The PNM-Wikistrat connection
Tuesday, June 22, 2010 at 12:10AM 
Got email a while back from Joel, Australia-born, now living in Israel after some schooling there. He says he has all the books, reads everything I write online, and brags that he's seen the brief well over a hundred times (none live).
Then he explains how he and three other twentysomethings have created a start-up company (incorporated 6 months ago) that seeks to adapt the Wiki platform to a competition-of-the-fittest-style generator of strategic planning within organizations (companies, government agencies, etc.). After two successful pilots using mostly Israeli intell types, the company moves toward marketizing the offering. In some ways, it reminds me of using GroupWise in the Naval War College economic security exercises I led atop the World Trade Center with Cantor Fitzgerald pre-9/11 and in other ways it reminds me of when email first starting hitting command post exercises at combatant commands in the mid-1990s (creating this fascinating individual-based work-around and highly competitive intellectual network that quickly trumped the formal thought-gathering processes). In both instances, you escape the limits of hierarchical conversations (often broadcasts by the most authoritative figure in the room) and tap into the wisdom of crowds under conditions of much tighter latency (less time involved to reach effective decisions after weighing alternative pathways). In a sense, a way to both speed up (under the necessary scenarios) and improve the usual pick-option-B mentality that prevails.
What attracted me was Joel's description of how the company has used my vertical-versus-horizontal-scenarios thinking to customize the system with all manner of prompts to analysts to think in both dimensions--so highly interdisciplinary.
The basic conceit is, unlike traditional wikis, we're talking more than one page per analytic target--hence a competitive environment. What often happens in these decision-making environments is that a core group is assembled to put together the options PPT package, and a tremendous amount of poorly thought-out necking down of pathways ensues. By creating a more horizontal playing field, freed from hierarchical bias (i.e., the guy with the most stars on his shoulder boards must be the smartest, right?), the primary intellectual traction points become the linkages between the competing options pages.
That's a thumbnail description that does not do the effort justice. Go the company's site to see more in-depth presentations.
Two ways this interests me:
1) Strategic consulting in the private sector requires--more than ever--some connectivity to solution-delivery, meaning almost nobody is paying the old top-dollar for PPT slide decks and reorg charts--only. Instead, companies want your interaction to come with some technology solution that simultaneously empowers them to deal with the issue in question. Advice just isn't enough anymore.
2) Governments as a whole struggle with these problems, and are always looking for new tools to empower individual workers while connecting them to the wisdom of crowds, whether it be fellow bureaucrats (where a tremendous amount of wisdom truly resides) or with the citizenry (their natural counterparty).
So check out the site if you're interested. I am happy to connect anybody to Joel (although I'm sure his site has a contact function) for whatever can be arranged in demos/dialogue.
Naturally, I got a kick hearing about how the vertical/horizontal scenarios-&-thinking stuff resonated so nicely with someone in the private sector, so I'm happy these young fellas out.
Plus, does it get much cooler that seeing your ideas expressed in an Israeli start-up?
Reader Comments (2)
Seems to me the best organizations merge the 'horizontal' and 'vertical'. They provide for rapid and informal information exchange, but ultimately make it clear that there is a decision-maker, and that person needs to get timely and accurate information to make that decision.
The most interesting characteristic I've observed comparing military and civilian decision-making (both in theory, e.g. FMs and Business School papers and in practice), is the knowledge that the military has about the time aspect of decision-making. Uncle Sam teaches you to explicitly manage the timeline of a decision; a lot of informal coordination occurs to "beat the clock."
The effectiveness of the horizontal (staff officer to staff officer) coordination and the 'informal chains of communications' (e.g. the NCO chain that leads to the Sergeant Major/Master Chief/etc) are key to military effectiveness. People who haven't served miss all this, they believe that the formal mostly downward flow of the chain of command is all there is. When the staff works best, it coordinates a set of feasible/effective options and has vetted them rapidly before presenting them to the boss. And they've worked out how to implement the recommendation, speeding not just the decision-making, but the decision-implementing.
And as a related note, I still believe the John Boyd "OODA Loop" is applicable as the model for effective organizations. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_(military_strategist)#The_OODA_Loop
dave
I spent a while thinking about how the Wikistrat concept would apply in the international development industry. Put some thoughts together here if any of your readers are interested.