I stumbled across this article by Grady Booch today whilst doing some research on complex systems. It’s quite old (well 3 years is an age in this profession) but what it has to say about developing complex systems is, I believe, timeless. In particular I loved Grady’s point about the importance of “developing social structures that encourage innovation whilst still preserving predictability”. Interestingly another post by Seth Godin says:  

The challenge of our time may be to build organizations and platforms that engage and coordinate the elites, wherever they are. After all, this is where change and productivity come from.

Seth’s definition of an “elite” is anyone who is “actively engaged in new ideas, actively seeking out change, actively engaging.

The internet is a great platform for bringing people together. The challenge is in how to scale the creativity, that can be easily bought to focus in a small, co-located team, across the internet. The boundaries of the enterprises that used to do this are beginning to crumble. There is often more creativity outside the enterprise than is in it and new architectures (new platforms) need to learn how to make use of this. This is more than just what has been happening with the open source movement, where a group of people come together to build new products, its about how to use creativity at scale to build new platforms.

Spookily (well it is Halloween) and with a great bit of webendipity just as I was about to push the publish button on this article up popped in my twitter feed this article by my colleague Jeremy Caine about platforms (e.g. Facebook, iTunes, Twitter) and the creatives that build them.