Incrementalism, exploration, exploitation

Apr 10, ’12 2:17 PM

A friend/colleague/friend tweeted this from an IBM ‘innovation discovery client briefing’, from IBM research in Switzerland: “Incrementalism is the enemy of innovation.” -Nick Negraponte

Which, ok, part of Negraponte’s gig is to go to things like an IBM innovation discovery client briefing. Sounds nice. But the other part of this is the actual assertion. Is incrementalism, in fact, the enemy of innovation?

At the level of what Negraponte is saying, his assertion is pure pap. Why? Because sometimes incrementalism is the enemy of innovation, and sometimes it isn’t. You don’t get to the bottom of the Mariana Trench by ignoring every innovation that came before you; sometimes you build on existing designs, and sometimes you think about new designs. His point is possibly closest to being something real if by incrementalism he means that any existing solution to a problem gains stakeholders who are tied to that solution; and then innovative solutions that dislodge those stakeholders are more difficult. It just depends so much more on what you’re talking about. To just be an evangelist for innovation is awesome for IBM meetings, but unhelpful for the rest of us.

I’m intensely interested in questions like these, and they dot (and sometimes define) the fields of organizations, political science, sociology, social movements, social studies of science and technology.

If we are talking about institutional change, then the answer to the innovation/incrementalism solution is a combination of: 1) Lis Clemens’ insight that institutional changes work best when they are wrapped in the language and form of existing institutions (that is, they are transformed, sometimes radically, via creep); and 2) Steve Barley’s insight that external shocks (‘technologies’ for him, in the broadest meaning of the term) disrupt existing patterns of behavior and meaning, and then those patterns are potentially and really reconstituted. That’s my answer, at least.

If we are talking about socio-technical change, I think the SCOT studies folks basically have it right, that a given technology creates relevant social groups, which rally around particular meanings and structures for that technology; which makes for interpretive flexibility; which creates theoretical closure around a particular solution that technology solves (what could have been many possible solutions is transformed into one solution and a bunch of solutions that ‘don’t work’). Depending on whether this is an open field, or a field with a dominant solution and some alternatives, or a couple/few/many dominant solutions, the dynamics will play out somewhat differently. But the underlying structure is the same.

In the marketplace for consumer products, the problem is a tricky one. Some have argued that Apple’s giant innovations are often innovations built on a surprisingly large amount of incremental improvement that only looks massively innovative in retrospect. This is where the best source for your money is James March’s argument about exploration vs. exploitation (seemingly ungated .pdf is here).

His argument is that organizations trade off between exploring new opportunities and exploiting existing ones. Via a simulation experiment, he argues that organizations ‘learn’ through their members (via creation of capabilities, routines, culture, knowledge management); and members learn through their organization (via socialization). But the more people just accept the organization’s way of doing things, the less likely the organization will see the world for what it is – endless exploitation means you are eventually in trouble.

What’s worse is that the payoff of exploration is highly uncertain and off into the future, so organizations tend to instead focus on reliability and exploitation, which is more proximate. Ultimately, in typically-quixotic fashion, March concludes that “the development of knowledge may depend on maintaining an influx of the naive and ignorant, and that competitive victory does not reliably go to the properly educated” (March 1991: 85). So ok, if this is what we mean in saying that incrementalism is the enemy of innovation, then perhaps I’m on board.

There’s an old talk by Paul Depodesta at a CSFB ‘thought leader’ conference which is also on the subject of disruption, innovation, and incrementalism – through the Moneyball-type transformation of the A’s. Totally worth looking at, if you are at all interested in these things.

And finally, a clip from the Moneyball film, which puts it so nicely.

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Sorting algorithms

Apr 10, ’12 6:45 AM

I love things like this, which quite simply demonstrate how to do something many people think they already know how to do. In this instance, it’s how to sort-by-ratings for the upteen number of sites which depend on user ratings to bubble things up to the top. And it’s not like these are unsophisticated sites doing this – Amazon, e.g., gets it wrong.

The simple solution is actually ‘complex’ – the lower bound of Wilson score confidence interval for a Bernoulli parameter. As Miller points out: “We need to balance the proportion of positive ratings with the uncertainty of a small number of observations. Fortunately, the math for this was worked out in 1927 by Edwin B. Wilson. What we want to ask is: Given the ratings I have, there is a 95% chance that the ‘real’ fraction of positive ratings is at least what? Wilson gives the answer.”

So the solution is really something like:

But in an age of programming, this complex solution is itself simple.

This reminds me of a problem I’ve kicked around in my head for years now, and I’m avoiding going to a statistician for a ‘true’ answer (which I imagine to be devlishly complex, but which probably is not). It’s to figure out how to maximize the joint probability of winning the maximum amount of money on a 50/50 bet, and not losing that money. That is, if you have a $100, do you bet $1 one hundred times? Or $100 once? Or $25 four times? Puzzle puzzle.

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Welcome back, Ze Frank

Apr 9, ’12 12:17 PM

“Let me think about the people who I care about the most, and how when they fail, or disappoint me, I still love them, I still give them chances, and I still see the best in them. Let me extend that generosity to myself.”

Feeling this lately. Welcome back to the show. Er, A Show.

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Yes we can; no we can’t

Mar 30, ’12 10:53 PM

I thought these two articles, written a week apart, are kind of amazing. Here’s the NYT on NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is in his (hopefully?) last term as mayor:

In a speech on Wednesday in Singapore, where he received a prize for urban sustainability, Mr. Bloomberg spoke about the difficulties of leading a city into the future amid a political culture that is often focused on the short term.

The mayor noted that technology, despite its benefits, can add new pitfalls to an already grueling process. “Social media is going to make it even more difficult to make long-term investments” in cities, Mr. Bloomberg said.

“We are basically having a referendum on every single thing that we do every day,” he said. “And it’s very hard for people to stand up to that and say, ‘No, no, this is what we’re going to do,’ when there’s constant criticism, and an election process that you have to look forward to and face periodically.”

Later, Mr. Bloomberg noted that long-term urban planning “requires leadership, and standing up, and saying, ‘You know, you elected me, this is what we’re going to do,’ and not take a referendum on every single thing.”

And then, a week later, we have another article on Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel:

At a time when the nation is only beginning to pull itself painfully and delicately out of a deep recession, and when cities and states are cutting essential services and wondering how to keep the courthouses open and the lights on, an infrastructure proposal for a single city with an estimated cost in the billions — with a “b” — is audacious. Mr. Emanuel, in an interview, suggested that nothing less than this “integrated, comprehensive approach” will do for what he calls “building a new Chicago.”

With the plan, Chicago is taking a leading role among cities and states struggling to keep their infrastructure from crumbling further but frustrated with legislative gridlock in Washington, said Robert Puentes, director of the metropolitan infrastructure initiative at the Brookings Institution.

“There is tremendous interest in doing something different — people aren’t waiting for the federal government to raise the gasoline tax or pass the carbon tax and have money raining down,” he said. He cited successful campaigns in “can-do states” that include Colorado, Washington, Arizona and Virginia to finance economic development projects with public-private partnerships, and Los Angeles’ vote in support of a major transportation referendum in 2008.

IMHO, Emanuel comes out looking much better that my current mayor. Bloomberg looks like a guy who is more worried about critics than actually having a plan for the city (which is, not surprisingly, a consistent criticism of him as mayor). But whatever your politics, it does seem amazing that we are currently at a place where we can do amazing, long-term planning; and also a place where we can’t possibly do anything.

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w/r/t the Supreme Court

Mar 28, ’12 8:38 PM

I would say, as I have said again and again, that they don’t give a shit about the law. The best way to explain the Supreme Court is to start with the politics, and assume that they can make up any old shit that sounds plausibly legalistic in order to defend their ideological positions. People who think the SCOTUS is different from any other political body are living in neverland.

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This is not a ‘clash’ of rights

Oct 20, ’11 8:36 AM

I have no patience for religious nutjobs who hide their discrimination behind religious doctrine. And a big screw you to Mayor Bloomberg, who could have taken the opportunity to say that treating women as less-than-equal people is wrong, but instead simply said that it was inappropriate on a ‘public’ bus.

The clash is not between religious and women’s rights. The clash is between a modern world where women are treated as full people, and a pre-modern world where women are simply less than men. We’re not going back, people.

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Michael Chabon on the 70s

Oct 17, ’11 9:31 AM

We are crippled in so many ways today by the desire to avoid fashion mistakes, to elude ridicule – a desire that leads at one extreme to the smiling elisions of political candidates and on the other to the awful tyranny of cool – that this willingness to be foolish is hard for us to sympathize with or understand. In this age of Gawker.com, we have forgotten the seventies spirit of mockery that smirks at the pretensions and fatuities of others in a way that originates with and encompasses ourselves. Aton for atom, we are made of exactly the same stuff as all the stars and galaxies.

It’s uneven, but where Manhood for Amateurs shines, it really shines.

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The problem with Per Se; conventions and uniqueness

Oct 12, ’11 7:26 AM

There is a glowing review of Per Se in the New York Times today, declaring it the best restaurant in New York City. I went there, and I agree: the food was incredible, the service impeccable, the experience indelible.

The challenge, I think, is that food at that kind of restaurant, particularly if you are not a professional food critic, lacks a set of genres and comparables for you to make sense of it. Here’s what I mean: if you have a great slice of pizza, you know what makes a great slice. You have eaten pizza enough times not just to have strong preferences about thick v thin crust, saucy, loads of toppings v minimilist, but also to know what criteria to use to judge said slice. If you are a New Yorker, it’s probably going to be judged differently than if you are a Chicagoan. But that’s fine, of course. The point is that you have a referent for what your ideal pizza is going to be.

Likewise for most foods that you eat on a regular basis, and even new foods that you don’t eat on a regular basis. It is wonderful to taste new and delightful things prepared in an excellent fashion. They expand your taste. But at the same time, the foods at Per Se are a combination of small bites (there are many small plates) and tastes for which you probably have no referent. As Sifton notes about the green salad:

a simple garden salad is the functional equivalent of an aria — particularly as sung at Per Se, with compressed figs and young red beets, Hakurei turnips (small, plump and white, very cute in aspect), red ribbon sorrel and a coulis of pine nuts. Each flavor is bright, distinct, amazing, but none is so purely intense, as reduced to its essence, as the dense, fragrant craziness of the figs.

It’s out of this world, I have no doubt. But you don’t know if it’s sweet, bitter, sour, rich, bright. I found myself describing every dish as amazing, but like nothing I had eaten before. What’s so interesting about Per Se is not, as Sifton says, that it “represents the ideal of an American high-culture luxury restaurant.” It is almost a form of outsider art. And you know what? That’s roughly the same language people use to talk about elBulli, and Alinea, two other meccas of modern high gastronomy.

Which is kind of fabulous, really. Normally, outsider art is used to describe people whose work is created outside the bounds of cultural, artistic conventions. Watts Towers is a good example. There are many. Most of the time, outsider art remains, well, outside. But sometimes its aesthetic, form, technique, or ideals get incorporated into the existing orbit of ‘conventional’ art, changing those conventions.

But Per Se is happening at a different kind level, the same way that molecular gastronomy and elBulli-type innovation works. Here is how Anthony Bourdain described Thomas Keller in a Cook’s Tour:

What’s missing from all the wild praise of Keller, his cooks, his restaurant, and his cookbook is how different he is. You can’t honestly use terms like the best or better or even perfect when you’re talking about Thomas Keller, because he’s not really competing with anybody. He’s playing a game whose rules are known only to him. He’s doing things most chefs would never attempt – in ways unthinkable to most. Everything about him and the French Laundry experience is different from most fine dining experiences; and Keller himself is a thing apart, a man hunting much bigger game, with very different ambitions than most of his peers.

It’s possible, I think, to simply chalk this up to Weberian charismatic authority, as with someone like Steve Jobs. But I think it’s helpful in the case of Per Se to think about how conventions ground us. I came out of Per Se thinking that it was a wonderful meal, but not one that I can even remember in any kind of detail – there wasn’t enough that I was familiar enough with for me to do that. I had a gnocchi dish once at Tru in Chicago that made me swoon; a wild combination of substantial but not heavy, rich without cloying. I still remember how it tasted. By contrast, I can’t remember a single dish I had at Per Se. They were heavenly, but essentially all unreproducible.

And this, for me, is what’s interesting. Sometimes you can be different by doing what everyone else is doing, but doing it so much better that it takes on a kind of phase-shifting, difference-of-degree-becomes-difference-of-kind. This seems very different from doing something just plain different from what everyone else is doing. Analytically, it’s hard for me to articulate exactly how this is working, but it seems really important.

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delicious meat

Sep 30, ’11 7:18 AM

If you’re quick with a knife, you’ll find the invisible hand is made of delicious invisible meat…yes yes.

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Supreme Court rules for Wal-Mart

Jun 20, ’11 11:31 AM

The case, to consolidate and ratify a class of women who claimed discrimination at the hands of Wal-Mart, was rejected by the Supreme Court today. I’ve nothing much to say about the case or the role of sociologists that has become something of a flashpoint this summer.

I would, however, suggest that we are living in an era when you don’t have to know a single thing about the law to know how the Supreme Court will rule on a case. Occam’s razor suggests that you simply ask yourself if it benefits business over workers, the powerful over the powerless, or Republicans over Democrats. If the answer is ‘yes’, that is how the Supreme Court will rule. I don’t know if this was always the case. Lawyers I know adamantly suggest that there was once upon a time a less ideological, more ‘law-focused’ Supreme Court. But it’s long past time we think of the Supreme Court as a ‘court’ in its proper, legitimating meaning of ‘arbitrating and interpreting the law of the land’, and instead just consider them one of many political players/institutions in the US landscape of other political players/institutions.

In other words, the ‘decisions’, ‘opinions’, ‘reasoning’, ‘precedence’, or ‘interpretation’ are all meaningless. If you refer to these things, I think that makes you something of a sucker. Instead, just draw a straight line between who benefits and how the court will decide.

I’m not bitter about this, genuinely, but I think legal commentary is essentially worthless here.

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