Engelbart's Law 0

Put simply, Engelbart's law is the observation that our collective human effectiveness at tackling important challenges could be infinitely improved on an exponential curve, given the right evolutionary strategy. Further, Engelbart surmised that it is not simply desirable or important for organizations to jump this curve, it is imperative to our success and survival as a human race and a planet. 1

The upside poses a golden opportunity, easily well worth the investment (see Engelbart's proven visionary strategy for a ready-made onramp). 2

Conversely, the flip side reveals an emergent existial threat, that accelerated change, driven by the digital revolution, increasingly spurred by AI, is itself accelerating on an exponential curve. So organizations that do not rise to the cause along that curve will increasingly suffer and fail. Further, without appropriate safeguards in place, whole communities and nations will suffer. Humanity increasingly depends on a critical mass of organizations and institutions successfully evolving ahead of emergent risks to put sufficient safeguards in place, with scrupulous humans in the driver's seat, whereby humanity and their communities and organizations can prosper, and unleash their greatest potential. This puts the stakes at a Grand Challenge level. 3

What led Engelbart to these conclusions? 5

Before there was a Moore's Law, Doug Engelbart predicted the following – call it Engelbart's Law: 6

1. Digital technology would become increasingly miniaturized and affordable, confirmed by his 1959 study on scaleability (he actually did the math); therefor its injection into all aspects of business and society, at an accelerating scale, would be inevitable;
2. Impact to Society: Therefor we should expect a much greater impact on the world than the introduction of writing and printing press combined, and in a greatly compressed timeframe. Whereas the impact from past technological innovations unfolded gradually over decades or centuries, slowly co-evolving with how people lived and worked together, and how they organized around the change. Now with the anticipated explosion of digital technology, the challenges we face would become increasingly complex, interdependent, urgent, global, where people and their organizations would be hard-pressed to navigate;
3. Career Goal: Engelbart had previously been surveying organizations working to make the world a better place. He realized that humans depend quite a bit on the effectiveness of their organizations to safeguard and improve conditions in business and society – be it finding a cure for cancer, improving education or public safety, passing legislation, or coming out with a better product or service. On closer inspection he realized that such organizations share an underlying capability – how well they can pull together to comprehend and solve for important challenges. Therefor improving this underlying capability, which Engelbart came to call augmenting human intellect or boosting Collective IQ, could serve to improve the effectiveness of all initiatives tackling important challenges and improvements. Instinctively he knew that computers could be part of the solution. That's what he committed his career to.
4. What Makes Organizations Capable? Engelbart further realized that what makes us capable is a combination of technological aids as well as the many human processes, skills, practices, methodologies, learning, experience, language, paradigms, etc., all operating in concert. What augments us is that system of human and tool elements – our augmentation system. Today's capability level, based on today's augmentation system, is a result of all those elements co-evolving over time.
5. How to Improve That? So the key to improving capability effectively is cultivating the co-evolution. Conversely, when parts change abruptly, without benefit of co-evolution, the effects can be disabling. Thus the evolutionary success of organizations and institutions depends significantly on their ability to co-evolve that augmentation system of human and tool improvements.
6. Need to Improve Faster! Throwing the anticipated digital revolution into the mix, Engelbart realized that increasingly rapid introduction of technology would soon outpace our ability to cope, thus the prospect of augmenting organizational capability, cultivating the co-evolution process, would need to speed up at scale.
7. Need a Strategy. The question becomes 'What will it take for our initiatives, organizations, and institutions to stay up to the task of adequately addressing all these challenges?' So Doug Engelbart set about designing an appropriate evolutionary strategy to answer this challenge. He realized that the teams working to improve Collective IQ capability, could themselves be a pilot project of rigorous users, bootstrapping their ability to improve Collective IQ for themselves and their end-users. It's a cascading strategy for teams and organizations to get progressively smarter at getting smarter, while improving the way they improve -- he called it a Bootstrapping Strategy (see his Vision for the Future, ABCs of Organizational Improvement, Pivotal Strategy for starters).
8. It's a Race! Engelbart predicted that organizations would be entering a new frontier that would demand higher and higher collective intelligence in a compressed timeframe. It is no longer an option to get incrementally smarter and faster; organizations must keep pace with exponentially accelerated change, becoming exponentially more capable and agile, using successive gains in Collective IQ to accelerate their evolution ahead of the curve -- the essence of bootstrapping. It's not a matter of simply improving, but improving at a rate and scale sufficient to match or surpass the challenges ahead.

Where to Start? Get started with pilot projects to prototype these strategic capabilities in teams, initiatives, and organizations. Join forces in networked improvement initiatives to share costs, learnings and results, and advocate for Grand Challenge initiatives. It's about teams and organizations learning to yield ever more brilliant outcomes, and through them more brilliant societies, and evenually, a more brilliant world. 7