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About a Bootstrapping Strategy 0Overview1Doug Engelbart is best known for inventing the mouse and other tools; however his greatest innovations have been in the vision and strategy he devised for bootstrapping the innovation, creating a very fast sort of turbo charged learning curve in his lab out of which emerged unprecedented levels of insight and breakthrough innovation. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Doug began seeking an approach that might offer the most cost-effective leverage for accelerating the advancement of our Collective IQ capabilities to the highest levels in the shortest timeframe. Why the urgency? If you consider the rate and scale of change in the world on every level, the complexity and urgency of every challenge we face increasing explonentially, what will be the difference between the organizations, initiatives, and societies that find the shortest path to significantly elevating their Collective IQ, and those that don't? 1a In it's simplest terms, the goal of Engelbart's bootstrapping strategy is equipping those groups that can make the most difference in addressing major challenges (call these the A groups) with the most effective Collective IQ tools and practices available. The strategy is about how you get those tools and practices continuously improved and deployed into those A groups in the least disruptive, most effective and enabling way. So the bootstrapping strategy focuses quite a bit on whoever is advancing the state of the art in Collective IQ and facilitating the adoption of it -- i.e. the internal initiatives, quality circles, consultants, vendors, associations, networked initiatives and consortia working on some aspect of Collective IQ advancement (call these the B groups) -- that these provider groups will be rigorous pioneering users of those tools and practices they are deploying. They will use the results of their own work, in much more advanced ways than their end users. These B groups are thus increasing their own Collective IQ at higher rates, and thus ever more effective at continuously improving their own Collective IQ, while facilitating similar gains in the A groups, and out into the world at large. This feeding the gains in Collective IQ back into the business of improving Collective IQ is the essence of bootstrapping -- getting better at getting better at solving complex urgent challenges, at improving how we improve. 1b More Detail2This bootstrapping does two things. First, the B groups are embedding their results and any other best practices they can integrate into their own operations, boosting their own Collective IQ on a fast evolutionary learning curve, thereby getting collectively smarter and faster at continuously improving and innovating their products and services, and integrating them into a more advanced way of working. This means they're turning out better solutions, more solutions, faster. Second, these B groups are also presumably getting smarter and faster at easing these rich 'best of' Collective IQ tools and practices into the A group operations as seamlessly as possible -- optimizing involvement of the A group in the process, learning how much to introduce, how fast, etc. So the A groups working on the front line as it were, will be assimilating proven, integrated, co-evolved tools and practices from really experienced B group providers who are model users and innovators -- you can go and see how they are really pushing the envelope in day to day operations in their own organizations, you can even go there and get first hand, hands-on experience working that way. So the A groups will be able to boost their own Collective IQ to much higher levels, much faster. This has a compounding effect, since the developers are getting exponentially faster and smarter at incorporating lessons learned into continuously improving solutions and deploying more results with greater ease. 2a However, there is a critical missing piece => who is it that's integrating the results of all the diverse B groups into the most advanced Collective IQ working environment we can muster for operational usage? The A groups? The B groups? Well each B group can only do so much, and without having living examples of how it all works together, the best the B groups can do is guess how their piece will play into the whole. So here's the missing piece: you can get significantly more leverage toward increasing even more gains faster and more broadly, if you do one simple thing -- network the B groups. An alliance of B groups (call it a C group) representing all the ways you can elevate Collective IQ -- i.e. leading edge meeting techniques, quality practices, groupware, digital libraries, online communities, management practices, whatever -- together with all the end-user organizations' own internal B groups, you now have the opportunity to have all these guys collaborate on how to integrate the 'best of' across the board into a foundational working environment, an evolutionary advanced pilot outpost, and to collaborate on the best practices for assimilation of results into the participating B and A groups. These collaborating C networks are bootstrapping, naturally, by rigorously using and integrating the most advanced results of their collective work, and whatever else they can collectively learn about that sounds promising, to facilitate their broad-based collaborative investigation, experimentation, pilot trials, and growing repository of emerging know-how and lessons learned. So the C networks are elevating their own Collective IQ at higher rates, going deeper with their inquiry, experiments and pilots than any B group can, thus getting smarter and faster at integrating, innovating, and transferring their gains into the B groups and on into the A groups. 2b All the B groups benefit immensely by sharing the costs and risks of C network inquiry and experimentation, by having access to a working model of the most advanced, most comprehensive, integrated, evolutionary working environment that can be mustered by the C networks, along with an extensive repository of collective know-how, which now provides the B groups with a clearer sense of what to aim for with their respective tools and services, as well as working models of integrated cross-cutting capabilities they can plug into their own operational usage to further boost their own Collective IQ, and thus be that much better positioned to serve their respective A groups. 2c With B groups and C networks bootstrapping all the capabilities that promote higher Collective IQ in an integrated, co-evolutionary approach, the A groups can advance the furthest, the soonest, and thus be optimally equipped to address more complex, urgent challenges that much more effectively and swiftly. 2d The bottom line is, Collective IQ is the key to how effectively we can pursue solutions to any complex, urgent challenge. For example, how quickly and effectively can we find better/more cures for disease, world hunger, violence, environmental destruction. How many breakthrough innovations can emerge how quickly in your organization, how many more excellent new products can you innovate and announce, how much more value can we collectively create for our customers or constituents more quickly while reducing overhead? How quickly and effectively we can respond to a regional or global crisis (or forsee and divert them)? How much more effectively can our governments serve our collective needs? What if we could double our Collective IQ capability every 5? Engelbart's manifesto is to make this challenge the Grand Challenge of Grand Challenges --to fasttrack and turbocharge our Collective IQ the furthest, the soonest, with the fastest possible learning curve so we can be that much more effective at tackling all the other challenges we face, that much sooner. This is what bootstrapping is all about. 2e Built in to the bootstrapping strategy are a set of organizing principles for optimizing the learning, innovation and effectiveness: 2f
Further Inquiry3
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