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?