Today life is always in beta: preparing for life in the post-modern age

A good friend of mine Jon Barrett says

With technology the one thing you do know is that you will always be wrong. So you might as be wrong as quick as you can, to start working on how to make it right

This flies in the face of big R&D projects in traditional organisations, whose process realted to technological R&D and then the timeline to the marketplace etc., often takes us on a long and winding road.

Gary Hamel in his book Leading the Revolution talked about the future being about the leaps of human imagination. This is the world of forever Beta vs. the world of the absolute best Alpha product, which by the time it gets to market could be redundant, irrelevant, ill conceived etc., And the investment is never recovered.

In a post at FrogBlog entitled Beta Goes Meta: From Innovation to Trend in a Heartbeat

Tim Lebrecht the author of the blog posts

The fact that the Forrester Consumer Forum dedicates a panel to this much-blogged about topic is a sign that being in beta has become a broad cultural phenomenon. By nature we are all in beta, as the Boxes and Arrows blog poignantly remarks, and clearly, we now also live in an economy where “planes are built in the air.” Many new products never make it beyond trial stage, and the trial and error beta-approach that helps Google and other alpha innovators to out-fail and thereby out-innovate the competition, is as much an attribute of successful organizations as it is a sign of our time.

Thats right, currently I and some other colleagues are working on a very interesting project that will practically explore all that we write about on this blog. Our view is get it out there, lets see if it works and if it does then we can crank it up. We bring low risk innovation to a global market place and see if it sticks.

Lebrecht gives a rapid fire overview, exploring themes of social networking, innovation, speed to market, speed of response and engagement. He sums up...

Evidently, the media need to cope with the current while also putting forward a vision for the up and coming. The time between observation and conclusion, between description and prediction, however, has shrunk to almost zero. There are no more lapses between news, analysis, background story, industry trend story, and intellectual dissection; they have become one and the same, at the same time. Not only is beta the new alpha–beta has gone meta.

Curiously, even though I am 43, I have learnt the clock speed of this new world where Gen C works on approximately 26.3 hours per day.. For sure, sometimes its hard to keep up. But it is just exhilarating.

Then you meet people working in traditional organisations that are nowhere, even near, grasping the basic concepts of this new world, let alone knowing how to deal with them. That is not their fault, its the fault of the board members who are not prepared to focus on how to deal with the future within a new context.

So my life is always in beta and in fact all the better and richer for it.

Comments

[David Cushman]

Well said Al.
You can't really learn where your connected community will want to take their community until you give them some basic tools to share. Once the community is functioning then - and only then - does the R&D of the nobody-is-as-clever-as-everybody variety start.
Read some claptrap recently about how the best websites in the world have 'not been developed by committee'.
The original kernel may well not have been - the execution as social phenomena has only been possible because of the engaged involvement of their particpating communities.
Time we caught up? dc

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi David

Good points. I've been thinking somewhat the same way. The initial invention or idea or concept is perhaps not very likely to come out of committee (it may, but probably not), but once an initial idea is out there, an empowered and motivated community will definitely outperform its further (commercial) development ideas compared to the best individual experts, product managers, business developers etc ha-ha.

Tomi :-)

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