Posts Tagged: Participation

Business / Technology — No Comments
29
Aug 09

The pen to paper transformation

The physical practice of writing, drawing and doodling is at the heart of constructing high-bandwidth content for low-bandwidth fluid consumption. Yet, there are few people that actually practice these methods. Of those that do, the technology mediated construction of content vaporizes the artifacts associated with the experience. People still benefit from keeping a digital diary, but all the edits typical of pen are erased to leave a final pristine form.

Simplicity is often thought of as minimalism, however there are plenty of complicated things that appear simple – look into biomimicry for examples and inspiration. Simplicity is possible with more thoughtful design. Being thoughtful requires clear understanding of evolving thinking – a reason people love to study the work of others to help define their own.

Zack Arias has become a wonderful source of thoughtful content. Recently he posted a photograph of his whiteboard where he was thinking through the end-to-end experience that his clients have when working with him. It conveys an enormous amount of information that clearly transpired of a much longer period. The final product is something the viewer has the honor of appreciating, while Zack had the hard work adding and editing the realities of his business and priorities. Zack gets the transformation in how he thinks about his business, while the viewer simply gets to peer onto the artifact.

Dr. Michael Wesch has been working with the LiveScribe SmartPen which records the audio and markings of the author in digital form. It can then be explored and shared in video progression with others. The author gets additional benefit being able to play audio associated with any note by tapping. What is wonderful is that Dr. Wesch is also sharing how he filters, structures notes and draws relationships with his content, all in the context of the presentations of his students. This is an improvement over the whiteboard where the viewer is regulated to one state of a product. While a lot can be teased out with Wesch’s smart pen experiment, we do not in fact understand what he is thinking. We do not know his transformation.

A sample of what the Behance Action Pad looks like.

A sample of what the action pad looks like.

Behance is a company that creates products and services that help provide order to what can seem like creative madness. In fact, they help bring simplicity – clarity – to the numerous aspects of thinking. They break things down into preparation, actions steps, back-burner thoughts and unlined but dotted work spaced that facilitate diagrams and writing the same. This is an example of encoding a structure to help replicate behavior. It comes from patterning after a methodology that mediates the structuring of creative thinking. As a tool, this method and its papers facilitate – we hope – more clarity and hopefully more simplicity. Again, there is no way to capture someone’s transformation, except possibly in his or her progression through the framework.

Now, if only more people took a pen to paper to write, draw or doodle. There is no shortage of content creation, but we lack the records of the experience. We snap endless photographs and videos to simply flood and archive the world. People love to say it is the journey and not the destination. What if there is no destination and not enough people are journeying?

Consider the complexities in your art or business. What are your most complex challenges? Can you gauge from your work products how evolved your thinking is? What we present is a direct representation of how clearly we think and evolved our thoughts are. Yet, the majority of examples of slides and diagrams show the garbage dump yet to be wade through. When was the last time you saw a white paper? When was the last time you read one? There is a class of people that know, writing anything at all puts you in a position of leadership. There is another class that actually reads it and sees the mess. The only way to come to deep understanding is to work though it, be it with a whiteboard, a SmartPen or Behance pad, and allow the transformation to occur with your thinking. It can be done digitally, but there is something more impactful in picking up a pen and placing it to paper, that captures the evolution as you think that represents to the author the journey and to all others, the result.

Business / Culture / Relationships — No Comments
10
May 09

Breakup with your organization without leaving

Sophisticated organizations construct relationships with the people that enable the group. Even if all you do is punch the time clock at work, part of your identity is associated with your job, the building you work in, the company you work for and the people you work with. If you actually like what you do, have skills that help you deliver in meaningful ways and the stomach to deal with the human condition, then it is in your organization’s best interest to retain you – even better if they get you to retain you.

It takes an incredible amount of clarity to both understand what is important and why it is important. A few years back an executive offered some mentoring advice to help structure the conversation of what was important to me. Consider money, recognition, visibility and content. Assign a percentage to each of these according to the contributing importance to what drives you. This and other techniques help someone understand what is important, but not why. What in the absence of why is dangerous. Deriving insight from the what is certainly possible, in fact powerful. Investigating why someone feels a certain way can be even more transformative.

Incentives are a common method of influencing behavior. The most powerful of which communicate social or professional status – titles or black credit cards. There is nothing wrong with wanting to be an executive with a fancy title, but the meaning of such a label has power within the organization and possibly with other groups that identify with similar notions. Everyone else, especially an indigenous tribe in a far away land, has no idea what it means. Creative workplaces often poke fun at organizational structures encouraging titles to be fun – Guru of Internet happiness. It is easy to not realize why what you desire is fabricated. Ensuring the “why” of “what” comes from you and not someone else is the key to freedom.

Breaking free from your organization makes you a more effective contributor. It is impossible for your relationship with an organization not to contribute to your identity. The longer you groove over the same mental and physical paths the more efficient traversing these passageways become. Realizing any path is possible often means breaking some of the psychological and physiological habits associated with the current context – the more deep the groove the more resistance and pain involved in changing. This can be an emotional break up where the individual is reorganizing and reestablishing the relationship with the organization. People tend to change organizations instead of changing their conception of the organization – guaranteed to repeat the pattern. Your organization defines you, but you can define the organization and leave and define something else somewhere else if need be. The terms of your contract are not to be a hamster in a running wheel. That is just what happens when people accept things as they are.

Business / Culture / Design / Innovation — No Comments
12
Oct 08

Creating the future while minding your business

The last day of the Buckminster Fuller exhibit at the Whitney delivered many surprising moments of genius. Visionary and inventor, Buckminster is an innovator’s innovator. He saw the value of drawing upon interdisciplinary fields to inform a unique and faceted view of the world. His work is grounded in helping people with a do “more with less” attitude that extended to environmental impact. While it is easy to hand wave this exhibition as an old time futurist, his philosophy alone was worth absorbing.

There are many ways to go about change. Over the last couple of years, innovation has become all the rage. It is seen as the fundamental approach to growth. Companies exist to deliver value to customers through the creation of products and services. Through the innovation contributed by products and services companies compete for higher sales, larger market share and if they are lucky the hearts of their clients and customers.
Companies also consider innovating on their business a key model for transformation. Many change makers push against the system to get it to change, to innovate and evolve. In the end, the fastest and most exciting opportunities are those that usurp the existing establishment. They politely and subtly thumb the current way of thinking, in favor for an alternative approach, one that could change the landscape completely. Apparently, Buckminster Fuller saw this approach as the only viable approach to change.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

R. Buckminster Fuller

The resistance to change, even from the most progressive is an adversary that drains the innovator directly. More time is spent talking than doing. People argue about subtle points to maintain the current course and speed. My father taught me at a young age that if you always do what you always have done, then you always get what you have always gotten. What is difficult here is that it takes the majority of workers to deliver on today; after all, it brings in the money to create for tomorrow. In order to remain viable companies need to invest just as heavily in inventing and innovating for tomorrow. Traditional R&D organizations are no longer the primary source of innovation and there is lots of research that suggests answers is in the masses. This is an area where maybe only a few are required to institute change.

Never doubt that a small group of dedicated people can change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.

Margaret Mead

No one wants what he or she has today, but if that is all the people of a company spend time doing, then how could any expect anything more than a game of catch up? Something far more radical would be to create an organizational structure that enabled the pursuit of both present and future with equal vigor.

Change is a critical part of business. Fuller’s attitude toward creation, focused on his contribution without regard to if the world was ready. The world catches up and regardless of success is influenced by the doing.

Business / Culture / Design / Relationships / Technology — 1 Comment
28
Jun 08

I think ICANN

ICANN is loosening the rules around domain suffix at the detriment of having any meaning and comprehension embodied in a hostname. URLs need more thought, not freedom. Even ICANN’s CEO brings the move down to vanity plate level contribution. Apparently, the Internet was running out of space.

The potential here is huge. It represents a whole new way for people to express themselves on the Net,” said Dr Twomey. “It’s a massive increase in the ‘real estate’ of the Internet.

We have numerous examples of shooting ourselves.

Nine kids under 19 years of age will be killed with a gun today. 30% will have intentionally taken their own life. Even if we want to dispute the fact, suicide by handgun exists and people are not managing their relationship with firearms well. Consider the recent Supreme Court ruling objecting to a Washington D.C. ban on hand guns. Sustaining laws like this one does not actually make things safer, it just makes them illegal. We have speed limits and many of us do not follow those. Yet cars kill just fine at a rate of five to six thousand teenagers per year.

Some schools in some states attempt to teach safe sex. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation reports that children have sex at around age 17. Include other forms of sex and those polled report almost 50% of males having received oral sex and 39% gave. So kids are sexually active and there is a movement to focus on not having sex, not how to do it safely or how to be smart about it. An NPR story reported…

…Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government finds that only 7 percent of Americans say sex education should not be taught in schools.

If we are in such agreement, we should start measuring how many of our children’s decisions around sex are well informed. Remove the issue of if their decision is something we personally agree with and simply ask if they felt they were informed.

No one disputes, though, that many were delighted to discover they were pregnant. “Sweet!” one of them shouted in the school nurse’s office. The school superintendent admitted: “They were not trying very hard not to get pregnant.”

From Financial Times, The ideology of teen pregnancy (Gloucester High School Pregnancy Pact) by Christopher Caldwell

Prescription drugs seem to be all the rage. Some might naively interpret that the war on drugs must be almost over if kids are turning to medicine cabinets. Or we could simply be inspired by Dr. Twomey and say that we have a massive increase in the ‘real estate’ of drug market.

Structured naming lets us work and communicate meaning. Our world works in abstractions. We cannot possibly consider the totality of our own lives, the community, the nation or the world without coming to a screeching halt. Abstractions allow us to consider just enough of reality to work with it. Loosely regulated naming is not a good thing. One lesson we can apply from corporate life is that things done by committee often fail or are fraught with issues. It lacks leadership and puts the idiocracy into the lead.

A recent article in the Atlantic, Is Google Making us Stoopid? by Nicholas Carr, talks about our increasing reliance on the intelligent Internet and our own asymptotic tendency away from our rich, educated and thoughtful past. One can only hope that Internet naming is just a fluke, that this is not just another data point of stupidity.

Business / Innovation / Technology — 1 Comment
29
May 08

The success of participation

One of the magical things about grassroots computing – grassroots anything probably – is that any success is decided by the participants. This basic rule is what ensures support but perplexes companies who want to make money from the productive application of technology. Users of technology do not overtly care about the monetary value of technology which is what makes it even harder – we are all quite content to use something we deem useful even if – and often even more if – we are delighted by it.

One of the challenges companies fall into is trying to create a community or an online social experience where there is no compelling groundswell. Online community development and certainly grassroots computing are not about technology, so building something rarely begets either.

Web 2.0-ifing existing applications is often a sure way to move further away from productive. The only time it helps is when the existing solution has a decidedly undesirable experience and the aspects of grassroots activity might result in better outcomes. Adding a set of widgets tells people you acknowledge and recognize the movement, designing or conceiving business with social computing as a core heartbeat tells people you are the movement. If you are successful, you did it right otherwise you learned a lot.

If the barrier to progress focuses on a framework articulating the values of the past or present, then the outcome will be one that follows instead of leads. There is plenty to be done meet the expectations of traditional returns on investment, but they will necessarily either limit innovation or shape the potential successes. To be really leading edge new measures and values are required that articulate the future state. Without this it is all smoke and mirrors.

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