Tuesday, November 15, 2005
Non Player Characters
So there is this "innovations" meeting--a sort of "rah rah" meeting here at Symantec--discussing how the CTO is dealing with promoting innovation. He defined innovation as creativity that actually changes the user experience. That is, it's not good just to invent a better mouse trap; you need to invent one that the user wants and will buy--or at least one which will change how the user catches mice. A better mouse trap isn't good enough; it's got to be something the user uses.
So he discusses different ways to promote innovation--and it's all the same platitudes I've heard forever at various companies: "management did this", "management did that", "the sales engineer managers got together", "the architects got together"--combined with "and we have to figure out a better way of communicating the customer facing problems down to the engineers so they can factor this in when they innovate."
It's all a top-down model. So silly me, I stuck my hand up and asked "what about bottom-up innovation and cross-pollination?" combined with "often the customer doesn't know what they really want"--which led to a rather interesting response about "how do we balance the needs to tell a consistent story" with "how do we get better insight into the expertise developed in this company."
But I think there is a bigger problem here that just struck me. Our monkey brains have a finite number of people we can actually deal with. To our monkey brains, beyond a certain number of people, and we are simply incapable of treating them as human beings.
So with a large company the fundamental problem exists to upper management that the thousands of workers cannot be conseptually seen as anything other than cogs in a very large machine. Now this wouldn't be such a problem if there wasn't the second problem--which is that in everyone's desire for upward mobility, most of us focus upwards: that is, we are more likely to see the people above us as real as we wish to join their ranks--and we see the people at the same level as us and those below us as, well, as non-player characters.
This becomes a fundamental problem. Individuals who have something positive to contribute basically are discouraged by the triple pressures of upward competition, their own non-player status in the eyes of management, and the desire for their immediate superiors to preserve their own jobs. So innovation gets squashed--unless it is top down.
It's just human nature. ¶ 4:32 PM
So he discusses different ways to promote innovation--and it's all the same platitudes I've heard forever at various companies: "management did this", "management did that", "the sales engineer managers got together", "the architects got together"--combined with "and we have to figure out a better way of communicating the customer facing problems down to the engineers so they can factor this in when they innovate."
It's all a top-down model. So silly me, I stuck my hand up and asked "what about bottom-up innovation and cross-pollination?" combined with "often the customer doesn't know what they really want"--which led to a rather interesting response about "how do we balance the needs to tell a consistent story" with "how do we get better insight into the expertise developed in this company."
But I think there is a bigger problem here that just struck me. Our monkey brains have a finite number of people we can actually deal with. To our monkey brains, beyond a certain number of people, and we are simply incapable of treating them as human beings.
So with a large company the fundamental problem exists to upper management that the thousands of workers cannot be conseptually seen as anything other than cogs in a very large machine. Now this wouldn't be such a problem if there wasn't the second problem--which is that in everyone's desire for upward mobility, most of us focus upwards: that is, we are more likely to see the people above us as real as we wish to join their ranks--and we see the people at the same level as us and those below us as, well, as non-player characters.
This becomes a fundamental problem. Individuals who have something positive to contribute basically are discouraged by the triple pressures of upward competition, their own non-player status in the eyes of management, and the desire for their immediate superiors to preserve their own jobs. So innovation gets squashed--unless it is top down.
It's just human nature. ¶ 4:32 PM
