At the Tech4Africa conference I had the pleasure of meeting Clay Shirky and demonstrating Cognician to him. He was impressed with Cognician and particularly keen to think about how he could use it with his students at NYU – perhaps to get them to make their own cogs as part of the learning process. He also suggested that there may be a link with Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, which is content that we’d love to have in Cognician.
I asked Clay if he had any content that we could adapt into a cog and he suggested his recent article, The Collapse of Complex Business Models. In the article he discusses how businesses that reach a certain level of complexity are incapable of becoming simpler. At that point, the simplest thing to do is to collapse. Barry and I discussed the best way to adapt the article and we settled on the angle of using the concepts that Clay identified as lenses with which to view your business. So people responsible for strategic planning could use the cog to pinpoint where they may be in danger of becoming too complex. Reading these early warning signs may just allow them to prevent the decline into complexity and collapse.
So we split the article into sections, which now appear in full in the Cognician sidebar. And we created questions based on the key concepts in the article. Working through the cog allows you to focus these questions on your own business. So now there are no excuses for reading Clay’s excellent article and doing nothing about it. Download the cog, put the ideas to use and think about how you can keep your business simple. It’s not a comprehensive tool and I doubt you’ll see it prescribed in any MBA courses, but it’s a good way to get to grips with some strong ideas.
You can download the The Collapse of Complex Business Models cog here.
And you can watch a video demo below:
