| D O O R S O F P E R C E P T I O N 5 | |
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| The play of business |  |
| PDF link for printable transcription | Danny Hillis |
When I saw the title of the session, I was all a bit worried. But then I realised I could talk about the play of business as opposed to the business of play. The business of play actually turns out to be, as many of you're discovering, not that much more interesting than any other business. On the other hand, I think that play has a very important role in any kind of a business. So that's the topic I'm gonna discuss today. And I'm gonna give a few examples of lessons that I've learned, some of them the hard way, in working in small companies and big companies and big companies that are becoming small companies and small companies that are becoming big companies, and so on. And I suspect many of you are in that situation right now. And as John said, it's something to worry about; you should be worried about it because the character of business changes. But I think that play continues to play an important role. And that's what I'll be talking about. Now first I should say what I mean by play. We've been talking about it a lot but I think people mean various different things. I'm using play in a fairly broad sense, I don't just mean games or toys. But what I mean is 'undirected activity that's done just purely for the joy of it, by amateurs at it'. So it's something that, first of all you're not an expert at it, and second, you do it because you love it. So I don't count for example the professional musician playing an instrument as being play. I think that's something else. That's the exercise, the skill, that means redoing it for the joy of it. But I think it's a different kind of a thing than play. With play I basically mean, doing something that you don't quite know how to do yet. So it has a learning component to it, fundamentally. Now if you think of these two aspects of the definition of play, it seems almost contradictory to business. Because business is what you're doing to make money, so you're doing it for a very focused reason. And also if business is any good, you're doing it because you're good at it. So you're doing things. You're exercising skills that you're very good at or at least better at than anybody else. So it seems almost diametrically opposed to play. On the other hand, I'm gonna argue that great businesses always incorporate an element of play. They use play as a tool and they do it well. For me the place where I first learned this lesson, or first started and learned the first half of this lesson, was at the Artificial Intelligence laboratory at MIT when I was a student there. When I arrived at that laboratory, it looked like a bunch of schoolchildren playing around. There were unicycles going through the hall, there were people in offices building piles of blocks, reading children stories, playing little games like Tic-Tac-Toe and chess. And in fact it was kind of embarrassing when the sponsors came to visit us. It was sponsored by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, they'd be sort of generals and politicians and things like that. And they would come in and see somebody ride by on the unicycle and see the kids playing with blocks and reading stories, and go: 'what's going on here?' And we made up all kinds of stories to explain to them what was going on, about how in order to develop machine intelligence, we had to understand the basics of human intelligence. So we had to play games because they were ideal ways of studying human intelligence. And we had to ride unicycles because we needed to study motor control. And we had to sing songs because we needed to study the structure of patterns. A lot of this we just made up, but they bought it and continued to fund us. And there was a grain of truth to it - but it was an incredibly playful and fun place. The meeting hall was called the playroom. And in fact we did try to give our sponsors their money's worth and work on these things like product logic and machine vision analysis, salk rhythms and so on. But then at night we would come in and we would do things like develop Space War, or make the computer so that we could do our term papers on them, or connect the computers together so that we could send messages back and forth in a little mail system. But the interesting lesson that I learned from that experience is that if you go back and look at the things that we were doing, the stuff that we were doing that we thought was the hard work and the serious work, which was things like the machine vision, algorithms and the logic of reasoning and so on, actually turned out to be not that important. I mean, they're continued to be developed, but the real breakthroughs that happened came from the stuff that we were playing with. And so the really important things that came out were things like Space War, and text editors and computer mail and networking and that kind of stuff that we were just doing for the sure joy of it. So in fact the very sensible business person that would come in should have ignored what we're doing during the day as the official thing but if they'd come and taken what we were doing at night just for the joy of it, they could have made a multi-billion dollar businesses out of it. So that for me was a kind of object lesson as the computer industry began to grow. And it is hard to - I know that a lot of people in the audience are much younger than I am - it's hard to appreciate how much the nature of the computer businesses has changed. I would characterise the changes as: if it was originally something that was done by he design team, very soon the members of the team will feel bored, feel they're wasting their time. Here in the West, we lost the words to exchange idea's about these issues. The words have been highjacked by certain realms of society and this prevents an open communication where it's actually so needed. These words represent whole areas of attention, that every parent wishes for his or her child. It reflects deep issues of social structures, education, law making, trading systems, etcetera. If we do not address them, how can we play with them? And if we cannot play, then where is our joy? Each of these words actually require personal and physical attention on an everyday basis. So whether we do or do not design them into our products, what we design will anyway affect these qualities of our everyday life. This is the layer to me where sensations and experiences, history and geographical realities, become embodied knowledge, where craftsmanship develops. It makes you wonder about the games we play. But it's also a bunch of people (in it) primarily for the joy of it, and what changed was that it became commercially important. It became a business. And in my mind when that happened it tended to become much less creative. So in fact most of the inventions that we see in computers are really just refinements of things that were developed in a different stage of the industry where they were just being done. That's important to keep in mind, because it sort of says what play is good at and what business is good at. And that's the second half of the lesson, which I would say I learned the hard way. I left the lab, I started a company called Thinking Machines. My model of how to do it successfully was to make it a very playful place. And so we decorated the place literally as a playground. And we had giant toys around. And everybody was working on whatever they found interesting and exciting. And it was an extraordinary innovative place. It was the kind of place where professors would come and take their sabbatical from universities because it was sort of more exciting to work at Thinking Machines than it was at the university. It invented all kinds of things in fields ranging from theoretical physics to biology to computers. It did very well for a period of about ten years. Now looking back on it, I can say that it did very well because the industry that it was in was in a period where innovation was the primary product, so the way that you did well was by being innovative and inventing new things. Now what happened was that some of the things that we developed like neural processing became commercially important. And when they became commercially important and people really started using them, whole companies started using them and things like that, it became a real business. And so other people began competing with it. Once it became a real business a different set of things became important. Instead of just innovation, efficiency became important. So it wasn't so much that you could come out with the newest, greatest idea of a computer but that you could kind of deliver it for less cost and more on time and at more profit than your competitor. What turned out a playful environment is actually not such a great environment for doing that. And in fact there is always a trade off between creativity and efficiency. Creativity is fundamentally an inefficient process. Because creativity is fundamentally doing things that you don't know how to do, is exploring things that you don't yet understand, so you're not good at it yet. As soon as you're trying to apply that kind of process to an area that is relatively static, it's staying the same, you're actually better to adopt a strategy of saying, let's refine it, let's learn, let's stick to things we know how to do, let's learn how to do them better, let's develop that craft, that skill to be able to be repeatable to do the same thing day in, day out. And that's a very different kind of activity than play. So in fact what happened once the machines got into that environment, as the world changed we did very badly. We couldn't compete with people like IBM, who were very good at doing the consistent, steady, focussed work. So I learned the other half of the lesson from that. What I've come to believe is that great businesses are businesses that are able to incorporate both types of activity and keep a balance between them and use them, each one as appropriate and as the world changes around them, they're able to emphasise one type of activity versus another. Let me give you a very simple example of a company that I consider a great company and I've known some people from strategy planning which is Royal-Dutch Shell. The oil business has typically been a business that's very much an efficiency business. It's who can get the oil out of the ground at the lowest costs, discover it at the lowest costs, deliver it at the lowest costs and so on, that's the way that you're profitable. And most of the time it's important that that's the way oil companies operate, they're not very playful companies. On the other hand, there are moments when creativity is called for. There was a period during 70's that the price of oil was continuing to go up, up, up, so being good and being successful in the oil business was a matter of being very efficient at drilling new wells, opening up new installations, constructing new refineries and so on. And the companies that were successful - and Shell was among them - were the ones that got very efficient at doing that so that they could bring up a new refinery without even thinking about it. What happened was that they began to get to a point were there were some signs that the world might start changing around them. That the dynamics that control oil prices seemed to be changing, Opec seemed to be falling apart. And what Shell did was they gathered together a bunch of the senior executives. The head of strategy planning at that point was a fellow by the name of Arie de Geus, and he had a fellow by the name of Peter Schwartz working with him. And they brought together a group of senior executives. And they got them in the mode of playing, because first of all they tried just the standard thing of showing them graphs of oil prices and things like that, and nobody really changed their behavior, or really thought about it because they were sort of in this automatic, uncreative mode of doing something they knew how to do very well. So they set up a situation where they had a simulation game. They said 'look, we're not making decisions today. We're not doing anything about the Shell oil company or anything about that. We're just going to play a game over the next few days.' And the game was that the oil executives would throw out their assumptions about what controlled oil prices, and feed those into a simulation. And they would just see what happened. So they would make up scenarios for the future that would follow from their assumptions. So the executives put down their assumptions and they put them in and in the simulation the price of oil plunged to ten dollars a barrel. And everybody laughed. It's a funny thing that that was somehow a consequence. And as soon as they got them laughing, they were into a different mode. They weren't in the mode of serious executives thinking what was going to happen to this multi-billion dollar company. They were in the mode of play. And so in that mode of playing they were able to throw out different assumptions, joke with each other, discuss things that they probably would never discuss in a serious context. The interesting thing about that is at the end of that session, a large number of them went back thinking: 'you know what? The oil prices may actually start to go down, that's actually a very plausible thing.' Something that seemed unthinkable to them going into this play session. They had a change in the context of play to think about. They got used to the idea. They started recognising certain signs happening out in the world. It made it possible to think about the unthinkable. And in fact Shell started getting ready before any of the other oil companies did for the oil price collapse that came. Shell was much better prepared than any of the other companies, exactly because the company which was in general a very unplayful company had used play at an appropriate moment. Now I live in an industry where creating and inventing is probably a larger part of the business than the oil business. And we're more often sort of stuck with that blank sheet of paper when we have to invent something new. And it's interesting that the companies in the entertainment business that have been successful have institutionalised, one way or another, the process of play. So for example, Disney has a an entire division called imagineering. If you went to visit imagineering it would look a lot like the lab, maybe even more experienced because it's lots of arts and crafty kind of things going on. You go there and there's people cutting out giant pieces of construction paper. There're people making swings and people putting on costumes and parading around. It looks for all the world like a giant kindergarden. And it is for Disney a little institution for perserving a certain kind of play. And it's treated within Disney like the Crown Jewel within Disney. It's known that this is not a part of Disney that makes money directly, this is not marketing and financial analysis and all the other things. In fact, it's a very small part of the company percentage wise. And most of the company is in fact very serious business people who wear suits and ties and sit in offices and do financial analysis and things like that. But it does carefully preserve this other kind of a world in which this other kind of activity happens. And it realises that out of that activity comes ideas, comes creations - things like that, which are the the seeds, if you will, the core of the business ideas. And that the future of the company depends on keeping that stream of ideas, and that that stream of ideas requires a different kind of playful environment. In fact it's very easy - when I show up to a meeting at Disney, very often a security guard will take one look at me and say: 'the creative meeting is over there.' You know, they can tell which room I belong. The people look different, they're a little bit goofy. And they do different things. They act and they have a different set of aesthetics. And there is of course always a kind of a tension between the business force , who're deciding what idea we should actually put money behind and what do we market and so on, and the creative forces who want to do everything. And I think what's happened with Disney and I think many other companies in the entertainment business is that the creative tension between what's typically the creative side of the company and the business side of the company, has been institutionalised. They accept it. They know that that always has to be there. They know that their companies would not succeed over the long run without it. I don't think that's the only way of solving the problem. But I think that any successful company somehow has to have a mechanism for preserving the possibility of play., preserving the possibility of activity which is done for pure joy, which you're not very good at yet. And interestingly enough, I think there's a kind of analogy between the growth of companies and the growth of humans as individuals. I think the same thing can be said of adult humans too. Just like it's easier for children to play, it's easier for small companies to play too. Beginning companies tend to be very playful. And what happens is as children grow up and as companies grow up, the natural tendency is to get serious and forget about all that play. But the great companies and the great people always maintain that element of playfulness. JT: We had a little game in the discussions before the conference guessing how many journalists would write in their article 'well this is supposed to be about play but this is a really serious event.' We do our best. Bas Ording was a big star from nowhere in some programs we did at the institute about two years ago. Just one of those moments when you see a piece of work that is just amazing. And you think 'where did this guy come from?' and you don't even think about where is he going to. |
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url: DOORS OF PERCEPTION |
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