Dialog: Running Light One-On-One

Running Light: Is the top-down, strategic planning approach of organizing the company failing?

Jeff Crigler: It used to be that when we were old enough to go to work, we apprenticed with someone who knew a craft. You learned the process and that was communicated from generation to generation, which gives you some idea of the product lifecycle. A whole generation could come and go and the product remained the same.
Today, there is no one to apprentice from. Who is going to teach me? You and I are ancient old-timers in the world of the Web, but we have only been doing it for eight or nine years. There is no notion of what the tasks, the steps are in the process. We have to assign responsibility for figuring out the process to the people who are actually doing the work. That's why the command and control thing doesn't work. I can't command you, because I don't know how.
The pace of change and the shortening of product cycles have two effects: one is that command and control breaks down. The other is that we have to move from a model of planning that puts 100% of the probability of success on one project to the project portfolio view.

RL: This is the notion of requisite variety; you have to keep a repertoire of behaviors going because one of them will succeed.

JC: That is a risk management strategy. It says: we are going to try five new products, and three new partnerships, and make these three acquisitions, because frankly we don't know what will work. You can afford to do that because product lifecycles are so short.

RL: If you're wrong, you will find out relatively quickly.

JC: But only if you've got the ability to sense and respond. Part of what our software helps the company do is to quickly detect the relative likelihood of success and failure of the various things that are going on. Not so much because you want all of them to be successful, but because you want to kill the ones that are failing, early, and put the resources behind the ones that are succeeding.

RL: How did you get this idea?

JC: First, a frustration with existing platforms that were out there. As humans, we operate on the basis of relationships. How we work with each other and how we work with our documents all has to do with the context around which we know those people or the work being done on those documents. Most of the existing systems out there apply some artificial categorization schema to organize information, rather relying on the context that the information was created in the first place. The breakthrough in our thinking was that if every new piece of information is always created in the context of a relationship it has to link to the person that created it, and the project its used on, and the topic at hand.

RL: So you don't have to discover it later.

JC: It's the old needle in the haystack thing. One of our competitors likes to brag that using their software you can find a needle in a haystack. Why would you put a needle in a haystack to begin with? Our view is to start with a view of what it is you are trying to accomplish. What are the goals of your organization? What are the projects and initiatives you have spun out to satisfy those goals? And within the context of that, what is the information that has a relationship to those goals? What are the people that have a relationship to those goals? What you have is a web of relationships between these things, and its no longer a challenge to find a needle in a haystack. The needle is right where it should be.

RL: And how will companies coordinate strategic thinking with this technology?

JC: Today, when you delegate work, you have to understand the critical events that will tell you whether the activity is successful or not. The value proposition of our technology is the benefit that comes from managing the tracking of portfolios of critical events, which is totally foreign to technologies like project management tools. This is what we are bringing to the market.