Harnessing the complexity perspective to better understand internetworked companies

Especially in turbulent and tempestuous times like now everybody has a natural tendency to revert to traditional and conservative practices, because even though they are not as progressiv or "cool", they have proven their worth. Especially many successful internetworked companies have undergone several evolutionary phases, and while some companies managed to maintain a decisively progressive and unconventional culture, with stunning growth complexity has grown to a point that is intimidating not only for new employees but also for veteran knowledge workers who observe that these organisations' startup approach needs to evolve so it can scale to global operations. 

In the field of complexity sciences researchers have found patterns and insights that can help individual workers, teams and organisations as a whole to frame and harness heterogeneity and decentralization. Wisdom of the crowds, peer-production, community driven development, crowdsourcing are just some phenomena that can be explained and trained for using the complexity perspective.

Taking this new perspective will not only change the way how you see things but also what you see.

Read my 3 page musing in Google-Docs (And if you feel like commenting or collabowriting please drop me a mail).

Also, if you want a much more elaborate perspective on how the complexity perspective can be applied to internet policy making i highly recommend Rick Whitt's thinking:

• the full 10 7 page article Adaptive Policymaking:  Evolving and Applying Emergent Solutions for U.S. Communications Policy
• Rick also kindly recorded a podcast in which he explains the paper. Together with the following  presentation one gets motivated to read the whole piece. 
  

Wind Art – Transforming Wind Mills into Innovative Beauty

This is a marketing idea for an energy production company, pitched in an open source style under creative commons license. I would be happy to help interested companies with the implementation.

1.   The Product

Wind mills have complemented our energy mix for many years. While alternative energy has a very positive intrinsic marketing value, in the best case they are tolerated, but mostly they are perceived negatively as ugly and devaluing the landscape and natural environment.

2.   The Idea

What if windmills became art? The energy company responsible for the windmills will have the chance to present itself as innovative, as turning ugly into beautiful, as leading the way into a more humane, a more beautiful future.

Two promising creative elements to consider are color and light. Thanks to the organic shape of most windmills simply coloring them in relation to the landscape context could result in very appealing sights; more spectacular however would be to attach light diodes to them and connect them to a central programming interface which allows to have the lights create firework-like effects across the whole wind-park.

WindArt can be used for positive public relations from the initiation of the project to the inauguration of the artistic wind energy park and if desired, it can be repeated after a certain period.

The PR/Advertisment Campain has the following components:

·      Call a competition for artists to propose the transformation of a given windpark into an artistic theme.

·      Collect artistic proposals on website for everybody to review

·      Have the public and experts evaluate the contestants in stages (from Xà100 à 10 à1,2,3)

·      Document the creative transformation of the wind park

·      Celebrate the inauguration of the wind art park

·      In case of the wind-fire-work lighting effects the ignition can be celebrated every night at a given hour.