aaron crews online

As an industry, we have become too conservative, preferring to coax more years out of an automation system that is already 20 years old rather than take advantage of today’s technology.

Careful - extreme conservatism with something as expensive as process automation systems leaves you ripe for disruption.

Overall spot-on column from John Berra.

It turns out that while large companies and organizations are phenomenally good at managing complexity, they're actually quite bad at tackling ambiguity. A complicated problem is like playing a game of chess, an ambiguous problem is like having your in-laws over to dinner for the first time. In the latter situation, it's not the number of variables that kills you. It's what you don't know that you don't know.

Fortunately, there is an answer, and that answer is hybrid thinking. It turns out that the antidote to ambiguity is hybridity. Take healthcare for example. Is fixing the American healthcare system a medical problem, a political problem, an economic problem, a social problem, a religious problem, or a technological problem? The answer is "yes." It's all of the above.

However, the solution isn't just gathering together different disciplines. I've attended several conferences on healthcare that tried to get a doctor, an economist and a priest to walk into a room. That's the start of a great joke, but not an answer to the problem. Getting these folks together just results in having them talk past each other.

Hybrid thinking is more than just having multidisciplinary teams. It's about having multidisciplinary people -- folks who are one-part humanist, one-part technologist and one-part capitalist. When multiple disciplines inhabit the same brain, something magical starts to happen. The disciplines themselves start to mutate. They hybridize. We start practicing business like a designer -- think Mark Parker at Nike. We shape technology like a culturalist -- think Steve Jobs at Apple. And we start thinking about the most complex problems that plague our societies like an entrepreneur.

In a "startup culture," everyone does lots of different things because they *have* to, and amazing things get done and big problems get solved. In a "corporate culture," we specialize and compartmentalize to get scale, which lets us manufacture solutions but makes it hard to solve problems.

Generally, you should only need three.

1. Zero in on what really, totally, absolutely sucks.

2. Ask yourself why, why, why, why it sucks until you reach the root cause.

3. Now come up with at least ten ridiculously, hopelessly utopian, childish ways to make it totally, unstoppably awesome. The dumber in yesterday’s terms, the better.