The Authentic Organization

How long to hold on to an idea is a wonderfully tricky question. I can’t help but write in fairly personal terms about it.

Early on in the life of an idea, my own preference is to give it room to grow. That means I will expose the idea to supportive criticism, but not to a mainstream marketplace of ideas. Such marketplaces have a way of homogenizing, ignoring, or distorting concepts that don’t fit into the currently fashionable frames of reference.

My personal weakness (and sometime strength) is to anticipate structural problems in a community of practice that don’t directly relate to the current day to day issues of most of the practitioners. This means that most of the time I can only effectively speak to a small proportion of those practitioners who are also looking at the same time frame. From the rest, the mostly likely response is indifference and from some, outright hostility. Both of those responses can be seen, from a certain point of view, as entirely reasonable.

One relatively recent example in my own life is my work a number of years ago, in favor of open standards and APIs in the field of nonprofit software. Basically, I was arguing that nonprofits should be pushing vendors to not lock them in, to open their systems to work with other systems, and so on. While most people at the time would admit that this sounded like a good idea, basically very few cared to invest anything in it. Today, the mainstream environment around this has shifted and thus the field is starting to come around. In the mean time, vast resources have been spent, enormous lock-in created, far-thinking vendors put out of business, and generally, the problem is much worse.

Common story, isn’t it? It’s a systemic issues that speaks directly to a question of strategy about new ideas: What sequence of environments will best nurture good ideas over time? Sometimes it makes sense to release good ideas “into the wild” in the hopes that the right people will connect to and through those ideas. Sometimes it doesn’t.

That said, I’ve been blogging my ideas about civil society quite openly for ten years now, at Nonprofit Online News. Nobody would suggest that I’m shy about sharing new ideas, although I have a lot to learn about identifying and creating nurturing environments for them. Most of those ideas don’t get much traction, but that’s the way with ideas in general. Ideas are cheap. If a few get some traction, then I’m pretty content.