Forth International Seville Conference on Future-Oriented Technology Analysis (FTA)
FTA and Grand Societal Challenges – Shapping and Driving Structural and Systemic Tansformations
Seville, 12-13May 2011
How-to Develop Foresight Capabilities In Enterprise 2.0 Driven Organizations
Adrian Curaj, Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation (Romania), 1 Schitu Magureanu St., Bucharest, Romania, email: ,
Dan Grosu, Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation (Romania), 1 Schitu Magureanu St., Bucharest, Romania, email: ,
Abstract
An Enterprise 2.0 driven organization usesemergent social software platforms (such as wikis, blogs, prediction markets, Facebook or Twitter) within and between organizations, developing new capabilities and producing powerful results. The concept of Enterprise 2.0 is a truly disruptive innovation, designating an emergent and self-organizing network of relationships which enables executives to digitize and monetize collaboration. E2.0's organizational and technology constructs represent a new approach toward satisfying goals for growth and innovation, where the hope is that an open exchange of ideas will support business value and personal development. E2.0’s are highly connected and agile organizations, sensitive in respect to societal trends, concerns and needs, while still willing to create Foresighting abilities. The paper identifies key concepts employed in building the Foresight Wiki - a learning support infrastructure designed with the specific goal of developing Foresight capabilities in Enterprise 2.0 driven organizations – and states several implications for the platform’s structure and organization. The Foresight Wiki (or FORwiki) is the Web 2.0 version of the FOR-LEARN Online Foresight Guide, inscribed within the connectionist paradigm of eLearning 2.0. Moving beyond cognitivist or constructivist approaches, eLearning 2.0 relies on a self-organizing process which requires that the system is informationally open and capable of changing its structure. FORwiki offers a platform for creating communities of shared meanings (in Bakhtinian sense) on fundamental concepts of Foresight, as well as practices of Foresight. The platform’s content is open-ended, while the communities’ discourse rests in continuous transformation. The paper uses discourse analysis techniques in order to systematically explore often opaque relationships of causality between discursive practices and wider social-cultural structures within the larger Foresight community of practice. The analysis takes place at two levels: microstructure and macrostructure. At the microstructure level, the analysis is focused on the semantic relations between the discourse’s elements, including the rhetorical elements. At a macrostructure level, the analysis is directed at the thematic/topic structure of stories about Foresight exercises, and overall understandings of Foresight. The conclusion supported by the authors is that Enterprise 2.0 driven organizations will trend to connect Foresight units in socio-cognitive spaces of innovation, creating thus networked structures of FTA.
1. Introduction
Over the past decade or so, a new set of technologies appeared over the Internet. To some people, who strongly supported the development of new informatics technologies, these tools seemed so innovative and desirable that they deserved a new name: Web 2.0. And then came Andrew McAfee, who coined the term Enterprise 2.0 to describe how these same technologies could be used on organizations’ intranets and extranets, and torecognize the impact they could have on business. Our paper addresses the problem of how can we better develop foresight capabilities in organizations which had adopted the Enterprise 2.0 paradigm. We will describe a tool created for such a purpose, and we will analyze the content developed for such a tool. Our expectation is that we will discover certain hidden traits of such spaces of interaction which will allow us to speculate on the relation between foresight activities in Enterprise 2.0 driven organizations.
But first, a word about Enterprise 2.0 driven organizations. Proponents of Enterprise 2.0 claim that Web 2.0 technologies offer significant improvements, not just incremental ones, in areas such as generating, capturing, and sharing knowledge; letting people find helpful colleagues; tapping into new sources of innovation and expertise; and harnessing the “wisdom of crowds”. They also claim that the technologies currently in place to support these activities are weak, primitive, and unpopular. But the Web 2.0 phenomenon is about to change all that. (McAfee, 2006 and 2010)
There is an extensive body of literature on the Web 2.0 phenomenon, developed during the last few years, and even though it is not the objective of this paper to present a comprehensive picture of the academic discourse on this topic, we will attempt to depict the context in which this idea appeared. We will first note that Web 2.0generally refers to a set of social, architectural, and design interaction models between communities, people, computers, and software. Human interactions become an important aspect of software architecture and, more specifically, of web-based applications built on a core set of design patterns that blend together human experience with technology (Governor, 2008).Three essential aspects describe general characteristics of these Web 2.0 design patterns: (1) data and data streamsfrom various sources are combined into a representation that allows for the derivation of new information or added value; (2) new applications are built as a composition of other, already existing ones in order to create Rich Internet Applications, and to exhibit features previously available from stationary computers only; (3) tagging, blogging, and “wiki-ing” are important components of Web socialization, where a user’s personal entries are not private anymore, but are made available to a certain community, and ultimately to the general public. These core aspects make-up the three dimensions of a “Web 2.0 space” (Vossen and Hagemann, 2007).
By the time Web 2.0 had become a buzzword in the discourse on new technologies, enthusiasts had already hastened to proclaim its empowering value associated with new forms of interactivity. Communication between people had always been a central part of the commercial internet, but with Web 2.0 it now went far beyond simple messaging. It was more about users modifying websites in the process of interacting with other users: posting text commentary and opinions; uploading and tagging photos, creating videos, audio streams, online conferencing, and collaboration; and visiting the 3-D virtual worlds of multiplayer online games. New programming tools and cultural trends produced an explosion of web-based applications. Wikis, social networks, and basic online stores could now be launched inexpensively and quickly, by almost anyone. Web 2.0 was about businesses changing, people collaborating and unlocking content to be used in new and innovative ways through customization, at orders of magnitude of less cost than they’ve ever had before. In the words of Rod Smith from IBM, “Web 2.0 really is empowering and can help transform IT and line-of-business relationships” (Jones, 2008).
Blurring of boundaries between human agents and software produced unintended consequences which, in turn, attracted critical explorations of Web 2.0 social, political, and ethical dimensions in relationship to the organization of social power. Critical researchers of the Web 2.0 phenomenon considered its celebrated interactivity to be no more than a seductive expression of power based on condescension, a deliberate masking of power in order to exert effective control. They go as far as to say that interactivity in Web 2.0 is disciplinary in nature, offering merely a contingent freedom, and advocate the necessary effort to “continually interrogate the fabric of digital media” (Jarrett,2008).
Such interrogations of Web 2.0 have leaded other authors to describe its design patterns as “architecture of exploitation” (Petersen, 2008). A key component of participatory architectures described by Petersen is the free flow of data from site to site, from user to user, which international corporations manage to piggyback. Much of this free flow of data contains personal information, which poses a further threat to informational privacy online. The discourses surrounding Web 2.0 might seem seductive when highlighting concepts such as democracy and participation. But relations of subjectivity, technology and new media need to be placed in their true context, where patterns of use are reconfigured into practices which carry a resemblance of work relations.
However, in their quest towards unveiling the latest corporate conspiracy, critical theorists often fail to see Web 2.0 design patterns for what they really are, that is a reasonable solution to common usability problems. Previously to Web 2.0, the first rule of usability was that the user shouldn’t think much, and that using quality software should be self-evident. Interaction between humans and software was supposed to be composed out of a sequence of self-evident, mindless choices. Unable to implement such an approach anymore, design experts started to ask themselves if usability itself isn’t becoming difficult, irrelevant, and obsolete (Scott, 2009).
What brought us here is the evolution of computer systems beyond the standalone desktop systems of the past, with users interacting on daily basis with interconnected network of hosts, services, applications and platforms. As computing became more complex, the usability community was also forced to evolve. Usability and design are an integral part of agile development, bringing users and engineers together as design partners in a “new usability”. In the new context, new meanings of “usability” have appeared, and are now aimed at improving environments within which the user is at liberty to define her/his choices.
Web 2.0 technologies hold the liberating possibility of a narrative approach which, more than any other, offers the user a chance to think and write about personal experiences. We all have memories which are worthy of sharing with readers, and which are lost when all we are asked to do is fill-up questionnaires. Narratives are told from a defined point of view, so there is feeling that specific and often sensory details are provided. Since a narrative relies on personal experiences, it often is in the form of a story.
2. A Wiki System for Learning Foresight
The idea to develop a Foresight Wiki, as a tool for nurturing foresight capabilities in enterprise 2.0 driven organizations, first came up during the FORLEARN Project run by the Institute for Prospective Technology Studies. One expected result of that project was an “online foresight guide“, meant to become a unique resource on institutional foresight and its techniques, guiding foresight practitioners throughout critical steps of design, implementation and follow-up of a foresight project, and giving a description of the main methods that can be used. When the FORLEARN Guide was completed, one of the participants to the project’s “mutual learning” workshops observed that using a wiki system for such a learning platform seems the appropriate choice. The Foresight Wiki is that wiki system.
Designing a Foresight Wiki relied strongly on a systemic approach to institutional foresight, and on its narrative complement. Dennis Loveridge remarked that foresight thinking and systems thinking are strongly inter-linked, as both are influenced by behavioral traits. Foresight thinking is dependent upon pattern recognition, it provokes and is provoked by the recognition of a new situation composed of patterns linking elements of a new object or of a new idea. The new situation has to be familiar to the interpreter through old experiences, otherwise it will not be perceived or comprehended. Following Vickers, Loveridge further states that dissolving the new experience into existing experience is more than assimilation, and it involves the more subtle process of appreciation. To talk about new situations, rather than new problems or future challenges, is central in Loveridge’s systemic approach to foresight. Situations are not solvable or “well structured”, but can be recognized from their elements and inter-linking. Causal relations may be present, but they are not the dominant feature, leaving many relationships to depend on the behavioral pattern of the appreciator. Since the appreciator is also part of the situation, perception of its boundaries is a matter of debate and dialogue. Furthermore, situations are dynamic, occur in cascades and are never solved, “but simply change their context and content after every intervention, appearing to become unrecognizable from their initial form over a period of time, though the initial form remains buried in the stream of new contexts. […] The emergent properties of each situation will be the input to the next, each embodying the question of how the interactions of agents in the situation produce an aggregate entity that is more flexible and adaptive than its component agents”. (Loveridge, 2009) As situations occur in cascades, each generates a new experience requiring a shift to a new appreciative setting.
Understanding the concept of appreciation (or sensitive awareness) becomes thus fundamental to understanding institutional foresight. After all, situations are systems themselves, open to the reception and interpretation of weak signals, with low probability and high information content. Following again Vickers, Loveridge states that appreciation has a circular relationship with anticipation and learning, and with their internal feedback loops, and that this relationship is fundamental to the capacity to develop coherent ideas and narratives about the future (Loveridge, 2009). Appreciation is thus defined as a combined process of deriving the information that describes the current state of a soft system, and its comparison with the norm, providing thus a signal for action. The resulting appreciative behavior is a dynamic control action different than a regulation, since regulations are altered only at discrete intervals of time. Appreciative behavior may generate responses that vary according to the extent of the departure from the recognized norm.
Therefore, appreciation requires two kinds of judgments of reality in order first to assess the state of the system, and then to value the facts with respect to the individual and society. Loveridge concludes that “foresight and systems thinking are interdependent, this is a point made strongly by Saritas in his development of systemic foresight (Saritas 2006). So far this interdependence has not been in evidence in institutional Foresight programmes where it would have been most obvious. Saritas illustrated this lack of connection through bibliographic research” (Loveridge, 2009).
We must observe that, according to Luhmannian System Theory, a system is created once a cut is being made, and a boundary separates the system and its environment. Communication within a system operates by selecting only a limited amount of the available information and the criteria for this selection is meaning. Systems operate by processing meanings. The exterior of the system is characterized by chaos, while the interior is where complexity is reduced; the process is called reduction of complexity. Furthermore, each system has an organization and a structure. The organization is what gives the system identity, and depends on what is considered meaningful. If the system fails to maintain its organization, it ceases to exist. Structure changes over time, and is determined by organization. This process of reproduction from elements previously filtered is called autopoiesis (self-production).
This way of explaining how systems come into existence describes the generation of systems, but it also constructs the world as it appears from the viewpoint of systems theory. The primary distinction necessary to be able to think in the frame of systems theory is the cut that divides a system from environment. However, there is also an outside to this cut, an area of undifferentiated world tissue that might have included in the system, or at least part of it, if a different cut was made. There a certain level of indeterminacy to this approach, which might be dealt with if we organize the material in a narrative manner.
Katherine Hayles (2000) observes that the coexistence of narrative with system can be seen in Luhmann's account of the creation of a system, which is obviously a narrative. If the creation of a system begins with an observer making a distinction, then we must ask ourselves where this observer comes from. If he is brought into view through the action of another observer, then where does this second observer come from? The possibility of such an infinite regression forces us admit the relativeness of meaning-structures that are creating, and find refuge in a narrative approach as an analytical tool.
2.1 The Foresight Wiki
The design of the Foresight Wiki emphasizes the centrality of the foresight narrative. The consequence is that the Foresight Wiki employs the open editing model where every article may be created or edited by any registered user, and changes to an existing article become instantly available without review. No article is owned by its creator or any other editor; all the articles are collectively owned by the FORwiki community. Only the FORwiki Guidelines and Policies are restricted from editing, and changes can be made only by the Administrator after a consensus among members was reached. Other than that, any user of the Foresight Wiki can take advantage of all the features made available by MediaWiki, the software that powers the Foresight Wiki. The "Discussion" pages associated with each article represent an essential component of the platform, as they materialize the dialogical nature of the Foresight Wiki. They allow coordination among multiple editors, and foster debate among the members of the FORwiki community. Also, there is a "History" page attached to each article, recording every single past revision, making it easy to compare old and new versions and undo changes that an editor considers undesirable, or restore lost content. It is recommended that each member keeps a watchlist of articles of interest to them, so that they can easily keep tabs on all recent changes to those articles.