Dialog News & Views

Published Articles

Joint value propositions: An untapped advantage

As a marketing executive in the ’90s, conventional wisdom held that segmenting and personalizing your message was the best way to get the right product in front of the right person at the right time. This was, and still is, the most popular tactic in marketing: lining up the dominoes just right to trigger a purchase.

Turns out that’s very good in theory; less so in practice.

by Mark De L. Thompson

Published September 1, 2021

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We Are at a Leadership Reset Point

Successfully shaping a shared future relies on applying three integrated next-level leadership tools.

by Vince DiBianca and Mark De L. Thompson

Published August 18th, 2020

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Insights and Views

Novelty is Not Dead: What Artificial Intelligence Can Teach Us About Discovery

Featured Article, Featured Insights, Insights & Publications, Uncategorized

Why did you decide to go into this bar and not that bar? On this question may depend the future of AI, and perhaps humanity. By posing it, AI researchers shift artificial intelligence from the source of convenient robot helpers to the thing…

21st Century Management: Changing Motivations in the Age of Abundance

Featured Insights, Insights & Publications, Organizational Design

In America $75,000 per year buys happiness. That is to say that before $75,000 there is a direct correlation between money and happiness; yet, money in excess of $75,000 does not bring additional happiness.[1] Even more fascinating is how Americans…

A Path Forward: How Network Design Can Help Solve the National Behavioral Health Crisis

Featured Insights, Insights & Publications

An obligation and an opportunity – a national moment on behavioral health We spend a lot of hours at Dialog working to create an inflection point in the growth curve of some of the world’s best brands. But one of the areas in our work…

The Peacock’s Tail: Time for a New Central Metaphor in Business?

Featured Article, Featured Insights, Insights & Publications, Uncategorized

We are all to varying degrees prisoners of our metaphors. This is true in both our heads and when we communicate with others. And it's definitely true in business. Depending on your industry, any number of metaphors can guide the acquisition…

Hacking Boredom to Design Your Own Disruption: The Network Map of Main Street

Featured Insights, Insights & Publications, Uncategorized

The holidays are here so it's time for us to jump on the bandwagon with a friendly PSA: If you go and buy that giant inflatable snowman to keep up with the Joneses, you're playing into positive feedback loops, and before you do that you should…

Algorithms Need to Learn Boundaries

Featured Insights, Insights & Publications, Uncategorized

“Ideally, we want News Feed to show all the posts people want to see in the order they want to read them.” -Facebook What Are Algorithmic Values? From our perspective, the purpose of a recommender algorithm is simply to give us the…

Why "Begin With the End In Mind" Is a Bad Idea for Innovation: A Conversation with Leading AI Scientists Joel Lehman and Kenneth Stanley

Feature Interview, Featured Article, Featured Insights, Innovation, Insights & Publications, Uncategorized

"If your objective was to invent a microwave oven, you would not be working on radars." These days, amidst a great collective effort to reverse engineer innovation, everybody’s looking to model the success stories. Tales of disruption pepper…

To Err Is Divine: Deep Learning and the Art of Machine Mistakes

Featured Insights, Insights & Publications, Uncategorized

As we teach AI to visually recognize things it "sees" we get some interesting imagery. In the example below, a neural net exaggerates the variation in each "version" of the picture of reality it renders, creating images that have evolved to…

Science’s Next Big Experiment

Ecosystem Management, Featured Insights, Insights & Publications, Uncategorized

Science isn’t a club. It’s a cultural activity, and it should be participatory. But if it were a club, these people would have made it a whole lot cooler. “We are the kids who got in trouble in chemistry lab for setting the things on…

Inconvergent: The Algorithmic Art of Anders Hoff

Featured Article, Featured Insights, Insights & Publications, Uncategorized

Near a window, steam rises in spirals from a cup of tea. A column of sunlight intervenes, producing emergent ribbons of heat and ephemeral color. It’s an ordinary cup of tea, and steam is an ordinary product of nature’s processes. But to…

NODENESS: A NEW VISION OF PEOPLE, TEAMS, AND MARKETS

Ecosystem Management, Featured Insights, Innovation, News & Views

“For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.” — Rudyard Kipling We define nodeness as the art and science of living and working as both a whole and a part. The Greeks gave us a similar…

Future Leap: Jumping this wave and the next

Featured Insights, News & Views

The shift from industrial to information was still essentially mechanical – digital is an extension of that change, with new machines and methodologies. It’s been information that’s made all the difference, the rise of an ultravaluable new currency alongside new economies driven by intangible assets and ecosystem-level relationships. This is the network age.

We are all systems: the power of network design

Ecosystem Management, Featured Insights, News & Views, Organizational Design

About this brief This is part of a series exploring the power and possibilities of network design. “The future belongs to those who can see it.” David Bowie To understand the core promises of network design, we must first understand…

This week at MHCA: Medicaid is not a Business Model

Featured Insights, Insights & Publications

The struggle to achieve long-term innovation isn’t about new technologies, but a new framework for identifying challenges and illuminating paths forward. This is especially true for those working on the front lines of mental health, where…

The Adaptive Challenges Community Service Boards Face

Featured Insights, Insights & Publications

A vital lifeline at risk Dialog CEO Mark Thompson will be attending Georgia Association of Community Service Board’s annual Education Exchange next week, speaking on the foundational power of adaptive growth and resilience strategies. …

What Epidemiology Can Teach Us About the Infectiousness of Ideas

Featured Blog, News & Views

Different diseases spread differently. A simple observation, but with a level of complexity behind it that is worth understanding. It is not solely the infectiousness of a disease that affects its spread; the type of network the infection is…

“Mama always told me not to look into the eyes of the sun, but Mama that’s where the fun is.” This line, from Bruce Springsteen – perhaps made famous by Manfred Mann – could well have been said by Toby Shannan, Shopify’s SVP…

Analyzing the Local Narrative Around Uber and Lyft’s Return to Austin

Featured Blog, News & Views

Back in May of 2016, we wrote a perspective on how effective the Lyft and Uber campaigns were in getting people to the polls in Austin to vote on Prop 1, a referendum to roll back rules passed by our city council that would have required Uber…

Three Key Takeaways from the Annual Santa Fe Institute Symposium

Digital Experience, Ecosystem Management, Growth Strategy, News & Views

Three Key Takeaways from the Annual Santa Fe Institute Symposium The Santa Fe Institute (SFI), a leading cross-disciplinary institute for the study of complex, adaptive systems, held its annual symposium this past weekend. This year’s theme…

Dialog-SFI Takeaways: In Any Endeavor, Connect the Network to Itself

Featured Blog, Innovation, News & Views, Tech, Tech Innovation

Last week was big, and we believe it’s just the start of something even bigger. Dialog, in collaboration with the Santa Fe Institute (SFI), hosted an all-day network design symposium titled “Influence and Complexity: New Views for Business,…

How Uber and Lyft Could Have Won at the Polls

News & Views

On Saturday, May 7, Proposition 1 in Austin failed in a 55–45% split. For those of you who are unaware, Prop. 1 was a referendum on rules the Austin City Council passed that would have required Uber and Lyft drivers to undergo fingerprint-based…

Tacos, Technology and Total Transformation

News & Views

Obama @ SXSW 2016: the need for networks, now more than ever I was lucky enough to attend last week’s chat with President Obama that kicked off 2016 SXSW, where he spoke on digital government and the ability of collective innovation to…

Why David Bowie’s Passing Hurts so Much

Featured Article, Featured Blog, Innovation, News & Views, Organizational Design

I am unreasonably saddened by David Bowie’s passing. To understand why, it is helpful to know a little bit of network theory and understand the implications of neuroplasticity. On the network theory front, the "Rule of 150" states people…

Beyond Innovation – Solving for Success in a Changing World

Featured Blog, News & Views

Thinking Beyond Innovation and Solving for Success in a World of Rapid Change. From technology to organizations, a system is only as fast as its slowest component. Innovation today won’t naturally, on its own, always lead to transformation…

Every Three Seconds: A Film About Beating Hunger & Poverty

Featured Blog, News & Views

Poverty is not simply an absence of material wealth. To mistake poverty for a small bank account or the lack of a diverse 401K portfolio is mental myopia. Rather, the impact of poverty is far-reaching and eventually the death of all things—most…

Move Over, House of Cards: Real Political Intrigue in Action

Featured Blog, News & Views

Breakthrough Collaboration, Brought to You by Dialog As America prepares for another divisive presidential contest, two political dynasties are charting a different course. Sponsored by the libraries of former presidents Bush (I and II), Clinton,…

Dialog News & Views

Published Articles

Joint value propositions: An untapped advantage

We Are at a Leadership Reset Point

Insights and Views

Novelty is Not Dead: What Artificial Intelligence Can Teach Us About Discovery

21st Century Management: Changing Motivations in the Age of Abundance

A Path Forward: How Network Design Can Help Solve the National Behavioral Health Crisis

The Peacock’s Tail: Time for a New Central Metaphor in Business?

Hacking Boredom to Design Your Own Disruption: The Network Map of Main Street

Algorithms Need to Learn Boundaries

Why "Begin With the End In Mind" Is a Bad Idea for Innovation: A Conversation with Leading AI Scientists Joel Lehman and Kenneth Stanley

To Err Is Divine: Deep Learning and the Art of Machine Mistakes

Science’s Next Big Experiment

Inconvergent: The Algorithmic Art of Anders Hoff

NODENESS: A NEW VISION OF PEOPLE, TEAMS, AND MARKETS

Future Leap: Jumping this wave and the next

We are all systems: the power of network design

This week at MHCA: Medicaid is not a Business Model

The Adaptive Challenges Community Service Boards Face

Blog

What Epidemiology Can Teach Us About the Infectiousness of Ideas

NODENESS: A NEW VISION OF PEOPLE, TEAMS, AND MARKETS

Future Leap: Jumping this wave and the next

We are all systems: the power of network design

Shopify’s Toby Shannan on the Joy and Sorrows of Integration

Analyzing the Local Narrative Around Uber and Lyft’s Return to Austin

Three Key Takeaways from the Annual Santa Fe Institute Symposium

Dialog-SFI Takeaways: In Any Endeavor, Connect the Network to Itself

How Uber and Lyft Could Have Won at the Polls

Tacos, Technology and Total Transformation

Why David Bowie’s Passing Hurts so Much

Beyond Innovation – Solving for Success in a Changing World

Every Three Seconds: A Film About Beating Hunger & Poverty

Move Over, House of Cards: Real Political Intrigue in Action

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