 Changing the Collective Mindset, remarks by John C. Brown at the 2012 ARL Fall Forum, convened by Susan Gibbons. So good morning, my name is Susan Gibbons. I am the University Librarian at Yale University, and I have the honor of starting our session this morning called Changing the Collective Mindset. And it is my pleasure to start our session and to introduce John C. Lee Brown, or JSB, as he likes to be called. The program's description includes a quote from Machiavelli's The Prince, which is quite fitting, we think, for this morning's session on change. It says, There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Today, research libraries are struggling and endeavoring to make sense of the change in our higher education organizations. When it comes to making deep changes in our libraries, we're forced to consider what is pushing us, what is pulling us, and in what direction. What does it mean to create deep change, and why do we need to do this? What does it mean for our library workforce to bring it back to the HR focus of this entire session? So JSB is going to help us today by exploring the challenges that we're facing, by helping us to test our assumptions, and by getting us to think differently about the future. Now in the package, you have the full bio of JSB, but let me give you a few highlights of his career. He is currently the independent co-chairman of the Deloitte Center of the Edge, and a visiting scholar and advisor to the provost of the University of Southern California. Prior to those two roles, he was chief scientist of Xerox Corporation and the director of its Palo Alto Research Center, Xerox Park, a position he held for nearly two decades. JSB is a member of the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Education, a fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence, and of the American Association of Advancement of Science, and a trustee of the MacArthur Foundation. So the fact that he has time to join us today is really quite remarkable. He is a co-author of the book, The Social Life of Information, which I really think needs to be a required reading for all of us, and if you haven't read it, I highly recommend you do so. His current book is The New Culture of Learning, co-authored with Professor Doug Thomas at USC, which was released in January of 2011. And the last piece I want to point out about his career is that while at Xerox Park, he helped to develop what I refer to as the Work Practice Study, and I hope that's the right way to refer to it. In other words, going into work environments, study how people do work, and then think about how you could create new services or new systems to improve that work environment. The first place that they went was to Cornell Library and looked at their preservation department, and then they went to RIT and looked at their slide library. And if this sounds familiar, it's because that was the methodology that the University of Rochester then adopted and hired an anthropologist, and for the last nine years has been using the anthropologist to study library users and to think about the modification. So I was formerly at the University of Rochester and I owe a huge intellectual debt to the work of John C. Lee Brown, and I think my career has really had a different trajectory as a result of it, so I'm very much indebted to him. So it is a great honor today to introduce JSB to you, and I'll invite him up to the podium. I'm not quite sure why Xerox originally hired me, but I was kind of a hardcore geek, and I had the wonderful opportunity to suggest that the problems facing the 21st century were not primarily technological, but primarily social. And so I changed the people we were hiring from being only physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists to then bringing up a whole new set of people, sociologists, anthropologists, actually philosophers, believe it or not, and an artist. And I had a whole bunch of slides on what we did with artists and took them out the afternoon last night. So I do want to talk about change. I'm hardly an expert on change, but being at the cutting edge of modern technologies and their uses, you can't help but discover some secrets along the way. So if you wanted an organizational theorist, you probably got the wrong person, but I can tell you a lot of war stories and some kind of bigger ideas we're now working on in terms of mammoth change, almost how do you change entire ecosystems as opposed to just standalone institutions. I was also saying as I got up here that we're in an interesting world because I work a lot in, right now, in big data, one field, and obviously things related to schools of information. And I have to say that if there's a war for talent, you guys are it. If you actually look at schools of information, I'm finding, I don't know, you have a couple of deans of schools of information sitting here, I think, the ones I'm looking at basically are being paid, kids coming out of these schools, are being paid about 10% more than coming out of hardcore computer science. And I believe everyone I know is getting hired. So the war for talent is on, especially in the fields that you have to think about, which I'm sure is going to be an interesting topic in its own right, maybe later on today. So let's get on with this. I want to kind of briefly go over our context and then talk about what this might all mean. I'm arguing that, in fact, perhaps for the, maybe dramatically speaking, the first time in the history of civilization, but at least for the last 300 years, we are actually experiencing something civilization has never seen before, which is one of the reasons why we're all struggling one way or another. That's to say that almost all infrastructural change in the past, road systems, steam boats, railroad, cars, airplanes, et cetera, et cetera, have a very interesting property. There's a period in which they're first invented and then there's a sharp kind of exponential period for brief moments of time when they make their transition into reality. And then once they kind of get distributed, then they stay there relatively unchanged for 50, 60, 70, 80 years. There are long periods of relative stability and this period of long stability is when we reinvent the social practices, the work practices, et cetera, the take advantage of this technology. So for example, cars, actually it's somewhat of a specialty of mine for other reasons, have not really changed in 50 or 60 or 70 years. That first change is about to happen in terms of Google's autonomous driven vehicles, but basically cars are the same, airplanes are surprisingly the same, the roads in this country seem to be decreasing. But these infrastructural changes, you do go through this kind of moment of electrification in the United States around the turn of the century, the last century. There's this brief period of everything that shakes them up and then things stabilize out. So people that keep saying we've never seen so much change, that's actually wrong. We often see jumps of tremendous change. The catch is it's followed by really long periods of stability in which we all have a chance to catch our breath, reinvent who we are, so on and so forth. Then something happened. School's information came along now. Something happened. And what actually happened is we suddenly shifted from the era of S-curves driving infrastructural change, underlying infrastructural change to a period in which now our infrastructures are basically being driven by something called digital, in which basically the digital technologies, the infrastructures of course more than technologies, we can come back to that if you want, but the digital world appears to be on a relentless, exponential curve. Now I say relentless because those of you with a physicist here know that we can't push some of the Moore's laws more than probably another five years. But let me tell you, it's not going to stop. This exponential law is going to take on new forms, computer architectures, ways of running these machines, stringing these machines together on so on and so forth, that are going to continue this path for the foreseeable future. I'm talking 20, 30, 40 years. I actually do some work on quantum computers, which provide a jump of another factor of 1,000 to 10,000 on what we're currently used to and so on and so forth. So this ain't going to change, I think. And therefore, we have this sense that now, about every 18 months or so, the technology is going to potentially double in capabilities. And you folks, better than almost anyone, know that Moore's laws are relentless in terms of what this exponential curve means, but data is faster than Moore's law. Data is increasing faster than Moore's law, which technically means we don't know how to handle it. If data was exploding at about the same speed of Moore's law, then we'd be able to say, oh, we'll just use bigger computers, faster computers, and they'll take care of our problem. But it's not working out quite that way. Data is exploding even faster. We know how we think we know how to handle that, and we can talk about that later if you want, but this is a kind of an arms race, so to speak, between compute power and big data. And that's pretty, for those of us in this game, it's a pretty interesting set of tensions. But what I want to argue much more to the social practice game, et cetera, et cetera, is we're entering a world because of these exponential changes on the underlying infrastructures is that the half-life of a given skill has shifted from when I grew up. Basically, I thought that I could be trained in X, and that skill would probably last 40 years, something like that. Now we're down to about five years, half-skill. Think about it. The skills happen to be completely refurbished every five or so years. Obviously, there are a few things that do matter, critical thinking is more than a skill, but the fact is that we're now in a world in which we're constantly having to refresh our own skills. And guess what? There's no way that you're going to be able to refresh your skills by going back to college, universities, because universities can't handle this kind of flux. If you listen to Sir John Daniels, we're already one university per week behind the game in terms of being able to get universities to educate all the people in the world in terms of the skills that are needed. But more importantly, in this kind of relentless change and this kind of half-life of skills shrinking is we have to kind of maybe change completely our eyeglasses. The shift from thinking about basically stocks of assets, collections, money, whatever, in terms of basically we used to think about how do we kind of deal with kind of efficient ways to handle these relatively fixed assets to now a world of it's not so much the assets of matter, it's how do you participate in the flows. And this shift from stocks to flows or this shift from a world of push where I could determine ahead of time all the skills you need and then educate you in a highly efficient way called mass teaching into a world of flows which basically you have to participate in those flows, you have to be able to pull your assets, you pull your knowledge from those flows and then reinvent yourself every few years or so. This is a different game. But in fact, you folks and all folks see it in a different way. Not only is everything I just said more or less true, but we also come out of a very strange world in which as you know, the genres emerge as negotiations in practice between readers and writers. And it takes often a decade or more for that negotiation to stabilize out into a fixed genre and those genres remain relatively fixed and those notions of what constitutes a genre determines how you do collections, how you do cultivation of those collections and all kinds of other things like that. Well, that game has also changed. It's a very core of your business. No longer are genres fixed by large. They're becoming excessively fluid. And these things like transmedia are coming up into action now. Well, let me tell you, I work in transmedia. That game is changing about every year. What it even means is changing. Just read Henry Jenkins' book on the participatory cultures. You will see how fast this is changing. So we have a different game now in terms of how do you actually stay ahead of these fluid genres. And I was really struck by a colleague up at Berkeley, Carla Hesseb, Carla Hesseb, on what she thinks of, actually we both do, in terms of what I'm going to call basically an epistemological shift. Let me read what she says. Quote, knowledge is no longer that which is contained in a space, but that which passes through it like a series of vectors, each having direction and duration yet without precise location or limit. In the future it seems there will be no fixed canons of text, no fixed epistemological boundaries between disciplines, modes of integration and moments of encounter. The moments of encounter is a critical notion in terms of this notion of negotiation in practice between readers and writers. These moments of encounter are excessively fluid. That's the world everyone in this room works in. That's pretty daunting if you go to the root of what that really does mean. And that again comes from this exponential march in terms of the infrastructures underlying this. I said differently, the challenges I think we face are both fundamental, I guarantee you they're fundamental and substantial. We have moved from an era of equilibrium to a new normal, not a new economic normal, that's arguable, of constant disequilibrium. And I think it is safe to say our ways of working, our ways of creating value, our ways of innovating, our ways of learning, our ways of teaching now must all be reframed. That question of that reframing is a challenge we all have. But you know, we've seen this before a little bit. We've survived maybe. Let's look at this. I think we're going to argue this time that our job is going to be harder than we've ever thought before. Because now, in this world of fundamental fluidity where we have the epistemological shifts that Carla was talking about, we must now step back and not just pick up new skills, which most of us are pretty skilled at by now. But we must also think about how do we change our mindsets. The curious thing is if we have to change our eyeglasses, most of us are unaware, even if we wear glasses at one way or another. We look at the world through a set of lenses. You tell me I have to change my lens. I've had no practice in changing lenses. I've had all kinds of practice in changing what I know, how do I interpret things through the lens, how do I do it myself? I think the challenge we have before us is actually re-grinding lenses and maybe we have to continue to be able to re-grind these lenses. Let me show you kind of historically an example of how easy it is to get into a rut, not challenge certain background assumptions and maybe to fall into what I'm going to call kind of the competency trap. Because basically as we get better and better at something within a particular paradigm, with a particular skill set we actually, as we get better, we have a hard time seeing new patterns. I just want to show you historically a dramatic example of how once you get really good, you can think you can keep pushing that boundary further and further and further and you become in some ways excessively more blind to a new pattern that you should actually think about shifting to. So I want to go back to the 1880s, the era of the famous clipper ships. Here was one of the most impressive clipper ships there ever was in the 1880s. What it could carry was fast, furious, huge. It was the king of the ships in those days. But guess what was happening? There was a clunky thing called the steamship coming along. And the steamship was kind of starting to kind of edge up on what the clipper ships could do. And so they built the Grand Levalin to kind of put that race to rest. But alas, the steamship kept marching along. But fear not, the good engineers said, we know what to do. We'll build the France too. And if you compute the number of sailors in the sail area, this is impressive. And everybody felt good. But I think you gathered guess what happened? The steamship got even better. And the engineers and the capitalists and the crowds said, don't worry, we know what to do. We'll build the mother of all mother ships. I may build the prusa. And this amount of sail area, this thing was awesome. It cost per ton per mile. Lower and lower. Things look really good. But the story, of course, continues. And lo and behold, oh, the Thomas W. Lawson was crafted. This is really an impressive ship. And actually, this one now is shifted to a steel hull, so it's going to be really robust as well. And on this maiden voyage, on Friday December the 13th, I think they should have chosen a different day, but on Friday December the 13th in 1907 it went on this Virgin voyage launching off of England. And it got maybe 100 miles when the storm blew up. And they couldn't maneuver around the storm. And it crashed into a set of rocks and sank. And curiously, completely unlike corporate America, strangely enough everybody died except the CEO. I mean, part of the captain. I kid you not. I don't know how he was the only person to say but he was. Check it out in Google. This was kind of in winds of like 60 knots it lost control of the boat. And that basically was the end of the clipper ship industry. And the world now switched to move to steamships. That was the kind of thing that happened over like a 40 year period to basically have to reinvent the very notion of what a ship was and to move substantially with a completely different kind of technology. I think we can conclude as this little example shows that competency traps can often rain supreme. And we have to think about this each in our own particular way. I can tell you later on lots of my own stories about trapped in competency traps. But I think there's something that we all I think share one way or another here. There is a great challenge not only our own beliefs but then how do we change our institution's belief. And I like to think about that when I first went to Xerox Park I actually tried to convince the corporation that we should hire anthropologists rather than hard core computer scientists. Fortunately I was a computer scientist so I could have some credibility making that argument. But it was kind of like hitting your head against a brick wall. Because how do you create action? How do you bring about change? So let me just say if you think about that a lot most of us throw up our hands if you deal with architects as I do say e-gads we don't know how to do this. But bear with me let me stumble along we can all stumble along maybe some personal examples and then some more general principles especially in terms of the broader approaches that brings me to Washington in terms of even bigger sets of changes we're trying to pull off right now. I said most simply and everyone here kind of already intuitively knows this part of the catch of trying to capture somebody's attention and what to pull them through a change is how do you actually design kind of evocative experiences beyond the cognitive you never talk somebody through a change of religion giving up an old skill set to pick up a new skill set so how do you think about this how do you create experiences that capture their imagination pull them along talk to their emotions let them kind of engage in the gut and so on and so forth and it's not too surprising to this group that narratives turn out to be pretty damn important because narratives actually go beyond the cognitive although we could probably argue that let's show you one example that where we used the narrative to bring about an extremely major change in the corporation and how we did that this is in the early 80s actually it started happening in Rochester we designed kind of like the mother of all clipperships the mother of all Xerox copiers the end was the famous 8200 machine which is an awesome machine three levels of Ethernet built inside of it 30 processors an AI machine that would diagnose it I mean it was amazing it went through all the user tests everybody including the CEO could figure out how to use this machine it did huge copying jobs by the way it's going like 60 pages a minute and duplex and blah blah blah blah I know it sounds pretty simple today but in the 80s it wasn't we put it in the market and we lost something like a billion dollars that's a lot of money back then in Washington they say what that was last year how could that happen how could it go through all the user tests and nobody pick up anything and couldn't it be fixed so on and so forth so they gave us the machine at Xerox park I was just coming there we had the Lucy suspense group but we had like six anthropologists at that time so we'll kind of figure out what's going on here we may have to invent our own methodology to do that because obviously the machine never would have been turned out this bad if somehow the academic community had given us the right practices to look at user science that was failing so what we did is we put this little machine it wasn't a huge machine kind of in this room and without anybody for free you could use it you only use it if you have huge computer jobs and copy jobs but we made one restriction you had to use it with somebody else you could only use this machine if there were two of you using it and you had to be willing to let us constantly run the table the video recorder and of course what happens completely contrary to how anybody did use the testing in those days it's with two of you there you start swapping ideas about what the hell you're supposed to do with the machine jam what this instruction actually meant and so these wild conversations what happened and what you recorded video and we discovered a lot I won't bore you with all that many books now written on this topic I'm on this example actually we knew we had a serious problem at this point we thought we'd have to pull the machine out of the market and basically design it from scratch again leading somewhat to what machines you probably know is called the docutex but how to get the corporate office to kind of go through the belief that we had built a billion dollar baby that nobody wanted and so we took and we crafted one of the tapes of these two folks struggling to understand something about this machine took it to the to the board room played it for the directors of the corporate officers and about halfway through this like eight minute interchange one of the people slams his fist down and says come on brown let's get those guys off the loading dock didn't you and I say well actually no you might not recognize but this is over here one of the most famous professors of artificial intelligence ever to graduate and actually a university research professor at a small place called CMU and this is Ron Kaplan over here who is probably the father of computational linguistics these are just two normal people trying to use this ridiculous machine and they look at you and they say we got a problem don't you so yeah you got a serious problem and by the way just capturing that one story changed everything so it was kind of a cute little example of every once in a while the right narrative can do this amount of work for you unfortunately those narratives don't happen very often this was so much stage I mean we have to admit that we did recordings about three months before we got this key story but you know I have to change a corporation as big as Xerox they thought that they knew everything they did about competency of how to build one kind of machine they was going to be very hard to convince them to the difference so let's talk more now about bringing about more systemic change inside your organization and systemic change is something which is not just a question how do you do once which is the S-curve world would be sufficient but rather how do you actually think about transitioning into systemic change of constant systemic changes how do you move from transition to transitioning to constant transitioning and that is kind of the whole notion of how do we now have to build new types of institutional architectures to use a fancy word that are fundamentally agile and we all know that in fact that curve I put up was a technology curve technology again is not infrastructure but actually if you look what's really happening is from an infrastructure point of view there are kind of small moves in terms of building new skill sets, new social practices new needed services etc etc that you try to install hopefully before they become obsolete but in fact in this world these little S-curves that make up this exponential curve have about an 18 month lifespan that is terrifying personally speaking you know just the last three of those bumps where I had to go through myself I'm a hardcore computer scientist been trained pretty well by the way in the predecessors school of information at Michigan but you know I was kind of knew a lot about kinds of architectures and then had to relearn everything around cloud computing and then had to relearn everything about how do we really run what I call big data in terms of a dupe architectures I put tens of thousands of small disks and tens of thousands of computers in front of those disks and then how do I actually understand how to use GPUs graphic processing units that come into these like $500 game sets how do you take that processor and actually build a super computer out of it that's a fundamentally non von Neumann machine and everything back up here was about Neumann machine I had to kind of completely relearn everything to do that we build actually some of our best super computers today with that kind of technology but in fact that's just the last six years those are the fundamental changes I personally have to go through and I have a pretty good network that's willing to kind of help me because we do most of our learning through peer based networks these days but that sense of this kind of change is decidedly kind of non trivial and in fact that kind of underlies what I consider to be you back that up a little bit to the real challenge I had running Xerox PARC Xerox PARC we had about 250 300 PhD researchers now including the anthropologists et cetera et cetera and the catch was when I kind of inherited running this operation in the early 80s how do you get researchers who are not used to taking instructions very well and in fact they're probably worse than full professors because we had no soft funding everything was kind of guaranteed us ahead of time we were paid 90% of our salary came from Xerox PARC you know how do you actually think about this and given that the exponential career I was talking about was already showing its nasty head back then it didn't get full force until I would say this century but nevertheless this issue of constant change was upon us so when we took it over I became very much aware and that not only did Xerox have to change a lot how it was doing things but we researchers had to change a lot so the first problem I find is I could beautifully characterize how much the world has changed and they would say you know John is really poetic I'm so glad that the world has changed but that's not for us in fact I had the disadvantage that in those days those of you back in those era Xerox PARC was probably the highest flying and considered probably the best research group in the world I actually think Bell Labs and IBM are equally good but the press like us and so almost without fail any one of the laboratories in my center the heads of those laboratories and various researchers there in compounding on my door saying you know John don't you know we're the best we don't need to change you get that message often enough you kind of wonder what are you going to do well it turned out that that was a really interesting challenge to be given by these folks because what you can do is turn that whole thing around and say we're all researchers right all academics in some sense we're not just spouting a ping in we're supposed to have empirical proof of things how do you know you're the best how do you know you're still the best and if you're still the best how do you know you can't even be better and it turned out that framed that way these folks got actually engaged with how would you build a metric a measurement system that was attuned to their sensibilities their value system but I would actually prove categorically that they were producing more value than anybody else and couldn't produce any more value and that turned out to be kind of a very reflective and very powerful move we turned this all this thing around any time I would create a change metric you would see what the number of papers don't count and the number of grants you bring in don't count and the number of patterns you know if you break John the company patterns you create the company doesn't count so on and so forth any measurement you come up with isn't going to work so it's an interesting issue to turn this whole game inside out and see oh hey guys let's see it so the game here was to turn this thing into kind of a meta research project to see if they could actually discover for themselves the truly legitimate measures that actually measured something and that they would buy into that by the way opened up the conversation space unbelievably and it turned out to be a pretty interesting reflective experience for a year or so but then the next thing we wanted to do because there were really those exponential curves coming along starting kind of the year long process getting folks in the lab out to kind of seriously look at who were the folks that were doing true breakout research now after the fact five years after the fact it's pretty easy to see that this was like 1990 we're talking about here nanotechnology wasn't even a term that was being used back then let alone how do you build atomically precise machines out of nano structures at the atomic level that turned out to be by visiting two or three laboratories around the world getting these kids to get out there we kind of realized that people were starting to ask questions we didn't even know about and from that easily come back and start people start saying like should we actually get into this field and some of you may or may not know that we were probably the first ones into this country nanotechnology to try to kind of build a new kind of material science that was kind of another very simple change was actually asking researchers when they go out we all go out and we love to talk we feel good about it well the smallest tiny change saying go out and give talks blah blah blah build a reputation blah blah blah feel good blah blah blah but when you come back I want to hear from each one of you a small little one page report on what you personally learned from that experience and that actually started opening up their ability to listen and to kind of try to distill distill what was really going on the biggest change because as you know because most of you come from universities college students tend to be pretty much graduate students at least pretty much on the cutting edge they are often even ahead of the faculty in terms of picking up the wind of what's really going to turn out to be important and so I started very ambitious basically 50 intern summer program we've been in 50 interns from around the universities actually the world of the most came from the United States but that's not too unusual it was a little tiny bit unusual as I would address them when they first came in I said your job folks needs to be thorns in our side and in fact I want to take out each one of you the dinner during the summertime I want to hear your opinions but most importantly I want you to be thorns in the sides of all of us researchers this turned out to be surprisingly powerful because we had invented our own computer languages we invented everything no no you see programming you kidding me we can build a better language John I said yeah you can so what but that didn't work out too well and for example you learn a set of tools it's just true everyone of us sitting here and somebody comes in and says well you know that tool set is kind of old you don't want to hear that you don't want to pick up it consider golf consider tennis oh that stroke Jesus Christ picking up a new skill set a new tool set actually regresses you for about a half a year to figure that tool set out and so it's very interesting to have the graduate students these 19, 20, 21, 22 year old students start to ask our august researchers why do you guys still use that tool and it was discussed on their face much more important than me and that turned out to be a way to actually almost every other year to kind of start getting kids to question kind of why they were doing it by kids I mean by researchers I was a kid too back then but you know why we were so slow actually kind of taking this competency trap and not getting over it faster but that's only the beginning because you know if you actually look at the problem the universities have in spades in terms of these silos how do you actually think about something in 10 minutes very good so what I'm going to do is not tell you about how you do physical space social space and I want to kind of go ahead to something a little bit more significant I will say one thing on the path to that this I actually do more with now major corporate execs you know what I find and I find this true with provost I work with three provost now but it's it's very hard to get out of your own comfort zone and it's very interesting how do you get somebody to even take a week out to say go to a conference but you don't know anything about maybe maybe maybe there's some slight chance that you do and Jack Hittery is my hero I ran into him a few years ago at aspirin and he developed a brilliant practice of every year taking off three days to go to a three day conference in something he knew nothing about but he developed a practice of how to do that he says here's what I do John the first day I sit in the conference room I listen to the conversations I listen to the talks I try to kind of pick up the technical lingo that's being used then one day you kind of get that the second day I sit outside around the coffee pots and what I do is I listen to the genres of how they talk to each other what how do you how do you discuss this kind of and then once I pick up that genre then the third day I enter the conversation I kind of know the terms I get the ideas vaguely I know how you approach people in that particular epistemic silo so to speak and then I start to engage in the conversation myself and the time I was with Jack I watched him do this you actually know Jack Hittery but maybe not by his name he's the guy that created he'd never done anything on Energy at all he went to this conference and I met him on Energy he did all of the things I just said and he's the guy that created the program Cash for Conquers got this idea at this conference went to Washington at the year sold it to the White House and he also drove Bloomberg into the hybrid cab taxi program inside so ironically now he's chairman of the Energy Commission but he still does it for something new so it's just been very interesting to see this happen but I want to talk about his two notions we might call change I called the first one kind of change 1.0 and change 2.0 this is a beautiful little article called The Rhythm of Change by Mike my book Henry Minsberg I know I don't know the other guy some of the best organizational theorists on change a beautiful kind of simple quote change has to be managed with a profound appreciation of stability and in this game of change 1.0 they say well you know there are three kinds of changes there's kind of a dramatic change we're talking the corporate world where the CEO dramatically says we must do X sometimes works there's also down at the bottom in the grassroots there's kind of a sense of an organic set of changes the folks are figuring out they want to just do things differently and they're doing kind of local improvisations and so on and then kind of coming from the side there are more kind of systematic procedures such as how do you do your performance reviews and how do you do new types of 360s and all this kind of stuff how do you start to systematically put in some of these new practices they say like you know something very interesting happens you kind of think about these three kind of approaches to our change they said there's a rhythm that starts to develop because from the top dramatic change alone can be guess what just drama systematic change by itself can be deadening I think we all know that an organic change without the other two can be chaotic they must be sequenced and paced over time creating a rhythm of change a rhythm of change that honors the value of stability because most of what we do does stay the same but we have to then be able to focus on what really does matter and I think that was kind of a very kind of interesting observation and it worked pretty well I want to not talk about change 2.0 I got into this myself and this is actually why I'm watching it right now because it hit us partially because of the Arab Spring and some other things that were happening that we know a lot about kind of diplomacy is a form of change but we think about it in the 20th century is basically the topic of statecraft all our diplomacy is based on from the top down the dramatic coming down from the top and we know a lot about how to do this not too many blocks from here at least we think we do but in the 21st century as we kind of woke up and discovered there's also something that we don't know much about streetcraft which is kind of the organic change in terms of the change 1.0 the interesting question is how does dramatic change up here statecraft actually start to meet basically streetcraft how do you take the things that are happening down here and how does the thing up here start to create a gradient force a pull that actually pulls these things into a collective action for example the Arab Spring as you know turned out to be pretty much a disaster because they were against something not really for something being against something can get something going but once you get that thing going there's no kind of clear notion of what it is you're really trying to do and so basically this whole sense of how do you kind of begin to understand from the bottom up and the top down and that got us actually thinking about this for some bizarre reasons and we took as a guiding example in rethinking this whole problem a movie Minority Report how many here are seeing a Minority Report I hope almost everybody but you may not know is Minority Report at a very key person Alex McDonald you know him now through a bunch of other more bizarre movies but Minority Report did not have a script it was the first movie created without a script what Minority Report did is it actually built a world it envisioned a world basically it built up a mock version of this world mostly electronically so that basically the producers actors etc etc could live in this world and build this world together in terms of various types of concentric circles having to do with social practices technology practice all kinds of things they were building up and they got this world built in a way that they could they lived in this world very much like a really professional actor could do they started to assume the properties of that world and then out of that the first was the Minority Report that was not particularly scripted now that's only partially true we now have gone much further than that but that's the way that that that was the first kind of example of this so what we really saw is there was a sense of the Minority Report to kind of create a vision going back much more to the etymology of the word vision is about sight, perception imagination so they started to construct an imaginary world and it's about kind of world building kind of building out the full kind of context of that world you've seen that before with Star Wars George Lucas built seven worlds actually he built six worlds but maybe a seventh we don't know about and then he shot the movie starting at world number four because he could actually show he understood the history of how this world came to be and then what would happen with the world he wanted to construct the silos of worlds so that he could kind of and the actors could live in this world we saw a much more deep understanding of the social morease all these things that would define that world so change 2.0 that we're looking at now is how do you actually start to construct a vision that kind of prepares a certain kind of I'm going to call it a metanarrative that sits above the stories and then looks at the kind of the micro-narratives that are happening on the street this can be inside your own organization it can be in Afghanistan where we're actually trying some of these ideas out Columbia as well etc etc and looking for kind of to find kind of a vision and kind of the role of this metanarrative that is kind of really compelling aspirational but this is the weird thing strategically ambiguous so next shift from Minority Report to Robin Williams' beautiful movie did poet society I think you will all seeing that movie already what did he actually do what he did in that movie is for the kind of seven kids in his class he had this notion of a metanarrative the metanarrative at one level was be the most extraordinary version of self you could be and the real metanarrative he said in Latin what translated was seize the moment in order to be the most extraordinary version of self so that was a metanarrative that is inherently ambiguous in terms of the micronarratives of the different people in his class but he would find the right moment to take that and say seize the moment and that moment then led to an epiphany that basically altered the life of each one of his students some so dramatically that one you know committed suicide because he changed so much that his parents kind of went berserk and he went berserk now it turns out we've been looking at this can't talk much about it but in Columbia in terms of the drug trade name I had a beautiful chance to kind of run into the new chief strategy officer for IBM who had just actually unwittingly with the CEO of the new president constructed their own new metanarrative the new metanarrative without using that terminology he said this was the right what he was doing is IBM the essential the idea of calling it the essential company interesting overtone to it let that dwell on that a moment and then he said to each kind of employee be essential you can figure it out for yourself but be essential how do you convince yourself you are being essential mixed to it authentically but you know I just blew my mind that that idea has just galvanized and I'll ask like a few months IBM created a kind of strategic alignment and yet honors in some sensibility but also honors saying each individual will figure that out for yourself and we the company will figure out what makes that essential as the companies and it's you know I haven't kind of fully materialized that myself I mean it was an amazing conversation I had with him in Columbia bringing the drug lords and the government very complex story that's not yet public I mean we're not allowed to talk too much about it but the meta narrative is in English no more blood believe it or not every single warring group has bought into that narrative a strategically and figures interpreted completely differently by each group but that they could buy into something kind of so I think this idea of and how do you do that how do you create the metanarrative how does it honor the micro narratives each of us have our own stories about ourselves then what are the mechanisms that one might use to kind of pull the micro narratives into alignment with the metanarrative and how besides these mechanisms you might do that might you also use social networks to kind of amplify the ability of the metanarrative to take hold of the micro narratives and so on and so forth so this look at this moment the metanarratives we think of as in terms of a world building the mechanisms for the on the side could be things like transmedia if you want one of the most beautiful examples of how transmedia may have worked out I don't know how many of you know the world without oil it's an amazing computer game, network game tens of thousands of people play it it's basically a world building activity by the way the best example of world building is Harry Potter Harry Potter is a fantastic ability to build an entire world Star Wars is another example but you know that created a world that you could then enter it's one of the reasons why kids you can't take Harry Potter away from kids they have entered that world and they've made that world that strange world very familiar very interesting way World with oil they've had tens of thousands of people play that game to try to live in the way of suppose we had no oil and they use then social networks to be able to pass ideas back and forth as well as a few games I have actually seen as an augmented reality game an alternative reality game more technically called that actually has led to fairly major change of behavior of many of the people in it the reason why we're interested in this today is if you look at problems of chronic disease we're looking at how might you use some of these mechanisms to actually crack the problems of chronic disease in terms of finally finding a way to change your behavior we have a lot of really cute apps on our iPhones they kind of give us all kinds of measurements but they don't change behavior and so the one question is how do you start to do that that's the mechanism we're talking about here and then in your own organization you want to think about in terms of what are the structural holes in terms of the networks of communication in your own organization so these are some of the kind of tools that we now have with that I'm out of time thank you thank you very much so we have about 15 minutes for questions there are microphones across the room you know it's curious because let me look step back a moment and I'm sure you know this from your own experiences but I'm constantly being asked about the return on attention the lack of attention that kids have the lack of interest in reading that they have and their inability to write on the other hand I study Harry Potter I study what these kids do I don't know how much you've been tracking but these kids have fan Harry Potter sites last I checked there has been 1,500 books of over 400 pages per book written by these kids there are probably 500,000 or more each of two sites in terms of kids writing amazing things about the backstories and so they're evolving a new form of close reading they are taking the white space and building the backstories that actually suggest what's really going on what could be happening next they're filling the whole thing out and so I find it interesting that we think of these kids as being very superficial but in fact the ones that I study are doing and they have invented a new form of close reading and so we have to be careful the purpose I brought up trans media is that sometimes if you look at what they're doing on one media you're not really aware of what they're doing in other media so it looks like they're kind of just always multiplexing but if they're on the other media actually building the backstories for the front media that is a new form of close reading that doesn't happen all that often but it does happen enough to pay attention to so I mean I think one of the tasks we have is we've got to begin to realize that when you have these multiple media you may use one kind of media for one kind of backstory and another kind of media for something else so I actually find that there's much more focus of attention than we might first think and we have to be a little bit careful we've done as you may know probably the biggest ethnographic studies of today's digital millennia around the entire United States not just in the Silicon Valley types or New York and we're not finding this to be as big a problem as we first thought and since I spend most of my time working with and talking to corporate officers and CEOs I actually find the attention span of CEOs much less than kids that I'm in the boardroom I have about 30 seconds to capture their attention and if I can capture for the first 30 seconds I have two whole minutes to make my point and if I can actually use a graphic story graphically have multiple meanings to do that I may carry the day and so what I really do have I don't think this attention span is actually that new problem completely contrary to what's in the public myth that's highly debatable by the way he may be oh okay I'm in the bathroom sorry Hi I'm Tito Sierra from MIT can you elaborate on the point of a strategically ambiguous it seems like a very fascinating concept but can you elaborate on why the ambiguity is important well the ambiguity is important because you what you need is something that's under determined so that for the particular kid I can in this particular case instantiate he and I they and I for the particular person can actually craft what my metanarrative means relative to the more narrative of that kid and so you need one thing up here that can actually be interpreted to make it completely personal down here so that that's kind of the idea behind that so the for example the essential corporation I mean what does that really mean well it gets me to ask myself what am I doing today that's essential you know it's that ambiguous and yet relative to my personal micro narrative of why I met IBM or what I'm trying to achieve I have no trouble entering that when posed that question and so it's a sense of you know how that produces attraction and focus on the micro narratives down here but still creates kind of a sense of togetherness now that's I mean this is pretty new kind of thinking we're playing it out in terms of world politics right now and we're trying some stuff but I was so happy to see IBM but if you really take this big shift seriously what we're going to do as you know at universities is our old institutions the architecture of those institutions have been turned inside out and it may just be that the old institutional architectures structured everything so well we always thought we knew exactly what to do next more of us if we're going to bring agility to the forefront in the as a new kind of institutional architecture then what creates alignment and let me tell you the strategic intense very group I know when they tell them to me as I just go to sleep it doesn't work and so we're trying to figure out what might work in terms of actually pulling people but yet honoring the individual our terminology is somewhat in flux I mean these terms are only like three months old it's the it's developed in this new I mean the book will be out the book will be finished at the end of this month you know I happen to have said that three months in a row those if in fact you have a culture of collaboration as opposed to a set of processes of collaboration and process is not the same as culture you know I actually think that a culture of collaboration actually has more to do with listening deep listening and if you're capable of listening to each other especially across epistemic boundaries and listening with ability to honor then you have tremendous agility so I actually see those things very much in alignment if you have it as a set of road practice road practices and processes then you've got a problem but it's I think is a crucial distinction the in fact the reason that I accepted your kind invitation to come is I'm actually here because of higher education I just came to the complication at Georgetown two days ago and blah blah blah but the as you may or may not know I kind of education is one of my hot horses, hobby horses, etc I've never seen as much fear and confusion about higher education in the last six months in the last 30 years the shot across the bow has been fired I call it Muka Mania I can't tell you the number of presidents of major universities that have been calling me saying you know you come in and talk to me and my staff about what may be going on and you all know that the old game is up partially because of the new technologies although those technologies were not that new but they give a good name you've got one but also because of the financial challenge so let's take the mooks for the moment I mean by the way the mook itself is a piece of technology blah blah the what it does through flipped instruction is of course gives you the chance to say let's use the classroom in a fundamentally different way and in fact if all you're doing is learning material in terms of conceptual material facts then maybe we don't need to have these highly these courses are 200-300 people per classroom in the first two years they can be done maybe in better other ways and everybody should be happy about that except there's a dirty secret and dirty secret pays some of your bills in your libraries that the dirty secret is there's a power law distribution 80% of the revenue comes in 20% of your courses and it is exactly that 20% that the mooks may attack so if you think that you've got a financial war going on now the long term consequence of the mooks if they get figured out could radically change the economic basis of higher ed that's why I think the provost and the presidents are beginning to worry much more about oh my god the foundations of how we've been running this corporation which we don't ever want to talk about we had to actually subpoena the records along the universities to find some of this stuff out the task force to look at this that nobody wants to talk about the cross subsidization that's going on so that's another force here and you have this $1 trillion debt of student loans so you have the perfect storm at the exact same time that this technology rears its head and says oh we can train a million people we'll have to both quote train and so I think that I think all of a sudden people are honestly saying what do we need to do what could we do with the new tools that and is there a new way to think about this game you know the irony is in fact I thought that you first asked me and it turned out not to be at all because it's a different set of libraries but you know some of us have been very much engaged in we conceiving the community library with our argument that the community library is going to be the center of learning for most kids in the future and they're going to be kind of hacker spaces, make spaces if you look in Chicago the media work there is just spectacular and so on and so forth so I think you're going to find more and more you're going to find a complete new conception of the role of the community library you know it's going to kind of take advantage of the fact that the Ewing has locked the formal schooling down in a way that most learning happens with after school programs if you look at the learning ecology the ecosystems inside cities in terms of all the resources that kids actually use today the only reason we're looking at new ways to do badging is how do you get kids to be able to get some credit for what they've been learning outside of the formal school the libraries are going to play one more key role in that so I think that through the K through 12 game or 6 through 12 you're going to find libraries playing a huge new role so therefore I think K through 12 12 through 16 and 16 through 20 you're going to see huge changes in each one of those I think that's why the ability to kind of really look at new lenses to what becomes not to make a pun essential how to play that game I think we're going to see some very new interesting proposals coming forward the one thing that's really nice about it and I was at a curious meeting where the argument was made that anybody who thinks for example Google replaces the library research library has no understanding of preservation so there's certain things that you guys do that are so incredibly critical of which nobody values until after the fact that point is too late so you know there's you talk about creating a new metanarrative you may want to start thinking about a metanarrative about preservation because it is critical and by the way preservation is getting almost impossible given the flood of information going on and how do you do the curation of that well you know you gotta blah blah blah I'm from USC so the Shoah Foundation's preservation project with those videos you know I can appreciate even with our infinitely high technology is decidedly non-trivial and Spielberg once had done it the bitwise precision level so I mean the theory most about in higher ed is the things that may have the most value or the things that are seen they're kind of below the radar screen and we don't necessarily know how to articulate the value of that until it's kind of too late and you can say we'll save everything well that doesn't mean make much sense either save everything at what preservation rate how well do you want to save it so on and so forth and I think you guys are again in this perfect storm not only the financial storm but the information is exponentially exploding faster than Moore's law you're hardly getting being given the money to be able to handle some of these problems but you know I come out of this work on storage the ways we're now architecting storage you know today as opposed to three years ago it boggles my mind how do you do, how do map reduce for this kind of stuff etc etc you know the university is not even training schools of information are finally getting at it the computer science department are actually kind of behind the eight ball some of this stuff so you know you've suddenly gone to the outer edge of technology so the needs are greater than ever the technology is greater than ever and anybody willing to invest it is less than ever thank you for your job thank you for listening music was provided by Josh Woodward for more talks from this meeting please visit www.arl.org