Translating Engelbart to today’s circumstances is rather difficult for various interesting reasons. Most of his more recent disciples split into two separate camps: those who exclusively focus on the human system and conceptual side versus those who exclusively get practical with the tool system and implementation side. Now, Engelbart didn’t invent system theory or cybernetics, but he can be seen as one of the giants of the post-war systems movement, which is based on a long, earlier tradition of course. In contrast to the academic theorists however, his unique contribution might well be the parallel practical application and development/improvement of conceptual models by introducing the bootstrap “pattern”, using (new) technology of his time that would support or was created/adjusted to support such a systemic approach/strategy. In 2010, Sam Hahn asked Engelbart, how much of the original vision has been realized up to that point in time, and the answer was: approximately 3.6%. The challenge of the remaining 96.4% are reason enough for thinkers and methodologists to jump on designing many more abstract concepts as if that alone would help, while the technical implementers too sink into work lamenting that despite or because of the dominant web, operating-system, formats, application and programming paradigm, not only didn’t we make progress or realize the potential of computers, networks and digital, but also lost a good portion of capabilities that were available more than 50 years ago.

If one would consider a bootstrapping + co-development of theory/methodology together with parallel practice/implementation today, the easiest and initial way would be to do it for/with/on our own activities by improving our improvement to get better with getting better. Every activity within an organization/group or external clients likely demands certain practices and some tool augmentation, therefore it’ll always benefit from ABC improvement, potentially in a dogfooding fashion. And here’s one, big problem if the goal of all of this is solving complex, urgent problems: the highly specialized domain experts and communities working on solving complex, urgent problems which traditionally are stuck in doing iterative improvements while being separated into silos and disciplines, if there’s no way to get embedded with them, to get involved in their activities so that there can be an augmentation support service as B for their A, how could we ever hope to co-develop methodologies with (not for) them? And indeed the best chance in lack of other options is to start out with a group that’s very accessible and around for co-development, which is ourselves, trying to do our own ABC improvement on/with/for ourselves in a synergetic, exponential, bootstrappy way. Unfortunately, that alone wasn’t and isn’t a guarantee that a good demonstration/example of doing so would convince any other group/community to allow/invite external B improvement to come in, which is crucial and the core goal/challenge/intent of the whole ABC model and it’s meta-plan/-strategy, to make that happen somehow. Sure, every company, group, institution might start their own B improvement, which in turn is supposed to receive higher collaborative C improvement beyond and between organizational divides, but that didn’t really happen yet or manifest itself (with a few exceptions, some in no relation to Engelbart), it remains to be proven realized on a larger scale.

How would one go about solving this problem of somehow get complex, urgent problem analysis, understanding and potential solving started and scaling? That sounds like an exclusively organizational challenge, but isn’t it very likely that all of it requires the coordination of activities, lots of communication as well as accumulating and structuring knowledge? Can we hope to ever make meaningful progress without technical support/augmentation tools operated by curating knowledge workers specifically designed (customizable, if not even custom-made) for such highly complex, intellectual and systemic endeavours? For each of these different components/aspects of Engelbart’s approach, what would today be a solution that could and can work?

Invention, basic research and iterative improvement is a very slow, difficult and tedious process. Few can and do it well, it’s very expensive and risky. Innovation is the smart combination of already existing inventions that lead to great advances. Productization of innovations leads to change on a big scale and financial success/payoff. Innovation usually does not come from within the discipline precisely because it’s about combining different components/results from different fields in new ways the domain experts in their high specialization can’t afford to occupy themselves with in great interdisciplinary detail. Engelbart as an excellent innovator with his experience as a navy serviceman, radar technician, electrical engineer, researcher of scaling effects, his family background, mechanical practice, connection to nature together with systemic influences, also equipped with the rare chance of government and ARPA Cold War + Space Race blue skies funding supported by the larger community and conspirators around Vannevar Bush, J. C. R. Licklider, Ivan Sutherland and Robert Taylor found exceptional circumstances and coincidences that allowed his intellectually clean and rigorous work to prosper, which may not be available any more in our days. With several pieces being taken out of the puzzle later, most of the grander vision collapsed.