It’s been three years since I’ve written a blog post. I just want to see if this site still works. And if it does, wondering if I can start writing again. I miss it, really.
Understanding transformations: squaring the circle of Disruption vs. Stability
We tend to think about things in terms of evolution and revolution, of steady continuous changes or else monumental discontinuity. We reach for examples that allow us to identify these watershed moments, and we are often blindsided by changes that look revolutionary after the fact, but which look pretty gradual while they are taking place.
At issue is that the analytic tools used to understand institutional change relies on a model of stability punctuated by disruption. This is too conservative, since it underestimates gradual transformational change and leaves us arguing about ‘disruption’ vs. ‘continuation,’ as two opposite poles. To correct for this either/or problem, we need to distinguish processes of change from outcomes of change (e.g., Streeck and Thelen Beyond Continuity). Consider this 2X2:
The interesting box is that top-right one, ‘gradual transformation.’ These kinds of transformative changes are game-changing, but they happen as a result of an accumulation of gradual and incremental changes. They are often endogenous, and they come as a result of the gaps between formal institutions and their actual implementation and enforcement.
Gradual Transformation
There are 5 broad categories of gradual institutional change.
- Displacement. New models for action emerge and diffuse which call into question existing, previously taken-for-granted organizational forms and practices. For example: electronic trading in finance, took the assumptions of markets to extremes, and then ended up displacing face-to-face marketplaces.
- Layering. New forms are enacted atop existing forms, and then the process of differential growth creates systematic changes. Compromise between old and new slowly turns into defeat of the old. For example: charter schools become a compromise towards school reform, and then slowly siphon resources from public education.
- Drift. Changes to the economic/political/cultural environment change, leaving a seemingly-stable institution to lose salience. Institutions retain their formal integrity even as they increasingly become inattentive to social reality. For example: Without changes (which, to be fair, they are seeking to make) I would gently suggest that Intel may be in this position. Or at least it’s historical attention to cadences and user practices may put it there.
- Conversion. Redeployment of old institutions to new purposes. Or rather, new purposes are attached to old functions. For example: interest group politics (by marginal actors, like women who were unable to be part of political parties because of disenfranchisement) at first cross-cut, but then reorganized party politics in the US
- Exhaustion. Gradual breakdown and withering away of an institution over time. The normal working of an institution undermines itself. For example: (a cynic would suggest) the world power model of democracy, combined with the workings of a modern security state. We need security state to make us safe so that we can be a democracy, which requires security state, which undermines democracy, etc.
For large corporations interested in innovation, this 2x2 offers a couple of lessons. The first is negative – drift and exhaustion are both things that tend to happen ‘to’ companies. Drift is when you are good at something that no longer matters, as the underlying conditions in your external environment change. At Intel, this was the story around mobile. Competing along vectors of ‘computational power’ when the world has turned to ‘low-energy’ devices means that increasingly your position in the ecosystem gets eroded. We are seeing some dangerous signs of similar activities around GPU cycles, as machine learning turns to non-CPU cycles to run efficiently. We have highly competitive products in these spaces, but they are now competing along different vectors.
Exhaustion, by contrast, happens in the form of something like an increasingly complex and onerous PLC process. As a highly integrated manufacturer, our central values are around integration in the compute ecosystem, and so our core products become more complex over time, and more difficult to integrate. Or, at least left unchecked, more expensive. This is the horizontalization story – and we have done it to other competitors, even as it happens to us.
Both of these are not inevitable, but they tend to be more about losing positions in ecosystems.
More useful for understanding how to drive transformational innovations into the company, are displacement and layering. The way I would characterize displacement is closer to Moneyball in baseball – a new set of analytics (on-base percentage, eg) replaced long-standing ones. And their diffusion into the game actually changes quite a bit, from draft to player management. It’s not that the more conventional measures go away (people still, I’m sure, talk about someone having a good ‘baseball body’ or a 5-tool whatever), it’s that the new measures have more or less replaced old ones. The clubs that have done it more readily have been more successful.
So what would one do at a larger corporation? Start small, and measure the hell out of everything. The process, the financial models, the business models, you just have to be sure to capture as many of the things Intel thinks it already knows. Because, my argument is, the existing measures (market forecasts, consulting firm strategies) are meant to capture a marketplace ecosystem that no longer obtains for us.
Second is layering. For our purposes, this is to create a new offering (product or service, or a new business model), in a niche market that is underserved by existing offerings – and which niche has the properties that it is ‘like’ other niches, or that is likely to grow over time. This is Venmo’s strategy with millennials in digital payments; it is Snapchat’s strategy with teenagers. Usage-based insurance starts with teenagers who otherwise can’t get insurance (because of their age group), and this increases chances they’ll put a tracking dongle in their cars – and then UBI spreads from there.
Absent a better map for driving innovations into large organizations, this is the high-level map I would use. The next level of detail is about what kinds of specific projects, and where in the organization it would be useful to drive those changes.
Funding little projects in big organizations
This is a PSA that is most relevant for people who live in big organizations, rather than small ones or agencies. But there is something of an art to getting funding for projects.
Generally, how it works is that budgets are allocated annually or semi-annually, and they are accounted for on a quarterly basis. In my organization, big budgets are different from smaller budget items. There's often a threshold below which projects and budgets do not go through the main process.
This this in mind, one way to get funding is to 'exploit' (though it's not really exploitation in the negative sense) the gap between quarterly funding and ongoing ebbs and flows of budget. In other words, there's going to be money most often at the edges of quarters/budget-cycles.
This is actually fairly common knowledge among consulting agencies, judging from solicitations I get in...timely...fashions during these interstices. But it's something that took me a while to understand.
So here's my maybe-obvious, large corporation-centric advice:
- Find the person in your group who knows exactly what these dates are, how to access and manage purchase orders. This person may be an administrator, it may be a co-worker. If it's a co-worker, you will be able to find the person who knows this by the fact that they always seem to have budget for quirky projects.
- Have shovel-ready projects in your pocket. Discrete research or tactical design/builds are the best. Cultivate relationships with design, research, and consulting agencies, learn the RFP process (request for proposals). I don't mean having a 4-6 week Mad Men-style process (I mean, Jesus, that certainly does sound like a waste of time). More like 5-7 agencies/consultancies whose work you either know or where you have an initial contact. A useful RFP in my world is a page or two at most, with: a) context; b) budget; c) deliverables.
- A few weeks before the end of the quarter, find out how much money is left in the budget. Ideally, in a perfectly-run organization, the answer is zero! But because that's rarely the case (for a variety of perfectly reasonable, rational reasons), this is your time to make your discrete, carefully considered budget ask.
- You can also "tin cup" your project around a bunch of different groups where possible, getting portions of funding here and there, and pastiching that into full project funds. If your group has no money, that does not mean someone else's doesn't! In a matrixed organization, this is common.
How to be a corporate sell-out
Occasionally, I get contacted by academics who are interested in leaving academia, to take glamorous jobs in the corporate world. I usually don't get the machine learning or computer-science types, since they are snapped up by tech firms faster than universities can train them. I get sociologists, who are more like me - ethnography, organizations, work, technology, culture.
I find myself giving similar advice to these students, so let me try to get this down.
- Hire a career coach, it's going to cost you at least several hundred, and sometimes as much as a couple thousand dollars! I worked with Ann Browning, and she is 100% boss! There are three reasons to do this. First, academic job searches are different than corporate ones. And you are almost certainly doing your job search wrong. You should expect your job search to be something like 50% of your time, with much research and many awkward contacts. Also, the general rule I heard was that you could expect to spend 1 month for every $10k of salary you are hoping for. Second, you need someone external in order to motivate you (and not your partner/spouse/friends). Third, the career coach will help you with resume, interviewing, negotiation, onboarding. All of those things are really hard!
- Expect corporate life to be much faster-paced. No one has time for your inner demons, angst about your deadlines, and how difficult it is to be you. Almost certainly you need to stop trying to get things perfect, and make certain you get things done. What I have found, and this is the good news, is that getting things done faster, surprisingly, does not diminish the quality of what you do.
- Expect a huge amount of uncertainty. It's possible, maybe even likely, that you will work on lots more diverse things in corporate worlds. And you simply have to be willing to, say, move groups or projects, quickly. In my industry, it's pretty much at-will employment, and that's the inverse of academic tenure. Practically speaking, it means that the gilded cage is likely to be more about money-you-can't-leave than job-security-you-can't-leave.
- Outside academia, you need to own the solution. It's hard to explain this adequately, but your job is unlikely to entail just complaining about a problem. That's graduate school, for the most part, and it's hugely useful to live critically in the world! But it's not sufficient. In my job, this manifests weirdly: people here never use the word 'problem,' but instead they use the word 'challenge.' That feels creepy sometimes. But it's indicative of a worldview - don't just identify a problem, propose a solution.
- Expect for the near future, and possibly beyond, that your job is going to an idiosyncratic one. Finding it will be lucky, getting it will be lucky, being successful at it will be lucky. One downside of the relentless social science (minus economics) focus on academic job outcomes, is that there is a constrained ecosystem for non-academic positions. You won't find a "staff sociologist" job. They don't exist. So be brave, fight through the anomie, expect that it will be that way until it's no longer unusual to have social science PhD's doing corporate work.
- Leaving academia for industry is a divorce, not a revolving door. At least it's been for me. Maybe over time this will change? Right now, I'm 95% industry stuff, and maybe 5% academic stuff. Again, maybe this will change.
Finally, your people are already out there, you just don't know it. Try looking at CSCW (and give me a shout if you're in Portland!). Look at EPIC. Talk to UX (that's user experience) people, talk to UX researchers in particular. Look into Microsoft Research (and their academic adjacency, Data & Society Institute, ReD, and Stripe Partners. Your people are out there, it's a matter of connecting with them!
Hopefully that is enough to get you started, and going. And please let me know if I can help!
Systems-led development, initial thinking
One of the big transformations that I want to impart and be a part of is to figure out what an invigorated social science of ecosystems would look like? Or more usefully for me, what a more invigorated social science of ecosystems can do to help me innovate at work.
The problem (or, at least, one problem) is that I work at a company that considers itself a product company. This can be problematic, or it can be amazing. But mostly it means that we think about innovation as being about products that we sell. We are not stupid, though, and we know that most of the products we sell require active ecosystem engagement. We know how to work with ecosystems - the users, developers, OEMs, partners, regulatory bodies that all need to be in sync in order for any of our 'products' to be successful.
But it seems that there is still a lot of room in this space to get better.
There is, helpfully-not-helpfully, a huge market for what the IDEO people would call human centered design. That the design of 'things' does better oriented around human needs, rather than starting with what the technology / innovation can accomplish, and then thinking about how it might affect human beings afterwards. And this movement (and it seems to be rather a movement) is tied into design-thinking more broadly.
I don't want any of that. I mean, I'm pro-human, don't get me wrong. But I don't want design thinking.
Instead, what I'm driving at, poorly, is something more like Ron Adner's "wide lens" vision of a minimally viable ecosystem (and you know you can trust him, because his picture has him standing in front of bank-looking buildings. Plus the Wide Lens is really good). Design thinking doesn't get us to the wider ecosystems that are necessary for big-system solutions and innovations to work. That's the rub.
And yet, there is a social science of ecosystems - that could, but does not, help to address these problems. This is an orientation that combines social science, technology, and strategy; it is a corollary to the social science, technology, and design that characterizes User Experience (UX). If UX is meant to substitute technology-led development with people-led development, what we are talking about is substituting technology-led development with system-led development.
As our competitive environments are increasingly characterized by speed, technological innovation, changes in the bases for competition across a wide range of products and services, how should we understand and act in these environments?