It’s a familiar refrain: We’re drowning these days. We’re suffering from information overload. We strive for inbox zero. We seek to avoid (cue foreboding soundtrack) email bankruptcy. Who knew that progress came with an asterisk? Access to all this stuff didn’t lead to knowledge nirvana but to anxiety and a sense of failure. Go figure.

In response, the technologies that got us into this mess in the first place are trying to make right. Google introduced priority inbox last week. Amazon tries to pluck out the stuff we really want from its millions of products. Netflix sniffs out what movies it thinks we’re going to like by paying attention to our behavior. These are all good things. We can use all the help we can get to help us get to the stuff that matters most to us. But there’s more than stuff at stake. We’re not only suffering from information overload. We’re suffering from people overload.

Whereas in the past, we could maintain five, ten maybe fifteen significant relationships with other people, we’re now faced with the ability to connect to anyone, anywhere. And so, the puzzle remains around the idea of connecting with others. How do I connect with people that share the same passion and curiosity for the things I care about? Taken further: how do I connect with others that can help me realize the vision and ideas that I want to make a reality? How does a Steve Jobs meet a Steve Wozniak today?

Connecting people in any sort of substantive way is a tricky proposition. Yes, you can ask users to fill out profile pages that beckon for your “likes” and “interests” but that only goes so far. The Holy Grail lies in the ability to connect on a different pivot point: the unrealized ideas of others. This is less about clutter and bankruptcy and more about the unrealized potential of collaboration.

When we sat down to think about our next release of Kindling, we found ourselves doing the usual “what features do we want in the next release?” session.  “Our competitors have this, we don’t.” “Our customers are clamoring for this feature that we don’t have…” and so on. As we shuffled and reshuffled requirements, we finally took a step back and realized ideas are nothing without the connective tissue – the people – that make them happen. They’re a waypoint that connect others that share a common passion and drive to take something from the back of a napkin to reality. With that backdrop, we wiped the slate clean and created a platform that makes it easier than ever to seek out and connect to ideas – and others – that matter to you. Kindling 2.0 has a wealth of new features, but its ability to learn and understand your behavior and connect you to the ideas that will matter to you is the standout.

Amidst all the alarms of information overload lies amazing opportunity. Whereas the possibility of connecting in the past was limited to physical proximity and your limited social connections, such limitations no longer exist today. Still, the risk of overload and dilution come with this shedding of limitations. We need tools that help us connect on an aspirational level. There are few things more galvanizing than an unrealized idea. Realization is rarely a one man job. We just need the right tool to connect the next Jobs with the next Wozniak – wherever they may be.

When you design and build RESTful web applications (REST is a software architectural style), you focus on nouns – what are the things of your application? Customers, stocks, bonds, books, authors, etc. In a RESTful system, those nouns are the currency, the things that are exposed through the interface to be traded and acted upon. 
I’ve been working with technology, and building software systems for well over a decade now. As such, I’ve worked on many systems, each containing a new set of things. Deals, employees, sales, gift cards, students, notes, insurance policies, investors, to name a few. For the last few years, I’ve been working on Kindling, our idea management and collaboration tool. Kindling has the most interesting thing of them all: ideas.

It’s interesting to design and build software to help organizations manage their ideas. Ideas never get boring. They’re limitless in potential. They can, quite literally, change the world. 

The other cool thing about working on a system of ideas are the stories we hear from our clients: the new employee that turns out to be an idea machine, new products and services that came directly out of their usage of Kindling, ideas big and small that help shape a organization.

Recently we were talking about ideas, and had the – well, idea – for a blog series answering the question, “What makes an idea good?”. The responses to this open-ended question were as compelling as we could have expected, we hope you enjoy them.

First Kindling Product Specialist and Arc90 Director Jen Epting suggests that:

By the simple action of typing out an idea, tagging it with a couple of relevant words and attaching something to demonstrate your point, the idea is already better… because it’s OUT THERE! And the mere fact that you wondered what Suzy in Accounting or John in R&D might think made your idea better because you accounted for their perspectives.

Next, I attempt to draw a parallel between ideas and mutation in an evolutionary system:

Change is generally bad; stasis is preferred. But occasionally something magical happens, and a mutation is helpful. Every once in a while, the giraffe baby’s neck is longer or the bat’s ability to distinguish its own frequency is improved. For whatever source you want to attribute that, it’s truly wonderful and magical. If you do believe in God, this is a great place in which to find Him. Another great place to find Him is in the those moments where an idea mutates in the mind.

John Caldwell, CEO of Fidget Factory, asks the memorable question: “What is the intent of your company’s “Idea Management” program? Are you looking for ideas or are you looking for solutions?” and suggests a set of Guidelines for an organization looking for great solutions.

Next up, Arc90 Founding Partner Rich Ziade talks about the individual and their search for great ideas:

An idea is, by definition, a departure. It’s a step away from the norm. To find new ideas (and by “find” I literally mean stumble upon an idea that you would otherwise never discover) you have to be willing to drift off and think in a divergent way. Pre-conceived notions of how the world works have to be brought into question and doubt. It’s almost a child-like reversion to questioning and doubting just about everything around you.

And finally, Kindling’s Lead Developer and Resident Poet Garrett Kalleberg closes out the week with a poem. Pulling a quote just wouldn’t do it justice, read it for yourself …now that’s a good idea.

CBS premiered their anticipated new show Undercover Boss after the Super Bowl last night. It was a genuine show about an executive of a large company, in this case Waste Management, going undercover to ‘learn from the front-lines’ about problems in the company. The executive, in true executive form, then ponders what he or she has learned and alters company policy armed with this new firsthand knowledge.

Again, a nice show and quite interesting. It was definitely entertaining, and good to see something in the media portraying ‘The Corporation’ as something other than evil. That said, though, I found I few issues with the program.

First, and most obvious, is that this approach doesn’t scale. The Big Boss interacts with a handful of people over a week and then draws policy-changing conclusions from these interactions? Surely they’re aware of sampling errors. Also, I wonder about the culture of a company where the executives are so far removed from the goings-on of the company that they are not even aware of the effect that their decisions might have on the average worker. I suppose that’s possible, and may even be common – but that’s exactly the problem that needs to be addressed, not the specific findings of the round of investigation. For what else has management not been exposed to?

What went unsaid in the program is the fact that employees [obviously] had no voice for which to channel their ideas through the organization. It took a CBS programming idea and one brave executive to let management know that women garbage truck drivers need to be allowed time in their routes to go to the bathroom? As someone passionate about ideas, and involved in the creation of an application which is focused on giving employees a voice in the idea process within organizations, that was startling to me. The bathroom policy doesn’t need fixing, the company culture which allows problems to hide in plain sight for years does.

If there are any executives reading this who have been turned down by CBS for a future episode of Undercover Boss, I’d like to offer you an easier way to learn from your employees – contact us to discuss Kindling, our idea management and collaboration tool. Going undercover is cute, but spend your energies creating a culture of open collaboration around innovation for your company – it’s a much more effective use of your time.