottles on the tables are
even saying broadcast. The water bottles—and here I'm getting to the crux of it—
the water bottles are translating what we've got to do today into the organizational
physics of the last epoch. We're downsampling the message into a familiar idiom,
and because of that the real opportunities available to us in the present moment are
slipping away.

Let me give you a specific example.

11


This is from a strategy workshop I participated in at a major museum in the
Northern hemisphere last year. (Don't try to guess what museum this is from—
you'll get it wrong!)

This is the mission of the museum:
"Become the preeminent place for engagement and dialogue about national identity
and the accomplishment and experience of citizens."
That's a great mission—a great vision!

At the workshop, one of the initiatives proposed to fulfill that mission was,
"Build an online collection of 10 million portraits of citizens and their stories,
created and uploaded without official curation by members of the public. Build a

12


community around this initiative to fuel engagement with national history,
biography, and artistic creativity."
That's a pretty strong and compelling project!

After 90 minutes of meeting in a room like the conference room I showed a few
slides back, brainstorming together and working with post-it notes and on white
boards, this was the project that was eventually adopted: "Do a website about family
portraits."

This is indicative of what's happening in that strategy room, all over the world, again
and again and again.

And we should know better. If you've been paying attention the last ten years or so,
what you need to know now to solve the problem—the disconnect—that's
happening in these strategy workshops has been broadly known and written about.
It's been an open secret.

Five to ten years ago, Howard Rheingold, Lawrence Lessig, Tim O'Reilly, Don
Tapscott and Anthony Williams, and even the editors of Time Magazine observed
the world around us and told us true things about what was happening.

13


Smart Mobs

Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution was printed and put
on bookstore shelves in 2002. I've been re-reading it, carrying it around in my bag,
on-and-off, for years, and Rheingold nailed it. He nailed the moment we're in now, 9
years ago—actually 11 years ago. He talks about collective action without central
authority, crowdsourcing, the rise of cheap and ubiquitous mobile platforms, the
global knowledge commons, the fact that most of the world will interact with the
World Wide Web through a mobile device—all very firmly established a decade ago.
The introduction to Smart Mobs, titled "How to recognize the future when it lands
on you," begins,

"The first signs of the next shift began to reveal themselves to me on a spring
afternoon in the year 2000. That was when I began to notice people on the streets of
Tokyo staring at their mobile phones instead of talking to them. The sight of this
behavior, now commonplace in much of the world, triggered a sensation I had
experienced a few times before—the instant recognition that a technology is going
to change my life in ways I can scarcely imagine."

14


[Rheingold, Howard. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, Cambridge, MA.
Perseus. 2002. Page xi]

The Future of Ideas

Lawrence Lessig's The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected
World also was published in 2002. I'm going to read a brief quote, and as I do keep
in mind that this is two years before Facebook was founded and four years before
Twitter launched.

"The open and neutral platform of the Internet has spurred hundreds of companies
to develop new ways for individuals to interact. E-mail was the start; but most of the
messages that now build contact are the flashes of chat in groups or between
individuals—as spouses (and others) live at separate places of work with a single
window open to each other through an instant messenger. Groups form easily to
discuss any issue imaginable; public debate is enabled by removing perhaps the
most significant cost of human interaction— synchronicity. I can add to your
conversation tonight; you can follow it up tomorrow; someone else, the day after.
And this is just the beginning, as the technology will only get better."

[Lessig, Lawrence, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected
World Random House, NY 2002. P. 10]

15


What is Web 2.0?

Tim O'Reilly wrote "What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the
Next Generation of Software" in 2005. I've carried around a dozen of copies of it
over the years. I've put it on every laptop and mobile device I've ever owned. I've
handed it out to people on the street and begged them to read it. Many people who
should have read it, haven't, and many who have haven't shown that they've thought
hard enough about the central assertions of the 2.0 design pattern that Tim O'Reilly
laid out six years ago,

1. The long tail
2. Data is the next Intel Inside
3. Users add value
4. Network effects by default
5. Some rights reserved
6. The perpetual beta
7. Cooperate, don't control
8. Software above the level of a single device

These ideas—these assertions about what is and isn't important were not formed in

16


2005 in an isolated act of intellectual prowess. They came through brainstorming
and reflection and practical knowledge of the things that worked and didn't work
following the crash of the dot-com bubble in 2001.

[Tim O'Reilly, What is Web 2.0? September 30, 2005.
http://oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html?page=1. Accessed
7/21/2011]

Wikinomics

From "Wikinomics" by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, first published in

"Smart companies are encouraging, rather than fighting, the heaving growth of
massive online communities—many of which emerged from the fringes of the Web
to attract tens of millions of participants overnight. Even ardent competitors are
collaborating on path-vreaking scientific initiatives that accelerate discovery in their
industries. Indeed as a growing number of firms see the benefits of mass
collaboration, this new way of organizing will eventually displace the traditional
corporate structures as the economy's primary engine of wealth creation."

[Tapscott, Don and Williams, Anthony D. Wikinomics. USA: Penguin, 2006. page 1]

17


"You" were Time Magazine's person of the year in 2006.

Doesn't that seem like a long time ago? The cover said,

"December 25, 2006. Person of the Year. You. Yes, you. You control the Information
Age. Welcome to your world."

An excerpt from the article demonstrates that Time's writers understood just how
much the tables had turned from broadcast to co-authorship and co-ownership of
production—back in 2006!

“And we [by which they mean the collective we, all of us] didn’t just watch, we also
worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and
reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our
candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered
bombing runs and built open-source software.”

I remember seeing that issue on the newsstand and thinking "Yes, change will get
easier now that Time has validated these ideas."

18


There's a new sheriff in town. Or new sheriffs, plural. And, actually, my whole point
is that they're not that new. They're old, and we should be able to recognize them
and act upon them by now.

1. The Long Tail. Chris Anderson's assertions about the immense power of digitally
connected niche audiences.

2. Joy's Law—Bill Joy was the co-founder of Sun Microsystems and he famously
quipped that "no matter what business you're in, most of the smart people work for
someone else." 3

3. Cognitive Surplus

Cognitive Surplus—this is a new book by Clay Shirky, [Shirky, Clay, Cognitive
Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in the Digital Age, Penguin, 2010] but Clay has a
magical way of recognizing established phenomena in the world around us and
weaving them together into new ideas about what's really happening. Clay says
"Imagine treating the time of the world's educated citizenry as an aggregate, a kind
of cognitive surplus." [Kindle edition, location 146] What could we do? Clay asserts
that there are a trillion hours of free time in the educated, Internet connected world
that can be harnessed for societal good. This idea got my attention right away as an

19


employee of an organization whose mission is "the increase and diffusion of
knowledge." (Clay notes that as a point-of-reference American watch over two
hundred billion hours of TV annually - - enough human thought-hours to create two
thousand complete Wikipedias, every year. [Kindle edition, location 175]

Network Effects—I can't talk enough about network effects. I've had those two
words written on the whiteboard in my office for years. Tim O'Reilly laid it out for
me in 2005 and I'm still learning how to explain it to people.

Moore's Law, which addresses the increase in the number of transistors you can fit
onto a silicon chip and therefore the accelerating speed and memory (and falling
costs) of computers. Acceleration means compounding increases of speed and
storage. If I've done my math correctly, in 12 years the iPhone will probably be
1,706 times more powerful than the computer I'm using today to show these slides.
That's a supercomputer in your pocket for a couple of hundred bucks, Internet
connected, and loaded with all kinds of cheap and interesting sensors: cameras,
thermometers, accelerometers, altimeters, GPS. And 12 years is nothing, no time at
all. I've got bottles of wine in my fridge that have been there for 12 years. 12 years
will go by in a flash and most of us aren't thinking hard enough about the impact
that these mobile devices will have. (The last 12 years sure went by in a flash.)

Kathy Sierra, a hero of mine, has been telling people that in the old epoch, the
relationship between brands or organizations and the public was follow me, buy my
product, because I'm great. Now, she says, the proposition is follow me, buy my
product because I help you to be great. Kathy tweeted "I'm your user. I'm supposed
to be the protagonist. I'm on a hero's journey. Your company should be the
mentor/helpful sidekick. Not an orc." [@kathysierra, November 5, 2009. Sierra's
Web site is Creating Passionate Users, http://headrush.typepad.com/ ]

20


These are not terribly new ideas. Not if you've been paying attention the last few
years.

Note this pointer.com interview with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales about the
Associated Press's new website strategy. The strategy, called “Protect, Point, Pay,"
describes how AP is going to compete with Wikipedia as “a focal point for discovery
of authoritative sources of news.” [Jimmy Wales; AP's 'Landing Pages' a good, if Late,
Idea, Steve Myers, published 11/15/2011, http://www.poynter.org/latest-
news/top-stories/99432/jimmy-wales-aps-landing-pages-a-good-if-late-idea/
Accessed 7/21/2011]

Wales says,

"Nothing in this strategy couldn't have been written by someone actually savvy in
Internet culture 5 years ago."

Ouch.

So 5 years ago, looking at that list I just pulled out, we knew stuff pretty firmly about
the physics of organizations, the physics of creating value in society, that most of our

21


organizations haven't actualized yet. We've been cautious bystanders to a certain
degree.

And around the time I was working on the "Where do we go from here?" talk and
thinking about "now" and the disconnect between the now we've know about for
years and the so-called future, and I came across an interview with William Gibson,
the author of Zero History—the source of the flying penguin passage that I read a
few minutes ago.

Gibson said,

"I think that when I was first reading science fiction, which would have been in the
late 1950’s, the consensual 'now' was 3 or 4 years long, and with 3 or 4 years of
relatively unchanging 'now' a writer of science fiction had the space in which to
erect something..."

Gibson continues,

"With that long a ‘now’ you could build a relatively big structure before that now
hauled itself into the future that made your big structure obsolete. But today, now
can feel like a news cycle. It’s like the now is too narrow to allow for that big a

22


construct. We have too many wildcards in play with regard to our future to casually
erect believable futures beyond a few years."

[ Transcribed from the blog post "Audio from last night's live event with William
Gibson and Cory." Cory Doctorow, 10/5/2011,
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/10/05/audio-from-last-nigh.html, accessed
7/21/2011. Another important perspective on Gibson's relationship with 'now' is
Network Realism: William Gibson and new forms of Fiction, 10/25/2010, James
Bridle, booktwo.org/notebook/network-realism/, accessed 7/21/2011]

The penguins are real.

Poking around a little more I found out that the penguins are real.

23


[video: Festo – AirPenguin, http://youtu.be/jPGgl5VH5go]

So the science fiction penguins, the world-building that I got seduced by through
William Gibson's Zero History, is real. It's not science fiction. It's real, now.

The flying penguins are a metaphor for all this change that has arrived, from the
future, into the present, without most of us noticing.

These futures that our visionaries thought about and wrote books about years ago
(which, given publishing lead times really means that in many cases these ideas
were developed years before the publication dates) are real now.

A few years ago organizations were wringing their hands about participating in sites
like Facebook and YouTube and Twitter—"Will it dilute the brand? Isn't it just a
bunch of people sharing pictures of their cats?" Are we really still in doubt about the
business value of these sites now? No.

This future that we're supposed to be planning for and gradually, slowly, positioning
for is now. The distance between now and the future has compressed to almost
nothing. It's as if a big part of the future has broken off of the rest of the future, like
an iceberg, and crashed into us.

24


And for most of our organizations, the future doesn't matter as much as it once did.

Most of us have been slow out of the blocks. And there's so much business value—
and I use business with a lower case "b"—there's so much value, shared value, to be
had just by following the dynamics and basic physics of digital culture now that I
just don’t think our organizations need to be having terribly lofty ideas about the
future. This notional future. It's really just opening our eyes and looking at what's
happening all around us in the present. And to paraphrase William Gibson, the
present is far more interesting—far more interesting—than most of our
organizations have noticed. [In the interview cited above, Gibson talks about how
interesting the present is and how "most writers haven't noticed yet."]

So, really, the call to action is not lofty ideas about the future, it’s Come, Let Us Go
Boldly Into the Present.
25


I’m probably on this stage because of the work we’ve done—me with many of my
colleagues across the Institution, some of you in this room and others outside the
Smithsonian—on what the “increase and diffusion of knowledge” (the Smithsonian’s
mission—the mission of the world’s largest museum and research complex) means
in the digital age. We created—we called into being a digital strategy that many of
you have read and it says sensible things about what we should do now. It has three
themes, eight goals, and 54 concrete, plain English tactical recommendations. You
can read it in about 20 minutes on the public wiki that was the platform for the
strategy creation process and on which the strategy continues to live and breathe.

We positioned something called the Smithsonian Commons as the centerpiece of the
strategy. We describe the Smithsonian Commons as a new part of our digital
presence (not just “website”—‘digital presence’) dedicated to stimulating learning,
creation, and innovation (not just doing it ourselves, but creating a platform, the
preconditions, that help other people get it done) through open access to
Smithsonian research, collections, communities, and expertise (not just research,
not just collections. Not just communities. Not just expertise, but all of these
things—together).

And all those things are lovely and great.

26


And now we’re trying to figure out how to make them happen…now.

How do we realize these goals? It’s still the right strategy, even though it’s a couple
of years old. It’s the right set of ideas.

And here’s where the rubber (of this talk) hits the road.

[Updated 5 patterns slides]

Here’s what I’ve noticed—here’s the design pattern I’ve observed—the things that
help me think, in a practical way, about how our organizations can take advantage of
this amazing present moment.

[To-Do - - work in XP, agile thinking about doing stuff now and doing stuff that
matters]

And you'll notice that among these patterns is not, innovate. Please stop
innovating—I beg you. I'm not talking about failing fast, risk taking, or collaboration.
I think many of these words are used as tokens for something else—something
deeper and more profound that we often don't get around to discussing or
understanding at sufficient depth. And the cart is often put before the horse: inputs

27


are confused with outputs. We shouldn't wake up in the morning and say "we've got
to innovate more." We should wake up in the morning and commit ourselves to
trying to accomplish some tangible good in society. Some goal. Some win. And we
should measure our progress towards those goals every single day. If we find we
need more innovation, collaboration, risk taking or failure to meet those goals then
we should by any and all means remove obstacles to those things happening, but
they are not goals in and of themselves. We don't innovate for innovation's sake: we
innovate to accomplish meaningful goals.
[As a point-of-reference, see Forget Innovation, a report from the Finnish innovation
fund Sitra: http://www.sitra.fi/julkaisu/2011/forget-innovation]

Pattern 1, The extraterrestrial space auditor.

Don’t ask me what this image is all about. I found it through a Flickr search on
“extraterrestrial.”

I’ve found it very helpful over the last couple of years to invoke the image—the
construct—of an extraterrestrial space auditor. Imagine that a whirring, buzzing,
hovering spaceship comes down through the atmosphere and out comes an alien. A
kind of Martian CPA ninja. And the job of this extraterrestrial space auditor is to

28


compare the mission of your organization, your business, your agency, with your
collective actions—what you’re doing. What you’re doing now. Are you using the
best tools and methods to accomplish your mission. Are you doing it—whatever “it”
is—now?

The extraterrestrial space auditor is objective. He/she/it doesn’t care about your
organizations legacy commitments, your history, your funding woes or HR problems
or, frankly, any complaints or excuses. They don’t have to get along with anybody,
they’re from out of town—waayyyy out of town—and they’re not going to come to
your staff picnic or schmooze with your CEO. They are a baddass of objectivity.

And this image is a way of tricking yourself into thinking clearly about what you’re
doing. (I started my adult life as a visual artist, and I always found the hardest part
of being an artist was getting rid of my own preconceptions and biases when I
walked up to a canvas.)

Scott Berkun, in the Myths of Innovation (O'Reilly Media, 2010), notes that the
British navy, "at the peak of their dominance in the 17th century," took 150 years to
adopt a proven remedy for scurvy [p. 57]. The extraterrestrial space auditor would
have noticed the generations of stricken sailors and called the Admiralty on it.

At random, on a whim, I looked up the mission of the Ford Foundation. The mission
of the Ford Foundation is: “The Ford Foundation supports visionary leaders and
organizations on the frontlines of social change worldwide.” [Ford Foundation
Mission. http://www.fordfoundation.org/about-us/mission, accessed 7/20/2011]

Awesome mission. Extraterrestrial space auditor says “Wow, that’s an awesome
mission. Let’s take a look.”

29


Show me your books.
Show me your business processes.
Let me talk with your staff.
Let me talk with your audiences.
Let me see what kinds of meetings you have. Where do you spend your time? How
do you measure your effort towards these lofty goals? What gets in the way? Who do
you serve? Who don’t you serve?
What resources does the Ford Foundation have at its disposal?
Who are the visionary leaders? Where do they work? Are they worldwide? What do
they do? How are they helped?

Not "how does grant program X work" but "are you using the best tools on the
planet to 'support visionary leaders and organizations on the frontlines of social
change worldwide.'"

So without the baggage of the last epoch, are you exhibiting the kinds of behavior
one would expect to see from an organization with your mission? Are you still, only,
broadcasting?

Are you printing new copies of Encyclopedia Britannica when you should be adding
articles to Wikipedia?

Last year, Marc Andreessen told old media companies that they needed to burn their
boats—they needed to commit totally to a digital future rather than clinging to
legacy business assumptions. [Andreessen's Advice To Old Media: "Burn The Boats."
By Erik Schonfeld, Tech Crunch, 3/6/2010
http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/06/andreessen-media-burn-boats/ ]

30


2. On ramps and loading docks.

These days I think more about infrastructure and execution in terms of on ramps
and loading docks: ways to get people and resources in and out of organizations. It's
not that I think basic, traditional IT execution isn't important, I just think there's a
lot of untapped opportunity in thinking a little differently about it.

Digitization pioneer and map collector David Rumsy once advised a museum I was
working for to (and I paraphrase) “do what you can, and really do it, but understand
that you’re never going to be able to do everything yourself”—no matter how big or
powerful your organization is—and the trick is to enlist the help of others to create
outcomes you all care about. As we talked about earlier, this idea has been on the
table for a while.

Imagine a highway with one entrance and one exit. It's an expressway, very good for
moving people and goods from point A to point B efficiently—but only good for that,
and nothing else. Imagine a huge factory built in a concrete bunker with only one
entrance and exit for people (employees only) and one loading dock for materials.
Very secure and controllable, but with obvious challenges to scale and versatility.
This is the way a lot of our IT services are created, and it's the typical of the way that
most organizations think about IT and New Media.

31


Tim O'Reilly said that "A platform beats an application anytime," [See What is Web
2.0 at http://www.oreilly.de/artikel/web20.html] and in relation to the On Ramps
and Loading Docks design pattern it's important to think expansively about what
constitutes a platform. On ramps and loading docks are about investing in the
foundations of a strong network, in the broadest sense of the word, rather than the
capacity to crank out more widgets. It's about making sure you have enough desks
for interns and volunteers, that there's sufficient training, that standards and
leadership are in place to work with new kinds of partners. That people are listening
to audiences and customers and doing things they need and care about. About
building the capacity to move ideas and goods between the organization and its
customers, partners, or beneficiaries quickly, knowingly, and efficiently. It's
read/write across the corporation.

3. Edge to Core
32


The Smithsonian Web and New Media Strategy explicitly says that we’re in an edge
innovation environment—it’s like the prime directive of the strategy.4 The strategy
says that the best work happens when you have the public (from third graders to
Nobel laureates), collections or research data, subject matter experts, and some
degree of technology/production expertise close together. And that doesn’t happen
in administrative offices, it happens at the edges of the Institution. Think about a
border habitat. Border habitats—boundaries or edges between ecosystems are very
productive places.

But, just letting a thousand wildflowers bloom in the wilderness is not enough. Edge
to core is the process by which you identify interesting, small, bootstrapped
innovations and support them, bring them into the center of the organization where
they can scale, and so your innovators don’t have to bear the burden of sustaining
every single bit of their projects for time immemorial and so newcomers can adopt
and build on their work.

Organizations undergoing change often have a lot of small, isolated, experiments
going on, some of which can be quite successful. Without strong edge-to-core
processes, each of those experiments will succeed only as a one-off. It's hard for
them to scale or be replicated, it's hard for the organization to learn from what
worked and what didn't—to develop best practices—and it's hard for new
innovations to become the infrastructure for whatever comes next.

To illustrate this phenomenon of innovations gradually becoming infrastructure,
Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet in American Life project, has observed that
you don't walk into hotel ballroom and say (paraphrased) "Hey, this room is 'on
electricity. That's amazing!'"5 It's unremarkable because the technology, once new,

33


has through a variety of change processes become a reliable part of our
infrastructure.

New innovations can become part of the core IT stack quite quickly. When I helped
start the Smithsonian's first blog back in 2005 I had to write long memos and go to
meetings to argue about why the Smithsonian needed a blog. Blogging was novel
and new to us but I argued that a blog was just a serial publication with certain
conventions about voice and formatting, and that in a few years time everyone
would expect blogging to be an unremarkable facet of the web. Like hyperlinks and
bookmarks, blogging would go from edge to core, from exotic and hard to being just
another part of the IT stack. We long ago decided that our curators wouldn't have to
shovel their own coal to heat their offices, that we would provide them with heat
and computers and fax machines and electricity as part of the core organizational
services stack.

If edge innovation is happening in an organization—and with free and easy IT and
social media tools available in the cloud, it almost always is—edge to core needs to
be a core capability.

[NOTE: I've included two #4's in this document. Sometimes I use one: sometimes I
use the other. I'll mark them below as 4.1 and 4.2]

34


4.1, The organizational immune system

I think most organizations are unaware—show little self-awareness—of the
behaviors that come with innovation and rapid, transformational change. Many
organizations say they want innovation and transformational change, but the more I
talk with innovators and the more I can recognize the disconnects between the
rhetoric and the reality.

Peter Drucker, already a revered business management guru, wrote about this
phenomenon as early as 1985. In Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and
Principles (New York, Harper & Row), he observed " “Management tends to believe
that anything that has lasted for a fair amount
of time must be normal and go on forever. Anything that contradicts what we have
come to consider a law of nature is then rejected as unsound.”" (p 38)

Scott Berkun in the Myths of Innovation observes that "Professional management
was born from the desire to optimize and control, not to lead waves of change."
(And I present this to you, with all humility, as someone who has been a
professional manager for the last decade.)

Berkun further observes that few managers are trained to recognize and nurture the
disruptive and often half-baked knocks on their door. It’s not a question of
intelligence or intention, it’s a willingness to re-evaluate management’s purpose.
(Both Berkun points are made on page 100.)

35


4.2. Focus on the mission

It sounds trite when I say it that way. Obvious. But after talking with, I don't know—
80 or 90 organizations in the last two years I've noticed that the organizations that
are not…suffering…in their pursuit of worth in this epoch are the organizations that
are confident and clear about the outcomes they want in society. They know what
impact they want to have on different groups of people.

I'm fortunate to work for an organization with a stupendous mission: the increase
and diffusion of knowledge. And in our strategy, under this mission, we say that
"Four challenges provide an overarching strategic framework for Smithsonian
programs and operations."6 They are,
Unlocking the mysteries of the universe
Understanding and sustaining a biodiverse planet
Valuing world cultures
Understanding the American Experience

These are indeed four Grand Challenges. And we say in our strategy document, that
"together, they will influence how the Institution directs our resources and focuses
our energies."

36


This is the strategy of an organization that wants to have an impact in the world.
This is strategy that does "does work"—that tells you what's important and what's
not, that helps us do our jobs.

This is a picture from a strategy workshop I was at at the National WWII Museum in
New Orleans, Louisiana. Those people know the job they're doing in society. They're
extremely passionate about it. Their director says (paraphrase) "Every day, every
week, we have WWII veterans in our museum distraught at how little their
grandchildren know about WWII—the conflict that changed the world. Sixty-five
million people died in that war and our grandchildren don't know anything about it.
You need to help them know and remember."

So I get the sense that the 200-plus staff of this museum get up every day and have
their Weaties and try to succeed in that mission and they don't really care so
much—they have their biases and their expertise, things they're already good at—
but they're fairly agnostic about the tools, and refreshingly open minded about
using new media in unconventional ways to achieve their goals.

Organizations with a clear sense of the impact they want to have on society are not
struggling as much organizations that are wishy-washy (less clear) about the job
they're supposed to do.

37


5. Place the bet

Within most organizations the staff know what they need to do. The leaders know
what they need to do. Everyone knows, but they're often hesitant, they're waiting.
And now, with this compressed, fast "now" - - it's all about execution. About doing.

I'll leave you with this. A January, 2011 Tom Friedman op-ed in the New York Times
called Serious in Singapore [1/29/2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/opinion/30friedman.html, accessed
7/25/2011].

Mr. Friedman talks about visiting a fifth grade classroom in Singapore and being
gobsmacked by what he felt was a highly innovative CSI-like forensic DNA activity in
a fifth grade classroom. He was floored. And when he went to the principal and
38


asked how did you know to do this? What minister of Education put this program in
place? He was told that they had created this program because they had a great
science teacher and they knew that Singapore was "making a big push to expand its
biotech industries and thought it would be good to push her students in the same
direction early."

After this encounter Friedman concluded that there were three things going on in
this principal's head that made this innovative fifth grade science activity possible:
She knew what world she was living in, she knew the role that her country wanted
to play in that world, and therefore she knew what kinds of things should be going
on, day-to-day, in the classroom.

I think that's the trick now for the stewards of our memory institutions—it's the
trick of keeping those three things together, at the same time, in working memory.
1. What is the world I am living in
2. What impact does my organization want to have in that world
3. And therefore, that third thing becomes pretty easy, what should we do—today

That's all I've got. Thank you.

Postscript

1. This talk is focused on getting us to act upon the amazing potential of the present
moment. That being said, make no mistake about it—I do still think the future is
important. But if we're really going to think about the future, if we're really going to
try to figure it out we're going to have to work a lot harder at it than we are now. I
think that the future, even ten or twenty years out, is going to get deeply weird. It's
going to challenge us, as a species, in ways that we've not had to confront in our long
evolution. Just the advent of advanced DIY biotech and technologically augmented
39


human life—things we can already see happening—are going to stress the
functioning of our society and institutions in ways we can not quite imagine. If we
want to venture into this world we're going to need to invest a large amount of
serious time and energy and talent. It won't be for the faint of heart.

2. In the context of organizational change it's worth mentioning a saying I've
borrowed from the Social Entrepreneurship movement,
Think big,
Start small,
Move fast.

1 "Do modems still matter?" May 29, 2006, from the blog Coding Horror,
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/05/do-modems-still-matter.html. Accessed 7/29/2011
2 The Quicktake camera line was discontinued in 1997. See references at Apple QuickTake,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_QuickTake., Accessed 8/3/2011
3 Joy's Law is frequently referenced in business and strategy contexts without academic source
attribution. A suitable primary reference seems to be Lakhani KR, Panetta JA, "The Principles of
Distributed Innovation," 2007, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1021034.
4 Smithsonian Web and New Media Strategy, Theme 3: Balance Autonomy and Control,
http://smithsonian-webstrategy.wikispaces.com/Strategy+--+Themes#balance. Accessed
7/29/2011.
5 Heard by the author at the Foresee Results Citizen Satisfaction Summit, Washington, D.C. 2006.
6 Page 3, Strategic Plan: Inspiring Generations Through Knowledge and Discovery. Smithsonian
Institution, Fiscal Years 2010-2015. http://www.si.edu/Content/Pdf/About/SI_Strategic_Plan_2010-
2015.pdf. Accessed 8/3/2011

40

Let Us Go Boldly Into the Present (text version) :: Michael Edson

Recommandé

Recommandé

Contenu connexe

Tendances

Tendances (14)

Similaire à Let Us Go Boldly Into the Present (text version) :: Michael Edson

Similaire à Let Us Go Boldly Into the Present (text version) :: Michael Edson (20)

Plus de Michael Edson

Plus de Michael Edson (20)

Dernier

Dernier (20)

Let Us Go Boldly Into the Present (text version) :: Michael Edson