The current ‘information behaviour’ of the group is largely ad hoc. Each person does what their job description and the local ordinances and regional laws dictate. There is some peer-to-peer sharing but it tends to be local, among people who already know each other well, and it is done almost exclusively by e-mail. A complicating factor is that divulging personal information to others is a criminal offence, so there is a good reason not to share information. Most of the people in this ‘community’ do not know each other. There is considerable overlap in jurisdictional authority and responsibilities.

Why would anyone care about creating a community where none exists? Well, in the “food poisoning” example, if there had been such information sharing, the tragic poisoning of thousands of dogs and cats by Menu Foods, Nestle Purina, Del Monte, Hills and others might have been averted. And it’s estimated that every year one out of four people in affluent nations contracts at least one case of food poisoning. Much of the meat we eat is contaminated with salmonella and other toxic bacteria that thrive in the miserable conditions farmed animals live in. And poisoning of the food supply is high on the list of terrorism risks. So since prevention of food poisoning is, alas, not an option, the task becomes identifying, among the hundreds of millions of cases of food poisoning every year, the ones that will kill or permanently sicken the most people if a recall is not instituted quickly. It’s needle in a haystack work. Important work. My colleague’s prospective community of practice’s work is equally important.

Suppose we were to set up a database, a wiki, a group blog, an RSS aggregator page, a discussion forum and other tools to allow my colleague’s couple of hundred potential community members to share knowledge and collaborate. Would any of them use these tools? Would these tools replace the current ad hoc e-mail groups and peer-to-peer phone calls that are currently used for this purpose? Would prospective users be turned off by the substantial security front-end needed to protect confidential information? By the unfamiliarity of wikis and blogs? By the boring yet complicated user interface of commercial databases? And how would we deal with the fact some people want information pushed to them (in e-mails etc.) and others prefer to go and get it from a designated site they can pull it from when they’re ready?

Last year, riffing off an article by Dave Snowden, I identified a set of four necessary preconditions for organizational innovation. By analogy, I think they can be generalized into four necessary preconditions for any sort of organizational behaviour change, including information behaviour change:

1. a need or scarcity
2. a sense of urgency
3. a perspective shift (that suggests the current way of doing things is inadequate, and another way is possible)
4. a capacity for change

The first two preconditions go together, and Dave Snowden calls them starvation (internal motivation) and pressure (external motivation). You need people to want to change before they will. It is very difficult to create this sense of urgency, and those who try to do so usually find the sense of urgency they have momentarily created disappears as soon as they turn their backs. Generally that sense of urgency needs to be created by some real event. We do what we must, and there is no time left over in most of our lives for nice-to-do’s.

In my colleague’s particular case there is a need, but there is no sense of urgency. In other words, there is some personal ‘starvation’ but no real pressure.

How about a perspective shift? My sense is that new technologies, as enjoyable and intriguing as many of them are, do not constitute a perspective shift, a significantly better way of doing what they are doing now. They might get prospective community members to visit once or twice out of curiosity, but (just as most new websites and community spaces never get much traction) simply offering new information-sharing tools is unlikely to bring about any sustained information behaviour change.

Do the potential participants have the capacity for change? Are they willing to trust each other, to share peer-to-peer with people they don’t know, to pay attention to people who have no say in their performance evaluation? In my colleague’s case, unlike most groups I am familiar with, I think the answer is yes. Her cohorts are professionals who are largely self-driven, and I think they have great capacity for self-organization and self-management, if the other three preconditions could be met.

But my suggestion to my colleague is that, with only two of the four preconditions (#1 and #4) met, her best bet is to work on #3, and then put something in place that is ready when precondition #2 gets met by some major “food poisoning” crisis.

How do you create a perspective shift? I think the best approach is to create a story. This was how Steve Denning got the World Bank to see the value of a major investment in knowledge management ñ he told a (true) story about how sharing information between aid workers in two distant struggling nations saved lives. My colleague needs to find a story about how sharing information about “food poisoning” openly, promptly and extensively has “saved lives”. By telling and retelling that story, putting together the tools and processes for her community to enable them to share what they know more effectively, and then waiting patiently for the crisis that will create the missing sense of urgency, the community will, when it’s ready, be born and flourish. Until then, I think she should keep her expectations low.

What do you think? Am I too jaundiced about people’s propensity for change? Are there other preconditions for information behaviour change that I’ve missed, or can some of the four I’ve identified beshort-circuited? What’s the most successful sustained community of practice you’ve been involved with, and what has been the secret of its success?

My last effort drew together ideas from a dozen different complexity theorists. I was trying to accomplish two things that I think previous attempts to define such methodologies have lacked. The first was to tweak the invitation process so that the ‘crowd’ that was attracted to the event was truly diverse (some such events are too self-congratulatory and suffer from groupthink). Dave Snowden has even suggested that debate and disagreement are probably essential to progress in addressing complex problems.

The second was to ensure that, while the process had to be principally self-managed (or at most loosely facilitated), the attendees would be sufficiently informed about both the process (the methodology, and the nature and challenges of complex problems) and the specific problem they were addressing, that they left their preconceptions and pre-formed conclusions behind, and came to the event both knowledgeable and open-minded.

But it has since occurred to me that these two additional ‘ingredients’ (diversity and lack of preconceptions) are to some extent at odds. Let’s suppose for example the complex problem we’re tackling is creating natural enterprises — finding people to make a sustainable, joyful living with, and establishing and operating an enterprise with those people. A couple of weeks ago I presented a model for what I think is the first and most difficult part of that process: finding the right people to make a living with. Having put a lot of thought into it (and having a lot of entrepreneurial success stories and horror stories to draw on that support it) my propensity would be to provide this model as pre-reading for a ‘creating natural enterprises’ event, to help inform attendees. But what if that model were to turn off potential attendees who didn’t like that model, or who didn’t think finding the right partners was an important part of the process of creating natural enterprises? Would ‘my’ event end up being attended only by people who (perhaps erroneously) agreed with my ideas?

The great challenge we have in any open, self-managed process is that the more informed you are about a subject, the more likely you are to have already formed conclusions about approaches and even answers to the problems it presents. This is human nature — we form opinions quickly and change them slowly and reluctantly, as Lakoff’s theory of frames and worldviews has demonstrated. So we have a choice, in our invitees to complex problem events, between people who have already made up their minds what should be done (and will fiercely defend those views during the event) and those who are open-minded and are likely to accept the first intelligent view they hear at the event (not necessarily the most defensible). You’ve probably seen this dynamic in meetings and conferences you’ve attended. And notwithstanding the urgings of Scharmer, Varela et al to practice teaching ourselves to be open to new ideas, to ‘let go’ of our preconceptions and ‘let come’ new emergent possibilities, this is, I think, asking most of us to be what we are not.

What has, in my experience, led to the creation of extraordinary natural enterprises is a fortunate synchronicity of a group of people with complementary gifts who love each other (no I do not think ‘love’ is too strong a word) and who have learned something new on a subject about which they had no preconceptions at a time when they had the energy and predisposition and resources to do something about it. People who love each other are more willing to be open to new ideas, more willing to ‘let go’ and ‘let come’ and to persevere past the inevitable hurdles in new enterprise creation and operation.

If I were to organize and invite people to an event to address the challenges of creating natural enterprises, my guess is that it would attract roughly the right people — mostly people looking to create natural enterprises for themselves, and therefore engaged and motivated. It would, however, probably include some annoying people with magic, one-size-fits-all formulas for how to create natural enterprises that they’d try to force down everyone else’s throat.

The big problem would be that most of the motivated attendees would come with a lot of burdensome baggage, including preconceptions that natural enterprises, like other small enterprises, inevitably require:

• External ‘market’ financing
• A sales force, and lots of ‘marketing’
• A huge amount of work and self-sacrifice
• A tolerance for stress and the high likelihood of failure
• Hiring and ‘motivating’ employees
• Competition with ‘established players’ and adversarial relationships with some stakeholders
• Continuous growth

I have tried many times to smash these myths of entrepreneurship, but as long as business schools and other entrepreneurs keep repeating and reinforcing these myths, they will continue to prevail in the minds of most prospective entrepreneurs (and keep most from even trying to become entrepreneurs).

My great fear is that, if I were to convene an event on creating natural enterprises, it would be hijacked by:

• Believers in the myths above, who will try to focus the attendees’ attention on how to finance, sell, market, sacrifice, cope with stress, survive, hire, motivate, compete, defeat and grow, and
• Advocates of one-size-fits-all ‘turnkey’ solutions (ý la eMyth) trying to ‘sell’ their preconceived solution to the whole group.

If that were to happen, I think I would probably throw up my hands and walk out of my ‘own’ event. And I think there is a substantial likelihood that it would happen. I think that is the reason so many people end up developing and trying to sell their own entrepreneurial formulas (and there are a million of them out there) rather than put up with the disagreements that collaboration seems destined to bring. I also think that is the reason that I haven’t already held a event on creating natural enterprises.

If I were to hold one, the complex problem methodology I would propose to use is shown above right. It is simpler and more iterative than my previous attempts. The first three steps are pre-event activities, while the latter four are event activities. Here’s how they would work:

1. Research the Issue: Draw together as much information as possible about the issue. Post it somewhere, ideally using a wiki or some other collaborative format. Cite sources. Interpretations are permitted, but solutions and prescriptions, at this stage, are not. 
2. Articulate the Challenge: Develop a clear, succinct statement of the problem or challenge, and why it is such a challenge (i.e. extent, intractable nature, why previous ‘solutions’ appear to have failed).
3. Invite People to Address the Challenge: Send out an open invitation (Open Space style) designed to attract a diverse, engaged, reasonably informed and open-minded set of attendees. Invite people, whether they can attend or not, to contribute to the collective research developed so far. Ask invitees to study and think about the research. Also, ask invitees to think about how the challenge might be parsed (divided up into aspects for the brainstorming conversations during the event), and to post their thoughts on this to the collective research repository.
4. Parse the Challenge: At the start of the event, have the group decide (self-managed, Open Space style) which aspects of the challenge to address in smaller groups. They may draw on the parsing ideas in the repository, or may not.
5. Brainstorm Each Aspect: Over the next hours or days, have the self-selected groups converse, brainstorm, and self-document (using mindmaps or similar techniques, and transcribed stories) their learnings and ideas. Each session should start with an overview of the pertinent research from the respository, which should be available to everyone, and linked to from the mindmaps.
6. Integrate Learnings: This is a period for each participant to read and think about the mindmaps and stories from all the sessions.
7. Decide on Next Steps: Each participant tells the others, in turn, what they plan to do next, personally or with others, to use what they learned from the sessions. Participants may self-organize into groups to pursue some of these next steps. These next steps could include research towards another, perhaps more specific, event.

That’s it. I’ve deliberately made it as flexible as possible, and tried to avoid being overly prescriptive. The only differences from Open Space are the more substantive up-front research and the use of specific technologies (wikis for collaborative research, mindmaps and stories for documenting conversations). It could be used for a session on global warming, or world poverty, or creating a health system or an education system that actually works. It would be iterative, with high-level events leading to other events on more focused subjects, approaches or aspects of a problem. The events would probably have to be face-to-face, but there’s no reason they couldn’t be broadcast live and recorded, for Internet viewing.

So for an event on creating natural enterprises, for example, I would set up a wiki with all the data on underemployment, entrepreneurial failure rates and the reasons for them etc., but not including my Natural Enterprise models — that would be jumping to solutions. After articulating the challenge I would send an open invitation to the event, and open the wiki to others. I might suggest, on the wiki, as parsing options, a session on finding the right people to make a living with, and sessions on organic financing, viral marketing, how to research unmet needs, non-hierarchical organization, and succeeding without growth. As Open Space requires, whoever shows up would be the right people. I would not twist arms, nor would I refuse anyone who wanted to come.

And then the event would occur, and I would be just one of the participants, equal to all others. My guess is that, especially since Open Space would be a new process for most of the participants, it would be as much an experience learning about Open Space as grappling with the challenge of creating natural enterprises. I suspect I would be disappointed with what got accomplished, but not with the process. I expect some important new relationships would be formed and they would lead to some important new collaborations. I doubt that a strong consensus on how to create natural enterprises would emerge, though that might come later. I doubt that anyone would find others to make a living with at the first event, or decide on a product or service for a new natural enterprise, but I think it’s possible that future events on each of these two more specific subjects might well be more fruitful in those regards.

What is holding me back, I think, is fear of failure. Fear that I won’t be able to convince anyone that the myths of entrepreneurship are just that. Fear that I’m too far ahead in my thinking, and that no one will come, or understand. Fear that someone will try to hijack the event to sell their stale or naive ideas. Fear that people will not like, or not follow, the process. Fear that people will not be open to new ideas, or will be too open to new ideas. And most of all, fear that we no longer have the patience, or the time, to commit to any process that can actually work, that can actually make a difference in our beleaguered world.

But I think I will do it anyway. Probably a weekend this summer. Time to stop talking about it and do something. Stay tuned.