1: EMBRACE THE SWARM, STRATEGIES
If you are not in real time, you're dead.
Swarms need real-time communication. Living systems don't have the luxury of waiting overnight to process an incoming signal. If they had to sleep on it, they could die in their sleep. With few exceptions, nature reacts in real time. With few exceptions, business must increasingly react in real time. High transaction costs once prohibited the instantaneous completion of thousands of tiny transactions; they were piled up instead and processed in cost-effective batches. But no longer. Why should a phone company get paid only once a month when you use the phone every day? Instead it will eventually bill for every call as the call happens, in real time. The flow of crackers off grocery shelves will be known by the cracker factory in real time. The weather in California will be instantly felt in the assembly lines of Ohio. Of course, not all information should flow everywhere; only the meaningful should be transmitted. But in the network economy only signals in real time (or close to it) are truly meaningful. Examine the speed of knowledge in your system. How can it be brought closer to real time? If this requires the cooperation of subcontractors, distant partners, and far-flung customers, so much the better.
Hi Kevin,
Very seductive idea, but I think it has three big weaknesses:
1) Your real time notion works only as long as computers are the main recipients and processors of this real time information. Human brains need time to process information and make decisions, and tend to make them better on a large amount of information than one piece at a time, which by definition defeats the purpose of real time.
2) Computers are only as good as the programming and information given to them. The more complex the decision algorithm or the model, the more likely that there are using simplifying assumptions, their programmers neglected unforeseen special cases and made outright errors, which will give garbage out - i.e. bad decisions and reactions. Only a human exercising their critical thinking will see the mistake (and we're back to 1) and the limitations of the brain in terms of speed).
3) Reacting in real time - or short-term - does not always lead to the best long-term results, because you don't give yourself the time and space to think things through and examine the long-term consequences and what-ifs. There are many examples of business short-term decisions that didn't serve a company in the long term (for instance, it's one of the reasons GM is teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, while Toyota became the largest auto company and is still doing very well).
My experience in individual productivity has also shown me that reacting in real time is not always the right thing to do. One among many reasons: many things don't need to be reacted to at all, but if you get in the habit of real-time reaction, very quickly you forget to first ask yourself whether you need to react in real time.
And real-time reaction doesn't always improve the situation. I much prefer receiving one monthly bill for my phone than being billed individually for every call - much easier for me to keep track of the trends. :-)
I think real time works really well in just-in-time manufacturing and stocking, but shouldn't necessarily be extended to everything business.
Karin
www.dailymastery,com
Latency is a measurable quantity for any information transition. As messages may have taken years, months, or days through prehistoric, ancient, and industrial times, so they will continue decreasing in latency from hours, minutes, seconds, and milliseconds.
@Karin RE: 1)
That is why most successful realtime collaboration platforms facilitate small and discrete additions. Each message in a forum is relatively brief, yet the contributions of many participants adds up to a larger discussion. Likewise, wikis allow many individuals to make small edits, combining them into the final result.
@Karen RE:1)
1. I agree with Mike (not me the other one, although I do agree with myself, most the time.). One brain needs time to process much information but many brains processing limited amount of information working in collaboration or coordination makes for quicker output, while utilizing multiple perspectives (granted of course that these perspectives are capable of making most accurate decisions).
2. Everything is changing in Real Time. Planning, while good for the human that is running away from death, is possibly not the best options for companies who want to evolve to the next stage. I know it's cliche but no one knows for sure what is going to happen tomorrow, so how can you make plans about something you don't know. We run into this problem when wondering if you should borrow money to buy x amount of widgets, expecting the demand during Christmas to be huge. You have three possible outcomes, 1. You sell many widgets and make a fortune, 2. You don't sell hardly any and suffer losses, 3. Some combination of 1 and 2. But you are put into this quandary precisely because of latency. Ideally we would want to operate as close to Real time as possible. Our form of production currently limits that possibility because of how we manufacture products and provide services, but hopefully the difference between a problem and a solution or a supply and demand will get shorter and shorter. Pretty soon if we desire some product, a chip in our head will register the product of want, tell our product printer at home, which will contact the license holder of said product to get the specs, and have the thing printed out by the time we got home.
3. Working in Real time is not the problem. The problem is our current ways of providing goods and services is not set up to respond quickly enough. Humans have to account for the latency inherent in our current business models (ie. future demand forecasting, budgeting, etc.). But if the business is designed around operating in Real Time or short-term we can realize these goals much quicker. Anyway how much cooler would it be to be living right here right now. Most of the anxiety people face at their jobs is because of keeping up with a future that seems to move more and more quickly.
I realize Karin, that you do make some very good points, I just thought I would play devil's advocate. But in all seriousness I think the Now that is coming into existence will benefit from the best of both approaches and any combination of other possible ideas.
There are slow responders in nature that are very successful. Plants, and trees especially, come to mind. Not everything in the world is animal-quick.
Being a student of lean development (Toyota school of thought), I clearly recognize the principle you are outlining. Drive down cycle-times, where real-time is the ideal objective.
Toyota specifically mentions the cooperation of subcontractors and partners as a prerequisite for achieving real-time (just-in-time) decision making.
The principles are outlined here : http://www.poppendieck.com/