Tackling barriers to trade, the 'Chinese Walls' erected in large organizations to repel initiatives and the "not invented here!" syndrome and open governance and government
3. Culture and Counterculture: Reason
and Belief
• Aka. hearts and minds
• Organizational culture
– May become fragmented
• departmentalization and roles may develop a culture
and a counterculture
• As documented and occurring in our inner-city state schools in the UK: external
peer group pressures reach both inside and outside the classroom (Sociology of
Education)
• B. F. Skinner's “Technology of behavior in American life: From consumer culture to
counterculture” (google)
• T. Liyoshi, M.S.V. Kumar, “Opening Up Education”, Ch. 1; Visions of a new learning
ecology, MIT, Google Books, (c)2008
• Google “education, classroom learning, culture social science, counterculture, peer
group pressure”
(c) Nicholas Robinson Design, May 2015 3
4. Socially smart behaviour
• Those that succeed in work and life do so by: -
– Adopting a set of rules
• Playing the game
– Developing an ecosystems awareness
– Safety in numbers
– Inclusion and exclusion
• Self-preservation
– rarely rock the boat
• Adopting survival tactics
– know their Machiavelli
– form alliances and associations aka. networking
– Develop empathic skills
• Develop a “counter-culture”
– Humpty’s hard shell
– Deploy “not invented here”
(c) Nicholas Robinson Design, May 2015 4
5. The Humpty Dumpty Problem
Closed governance: -
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall ..
for Humpty Dumpty was overseer of
all ..
5(c) Nicholas Robinson Design, May 2015
6. Europe 2.0
• Open Government
• Science 2.0
• Creative Solutions
• Organizational Culture
• Environmental
awareness
• Empathy with the local
social and economic
environment(s) aka.
cultures
(c) Nicholas Robinson Design, May 2015 6
7. Humpty Dumpty became prosperous
and important ..
– So he developed a hard shell
• to protect his soft sell
– And because he was so brittle
• he built a wall
– So he could sit high and tall
• and control all passage below
– And prevent collaboration with outsiders
• who might threaten his position
7(c) Nicholas Robinson Design, May 2015
8. Humpty The Great Gatekeeper
• Mature organizational structures become
brittle because they end-up headed by
‘Humpty Dumpty’ types
• “I run a budget of $1M a day
– to keep intruders away”
– We ‘don’t do inventions’ that are “not invented
here”!
– We run a monoculture!
(c) Nicholas Robinson Design, May 2015 8
9. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall..
• Male territorialism and organizational
structures
– organizational structures beget (cause to appoint)
organizational thinkers
– job-security under threat
• creativity-driven targets struggle in a monoculture
• Trade barriers were erected
– overseen by yet more gatekeepers
– But no one could see why, except of course
Humpty from on-high
9(c) Nicholas Robinson Design, May 2015
10. Not all the Kings Horses
• Nor all the Kings men
• Could put Humpty together again!
– Organizations run by rank and seniority are not
self-healing
(c) Nicholas Robinson Design, May 2015 10
11. Brittle Vs. Self-Healing Organizational
Cultures
– Cultures and Countercultures
– Lack of collaboration occurs where everyone
works on an authoritarian ‘need to know’ basis
– Inflexibility begets inflexibility in the ranks
– Leaders set the culture ‘trickle-down’
• Authoritarian vs. Collaborative
• Creative vs. Organizational
• MBO vs. MBC
(c) Nicholas Robinson Design, May 2015 11
12. Towards Open Governance
• Incentivising self-healing organizational
countercultures
– Understanding thoughts and feelings as the
determinants of behaviours
– Adopting “continuous improvement” as a culture
– Understanding Ecosystems
– Implementing reward systems
• Career progression
(c) Nicholas Robinson Design, May 2015 12
Notas do Editor
If you are an inventor, then hawking your ideas around organizations will be familiar to you - and you will have definitely heard of “not invented here!”
Nicholas Robinson is a freelance serial inventor and patentee, a member of the CeDEM15 Steering Group and a member of the BCPE