http://www.bootstrap.org/chronicle/chronicle.html
"Concepts such as augmenting human intellect, improvement infrastructure,
co-evolution of artifacts with social-cultural language-practices, and
bootstrapping evolved directly from Doug Engelbart's work, as did the
following twenty years of applied co-evolution. Motivating that framework
were, and still are the assumptions that complexity and urgency are
increasing exponentially and that the combination of these two will soon
challenge our organizations, be they private or public, to henceforth do
their changing by effective, continuing strategic principles rather than in
incremental steps. Therefore, in addition to aspiring to be increasingly
faster and smarter at their core missions (whether creating better widgets,
or solving societal problems), organizations will need to get increasingly
faster and smarter at how they keep improving. Engelbart saw both
organizational missions as relying heavily on a common set of core
capabilities, which he encapsulated in the term human intellect. Later, he
began using the term knowledge work after reading a '68 Peter Drucker
publication, and later still, more purposefully, switched to the larger,
centrally significant concept of collective IQ.
Engelbart's thinking prompted assessment of the infrastructure of
capabilities that support the operation of organizations of collectively
purposeful humans, capabilities developed atop their genetically endowed
capabilities to provide their personal and collective operational
effectiveness. A myriad of technical and non-technical elements came into
play, such as tools, media, language, customs, knowledge, skills,
procedures, and so on. He perceived that these elements had co-evolved
slowly over centuries, but that with the explosive emergence of digital
technology, the technical elements would shoot way ahead of the
non-technical and cause a trend toward automating rather than to augmenting
peoples' activities. It would be necessary, therefore, to gain a grip on the
elements of that ever accelerating co-evolutionary process, which means
purposefully focusing in on the infrastructures of society's activities,
those that serve to improve our collective capabilities.
From this emerged the basic concept of bootstrapping. Purposefully investing
in improving organizational collective IQ through intelligent improvement
strategies promises to yield compound returns. In simple words, the better
we get at our collective IQ, the better we'd get at improving our collective
IQ.
(...)
In recent years, Engelbart has been heartened by the movements in total
quality, business process re-engineering, reinventing organizations,
concurrent engineering, groupware, hypermedia, the World Wide Web, and all
the impressive networks of improvement activities sprouting up all over the
world. He hopes that enough synergy can be generated among these activities
to ignite a serious, thriving bootstrapping activity -- a collaborative
improvement community aimed at spawning those vast improvements in our
organizations that will boost mankind's collective IQ to unforeseen
heights."