Musings on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Tuesday, March 25, 2003Micah Alpern has an updated version of his blogsearch tool. It now can search a blogrolling.com blogroll as well as the feeds from an RSS news aggregator. The line between searching for content within documents and searching social networks is getting very blurred indeed.
Jack Ricchiuto is working on a new book to be titled New Spaces:
New Spaces is based on two observations: 1. Life is a space created by our questions and 2. New spaces come from new questions.
Our life is a unique space of experience that, as it turns out, is created by our questions. More than it is sometimes apparent, the contours of our life are shaped by the quality of our questions. The defining difference in the quality of our experience is the quality of questions we use to design it. The design of our relationships, events, technologies, identities, lifestyles, organizations, and communities all emerge from the design of our questions.
In my experience, entrepreneurial learning is a recursive process composed of questions, connections, conversations, and resolutions. Too often, I've made the mistake of trying to craft a conversational space in search of connections without a sufficiently clear understanding of the question. What works is when a conversation emerges from the question of a single entrepreneur. At least in the context of a network distributed in space and time, I've found that there is no shortcut. Resolution is, to a large degree, a function of hard work and attention to detail.
Stuart Henshall makes an important point:
"Expand your Circles". professionally, financially and socially. The disruptive revolution is now in the wings. It's more than matching, it is about creating environments where you can learn and grow from whom you know and the transactions you have completed. Collectively and individually we move in many different CIRCLES and that's where the real value opportunities are to be created when we discover we "collectively" have a lot more to offer, even when we can't possibly know what we can do for each other.
Stuart Kauffman, the theoretical biologist associated with The Santa Fe Institute, notes that work requiries boundaries. Kauffman thinks deep thoughts about how boundaries came to be in a universe of thermodynamic work. It's enough for me to think about how to create boundaries or environments that facilitate learning among entrepreneurs: learning circles.
Duncan Watts, in his book Six Degrees, explains why this is important:
When solving complex problems in ambiguous environments, individuals compensate for their limited knowledge...by exchanging information with other problem solvers...The problem of coping with chronic environmental ambiguity is, therefore, equivalent to the problem of distributed communication. Firms that are bad at facilitating distributed communication are bad at solving problems, and therefore are bad at handling uncertainty and change.
The trick, of course, as Henshall underscores, is that each of us defines our world as a multiplicity of overlapping circles. What's more, our circles change as our circumstances change. In my efforts with my colleagues, we've found that centrally defined circles have limited usefulness. We're looking for effective ways to help individuals dynamically create their own circles so they can learn from, and teach, their peers in order to solve problems and be more successful.