“Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.” – James Carse
We like our boxes. They are how we make sense of an overwhelming world with too much information and demands for rapid decisions. Yet, they also form prisons for our imaginations. The digital world has always threatened these boxes. AI has the potential to liberate us from them altogether.
The industrial world was a world of boxes. Most of us worked in boxes, and if we were lucky, those boxes intersected with others to provide a richer experience. If we weren’t, we never left our boxes.
The boxes in question here could be physical, like the infamous cubicle. However, these boxes were usually also manifestations of conceptual boxes.
Those boxes are layered: this is my job, this is my company, this is my career, and these are the bounds of my universe.
If you didn’t clearly fit into a box, you were suddenly unhoused from a career perspective. For some of us, that has been our fate. It has also made me exceptional at any job that I applied my creative energies to because I never let myself be fooled or constrained by any boxes I find myself in.
I’m also very aware of the artificiality of edges that others may seek to impose on me. We construct our existences. We can also reimagine them.
I’m constantly running up against people who are stuck in their boxes and find sanctuary and solicitude in them. The rules provide comfort and companionship comes from those who are stuck in the same boxes. If you give them opportunities to transcend those boxes, they ignore or violently reject them.
Generative AI doesn’t respect boxes. That is why so many people feel threatened by it. AI breaks their rules. It brings rapid fire outside influences into their work. It shatters paradigms.
Franz Johansson argued almost 20 years ago now that it is in these intersections between boxes that true innovation emerges. You do nothing new if all you do is the same thing repeatedly.
The digital world has been threatening boxes for decades. Once information became digitized and was no longer confined to paper, books, filing cabinets, etc., it started leaking across boxes. Insularity became a liability, but many institutions resisted pressures to unbox themselves.
Leaders may expound the virtues of interdisciplinarity, but in the real world, most of the people who would benefit from it resist change. Innovation suffers. Networks atrophy.
The other insight that has driven much of my innovation work was Steven Johnson’s liquid networks. Liquid networks allow ideas to flow but give them channels for application.
For liquid networks to work, people must flow between boxes. Channels must be flexible and adapt to the needs of the project.
I have been trying to break down boxes within the networks of education for over two decades. However, until recently, I have been reluctant to step outside the larger box of education itself. I have a deep and abiding love for the work of education, and I come from a family of educators.
One frustration that drove me to pursue my passion outside of formal educational structures is that education boxes are extremely inflexible. One of the more liberating aspects of my startup journey has been to step outside the education world. This move has allowed me to create completely different networks that serve my passion for teaching and learning.
Not that the startup world doesn’t have its own boxes. Many people in it come from heavily boxed environments. They bring that with them because they are seeking to understand and impose a structure of thinking on what they see is a chaotic system.
For a while, I took these boxes at face value because I was used to an environment of navigating a honeycomb of boxes. But over time, I perceived a collection of boxes rather than a rigid system.
We design boxes to mitigate risk. Risk takes many forms. There’s personal and career risk, which is something I have unfortunately never paid much attention to. There’s corporate risk. And then there’s the risk associated with money.
Money drives the creation of boxes. That is what I found in the more structured elements of the startup world. Those who have the money want quick returns. They want to reduce the risk associated with making those returns. This creates boxes because “no one will give you money unless you [insert truism here].”
I am designing the Knowledge Navigator to break down boxes. It does so by showing connections around any chunks of information or between them. It doesn’t actually break down boxes, but at least it shows you what you’re missing if you never look over the edge of where you are.
As part of my marketing efforts, I designed a map of some products that the Knowledge Navigator could provide in various fields. The map is necessarily incomplete because, like every tool I’ve ever built, people will find uses for it I have not imagined.
However, in building this diagram, I immediately saw connections between the boxes that the use case scenarios represent. The Knowledge Navigator would do this work automatically. It took me quite some time to do it manually.
When I make these intersections, it breaks boxes. The true power of the tool lies in connecting the unconnected. For instance, a company needs someone to do a particular set of tasks. That person is out there.
However, the systems for connecting that person to company needs are horribly inefficient and time-consuming. They stretch through personal, informal creation to the education system to various layers of human resources before they get anywhere near the person who actually needs the skills. Those boxes are all disconnected.
The Knowledge Navigator could break through all of those boxes by connecting information siloed within them. The potential employer gains immediate perspective that allows the company to navigate to the needed talent.
So many of the problems of the world are at root problems of a lack of perspective. We can educate and feed everyone, but our boxes tell us that’s impossible. As the boxes collapse, we feel an increasing sense of desperation and retreat further into what’s left of those boxes.
We are not rabbits. I hope we’ve evolved past that. However, those instinctual flight instincts run deep and are associated with fear. It’s way past time that we put our heads above the horizon and see out of our perceptual boxes. That’s what I hope to change with the Knowledge Navigator project.