JSB on Change and Games

Here is my rough impressionistic transcript of a talk by John Seely Brown on Change, Organizations and Gaming.  It is from Don Tapscott's New Paradigm conference on Enterprise 2.0.  I am bandwidth constrained, so pardon the lack of links and supporting materials.

Shift happens.  Video by a high school teacher in the middle of Colorado to make the argument to a school board that change has to happen.  JSB says this is a better video for corporate america.

Technology is doubling (every 18 months for computing, 12 months for communication, 12 months for storage).  But becoming invisible.  Problem isn’t building skyscrapers, it is a new infrastructure of electricity that powered elevators.  Every infrastructure has an interesting property to it, an S-curve.  Autos haven’t changed much in 70 years.  Today we have the first infrastructure that doesn’t seem to be leveling out, at least 20-40 years left in the growth in infrastructure.  Imagine if transportation advances were so exponential? 

Do we really understand exponentials?  In 1626 Peter Minuit bought Manhattan for $24 of trinkets.  Who got the better deal, Peter or the Indians?  If you invested in 7.5% interest it would be worth a hell of a lot more than all of Manhattan today.    Approximation 101: almost flat for the first 23 years then an almost 45 degree take off followed by a vertical line.

With Enterprise 2.0, the kind of changes around us will be dramatic and there is virtually no way we can structure the organization in time. There is an exponential change for infrastructure, people can change less fast, but organizational and institutional change can fundamentally not occur fast enough.

Wants to cast this as a culture of participation.  Where these kids are constantly building, tinkering, remixing and sharing.  But only when someone picks up what they have done and acknowledges it or remixes that these kids feel they are rewarded.  A lot of people in this room were tinkerers, but the tinkering stayed with us.  They are creating meaning and identity by what they produce and others can build on – a remix, open source culture.

Studying Anime with Mimi Ito, a new way to read.  Remixes of Anime is creative tinkering and the play of imagination – but it is also creative reading like in fandom – fans filling in the backstory in highly imaginative ways.  Creating meaning by integrating their imagination with that of the author in remix.

Shows the Matrix Reloaded trailer, and then a remix of it  The Narutrix Re-ninja’d to tell a story that makes sense in the Naruto world made by an 18 year old kid.

From mass media to participatory media, with a feedback loop between producing and consuming.  Amateur used to have a pajorative meaning in this county, comes from latin, amator, meaning to love.  He tells his MBA students to go and post something to Youtube as a way to carry a message.

Web 2.0 – “an emerging network centric platform to support distributed, collaborate and cumulative creation by its users”

Spirit of Web 2.0 – “to enable many people to participate in making small contributions that become culturally significant”

Google map mashup from citizens on the ground during Katrina.  Each contribution took only one minute.  Was not planned, a key part.

Who is Sick?  Anyone in SF can share where they are and how they are feeling, plots it on a map.  Voluntary contribution that would be impossible because of privacy of data. (/me wonders what happens when people can contribute when they think their friends are sick)

Game plan, introduces a new critical disposition: no learning, no fun.  I want to be measured and if I ain’t learning this isn’t fun.
* Pattern recognition and sense making
* Continuous decision making
* Conquering immense complexity
* Immeadiate feedback
* Constant change – constant challenges
* Joy from mastery of skills
* Bottom line oriented – scores matter! (bragging rights)

Economist, August 4, 2005 on gaming

Takes us on a quest in World of Warcraft.  Shows a slide on the exponential growth of WoW compared to other MMOGs.  Lineage in Korea also has significant growth. 

To see the value of games don’t just look at the core of the game, but pay close attention to the ‘social life’ on the edge of the game.  The edge is often referred to as the knowledge economy.  I got into this by taking the position “games are a waste of time” and one of the Mage developers said, “you are kind of smart, but you don’t understand my world.”  Did a reverse mentorship.  Also helped that this was outside his PARC non-compete clause.

Skills of a Guild Master – are actually the fundamentals of leadership
* Creates a vision and a set of values that attracts…
* Finds, evaluates and then recruits players that have a set of diverse skills and with fit with your norms
* Creates a platform for apprenticeship – newbies
* Orchestrates group strategy and governance
* Creates, sells and adheres to the governance principles for the guild and adjudicates disputes.

(/me realizes what’s different is putting people together in scenarios of constraints and abundance)

Steven Gillett, CIO Corbis, as a guild master, see the Wired Magazine article from 2006.  At Yahoo, he got an assignment for a big project and didn’t ask for resources, he thought that doing the job was finding the resources, a natural thing in WoW.  Corbis to most of us is a conservative company, and being the CIO reporting to Bill Gates is not an easy job.  Took the job, and in the first meeting he had to present to Bill and was over-prepared by others.  JSB said to take a risk and explain that you are a gamer.  Bill lept up and dashed up to the whiteboard, and said, my god, I’ve heared about gamers and I’ve never met one!  Rest of the meeting was spent drawing architecture on the whiteboard.  Two weeks ago they launched Corbis in Second Life, btw, and he just did it on his own and it transformed both internal and external perception.

An organizational perspective on guilds – where agility and fluidity reign supreme.  What you do changes the game.  Guilds are themselves extremely flexible, hyper-responsive modern organizations, which change and shift dramatically in response to player and game-driven needs.  They provide a model not only for management, but for understanding how players continually position themselves in terms of the needs and goals of the greater organization.  Describes tanking and healing in WoW raids.  Tanks are often the most respected people in guilds.

What gamers want at work and how they expect to be treated.
* Be given clear top level direction/problem – then permitted to explore and discovery how to proceed
* Want metrics for measuring success – and recognized when they are met or exceeded
* Balanced decision making
* Believe without learning there is no fun
* Capable of intense concentration
* Interface with peers, build bridges

WoW is way to complicated to play without complex analysis tools and dashboards.  Guilds also do after action reviews.  Shows some mod Uis.

JSB concludes with a list of dispositions that gamers has, and says, "it is not the skills, but the dispositions of people that matter in a changing world."