Process of Change : ideas

Bridging the gap between possibility and practicality

bobreb — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 21:27:00 GMT

I've been attracted recently to ideas that bridge the gap between possibility and short-term practicality. The game is managing the evolution of an innovation. It goes like this: first, what is this thing; second, how does it help me do what I already do; and third, what new things might I do with it. You can't jump from one to three. You have to go through the steps sequentially.

My favorite example goes like this: people at one time thought the best thing to do with a video recording device would be to take it to a live performance and situate it in the best seat in the house. The resulting recording would deliver to every viewer the perspective that could be had only by those few attending the live performance and seated in the most advantageous physical location. As a phase two conception, it makes perfect sense. You can almost hear the pundits: "now everyone gets the best seat in the house." We can only understand something using the conceptual tools we already possess. In this example, it wasn't immediately obvious that you could put the camera places where people couldn't sit at all, or that you could have multiple cameras, or film the event out of order, or in multiple locations, or add special effects, or any of the many things we associate with recorded content today. It's a classic phase two conception.

Today, in the online social space, we find the early majority figuring out phase one, and beginning the move to phase two. Consider that the phrase "social network", or maybe "social graph" is popularly understood as a collection of your friends and acquaintances. That's a very narrow perspective, but it is understandable when we consider the conceptual space the idea is entering. In time, on the other side of the hype curve, we'll grow out of it.

Anyway, one idea that I think bridges the gap is the social media release. It bridges the phase one to phase two gap for the PR and marketing professions. I've blogged about it before, because I think it's both practical and a great case study in the evolution of an idea. As it goes mainstream, rigor is added, and process evolves around it. The image here was taken from a deck created by Matt Herzberger and made available on Slideshare.

All hail the bridge builders...

And I thought The Teaching Company was cool...

bobreb — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 03:32:00 GMT

Actually I still think The Teaching Company is cool. I've taken many of their courses and I can testify to the fact that they are high quality.

But this is getting too good:

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php

I really need a way to do three or four things at once. One life is just not enough.

Tier Three Design

bobreb — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 01:06:40 GMT

Lots of really fascinating stuff is happening in my world lately. Some of it is a bit unusual. For instance, my wife now refers to me as the Hannibal Lector of Microsoft -- I'm not going to pursue that other than to report that I don't actually bite.

Anyway, half of what I've been working on is what I've come to refer to as "Tier 3" design. From this perspective, what we sometimes think of as Web 2.0 is in part the next level of abstraction of the internet: from physical; to content; to people.

The diagram might look like this:

It might not look like much of an insight, and perhaps it's not, but the ramifications are significant. For instance, if this is accurate, then MSN Spaces would not be Microsoft's consumer social networking offering. All of MSN/Live would be our social networking "solution". The same could be said for Sharepoint and Enterprise 2.0.

In other words it means a re-visioning of online experience generally.

The question then becomes, how do we accomplish this re-visioning? I'm keeping some cards to myself for the time being, but I will share this, when we applied this thinking to product support and troubleshooting we came up with a much different solution than we see in place today, or hear discussed, across the industry.