John Seely Brown
assumption hold gold
“The Harder you fight to hold on to specific assumptions, the more likely there’s gold in letting go of them. ”
― John Seely Brown
institution design push pull
“Institutions designed for push cannot easily accommodate pull.”
― John Seely Brown
push organize activity demand
“Push” describes a method and means of organizing activities and actions. Push operates on a key assumption—that it is possible to forecast or anticipate demand. Based on this assumption, push works mightily to ensure that the right people and resources are delivered at the right place and the right time to serve the anticipated demand.”
― John Seely Brown
big shift scale bigger efficiency scalable learning distributed
“As the Big Shift takes hold, companies are no longer places that exist to drive down costs by getting increasingly bigger. They’re places that support and organize talented individuals to get better faster by working with others. The rationale of the firm shifts from scalable efficiency to scalable learning—the ability to improve performance more rapidly and learn faster by effectively integrating more and more participants distributed across traditional institutional boundaries.”
― John Seely Brown
talent attract retain access develop
“Rather than focusing on attracting and retaining talent, as they do today, institutional leaders must shift their attention to accessing and developing talent.”
― John Seely Brown
institution leader inverse mentor
“Institutional leaders will need to seek out “reverse mentors” among (often younger) individuals who can help them understand and master edge practices.”
― John Seely Brown
transaction long-term trus relationship
“Core participants tend to focus on transactions rather than investing in the long-term effort to build sustainable, trust-based relationships on the edge.”
― John Seely Brown
pull platform ad hoc potential positive friction solution
“Pull platforms make it easier to assemble participants and resources on an ad hoc basis to problem-solve unforeseen issues or situations. As a result, they enhance the potential for productive friction as people with different perspectives, skills, and experiences come together to try to find a solution for a specific problem. In contrast, push programs view all friction as an inefficiency that must be eliminated. The purpose of tightly specified programs is to eliminate wasteful debate and disagreement, especially at the point of execution.”
― John Seely Brown
creation space design collaboration learning performance
“the success of creation spaces can be traced back to careful design at the outset by a small group of people who were very thoughtful about the conditions required to foster or “scaffold” scalable collaboration, learning, and performance improvement.”
― John Seely Brown
creation space successful participant interaction environment
“Our research into emerging creation spaces has identified three elements that combine to set in motion the increasing-returns dynamics that make these spaces successful: participants, interactions, and environments.”
― John Seely Brown
mold individual need institution potential performance
“Rather than molding individuals to fit the needs of the institution, institutions will be shaped to provide platforms to help individuals achieve their full potential by connecting with others and better addressing challenging performance needs.”
― John Seely Brown
tell people insight experience evoke power eyeglasses see world
"It's never enough to just tell people about some new insight. Rather, you have to get them to experience it a way that evokes its power and possibility. Instead of pouring knowledge into people's heads, you need to help them grind anew set of eyeglasses so they can see the world in a new way."
― John Seely Brown
physical social information space collaborative learning technol
"If you can design the physical space, the social space, and the information space together to enhance collaborative learning, then that whole milieu turns into a learning technology."
― John Seely Brown
piece of information mean matter
"People need to know more than what a piece of information means. They also need to know how the information matters."
― John Seely Brown
leadership money meaning
"The job of leadership today is not just to make money, it's to make meaning."
― John Seely Brown
design object-oriented process system institution
"For me, the concept of design is more than object-oriented; it encompasses the design of processes, systems and institutions as well. Increasingly, we need to think about designing the types of institutions we need to get things done in this rapidly accelerating world."
― John Seely Brown
corporate innovation product organizational aptitude
"The locus of corporate innovations has been product development. But in times of rapid and unpredictable change, the creation of individual products becomes less important than the creation of a general organizational aptitude for innovation."
― John Seely Brown
conversation catalyst innovation
"Conversation is a catalyst for innovation"
― John Seely Brown
technology human behaviour workplace
"The technologies that will be most successful will resonate with human behaviour instead of working against it. In fact, to solve the problems of delivering and assimilating new technology into the workplace, we must look to the way humans act and react. In the last 20 years, US industry has invested more than $1 trillion in technology, but has realised little improvement in the efficiency of its knowledge workers and virtually none in their effectiveness. If we could solve the problems of the assimilation of new technology, the potential would be enormous."
― John Seely Brown
invention corporation research
"The most important invention that will come out of the corporate research lab in the future will be the corporation itself."
― John Seely Brown
learning fun
"If I ain't learning, it ain't fun."
― John Seely Brown
practice rail knowledge flow
"Practice provides the rails on which knowledge flows."
― John Seely Brown
process work people
"Processes don't do work, people do"
― John Seely Brown
pull platform loosely coupled interface people understand
“In pull platforms, the modules are designed to be loosely coupled, with interfaces that help users to understand what the module contains and how it can be accessed.”
― John Seely Brown
participate knowledge flow stocks
“No one will be able to effectively participate in relevant knowledge flows without possessing useful knowledge stocks of their own.”
― John Seely Brown
pull platform assemble people ad hoc issue situation
“Pull platforms make it easier to assemble participants and resources on an ad hoc basis to problem-solve unforeseen issues or situations.”
― John Seely Brown
innovation imagination play
“The need for innovation – the lifeblood of business – is widely recognized, and imagination and play are key ingredients for making it happen.”
― John Seely Brown