Spirited Thought

Twitter is a centerpiece to techi-discussions where everyone shakes in amazement that such a simple application could become so integral to people’s lives. It is the simplicity, content and medium that supports such phenomenal adoption. More specifically, the interfaces to Twitter are minimal – website, email, feeds, Twitter Tools (extensions to Twitter) and most importantly text messaging. The website supports initial account creation, management, historical archive and message broadcasting, but in truth, like every other website would require a user to show up to participate and benefit. Extending their interface to email offers the few people who have a computer but no mobile phone a way to engage, but it is the text messaging that lets Twitter reach down and touch you in your pocket. There is too much information and yet participating in Twitter only increases it. So, why are we experiencing such compulsion?

Twitter has been described as micro-blogging and it is not a terrible coin. Twitters are character limited training people to marshal life updates into pithy messages. If one made a valuation of a blog post that journals a person’s day-to-day activity, the value in any given twitter is at most proportionally as small. However, considered in the context of the same person’s daily twitters and an individual’s understanding is enhanced. Consider one person’s twitters in their twitter-network cocktail and the twitter-log takes on additional meaning, meaning only understood by the receiver. Throw into the mental mix that one person does not necessarily need to know another in order to follow them – supporting fantastical senses of potentially very distant individuals.

Blog-trolling a last weekend I remember running across Matt Hatem’s reflection on the social sixth sense. He actually ends up meeting a friend that he might not have otherwise through Twitter. Interestingly, Matt’s very real social connection enhances his relationship with Twitter. Regularly, Twitter is a simple way to keep up with his network virtually. He is left to construct what one buddy is up to based on what he knows of them and what the message said. In his example, though, Matt bridged the relationship into the real world, which is far richer and now forever part of how Matt understands Twitter – it connects him with people he knows – virtually and in the flesh.

Matt also points off to Clive Thompson’s Wired article How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense. Clive offers similar anecdotal support that small messages understood cumulatively have meaning, meaning that changes what we understand about the people we know. The fact that these messages show up on a mobile phone – a intimate device – offers urgency of interruption and often a visually simple rolling log of what is what in the network. The mobile phone has become an ambient device that creates more socially aware people, in some cases, actually getting them away from tiny keyboards and meeting up close enough to touch.

On the first of February, I accepted a new assignment managing an IBM innovation team – WebAhead. This new opportunity came as part of a reorganization where the Technology Adoption Program (TAP) and WebAhead came under the same manager. My previous work, conceiving and co-founding TAP, is still with me and has become invaluable in understanding the challenges of inventing and innovating and having those outcomes impact the company broadly. Managing technology adoption or as some like to refer to it as technology diffusion is a key part of the mix – both are part of managing innovation, but a smaller part. In my case, I am managing the software development side of an innovation team – a group of developers that sit alongside systems administrators on a raised floor lab with an impressive amount of infrastructure and connectivity. What we work on, how we work on it, which people we collaborate with and when & how we deliver a given technology all determines the gait of innovation and our ability to transform the company – not just through new technology, but through leadership and cultural change. The creative outlook for this team is critical in its evolutionary output and certainly fundamental to its ability to invent completely new systems. Both the managing and creation of innovation is art.

As part of my drink from the information fire hose, I reviewed an article by Lars Erik Holmquist, “Inventing the future.” He presents the notion of predicting the future by inventing it (Alan Kay) and that one way might be to use user-driven innovation, where unlikely (extreme) users are engaged with new technology. (e.g. Find a group of fire fighters and show them a miniature wireless video camera intended for bank ATM monitoring) It is an interesting idea, a brainstorming technique that focuses on a group of like minded people that might think differently about a given technology. The seductive part is that it is an outside perspective that is irrefutably valid, because while they are engaged around the technology they are users of their ideas. Now, of course, this gave me some interesting thoughts around how we might approach some of our resources as define what we work on and how we innovate.

One of the key aspects of the Technology Adoption Program is helping identify, understand and interact with early-adopters, the users of early work. They tend to be a engaged and vocal group, willing to contribute in exchange for access to the latest stuff. Early data analysis confirms our ability to herd cats (early-adopters) and I wonder, what we might find if we repeated Holmquist’s user-driven innovation technique with segments of our early adopter community? This raises the flags of all the usability professionals, “do you even really know what kind of people make up your community?” The answer is sort of, but yes, I agree, we would need to do a deep dive on this. The second thought was, could we build a process and set of measurements around this technique to help articulate the value this method brings? Could we end up being able to compare its relative value to other methods of focused invention and innovation and then correlate when which technique provides the best output?

On any given day the lab is buzzing with the team understanding what it is we are building and the architecture and development that paves the way to get there. I am a believer in the idea that managing innovation is largely an art and in that way excited by the notion that we might create, discover and integrate other “paintbrushes.” While the brush does not make the painter, it can inspire and participate the creation of the painting and the development of the painter.