A power shift in networks?

Euan makes a very interesting point:

Contrast this with this and consider where the future lies.

The benefits of rough prototypes

David Smith pointed to this article about innovation at P&G. I think it smacks a little too much of the corporate Kool Aid; I'm just naturally wary of claims about "transformation", especially of human beings. Still, this quote about their experience of co-creating with customers resonates well with me:

Participants get scared using such rough prototypes to elicit consumer feedback at the beginning, but they are won over when they see the benefits of co-creation," says Kotchka. "We have found that the more finished a prototype is, the less feedback people will give you. When you give prospective users something half-finished, they think you don't know the answer. They know you need their help—and really open up.

Insight

Jonah Lehrer has a good article in the New Yorker, The Eureka Hunt (pdf), looking at research on what happens inside our heads when we come up with sudden insights. It seems to suggest it's ok to try, but best not to try too much. Here's a snippet:

The insight process, as sketched by Jung-Beeman and Kounios, is a delicate mental balancing act. At first, the brain lavishes the scarce resource of attention on a single problem. But, once the brain is sufficiently focussed, the cortex needs to relax in order to seek out the more remote association in the right hemisphere, which will provide the insight. “The relaxation phase is crucial,” Jung-Beeman said. “That’s why so many in-sights happen during warm showers.” Another ideal moment for insights, according to the scientists, is the early morning, right after we wake up. The drowsy brain is unwound and disorganized, open to all sorts of unconventional ideas. The right hemisphere is also unusually active... We do some of our best thinking when we’re still half asleep...

(T)he insight process is an act of cognitive deliberation—the brain must be focussed on the task at hand—transformed by accidental, serendipitous connections. We must concentrate, but we must concentrate on letting the mind wander.

I think the challenge is hold space open for ideas to come in the face of organisational pressures to deliver results to a timetable.

Hat tip: David Smith

UPDATE: I liked Earl's riff on this theme:

That's why the Christians begin the bible with "in the beginning there was nothing" rather than, "in the beginning there was a brainstroming session where nothing was too stupid to go on the table".

Not a journey

I had a great meeting yesterday with Jack Martin Leith, who has done more thinking about things like innovation and change and is refreshingly cynical about much conventional thinking about both.

For instance, read his latest post about change metaphors in which he puts the boot into the pervasive idea that change is a journey.

The shortcoming of the journey metaphor is that it tends to limit our ability to create results quickly and easily. The metaphor deludes us into thinking we can make a map for getting from A to B. Armed with this delusional map, we embark on what we imagine will be a hazardous journey. We start to foresee all sorts of road blocks that don’t actually exist. We find ourselves believing the milestones we invented are real, and get anxious when they don’t appear on the horizon.

This is good stuff as I think it's easy to be so future-focussed in discussing change that we are blind to the change happening in front of us right now. And then we lose our sense of agency... which we end up replacing with more anxiety about the future.

For instance: the person in a meeting who chastises people for wandering off brief, and doesn't notice the chilling effect his harsh words have on people's willingness to engage openly in future conversation.

Or the person who brands an experiment a failure without noticing that there were some interesting by-products that could be used for something else.

Check out Jack's list of alternative metaphors for further provocation.

Worrying

I enjoyed Annette's latest post, On lessons to be learned from worrying... [UPDATE: quoting Adam Philips.] Annette's always thought-provoking on things like this. (This is a woman doing a PhD on Disappointment in Organisations - what a great topic for a dissertation!)

Worrying carries quite a strong taboo, so I like the idea of rehabilitating it as Annette seems to suggest. I also like her interest in styles of worrying. I think a lot of what we call planning is really just the socially acceptable face of worrying. That's great in some contexts; in others it becomes a bit miserable - we'd do better to acknowledge anxiety and not try to fix it.

The creative "process"

Adriana spotted this (via Ugly Doggy) and it made me laugh (and want to cry, a little.)

And if you liked that, you'll forgive me for reminding you of this one:

Vulnerability

Richard Oliver spotted this from Mary Catherine Bateson:

Biologists used to talk about the fact that human beings are what is called neotenous, which is to say that we never grow up. Thank heaven for that! If you look at a baby chimp, it's almost identical to an infant human being, but it's smarter and it develops and learns faster. But at a certain point, the chimp grows up and becomes less responsive. The shape of the skull changes, and the adult chimp is less like a human being, although very smart in many ways, less willing to learn, less willing to develop trusting relationships. Human babies are born extraordinarily immature and dependent, and our whole system of adaptation and survival as a species depends on the fact that we are cared for intensively over a long period of time. It is because of this that we can have an adaptation based on so much learning and we've been able to move over the entire surface of the planet, learning new adaptations - inventing science and technology and things of that sort - instead of following built-in instinctive programs.

The boy Earls has talked about this neoteny business before, but this quote triggers a further thought. I'm like the notion that our vulnerability and sensitivity, and the interdependence that goes with them, is what marks us out as human beings - and what actually makes us strong.

Process: the hardcore version

Earl Mardle riffs on Clay Shirky, prompted by my earlier link. Earl is vindaloo to my korma. I think he may be right.

Nudge

Yesterday the RSA hosted Richard Thaler, co-author of Nudge.

I found Thaler very engaging, and I loved his theme: that we can support a lot of changes in society with quite minimal interventions. Often people don't need to be made to do things - they actually want to, we just need to make it easy.

The best example of a nudge from his book is the US state that struggled to get people to complete their tax returns. The usual cajoling, fees and incentives were relatively ineffective compared to the eventual solution. That was simply to publicise the number of people who had actually done their returns.

He also highlights the significance of default settings: if you say people have to opt-in to a pension scheme, their participation will be way lower than if you make it an opt-out scheme.

Thayer was followed onstage by Julian Le Grand of the LSE. He recounted how he tried out this defaults theory by proposing that we combat smoking by requiring smokers to obtain a permit to buy cigarettes. He appeared surprised that this didn't go down very well with Joe and Joanna Public. I suppose one man's nudge is another man's stick in the eye and knee in the groin.

For me, Nudge is a reminder that the world is complex and non-linear, and that obvious solutions don't always work. It's also a reminder of the benefits of a little humility. We should not be too surprised that our little schemes for world domination won't always work.

And on the subject of subtely, here is the inevitable Python clip.

User-generated enthusiasm

NESTA's forum on user-led innovation was rather stimulating. Rainycatz, sitting beside me, took copious notes on her Asus EEE and I've lazily waited for her to blog them before adding my two cents.

Steve Flowers of Brighton University presented some research funded by NESTA which points out that the government hasn't paid nearly enough attention to the value of user-led innovation. It's very good to see NESTA sticking its oar in on this issue. During the Q&A, Steve elaborated on how policy discussions are often dominated by rights-holders which only reinforces the innnate conservatism of policy-makers.

There were some excellent talks from several folks who are big on user-innovation: Sibelius, Swapitshop and Pete Lemon who runs a Nintendo Gaming Community.

What really hit me was the infectious enthusiasm of all three, especially Justin Baron of Sibelius. He used to be a music teacher and came across with exactly the kind of mildly eccentric passion you might expect of one. Definitely not your standard issue marketing director.

It struck me that these people had an abundant worldview, with innovations apparently coming out of their communities' ears. It felt very different from many conversations around innovation which seem characterised by furrowed brows, hang-wringing and a general sense of scarcity.

Panels, Q & As etc

John Dodds has done a post - 10 Marketing Lessons From Conferences - with some tips on how to avoid your next conference being boring. Lots of interesting ideas if you as you use them as food for thought rather than absolute truth.

I say this knowing that I can be pretty dogmatic about some meeting formats and I have to concede that a lot depends on context. A format that sucks air with one speaker and audience might work well with a different speaker/listeners.

Having said which, I definitely share John's view of the practice of taking audience questions in threes and its variations.

8) Disintermediate.
Discussion works best when one person speaks and another responds to them, so don't invoke the inefficient democratistion of taking groups of questions. The questions will be forgotten and/or unanswered and the whole process requires the unnecessary expansion of a chairman's role as intermediary. Speakers can hold their own conversations.

Absolutely, if you host one of these things, make your life easy by getting out of the way.

I'm not sure about this though:

The audience is there to listen to the speaker not the egocentric ramblings of questioners, so when you open up the conversation, insist that questions are limited to one sentence and start with an interrogative. Maximise the exposure of the speaker, minimise distractions.

Sure, some audience members use Q&A sessions to bore us with their accomplishments or plug their pet projects. But I'm wary of letting the bad eggs determine the rules for the rest of us. If we've had the courtesy to listen to a speaker for an extended period, I think it's rather insulting to be told we have to be brief. And I strongly dislike the notion that our response has to be in the form of a question - I find that a bit patronising and connected to old fashioned notions that the speaker is an expert imparting the truth and Q&A is merely an opportunity for us to learn from him. One of my favourite speakers has a nice piece of shtick where he invites all forms of response - "any questions, doubts, protests, sarcastic remarks, weird fantasies, you'd like to share?". OK that might invite an audience member to take advantage, but they'd quite likely do that anyway.

And on another level, if we think Q&A is so tricky that it can only run with landlady's rules, wouldn't it be better to cut straight to the coffee break so we can all have a nice chat and organise our own conversations? I realise that there is a "pressure to perform" in standard Q&A sessions that often makes people nervous and so longwinded, or encourages us to blurt out exaggerations rather than open up enquiry. For fans of complex systems, I think Q&A tends to squash "weak signal" feedback that works better in more informal conversation.

Of course, you skip the whole powerpoint thing and do an Open Space. But you knew I'd say that, didn't you?

Instant solutions

My friend Oli London's-most-sociable-entrepreneur" Barrett has been thinking about the widespread enthusiasm for instant solutions - very much evident in crazed proposals for dealing with knife crime here in the UK. With suitable irony, he offers us

The Medium Term Solution (MTS).

You heard it hear first, reader. Too well-thought-through to be dismissed as a ‘gimmick’, yet tangible enough to show results within months rather than years....

What we need is a fresh new way for Britain to identify, share, rate and replicate Stuff That Works. The ideas are out there, in the hands of individuals and organisations around the country. We can’t rely on the traditional media to share their stories so we’ve got to take action ourselves. A Twitter stream of social action success. Now who wouldn’t want to follow that?

I think Oli's picking up on the dilemma for those of us who are weary of gimmicks and also recognise the challenge of selling "reflection" to an audience high on stimulants. I very much like the idea of sharing stuff that works and also fear the pitfalls of only talking about success. Maybe the real need is for a constant spirit of social action enquiry?

Talking peace

Chris Corrigan points to this fascinating NY Times interview with a leading Norwegian peace negotiator. I particularly focussed on this comment about the notion of a war on terror.

“The way this has been framed, as an indefinite war that will last for decades, has impoverished our ability to understand the point of departure of the conflict and how we should deal with it,” Store said. “Engaging is not weakness, and by not talking the West has tended to give the upper hand to extremists on the other side.”

Learning from mistakes

Annette makes an interesting point about the costliest errors item.

We spend time learning how not to make the same mistakes again but it's doubtful if we spend enough time learning about the range of feeling and emotion evoked when we don't 'get it right'.

The mantra about embracing mistakes is fairly well-established and in some circles pretty much a cliche. I think Annette's pointing to the deeper emotional complexity: what one person sees as trivial another takes on the chin; "learning and moving on" is good idea but it's not the same journey for everyone.

Muddling, revisited

I spent some time reading back through my archives for stuff I've written about process. I thought the following nugget from Chris Corrigan and thought I'd repeat it. (I can't find it on Chris's archive for some reason)

I actually think that muddling through is not a correction to the conventional wisdom that stretegy and planning is the way to go. Muddling through has always been the way. The evidence is actually overwhelming. Show me something in the world, a finished process, project, thing or event, that was not the result of muddling through.

Strategy is figuring out which way to muddle. Good strategists are great muddlers. They seem to muddle in the direction of the resources or of the political will or of the greatest benefit to others.

Planning is fun, and very useful for the short term, like on the last half day of an Open Space. But planning that goes beyond "when will we talk again" or a simple to-do list needs to be aware that the muddle factor increases as the time frame increases. More importantly, and more seriously, planning that doesn't take into account a muddle factor and that creates a complex, long term and fixed to-do list is both disempowering for people and largely ineffective. It ties people to the plan (rather than the other way around) and limits exposure to true sources of inspiration and innovation.

For a comprehensive set of data on the effectiveness of muddling, check out the Nobel Prize winners speeches. When you come to a Nobel Laureate that says that their accomplishment was the result of a great strategic plan, let me know.

I like that fingering of the pitfall of tying the people to the plan.

Clay Shirky on process

I enjoyed this from Clay Shirky: Process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity. Clay's not saying we shouldn't have processes, but he's a minimalist, as am I.

Regret is one of our most powerful emotions, and it is magnified in groups. When organizations overshoot, they tend to overshoot in the direction of minimizing regret rather than maximizing capability...

Process is the feature creep of organizations. In the same way software has to have features, groups have to have process. But like software, process creep in groups is insidious -- each additional check in or form seems to cost little and add much, but over time, the cumulative overhead of process can hamstring an organization, almost without their noticing.

User-driven vs user-centric

This provided an ah-ha moment for me.

When I first talked with Doc about user-driven instead of user-centric, Jim Carrey’s The Truman Show immediately sprang to mind: from birth, Truman is the protagonist in a huge reality show revolving around him… only he doesn’t know it. The climax of the show is Truman discovering the rest of the world and confronting his father/producer. Clearly the Truman Show is Truman-centric… but it is most definitely not Truman-driven.

Hat tip: Adriana

Democracy: this time it's less personal

Doug Rushkoff kicked off day two of the Personal Democracy Forum with a nice counterblast to excessive individualism. Here's the video.

He fears we pay too much attention to web 2.0 as allowing us write stuff, as if just being able to write back our feedback to the powers-that-be is somehow revolutionary. Basically, we should have grasped that opportunity in the first renaissance. He's great on mocking brands for pretending to be intersted in our conversations but really only being concerned with getting us talking about them.

He argues for a second renaissance, of "open source democracy", where we think of ourselves not as writers/commentators/citizen journalist but as programmers/participators.

Hat tip: Dave Pollard

Quote for the day

Ian McKellan put in a delightful performance on the telly this morning challenging fundamentalists who cite the bible as the absolute authority on morality. (Basically saying this was just a figleaf for homophobia). He quoted Thomas Jefferson

We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

Trying to impress

Dave Pollard links to: Who are you trying to impress.

Justin Kownacki analyses the pitfalls of conversation where the battle for status precludes deeper engagement. His suggested remedies are all about allowing status to drop. That's a bit of theme for me this weekend.

Not Binary

The metaphor of brain-as-computer is surprisingly prevalent in business. Trainers talk about changing the software of their subjects; human processes are reduced to linear diagrams that seem to eliminate ambiguity. With this goes the notion of brain-as-territory-to-be-colonised, very popular among advertising folk. (One of the big media independents calls itself MindShare).

I've always felt like a misfit in this world of diagrams as my own brain seems obstinately non-linear. Lately (like for the last 47 years or so) I've noticed that most of the people I run into have been showing signs of this non-linearity too. Clearly I mix in the wrong circles as in the airport bookshops everyone seems to be after business books that say it's all just following seven steps.

Anyway, it now turns out (surprise) that our brains are nothing like computers, as this interesting neurophilosophy post points out.

It has long been known that cells of the invertebrate nervous system produce graded potentials, whereby the amount of transmitter released is proportional to the intensity of the stimulus. We now have evidence that mammalian neurons can generate graded potentials as well - they are not simple on/off switches, and the action potential is not all or nothing.

Hat tip: The indefatigably analogue Dave Snowden (get well soon from those undercooked sausages, Dave)

Innovation and Reflection

About a year ago, I blogged about Matthew May's ChangeThis Manifesto: Mind of the Innovator. Looking at innovation processes, he drew attention to our preferences for generating ideas and implementation - and our reluctance to reflect on the nature of the problem at the start, and the effects of the solution at the end, of the process.

Often in day-to-day conversation, people leap to solutions. If someone says something suggesting stress or distress, we leap to "why don't you..." without really taking the time to get clear on what real nature of the situation is. In therapy, there's a well-established adage about being wary of the "presenting problem" which very often isn't the real issue.

Similarly, we like to talk about whether things worked or not, rather than how they worked out. That seems to reflect our impatience with evaluation, taking time to pay attention to the full consequences of an action or process.

This relates closely to what Jack Leith's been saying about innovation being reduced to "brainstorming and project management". I think it also becomes something of a status game: having ideas and (especially) making them happen can be high status games. Asking reflective questions often seems low status by comparision, and groups of people are often very uncomfortable with the silences that come with reflection.

I've also been thinking more about the point Bob Geldof surfaced at the recent NESTA conference: that innovation happens in response to need. Talking about needs may require us to show vulnerability - again risking appearing low status compared to the "ideas-people" and "doers". (Interestingly, just today I found this nugget demonstrating a cultural default to not asking for help.)

Much of what is written about innovation seems to present it as a rather linear, efficient, controllable process of stage-gates. And/or something that happens at high tempo in response to lots of stimulants. In some organisations the innovation process seems to have been reduced to gantt charts and neat little boxes and arrows. All of this strikes me as bit hyper and probably lacking the humanity that might attach inventive thinking to stuff that really matters to people.

I'm more for holding space: supporting conditions in which people can take time and feel more at ease to talk about their needs and understandings with less pressure to generate solutions. In fact, I sometimes think we might do well to change the subject from "innovation" altogether.

Mistakes

On the BBC website, they've been asking people to name their costliest mistake. I found it quite compelling, a little peak into people's inner lives. Part of the fascination is the emotional range of responses from some ghastly tragedies to little bits of humour.

And in a world that seems fixated on success, I find the idea of sharing stories of failure rather liberating.

Glittering prizes

David Smith's blog feed is made up mainly of his del.icio.us daily links. These are a pretty fabulous digest of interesting stuff. This one caught my eye today: biases of elite education. (And I love the idea of blog called overcomingbias.com)

I've had some great chats with David about the downsides of elite education, as we both experienced what I call the Oxbridge Disease. Some of its symptoms are highlighted in this article. Whilst the Oxford experience was brilliant in many ways, it had a big shadow side - something brought out in The Glittering Prizes. I see the DVD of the BBC series of that is coming out next month - I'd love to see it again.

Propositions about change

Jack Martin Leith seems to have spent a lot of time rearranging his website, deleting stuff then deciding to reinstate it. I know the feeling!

I think the results are pretty good for those who have the luxury of reading it, not having to write it.

This post in particular got a lot of my attention today: propositions about innovation and change. Jack's taken material from his old site and reworked it with comments left there by a range of pretty interesting people. Here's some of the opening section, but I recommend the whole thing.

1 Replace desired future with desired present

Change happens in the here-and-now, not in the future, so we should talk about ‘desired present’ instead of ‘desired future’. By using the term ‘desired present’ we open up the possibility of immediate and effortless change, even when circumstances seem to render this impossible, and we galvanise people into action...

2 Realise that change is not a journey

The metaphor of ‘the future is a place and change is a journey’ often limits our ability to create results quickly and easily. If we’re not careful we start to imagine all sorts of roadblocks that don’t actually exist. We kid ourselves that we’ve created a map for getting from A (current reality) to B (desired future state). We find ourselves believing the milestones we dreamt up are real.

In fact there is no starting point. No destination. No map. No roadblocks. No milestones. And no other trappings of a journey from A to B. These are nothing more that aspects of the journey metaphor. It’s very hard to move beyond this metaphor as it’s deeply embedded in our language and our consciousness.

I think we casually use language around change and innovation without noticing the way it restricts our experience. As Jack writes here and elsewhere, we easily end up with a rather narrow and dispiriting notion of innovation as being brainstorming followed by project management. In doing so, we think we're making it all rather efficient and safe, but I think we end up strangling the quirks, eccentricities and awkward feelings that may seem very untidy but actually contain the passion and energy that can actually allow change to work.

Steal this Camp

Sicamp was a great event held earlier this year, an effort to generate social innovation in a weekend. They've just listed nine lessons with the invitation to steal them, break them etc. They're all thought-provoking. The first is my favourite and goes right to the heart of why I dislike most conventional conferences.

I'd rewrite the third ("create moments of self-organisation") as I thought sicamp created a huge continuum of self-organisation. I'd say it's more about having a little bit of structure within which self-organisation can happen.

Hopes and fears for the net

In preparation for a visit by Tim Berners-Lee, the folks at NESTA asked people via twitter to send in short statements of their best hopes and worst fears for the future of the internet. Then they generated these two clouds:

(Disclosure - I'm doing some work for NESTA at the moment)

Bits of wisdom

Thanks to Andrew for sharing these little bits of inspiration from his recent trip to see the kiwis.

"Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity"

Drive to the conditions - a reminder about being present.

Social media and the mortgage crisis

Rob is doing some interesting work with KTEC in St Louis in response to the mortgage crisis. This is a pilot for a project that could roll out across NPR stations across the US. They're trying to help communities act together more effectively to support people in danger of losing their homes to foreclosure. Part of the challenge is to break through the isolation that those faced with foreclosure experience because of shame. One good reason why their neighbours could gain from the loss of isolation is it may help forestall the ripple effect: if the house next door stands empty, the value of your house goes down too - helping push you into negative equity.

Now traditionally NPR was part of broadcast media and would only address these issues as news, dispensing advice (and probably more anxiety) from the centre. They could perhaps have been part of the problem more than the solution. So they're working here to facilitate community, quite a different emphasis.

There's no magic answers to issues like this; what's needed are experiments, which is what Rob's project seems to be about.

One aspect that interests me is the use of ning to co-ordinate the project. Rob's whole post is worth a read, but here are some excerpts. Some interesting core principles: transparency; the avoidance of crude taxonomies that could distract from appreciating emergence; leadership as facilitation...

Everything on Ning is searchable so we don't have to worry about a taxonomy that we could never keep up with. Later when we have to go back and discover why we did something, we only have to use a key word to find out...

We use the Forum section for group reports. Here the PM, Ross, calls in public for our weekly task and outcomes. It's all public - you are late or ineffective - it's brutally clear. So Ross will be less and less the herder of cats and we all have to take more responsibility to do our job. There is no hiding here!...

Jack is always watching! A critical issue in moving fast but also safe is the paradox that in the end the CEO is responsible but if we make him the bottleneck for all decisions, then we fail.

The nature of the Site means that Jack can and does see everything. So CEO becomes the facilitator rather than the barrier for speed and safety.

Total transparency - we have not only all of us who have jobs on the project on the Team Site but we also have members from CPB, from PBS, from Stations, from our Measurement Team, from Social Media Advisers. We are doing all the work in full view of our peers and our client. They see not only the good work but our struggles too.

Meetings...

Reading my vanity feed, this cartoon (originally blogged in 2004) still generates the odd mention.

It's funny how we instantly think of meetings as boring and pointless. I recently asked a group to do a round of introductions by recounting the best and worst meetings they'd been to. The consensus seemed to be that the more formal the meeting the more likely it was to enter the worst camp.

My favourite answer for best meeting was the guy who said "meeting my girlfriend". That disrupted the usual trance in which we evaluate meetings as if they are only the boring things we do at work.

Go into any pub and you'll see how easy it is for us human beings to organise enlivening meetings. How come we make it seem so hard in our offices? (That's a rhetorical question, by the way, but feel free to answer it if it amuses you.)

User-led innovation

Another interesting event from my friends at NESTA: Harnessing user-led innovation - Wednesday, 16th July 2008, 10.30am - 12.30pm

On Wednesday 16th July 2008, NESTA will launch its latest research report ‘The New Inventors: How users are changing the rules of innovation.’...

Why is user-led innovation becoming so valuable? How do firms harness the power of user-led innovation? And what is the role of policy in stimulating it?

To investigate this phenomenon, last year NESTA commissioned a major new piece of research from the Centre for Research in Innovation Management (CENTRIM), University of Brighton, and the Science Technology Policy Research Unit (SPRU), University of Sussex.

Please join us to hear about the findings and to discuss the implications for policy and practice.

Posted by Johnnie Moore at 13:44 in Blogs & networks
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2gether08

I spent yesterday at 2gether08 and thought it was great. It had a lot of the elements that make Reboot a success: a good venue that feels down-to-earth; lots of tracks to choose from, scope for doing a few things on-the-fly; a bit of social network technology but nothing too fancy; and a cafe area in which to schmooze. I spent a lot of my time in the cafe bit, catching up with people I've not seen for a while, but also saw a couple of good sessions.

These unconferences are typically way cheaper than conventional ones, and seem to create much more enthusiasm from participants - partly because we know we have to make a bit of an effort. When you've spent £1000 for some conference, of course you feel obliged to moan about the slightest imperfection in the temperature of the coffee; when you've spent a hundred or so, you know you have bring a bit of goodwill along as well.