Whose insight is it anyway?

I'm continuing to enjoy Keith Sawyer's book, Group Genius (earlier post here). Mostly as an aide-memoire to myself, I wanted to log a few more of his ideas, conscious that I'm probably summarising and over-simplifying.

He takes a look at how insights are generated. He cites evidence that we're not terribly good at explaining where our insights come from, partly because we don't consciously notice the triggers. An experimenter set up two ropes hanging from a ceiling. They are far enough apart that one person can't reach out to be able to bring the two ends together.

One person is then (surprise, surprise) asked to bring the two ends together. After some stretching and struggling, they realise this won't work. Will they make the leap of insight to the solution? (There's a pair of pliers in the room too. If you tie the pliers to the end of one rope and swing it like a pendulum, you can go grab the other rope and then catch the swinging rope as it comes to you. Job done.)

People found it hard to reach this solution. But the experimenter sometimes helped them by wandering across the room on some pretext and "accidentally" hitting one of the ropes, making it swing. After that, lots of people were able to solve it.

Here's the best bit though: they didn't actually acknowledge the role of the experimenter's actions in reaching the solution. They come up with stories about how this insight occurred to them, but didn't seem to have noticed the action that really triggered it. (Sawyer elaborates with a nice yarn about Coleridge confabulating the origins of his Kubla Khan epic, disguising the detailed preparations that went into it).

A lot of folks are quite uppity about "owning" ideas "they thought of". Maybe they're just falling into this cognitive error that seems to blind us to the outside stimulii that are at work?

Learning from puzzles, not statements

Sawyer continues to challenge the notion of the blinding flash of insight inside our heads. In another experiment, people are given a set of 15 puzzles. Buried among them is one about a man who marries 20 wives in a week, is very happy and never gets divorced. And no, he's not living in Utah.

The solution is that the man is a clergyman. The interesting thing is that experimenters primed their subjects in two different ways. The first group, sometime prior to being given the puzzle are given the declarative statement, "It made the clergyman happy to marry several people each week." It seems they forget this input when they get to the puzzle and still struggle.

The second group are given something different in advance. They're given the statement, "The man married several people a week because it made him happy." Then a few seconds later they are given the word "clergyman". This group then go on the main test and don't struggle. By having a practice at solving the problem, they get better. Sawyer comments

What's happening is, you store information in a different way when you solve a problem than when you passively receive information.

Have you ever wondered why so often you tell people how to do something and they still don't get it? Maybe you've run foul of this psychological phenomenon then: there's more learning in working on a puzzle than in being given the answer. And then folks can map that learning across to puzzles of similar structure.

Collaborative ideas

Sawyer rounds off this section by challenging three common assumptions about creativity:

1. That we're blocked from creativity by our past experiences. Experiments suggest that simply eliminating false assumptions makes puzzles only slightly easier. (In the puzzle of joining nine dots set out in a square with just four lines, telling people they can draw outside the square doesn't, apparently, help much. So much for "getting outside the box"!)

2. When you break the fixation, the answer will come in a flash of insight. No, apparently not. What you need is experience in the new problem-solving domain.

3. Insight solutions are independent of prior knowledge. In reality, training in similar problems makes a big difference.

Sawyer summarises:

Creativity isn't about rejecting convention and forgetting what we know. Instead it's based on past experience and existing concepts. And the most important past experiences are in social groups filled with collaboration.

Blancmange sieving?

I'm probably labouring the metaphor, but a further thought on the blancmange leveraging post.

I just did one of those online, multiple choice surveys. This one happened to be for United Airlines' frequent flyer programme, specifically the membership pack they sent me.

It was the usual strange experience of trying to convey the reality of my feelings about an organisation through a janet-and-john filter.

So for instance, I'm asked if I've "received", "received and read" or just "read" various items in a mailshot. I'm wondering how they think I'd read something I haven't received. Also, one of the items is the frequent-flyer card. Have I read it? Err... what do you mean by "read"? I might have checked my name was spelt right, but is there something I might have missed?

Then I have to rate the "usefulness" of the items in the mailer. So how useful is the card? Well, in one sense it's useless except as a symbol of my vaguely elite status. But am I rating the card itself or the demi-monde of privilege it signifies?

I could go on but it's Sunday and I already lost one precious hour to the clock change, and I bet you know exactly what I'm talking about with these surveys anyway.

So if leaders are often leveraging blancmange, these surveys are trying to sieve it. I don't know what would happen if you sieved the pictured blancmange but I'm sure it would be less pretty.

Confidentiality

Annette has a typically thought-provoking post about confidentiality in relationships. I recommend the whole thing though this observation particularly resonates.

The second is that the stories that are revealed “in confidence” are perceived to contain the “truth” of the organisation – those stories revealed openly as part of the lived experience of clients are merely one level of engagement.

Leveraging blancmange

The great Reggie Perrin could never stop picturing a hippopotamus at the very mention of his mother-in-law. I'm experiencing a similar mental quirk, where the hippopotamus is replaced by blancmange and the mother-in-law is replaced by a different trigger. Let me explain.

It's said that Tony Blair admitted his discomfort at finding, during his first months of office, that he kept pulling the levers of power and then discovering they weren't connected to anything. I think he spent the next few years trying to make the levers work, and I think we all know how that experiment worked out.

People aren't solid objects and groups of of people are even less object-like. They can't be leveraged and as soon as you use that language, you're in danger of screwing up, big time. Lately I've been using a phrase I made up - "blancmange leveragers" to describe folks who are over-attached to being in control, and inventing new schemes to make things happen. The more elaborate their "tools", the fancier their diagrams, the more abstract their language, the bigger their "announcements" and the more sanctimonious their tone... the more I see them leveraging blancmange.

That's not because we're blancmange, obviously not. But the more you treat us as objects, the less impact you'll have. Which isn't to say, sadly, that you might not still get paid a lot of money for pretending.

Organising...

Roland Harwood at NESTA has a nice account of Clay Shirky's great talk at the RSA last week - Organising without Organisations. That talk, Roland's post and Euan's reflections on Clay's book have finally triggered my Amazonian instincts and I'm looking forward to a good read soon.

It's a funny word, organisation, and it's a bit misleading. It seems to imply a solidity to what are really emerging patterns. When we call Shell an organisation we make it more solid than it really is. It sounds odd to call Shell an organising but it might be more accurate, and place it a little more on a level with the humble little gatherings us mortals are organising all the time, of which Shell is really just a rather large scale iteration.

Zopa and credit crisis

Monevator left a comment here that led me to his interesting reflections on experience as a Zopa lender - and speculations about what will happen in a crunch.

The biggest issue for me is Zopa has not yet been tested in anger. We haven’t yet seen how individual borrowers will behave in a peer-to-peer system if money really becomes tight. With some economists predicting a 1980s-style recession in every way except the shoulder pads, that’s a very real risk.

I have a hunch, just a hunch, that peer-to-peer will turn out to be more robust in a crisis than institutuional lending - becuase I think if better cultivates a more primal human sort of trust than the purely mechanical efforts of banks. But we'll see, I guess!

Monevator also suggests it may be time for another Zopa podcast...

Not tagging

I notice I've pretty much stopped adding tags to my posts. This isn't a strategic choice, but I do tend to blog when and how I feel like it and something about categorising stuff this way now feels burdensome rather than innovative. Am I alone on this?

Innovation Conference

I generally find the cheapest conferences are the best, so a free one is not to be sniffed at. NESTA are hosting a one-dayer 20 May called The Innovation Edge and I plan to be there.

Here's their blurb for it:

NESTA’s Innovation Edge conference is an unrivalled opportunity to get under the skin of innovation in the UK – and consider the impact it will have on our future.

The conference brings together a powerful mix of experts from industry, culture, politics and academia. Bob Geldof, Lord Puttnam, Helen Alexander, Michael Birch and urban artist ‘Inkie’ are just a few of those who’ll be fuelling the discussion.

The format does not fill me with excitement, consisting mostly of important-sounding presenters and panels, but I won't prejudge especially (disclosure) as I'm doing some work for NESTA at the moment. Also, since the advent of twitter, it's usually easy to have my own back-channel during any bouts of death-by-powerpoint or the even grimmer death-by-audience-member-pretending-to-ask-a-question-but-really-just-pimping-himself.

Lessons from a spatula

Yesterday, I was told a delightful story about the paediatrician and analyst, Donald Winnicott. Winnicott was a pioneer in thinking about how mothers and babies relate and how that affects the child's development.

He talks about a spatula game. He noticed that if a mother placed a spatula near the child, and waited, it was very likely the child would become curious about this new object and play with it. If, however, the mother tried to get the child to play with the spatula, the child was likely either to reluctantly play along, developing a passive kind of engagement. Alternatively, the child would react against this intrusion and become healthily defensive.

There's all sorts of implications for those into psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, but I was thinking more mundanely about marketing. Especially as I stood on my cold doorstep while some unfortunate representative of Southern Electricity tried to lead me on an elaborate dance to do with changing my phone company.

For myself, I'd like to experiment a lot more with the careful placing of spatulas than shoving them in people's faces and expecting them to play. Oh, and noticing more of the pleasant spatulas placed in my path and spending less time grappling with those of the spatula-shoving school.

Work personas

One of the things I talk about in the new podcast is the way folks have a work persona that's different from their social persona. A client shared this with me today- an FT piece, sadly lodged behind a paywall: Be yourself—but know who you are meant to be

Here's a bit of it:

“…How should you present yourself to the world? What sort of leadership style does the situation demand? Or should you simply ignore such thoughts as you get on with the business of ‘being yourself’? A lot of people struggle with these questions. New research by the business psychology company OPP confirms the existence of so-called ‘workplace chameleons,’ those who feel the need to adopt a different persona as they arrive at work each day. Out of all the European workforces surveyed by OPP it was the Brits who came top of the chameleon league table: 64 per cent said they in effect became somebody else as they reached their desk. How unlike those straight-talking Dutch. Only 36 per cent of respondents in the Netherlands felt the need to compromise their identity in the workplace. You know where you are with the Dutch…”

I'm sure Dave Snowden would have a red alert about the robustness of those seductive statistics, and I'm dubious about the dubious nation-based mudslinging... but I'm fascinated by the pressures having a work persona can often create.

Podcast: Touch, organisations and Capt Mainwaring

Is touch - physical and emotional - a taboo subject in organisations? Why are we so sensitive about it? What is about things "touchy-feely" that seem to make people, well, touchy?

I recorded this podcast earlier today with Patrick Lambe and Mark Earls. Patrick wrote a provocative post on the subject a few weeks ago and I wanted to explore this further.

We managed to get into a discussion about lots of things from the tragic to the comic, the latter in the form of a riff on the lessons for management of Dad's Army. No firm conclusions reached, needless to say, but several hobby horses ridden and hopefully ideas provoked for you.

Patrick emphasises how controversial touch is, and suggests that some people just don't like it. (We missed the now-obvious Dad's Army link to Corporal Jones' "they don't like it up 'em"). Reflecting on this I'd probably make it about how we are willing to be touched than a blanket do-or-don't, but not sure Patrick would agree.

Anyway, hope you find it interesting and all feedback welcome.

Download the Podcast - 27m - MP3 (9 MB)

Podcast RSS feed for iPodder etc.

Show notes

Here are the show notes with my usual health warning: Timings are approximate and this is my paraphrasing of what was said. Don't take them it too literally.

0.00 Intros

0 45 Patrick explains why he wrote about touch in the first place: how knowledge management tends to autism, stripping context and emotion out of human organisation. The case of Victoria Climbie, how government agencies consistently failed to organise a response to the abuse people could see at a personal level. Also recent experiences of how a client responded uncomfortably to handshakes. Organisations seem to avoid touch, and knowledge management is seen as a very rational, disembodied thing.

3 30 Dangers of missing context when thinking about knowledge, eg the emotional context that often drives the process.

4 10 Johnnie contrasts work meetings with friends from social networks - warmer, less linear - and others in more formal organisational settings, which are less warm, apparently more strictly on-topic, but less productive.

6 10 Patrick and Johnnie talk about the word "autistic" to describe how some meetings operate when the sense of contact is missing.

6 40 Mark joins in. "We're scared of what it is to be human in organisations... scared to realise that what we do together is rather more than the bits of information in our heads and the grand abstract ideas we have, and it's rather more to do with just the day-to-day interaction with folk" Touching a really important part of our humanity. Autistic a really useful metaphor.

7 20 Patrick raises Dunbar's idea of language's origins in social grooming. Mark joins in on this - it's why so little of what we say is responsible for the meaning that the listener takes from it.

8 35 Patrick talks about the comments his post received, found them polarised: "That's pretty much how touch works, you either like it or you don't like it... you don't feel neutral about touch." You can fake your language but it's harder to fake your touch.

9 45 Mark: some people would really like to reduce the messiness of human interaction, "ideally to ones and zeroes... because it reduces all ambiguity and all personal risk..." Patrick: and corporates like it because it makes people interchangeable.

10 30 Mark: Most business thinking goes back 100 years to the age of the machine. People find it hard to let go of those ideas which see humans as fundamentally untrustworthy.

11 05 Johnnie: how people are reluctant to own their own response to touch, and prefer instead to moralise about "how things are done round here". That moralising means we lose touch, even with our own feelings.

12 35 Patrick: touch is very significant in the primate context where there are lots of group constraints about what is and isn't ok. In that sense, there are rules.

13 20 Mark: "Professional is everything that human beings aren't... organised, disciplined..."

13 45 Mark brings up the example of Captain Mainwaring from Dad's Army as example of that kind of ineffectual professionalism. Johnnie contrasts Mainwaring with Private Walker the black marketeer who Mainwaring sneers at but goes to sheepishly for his black market needs. Mark also contrasts with Sergeant Wilson who is more at ease touch/feel-wise.

15 40 Patrick: Where does this insecurity (about touch, feel) come from? Mark speculates part of it is just doing what we see those around us doing. How being professional appears to be morally superior although it's "a denial of everything else apart from what goes on betwen our ears".

17 20 Johnnie talks about how social software developments eg Facebook will contribute to a softening of this professional facade; that there will be less of a split between our working persona and our social one.

18 30 Patrick: I think the split might be between the touchers and the non-touchers. Some people just don't want it and others tune into it very easily. Johnnie thinks it's about context; people have different responses to touch in different contexts eg at work vs in the pub.

20 20 Mark: "people do have real lives as opposed to units of resource in a corporation" We might not find it easy to lose our own shackles but may find it easier to be around people who do. That might drive a gradual change.

21 20 Patrick refers back to the dangers of the Victoria Climbie incident repeating: "If we keep our separate lives... the autistic corporate one and the personal one, that problem is always going to be there."

22 40 Mark talks about his experience with Planning for Good. What he finds is he has a personal connection with the people, they want to get involved. If you get proximity and connectedness to a purpose, something happens.

24 00 A few closing comments.

25 27 End

Phoric 6

Rob and I chatted to Matt Moore on the Phoric yesterday. Matt's a bit of a force of nature and our 10 minute format went out the window!

Matt also went down the music video route and some clips I would never normally look at - but they are very thought-provoking. In the chat we talk around how the net meets a basic human urge to "yes, and" each other's offers.

Download the Podcast

More Hugh and the Rabbi

Hugh's just posted the latest Hugh and the Rabbi Podcast with Hugh, Pinny, Mark and yours truly.

Hugh's also written some good show notes which I appreciate as I know that's harder work than it looks, and a good aide memoire for me of the chat. We ramble around fairly shamelessly, but do get to talk about love and the value of small things, amongst other stuff. Hope you enjoy it.

Download the Podcast

High touch

Years ago in his book, Megatrends, John Naisbitt's best chapter was about High Tech, High Touch. He preseciently forecast a world where there'd be high technology and a compensating enthusiasm for quilting clubs.

Well, Lloyd's Social Media Cafe is majorly high touch. I've been the past two weeks and loved it. I had a great chat upstairs with Lee Thomas and that's my idea of a business meeting these days.

I suppose I half-expected such a cafe to be full of people starting at laptops and not talking to each other. Au contraire, it struck me as very untechy and human, with lashings of good coffee and toast and jam.

Friday mornings at the Coach and Horses in London. Recommended.

Gaming and life

Stephanie West Allen emailed me a link to this article: game developers can induce happiness. I've been thinking a lot about whether the fun and engagment of online gaming could be ported into less energised parts of our lives, and this piece sparks a few thoughts.

I quite liked the list of ten qualities that games have that make them fun and engaging. How could more of this be used to help organisations or to tackle tough social issues (without slipping into triviality or being simply patronising)?

(I'm also a little cautious about the postitive psychology movement, but that's for another day.)

Facebooked out?

This isn't too far off:

Hat tip to Andrew Rixon

What is Warcraft?

I suppose much of this will be lost on those of you who've avoided World of Warcraft, but this YouTube cracks me up. And captures quite a lot of the downsides of playing WoW.

Word of the day

Paul Levy came up with a word in a comment to his post about "icebreakers".

Some briefs might translate as "can you facilitate for these people to do what I want", in which case you need a facipulator, not a facilitator.

Euan's Phoric

Rob and I did our fifth Phoric podcast on Friday with Euan Semple. As with the other guests, Euan picks three youtubes and talks about what excites him about them. And as with other guests, this proves to be the launchpad for a great conversation - in this case drifting toward the future of broadcasting in a webby world.

I particularly like Euan talking about broadcast organisations needing to be built around stories rather than abstract notions like efficiency (I'm paraphrasing). Rob and Euan swap notes about how radio shows can be enlivened by integrating things like Twitter. Euan also shares a good story about a radio show stimulating listeners to edit wikipedia live as they interviewed the subject of one of its entries.

Download the Podcast

To see the clips, or get the 10min version, please go to the Phoric post.

Twittering warcraft

I set up a Tweetscan for the word "warcraft" as I wondered what my fellow addictsplayers might be saying on twitter. I found it hilarious - and revealing. If you're in branding, I recommend doing this for your brand - it's free research and you get to overhear thoughts that just don't emerge in the same way in conventional focus groups etc.

Here are some of the tweets I found engaging.

darinmcwatters : Wishing I was still in High School so I could be playing World of Warcraft during class

Wriggy : Can't get them up due to brother's on World of Warcraft ¬_¬ Going to watch TV and try again afterwards

ZicklePop : Warcraft makes my hands hurt. Damn you carpal tunnel syndrome!

PaulJManoogian : My kid is sitting next to me, with his laptop, playing Warcraft while eating Pizza. It's cute watching an 11 year old do that.

Zealoth : just quit World of Warcraft once again after a last sentimental Netherdrake flight

Nerdogical : At Grant's apartment. Everyone is playing Warcraft.

codinghorror : Imagine an Excel spreadsheet, but in 3D, and with massive numbers of people editing it at once. That's World of Warcraft!

revdancatt : Right, canceled World of Warcraft. It was fun, but really have better things to do with my time now (you know, like write a game).

rasteisleet : world of Warcraft is evil

There, a free search (and a feed if you want it) set up in moments. And tell me if you don't think this will give you insights into what Warcraft is like and - crucially - where it fits into people's lives. It's that context that is so important, and it's what gets screwed up when you sit people down for 90 minutes to talk to you about you.

No it's not the truth, but like all things twitter, these are engaging fragments of the truth. We all get to make our own meanings of them.

Update: Oh, and here are some tweets with "azeroth" (the place where the war is crafted)

Arrens : Giving serious thought to leaving Azeroth for good. Hanging with friends IRL was just too much fun to want to go back to the online grind.

ayfin : I wonder how long it will take the CIA infiltrating Azeroth to find WMD's and terrorists to realize they are wasting taxpayer money

patyomatt : 1250 words. 2 hours. On genetic algorithms. I'd rather swim around Azeroth naked.

bermar : Got my computer back today...with a brand new motherboard : Dsee you in azeroth Djevlen

kevnull : Introduced C to the world of Azeroth. We're matching fire and ice mages. And she's still hot in a virtual world.

eskye : Broke. Not going anywhere, except maybe Azeroth.

pvponline : This bitch in Ratchet is making me run all over Azeroth for mats. This robe better be worth it.

Hasteur : Pleasantly inebreated. Headed to Azeroth

SouthJ : off to Azeroth most likely be there most of the day.

Brainstorms

(Long slightly rambling post ahead)

I've been enjoying Keith Sawyer's book, Group Genius. Keith's singing to the choir, of course, as he's big on things like improvisation. His central theme is looking at how ideas are generated in teams, rather than going down the lone genius path.

The perils of storms

He pulls together some interesting research and thinking on the activity of Brainstorming. Classic brainstorming was invented by adman, Alex Osborn, with four rules: No criticism; the wilder the idea the better; go for quantity - don't worry about quality for now; go for combinations and developments of previous ideas. I've never felt terribly at ease with those rules and there's a fair amount of evidence that - even by his own criteria - Osborn's rules don't work as intended.

Curiously, the rules work better if people work alone rather than in a group! Also, if groups are given a steer towards "valuable ideas" - ie if they are told criteria for success rather than "anything goes" they appear to generate fewer but better ideas. So groups may actually work better at evaluating than pure, quantitative generation.

Sawyer outlines the reasons for shortcomings in group brainstorms: Production blocking: fighting for time in a group means you have less energy to think of your own ideas. There's also topic fixation: groups tend to cover few areas than sets of people working alone.

Social inhibition: I guess we all know what it's like to be uncomfortable in a group!

Then there's what Sawyer calls social loafing - people feel able to leave it to others in a group to do the heavy lifting.

This all fits well with my experience of brainstorming. I used to like it but over time I just felt more and more uncomfortable with it. I'd see reams of flipcharts filled up with a vague promise by someone to write them up, but a real sense that we were going through the motions.

What happens in groups...

What goes on in groups is a source of endless fascination to me, and I think many processes for making them work don't really correspond to real life. It's not that I reject models as such, it's just that I think they often stop us from sensing the ambiguity and richness of real life.

Anyhow, when I'm asked to support idea generation I try to point out that ideas are not generated in a vacuum. They arise out of communication. If we set goals about ideas, we may ignore the qualities of relationship that actually support creative thinking. A session that generates loads of ideas but leaves people miserable and out of touch with each other may be valuing the golden egg at the cost of the goose.

I love improv work because I feel it helps us to feel the relationship part of the deal as well as the output.

Sugar or solemnity?

A lot of innovation companies I see veer to one end of a spectrum or another: One set are all sugar-and-caffeine, as if creativity is all about stimulation and adrenaline. Others seem so intent on being taken seriously that they slide into a terrible solemnity of diagrams and metrics.

I was talking to Jack Leith the other day. He put it quite well: we seem to miss that it's just in our nature to be creative, we don't have to force it yet we keep inventing ways to do just that. Martin and I are Open Space junkies because we like to strip the formal structure down and get out of people's way. It's not about forcing the fun nor is it about suppressing it.

Holding

A lot of this comes down to holding, a word rich in meaning for me. It covers the somatic: how do I physically hold myself, how aware can I be of how I'm being shaped by what's round me? And it covers holding as in beliefs ("we hold these truths...); being aware of how we're thinking. How we hold each other in relationship is going to have a big impact not just on the ideas we have, but on our willingness to take risks to make them happen.

Noticing

The other thing I'd lob in here is noticing. Sometimes I think instead of having innovation programmes, we might try noticing progammes. A friend working with Unilver points out that many of its best innovations don't come from a central unit but are discovered in the outposts of the empire... and someone pays attention and helps them spread. I like the notion of uncovering ideas, noticing them... rather than frantically trying to make them. When I work with groups, I might try for some simple reflective activity or time to support that kind of sensibility.

If you're remotely into emergence, it's probably a good thing to get better at noticing stuff. Instead of dismissing events as unproductive, get better at seeing what was produced. People who slag off meetings as having no outcome are clearly not paying attention: there's always lots of outcomes but you need to look for them.

I sometimes run a very simple noticing exercise and it can have quite an impact. When people notice or are noticed (I could say touch or touched) by another, stuff happens. That kind of attention can be lost if we're trying to hard to be productive.

Possibility

And have I mentioned this before? Could we maybe start some of our meetings with an acceptance that nothing useful might happen? (If for no other reason than begging questions about what we mean by useful?) For me, that might help take some of the pressure off and actually invoke a deeper sense of possibility.

And then we might truly allow the other possibility, that something amazing could happen. Without us burying ourselves in trite rules, acres of flip charts and every size and shape of Post It note ever invented.