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September, 2003 |
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Technology
& Leadership
Participant Am I correct that use by business is the one that interests most Participants here and therefore should be the focus of our remarks? I support that--and will only suggest here that use of citizen participation might be the focus for a later discussion. Participant Participant Participant Participant Participant 1. There is a distinction being made about information vs. interpretation vs. wisdom, etc., that I think misses a point. When I spoke of having what is known in one place available immediately in another place, I did not have in mind that it would be a good thing for the CEO to know all the available information. I did have in mind that the CEO would want to understand that the capability was there, and think about how to use that capability wisely, adapting his structure and style to take advantage of it--and, of course, to avoid information overload by himself and others. To do this, he would have to have some understanding, I think, of IT works--what it will do and what it won't do, or doesn't yet do. 2. The prospect of instantaneous accurate opinion poll displays available to the Congress scares the hell out of me! I just came from the barber shop (and look better for it, even if I feel worse) where I listened to frightening exchanges of opinion by "ordinary folk" who knew nothing at all of what they were talking about. I hope, and believe, that we have designed our system of government for better things than this.
Participant What is missing is the ability (and experience) of those who have developed FACILITATION (rather than CHAIRING) of meetings to enhance the decision making potentials of groups. I see this as a promising, and still not widely accepted, field for experimentation. I am not suggesting that such procedures should replace the role of legislators, but rather that it will replace the current role of citizens simply to be counted in polls. Participant Participant Certainly executives have used videoconferencing (and I consider that a collaborative technology) and they use audioconferencing all the time. Email too. I remember right after my last book came out 10 years ago, one of the executives I interviewed was rather miffed with me and said, "Why did you write about email? Executives will never use email. They want databases." He called me 5 years later (in the early days of the web) to tell me he was dead wrong and could he take me to lunch as an apology! Email use by top executives may not be ubiquitous but it has certainly grown over the past 10 years. The point is that there are a whole range of technologies that can serve as leadership tools, but we don't have enough technology generalists who can illustrate creative ways to use them for leadership. Don, do you remember Newt Gingrich's reading list for Congress way back in 1995? He put Leadership and the Computer on the list because he really saw the need for leaders to understand technology. He heavily promoted the use of technology by citizens as a means of holding government accountable. Remember when he had all that Congressional stuff put online? I think if we want to use computers for citizen participation in government, that's more likely to happen after the leaders understand the value and capabilities of the technologies. Then maybe they'll be willing to allocate the funds to get citizens involved. Although, I have to say, I'd be hard pressed to suggest they invest in computers or other technologies until after they get better voting machines!!!!!!
Participant
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang My apologies for being such a hands-off host these last few days, not that the discussion has suffered from my absence. In the real world, my wife and I just took possession of a new house, and I've been pulling up carpet, dealing with hot and cold running contractors, and so on since the weekend. However, the illusion of control is starting to dawn. I wonder if it be useful at this point to split up the discussion into a couple parts: into, say, a thread on management and IT, and one on the use of IT in improving the democratic process? I can see some ways in which a comparison of the ways IT could be used in each realm could be valuable--especially given the underlying desire to make BOTH more participatory--but maybe we would get farther on each by treating them separately for a bit, then attempting a synthesis. Any preferences? Don: One important issue to deal with in an online network devoted to political discourse and decision-making is that of reliability--not the kind of reliability of having the servers always up, but the kind that comes from transparency in the process. At Britannica, we experimented for a time with online opinion surveys (beloved by Marketing, reviled by the content side of the shop, which at the time I ran), and we often saw what you could call the Kamal Ataturk Effect: no matter the question (who was the most important politician of all time, the greatest baseball player, the winner of the 1952 Kentucky Derby), the answer was Kamal Ataturk. Clearly, in the great Chicago tradition, someone was voting early and often. Credibility of process is likewise the great bugaboo of Web search engines (how do you know the results aren't weighted, through programmer's assumptions or bribery, to favor some sites?), Web shop bots (how do you know they've really selected the lowest price?), and any kind of online survey. We've recently had a lesson in how even something as simple as counting votes can become complicated and contingent when you deal with millions of them. Could you assure a potentially skeptical public that an online system you're offering them wouldn't be subject to the same kinds of potentially catastrophic uncertainties, or couldn't be hacked? Mary: I wonder if you could say a bit more about the differences in traditional versus interactive managerial styles? Maybe a more focused example would help--say, contrast how each would develop a policy, or respond to a crisis. I think Ray's point in 1:39 about the ultimate futility of parsing "information," "knowledge," "wisdom," etc. is right on. Among other things, even if most of the time managers want more abstract distillations of big data sets, there are times when they want a specific piece of information--a stock price at the opening bell, the news from a foreign capital during a coup--as soon as possible, in as raw a form as possible.
Participant Am I correct (and here I would rely on the views of Mary and Lisa and perhaps others) that much of the new research in business circles is focused on participatory decision making". I believe there are many lessons learned in that research that could greatly enrich the less successful efforts of those concerned with "governance". What I have in mind is: the use of facilitated rather than "chaired" discussions, the value of collaborative efforts at understanding the problem, pertinent data, and different goals before short-circuiting the decision process by the introduction of adversarial solutions. These are basic (almost cultural) shifts in how we reach decisions that really should precede a consideration of IT as a means to put them into practice. Participant Participant Participant Participant I think we are seeing that what top leaders want more than information is each other. What can IT do to foster that? What does it mean to have access to each other? Along what dimensions? How can advice, opinion, criticism, interpretation, encouragement be made systematically available? What more might leaders really want from each other? Can IT give them something they are not getting now in other ways? Does it perhaps get into less rational areas such as friendship? Does it cross emotional boundaries that IT usually doesn't address? Should it be organized on industry-wide rather than organization-wide basis? Or between the private sector and the state?
Participant Participant Many of the hard decisions ahead have to do with coming to grips with environmental/population impacts on our planet. And most of the strategies for reversing the damage that our consumption patterns are causing will demand difficult changes in our life styles. I have found it useful in some teaching that I have done to suggest that these changes/choices demand that we THINK THE UNTHINKABLE IN ORDER TO AVOID THE UNTHINKABLE. What I mean by that phrase is that we will not voluntarily or easily accept the higher costs of environmental protection unless we first "internalize" the unthinkable results if we do not accept those costs. Nor will we easily internalize such perceptions by simply listening to or reading the wisdom of others. Only through participating in deliberative discussion will we emotionally accept the unthinkable consequences of running out of water or global warming sufficiently to accept the "unthinkable" sacrifices needed to mitigate such results. One possible way to involve citizens in such deliberation might be to harness the skills of facilitated, participatory discussion with the new, computer-like technology of digital television (especially via Public Television). The timing is right for this, since digital tv for everyone is still some years away, but many of the Public TV stations are now thinking about how best to use this new technology. Perhaps this is a challenging, useful, and interesting route to travel for this forum?? ------------- Forgive this interruption. But there are not many forums that I know of where I would have the luxury of spilling my thoughts so freely as I have done above!!
Participant
Participant Participant Participant Participant Alex Soojung-Kim Pang While waiting for contractors and delinquent students, I've been reading Steven Johnson's forthcoming book "Emergence," which makes the argument that emergent behavior is something that explains a great deal of the interesting behavior of cities, brains, and various other complex entities. The essential idea is that systems can exhibit considerable intelligence that exceeds the capabilities of its individual members. Ant colonies, for example, are intelligent in a way that individual ants are not, and even have distinct--albeit very limited--personalities. In a similar manner, city neighborhoods--from industrial concentrations (think how many cities have areas called Jewlers' Row, Printers' Row, Bankers' Row) to the kinds of neighborhoods celebrated by Jane Jacobs in her work on cities--possess a kind of enculturated intelligence that isn't quite the sum of its individuals. What's fascinating about these things is that no one's in charge: these systems have lots of resilience and intelligence, and survive far longer than any single member. This has been especially striking because of the resonances between this argument and some of the points participants here have been making. It obviously overlaps with what most interests Donald --the use of IT to help the body politic evolve, to become capable of dealing with the scale of contemporary problems without abandoning the principles of participation and democratic action. The collective local intelligence of the town hall could handle eighteenth- and nineteenth-century issues, and still works for very local problems; but the problem is that fewer and fewer important problems are really local. This, I now suspect, is the flip side of the problem that is the principal concern of this forum. I've been asking what kinds of things leaders today need to make reasonable decisions. Perhaps the better way to frame the question is to ask: What kinds of technologies or organizational forms help institutions develop this kind of responsive intelligence? And what does that leave executives to do? Would it drive executive time between decisions up from 11 minutes to something else? When I first read that fact (see Richard's 1:69), I thought, Gee, I wonder what kinds of devices could help manage that flow. But the end of the anecdote suggests that the real solution is to reduce the flow. The other interesting reading that recently caught my eye was a couple pieces on Silicon Valley executives: Oracle's Ray Lane topped the executive salary list (at $250 million), while a new study indicates that CEO lifetimes are getting shorter, as company boards demand faster turnarounds, better response to crisis, and greater profitability. Clearly, CEOs aren't obsolete yet, even in a region that prides itself on being the technological and entrepreneurial capital of--well, the world in the late 1990s and first several months of 2000, anyway.
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang Governments like it because it's cheaper to run such an exchange than it is to determine and then enforce a new set of regulations. It has two other virtues. First, it turns pollution into something that companies really have to PAY for, the same way they do electricity or other goods. (Traditionally, pollution was free; it was the air scrubbers, stringent disposal practices, etc. that cost you.) Second, it creates a system that possesses a measure of intelligence about the costs and benefits of pollution, and the economical solutions. It doesn't force all companies in a sector to reduce NO2 emissions by X percent, for example, but allows companies to determine which economic goals--avoiding the cost of pollution or the cost of upgrading--is more attractive, even while pushing the entire system toward a certain goal. This might not be quite the sort of example of cooperation that Richard had in mind, but still, it is a successful one.
Participant Participant I hope that this fact, undeniable as it may be, does not suggest that problems that are not "really local" need not be addressed locally. In re #78 & 79: might it be possible to design a pollution credit system that would provide the same incentive for driving smaller cars or becoming vegetarian? The pollution from cars is readily measured; that from feed lots should be as easy to work out if it hasn't been already.
Participant There is a connection between Alex's tentative suggestion that perhaps IT can somehow capture, reflect, quantify, regulate, automate, underscore, support or enhance the emerging organizational or group wisdom about many dimensions of life that we ordinarily assign to leadership, and the kind of discussion we are having about crediting anti-pollution activities. I'm not sure what the connection is, but I believe it is there.
Participant Without that, I believe the ultimate "solution" may be a kind of dictatorship that will enforce the necessary behavior without voluntary consent. The first strategy will not be easy. The second strategy will not be pleasant. A prior question that we must all ask ourselves without fudging to be politically correct: Do we really want to be governed by we, the people???
Participant Participant Participant Participant Another of Dick’s non-intuitive insights is encapsulated in his chapter entitled "The Best Resource for the Solution of Any Problem Is the Person or Group that Presents the Problem". Again a "group dynamics" solution that would warm the cockles of Carl Rogers' heart and has proven to be a very rewarding management style for our company. Another from his book "Listening is More Difficult than Talking": In the earlier incarnation of WBSI, I found "listening" to the written words of others to make listening easier and more reflective that oral engagement so I would chalk up a plus for computer mediated discussion. Further, the use of it for group dialog "levels the playing field" so that all can be "heard"--a very useful tool for facilitating participative leadership! Considering these insights about "group leadership", I have great hope that our increasing technical competence in information technology will provide the tools for a different and more productive form of shared leadership.
Participant Participant For purposes of stimulating leadership, I'm sure we can agree that the stereotypes work against us. But there are situations where they work for us, too (i.e., in community building--see another conference on that point).
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The International
Leadership Forum is a program of
Western Behavioral Sciences Institute.
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