Just sort of a brainstorm here, following up on some of my relatively more youthful attempts to outline what this is all about:

• Draft Enterprise Model
• The Practice of Theory

The other day I jotted down a few points — trying to distill the underlying mission of this amorphous enterprise. It has a few different aims. I’m doing this one first because it’s the most relevant and the easiest to explain.

Make decision-making processes more open and objective, specifically through digital media.

This means advocating and educating people to bring all of our discussions and arguments and negotiations online to make them more

• articulate
• defined
• accountable
• machine readable
• measurable
• transparent
• organized
• scalable
• searchable
• reverse-engineerable
• replicable
• repeatable
• testable
• correctable
• extensible
• replaceable
• dynamic
• self-organizing
• generative
• sustained
• effective
• adaptable

I’m sure there are a lot more characteristics we could add to that list. The gist is that the web gives us tools to make our political and moral and business discussions a lot more open and objective, like science.

One important mindset-change we’ll need to make is to remember that all of our institutions, policies, programs, and ideas are works in progress. Business leaders like Roger Martin and Tim Brown call this design thinking.

Instead of reacting to crises by panicking and throwing around blame (or conversely, getting defensive), we need to start looking at our failures and crises (and successes) as evidence — information for us to build on, like the kind observed in science — to demonstrate how our policies and practices are performing.

We shouldn’t be surprised by crises. We should be watching for them the way geneticists watch for mutations, or the way programmers watch for bugs.

More importantly, we need to learn the habit of hypothesizing and anticipating specific outcomes.

Whenever we “solve” a problem, or make any kind of decision, we shouldn’t just say, “There’s that problem solved” and forget about it. Solutions are actually beta models that need to be followed-up on and assessed. We need to actively watch the results to see how the solution is performing — and not be surprised or defensive when it performs poorly — and make adjustments accordingly.

So the decision-making process needs to involve just as much predicting as planning. Instead of simply saying, “we’ll implement A and then B, and finally C,” we should frame it as, “we’ll see how A performs; if x occurs then we’ll implement to B, if y occurs then we’ll implement B2… and if z occurs then we might have to go back and change A to A2…” etc.

That’s why decision-making needs to be fully documented and digitized and opened up: monitoring and assessing and adjusting to performance is a big, big process — far too big for any old-fashioned, top-down organization that existed before the web.

Fortunately there are plenty of skilled, passionate, and knowledgeable people around who would do that work voluntarily… not merely out of a sense of duty (though that may be part of it), but because it’s a fulfilling challenge — a way to feel relevant, responsible, and respectable — as well as being a great opportunity to learn and work with complementary people.

The reason people don’t do more of this kind of voluntary work now is the whole system conspires to discourage it. Even within an organization: projects are divided and tasks are cordoned-off to specific people; nobody wants to step on toes (or have their toes stepped on) so people stay silent about obvious problems and opportunities; people guard their own little areas of responsibility to ensure coworkers and up-and-comers don’t undermine them, or make their job redundant.

But in politics and civics, participation is already encouraged, right?

Sure, but mainly the kind that reinforces an established player’s authority. Too many volunteers are still expected to be deferent and grateful for being bestowed with the opportunity. And the people assigning tasks don’t know what exactly everyone has to offer; knowledge and energy are wasted.

The only person who knows what one is capable of, creatively, is oneself (albeit with a little mentoring and nudging-along). Further, we don’t know exactly how we’re best able to contribute, creatively, until we actually start interacting and learning within the task.

You can’t plan where all of the best contributions will come from. A large part of what motivates us to get involved is that it’s an opportunity to find out exactly what we can do…

This whole transformation is going to require not just learning new practices and attitudes; it’s going to require substantial sacrifices in the short-term (and “short-term” in my scale can stretch to span a generation). A lot of organizations and people will have to give up some of their authority, influence, and competitive advantage — which they maintain by keeping things closed-off and under wraps.

This movement is very bad news for anyone used to playing at politics and business like a card game in which the object is to get as much as you can while preventing your competitors from getting anything, whether that means market share, information, whatever.

That cut-throat style worked for a time but that time is coming to an end. The web is naturally tilting the table towards greater openness. The game is changing whether we like it or not. Competitive advantage is increasingly going to the most nimble and adaptive, not the most robust and fortified.

More importantly, changing the game is in everyone’s best interest in the long-term. Considering the magnitude of power at mankind’s disposal, and the potential for tremendous harm that can occur when that power is concentrated around too-few decision-makers, we need everyone to be involved in the process of making decisions, and we need it all to be accounted for.

To get an idea of what I mean by making it “accountable,” see Jeff Jarvis’s last post on metadata for news.

As these processes become more developed, as everyone becomes their own publicist, we’ll start to get a better sense of how journalists can benefit by uploading much of their work to people and organizations themselves. We’ll increasingly expect organizations and institutions (and anyone “important” — or anyone who aspires to be) to syndicate everything about themselves into information feeds.

(If you’re worried about honesty, I expect that as our cultural expectations evolve towards openness, attempts to hide or withhold information will become taboo to the point of ruining those who are caught. The risks will be too great — or at least that’s what we should aim for.)

Journalists will specialize more in selecting from that, editing, scrutinizing and checking it, adding commentary, and turning it into stories.

Meanwhile, politicians and businesses can benefit because much of their thinking and decision-making will be downloaded to journalists and on to the general public. For example, what’s the point of polling and running focus groups when you’re already getting both quantified and qualitative feedback in real-time?

I realize this picture is fairly idealistic at this point, but that’s why I titled it an aim. And don’t forget it’s still in beta. I’m still in the process of deciding and discovering exactly how these ideas might work…

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David Warsh at Economic Principals has a very complementary piece this week about Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View:

Economist’s View is a lightly-edited aggregation of items from around the Web – newspaper columns and blog posts mostly, plus the occasional podcast or video, continually updated throughout the day and augmented periodically by Thoma’s own commentary, all the package distinguished by a selecting principle that is lively, informed, inclusive and nearly straight up-and-down. In this respect, Thoma’s site resembles Romenesko on the news industry, Johnson’s Russia List, or Real Clear Politics on the US scene (minus the slowly-increasing volume of Real Clear Politics-produced filler). Thoma monitors nearly 300 feeds, culls them, links thirty items or so, and himself writes as many as a dozen annotated entries a day. The easy-to-use site is an alternative to the sort of RSS feed-reader you might laboriously build yourself. Though the demarcation criteria are not quite so clear as on those other sites – the topic is vast, after all – I find Thoma pretty close to one-stop shopping for the sort of economic news and analysis that interests me qua news – a digital fire-hose, to be sure, but a manageable one. Looking at Thoma once a day is enough.

There’s more in the piece about blogging in general, specifically where Thoma and a couple of others like him (mentioned above) fit into the broader blogosphere:

The proprietors of each are essentially editors. They hue as best they understand it to the perpendicular. They seek to see whole the debate they cover, to present its raw files fairly to readers, to occupy the center ground and treat all comers fairly. They function more like referees on a stylized battlefield than (as Robert Wright distinguishes among bloggers) disc jockeys or musicians. It is no accident that in each of these cases the blogger’s ego is almost totally subordinated to the task, that the proprietors work long hours for little or nothing.

It’s in stark contrast to a column I read yesterday by Connie Schultz at The Plain Dealer (via Jeff Jarvis). She argues that tightening copyright law is the way to save newspapers. Fine for her and her organization, but it would be at the expense of everything newspapers supposedly stand for: open discussion, transparency and objectivity, public accountability, keeping the powerful in-check, shining a light on corruption, giving a voice to the weak and oppressed — all things that a more free and open web would naturally promote, but would be undermined by the atmosphere that would be created by efforts to tighten copyright laws.

I actually spent a long time working on a really negative piece, critical of Schultz’s plan, and more generally, the deeply contradictory attitude being exhibited by some journalists. I was glad when David Warsh and Mark Thoma gave me a positive alternative.

As an aside, I’ve been using Economist’s View as one of many models for my own blogging practices, but now that I think more about it, you might begin to see even more similarities here at Open Conceptual.

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Read this on O’Reilly Radar: Andy Oram getting to the Personal Democracy Forum in NYC:

I hooked my friends through the idea of an irreversible political shift. Not a regulatory regime that could be dismantled like the agencies responsible for civil rights, or a mandate that could be defunded like federal housing initiatives–no, in this case a movement integrating the public into government functioning, and that therefore creates an external constituency that helps to perpetuate the system; an ecosystem of non-governmental organizations that will react precipitously and aggressively if the government tries to shut them out.

Every day I’m more convinced that everyone’s first instinct to plan and sell solutions will become one of those thing-of-the-pasts; a century from now historians will pick apart the immodesty of our age. I can imagine them writing

They thought they had the economy under control because they acted quickly not to make the same mistakes that were made at the dawn of the Great Depression. But they were blind to their own mistakes — or rather, that was their mistake…

Our institutions — both in politics and business — are too exposed to the inevitability of human error. It isn’t mistakes we need to be rid of, it’s the notion we can ever be rid of mistakes that needs to be eliminated.

Science is one model to emulate (read on fallibilism). Silicon Valley is another (which I’ve discussed at length).

Those models accommodate mistakes. They have processes for quickly mobilizing to learn and keep moving forward, building on mistakes rather than grudging or sweeping them under the rug.

Oram covered this in his post:

Jeff Jarvis listed, as one of his four key elements of change, the ability for government to fail without risk of recrimination. David Weinberger approached the same theme from a different direction, talking about how all wisdom is provisional, emerging, and scattered. Vivek Kundra and Beth Noveck–who will be speaking tomorrow–have repeatedly made similar statements in the context of bringing the innovation culture of the Silicon Valley to the area around Foggy Bottom.

In my first ramp-up blog for PDF I talked about a four-part cycle for successful public/government collaboration. Perhaps we need to start the cycle earlier, or add some kind of parallel cycle, to recognize that the public has to make the commitment asked by Jarvis: the promise to show forbearance when the government fails and to grant it a mandate to do innovation.

The point is that everybody will fail eventually, organizations and institutions will fail, rules will fail, all plans and designs will fail…

The important thing is to make sure that when people and institutions do finally fail, there will be enough viable alternatives nearby to take over their key roles and resources.

I’m not just talking about “too big to fail” banks and other organizations. I’m also talking about the people in them — in both politics and business.

Too few people have too much much power and attention concentrated around them. When they screw up we should be able to say, “Well let’s try something else for a while,” not “this person’s career is finished and now we’re starting all over again with new leadership.”

Related posts from BrianFrank.ca:

• Cisco and the Internal Economics of Organizations
• Ex Industrialism
• ‘Selfless’ and ‘Selfish’ are Both Myths
• The Silicon Valley Model
• Our Society of Overachievers

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