Hi all,

The meme lifecycle that Chris mentioned is an idea cycle that follows a basic on/off switching pattern:

1.)     Uncertainty: resulting from an unsolved problem or a phenomenon that does not fit within our current worldview

2.)     (bio)diversity: a range of new ideas are then considered as possible solutions or ways of integrating the new experience into our worldview

3.)     Dominant Meme: one particular idea is adopted as the “best” explanation/solution, and becomes embedded into the updated worldview

4.)     Zombie Meme: social or business context changes, making the previously dominant meme no longer relevant. It is now “dead” and needs be laid to rest before it starts causing havoc

5.)     Lazarus Meme: a dead idea that is brought back to life, because changes to a social or business context suddenly make it relevant again.

Within the context of business, memes can be seen as the idea-pool DNA of an organisation that get expressed as an “extended phenotype” or sliding scale of effects: from commercial strategy to budgets, marketing, IT projects, etc. If we consider the subset of memes that constitute well-factored MMFs, then real options are the mechanism for determining what organisational memes should be expressed and when (via the optimal exercise point), and equally importantly which memes need to be culled (via negative valuation). Zombies are the things that cause the real damage: financially we are at present arguably living through the fall-out from a economic zombie meme – the efficient market hypothesis (which resulted in deregulation of capital markets, etc). Closer to home, some of the worst problems I have seen caused by technology programmes has resulted from “zombie projects”, where there has been a resistance to terminate despite clearly changed business conditions and commercials that no longer add up…

Evolutionary theory changed the focus of biological thinking from organisms to genes. In the same way, an evolutionary perspective to software delivery emphasises the need to stop focussing on IT projects and instead think solely in terms of MMFs. Then organisations with high resource liquidity become business value hunter/gatherer cultures, where teams are continually redeployed to whichever part of the company currently has the highest value MMFs to be implemented.

In other words, evolutionary theory suggests that the whole notion of doing “IT projects” is a zombie meme. And if we get rid of IT projects then out goes “XP Customer” as another zombie. Why is someone in marketing or sales any more of a customer than someone in IT? Customers are the people who work for other organisations, not ours. Without IT projects then colleagues from different parts of our company just become part of one cross-discipline MMF implementation team. And without IT projects then we can move towards a much healthier world of company-wide shared ownership of MMFs, which removes any political stigma of culling business cases that are no longer justifiable…

cheers

Julian

Julian Everett      |     Technical Architect, Digital Media 

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