I grew up in a world of science and business where everybody thought the way to work was to have a policy.

Once upon a time I worked in a company where we discovered new things about writing and how people worked, and how words in excess were brittle, and wasted on the task of getting people to live or work well. So I took that learning into the world of cash poor small businesses who felt they had to have a policy and I said “You don’t need policy manuals and stuff like that. What you need are clever ways to present information at the right time so it is embedded in the work”. And those businesses that made buckets and bolts said “thank you very much” and “we have never seen so clearly before”, and “look how much we can do with so little – we are world class’.

So then I got another job with a company that wanted to be the best in the world, not at buckets and bolts, but at the very sort of stuff I was best at. So much so they wanted to invent a new kind of corporation. So I took all my learning about how not to have a policy and presenting information at the right time so it is embedded in work, and added a whole lot of new learning about Web 2.0 and social networking and emergence and creativity and recruiting and retaining world class talent. But it turned out the company didn’t really know what it wanted. It didn’t really want to be world class, or novel, or leading edge. Because what it really wanted was to be too busy. And it was certainly too busy to learn and implement or build clever new things. So the day came when they felt they had to have a policy…….