The new challenge is immateriality. The immateriality of value, the immateriality of spaces, and almost – one could say – the immateriality of materials.

We already understood with the arrival of perhaps the telegraph in the 19th century (read the fascinating “The Information” by James Gleick), which so frightened journalists by transforming the world, by eliminating distances, that value was no longer physical, but knowledge, information. The speed of transmission, the means, have radically changed in recent years, and this change is only accelerating, frenetically.

Space and time

Spaces are no longer the same: we work from anywhere, with anyone. New tools (Right now: Slack, Google apps, Trello, Gitlab, Skype, Whatsapp, and many others) have made possible a group dynamic that frees itself from the physical limitations that we nevertheless mentioned previously. The ubiquity reserved in our legends for our Gods is not far: we are everywhere at once, we know everything immediately.

Making it operational?

How do we return to something operational when we have long said (and continue to think enormously) that colocation and the attentive treatment of all the physical space around a proximity, a visible autonomy were essential, and that, subsequently, the immateriality of the world opening up to us deprives us of this?

Remote work is certainly an important element of our era, inevitable, it seems like civilizational progress, a shame and even impossible to do without. But how do we deal with these remote teams or remote work? I have observed several phenomena. It is first important to preserve the same level of knowledge, knowing, information. The notions of clear objective and clear rules extend to the idea of shared, aligned knowledge. What we know about these non-localized teams is that there is a fundamental difference between dispersed teams: their distribution (number, geography) is unbalanced, and distributed teams where their distribution is balanced. For example, for dispersed you have four people on site, and two on remote sites. It’s complicated to make work because there is an imbalance in communication. But if you have six people, each on six remote sites, there is no imbalance. Communication is indeed key. By having the same level of communication, we induce the same level of transparency and therefore trust, and therefore involvement and freedom on which building something is possible.

We must also preserve this important notion of autonomy. The problem with offshoring is not so much the distance as the siloing and extreme blindness.

The problem with remote work, or more globally with remote activity, without physical gathering, is the impossibility of working on multiple channels at once (visual, auditory, kinesthetic). By kinesthetic, understand touch, bodily sensations. I was able to measure the importance of constantly repeating the same message using different formulations, and using different formats: written, drawings, post-its, speech, etc. I was struck to see how group dynamics evolve (in a good way) when we tried to mix all channels (visual, auditory, kinesthetic). This is lacking if we are perpetually at a distance, where everyone must think to equip themselves and act to make physical or written or oral the information that constantly arrives through another channel. This requires good self-knowledge, and discipline.

It is also necessary to create a sense of belonging and collective purpose. Open source software teams regularly hold summits; informal meetings whose primary objective is first to meet, to project oneself, to make one’s mirror neurons vibrate, to constitute this loop of loving, tribal, familial, ancestral belonging of the limbic brain.

Matter

Agile is often brought back to Lean. Often because industrial Lean reassures. I hope to have explained here or there (Lean Topology at InfoQ) why this notion of repeatable and linear industrialization is obsolete in most of the professions I encounter. I’m called and asked if we can be Agile in an assembly line? What worked there, well we’d like to reproduce it here. But the emergence linked to complex systems has nothing to do with the repeatability and linearity of industrial systems of the last century. Yet it’s emergence that is today necessary to skillfully respond to the modern world so competitive and changing: emergence, modularity, collective intelligence. In systemics too, we cannot rethink a part of the system, do sub-optimization, inject agile somewhere. We must often rethink the entire system. As always, we don’t go faster, we go differently.

For many years this seemed impossible, the industrial approach of the last century seemed durably installed. Difficult to explain to an automotive manufacturer to rethink its system, even today, and yet. As always the limitation was only that of our thinking, they didn’t know it was impossible so they did it, said Mark Twain. Wikispeed appeared. Wikispeed completely rethought car manufacturing with a fresh spirit, inspired by the Agile movement. Without muscle memory of what had to be done, with the naivety and power of children. They demonstrated and succeeded in inventing a new car, which is manufactured differently, which is thought differently, and which is used normally. Their results in safety tests are stunning. They had to dare. They did it. So if car manufacturing is not immune to this revolution, who would be?

Matter bends to our way of thinking about the world. To gain flexibility, matter articulates into small pieces, no emergence with monoliths. All IT services are starting to think microservices (we are in 2015/2016, I don’t know what the future holds). Microservices that articulate and aggregate according to needs. Wikispeed thought of its cars as components that are assembled and thought of like pieces of a construction set.

Matter bends to our way of thinking about the world and to the capacity we give ourselves to make it malleable. But I believe this last barrier with 3D printing has just exploded. With the democratization and coming surge of 3D printing, matter has loosened its grip on its dictate of the possible, the feasible. It’s thought, knowledge, understanding, information that now take precedence, that subjugate matter. Emergence, modularity, collective intelligence.

Matter maintains its importance: as raw material. As an energy source to manipulate. Once again: matter bends to our way of thinking about the world. In the same vein, it’s when we understood and knew that the world was round and not flat with an end that people launched themselves into its discovery. The barrier was mental.

Making it operational?

Difficult to tell yourself that you must think differently. It’s an injunction difficult to respect. I had mentioned a workshop I had called “meme space” itself very inspired by known and recognized games and workshops, which I practice when my clients understand its necessity and foundation. How to think differently. I will talk more about innovation (crossing notions and ideas to bring forth new visions, new development axes) than pure creation (something totally new).

Usually I take over a room, and I ask my contacts to wallpaper a wall with post-its on which they indicate what they are, their values, their principles, their qualities, their strengths, what defines them. On another wall I ask that we put in the same way the qualities we find in competitors or the qualities of great ideas and great products that surround us. Finally on a third wall, why not put adjectives (green, long, transparent) objects that surround us daily (this last notion is important, the everyday is probably where our impact will be most considerable). Afterwards, either during dedicated sessions, or as we go during the week (it’s good to let it simmer), we launch into the exercise of picking an element from each wall and finding a crazy idea that could emerge from it. Let’s keep a fourth wall to store these crazy ideas. As in all brainstorming, exaggeration is required. I propose strongly supporting it so as not to set limits on thought. We are often surprised.

I always have this story that Valérie Wattelle told me, and that serves as my example of the exaggeration necessary for good brainstorming (and that I had already told here):

A large Canadian consortium is responsible for the power lines that run through the country’s forests. Problem: the weight of snow threatens to collapse these said lines. And it’s long and complicated to handle. All the more so because it’s dangerous, Canadian forests host a slew of bears. How to solve this problem? They brainstorm, without hesitating to get crazy, we don’t know what will come of it, but well. Let’s see. Suddenly an incongruous idea emerges:

• What if we relied precisely on the bears? The bears?
• Yes they could come scratch the poles?
• Will scratching be enough to make the snow fall?
• Or shake them? With honey?
• Yes by making them shake the poles we can imagine that the snow falls. (really this meeting is ridiculous).
• Ok but the honey would need to be at the top of the poles to push them to shake or at least to climb the poles, right?
• By placing honey pots at the top of the poles, on the lines? Attracted they will come shake the poles.
• Ok, and how do we place the honey pots on the poles? We can’t place thousands of honey pots? Plus at the top…
• Hummm, what if we poured honey on the lines by passing with a helicopter? Easy for a helicopter to pass over the lines to deposit honey without risk!

…

Bingo: the organization solved its problem… by flying a helicopter over the lines, its blades make the snow fall.

All this innovation is a question of serendipity. Make it visible. Many card games allow exchanges and mixing, incongruous situations to think differently. Also inject new profiles. Hence often the great interest of new blood in teams. They dare things we have forgotten to dare. They think things we no longer know how to think. (But only new blood causes loss of knowledge).

Value

Value today is less and less about property (space, time or matter), but more and more about knowledge, understanding, information. Recent major economic successes are based on this new matter floating in the air, research (Google), connecting people (Uber, AirBnB, Blablacar, etc). Like one of the great shifts in the Agile way of thinking is to no longer focus on work, time spent, but on value created.

This completes this challenge of immateriality: matter has lost its supremacy. Information and knowledge have taken center stage. Let’s learn to play with them. Let’s learn to no longer judge on work but on value, let’s understand that this modularity expressed in matter, in new tools, is also expressed in the articulations of organizations: distributed teams, remote work, dematerialized belonging, digital community.

Ubiquity, malleability, simultaneity

Immateriality in the sense that matter is no longer a limit, neither in space (ubiquity), nor as material (malleability), nor almost at the temporal level (simultaneity).

To complement this article: video and slides at InfoQ: Lean Topology.

Illustration: Esther Stocker exhibition, London, 2008