John Seely Brown
Published for the Week Of December 13, 2004
John Seely Brown is a master storyteller, engaging listeners in a broad spectrum of topics. But his real fondness lies with examining how people use storytelling to reach new planes of understanding and inspiration.
It’s an area of investigation that Brown, 64, has been researching since his graduate days in the pioneering study of computer and communication sciences. During his 24-year tenure at the fabled Xerox PARC (half of that time as director), Brown built a reputation for his influence in organizational learning, complex adaptive systems and ubiquitous computing. Along the way, Brown—or JSB, as he’s commonly known—reshaped our thinking about technology’s role in spreading knowledge and inspiring new ideas within a given community.
“John is a catalyst for new ideas,” says Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future, Menlo Park, Calif. “John gravitates to the edges and frontiers of things that are new and can’t be easily described.”
But even more important than his work on technology’s effect on group dynamics is that JSB fundamentally changed how the high-tech industry brings technology to market. Today, the journey from concept to product almost always includes the efforts of sociologists, anthropologists, ethnographers and psychologists—all collaborating with engineers and programmers. Such a broad confluence of disciplines did not converge on commercial high-tech projects until Brown initiated the practice after joining Xerox PARC in 1978.
“John was the first person to bring in people whose research technique was to go out with a notebook, or now a video camera, to understand the world,” says Jack Whalen, a principal scientist and sociologist at Xerox PARC. “As sociologists, we bring back rich stories, narratives and details of people’s lives at home. PARC integrates those methodologies into the center of the effort. That’s PARC’s greatest achievement, and that’s John’s achievement.”
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This was just shy of revolutionary. “His brilliance lies in integrating people from diverse disciplines and avenues of research,” says longtime friend Bill Janeway, vice chairman of Wall Street firm Warburg Pincus. “He’s a major practitioner of original thought.”
JSB comes naturally by his investigative bent. Hailing from Hamilton, N.Y., the site of Colgate University, he literally grew up in academia. His grandfather was a mathematics professor, his mother ran Colgate’s fine arts library, and his father was a physical chemist. As a child, he became deeply involved in physics, electronics and astronomy, spending most of his free time with his father in the chemistry lab. When JSB turned 16, his attention switched to world travel. “I remember trekking through the rain forest and stumbling into a village in Borneo where all 50 villagers were clustered around a portable TV run by a generator,” he says. “Being a high-tech kid, it’s interesting to go to where life is made possible by a 45-horsepower diesel motor that pumps water out of a river, giving villagers two crops a season instead of one.”
Indeed, JSB is keenly interested in the many ways technology can change society. That interest is illustrated by Eureka, perhaps his best-known project at PARC. In the mid-1990s, Xerox needed to boost the productivity of its field technicians. It was PARC’s task to figure out why productivity was low. Its researchers noticed something interesting: Field reps would gather at the warehouse so they could trade anecdotes. Whereas most managers might have viewed that as a clear drain on productivity, PARC’s researchers saw something different: a way of sharing intelligence. Led by JSB, PARC decided Xerox needed to extend that conversation to all 25,000 field technicians. Using the Eureka knowledge management system, technicians were able to enter their own solutions to unsolved problems. After that, another tech could validate the solution, perhaps adding his own particular refinement. By 1995, Xerox believed the system cut 5 percent of a technician’s time and saved 5 percent in replacement parts.
Eureka demonstrated the power of conversation and how it could be magnified through technology. “It gets you thinking about the magic of conversation,” Brown says. “How does one idea build on another, where we create a spiral that lets us co-create something that’s more than either of us would have on our own? The collision of ideas doesn’t build an emergent idea. The conversation is what builds the idea.”
JSB is talking about more than just a knack for engaging another person. It’s the art of reading an audience, picking up on tacit clues and sending out your own signals—a gift at which JSB is particularly adept. “If you wanted to go to a meeting that was critical to your survival but you didn’t know anyone, you’d want him by your side,” says Johan de Kleer, manager of Xerox PARC’s systems and practice laboratory, who has known Brown since before their days at the research facility. “His ability to read a situation and know what has to be said next is like no one else’s. He’s the survival guide. He’s always ahead of everyone else.”
Which brings us to a chicken-and-egg question. Is JSB interested in the science of conversation because he’s so good at it, or did he become a great conversationalist by studying the science? Whatever the answer, he continues his research into how digitally enhanced storytelling can promote collaboration, mutual understanding and develop ideas. Retired from PARC in 2002, he is now a visiting scholar at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California. “Remember, stories are things that circulate in the community mind,” Brown says. “Almost no great idea is original. Storytelling provides a context for people to tinker with ideas. It sets the stage for great things to happen.”
