Friday, May 27, 2005

 

Thinking about Thinking, Part 4 of 4

[. . . continued from part 3]

In part one, I cited several thinking frameworks. These frameworks can be used by individuals or well organized, well managed, tight-knit groups operating in more or less real time. By contrast, the complexity theory approach to the generation of brilliant ideas is loosely coupled in time, across space, and throughout the organization. The complexity theory approach has a genetic algorithm feel to it. Ideas are combined and re-combined in many, many combinations and the brilliant ones survive.

To survive in the blogosphere means to have incoming links. The more incoming links to a particular post, the more value it has in shaping the community. Because authors want their blogs to be read (have their ideas considered to be brilliant), authors have an incentive to cite what they consider to be the most brilliant ideas by others, in hopes that their readers will also find the cited ideas brilliant. (See Dresner and Farrell paper.)

This is the mechanism that bubbles good ideas to the top. Frankly it doesn't matter what technique or framework is used to generate the idea. Its importance is in the value to other people, not in the method. Thus, in this model, it is more important to have lots of ideas propagating in the blogosphere. Applying the 99 to 1 rule tells us that we get more brilliant ideas out of 10,000 common ideas than we do out of 100 common ideas.

The keys are to blog early and often; to link frequently and generously; to share and share some more. While the thinking tools identified in part 1 will generate wisdom for a few, the blogosphere takes advantage of the Widsom of Crowds. Frankly, as a country we prefer electing candidates by the general population rather than by a few back-room polititians. The same principle applies to the blogosphere. There is more brilliance in the crowd than in the workgroup or task force.

[I'm not done, but I will stop here.]

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