Think of it as building on the field of human factors — applied not just to subjects and potential users but to the researchers and designers themselves.

It involves:

• ideas about our ideas
• methods for evaluating methods
• the discipline of developing new disciplines…

The term is new but the idea & practice are as old as philosophy. In a sense, meta factors is philosophy — stripped of its historical connotations and rendered more effective for today’s challenges & opportunities.

Related posts:

1. Managing Our Cognitive Biases
2. Designing Ideas for Democracy
3. Draft Enterprise Model

That’s a ‘perfect’ jump-off to introduce an important concept I’m trying to promote: generativity: instead of evaluating things on how well they accord with preconceived models and assumptions, let’s evaluate things by looking at how many unexpected new opportunities they generate.

Failure breaks things open and allows us to remix the pieces in different ways. If we don’t do this from time-to-time — if we just keep accumulating more mass onto the same framework — eventually it gets too bulky and falls on our heads.

It’s like forests that don’t have enough regular little manageable fires: eventually they get too dense, the ground accumulates too much dry wood, until one spark destroys thousands of acres without anything anyone can do to stop it.

This isn’t pseudo-profound stuff. This is just how life works — life outside the boxed-in board game version we’ve imagined ourselves playing for decades.

It’s like the shift from Newton’s physics to the less intuitive models of quantum physics and Einstein’s relativity: the new ideas aren’t as neat (and in many cases aren’t as useful) but they’re more accurate… and one day they will make sense and people will wonder how we could have been so stupid — just as we wonder how people could have once believed the universe revolves around a flat Earth.

That in itself is a good demonstration of what generativity means. Newton’s physics and calculus succeeded because it passed its DNA through generation after generation of subsequent discoveries, inventions, and ultimately a cult of efficiency that took over the world.

But now it’s becoming more difficult to stand on Newton’s shoulders. His ideas aren’t as generative anymore; they perpetuate more than they generate.

The technical edifice is so massive and sophisticated and dense that younger generations are having trouble seeing opportunities there. In science there isn’t much left that’s fit for Newton to explain; in engineering there’s plenty left to build, but the great challenges have already been conquered is largely gone.

The bridges and dams have been built, the moon has been conquered, the atom has already been split….

So we’ve been breaking-off Newton’s limbs and leaping away from the edifice to smash bosons, create ambient intelligence, and who-knows-what-else.

The new sciences address things that happen randomly, things that grow, things that don’t fit on the static grid: string theory, genetics, nanotech, etc.

Much of the new science — like the new economy — is not about layering subsequent successes on top of each other, but they are generative in the sense that they open up new fields to explore. They are adventures that could very likely fail to prove their original hypotheses but can’t fail to generate new ideas and insights.

E.g. String theory might eventually prove to be a “failure” in the limited sense — I suspect because it is tethered by what our math and mental models are capable of; we need to make some kind of conceptual leap — but whatever resolves the problems will be articulated by ideas that emerged by accident in the process of adventure.

In the process of writing this I remembered an older post (that should have been imported to this blog but doesn’t seem to have made it) about failing in a good way:

I just published (and deleted) a truly stupid post. Which is fine.

This blog is all about trying things out, challenging myself to explore and define new boundaries — that I don’t quite understand yet — as opposed to beginning (and then staying) within bounds.

Some of the best things are discovered by accident, and I wouldn’t want to miss out on them.

For example, a few days ago I was picking out random books and I accidentally found one about Henry Hudson.

I’d never heard of Hudson — or so I thought — until I flipped it over and read the back. Turns out this is the guy who lent his name to the Hudson River in New York, and Hudson Bay — and thus the Hudson Bay Company, HBC, The Bay.

Yes, he found the Hudson River for the Dutch (at the site of what is now New York City), and he found Hudson Bay for the British. For these accomplishments, Henry Hudson was seen as a total failure in his time.

Hudson’s backers weren’t looking for what he eventually found — nor even where they very interested after he found them. They wanted to find a route to “the Orient.” The expidition that took him all the way to (what is now) Albany NY was supposed to travel north of Russia, to China…

That obviously didn’t go as planned.

Nor did his expidition that took him into Hudson Bay, which was also supposed to reach China, although it did manage to set up one of history’s longest commercial dynasties. That expidition — and Hudson’s life — ended in mutinous disaster.

As we explore new ideas and new ways of doing things through the web, are we emulating Columbus and Hudson by “failing good”? Are we paying enough attention to the potentially positive accidents around us? Or are we more like Hudson’s financiers, who were disappointed that he never sailed over the North Pole?

Sometimes we react to these accidental discoveries as, “Oh well, I’ll take what I can get… could’ve been worse,” but accidents are aren’t mere consolations, they are the heart of life’s most essential processes.

Randomness and uncertainty are the keys to what we know of evolution and quantum theory so far — and, I believe we’ll soon learn, the keys to psychology and every related human science.

After all, what motivates us? What actually compels us to do things?

It isn’t perfection, and it sure as hell isn’t efficiency.

Even looking at the people who hold perfection in high esteem, it isn’t perfection itself that motivates them, it’s the challenge of pursuing it — and the sneaking uncertainty that they can’t attain it: it’s a dare.

Then there are the discoverers, creators, and adventurers who are drawn to the unknown — or rather, to what-they-think-they-know-but-can’t-prove…

If you take the uncertainty and randomness and genuine risk out of life (as in, risking oneself, not just other people’s money) you take the life out of life…

So why would we perpetuate organizations, rules, and systems that are based on the fundamental assumption that randomness and uncertainty can be mechanized and ordered into a irrelevance?

It’s the fatal flaw of both communism and industrial capitalism — not to mention fascism.

As a partial aside, I worry that our response to the finance crisis — “we’re getting it under control” — is simply an extension of the same defective ideas and attitudes that set off the crisis in the first place… like smothering a fire with wood: it’s still smoldering underneath, and now we’ve adding more fuel.

We’ve got a long way to go before overcoming these defects. And how do we get there?

I don’t know — but I do know that in order to move-on we’ll need to generate a lot of new ideas and a lot of new stuff. Most of it will fail — yes, but most of the stuff we have now is failing too… at least we won’t be sitting helplessly in the midst of collapse.

Ultimately there’s no single solution — nothing we can design and plan and settle on. What saves us at critical moments is a) luck, b) an abundance of options, and c) the ability to navigate uncertain terrain…

That last is the one that’s most in our control. Like any ability, it develops through practice. Unfortunately for most, by the time you actually need it, it’ll be too late to start learning.

The society that embraces uncertainty, nurtures a love for it (i.e. a love of learning) and develops institutions that thrive because of randomness rather than despite it, will eventually have the most success, generation-by-generation.

No related posts.

• 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…

Related posts:

1. The Best Disinfectant

The article includes a number of useful references for further study (if you haven’t read them already). Adding to Obama’s speech in Cairo (as well as at Buchenwald and Omaha Beach), here are some key books mentioned:

• Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (W.W. Norton, 2006)
• Simon Schama, The American Future: A History (Ecco, 2009)
• William H. Goetzmann, Beyond the Revolution: A History of American Thought From Paine to Pragmatism (Basic Books, 2009)

Money quote:

A truly cosmopolitan culture permits its members to choose different styles of life and thought, including antiquated ones, as long as they don’t harm the neighbors. Obama, like no president before him, has notified the rest of the world that the United States will continue to export its philosophy, ethos, and political theory — but through conversation, not declamation, seeking free adoption, not grudging acquiescence.

At this point I have a strong sense this is really going somewhere and I want to be on top of it when it happens. There’s a lot more to be said but I don’t have all the resources I need to say anything meaningful or new. My own reaction to Obama’s Cairo speech — and his leadership style in general — is here:

It isn’t exactly “selfless” leadership. It isn’t about putting oneself ahead of, nor behind, everyone else’s wants and needs. It’s about granting everyone the respect and responsibility they deserve as people who are capable of making their own decisions — whether good or bad — and using those connections to cultivate mutual benefit, gradually proliferating the good and diminishing the bad, by speaking to people, not to abstract political conceptions.

Here’s more on Obama’s pragmatic, learning-oriented approach, with more on the man here and here. Here’s more on pragmatism, and a bit more in Open/Conceptual’s very first post.

No related posts.

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

Related posts:

1. Open/Conceptual Aim #1: Digitizing Our Decision-Making Processes