Xerox PARC famously invented the mouse, the graphical user interface, and the printer. Then watched Steve Jobs walk off with all of it.
The usual lessons that are touted as a takeaway from this story? One is about creating the conditions to enable innovation, but the main one is pointing at Silly Old Management who didn't recognise what they had.
The actual lesson is much more useful. And more interesting. AND ... more uncomfortable for innovator types. You might want to sit in your beanbag so you can't storm off. It's not enough to just create the conditions for innovation to happen – although that's hard enough for starters. It also falls on your shoulders to create the conditions for innovation to be re-integrated into the wider company.
That's what the PARC director missed. What many innovators still miss today.
Xerox PARC is a cautionary tale about when Uncertainty Bubbles (which we first wrote about a few weeks ago) fail on the outside even when they succeed on the inside.
In the latest episode of our Tentacles podcast, we talk through all the nitty gritty details of this story: What Xerox PARC actually got wrong
And here's how Dave Snowden summarised Uncertainty Bubbles a few weeks ago as part of his excellent series about Rewilding OODA:
An Uncertainty Bubble is a protected space where different constraints apply from what normally happens in an organisation. The outside of the bubble is legible to the organisation’s existing processes, the inside is shaped with a different set of conditions that enable/encourage creation-destruction. Creating, holding, and closing an uncertainty bubble is a political and structural act. A bubble that never closes doesn’t integrate, it just orphans its own discoveries. Xerox PARC is the cautionary tale. [On 4U]: Unpack is the prior move: making the existing mental world visible as a mental world, rather than as reality. Undergo is about loading stress onto the existing frame. Unfold is the destroy and create moment. The new orientation needs to be more effective for operating in the outside world — that’s the external test. But it also needs to be reintegrated into the organisation’s implicit frame — that’s the political test.
We love Dave's dense summary, and our podcast conversation is a helpful companion to add meat to those bones.
Using Xerox PARC as the perfect case study of an Uncertainty Bubble with a membrane that's too thick and too long-lived, we contrast that with one of our client engagements that had the right kind of membrane:
- What does it take to run the scary process of innovation under the radar, while keeping stakeholders just comfortable enough not to kill it?
- Why the PARC director's real mistake wasn't being too far ahead, it was attempting to maintain the bubble with a trade fair.
- "Duringmath": why the groundwork has to happen during the bubble, not after.
- Nemawashi, information radiators, and the meetings before the meeting.
- The MAYA principle: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable, and what happens when you violate it.
- How a "challenge month" became an uncertainty bubble that nobody could see was improvised and revised daily.
- The barbell strategy for uncertainty: work the certain end and the wildly uncertain end; leave the middle for later.
- Why successful projects end up nothing like the plan ... and why that's the whole point.
- Pretotyping. Which means build nothing if possible, cobble something together if necessary, and build it for real last of all.
This one's for anyone who's tried to run an experiment inside a company that wasn't ready for it, or tried and failed to innovate by following official processes, or wondered why the brilliant innovator always seems to end up persona non grata.
Listen to the conversation: What Xerox PARC actually got wrong
Tom & Corissa x
P.S. Interested in learning more about Uncertainty Bubbles and how to make them work for you? We're running a free online session on Wednesday July 8th at 3pm UK time. Book here: https://luma.com/wnacouzn
