The following concepts and special terms emerged from Doug Engelbart’s strategic pursuit evolving the organization of the future, along with the enabling information technology. Brief descriptions are offered below.
For more detail, see Further Inquiry and Index to Detailed Descriptions below, or click on the Learn More hotlinks under a specific term. To see how it all fits together, see Vision Highlights: A Call to Action and the Engelbart Academy.
Premise - Exploding Complexity and Urgency
Expect an exploding rate and scale of change on an exponential curve, faster than our slow-moving organizations* can manage – meanwhile the challenges we face across public and private sectors grow increasingly complex, interdependent, and urgent. The growing gap represents both an existential threat, and a golden opportunity. 3a
Most are seriously underestimating the magnitude of change
Objective - High-Performance Organizations
Organizations* will have to perform as never before, evolving into the high-performance organizations of the future. The Grand Challenge question is, how do we jump tracks to a new trajectory that gets us out ahead of the curve. How much can we change in the organization, how fast, how far out can we comfortably push? Which capabilities yield the most leverage, cost-effectiveness, ROI? Which strategies? The stakes are high. 3b
Most are seriously underestimating the response needed, aiming too low, complacent.
Collective IQ
A measure of a group’s collective intelligence and effectiveness – how quickly and intelligently it makes sense of a situation, gains insight, weighs options, develops and deploys solutions, how quickly it learns and evolves. What makes Collective IQ high or low is the quality of interactions within the group’s dynamic knowledge ecosystem (DKE). 3c
DKE
The Dynamic Knowledge Ecosystem in which people work that powers them toward their goal, advancing their working knowledge toward their goal; includes their concurrent knowledge processes (CoDIAK) and evolving dynamic knowledge repository (DKR)
CoDIAK
The Concurrent Development, Integration, and Application of Knowledge - Doug's distillation of a group's knowledge work processes
DKR
Dynamic Knowledge Repository - a “living” repository of a group's knowledge, captured and accessible in real time, including dialog records (meeting notes, email, annotations), research intelligence, and evolving knowledge work products (vision, mission, designs, plans, proposals).
A key point of leverage for organizations and society to jump the curve – improve THIS early on
Open Hyperdocument Systems (OHS)
A framework for the enabling technology needed to support dynamic knowledge ecosystems (DKEs) sufficient to boost Collective IQ in fast-evolving initiatives and organizations. OHS describes a toolset to be made ubiquitously available within and across our information systems world wide, with the structure and properties of ‘hyperdocuments’, and the functions that you can execute on them, such as viewing, navigating, linking, editing, sharing, etc. – well beyond today’s standard. Doug characterized OHS as “the critical missing piece” still needed by organizations to push the envelope of performance and transformation. 3d
“Hyperdocument”
A multimedia file, document, or other ‘knowledge container’ with OHS properties, provides for flexible fine-grained addressability or linkages to any object, explicit structuring, and more. (using ‘hyper’ here to mean enriched, not just linkable)
“Open”
Providing vendor-independent access to the hyperdocuments within and across work groups, platforms, and applications
“System”
The functions work consistently and seamlessly interoperably across the whole knowledge ecosystem based on open standards
Hyperscope
A part of OHS tool set that you can implement early and get immediate utility; starting with OHS-style viewing, linking, jumping, browsing, as the minimum viable prototype evolves to add more features (e.g. editing), it becomes a bigger part of the OHS. Rigorous pilot usage will power exploration and pilot outposts, and inform the evolution and standards efforts. See also an early demonstration prototype named Hyperscope.
NLS
The extensive research prototype system developed by Douglas Engelbart and team in the 1960s-70s at SRI as a vehicle for exploring these Key Concepts (or early versions of them).
Augment
Commercialized version of NLS used in hundreds of organizations in the 1970s-80s
Enabling technology as a vehicle for exploration in Pilot Outposts, bootstrapping Collective IQ
Capability Infrastructure
What makes us capable is an infrastructure of capabilities that augments our innate human abilities, with higher level capabilities depending on the execution of lower level ones. Useful for thinking strategically about which capabilities to emphasize that will add leverage to any improvement efforts. From leadership's perspective, which will add greatest leverage to the organization’s transformation efforts. 3e
Think strategically about which capabilities will yield higher overall performance faster.
Augmentation System
What makes us capable is a system of capabilities that augments us humans beyond our innate abilities, including a Tool System and a Human System in which we are trained or enculturated. It’s the balanced whole that augments us. 3f
Tool System
the tools we employ – technology, equipment, artifacts, facilities, …
Human System
the intangibles we employ – methods, conventions, language, paradigms, values, skills, …
H-LAM/T
shorthand for "Humans using Language, Artifacts, Methodology, in which they are Trained" – a distillation of the Augmentation System concept – the Artifacts mapping to the Tool System, all the rest mapping to the Human System, including Language, Methodology, Training, and Indoctrination; what makes us capable, whether surgeon, concert violinist, or emergency response team leader, is the degree of mastery in all three sufficient to the task.
To increase capability, change THIS; the Human side is 80-90% of the equation, and slower to change; co-evolving the two is crucial
Co-Evolution
Refers to how our Human and Tool Systems co-evolve – aka human-tool co-evolution. For example, introducing a new, improved tool has a natural rippling effect on the Human side, and vice versa. The printing press changed business and society over centuries, which over time informed further evolution of the tools.3g
To transform organizations and society, evolve Tool and Human innovations concurrently; to accelerate the transformation, accelerate this co-evolution.
Co-Evolution Frontier
Advancing organizational capability like never before puts you out on a frontier. Doug mapped organizations’ progress on this frontier to illustrate how the Key Concepts converge: (1) the strategic challenge of navigating and advancing on this frontier; (2) how proactive co-evolution forges the most direct and efficient path; (3) the importance of Pilot Outposts as a key deployment target; (4) the role of B and C Activities, (5) the benefits of joining forces with others on the frontier, and (6) how the Bootstrap Strategy pulls it all together to focus strategic investment while accelerating results. The frontier metaphor reminds this is not business as usual, it's more like recruiting and equipping scouting expeditions and advanced outposts into uncharted territory. 3h
Pilot Outposts
A primary vehicle for advancing on the frontier - pilot trials or expeditions in real-world conditions serve as experimental testbeds for your minimum viable prototype, in which to rapidly learn, iterate, co-evolve the human and tool elements in concert.
Deployment Targets
The Pilot Outpost is one of 4 deployment targets identified to advance the whole organization or user base out on the frontier: Mode #1 is deploying change across the board, for example rolling out a new tool or set of procedures, yields incremental improvement; #2 is the Pilot Outpost pushing the envelope of new capability, an elite expeditionary force forging a path further out on the frontier; #3 expand the Pilot operation substance and scope; #4 launch additional Pilot Outposts modeled closely after the first. Stakeholders can be incorporated in the pilots through rotating 'internships' to provide input, and take first-hand experience back home or to the next pilot expedition. Low hanging fruit emerging from #2-4 can be folded into a #1 style roll out.
Push out on the fronter strategically. The emphasis on co-evolution in pilot outposts ensures you are augmenting new/improved capability, not automating, i.e. not evolving new process adapted to obsolete tools, not evolving tools to automate outmoded processes and paradigms.
ABCs of Organizational Improvement
Categorizing the improvement efforts of an organization into ABC activities highlights strategic points of leverage for staging the organization’s transformation: 3i
A Activities
Performing the day to day functions of an organization (“business as usual”)
B Activities
Attempts to improve how we do A Activities
C Activities
Attempts to improve how we do B Activities (“improving how we improve”)
On the Co-Evolution Frontier, "you are here" would show where an organization is today doing its A Activities, while its B Activities are busy attempting to move it out on the frontier using today's methodologies. How far, how fast, how effeciently and effectively is determined by the strength of its C Activity, which is scouting ahead for better maps, scenarios, methodologies to advance on the frontier more directly and cost-effectively, using the best Collective IQ capability it can muster to amplify results, which then become low hanging fruit for the B Activities. The ABC Model frames the organization's improvement infrastructure.
'C' is the point of greatest leverage in the organization; form a C initiative to learn how; this is a cornerstone of the Bootstrap Strategy; join forces with other C initiatives in Networked Improvement Communities (NICs).
Bootstrap Strategy
Doug designed this strategy to improve the way you improve organizationally, to more quickly advance on the frontier to higher and higher levels of performance, with a built-in multiplier effect. Leverages all the Key Concepts.
How it works:
(1) Activate an initiative to explore and improve your improvement strategy, employing best of breed Collective IQ tools/processes to amplify efforts;
(2) Deploy results/learnings within other improvement initiatives to amplify their efforts, and optionally out to end-users/customers;
(3) Engage stakeholders, integrate learnings, iterate with special emphasis on co-evolution, and reverberate;
(4) 'Practice what you preach' – be the most rigorous, advanced, model practitioners of your results and learnings.
Inversely: If you are in the business
of deploying tools/processes aimed at boosting Collective IQ, you pro-actively deploy those systems in your own team to bootstrap results (item 4); embrace items 3, 2, 1.
In any case, the Collective IQ capability is the highest value target for improvement, a strategic choice, because all knowledge-intense efforts depend on it, including all innovation and improvement efforts. Iterate on 1-4. For added leverage, join forces with others on a similar path as a Networked Improvement Community (NIC). 3j
Offers built-in scaling effect, designed to yield compounding ROI on improvement dollars, on an exponential curve
Networked Improvement Communites (NICs)
In Doug Engelbart's terms, an improvement community is any group involved in a collective pursuit to improve a given capability. An improvement community that puts special attention on how it can be dramatically more effective at solving important problems, boosting its collective IQ, is a networked improvement community (NIC) 3k
Meta-NIC
A NIC of NICs, or a NIC of C initiatives, joining forces to push the envelope at the C level of their respective member organizations; aka a 'C Community'
Unfinished Revolution
"The unfinished revolution is about what we can do to change the way we face the future so that we can better cope with all that is now happening." (Engelbart, from 1998 interview). As Doug predicted, the advance of computing technology has caused a revolution in the way we conduct our lives. But an important part of this revolution is not yet fulfilled – the Grand Challenge task of raising our collective IQ at scale, to better tackle important and pressing challenges, small and large, throughout the world. Best pursued using a targeted strategic approach (why Doug designed the Bootstrap Strategy). The Unfinished Revolution poses both a golden opportunity, and survival imperative. We have as yet barely scratched the surface. 3l
In other words, to pursue the above Objective to boost Collective IQ and improvement capacity using the ABC Bootstrap Strategy
*Organization
Used in the above to mean any size organizational unit – group, team, initiative, department, organization, corporation, institution, agency, government, nation, society, network of organizations
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