An example of Industrial Age attitudes

It is difficult to generalise in describing Industrial Age business attitudes to the Internet, so, perhaps it can best be explained in terms of an example. Such an example came along through a chance meeting I had with an old acquaintance of mine who had become a chief executive in a very large, old established menswear company.

I'd enquired about the current state of the menswear market. He'd told me that clothing sales in the high streets had slumped. There was a current recession and fashion goods were particularly badly affected. He then went on to tell me that they were beginning to run out of ideas as to how they could turn the situation around.

I asked if his company had started to use the Web. He told me that they'd had several meetings about possible applications but hadn't been able to decide how to use it yet. He said he didn't really think it would be applicable to their kind of business anyway. He was due to go on vacation the following week so I bought him a copy of Kevin Kelly's book "New Rules for the new Economy" to read on the journey.

As soon as he returned from his vacation he telephoned me. Wildly excited, he rambled on about how this insight into the emerging world of digital communication had opened his eyes to all kinds of exciting possibilities. From a position of not seeing how his company could use the Internet, in the space of a single week he had begun to see countless opportunities that might benefit his company. He had seen the light.

In the month following his vacation, he was due to give a talk to a large audience of top executives in the industry to describe a strategy for marketing a new range of menswear. He was keen to include some of the ideas that had come to him whilst reading Kevin Kelly's book. I helped him to work out an addition to his speech so that he could propose the idea of including the Internet in the strategy; not just for marketing, but, also for gathering information to influence future design.

I was quite surprised when he didn't telephone me after the presentation to tell me how it had been received. After a few days, I rang him, to ask how it had gone. He told me that it hadn't gone at all well and the references to using the Internet had lost him marks on his presentation. He'd been told that the explanation he'd given had gone right over their heads. "The trouble is", he explained, "Everyone is so caught up with efficiency, they've resorted to speaking in bullet points. Nobody has time to listen to anything conceptual".

This rang a bell. During my ill fated consultancy gig, I'd had an email dialogue with one of the other consultants who was also being employed by the company. He was an eminent academic from one of the countries main universities. He'd been questioning my use of a bottom up, evolutionary design strategy. He asked:

"Would it be possible to pedagogically formulate the key points in, say, less than ten sentences?"

This was the self same mentality. The Industrial Age corporate way, that had rubbed off onto the academic. He was asking for a bullet list summary that he could read and digest in the shortest possible time. Of course it made sense in terms of efficiency to communicate in this way, but, could it be done with unfamiliar concepts?

I thought I'd have a try as the academic would probably be familiar with most of the basic concepts anyway. The bullet point summary should be sufficient to assemble the thoughts into place and just enough to explain the gist of the strategy. I then offered the following list of ten bullet point sentences:

The disadvantages of a top down approach:

* Any pre-planned product can take into consideration only knowledge known at the time of the planning

* Any pre-planning cannot take into account the "emergence" effects of using the product (by definition these occur only after a product is designed and in use).

* Pre-planned designs are limited to the imagination of the planners at the time before the product is put into use.

* Changes in competitive strategies, technological changes and other innovations cannot often be anticipated in advance.

Characteristics of a true bottom up approach:

* All design decisions are taken while the product is being used (never before).

* Design comes not from an assessment of what a user wants but as a direct response to user needs

* Design is driven by observation and feed back (not by human intelligence).

* Observation looks for 'emergence'. That is, effects resulting from the dynamics of the product use by the users.

* Breakthroughs and competitive advantage is realized through being first to recognize and capitalize on any emergence that occurs.

* The product designs itself

I thought I'd made a pretty good job of explaining what a bottom up strategy did and how it was preferable to a top down strategy. But this didn't satisfy the academic. He replied:

"I wanted a ten liner about the very last point: 'The product designs itself '. I have no problems accepting this as an interesting concept. I just want to know _how_ it can be done and whether I have missed something that can convince me that it will work well in practice. "

Here then was a serious problem. The academic mind (as well as the corporate mind) has a need for absolutely everything to be summed up in neat bulletin points. But, not everything can be - and certainly not this final point. As you will see later in this book, a satisfactory explanation as to how a product can be set up to design itself involves several quite sophisticated concepts; many of which are not intuitive. Certainly it couldn't be summed up in ten sentences.

The dialogue with the academic came to an abrupt end when he stated that it was unsafe to apply evolutionary metaphors too literally. I explained that I wasn't using metaphors, but, actual evolutionary processes that had been uncovered only in recent times. Indignantly, he insisted that evolutionary processes were not yet fully understood. What could I say? As one famous biologist once remarked "Evolution has been around for such a long time that everyone thinks they know all there is to know about it".

The reality is, the principles behind the mechanisms of evolution are only now just beginning to emerge and are coinciding with the emergence of the Internet. Two of the most powerful mechanisms known to man are manifesting at the same time. This is another compelling reason to have faith in the potency of the Internet

Returning to my friend in the menswear business, his position in the company allowed him a certain degree of autonomy, I asked him why he didn't just go ahead and initiate some way to incorporate more digital communication into his area of responsibility. "Can't be done, he explained, "Even the directors cannot embark on any plan without specific approval and agreed funding. This would involve a procedure that, at the best, will take several months and in all probability might stretch into years".

"On this time scale, any plan involving digital communications is almost certain to be out of date before it's approved or funded", I remarked. He shook his head. "I know", he sighed, "But that is the way this company works. It is the way all big companies work".

That conversation set me thinking. If large companies were set up with this kind of internal organisation, they were not going to be able to respond appropriately to the rapid changes that digital technology were ushering in. There was a structural, built in resistance to sudden change. How wide spread was it?

Further conversations with my friend revealed that this policy seemed to be an accepted dogma; fundamental to the stability of these large, old established organisations. Big companies in the Industrial Age are owned by their shareholders, the investors. The investors need to have control over how their money is being spent. It makes sense to them to have a rigid system of detailed proposals with lengthy and rigorous examination of the details before any funding is granted. To the corporate mind of the Industrial Age, it would be totally unacceptable to allow people to take risks with money without there being a rigorous prior examination of the plan and a method established by which the progress could be monitored and controlled.

This is the strategy of the careful poker player, who needs to have aces back to back and be in full control before making a bet. There seems to be no way that the rigid system of corporate dogma can officially allow the funding of a strategy of open play. This would involve giving employees an open ended assignment in the spirit of: "Here, take this money and see if you can do something useful with it".

I was beginning to see a possible explanation as to why many large companies formed during the Industrial Age, despite their financial muscle and their pools of intellectual resources, weren't dominating the Web. This procedural funding policy is a crippling handicap in the rapidly changing world of digital communications. In this environment, policies and planning decisions need to be made on the fly. There isn't time to hang around, waiting for intricate and detailed plans to be prepared, examined in detail and then approved. My friend just shrugged his shoulders at all this. "If I try to change the system I'll be marked out as a trouble maker and could end up losing my job", was his pragmatic response to the situation. A company working without full financial control? It just didn't make any sense to his Industrial Age corporate mind.

Confirmation of this situation came during a conversation I had with one of the gurus of knowledge retrieval systems and groupware: David Coleman. I'm a regular reader of the monthly articles he publishes on his Web site (www.collaborate.com). I'd noticed that he'd begun his articles in 1996 as an enthusiastic proponent of evolutionary design strategies - systems that are grown bottom up. Yet, he'd gradually progressed to a position where he was talking almost exclusively about systems which were designed top down: groupware solutions that are imposed as finished applications.

I asked him why he'd changed tack. He told me he hadn't lost faith in the evolutionary approach to design, it was just that the ideas it entailed didn't fit in with corporate thinking. Getting large amounts of funding for big projects required the expected results to be specified beforehand. He reiterated what I'd already deduced from the conversation with my friend: investors wanted to know what they were getting for their money before parting with it.

I pondered the significance of this. I'd seen a report, that estimated the total expenditure on knowledge retrieval and groupware products for that year (1999); it was expected to top four and a half billion dollars. As far as I could see, the vast majority of this money would be going to fund top down designs: a technique vastly inferior to the more appropriate evolutionary, bottom up design strategies. Again, it was the aces back to back mentality. The most suitable and appropriate approach for dealing with problems involving change and complexity were being stymied by Industrial Age corporate dogma.

Looking at various other corporate attitudes to the Internet and World Wide Web, it was evident that there were many companies who were avoiding this conceptual quagmire, but, they seemed to be very much in the minority.