Organizations and institutions are being challenged increasingly to change in quantum leaps rather than incremental steps. So, in addition to aspiring to be ever faster and smarter at their core missions, organizations will have to get increasingly faster and smarter at how they keep improving. Both of these activities rely heavily on the same core capabilities, which Dr. Douglas Engelbart, founder and Director of the Bootstrap Institute, has termed Collective IQ 1
The Collective IQ of a group is a function of how quickly and intelligently it can respond to a situation. This goes well beyond getting more information faster, to include leveraging its collective memory, perception, planning, reasoning, foresight, and experience into applicable knowledge. Such knowledge includes not only the captured knowledge products, such as documentation, plans, and source code, but also the accumulating "web" of issues, lessons learned, rationale, commentary, dialog records, intelligence sources, and so on that iterate throughout the life-cycle of a project or situation. 2
Thus a key factor in Collective IQ is the quality and utility of the organization's knowledge repository. In actual practice, however, most repositories capture only a fraction of the knowledge assets, and are grounded in a "scroll or print" paradigm which adds little or no utility beyond publishing and retrieving the document.
What is needed is a fundamental breakthrough to a new paradigm, including agressively pushing into the frontiers of the knowledge age to make highly-enabling future workmodes available much sooner and much more cost-effectively than the marketplace might otherwise provide. Such efforts must also include the integration and acceleration of related key improvement initiatives such as intranets, knowledge management, process reengineering, distributed collaboration and teaming, telecommuting, continuous improvement, organizational learning, community networking, and so on. 3
These new capabilities will have a dramatic effect on product cycle time and quality, which we have labeled the "A" work of the organization. The many activities undertaken to improve the performance of A work, such as exploring intranets or introducing new quality management processes, we have labeled "B" work. While companies spend millions on such improvement processes, they seldom think about how to make B work, itself, more effective. That is the purpose of "C" work, which might include anything from attending a TQM conference to forming a consortium for enhancing an organization's "improvement infrastructure".
Organizations can literally compound the return on their improvement dollars by (1) targeting Collective IQ for aggressive improvement, (2) employing early gains at the C and B levels, and (3) joining forces with other organizations at the C level to share the costs and risks of pursuing 1 and 2. 4
We believe that quantum boosts in Collective IQ will be the point of greatest strategic leverage for an organization - yielding increasingly faster and smarter product cycles, as well as faster and smarter improvement cycles. We believe that quantum boosts in Collective IQ can be achieved via an appropriate improvement strategy, which result in quantum-leap improvements in effectiveness, productivity, and competitiveness for individuals, teams, organizations, communities, and whole nations. 5
After years of ground-breaking work, we have outlined the scope of work that needs to be launched, and defined a high-leverage strategic improvement process which we think will carve the most expedient evolutionary path. We have a highly-evolved research prototype collaborative hyperdocument system which integrates key ingredients still missing from prevailing technologies that will be needed to boost Collective IQ. And we are offering workshops and expeditions to provide first-hand experience to organizations serious about exploring the frontier. We are also launching a collaborative Bootstrap Alliance in which government, industry, universities, and communities can join forces to bootstrap this important effort. 6
Not everyone is interested in this grand vision. You may be interested mainly in the technology, or just the organizational issues surrounding future workmodes, and/or the strategies for getting there. Or maybe you are concerned with a particular domain such as software engineering, digital libraries, or total quality. Perhaps you are involved in a distributed task force looking for better ways to collaborate on your common purpose. 7
In any case, if you wish to learn more about us, you may want to request one or more of the items listed under Selected Works below, or select from any of our other publications. Also you can browse our World Wide Web home page at: http://www.bootstrap.org/ 8
If you wish to receive future newsletters, or be notified of upcoming seminars, workshops, and expeditions, please contact our office and we will add you to our mailing list. We can also arrange for speaking engagements, in-house seminars, expeditions, or consulting on a wide variety of topics to bring these concepts to light in your organization or association. 9
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Selected Works for Further Reading
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See also additional listings in Bootstrap Publications at http://www.bootstrap.org/library.htm 10C
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