Collective IQ and Continuous Improvement
“How do you harness the collective intelligence of a group, solve difficult problems, and share what you learn?”
An excellent distillation and synthesis of Doug Engelbart's driving vision for navigating accelerating change. See companion article Improvement communities
Here’s How To Master The ABCs Of Innovation
Here's How To Master The ABCs Of Innovation
“Fortune 500 CEOs cited dealing with the rapid pace of technological change as their "single biggest challenge." Another global survey [...] identified the speed of disruptive innovation as one of the highest risks facing their organizations. [...] Yet, the intense attention on innovation often misses a key element. [While] many companies are paying attention to immediate challenges and opportunities, [...] too few are being innovative in how they innovate. [...] Douglas Engelbart, the noted engineer and inventor, captured the critical difference when he wrote "the key to the long-term viability of an organization is to get better "and better at improving itself." To understand why, take a look at Englebart's framework for the "ABCs of Organizational Improvement."
See this article tweeted by the Author, and trending on Twitter.”
Reflections on our future
Reflections on our future
This article commemorates Doug's remarks from the Oct 1996 ASIS Conference on global complexity: information, chaos and control, where ASIS honored Doug with a Special Achievement Award. “We at the Bootstrap Institute say the world has one category of people who are operating and another category of activity that's improving the capability to do that work. So we called the first part the “A” activity and the next part the “B.” The “B” is that which is busy trying to improve how capable you can be at “A.” Because we have significantly more challenges coming, we must get a more effective “B” going to cope with that change. To improve the capability for doing “B,” you obviously have to add a “C” to improve your capability to improve...”
Doug Engelbart’s Design for High Performance Innovative Organizations
Doug Engelbart's Design for High Performance Innovative Organizations
Change Your Organization's Nervous System - “I have been a fan and follower of Doug Engelbart since I first discovered his work in the early 1970s. After his death in 2013, I revisited a videotaped interview I did with Doug in November of 1991 [in which Doug described] much of his seminal thinking about how to design high performance organizations. [...] In this article, I summarize a few of the high points from that interview.”
Improve Your Ecosystem’s Ability to Tackle Complex Issues
Improve Your Ecosystem's Ability to Tackle Complex Issues
“For internetworked organizations [...] there’s also a robust body of proven practices that reminds us how to accelerate our capacity for innovation as a group of people. Many of the basic principles for “bootstrapping innovation” among people who are working together online (and offline) to address complex issues were invented and practiced by Doug Engelbart. [...] At our recent Visionaries’ meeting, Christina Engelbart, Doug’s daughter, reminded us that her father’s life work revolved around helping groups of people tackle really complex issues.”
Bootstrapping Innovation: Leveraging Collective IQ to Achieve Powerful Results
Bootstrapping Innovation: Leveraging the Collective IQ to Achieve Powerful Results
“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”
Douglas Engelbart: More Thoughts
Douglas Engelbart: More Thoughts from Cassandra
Douglas Engelbart can be credited with inventing much of the computing paradigm we all use today, but have we missed his most important ideas? Adam looks at where Engelbart has been and where he thinks we need to strategize for the future, given the accelerating rate of change: “Wouldn’t you think [an organization] would try to knock off two birds with one stone by creating products that radically improve the productivity of its own employees, with the understanding that doing so would result in products that would better meet the needs of other customers?”
Reference: This article was inspired by Doug's Turing Lecture | Slidedeck
Improving your organization’s IQ
Improving your organization's IQ
“In some of the most innovative companies in Silicon Valley, the name Douglas Engelbart is spoken with reverence... credited with inventing the mouse, hypertext, multiple-window screen displays, and computer conferencing, among other staples of computer technology. But his greatest innovation has been largely ignored...”
In this premier edition of her award-winning journal from the Drucker Foundation, Frances Hesselbein covers Engelbart's strategy for improving how we improve our organizations, and the ABCs of leveraging our Collective IQ throughout the organization's "improvement infrastructure" and across improvement communities.
Doug Engelbart’s Design for Knowledge-Based Organizations
Doug Engelbart’s Design for Knowledge-Based Organizations
“Doug Engelbart was driven to help people address really complex issues. One path is to support collaboration through the use of a Dynamic Knowledge Repository. [...] To Doug, bootstrapping is “getting better at getting better.” It’s at the heart of continuous innovation. He believes in the principle of leverage. Put your attention not on the thing you’re trying to design or do, but on how to IMPROVE the process you’re using to design or do, AND on also focus on how to improve your capacity to improve.”
This is a two-part article; see also Part 1: Intro | Part 2: Intro.
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