Can You Compress Time
The time it takes to develop something of value is considerable. A new medicine takes on average over 15 years from science to market. A new aircraft platform may take 20 to 30 years to become of normal use. Even in sports a deep capacity for high performance requires a collective process beyond the team itself— The Barcelona Football Club is a social phenomenon that took 25 years to build.
This corresponds to our general experience. We do stuff which we can’t be certain will work out. And we rarely or ever do it alone, whether we know or not, there are myriads of parallels taking place at any given moment and often overlapping over decades. So how can we be sure beforehand if our projects are caseworthy?
We can safely assume that each of is doing what we deem the best compromise —between what is worthy and what is feasible, but our models of learning by doing are far too slow. What-if the social curation process can do it better—realizing earlier possible paths and higher likelihood outcomes? realizing how what we are doing fits into one or more larger puzzles?
The Hunt for the Mammoth
If the underlying picture—the whole, is not healthy, we should expect to see a splintered reality: many options but very little substance:
The mass market has split into ever-multiplying, ever-changing sets of micro-markets that demand a continually expanding range of options —Alvin Toffler
Hokusai depicts this as our efforts at grasping a larger-than-life problem. What we are trying by ourselves has a connection to the larger whole, and it may very well be that understanding it, can trigger actions and collaborations. It is also possible that our efforts seem to lack value and we turn away just when a breakthrough would have been possible—if we had just managed to see behind the bends in the larger picture.
What we want to bring with Aurora is the gift of the amateur — or the “curious outsider,” not only his or her openness to uncertainty, but also a boundless enthusiasm with a sharp focus to discover how the pieces add up to a larger puzzle. These are hard within a field or experts realm because reputations are at stake. But for the amateur it is possible to ask questions that hack at the grey borders.
Aurora Impact is in fact the collaborative hunt to make out the models— the mammoth, in order to capture it with forces that may feel puny.
Scenius and Group Genius
We borrowed from Brian Eno’s term “scenius”, and of course, build into Aurora’s Labs Gail Taylor’s “group genius”. Under these models, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals — artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other taste-makers — who make up an “ecology of talent.”
We think this is related to—yet different from, crowd-sourcing, where usually someone gives out a definition of a problem—a specific challenge and solution-space. In the Group Genius model, the definition of the problem emerges from the group. We think worthiness cannot be known before hand, not entirely— it is a quality of the hunt, that requires a personal involvement in creating the guiding target:
“The best way to get started on the path to sharing your work is to think about what you want to learn, and make a commitment to learning it in front of others. Find a scenius, pay attention to what others are sharing, and then start taking note of what they’re not sharing. Be on the lookout for voids that you can fill with your own efforts, no matter how bad they are at first. . . . Share what you love, and the people who love the same things will find you.” —Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist.
Aurora Impact is about taking it to the next level, where a group can together discover what the real problem is. We thought that if can build-in the models we have used in thousands of cases to align diverse groups, as in a continuous charrette -like process, we would have a fair chance to help everyone gradually discover how to tackle big issues with small steps.
Great storytelling is not about maximizing technical possibility. It is not about excellence. It is about meaning and sense-making, about ensouling information.
When we explore new ground (or re-explore old ground, forgotten ground) in new mediums, we often find it necessary to swing the design and interaction pendulum to the baroque side of the scale. We do this to see what “too much” feels like in order to understand the edges of “enough.”
— On the trail of the phantom women who changed American music and then vanished without a trace, John Jeremiah Sullivan, NY Times (wonderful inline sound recordings)
There are musicians as obscure as Wiley and Thomas, and musicians as great, but in none does the Venn diagram of greatness and lostness reveal such vast and bewildering co-extent. … There’s a song, Geeshie’s “Last Kind Words,” a kind of pre-blues or not-yet-blues, a doomy, minor-key lament that calls up droning banjo songs from long before the cheap-guitar era, with a strange thumping rhythm on the bass string. “If I get killed,” Geeshie sings, “if I get killed, please don’t bury my soul.”
Image: NY Times Archives, One of the many contact sheets in McCormick’s files. Mack McCormick
Seagate’s Three-Day Revolution
This little case of our experience with Seagate— later published in Fortune Magazine, took place at the time when the Innovator’s Dilemma book by Clayton Christensen started to whip up the idea of disruption as a sort of mantra. In fact, Seagate Technology was not felled by disruption but triggered to undergo a deep transformation.
… the principal facilitator was no less than the man himself, Matt Taylor, whose buzz phrase is “putting group genius to work.” The goal was to convert Seagate from an aloof designer-manufacturer into one that takes its cues from what customers say they want.
The experiential modeling that went on in that case changed the outcomes radically:
…the fourth group played the role of the customer, a computer company operating in 2003. This group, which included representatives of a real Seagate customer, worked out a request for a quote on disk drives that was handed to the three other groups for bidding. Nichols (CEO) says that setting the problem five years in the future helped everybody to start “thinking out of the box.” In the end, recalls Taylor, it was Swarm, with no organizational constraints and no fixed way of doing anything, that won the theoretical contract. As day one came to a close, just about everybody was ready to concede that Swarm deserved it.
Seagate´s sales doubled, reaching $2.4 billion in the 1989-90—more than all of its U.S. competitors combined according to an industry report. In 1997, the year Christensen published “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” Seagate was the largest company in the disk-drive industry, reporting revenues of nine billion dollars. Most of the entrant firms celebrated by Christensen as triumphant disrupters, on the other hand, no longer exist, their success having been in some cases brief and in others illusory. The lesson is that turning a powerful story can be as easy as flicking the switch. Yet it is something that too frequently eludes the incumbents as Christensen has observed.
Wall Street remained skeptical, but management believes there are still profits to be made in the hard-drive business. In a “going private” deal with more angles than a billiard tournament, in 2000, an investment group acquired the operating assets of Seagate for about $2 billion. Senior managers stayed onboard. How they cope in the disk-drive market in the meantime and what Seagate looks like when that day comes will certainly owe a lot to three days in July 1998, when they worked among those movable walls, books, and toys.
In 2014 everyone knows the outcome: Seagate´s market valuation overpasses $18 billion and is set on a path to become A Storage Systems Powerhouse.
The Polymath Experiments
But can this sort of Swarm also work its way also when the group is not present and are not members of a set organization?
In his Polymath Project [mathematician Tim] Gowers in 2009 decided to use his blog to run a this social experiment. He picked a difficult unsolved mathematical problem, a problem he said he’d “love to solve.” He decided to attack the problem completely in the open, using his blog to post ideas and partial progress. What’s more, he issued an open invitation asking other people to help out. Anyone could follow along and, if they had an idea, explain it in the comments section of the blog.
The Polymath Project got off to a slow start. After seven hours mathematician Jozsef Solymosi from the University of British Columbia posted a comment suggesting a variation on Gowers’s problem, a variation which was easier, but which Solymosi thought might throw light on the original problem. Fifteen minutes later, an Arizona high-school teacher named Jason Dyer chimed in with a thought of his own. And just three minutes after that, UCLA mathematician Terence Tao—like Gowers, a Fields medalist—added a comment. The comments erupted: over the next 37 days, 27 people wrote 800 mathematical comments, containing more than 170,000 words. Just 37 days after the project began Gowers announced that he was confident the polymaths had solved not just his original problem, but a harder problem that included the original as a special case. Gowers described the Polymath process as being “to normal research as driving is to pushing a car.”
What-if we applied this experiential modelling as in Seagate’s Three-day Revolution, and the online polymath process to engage openly around worthy missions?
The real Scenius and Group Genius mateur harnesses the Zen notion of “beginner’s mind” — bringing a state of openness to possibility that closes up as we get calcified in expertise. Which prompts us asking:
