Human Detection and Diagnosis of System Failures, 1981
One of the intriguing properties of many expert trouble-shooters is their ability to diagnose sys... more One of the intriguing properties of many expert trouble-shooters is their ability to diagnose systems that they have never seen before. These experts construct their own qualitative causal models of how a system functions given a description of its structure and what it is supposed to do. What is the basis of this skill? Towards answering this question, we have been investigating properties of the “mental models” that such experts might be constructing for representing the underlying mechanisms of a system, i.e. their understanding. Some of these properties are apparent. Firstly, they involve a qualitative understanding of how the system functions in contradistinction to the analytic or quantitative models often taught to engineers. Secondly, these models appear to have many of the properties of a simulation which is, metaphorically speaking, “run” in the mind’s eye or what might be called an envisionment. From running such an envisionment the expert can discover and/or encode much of a system’s underlying causality.
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 1973
Page 1. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS, VOL. SMC-3, NO. 3, MAY 1973 independe... more Page 1. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS, VOL. SMC-3, NO. 3, MAY 1973 independent visual-manual tasks. In this way the attention function can be made explicit through eye-position records. ...
Page 1. ELSEVIER HI Til »»l lit IH tlllMUVW STORYTELLING Wfiy Storytelling Is Transforming21st Ce... more Page 1. ELSEVIER HI Til »»l lit IH tlllMUVW STORYTELLING Wfiy Storytelling Is Transforming21st Century Organizations and Management Page 2. ELSEVIER armmiuiH STORYTELLING Why Storytelling Is Transforming 21st Century Organizations and Management Page 3. ...
A brief glance at the evolution of strategic focus reveals dramatic shifts in relevant context wi... more A brief glance at the evolution of strategic focus reveals dramatic shifts in relevant context with potent implications for organization and control, rooted in the reversal of a century-old “long wave { XE "long wave "} ” centered on internalizing various economic activities to control them that gave rise to the integrated firm, the corporation and the conglomerate (Chandler, 1977; Chandler & Salsbury, 1974). Where companies from the mid-1860s to roughly the 1980s created strategic advantage by internalizing activities for greater stability, efficiency and control, increasingly since then advantage has centered more and faster learning and innovation (IBM { XE "IBM "}_Global_Services, 2006; Prahalad & Krishnan, 2008; Schramm, 2006). But no company can control all the resources needed for innovation (Prahalad & Krishnan, 2008), so creating strategic advantage has increasingly required collaborative, outsourced, strategic alliances
Redefinir los terminos competitivos de un segmento de mercado, de un sector o de un ecosistema gl... more Redefinir los terminos competitivos de un segmento de mercado, de un sector o de un ecosistema global es una enorme tarea. Implica atraer a miles de participantes, galvanizar sus esfuerzos y retener su compromiso en el largo plazo. Hagel, Brown y Davison, de Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation, ofrecen un plan de accion para la titanica tarea de crear una estrategia configuradora a medida que la infraestructura impulsada por la tecnologia cambia constantemente. Los autores se refieren a tres elementos clave que, en todos los sectores, son vitales para una estrategia configuradora. Una vision configuradora, o llamado a la accion para los participantes potenciales, clarifica la oportunidad de mercado, traza un mapa de las fuerzas fundamentales, identifica las recompensas y resalta la naturaleza compartida del riesgo. Bill Gates, por cierto, creo una buena vision para las computadoras de escritorio, y mas recientemente Marc Benioff de Salesforce.com hizo lo mismo con el software para empresas. Una plataforma configuradora, como AdSense de Google, define claramente los estandares y practicas que ayudaran a organizar y respaldar las actividades de muchos participantes, permitiendoles hacer mas con menos. Las acciones y activos configuradores especificos convencen a los participantes de que el configurador tiene la capacidad de lanzar sus iniciativas, como hizo Facebook al publicitar su relacion con Microsoft. Los tres elementos juntos permiten que el configurador movilice rapidamente una masa critica de participantes y, con ello, desate poderosos efectos de red que pueden traer grandes recompensas en tiempos de cambio rapido. Casi cualquier empresa se puede beneficiar si intenta una estrategia configuradora, dicen los autores, pero reconocen que no todas pueden, en ultimo termino, ser configuradoras. Sin embargo, demuestran que al participar en la estrategia configuradora de otra firma, una empresa aun asi puede descubrir muchas oportunidades de crear valor.
Open innovation has become the latest management buzzword. We would have to look long and hard to... more Open innovation has become the latest management buzzword. We would have to look long and hard to find an executive who does not agree with the basic premise of open innovation that success in coming up with creative new value to offer to the marketplace depends upon connecting effectively with other companies. Executives realize they simply cant do it alone. Virtually all of them now buy into the wisdom of Bill Joys observation that there are always more smart people outside your company than within.
The educational needs of the 21st century pose a number of serious problems for current education... more The educational needs of the 21st century pose a number of serious problems for current educational practices. First and foremost, we see the 21st century as a time that is characterized by constant change. Educational practices that focus on the transfer of static knowledge simply cannot keep up with the rapid rate of change. Practices that focus on adaptation or reaction to change fare better, but are still finding themselves outpaced by an environment that requires content to be updated almost as fast as it can be taught. What is required to succeed in education is a theory that is responsive to the context of constant flux, while at the same time is grounded in a theory of learning. Accordingly, understanding the processes of learning which underwrite the practices emerging from participation in digital networks may enable us to design learning environments that harness the power of digital participation for education in the 21st century.
Human Detection and Diagnosis of System Failures, 1981
One of the intriguing properties of many expert trouble-shooters is their ability to diagnose sys... more One of the intriguing properties of many expert trouble-shooters is their ability to diagnose systems that they have never seen before. These experts construct their own qualitative causal models of how a system functions given a description of its structure and what it is supposed to do. What is the basis of this skill? Towards answering this question, we have been investigating properties of the “mental models” that such experts might be constructing for representing the underlying mechanisms of a system, i.e. their understanding. Some of these properties are apparent. Firstly, they involve a qualitative understanding of how the system functions in contradistinction to the analytic or quantitative models often taught to engineers. Secondly, these models appear to have many of the properties of a simulation which is, metaphorically speaking, “run” in the mind’s eye or what might be called an envisionment. From running such an envisionment the expert can discover and/or encode much of a system’s underlying causality.
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 1973
Page 1. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS, VOL. SMC-3, NO. 3, MAY 1973 independe... more Page 1. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SYSTEMS, MAN, AND CYBERNETICS, VOL. SMC-3, NO. 3, MAY 1973 independent visual-manual tasks. In this way the attention function can be made explicit through eye-position records. ...
Page 1. ELSEVIER HI Til »»l lit IH tlllMUVW STORYTELLING Wfiy Storytelling Is Transforming21st Ce... more Page 1. ELSEVIER HI Til »»l lit IH tlllMUVW STORYTELLING Wfiy Storytelling Is Transforming21st Century Organizations and Management Page 2. ELSEVIER armmiuiH STORYTELLING Why Storytelling Is Transforming 21st Century Organizations and Management Page 3. ...
A brief glance at the evolution of strategic focus reveals dramatic shifts in relevant context wi... more A brief glance at the evolution of strategic focus reveals dramatic shifts in relevant context with potent implications for organization and control, rooted in the reversal of a century-old “long wave { XE "long wave "} ” centered on internalizing various economic activities to control them that gave rise to the integrated firm, the corporation and the conglomerate (Chandler, 1977; Chandler & Salsbury, 1974). Where companies from the mid-1860s to roughly the 1980s created strategic advantage by internalizing activities for greater stability, efficiency and control, increasingly since then advantage has centered more and faster learning and innovation (IBM { XE "IBM "}_Global_Services, 2006; Prahalad & Krishnan, 2008; Schramm, 2006). But no company can control all the resources needed for innovation (Prahalad & Krishnan, 2008), so creating strategic advantage has increasingly required collaborative, outsourced, strategic alliances
Redefinir los terminos competitivos de un segmento de mercado, de un sector o de un ecosistema gl... more Redefinir los terminos competitivos de un segmento de mercado, de un sector o de un ecosistema global es una enorme tarea. Implica atraer a miles de participantes, galvanizar sus esfuerzos y retener su compromiso en el largo plazo. Hagel, Brown y Davison, de Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation, ofrecen un plan de accion para la titanica tarea de crear una estrategia configuradora a medida que la infraestructura impulsada por la tecnologia cambia constantemente. Los autores se refieren a tres elementos clave que, en todos los sectores, son vitales para una estrategia configuradora. Una vision configuradora, o llamado a la accion para los participantes potenciales, clarifica la oportunidad de mercado, traza un mapa de las fuerzas fundamentales, identifica las recompensas y resalta la naturaleza compartida del riesgo. Bill Gates, por cierto, creo una buena vision para las computadoras de escritorio, y mas recientemente Marc Benioff de Salesforce.com hizo lo mismo con el software para empresas. Una plataforma configuradora, como AdSense de Google, define claramente los estandares y practicas que ayudaran a organizar y respaldar las actividades de muchos participantes, permitiendoles hacer mas con menos. Las acciones y activos configuradores especificos convencen a los participantes de que el configurador tiene la capacidad de lanzar sus iniciativas, como hizo Facebook al publicitar su relacion con Microsoft. Los tres elementos juntos permiten que el configurador movilice rapidamente una masa critica de participantes y, con ello, desate poderosos efectos de red que pueden traer grandes recompensas en tiempos de cambio rapido. Casi cualquier empresa se puede beneficiar si intenta una estrategia configuradora, dicen los autores, pero reconocen que no todas pueden, en ultimo termino, ser configuradoras. Sin embargo, demuestran que al participar en la estrategia configuradora de otra firma, una empresa aun asi puede descubrir muchas oportunidades de crear valor.
Open innovation has become the latest management buzzword. We would have to look long and hard to... more Open innovation has become the latest management buzzword. We would have to look long and hard to find an executive who does not agree with the basic premise of open innovation that success in coming up with creative new value to offer to the marketplace depends upon connecting effectively with other companies. Executives realize they simply cant do it alone. Virtually all of them now buy into the wisdom of Bill Joys observation that there are always more smart people outside your company than within.
The educational needs of the 21st century pose a number of serious problems for current education... more The educational needs of the 21st century pose a number of serious problems for current educational practices. First and foremost, we see the 21st century as a time that is characterized by constant change. Educational practices that focus on the transfer of static knowledge simply cannot keep up with the rapid rate of change. Practices that focus on adaptation or reaction to change fare better, but are still finding themselves outpaced by an environment that requires content to be updated almost as fast as it can be taught. What is required to succeed in education is a theory that is responsive to the context of constant flux, while at the same time is grounded in a theory of learning. Accordingly, understanding the processes of learning which underwrite the practices emerging from participation in digital networks may enable us to design learning environments that harness the power of digital participation for education in the 21st century.
recent commencement speech (May, 2019) at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT)... some new vie... more recent commencement speech (May, 2019) at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT)... some new views on higher education for our white water world of exponential change and complexity science.
We’ve all heard about and experienced this ‘pace of change’ narrative. I want to step back a bit... more We’ve all heard about and experienced this ‘pace of change’ narrative. I want to step back a bit to consider some aspects of this world to try to open up a space of possibilities that’s a bit little different.
The game has changed. The real question is, have we? From my point of view, sense-making has chan... more The game has changed. The real question is, have we? From my point of view, sense-making has changed since the amazing moment last year when a deep learning computer program defeated a human professional at the abstract strategy game Go. In March 2016, Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo defeated Mr. Lee Sedol, winner of 18 world titles and widely considered the greatest Go player of recent history. It was a moment that I think quite honestly shocked the world, and one that causes us to step back and rethink what we do, who we are, and what meaning actually means. In this post AlphaGo world, what are the new mindsets we should be adopting? What are the new lenses that may be required to make sense out of the complex and exponentially changing world we're walking into? I want to look at this post AlphaGo world through three different lenses. The first is through an operational lens, then an epistemological lens, and finally an ontological lens. What does it mean to be in this kind of world? The answer to these big questions really comes from the composite of knowing how to look at this through all three
The game has changed. The real question is, have we? From my point of view, sense-making has cha... more The game has changed. The real question is, have we? From my point of view, sense-making has changed since the amazing moment last year when a deep learning computer program defeated a human professional at the abstract strategy game Go. In March 2016, Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo defeated Mr. Lee Sedol, winner of 18 world titles and widely considered the greatest Go player of recent history. It was a moment that I think quite honestly shocked the world, and one that causes us to step back and rethink what we do, who we are, and what meaning actually means. In this post AlphaGo world, what are the new mindsets we should be adopting? What are the new lenses that may be required to make sense out of the complex and exponentially changing world we're walking into? I want to look at this post AlphaGo world through three different lenses. The first is through an operational lens, then an epistemological lens, and finally an ontological lens. What does it mean to be in this kind of world? The answer to these big questions really comes from the composite of knowing how to look at this through all three.
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