My brain hurts (a little)

Dave Snowden serves up a very high fibre meal today. His focus is on the ways our brains are not like computers, referencing this list of ten key differences.

I was attracted to this because I've become increasingly sceptical about approaches that appear to rest on the metaphor of "brain-as-computer". For instance, I distrust the notion of "installing new beliefs" as if that's just like sticking a new piece of software into our heads.

I'm not against reframing or suggesting different ways of thinking about things but I resist the idea that "changing how we think" is the absolute key to all change. (I remember a powerpoint called "Creating a Compelling Case for Change". It was created by consultants trying to change the culture of an oil company. It was very uncompelling, and a very think-centric approach to change).

Dave is particularly interested in the implications for notions of distributed intelligence. Our brains don't work in a binary fashion, there isn't a clear distinction between hardware and software so their internal intelligence is distributed. Crucially, it's outsourced too... here's one example which fascinated me:

For example, despite your intuitive feeling that you could close your eyes and know the locations of objects around you, a series of experiments in the field of change blindness has shown that our visual memories are actually quite sparse. In this case, the brain is "offloading" its memory requirements to the environment in which it exists: why bother remembering the location of objects when a quick glance will suffice? A surprising set of experiments by Jeremy Wolfe has shown that even after being asked hundreds of times which simple geometrical shapes are displayed on a computer screen, human subjects continue to answer those questions by gaze rather than rote memory. A wide variety of evidence from other domains suggests that we are only beginning to understand the importance of embodiment in information processing.

Needless to say, a rather signicant part of the environment to which we're outsourcing intelligence are the other two-legged creatures with their own intelligences...(Mark, I'm thinking of you).

Another idea Dave liked and that got me intrigued and puzzled was this: unlike computers, our brains don't have a clock. Try thinking about that for a while. For me it's like trying to contemplate infinity...

Regional variety

It's quite interesting to see how newspapers and magazines tailor their coverage to different regions. Tabloid coverage of soccer results varies a lot by country here in the UK.

I was rather struck by this image of contrasting covers for Newsweek (from registan.net via Andrew Sullivan)

I guess in a flatter world, this sort of thing becomes a little less easy to pull off without challenge.

And here's another from the same source:

Getting vernancular

One of our Co-Creation Rules is "Get Vernacular". This means dumping some of the dinosaur speak and using language that the rest of us use.

Rik spotted a great example of someone who gets this - Warren Buffett, in his letter to shareholders.

“Warning: It’s time to eat your broccoli – I am now going to talk about accounting matters. I owe this to those Berkshire shareholders who love reading about debits and credits. I hope both of you find this discussion helpful. All others can skip this section; there will be no quiz.”

Vanity

As a certified introvert, I might be expected to hate public speaking. Actually, I usually quite like it.

So I have to admit feeling chuffed that James and I got nominated for the best presented paper at last week's Market Research Society Conference in Brighton.

(You can make your own ironic joke about what this might imply about the content.)

Distributed intelligence

Hard on the heels of efforts to open source the analysis of thousands of government documents, David Weinberger highlights Google's latest idea: to allow readers to improve the automated translation service it offers.

Survey fatigue

I've just completed a survey handed to me at Euston station the other day. It's one of those standard, multiple choice jobbies. Don't ask me why I did it, I generally dislike these things intensely.

It's a 4 page effort and I was bored after page 1. The first question on page 2 is one of those that leads to subsequent routes through the survey. If you answer that, yes, you've had an adverse experience in the last few months, you have 2 whole pages of further questions to answer. If you answer no, you skip to the last page.

Needless to say, this creates a powerful incentive to answer one way, rather than another... the more speedily to qualify for entry in the prize draw and get back to real life.

I wonder if the marketing folks spent any time at all thinking about the message these laboured, tedious forms give their customers? Do they perhaps kid themselve that we somehow interpret them as evidence of care?

Love and the connection of reason and emotion

Dave Snowden writes about A General Theory of Love, highlighting this passage:

Because mammals need relatedness for their neurophysiology to coalesce correctly, most of what makes a socially functional human comes from connection - the shaping physiologic force of love. Children who get minimal care can grow up to menace a negligent society. Because the primate brain's intricate, interlocking neural barriers to violence do not self-assemble, a limbically damaged human is deadly.

I agree with Dave's approval of how the authors "avoid the crude dichotomy of the emotional and the rational that pervades too much management speak". In branding and marketing, this often manifests as a claimed ability to operate the target market's "emotional triggers" and bypass rationality - usually in a manner that suggests little real empathy with those being (allegedly) influenced.

(Here are some previous posts here that refer to this book.)

Eurovision

You know what it's like to see a movie that is so bad, it becomes good? Well, for us Europeans this is surely the only way in which to tolerate the Eurovision Song Contest. Tony's been doing some nostalgic work digging through YouTubes of some excruciating tat.

I'm interested

I've booked my place at Russell's Interesting2007 conference. (June 16, London) The basic concept: to try to do a TED at a tiny fraction of the cost.

I'm also almost certainly going to go to Reboot again this year. A bit like Euan, I think I may pass on presenting and just go to enjoy myself.

I have a rule of thumb that the interest level of conferences is negatively correlated with the price. Which bodes well for both of these!

Tough packages

David Weinberger had me laughing with his struggle to open the packaging of a bit of kit from Logitech.

Here are things that are easier to open than your packaging:

An unripe, fused pistachio shell
A coconut on a nude beach
A new CD
A space-time portal
A delicious vegan fast-food place

Eyes

Mark Earls points out the powerful influence of our eyes.

But eyes also work on us in a much more subtle and interesting way. They keep us in line. You know the feeling of being watched? Well, one psychologist, Melissa Bateson found that contributions to the honesty box in the psychology department communal coffee room increase 3-fold when a pair of eyes is stuck on the wall.

I love this. And this is just our eyes - what are all the other unconscious ways in which we influence and affect each other? For me, its another reason to question the value of those long, written documents attempting to get everyone to "buy in" to a strategy.

MRS

James and I are doing a short turn at the Market Research Society conference in Brighton on Thursday. We've got about 25mins to talk about Co-Creation Rules. Time for a quick game and about 2 slides I reckon.

Lee McEwan lists some of the other dishes on the menu.

Conversation

Chris Corrigan posts about conversation being sacred. I've been thinking about this too lately.

I wonder what it would be like if we conversed with each other as if our speech is a form of grooming, akin to the way apes show care for each other with their rituals of touch. I think it's easy to engage with "battles of ideas" and not notice the impacts that these are actual having on our experience of each other.

Here's a barmy thought experiment: what if when we disagree with someone, we try to express our thought as is we're using our words to gently massage their shoulders? Would the words come out differently? Would we maybe decide not to disagree so strongly, or at all?

Update: See my comment below - this isn't intended as a policy we should all implement, more an experiment to indicate choices...

How Southwest apologise

Nice article from the NY Times: Airlines Learn to Fly on a Wing and an Apology

No airline accepts blame quite like Southwest Airlines, which employs Fred Taylor Jr. in a job that could be called chief apology officer.

His formal title is senior manager of proactive customer communications. But Mr. Taylor — 37, rail thin and mildly compulsive, by his own admission — spends his 12-hour work days finding out how Southwest disappointed its customers and then firing off homespun letters of apology.

Southwest seems to get the value of using a recognisable human voice for what might otherwise be rote apology letters.

Thanks to Stanley Moss for emailing me this.

Interesting

I've pencilled 16th June in my diary for Russell's fab idea: Interesting.

In the detail

Mark McGuiness' comment here reminded me of another fascinating story in Made to Stick.

A group of students are asked to think about a problem they're dealing with and want to resolve. They're divided in three groups.

The first group are sent home to think about it and come back a week later. The second group are invited to take time to carefully visualise in detail how the problem arose, going over the incidents step-by-step.

The third group are invited to do a careful visualisation finding a positive outcome and how great they'll feel.

After only one night, the second group were feeling better and having more ideas about solutions than either of the others. Even more so after a week.

Interesting huh? Cos popular wisdom suggests we shouldn't spend too much time "dwelling on the past" and should be focussed on visualising success. This fits my own experience, especially after a tough gig: talking it through in some detail with a friend almost always lifts my spirits and improves my understanding. I go from thinking I've failed to realising some new learning. I think in part the patient re-examination creates more choices for how I'm interpreting what happened.

The Heath Brothers make another interesting connection, suggesting that this kind of mental stimulation is what happens when we hear a well-told, detailed story... and that's why stories are so important in organisations.

Starbucks gets free consultancy

I wonder how much attention the folks at Starbucks are giving to Paul Williams and John Moore? These guys are serving up so much free consultancy, I'd have thought someone there might feel the need to appreciate the effort.

Mischievous thought: Perhaps they're too busy trying to create new ways to build community that they've forgotten the simpler option of just joining one that's been created for them.

Twittering

I've got a a twitter account (johnniemoore) and I'm experimenting to see if I like it. You may find I'm a bit erratic in updates. Please add me etc if you're a fellow twitterer.

If you agree with Annette, please forget I even mentioned this.

Identity or behaviour?

Guy Kawasaki pointed me to this useful article about the research of Carol Dweck.

Guy's summary is terrific and I won't repeat it. The very short version is this:

If someone thinks their ability is just down to their innate talent, they're less likely to improve.

If someone believes their poor performance is because they don't have the talent... they're also unlikely to try to improve.

Dweck's research suggests that people who engage with things with a mindset of seeing what they can learn will tend to do better than those who are seeking evidence of whether they're good enough.

Guy picks out some excellent examples of constructive feedback that supports a learning mindset and avoids positive or negative labelling of the person. This echoes what I often suggest to people giving feedback: get really specific.

I so often run into people who get stuck and say "but that's just who I am". (The person I run into most often on that is me.) It's very liberating to get away from that kind of identity-level statement and realise that it's more helpful to see the things we do as just that: what we do (or have been doing) and not who we are, and not necessarily what we might be doing in future.

Sidenote: The article is titled "The Effort Effect" which I think is slightly unfortunate as it might play to the paradigm that this is about effort versus laziness. The shift in mindset that Dweck's work focusses on is more subtle than that. The consquence is that people have a greter appetite for challenge: for me that's not about making effort but feeling energised.

Another gem from PostSecret

Emergent advertising

Andrew Sullivan spots another home-made ad for Barack Obama and asks:

Who needs professional ad campaigns? When you have such enthusiastic and creative support for free, supporters will make their own ads for you - and put them on YouTube.

...And when you've got a network of supporters spontaneously generating messages for you, you don't need focus groups and polls to evaluate which ones will give you traction. The ones which will generate traction will simply identify themselves.

Enterprise 2.0 and the loveliness of the water

I liked Euan's neat summary of how to do Enterprise 2.0 and Jon Husband's elaboration of it. Jon points to Jim McGee's metaphor:

If my hypothesis has any merit, it does suggest that some of the objections to these technologies will be rooted in emotional fears and insecurities that will be unexpressed and potentially inexpressible. To someone who can’t swim, “come on in, the water’s fine” isn’t very helpful encouragement.

Great point. Actually, I think that the swimmers are doing fine until they issue that challenge. The "encouragement" may only serve to increase the anxiety, sense of isolation and therefore resistance of the landlubber.

So maybe the best thing is not to try too hard to champion new ways, not to overdo the "not getting it" taboo, and put the energy into doing the stuff and trust that, in the end, people's natural desire to join in will take over.

Coaching: what's in a name?

I describe myself as a facilitator, but when I work one-to-one some people would call it coaching. I don't use that term much here for a variety of reasons, many of which are probably neurotic. I feel the word and the idea carry a lot of baggage. (So does the word facilitation, but I've got used to carrying it now.)

I was reminded of this by Mark McGuiness' post differentiating coaching from counselling, and Annette Clancy's partial pushback. I've seen similar arguments about the difference between coaching and therapy.

Mark has some fantastic resources on his site and having met him I'd cheerfully recommend him as a coach. The same goes for Annette, with whom I'm inclined to side on this one: I think Mark's distinction tends to play to negative stereotypes of counselling.

Somehow, I think Mark's arguing in code and I wonder if he really wants to say something like real men use coaches. Well, he'd want to avoid that sexism I suppose.

Going into therapy or counselling still carries a huge cloud of shame for some people. If calling it coaching alleviates that, great. But I think efforts to say coaching is not therapy are a bit futile. There are hundreds and hundreds of different approaches to therapy and, I daresay, coaching. Trying to draw hard distinctions between two huge generalised terms looks like hard work to me. I'm vaguely reminded of Monty Python's revolutionaries in Life of Brian wondering if they could stand up for Stan's inalienable right to have babies.

I have found this to a hugely charged issue in the past. Some coaches have got very angry with me when I've expressed this view before. But I'd say call my process by whatever name you like, call it Mildred if you want. But whatever you call it, I'd suggest making up your mind about its value based on your experience, not on the label.

When people ask me for reassurance that coaching isn't therapy, I tend to see that as a legitimate way for them to express concern about what might happen to them in the process. It's a good cue to start a conversation about what they want to get from it, what concerns they have etc.

Once we get into the detail, the whole semantic debate tends to go into the background. Then I think we can focus on what is happening in the relationship and is it useful or satisfying?

(By the way, I think the same sort of argument might apply to a word like consultant, another label some of us might want to shake off.)

PS See also the continuation of the discussion in Annette's comments. We're all friends here really.

Inspiration

Nick Smith:

A question that often comes up is how to make inspiration more solid and stable, and not confined to brief flashes. And the answer, in one way or another, is always to turn the question around and see how we still resist it. We are Inspiration.... It's how we avoid and resist this recognition that we need to look at.

Gemeinschaftsgefuhl...

... means "a profound sense of caring [for] others and a desire to improve the world," according to Wiktionary. I can't pronounce it, but I'll have some, please.

See Tom Guarriello's post for more, especially if this hooks you the way it did me:

Steven Pinker's talk has made the greatest impression on me over the last few days. He articulated something I'd known but had never said so clearly: "we live in the least violent era in human history."

Twisted about Firestarters?

At some point I'll take issue with Mark Earls to prove that he's not paying me to shill for his book. But for now I'm really digging his stuff.

His latest post points to Duncan Watts' fascinating analysis of influencers. The research suggests that we easily overestimate the power of "key influencers". Mark does a good digest. Read the whole thing for the argument, but here's Watts' handy metaphor for seeing his alternative paradigm:

Some forest fires, for example, are many times larger than average; yet no-one would claim that the size of a forest fire can be in any way attributed to the exceptional properties of the spark that ignited it, or the size of the tree that was the first to burn. Major forest fires require a conspiracy of wind, temperature, low humidity, and combustible fuel that extends over large tracts of land. Just as for large cascades in social influence networks, when the right global combination of conditions exists, any spark will do; and when it does not, none will suffice.

As a former planner, like Mark, I'm all too aware of our talent for post-hoc rationalisation and therefore our ability to come up with plausible but actually quite mistaken stories about how stuff happens. This gives rise to what I'd call the cult of leadership, a tendency to exaggerate the role of charismatic figures in making stuff happen. It's also why I generally avoid the management porn in airport bookshops.

What this opens up for me is the possibility that those we identify as the firestarters are themselves the effect of a series of more complex causes. We might be confusing cause and effect; they may be bellweathers of trends but not the people we need to influence to make things happen.

And apart from anything else, it might be another reason to take Hugh's advice and not to get all gnarled up about the influence of A listers.

(There may be a pun about the fires and the futility of cool-hunting but I'll spare you that.)

Watching improv

I'm planning to see my friend Sue Walden guest improvising with the team of Crunchy Frog tomorrow (Wednesday) evening at The Wheatsheaf, 25 Rathbone Place, London W1T 1DG. Details here. If you're at a loose end, it would be fun to see you there. It's only a fiver.

Oh and I'll be at the Social Media Club in Covent Garden before that (and it's free!)

Risk

Earl Mardle has a great post about risk management. He reflects on a Discovery channel show which suggested that as cars became safer, the amount of risky driving increased. Suggesting there is a pyschological comfort level to which we like to push ourselves.

He then joins this thought to the idea of risk management in business:

Within business there is the whole Risk management process which, at first glance, looks and sounds, like a process for minimizing the risk to which a business is exposed; preferably by getting someone else to carry that risk at no, or low, cost to the company.

Paradoxically, I suspect, that this simply enables the company to assume more and more risk in other areas until it reaches again its limits on comfort with the risk.

But the fact is that the actual risks are not extinguished or countered or canceled out by risk management, they are simply externalized to the business and bedded into the surrounding community. Where they accumulate.

He then goes on to suggest this process fuels a forthcoming financial crisis when rising levels of debt pass crisis point:

Bizarrely, we will accept that our lives should be turned to custard, not because the oil is running out or the food wont grow any more or we fall sick to some appalling new disease, but because two rows of numbers no longer add up.

Our entire social and political and economic lives will be held hostage to those rows of numbers, and rather than just dump all the trouble of the people who caused it, we will be forced to protect those people who have apparently earned the right to have their numbers add up, even if getting them to do so costs us our livelihoods, our futures and our lives.

This sparks a series of loose assocations for me:

I certainly think that people like to get somewhere near the edge of their comfort zone, to get a balance between stability/boredom and excitement/anxiety. On a more mundane level than Earl references, I think excessive efforts to eliminate risk or exercise control will often be quite counterproductive.

I also believe it's fairly common to want to find someone else to take responsibility for some of the stuff we create for ourselves. I don't need to give examples for that, do I?

I hated economics at Uni, especially macroeconomics. Sometimes I thought it was because I was thick but I also felt is was just terribly ungrounded and surreal. Earl's post reminds me of that feeling.

My last post about the tyranny of the explicit in branding is linked to this too in some way. Something about the dangers of turning our felt experience into an abstraction and assuming we've understood what's going on. I should try to find a more down-to-earth way of expressing that but I've got a train to catch... sorry.

The tyranny of the explicit in marketing

I'm continuing to have thoughts in response to reading Herd, probably because Mark Earls' position so often reverberates with mine. There's nothing like having one's prejudices supported.

Like me, Mark enjoys taking potshots at market research. In particular, the effort to read the minds of individuals in search of the magic insight that will become a lever to engage with the market. I've done my share of focus groups where the client sits behind the one-way mirror getting in a twist when the moderator "isn't getting emotional insights" from the group. It's as if we can generate genuine insights hygienically, via an intermediary and without the sordid business of emotionally connecting with people. I wonder if we can really get much insight into our fellow man without taking the risk of opening ourselves to him, rather than prodding him like a lab rat. And as Mark says in a comment on his blog, when was the last time you sat in a research meeting and the debrief went essentially: "not really sure what's happening or why. It's much more complicated than we thought and indeed than our methodologies can really handle...."?

Related to this, you may be familiar with following notion of how we learn stuff, which I lifted from this article: Smooth your Learning Journey with the Learning Matrix I'm sure this a very useful model, the idea being that we start bottom right and work our way anti-clockwise to bottom left.

But it seems to me a lot of our learning skips the conscious stages altogether, and just skips from box 1 to 4. Vast amounts of what we learn as children and adults is just unconscious copying of what others are doing around us (hence the Herd title of Mark's book). I contend that most market research values only the stuff that routes via boxes 2 and 3, with a preference for what can be turned into long and clever papers for MRS conferences. The effort to drill down to insights may actually get in the way of really connecting with the audience formerly known as consumers. Of course, as smart beings we can easily conjure up all manner of rationalisations for our behaviour to entertain market reserachers with, but it may not approximate to what's really going on.

Money for blogroll?

Wow. I just got an email as follows:

Hi Johnnie,
How much are you asking for a blogroll link placement?

I suppose it's a fair offer in a commercial world, but I'll pass on this opportunity to "monetise" this blog.

Velcro memory

Nice thought from Made to Stick (I blogged it earlier here).

Your brain hosts a truly staggering number of loops. The more hooks an idea has,the better it will cling to memory. Your childhood home has a gazillion hooks in your brain. Your credit card number has one, if it's lucky.

Herd instincts

On a long flight to Austin TX I read most of Mark Earls' book Herd. I liked it a lot, and am impressed by the breadth of reading and enquiry that has gone into writing it. There's a nice irony in a book by a planner that does so much to undermine most of the assumptions on which planning seems to rest.

The bit that got me underlining with most enthusiasm is his chapter on "Us Talk", getting away from the marketing paradigm of just broadcasting stuff and recognising the conversation.

Humans have always talked to each other and always will. A lot of what they say is both uncomfortable and irrelevant to business or those in authorities. The truth is that the modern age has just made it easier to do just this (and easier for we students of mass behaviour to observe). It remains profoundly difficult for business to embrace the truth of this - the truth that most conversations are not about you-the-business even when you are paying people to have that conversation.

Shortly after reading this, I saw an ad for some plastics corporation at O'Hare aiport. I didn't have time to take a picture, but the headline was something like "This year 19m more plastic consumers will be born in China." With a picture of a Chinese baby to make it clearer. A pretty bizarre example of corporate communications that don't get this point.

Mark goes on to suggest watching any business meeting and imagine that you are watching apes in suits. The meeting won't really be about the subject, but a series of conversations around the subject. And that's not wrong, that's just natural, I'd add.

Mark makes this argument in the context of a discussion of grooming, which apes do a lot of and which humans are doing, with various degrees of competence, a lot of the time too. This got me re-reading what I wrote about John Clippinger here.

The "family" metaphor

I like Mike Wagner's argument for dropping the metaphor of family when talking about organisations. Money quote:

You’re not Moses and employees are not your people.

Not upgrading

I don't know about you (for all I know you're an Apple or Linux person), but the more I read, the more I think I'll not be upgrading to Office 2007 or to Windows Vista. I don't like what I'm hearing and to be honest, I'm quite content with the software I've got. Do I want to risk all the gremlins to add to the proportion of features that I don't understand and will never really use in my software?

Tony's latest update on Office is a good example of why I'll stay where I am, thanks.

Uploading innovation

I enjoyed an afternoon at NESTA's Uploading Innovation unconference on Tuesday, organised by my friends at Policy Unplugged.

I often facilitate PU events and it was nice to have the afternoon off and take part as a participant. There was a great buzz about the event and I met lots of interesting people. I sat in on a session run by Mark Earls on his new book, Herd, which I've just started reading. Mark was great, sparking a really interesting discussion. His book is a page-turner too (I'll post more on that later).

James and I ran a short session in the second round where we just played improv games, a nice non-intellectual break in a headspinning day.

Gratz to Lloyd Davis for a cracking job of social reporting. Every unconference should have a Lloyd.

Technorati (with the tag nestauploading) has links to more coverage in words and pictures.