(Originally posted at: Engelbart Book Dialogues as an interview with Eileen Clegg)
I’ve been committed to Doug’s ideas
since I attended his week-long seminar in March of 1992, at
Stanford University, and subsequently brought him in to consult with our
small team developing analytical and visualization tools for a branch
of government intelligence analysts. I was inspired by his comprehensive
and innovative approach to boosting the collective intelligence of
people and teams. Since that first exposure, I have sought to apply his
ideas in every professional (and even non-professional) role I’ve had.
In the early 1990’s, I was honored to serve as chairman of his Bootstrap
Alliance, and today, am working with my Program for the Future
associates to further disseminate Doug’s vision for enabling teams (and
all of humanity) to solve complex problems.
Doug is well-known for his amazing
technology innovations, but even Doug doesn’t call himself
a technologist. His focus is how technology can be leveraged for
problem-solving. He has warned that if we do not evolve our ability to
apply technology more effectively at a rate that keeps pace with the
evolution of technology itself, the end result will likely be
detrimental to our intentions. I share Doug’s concern that humanity is
running out of time to effectively counter those threats we’ve created
for ourselves.
Engelbart’s conceptual framework
encompasses a multi-layered approach to boosting the collective
intelligence of people—using technology to improve human
capabilities, and then using tool-augmented behavior and habits
to influence the further refinement of the tools, in a
continual “co-evolution.”
Engelbart has an appreciation for the
complexity of organizational processes that take place within and
among teams. His focus is on how tools and practices can make human
beings and teams collaborate, and how to integrate our work across
disciplines. These processes can then scale up, so that ever-increasing
groups of people can work together to address impending phenomena that
threaten our existence.
Unfortunately, often people fail to
increase their own capacity. We fail into the “ease of use” trap and
don’t choose to evolve our behaviors and practices.
Engelbart illustrates this concept
with a simple question, “Would you rather go across town on a tricycle
or a bicycle?” A tricycle is obviously easier to learn to ride, but
clearly nowhere near as efficient as a bicycle. There’s a learning curve
from tricycle to bicycle. There’s a learning curve moving away from
tried and true traditional methods, to new practices and ways of
thinking that will enable us to become more highly functional beings and
teams capable of collaboration.
Engelbart devoted his life to a
paradigm shift to move us away from our current dysfunctional political
and organizational models. Right now, we have no solution to urgent and
complex global problems: disparity between poor and rich, environmental
problems, evermore dangerous diseases, religious strife—those can kill
the human race. (In one extreme perspective, we have proven we are the
world’s most destructive virus.)
Engelbart’s framework proposes a new
way of thinking about problems—changing the competitive,
power-based models and focusing on how to integrate our ideas toward
a greater whole.
Engelbart does not offer a formula to
follow. The framework necessitates that you start somewhere and
build your collective capabilities by learning as you go—improving your
tools and practices, reflecting, and using your insight to develop
better tools and practices. Do this often, and do this quickly.
That’s the essence of bootstrapping
and the co-evolution of human and tool systems. (By the way, some call
it “agile” these days.) But it has to be done on a massive scale. If
we have a lot of uncoordinated small efforts, or working
at cross-purposes, we likely won’t accelerate our achievement of human
survival.
As a professional tool builder, I’ve
seen too much emphasis placed on the tools and not enough on the
human systems. According to Moore’s Law (which even Gordon Moore has
acknowledged was inspired by Doug, as reported in the New York Times by
John Markoff), we’ve grown multiple orders of magnitude in our computing
capacity. Our collaboration skills have seen little
improvement— namely, our ability to align, to detect
miscommunications early, and to be clear about our objectives.
We are still working off of Robert’s
Rules of Order and Quarterly Reports. The ways we measure and
manage ourselves is shortsighted. Westerners are surprised to learn that
in China, it’s common practice to make 50-year plans. In our society,
we don’t sincerely reward people for thinking much beyond the next
fiscal quarter or year. Our systems are organized around short-term
achievement, rather than in terms of scalability, sustainability and
strategic objectives—at the highest levels. It’s sobering to think that
our federal administrations think in four-to eight year time frames.
Ironically, Doug’s own teams over the
years have not sustained themselves to perform continuing,
directed, coherent activity around his vision. Some say Doug is hard to
work with. Others say the problem is people do not have the patience for
Doug’s long-term vision, so they take a small subset of his ideas and
go off to make their fortunes. A third hypothesis is that visionaries
like Doug are not skilled in leading groups to deliver. For whatever
reason, there has not been a critical mass of people organized around
his principles for solving complex, global problems.
Though Doug’s ideas are immortal—and
have changed the world in terms of personal computing—Doug is human and
has suffered from not being able to carry his big ideas forward. That
leaves it to the rest of us, who believe in collective IQ, to figure it
out.
I hope we’re not too late.
My dream is to build a community
around Doug and his vision for humanity that can rebalance the views,
and explore and push the capacity of teams so we can catch up and keep
pace with our tools and technological capacity. I’d like to see this
applied toward the threats to humanity and our habitat. I’m interested
in the modern day rules of engagement. I want to understand what limits
teams, and explore ways to counter those dynamics.
I want to understand and bring to
light the barriers to scalable collaboration, and am working with others
to evolve the means to counter these obstacles. The barriers often seem
traceable to miscommunications, misunderstanding, misalignment, fears,
and hidden mixed agendas—egos protecting themselves versus the greater
good. Self-protectionism keeps people from fully committing to
teams. There is a fear their needs will be jeopardized if they commit to
the team. All too often, team problems come down to personal fears and
the need to “hang onto what you have,” which prevents people from
reaching to the higher plane where over-arching goals are aligned.
If we could each put our fears and
agendas on the table, and develop effective ways to counter them, then
we could unleash our aligned energy toward a higher purpose. We could
then begin working together to accelerate toward positive results that,
in uncoordinated fashion, would take too long to achieve. Perhaps with
conscious massive cooperation, this accelerated ability to solve
complex problems could happen in our lifetimes. That would be worth any
effort we can imagine.
Doug devoted his life to a beautiful
vision, one that we must realize if we are to survive as a race, and as a
healthy ecosystem. Doug deserves a vibrant, aligned,
collaborative, inspired, dynamic, effective community to carry forth
his ideas and his vision. Humanity deserves a chance to see what might
be possible. It is also great fun to be a part of such a program: a
program for the future.
