Yesterday's Wall Street Journal (WSJ) included articles on Apple's new iPad, as well as the soon-to-be-released Required Navigation Performance (RNP) system for airline travel.   Both represent major advances that will change many lives, not withstanding the lives of those organizations whose products compete with iPads and the airlines who are following the lead of Alaska Airline and Southwest with RNP technologies.   Walter Mossberg of the WSJ suggests that the iPad has "the potential to change portable computing profoundly, and to challenge the primacy of the laptop.  It could even help, eventually, to propel the finger-driven, multitouch user interface ahead of the mouse-driven interface that has prevailed for decades."  How's that for moving the cheese of mouse-drive interface developers?   In parallel, after April 6th, passengers on Southwest Airlines will experience the next generation of the U.S. air-travel system, when the GPS-based RNP system provides for shorter flight routes, hence lower fuel costs.

 

Such advances in technology are integral to the Technology Roadmaps and business operations of Apple, Alaska Airlines, and Southwest Airlines.   While Technology Roadmaps are common, far less common is the potential of a Thinking Roadmap to develop the thinking patterns of individuals and collective enterprises and, thereby, challenge the thinking of what W. Edwards Deming termed "the prevailing style of management."   Such is the excitement to be found within the In2:InThinking Network, where our focus is on the ability to work together, as it follows from the abilities to improve how we think about the context of both our learning and thinking.  Absent such changes in thinking patterns, might the iPad, as the pager, cell phone, and Blackberry before it, serve to increase the speed of blame in our organizations?   Instead, imagine the potential of integrating Technology Roadmaps with Thinking Roadmaps, to move organizations into the realms of organizations that are increasing the speed of trust and cooperation.