CUSTOMERS.COM® RESEARCH FROM THE PATRICIA SEYBOLD GROUP
Bootstrapping Innovation
Leveraging the Collective IQ to Achieve Powerful Results
By Ronni T. Marshak, Sr. VP and Sr. Consultant, June 3, 2010
Share
your comments on this article!
NETTING IT OUT
At our Spring 2010
Visionaries meeting, Christina Engelbart, executive director of the Doug Engelbart
Institute and heir apparent to the visionary thinking of her father, Doug Engelbart,
presented the concepts and action model for bootstrapping innovation. Christina
has taken her father's considerable body of work to a whole new level, distilling
the conceptual into an accessible, actionable strategy for Bootstrapping Innovation
and Collective IQ.
Expanding and leveraging the Collective IQ of your people and putting them
in the context of a Dynamic Knowledge Environment and a strategy and structure
for increasing innovation empowers them to work together to solve complex
problems, make smarter choices, and achieve more brilliant outcomes.
HEREDITARY INNOVATION
We have long been fans and followers of Doug Engelbart, a true visionary and
innovator in both technology and human collaboration. Doug is now enjoying
a well earned retirement, but his daughter Christina Engelbart has continued
his research and mission to help people and organizations, both commercial
and public, achieve peak performance, especially within initiatives aimed
at making the world a better place.
Recently, Christina, a member of Patty’s Visionaries community, presented
the mission and latest thinking of the Doug Engelbart Institute at our spring
visionaries meeting.
Doug’s and Christina’s altruistic goal is to empower people to
solve complex problems together, leveraging the untapped potential of people,
knowledge, and tools—to help us make smarter choices, achieve more brilliant
outcomes, increase innovation capacity and overall effectiveness, thus reverberating
benefits to society.
We were all intrigued and stimulated by the Engelbarts’ vision of what
people can achieve when working together on challenges that impact our businesses,
our lives, and our world.
COLLECTIVE IQ
The Whole Is Greater than the Sum of Its Parts
All people have some level of intelligence and creativity—some more,
some less. But when we put our minds and creative natures together…WOW…amazing
things can happen.
Think about your organization. I’m sure you have a lot of really smart
and even average people who contribute a lot of great ideas. And I’m
sure that when some of these individuals work together collaboratively, either
on formal teams or ad hoc, they come up with even richer ideas.
That’s a basic tenet of the Doug Engelbart Institute’s vision:
to create an ecosystem of working together, creating a collective IQ that exceeds
the sum of the IQs of the individuals in the group. And then put them in an
environment where ideas are nurtured by leveraging the collective ingenuity
of the group members to even greater heights.
Defining Collective IQ
In Doug's words, “Collective IQ is a measure of how well people work
collectively on important problems and challenges—how quickly and intelligently
they can anticipate or respond to a situation, leveraging their collective
perception, memory, insight, planning, reasoning, foresight, and experience
into applicable knowledge.”
Applicable knowledge—this is key! There is a practical aspect to the
Institute’s vision that many “think tank” types of organizations
fail to achieve—the ability to take their ideas and make them actionable
in the real world of business and society.
In its simplest form, Collective IQ is a measure of how effectively a group
can Concurrently Develop, Integrate, and Apply its Knowledge toward its
specific mission (Doug affectionately coined the term CoDIAK to describe
this goal).
But the Collective IQ is not just about people’s ideas. It also includes
the knowledge they cultivate and the tools/technologies that they can use to
enhance that knowledge. (See Illustration 1.)
Collective IQ
© 2010
Doug Engelbart Institute
Illustration 1. The Collective IQ is a measure of how effectively a
group can work together to solve important challenges leveraging the potential
of the people, their knowledge, and the tools they use.
Dynamic Knowledge Repositories
Supporting your mission and your organization’s Collective IQ also depends
on how effectively your group can capture, organize, share, and use the collective
knowledge in dynamic knowledge repositories (DKRs).
Unlike the static archive of documents that most of us associate with repositories,
a DKR should be a living, breathing, rapidly evolving repository of all
the stuff accumulating moment to moment throughout the life of a project
or mission. This would include successive drafts and commentary of a given
document, brainstorming and conceptual design notes, design rationale,
work lists, contact info, all the email and meeting notes, research intelligence
collected and commented on, emerging issues, timelines, etc.
Thus, the DKR is an emerging collective record of all activity captured on
the fly—the group memory of the Collective IQ. A DKR can become a
comprehensive knowledgebase on a particular topic, including up-to-the
minute information—what’s happening right now and what’s
about to happen.
|
ABOUT COLLECTIVE IQ—IN HER OWN WORDS
By Christina Engelbart
Collective IQ is a measure of how effectively a given group of people
can work toward a common goal—how quickly and intelligently
they can anticipate or respond to a situation, leveraging their collective
perception, memory, insight, planning, reasoning, foresight, and
experience into applicable knowledge.
Whether seeking a cure for cancer, pioneering clean energy, turning around
a disadvantaged community, or increasing market share, the complexity
and urgency of opportunities and challenges we face are increasing
exponentially on a global scale. Finding exponentially more powerful
ways to collectively address important problems is critical. This
is both a dire threat and a golden opportunity. Organizations, initiatives,
regions, and nations that proactively increase their Collective IQ
to the highest levels in the shortest timeframe will likely surpass
those that don’t in leaps and bounds. Bootstrapping Innovation™ is
a cost-effective strategic approach for accelerating progress toward
this goal. It can be applied by teams, initiatives, and organizations,
and readily scales up to a global strategy. The sooner we reach critical
mass planet-wide, the better off we all are, and thus there is tremendous
value in sharing best practices, and approaching Collective IQ as
a Grand Challenge.
With increased Collective IQ, people become collectively more effective
at identifying and assessing needs and opportunities, designing and
deploying solutions, and incorporating input, feedback, and lessons
learned. They are increasingly better at leveraging the people, ingenuity,
knowledge, and tools that will contribute to faster, smarter, better
solutions. Their innovation capacity increases commensurately. They
apply these gains to enhanced execution of their missions, and to
find faster, smarter ways to further increase their Collective IQ.
As a group they experience increasing agility, ingenuity, effectiveness,
productivity, and success, with reverberating benefits to organizations
and society at large.
How to increase Collective IQ? It’s all about cultivating and harnessing
an ever more enabling and supportive modus operandi—an open, collaborative
ecosystem of people, best practices, and the tools to support them. Pay
special attention to the ease and quality of collaboration, as well as
the ease and quality of capture, management, and exploitability of the
emerging collective knowledge. Begin with shared values and vision, methodologies,
conventions, and roles for networking people and knowledge. Incorporate
best of breed, open, evolvable information technologies that can easily
support both casual and knowledge-intensive collaboration across organizational
boundaries. Ultimately, the goal is high-performance individuals, teams,
and initiatives, networked to increasingly benefit customers, businesses,
organizations, society, and the planet.
|
This
report continues...
blog comments powered by
(Back to top)
|
|