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Chris Meyer
CEO, Monitor Networks



in this article:
Stuart Kauffman
Biomimicry
fuel from microbes

Recombinant Strategy
Chris Meyer | October 2007
The CEO of Monitor Networks, a regular guest moderator at the ID Strategy Conference, talks about what design strategists can learn from complexity theory, molecular biology and the cross-pollination of disciplines.


(Vincent LaConte:) What is the history of your own interest in "design + strategy"?

(Chris Meyer:) My history with design as an aspect of strategy comes from resisting the conventional view. If you go to a business school, you'll hear phrases like, "Strategy is the irrevocable commitment of scarce resources." Sounds kind of scary, although I guess if you're Eisenhower, it's fairly relevant. Then you learn that strategy is a "growth-share matrix", which gets aggregated into portfolios of "stars" and "dogs". You basically get a very analytical perspective on what strategy should be. If you went to business school in the '70s, that was the dogma.

But my perspective is that what we call strategy at a given point in history is not just a more brilliant analysis than was ever done before of how to run a business; it's based on what's important at that moment in the economy. In the mid-70s, with an economy basically dominated by oligopolies -- three car companies, three major consumer products companies (Unilever, P&G and Colgate), Kraft vs. Nestle, Coke vs. Pepsi – slugging it out, it's no wonder you had a view of strategy that's just about market share.

Then later we got computers, and the "Bain view" of strategy, where finer and finer cuts at the data, "profitability analyses", became the norm. The idea was that you shouldn't subsidize less-profitable activities with more-profitable ones – we should be honing away everything that isn't "great". You got a very reductionist perspective.

So my history with design and strategy is a history of resisting those narrow "pronunciamenti" on what strategy is. Because if that was really all strategy is, computers could do it! So why is it that our view of strategy still can keep changing? Why do we still admire people who invent winning strategies?

My other perspective is, I've always been interested in seeing technology change what's possible, and how the economy reorganizes around that. The last 20 years have been a kind of orgy of this.

I didn't know anything about design, but came to discover it, not least through interaction with the Institute of Design, but also through a radically different perspective: from complexity theory.

Strategy as I learned it in business school was very much like engineering: making incremental improvements in what already exists. Well, if nothing's changing, probabilities favor that kind of strategy. But in a rapidly changing environment, it's not very good because your innovations won't fall very far from the tree.

So, we need what [complexity theorist] Stuart Kauffman would call "non-linear searches of high-dimensional solution spaces", or what designers would call "a charrette". The idea is that if you have a problem, and if you challenge a diverse group of people with different perspectives to solve it, then you will find solutions that are very far apart in this "high-dimensional solution space" – you don't even know how to talk about them using the same framework. Then you go through essentially a biological process of recombination of all these different features, to get to a solution you like. [Meyer, Chris and Stan Davis. It's Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology, and Business. Crown Business, 2003)]

The fascinating thing about events like this Strategy Conference is that it's a place where you can explore problems like this, from multiple directions.

Are you familiar with the Biomimicry Guild and their work with designers?

I'm aware of their founder, Janine Benyus, and I've looked at her book…. I think the profound truth of it is, that nature does the designing. The environment does the designing. There is a process complexity theorists call co-evolution: or as Stuart Kauffman once said, when the frog gets a sticky tongue, the flies get Teflon feet. Seeing that in action is a profound thing for designers or strategists (if you even distinguish between the two).

But I think it's possible to be a little too literal about why these things are cool. I've heard people talk about biomimicry as if you could directly copy strategies [from nature]. I think there is a place where that's true, but it's at the level of molecules and cells. I believe it was Richard Feynman who said, we can already create microscopic factories that do anything we want; they're called cells. Once we understand molecular-level processes, we can achieve the kinds of efficiencies seen in nature, in particular energy efficiencies. So at the level where molecular technologists work, doing tissue engineering, breeding microbes that clean the air or make diesel fuel, that's the level where biomimicry is transformational.

Is anyone really doing this?

Yes. There are large numbers of small groups of people doing this stuff. The winners roster of the MIT Technology Review TR35 competition has at least half a dozen. This year's winner, David Berry, was making renewable petroleum from microbes. Also, the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which has about six different approaches to growing organic tissues, from biotech to nanotech.

What's the most important social or technological long-term trend on your radar?

One we've already touched on, and that's molecular science.

The second is a cliché, until you decide what you think it really means, and that's globalization. For the purposes of this conversation, let's go back to this pointy-headed view of "searching for solutions in non-linear high-dimensional spaces". Biologists talk about the idea of "requisite variety", in other words, a monoculture [an ecology dominated by one species] is the least survivable type of culture in a given environment that's changing at a certain speed. Whatever that requisite variety is, it puts a boundary on what solutions you can consider. But when you expand your environment, you create many more possibilities, learning opportunities, and features -- and that's what's happening around the world today.

It's as if a mature economy or culture loses its requisite variety over time. We saw this in Europe several years ago, we see it today in the United States. So the source of new vitality is from other cultures, other "ecologies". Understanding why people in Dubai are building what they're building is really important; understanding why NGOs are taking a different role elsewhere in the world than [in the U.S.] is really important as we think about how capitalism is going to evolve. To say that the American model of market capitalism is, in Francis Fukuyama's phrase, "the end of history", and that it's now our job to impose it everywhere, is the national version of the loud Texan tourist in an Italian hotel, complaining about ordering a martini and getting a Martini & Rossi.

What's crucial for the world is that we have an open enough system, an open enough intellectual ecology, that we can learn and gain vitality from newly exposed parts of the world that see different ways to do things. Of course, you have to expect a certain proportion of those new ideas will turn out to be kudzu – an invasive species. This is how parts of the world view American business strategy today.

I just came from a meeting about the future of the urban planet. We talked about the huge number of solutions developing in the edge cities around Mumbai, Jakarta, Dhaka, where people have no infrastructure, and have to figure out their own water and electricity and sewage. The dialog between mature cities and emerging cities, what each can learn from each other, is a fascinating conversation.

What kind of education and skill-building (if any) do you think design and innovation leaders should be getting?

One is engineering: great design has to work. The design world in general can become too "artistic". To give a simple example, I now have a stylish briefcase from Zegna with beautiful hardware, except the hardware tends to lock up and put stress on the leather and cause it to break, if I'm not extra careful. This is a problem that's been solved successfully thousands of times! But somebody decided it would be cool to part from that solution -- and give me something that doesn't work as well.

Another skill is communication. Many designers expect a design solution to sell itself. But it is only a small segment of their audience for whom that will be true.

What are one or two best practices for designers to follow for better communication?

Two from my own experience, one about graphics and one about writing.

In the writing case, I'm in the role of designer and my editor is in the role of collaborator. My editor knows things about writing I don't, and will infallibly find passages where I actually didn't know what I was talking about. So we'll work together to make the thing communicate. This is really how I learned to write for a business audience -- not by trading marked-up pages, but by sitting down with someone I respected as a gifted editor and having her teach me how to improve.

I have a similar collaboration with my graphic designer, where I will give her a general description, she will design something, and I will be in the role of saying, "OK, here's something you didn't know about that subject" and how that can improve her work.

If you take Roger Martin's idea [of reliability vs. validity], where you have the two intersecting bell curves [of design-thinkers and business-thinkers], he tends to talk about the people who are at the intersection. I would say that the best practice is that, wherever you happen to fall as an individual, you learn to find someone from the other population and work together at that intersection around a specific task. Because if the message is, "If you're either a pure-bred designer, or a pure-bred strategist, you're kind of a schmuck", and only these magical people with a foot in both camps can do good design, that's a pretty tough message. You've already done your Meyers-Briggs or whatever and you just are what you are. The best practice is for people of good will and different skills to learn to collaborate both divergently and convergently. That's why my work since 1995 is all around recombination of thinking, finding ways that diverse groups can collaborate around a single issue, and finding the right social engineering so that everyone wants to hear other perspectives and learn from them.


About Chris Meyer
Christopher Meyer is Chief Executive of Monitor Networks and writes and speaks about the trends shaping business and economic developments. His most recent book is It's Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology, and Business. He has also co-authored Blur: The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy and Future Wealth with Stan Davis, and contributed to publications such as Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Fast Company, Time, The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Business 2.0. Chris' recent research and consulting have focused on the development of the Adaptive Enterprise, helping companies create the capacity to sense, respond, and adapt to changes in their business environments.

Prior to joining The Monitor Group, Chris was the Director of the Center for Business Innovation at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, from 1995 until its closing in December 2002. The Center fostered the conversation of leading issues among the business community, developed public conferences, established new services and businesses, and shared what it learned with business practitioners. At the CBI, he founded and served on the Board of the Bios Group, a venture that invested in applications of complexity theory to business. Chris holds a B.A. in both Mathematics and Economics from Brandeis University and a M.B.A. (with Distinction) from The Harvard Business School.

More at www.themonitornetworks.com/about/people_meyer.html.