Sociate

The Web is a superb place to collect and share insights, so let's put it to work. Need to learn quickly about an industry? You can run a quick search on Fortune or BusinessWeek, but what other resources are there?

Let's borrow a page from the Wikipedia and other grassroots resources and build some industry briefing books. If you know of some already finished on the Web, please let me know. Otherwise, I've taken a small step here, using a wiki.

Friction keeps us from doing things we might otherwise really want to do, such as writing a handwritten note to a friend or donating money to people whose work we admire. The causes can be quite complex, such as the bookkeeping, auditing and disclosure that assures us that donated funds really get to their intended recipients, but it's the other extreme that is remarkable: Even simple impediments can become insurmountable obstacles.

If it's hard to park at a downtown store, you might go to a shopping center a little farther away, or be interested in home-delivered groceries. If an online service won't store your ID and password, even for valid security reasons, and requires you to type in twenty characters, you won't be eager to use it. It doesn't take that much friction to cause a problem. Even one extra step can have as significant an effect as twenty.

Businesses constantly test this Law, and our patience, to make money. Ticketmaster hates deep linking because it wants to be sure its visitors go through several pages of ads before they get to the information they want. That's why so many sites have those pesky pop-up ads on every page. That's why TV networks feared TV remote controls early on. The work of getting up to change channels was turned into a flick of the thumb, and suddenly viewers were far more likely to switch programs or skip around during ad breaks.

The Law of Convenience is simple.

Every additional step that stands between people's desires and the fulfillment of those desires greatly decreases the likelihood that they will undertake the activity.

The Law has wide applicability. It's not just about product or service design, its obvious applications, but also about business models and sales strategies.

It's also less about laziness than about habits and memory. Reducing the number of steps it takes to do something makes the entire activity more efficient and more likely to become a habit. But first you have to know that it exists at all, which can be a huge barrier.

Not many people know that you can change the default home page on your browser (call it the Law of Defaults, a corollary of the Law of Convenience). Fewer still know how to, even though it is easy. It can also be done by a computer program, so some Websites ask whether you want to make them your home page, knowing that people who say yes by mistake may not know how to reverse their decision later.

http://www.sociate.com/Topics/Convenience/convenience.shtml

Bruce's many years of research and activism have found their resonant hour.

I'm expressing a point of view. I'd like it to be explicit, accessible and useful. I'd like its constituent parts -- the ideas, commentaries, citations and such -- to be available as building blocks for other people, just as I am going to build on others' work.

I love Weblogs and am starting one here, but they have two weaknesses that I would like to overcome.

First, Weblogs offer only one distribution model: People have to come read your blog at its Web address. Why can't people read each entry as it is posted, if they would like to, as they can with e-mailed newsletters? It is somehow strange that Dave Winer's Radio Userland Weblogging software doesn't allow its users to do what Dave does every day with Scripting News, which is post to his broadcast list and his Weblog. (You can syndicate Weblogs with Radio and use XML for other nifty features, but it's not a mailing list.)

This weakness isn't that hard to fix. I've been an advisor to Pyra (the company behind Blogger) for some time, and Ev -- surviving considerable nagging from me -- has added a post-to-e-mail feature in Blogger Pro. Excellent.

In fact, I'm creating two lists for this one Weblog. The first list, Sociate, is a broadcast list for people who want to see new items quickly, but don't want the e-mail traffic of a discussion list; the second, Sociate-Talk, includes all the outbound posts of the first list, but is meant for people interested in the discussion.

So, depending on your level of interest, you can

Visit the Sociate Weblog,

Subscribe to the Sociate List
(the Weblog info as an e-mail newsletter) or

Participate in the Sociate Discussion
(all of the above, as a two-way mailing list)

Again, if you join the discussion list, no need to join the newsletter also. It's included.

Here's the second weakness: Weblogs offer little context. Like articles and stories in more official news sources such as newspapers, radio and TV, blog entries flow past, one after the other, slipping off into archives. Good entries are cross-posted by other bloggers, but eventually they all slip into archives. If you know what you're looking for, you can probably find an old entry, but most are just gone. Blog posts live in evanescent streams of consciousness, rescued from total extinction only by Google, ever the watchful servant. In this sense, blogs are too much like the traditional media with which commentators often contrast them.

So I will harvest the best items and set them into a more permanent context, using several tools. The obvious method is to collect similar items into various categories and post them on this Website, which I will do. But Web pages aren't that expressive, so I will also use two more interesting tools: a wiki and my Brain.

By combining Weblogs, mailing lists, Web pages, wikis, TheBrain and other tools and services in interesting ways, I hope to turn the daily flow of news, recommendations and ideas into useful stocks of information, all within a broader context.

I won't be doing any of this alone. Many others are at work across the world, and I'll be weaving some of those pieces together from my perspective here.

Ackoff, Russell
Redesigning the Future and Ackoff’s Fables

I studied under Ackoff while I was at Wharton, where he was a bit of a black sheep. His ideas, well outside the mainstream Wharton establishment, affected me more than any others I was exposed to during the MBA program. I also did a bit of consulting for him in Buenos Aires after graduation. Ackoff may best be known for the Idealized Redesign process he uses to help companies rethink what they do (sometimess referred to as planning backwards). Surprisingly, I’ve found no resources online describing Idealized Redesign.

In the 1930s, Ackoff was a student of West Churchman’s. Alongside a few others, they helped start the field of Operations Research during World War II by figuring out how often ship convoys should zig to avoid enemy submarines and how many shells to test in each box of ammo to be sure most of them would work properly. (OR is a branch of applied statistics that includes techniques such as queueing theory, linear programming, Monte Carlo simulations and multiple regression.)

Later, disillusioned with OR’s direction and approach, Ackoff and Churchman founded the field of systems theory. For years, Ackoff ran the Social Systems Science department at Wharton, also known as S-Cubed, and consulted to the likes of Annheuser Busch, Mexico, Iran, Clark Equipment, Volvo, Alcoa and Martin Marietta. In the early 90s, Ackoff left Wharton and founded Interact Design with his longtime colleague, Jamshid Gharajedaghi.

Infamous for not getting along with his peers, Ackoff is becoming increasingly famous for the clarity with which he has long explained the complex ideas of how systems work (and therefore how companies, industries and economies work). If “systems theory” sounds muddy to you, Ackoff’s your man. His Fables are accessible anecdotes that he has used for years to illustrate systems solutions. Redesigning contains the bulk of his thinking, presented with his trademark simplicity.

Many of Ackoff’s peers have done fascinating work, including Eric Trist, Fred Emery, Stafford Beer (who tried to help Salvador Allende build a cybernetic control panel for Chile), Chris Argyris and Donald Schon (Argyris and Schon brought us double-loop learning). [Bo McFarland steered me toward Geoffrey Vickers.] Management guru Peter Drucker has long been a fan of Ackoff’s; systems thinking is Peter Senge’s famed Fifth Discipline.

Churchman, C. West
The Systems Approach and Its Enemies
Churchman, a gentle soul, didn’t originally have “and Its Enemies” in the title of this book. He added it in the second edition, having seen the reactions to the first edition. Systems thinking is challenging, but making systems change is really difficult. Hierarchies and mechanisms don’t morph easily.

Amitai Etzioni's criticism of MBA ethics courses matches my experience. Can't we offer better training?