We Think Therefore We Am

‘We Think’ by Charles Leadbetter, Draft, Blog & Wiki

Reviewed by John Helmer

As an occasional book reviewer I’m used to seeing books ahead of their official publication date. Usually, however, the books are finished, and as a general rule I’m sharing the experience with a handful of other hacks, not with thousands of members of the general public.

In October 2007 Charles Leadbeater, ranked by Accenture as one of the top management thinkers in the world, made the first draft of ‘We Think’, his new work about the power of collaborative creativity, freely available for download on his website. At the same time he made his text the basis of a wiki, inviting all-comers to comment upon, add to and generally help him out with his work in progress. The final result of this bold act of collaborative creation will be published officially in August this year – however that publication date is in a sense arbitrary, since the point of writing the book, according to the author, is not to create a text but to create a conversation. Consider this ‘review’, therefore, a contribution to the conversation.

‘We Think’ draws together a number of seemingly diverse strands to describe what Leadbeater sees as a socio-economic revolution in contemporary culture, charting the rise of mass, participative approaches to innovation and the advent of the ‘Pro-Am’ movement. This is where large groups of committed and knowledgeable amateurs, usually unpaid, create highly collaborative forms of organization: ‘...the barefoot philosophy of amateurs doing jobs previously reserved for professionals’. To support his case he draws on a wide range of examples – covering everything from pro-am astronomy and the development of open source software (Linux, Apache, etc.) to computer games and political campaigning.

The breadth and range of the examples is one of the greatest strengths of Leadbeater’s account. One minute we’re in the Indian state of Bihar, where Sanjit Bunker Roy is helping villagers train themselves up to be barefoot teachers and engineers – the next we’re in Marin County, California, witnessing the birth of the mountain bike, a new concept in bicyle design developed almost entirely by pro-am cycle enthusiasts. We even visit Get Frank in Brighton. Other examples he gives of the ‘We Think’ phenomenon will be even closer to home, for readers of Epic Thinking at least; namely the open source movement and the rise of user-generated content in developments such as Wikipedia, You Tube, Second Life and e-bay.

Occasionally this breadth of reference can lead to a sense of disorientation. ‘We Think’ is very good in identifying the drivers of the Pro-Am phenomenon in the affluent West – falling costs of technology, cheaper communications, rising educational attainment, longer life spans, greater affluence - however these drivers don’t really apply to Bangladesh, or Central Brazil, or other places in the developing world from which most of his examples concerning social entrepreneurship are drawn. At times you wonder whether what he is talking about here is really one thing.

Leadbeater’s core idea however, so far as I understand it, is that true creativity comes out of conversations between people who hold differing points of view, and not from lone thinkers and experimenters slaving in isolation. This is a valuable perspective, but in order to pull together the disparate threads of his observations into a ‘big idea’ he sets up an opposition between the fluid, collaborative type of creativity he is in favour of (‘the beach ethic of self-organisation’) and wicked corporate control freakery, as represented by a fairly familiar cast of baddies (whose names, incidentally, almost always seem to begin with M). “Open Source is a damning critique of everything that big business stands for and an essential challenge to monopolists such as Microsoft and Monsanto...” He also demonises McKinsey and Mickey Mouse. Well, OK; polemicists need Aunt Sallys. The trouble is that things aren’t always that simple, and in fudging some of the detail he lays the project open to criticism.

In the following paragraph from which the above quote is chosen, Leadbeater goes onto eulogise, by way of contrast, “open and interactive approaches to innovation with communities of developers and users.” All well and good, but the members of Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professionals’ (MVP) online community, one of the best established informal networks of IT professionals in the world, covering some 1,200 to 1,400 engineers, might with some justification complain that this account gives short shrift to the work they do and have been doing for many years to make Microsoft products less bad than they might otherwise be – activity which Microsoft supports. Sometimes the baddies get to use bottom-up creativity too.

Elsewhere he comes unstuck (we think) in making an invidious comparison between open source software development and cathedral building. “Eric Raymond, the open source software guru, says mass collaborative innovation is like a bazaar – open, cacophonous, with no one in control – rather than a cathedral, where craftsmen implement a master plan.” Well this might hold true if it’s one of Liverpool’s two cathedrals he’s talking about, both executed in the modern era, but it sadly traduces the nature of the process by which most (Medieval) cathedrals were built, a far more improvisatory and cacophonous one than he imagines, with structures frequently collapsing in whole or in part, their shape and design evolving on the job as their anonymous architects (craftsmen who shared knowledge informally through underground networks stretching across geo-political boundaries) struggled to understand an emerging science of structural engineering. Sometimes even the Church gets to use bottom-up creativity.

These are relatively small quibbles, however, and are certainly not designed to offer comfort to those who work to ‘enslave our imaginations’ by imposing top-down, industrial-era management styles.

Idealism is always easy to take a poke at, and Leadbeater acknowledges that his ideas will strike many as ‘utopian and fanciful’. Neither does he make any bold claims about their newness: these are old ideas, he freely admits. Both the philosophy, and much of the technology he is talking about come from the Sixties. Many of the organisational ideas he espouses – the idea of ‘the commons’ for instance – go back even further: they’re pre-industrial. What we are seeing, he says (not in his manuscript, but on You Tube) is a recovery of old ideas, and a strange recombination of these pre-industrial ideas with post-industrial ones. That in itself is a ‘big idea’, and what’s more, it’s an interesting one.

Some of us will have to look less far back to find pre-echoes of ‘We Think’. Aside from the obvious debts to Benkler, Surowieki and Hippel (Malcom Gladwell also gets several name checks), veterans of First Tuesday and the ferment of radical ideas and commercial naïvete that was the Dot-Com Boom will find much of what they read here familiar. We might also be reminded of lesser-known writers associated with that period such as Peter Small, whose book ‘The Entrepreneurial Web’ covered similar territory, though in a perhaps more off-beat way. Leadbeater’s great advantage over such pioneers, writing now as he does, is that the Web is here, and real – so real that he barely mentions it, focusing on the human dimensions of social and business organisation rather than on the enabling technology.

It’s this focus on the human and social plane that kept me reading through to the end – or to be more accurate, to the place where the manuscript peters out and stops, halfway through a thought about cities (this is a first draft, remember; full of typos and repetitions, and lacking a polished conclusion). Even if you’re not quite sure whether the ‘social entrepreneurism’ strand of the book fits entirely neatly into the whole, you have to applaud the breadth of vision behind the enterprise. This is not just another ‘gee-wow’ book about how the internet is changing our lives. Like many others, I imagine, I will be going back for a second look in August to see where the conversation ended up - if publication really can, for this project, be described as an end point.

While ‘We Think’s message is broad enough in scope to merit a wide audience (assuming that the 12,000 people who have downloaded the first draft aren’t the sole limits of its market) the book seems liable to spark the most interesting continuing conversations, perhaps, in large organisations. Leadbeater is, after all, a management consultant, and his core area of expertise is those organisations and the various ways in which they can be structured and led. Despite its Speilberg-style wide focus beginning, its frantic darting across the globe chapter by chapter, the book’s most absorbing moments come when Leadbeater is focusing on the thing he has studied most deeply in his day job, how creativity can be aided - and hindered - in the workplace, and the vital difference between Attraction and Propulsion as leadership styles.

Most traditional senior managers think they are in the propulsion business: it is their job to propel their organisation on, drive it forward. Senior managers arrive at their offices early in the morning, ready to pick up the organisation as if it were a rock and throw it forward, to get it from A to B. But instead imagine your task is to get a bird from point A to point B. If you have spent too much time with McKinsey & Co you will know the solution is to strap up the bird’s wings, attach a rock to the bottom and throw it. The bird is likely to die in the process and has been robbed of all birdlike properties but at least it gets to its destination. Now imagine your task is to get a flock of birds from point A to point B. That flock includes you staff, customers, suppliers, shareholders, partners, even some of your competitors. You do not have enough hands and rocks to propel them all. The only way to get them to point B is to attract them by putting out bird-seed and water at point B. Standard approaches to management rely on shock and propulsion. Innovation thrives when flocks of creative people – inside and outside an organisation – are attracted to an exciting goal or opportunity ... Or put it another way, if it’s a choice between Jack Welch and Jimmy Wales, give me Jimmy Wales every time.