Holding back time?

I pretty much agree with Cory Doctorow's counterblast to Lord Mandelson's plans to disconnect alleged filesharers: Denying physics won’t save the video stars. Lots of good lines, and this one stood out for me:

It is not the job of government to guarantee that the business model enabled by last year’s technology will go on for ever. If it were, we would have outlawed radio to save vaudeville.

Hat tip: David Smith

Bottle bank arcade game

I'm enjoying Jonah Lehrer's How we Decide. I'm currently on the chapter looking at the role of dopamine on our thinking. Getting a hit from dopamine is what gets people addicted to intermittent positive rewards - think fruit machines or World of Warcraft. This makes our thinking quite non-rational, for good or ill.

On the good side, I guess we might consider this bottle bank.

Hat tip: A tweet from Christian Heilmann

The genie out of the bottle

Antony Mayfield links to Google's "mind blowing collection of creative ideas". I just skimmed through, but you could spend days exploring all the web apps listed there.

All this inventive technology is being made available to just about anyone with a web connection. How does it compare for engagement and collaboration with anything inside the firewall of organisations? I've argued before that, over the last few years, the technological advantage has shifted massively away from companies to individuals. I think we may only have scratched the surface of the impact this will have.

Luck...

Richard Wiseman researches luck and says:

Personality tests revealed that unlucky people are generally much more tense than lucky people, and research has shown that anxiety disrupts people's ability to notice the unexpected.

Interesting and feels connected to my own little mantra of notice more, change less.

Hat tip: Charles Frith

Stimulating complexity

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in Good Business: Leadership, Flow and the Making of Meaning says this:

One of the key tasks of management is to create an organization that stimulates the complexity of those who belong to it.

It's so tempting instead to write complicated rules that actually stifle people's complexity. And it's not just management that could do with remembering this, it's all of us.

Questions that keep physicists up at night

New Scientist describes seven questions that keep physicists up at night. I liked this one:

How does complexity happen? From the unpredictable behaviour of financial markets to the rise of life from inert matter, Leo Kadananoff, physicist and applied mathematician at the University of Chicago, finds the most engaging questions deal with the rise of complex systems. Kadanoff worries that particle physicists and cosmologists are missing an important trick if they only focus on the very small and the very large. "We still don't know how ordinary window glass works and keeps it shape," says Kadanoff. "The investigation of familiar things is just as important in the search for understanding." Life itself, he says, will only be truly understood by decoding how simple constituents with simple interactions can lead to complex phenomena.

This reminds me of the richness in human relationships when we slow down enough to see how much we affect each other, simply by being with each other. Most organisational conversations seem to wrestle with grand strategy and delete the lower-status but real stuff that's going on moment-by-moment with those immediately around us.

I also liked the section which explored how the act of observation affects the phenomenon being observed. Especially when put like this:

No one has yet fathomed how the universe seems to know when it is being watched.

Hat tip: Boing Boing

Whose country?

I've talked a bit recently about the book Us and Them. Getting behind stereotypes has been on my mind lot lately.

So Andrew Sullivan's blog exploration of "whose country" America actually is (continued 2 3 4 5 6) has been fascinating. He's summed it up in a Sunday Times piece: Scratch white America and beneath it is black. There are obvious parallels for those in the UK who've been arguing about whose country Britain is.

In human history there is no purity, only change. There is no stability, only flux. The past always inhabits the present, even as the present tries to distort or co-opt the past in its own myths and dreams. That many white Americans do not even acknowledge or realise how black they are — and that many African-Americans do not grasp how utterly different they have become from those Africans they were forced to leave behind centuries ago — does not alter this reality. In some ways, it deepens it. It is so deep it has become unconscious.

And he continues:

It is a pied kind of beauty, this diversity. And those who wish to simplify it, to reduce it to some biological or racial element that renders us something other than we actually are, are not in any way conservatives. They are fantasists and bigots, deaf to the music true nations make, and the many variations that still make their melodies soar.

Seeing from outside

Ethan Zuckerman blogs a talk by Jonah Lehrer at Poptech.

When we’ve got hard problems, we turn them over to experts. That might be the wrong thing to do, Lehrer suggests. … Lehrer ends on this intriguing idea: “Problems are intractable because we didn’t see them from the outside."

Lehrer cites some fascinating research to support this: two groups are given a problem to solve. Their performance is strongly affected by one variable. One group is told the problem comes from people down the corridor, the other group are told it comes from Greece. The From Greece group do much better. Check it out.

Hat tip: David Smith

Shadows of organisational life

I enjoyed reading Matt Moore's post about his participation in a Knowledge Management Conference.

Like Matt, I don't much want to do presentations these days, preferring sessions that are genuinely interactive and conversational. So I was glad he wanted to try something different at this gig. He got a sense that there lots of issues around boundaries in the KM business. So after some initial suggestions didn't work out, Matt came up with a simple session idea:

Then the thought struck me. Get the participants to draw maps. So that’s what I did. Six tables, six maps. In each case I asked them to map out knowledge management as an imaginary nation and then identify who else this nation might interact with (through trade, war or something else).

You can see the results on Matt's blog. I think what emerged was really interesting - a graphic demonstration of the complex and often conflicted nature of the business these folks are in. For me, it's as if folks were quite able to draw the elephant under the table - even though there had been a lot of resistance to naming it in the run up to the conference.

I have sometimes found getting people to express their ideas through a medium or metaphor seems to unleash more refreshing, often less refined/polite ideas and observations. It's as if it bypasses some of our defences against stepping into riskier territory.

Many years ago, I had an interesting demonstration of the range of material it can uncover, for good or ill. I was hosting an awayday for a client - it was one of those team-building/strategy gigs. I asked everyone to grab a marker pen and flip chart and produce a picture of their personal future if the business was really working for them. (I'm not a massive fan of "idealised visions" but they can often give us information about what's happening right now).

Two images from that process still stand out in my memory. One participant drew herself at a desk with colleagues saying simple greetings and thanks to her. When she spoke about her image, she revealed how important it was for her to be acknowledged. She hated arriving at the office in the morning if everyone was head down at work and didn't say hi. It's easy for these very simple needs to go unspoken in a corporate environment - but it was brilliant that she brought this up. I suspect for her, a lot of grand talk about strategy would not have been that useful. What mattered was something very simple, close to home... and (I say laughing) very easily deliverable.

In sharp contrast, another particpant drew a picture of two tall buildings. One represented the company itself. Next to it was a much taller building with his name on it. In his ideal future, he would establish his own more succesful business and his current employer could be a valued (smaller) client. As he explained this, you could have heard a pin drop. I can imagine many different ways to interpret this image, and it does seem at a far extreme, status-wise, from the first. I'll just say that again, this is not something you'd normally expect to hear in a conventional business discussion.

Things like this, and Matt's experiment, suggest there's a heck of a lot that easily goes unspoken and unprocessed in organisations. And an awful lot of energy is tied up when it says that way.

For clarity, I'm not crudely advocating that people have to let it all hang out. But I do get excited at the possibilities when more of the organisational shadow comes into the light.

Self-doubt and the bullying boss

The BPS Digest reports that Self-doubt turns bosses into bullies. If power corrupts, it may not corrupt equally. They describe some small scale experiments from which researchers concluded:

Power holders who do not feel personally competent are more likely than those who feel competent to lash out against other people.

That makes some kind of sense to me, and reminds me of Richard Farson's formula, that responsibility plus helplessness leads to abuse.

The researchers add this slightly depressing suggestion:

Additionally, the finding that self-worth boosts assuage the aggressive tendencies of such power holders implies the effectiveness of a strategy commonly employed by underlings: excessive flattery.

I bet we've all seen that strategy in action and I know I've been guilty of it in the past. It stores up even more trouble for the future.

Social creativity

Keith Sawyer has spent decades researching creativity. His latest post reports his interviews with winners of the New Yorker cartoon caption competition. Among his conclusions:

The first important discovery about creativity is that ideas emerge over time, from hard work and constant revision. The "sudden flash of insight" is largely a myth. And the same goes for the cartoon caption contest: caption winners almost never have their ideas instantly.

Although creativity may love constraints, it doesn't run on schedule, especially the manager's schedule. (I covered a little more of Keith's material on time boundaries here).

And this resonated strongly:

The creative insight seldom comes to lone geniuses who sequester themselves from society; on the contrary, conversation and social ties enhance creativity. Contest winners tend to bounce ideas off of friends or family. Patricia Carrington had her idea while discussing the cartoon with her husband. Harry Effron while talking about the cartoon with his dad. John Kinde actually gets together every week with a "humor master-mind group" to brainstorm caption ideas.

Coaching to connect

I wanted to plug my friend Sue Glasser's upcoming workshop, Coaching to Connect. It's in London on November 18th. Sue has done pretty much a lifetime of work exploring how we humans connect and mis-connect with each other. With her background in dancing and choreography she also gets the ways in which unspoken but very real physical behaviours affect working relationships.

I'm going to be staggering through Heathrow that day but for anyone else, I think you'll find Sue's approach distinctive and very engaging.

Are we doomed?

Dave Pollard is one of the unique voices I'd never have heard but for the internet. He writes with tremendous passion, intensity and bluntness.

I remember him saying he was a happy pessimist, which is a great paradoxical truth about Dave. He tends to think we're all heading for hell in a handcart, but carries on his life with incredible gusto.

What he's just posted, Nobody Knows Anything, is Dave at his most eloquent. I think he's right to challenge our collective willingness to invest in the notion of leaders who can save us. That he does so so boldly is challenging and exciting. Here's a taste, but I recommend the whole thing.

Economists, financial 'experts', psychologists, consultants, pundits, celebrities, policy wonks, advisors, barons of industry, doctors -- none of these people really know what they're doing. They want you to believe they know what they're doing, so that they can justify what they're taking out of the system in salaries, bonuses, perks, commissions and fees. But they're making it up as they go along...It's all veneer. Beneath each $2000 suit, behind all the swagger, from the boardroom to the office of the commander in chief, there's an insecure, terrified little boy pretending to be in charge, faking it, and easily swept away by the first pretty young adoring intern who will go down on her knees before him.

I'm not as sure as Dave appears to be that we're all doomed. In a way, that is another false certainty to cling to. I've felt for sometime that we're in some kind of race: will our talent for collaboration and collective intelligence catch up fast enough with our opposing talents for waste and obsessive rivalry?

The benefits of the idling mind

Clive Thompson has a good piece in Wired: Why Idling Mind Is Mother of Invention. He cites evidence that lots of important processing goes on in the brain when we daydream. This leads Clive to ask:

If he’s right, we ought to think about redesigning the way we work. Modern productivity software is made to minimize mental drift. We ruthlessly track our progress on each task, click off to-do lists, design our workdays with Google-Calendered five-minute-increment meetings. How about designing software that optimizes daydreaming?

Interesting thought. Until that software arrives, maybe we can just cut ourselves some slack.

"Pepsi to cease advertising"

I thought this Onion report was very funny, and like all really good satire points to a truth that some may find uncomfortable. I urge you to enjoy the whole thing before reading the next few paras.

Consider some of the statements the Onion puts in the mouth of the Pepsi Boss:

"Frankly, it just feels sort of weird and desperate to put all this energy into telling people what to drink. If they don't like it, then they don't like it."

"Look, Coca-Cola is a terrific product," Nooyi continued. "Millions of people choose it over Pepsi every day. Are those people wrong? Of course not. Concepts like 'right' and 'wrong' shouldn't even apply. It's a soft drink."

These are pretty sane and sensible things to say... the hilarity is that, of course, a Pepsi boss could never acknowledge these truths.

Of course, vast marketing hierarchies a have a strong interest in maintaining the status quo. Too much Onion really would bring them to tears.

But there may be some smaller businesses that would do very well to use the Onion strategy. Run one last farewell ad, hack huges costs out of flim flam promotion and bet the ranch on actually delivering good stuff and services that people will want to talk about.

Past and future

JP has a good post summarising the differences between the analog and digital eras: Musing about culture and customers and choice: the eBaying of “content”.

A bit of Block wisdom

Philip Bonser picked up on my recent post about dealing with complex issues. I liked this quote he found from Peter Block

..we have a deeply held belief that the way to make a difference in the world is to define problems and needs and then recommend actions to solve those needs. We are all problem solvers, action oriented and results minded. It is illegal in this culture to leave a meeting without a to-do list. We want measurable outcomes and we want them now. What is hard to grasp is that it is this very mindset which prevents anything fundamental from changing. We cannot problem solve our way into fundamental change, or transformation.

I'm with Philip in not wanting to reject problem-solving approaches out-of-hand. I am arguing for more reflection before leaping into problem-solving as the default.

Words...

A few days ago, Jack Ricchiuto blogged this thought:

what happens in language is what happens in culture. In many ways we treat ourselves and each other the way we treat language

It rang bells for me; often the casual choices of words we use may dramatically shape how we can respond to any challenge. For instance, in biz meetings where we talk about "deliverables" we immediately start deleting ambiguity, often treating fuzzy things as if they are just hard objects. It's perhaps a small step to treating people as objects, as in human resources.

Today, I see Jack refers to Karen Fong's collection of words in other languages that have no precise equivalent in English. For instance,

The Dutch word gezellig can be described as a cozy, communal feeling, like the warm sensation one has surrounded by good friends at a long meal, with the conversation flowing

Having that Dutch word added to my vocab feels like a really good thing to me.

Media maybe, but not, Jim, as we know it...

Jeff Jarvis has a good post about where power lies in the new, networked world. It's a detailed argument and I'm simplifying it, but this is the nub for me:

Control of distribution was how the old moguls prevailed. But that is not replaced, one-to-one, with new control of distribution. The internet makes us all distributors. That is why you want to be open and part of the conversation so the people formerly known as the audience distribute you.

I think that's the point that is so easily missed.

For instance, take the hoohah over Jan Moir's unpleasant article, or the Carter Ruck/Trafigura controversy. It's easy to frame both these as victories for twitter; Moir herself appears to see a highly orchestrated campaign. Emergent patterns get retrofitted to a worldview where someone is control and has the power. Moir may be treating this as her vs twitter whereas it's really her and a very wide spectrum of people who happen to be using twitter; most don't seem to like her article but there is no uniformity and no-one is in charge.

This is also where the term social media can be tiresome, placing these network phenomena as if they are just a variation of old, central media. (Antony Mayfield highlighted this very consisely the other day, dreaming of the day we can drop the word media and focus on the social.)

UPDATE: Stephen Fry has put up a post of dazlling brilliance and spirit that explores all this in ways I couldn't begin to emulate.

When doing little can be smart

I've been going on about the idea of notice more, change less quite a lot this year.

With this in mind, I was intrigued by Andrew Sullivan's analysis in The Sunday Times of Barack Obama's strategy: President Obama may seem to dither, but he is ready to strike.

Of course there are plenty of other ways to interpret these events, and to frame Obama's leadership or otherwise. I don't particularly want to get into an argument about that.

I will just say that what Sullivan suggests does resonate with me as an approach to complex issues, where there is so much temptation to take big, decisive action, and take it quickly. It's easy for patience and sitting with ambiguity to be denounced as indecisive. There are times to move boldly, and times to wait patiently.

Clouds and corporates

I like Euan's article Does Cloud Computing Mean Stormy Weather for Managers.

I've written before that there's been an important shift in technological power from inside corporations to outside. Euan puts it well:

In the old days having an office used to be a symbol of status, emblematic of the ability to get things done. Now having an office means that you have to work with slower bandwidth than you have at home

And I think this is pretty on-the-money too:

So the cloud is not just the latest buzzword... it is a reflection of the shift in the relationship between organisations and the staff they employ, and a shift in how the organisation defines its boundaries with the outside world

Slogans

In Are you lovin' it?, Tom Asacker has a great post elaborating on David Ogilvy's comment that "Agencies waste countless hours concocting slogans of incredible fatuity."

For every vaguely memorable slogan, there are countless utterly forgettable ones. Tom lists ones McDonalds have used over the years as evidence, and also suggests this list of company slogans. Barely a spark of memorability among them.

Yes

Tom Atlee looks at whether changes depends on individual commitment or effective systems. It's both, of course:

Whether we assume that "it all starts with the individual" or "the individual is shaped by their social systems and circumstances", we miss the extent to which individuals influence collective awareness, functionality and evolution AND collective systems influence individual consciousness, evolution and functioning. Individual and collective capacities and dynamics constitute a feedback cycle which doesn't START anywhere.

The new order of things?

Earl has some interesting reflections on a post by Jon Husband about the kind of changes we may be going through.

Lots to think about. I'm enthusiastic about the notion that we're in the midst of revolutionary change and the imminent collapse of the old order. Of course, my conception of the old order may be different from yours and I'm always wary of two-dimensional diagrams to represent how we may be experience complex change. Of course they offer insights but they also tempt us back to the idea that change is sort of linear, really. I like the way Earl points out there's other ways we can draw all these curves.

Fear of new tech goes back a long way

100 years of Big Content fearing technology—in its own words

Nate Anderson looks back at a hundred years of alarming predictions about the adverse effects of technology, from the player piano and the gramophone onwards.

It's almost a truism in the tech world that copyright owners reflexively oppose new inventions that do (or might) disrupt existing business models. But how many techies actually know what rightsholders have said and written for the last hundred years on the subject?

Here's the short version of Nate's answer, I think the whole thing is worth reading.

The anxious rhetoric around new technology is really quite shocking in its vehemence, from claims that the player piano will destroy musical taste and the "national throat" to concerns that the VCR is like the "Boston strangler" to claims that only Hollywood's premier content could make the DTV transition a success. Most of it turned out to be absurd hyperbole, but it's interesting to see just how consistent the words and the fears remain across more than a century of innovation and a host of very different devices.

Hat tip: David Smith's daily feed

Social capital: Scandanavia vs Anglo Saxons

My friend Julian Burton emailed me a link to this article by David Halpern at the RSA website. He looks at social capital and suggests we pay more attention to it as an indicator of national well-being.

There's a lot to chew on there, but this bit particularly caught my eye: Halpern looks at one of the indicators of social capital, the reported likelihood of a citizen thinking "most people can be trusted". Whilst this has fallen over the years in America and parts of Europe, it's gone the other way in Scandanavia. He argues:

In essence, we Anglo-Saxons have spent the past few decades using our growing personal wealth to escape from the inconvenience of other people. To use an everyday example, we buy several TVs so that even our own children don’t have to negotiate with each other about what to watch. We use our wealth to ensure that we can do what we want, when we want to. In contrast, our Scandinavian neighbours seem to have used their wealth to see more of one another – to go out with friends, to join more reading groups and so on.

Reminder

Just a reminder that Peter Hanke and Rob Poynton are running their workshop, Communication as a Performing Art on November 2nd in London. I'm going there, as is Marks Earls plus Roland Harwood from NESTA so I think we're going to have a very interesting time.

Managed to death

Alan Moore has an alarming and important post about workplace suicides, pointing the finger largely at management.

He includes a link to Simon Caulkin's valedictory column for the Observer. I've long admired Caulkin's acerbic, no-nonsense approach and this is pretty much his j'accuse moment.

Across both public and private sectors what readers experienced as “management” was pervasively problematic. It just wasn’t what it said on the tin. Wherever they looked, readers found a glaring discrepancy between “official” and “unofficial” versions, between talk and walk. The talk was empowerment, shared destiny, pulling together: the walk was increasing work intensity, tight performance management, risk offloaded on to the individual. The talk was flat organisations: the reality, centralisation and a yawning divide between other ranks, required to minimise their demands for the greater good, and a remote officer class whose rewards had to soar to motivate them to do their job. Employees were the most valuable asset – until costs had to be cut. Repeated mis-selling and other scandals demonstrated it certainly wasn’t the customer who was king.

I fear there is much truth in this analysis, and in Caulkin's subsequent attack:

Somewhere along the line the edifice of management had been turned upside down – it was shareholders who had become monarch, their courtiers lavishly rewarded managers whose MBA courses had taught them to manage deals and numbers, not things or people. Management had suffered a reverse takeover. Finance annexed reality, cost ousted value, the means became the end.

In some ways, shareholders are not really in charge at all; actually most of them are the same stressed employees investing via pension funds. They end up being cost-cut allegedly to protect their pensions.

Emergence

Over at FastForward, Rob has written again on the theme of emergence. This is stuff he's been working on for a long time, and I like to pay close attention to each iteration.

One of the ideas that particularly engaged me was Rob's example of how children get hold of language. We all know the timeline, but Rob makes me see how astonishing it really is. How in a relatively short time, infants experience an explosive growth in their language skills.

What happens inside brains is dead interesting, especially if you're attracted to metaphor of the brain as a network. It excites me because the net and what goes with it have created in a short space of time a peer-to-peer network of incredible richness and complexity. Rob's post begs the question: what if we as a species may be about to experience a sudden and very significant explosion in our capacity to think together?

That's just a partial response to Rob's part one. There's two more chunks to process as well.

Wicked Problems

I've written before about Dr Jeff Conklin's work on Wicked Problems, and I've just discovered a more recent, updated version of his paper on the subject. Wicked Problems & Social Complexity (pdf) It's excellent stuff.

Information and overload

NY restaurants were made to post the calories of all their meals. The effect may have been to encourage people to make less healthy food choices.

Jonah Lehrer reflects on this particular manifestation of the law of unintended consequences. Maybe more calories gets equated in our minds with more pleasure.

I think it's easy to overvalue information as a means of controlling behaviour.

If only we could stop those pesky unstructured processes

Sig has a good post, mischievously citing this from a post by Gartner

...the hidden costs of unstructured processes: although a lot of focus of BPM efforts (time and money) is on structured processes, as much as 60% of an organization’s processes are unstructured – and probably also unmonitored, unmanaged, unknown and unruly.

This raises all sorts of heady questions, not least of which is how exactly do you get to measure things that you say can't even be monitored and are unknown. Astrophysicists, stop what you're doing because Gartner quantifies the unknown. Where's Donald Rumsfeld when you need him?

Plus I have to laugh at the emphasis on the costs of the unstructured processes. What about the benefits, like when you find someone inside the bureaucracy who can short cut it for you, or the one that gets outside the call centre script and treats you like a fellow human.

And I love that final adjective, "unruly". For me it's where the grownup managerial mask really slips and we move into doilies-around-piano-leg territory.

Sig explores this with a nice analogy about cross-country skiing versus snowboarding.

The Man, and whether to spend time with him

I'm one of those people who thinks too much, and there's often a mush of vaguely related ideas at the back of my mind. Then once in a while, I read something that crystallises it.

Today, the crystalliser is Dan McQuillan's post - Will Politics 1.0 Swallow Government 2.0? a response.

I've been weary of party politics for a long time, and my level of engagement with it has dropped to almost nil. Unlike most of my friends, I almost never watch Question Time. I'm deeply sceptical of the pantomime of senior journalists affecting to "grill" senior politicians, which seems to veer more towards WWE than a real fight.

Dan's questioning the value of web enthusiasts working with established parties, and cites Andrea DiMaio's post, Why Government 2.0 Has Little To Do With Government . Here's how Dan summarises:

Critiqueing the idea that gov 2.0 is about the ways "organizations and institutions can leverage technology to improve effectiveness and efficiency and to better engage constituents" he reframes the issue: "The problem is that government 2.0 is not about organizations and institutions. It is about the way in which constituents aggregate and socialize knowledge in ways that change their expectations and how they relate to government institutions." It's nicely articulated but stays on the safe ground of information and knowledge. I'd contend that the bolder win is for people to aggregate and socialize solutions i.e. actual functioning answers to social needs, whether stand-alone, grant funded or direct hacks of gov operations.

I don't want to go all binary here, and I don't suppose Dan or Andrea do either. But as time passes, I notice I feel more and more sceptical about the transformative power of institutions and more interested in the transformative power of individuals connected not by bureaucracy but by shared enthusiasms.

A long moment one wartime dawn - and its lessons

In Us and Them, David Berreby tells the story of a band of WWII British commandos who have captured a senior German commander, General Heinrich Kreipe.

The Brits are moving stealthily around a Greek island, watching their prisoner and avoiding discovery by German forces. Imagine the state of tension between captors and captive, each walking a knife edge of death and emnity.

One morning, Kreipe witnesses dawn breaking over a mountain and is reminded of an ode by Horace and starts reciting it. One of the British commandos, Major Fermer, recognises the verse and surprises Kreipe by taking up the Latin and completing the poem. Here's how Berreby continues the tale:

"Ach, so, Herr Major," Kreipe says, and for some time the two men look silently at the peak. "It was very strange," Fermor wrote years later. "As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together."

I find that a remarkable story and it's just one of the many pleasures of Berreby's book.

Here's the deeper point that the author makes about our very human habit of stereoptyping: that we think we're doing it based on information (accurate or not) about the person, but actually that's not how our mental processes really work.

We think the human-kind code is based on facts about people. Instead, it's based on facts about how we relate to those people at the moment we categorize them - what we want, or expect, or fear from them. Mental codes interpret human kinds as if they were things that have dimensions and persist through time. But the information that makes the codes work is not about things. It's about actions - what we're doing and planning to do as they relate to what other people are doing.

His work presents a powerful challenge to notions of original sin, tendencies to see people as "them" and essentially bad (or "us" and essentially good) and unchanging. He does this with eloquence as well as scientific precision, as in this further reflection on events on that Greek island in 1944:

A conscious mind makes decisions and swears oaths to treat an enemy as an enemy, always. But consciousness is a tight, bright spotlight running over a restless ocean of mind. Elsewhere in that ever-changing sea of perception and feeling, things change without conscious intent. All that's required is a message, set in human-kind code, touching the human-kind decoder. You - the you who thinks you know yourself - need not be involved. And so one dawn sixty years ago a soldier found that the code dividing the world into Horations and non-Horations mattered more, for that moment, than the one dividing armies.

Berreby cites much research to show the massive consequences for our well-being of believing we're "us" or "them", with their many linked ideas of status. He matches this with insights into how complex are the signals that give rise to these notions.

Reading his work reminds me of the preciousness of a sense of belonging. And I am forced to draw breath at the careless ease with which it's possible to either violate it, or to create it - either for myself or for those around me.

(I am also reminded of the Buddhist instruction to go into the world as if your every action will have an impact upon it, whilst laughing kindly at your grandiosity in thinking so.)

Oh, and nature too

Jonah Lehrer in The Frontal Cortex also points to research suggesting communing with nature increases our compassion. I liked Lehrer's closing thought:

As usual, Emerson got it right: "Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience."

Love and creativity

Nira Liberman and Oren Shapira explore the relationship between love and creativity. I'm generally excited to see the L word invoked in exploring how new ideas emerge, and the article is full of interesting stuff, raising lots of questions in my head as well as answers. Here's a chunk of it, but the whole thing is worth a read.

Why does love make us think more globally? The researchers suggest that romantic love induces a long-term perspective, whereas sexual desire induces a short-term perspective. This is because love typically entails wishes and goals of prolonged attachment with a person, whereas sexual desire is typically focused on engaging in sexual activities in the "here and now". Consistent with this idea, when the researchers asked people to imagine a romantic date or a casual sex encounter, they found that those who imagined dates imagined them as occurring farther into the future than those who imagined casual sex.

The distinction between love and lust is an interesting one - they are often conflated in the way we use the word love, especially in business where it seems to carry a lot of charge. I was intrigued by the researchers' efforts to separate them. (Andrew Sullivan explores the whole sex/love thing very forthrightly ).

The article continues:

According to construal level theory (CLT), thinking about events that are farther into the future or past - or any kind psychological distancing (such as considering things or people that are physically farther away, or considering remote, unlikely alternatives to reality) triggers a more global processing style. In other words, psychological distancing makes us see the forest rather than the individual trees.

Ok, that part resonates with me and my experience that creativity often requires a reduction in time pressure, or goes with a different sense of time. It makes me think about the practice of holding space. I find the most satsifying creative moments in coaching relationships or meetings seem to arise when there's least effort to make something happen, more sense of presence and some hard-to-articulate openness to the new. It feels like getting away from problem-solving.

Hat tip: The Frontal Cortex

Behaviour change, revisited

Please don't take this too literally, I just need to get this off my chest.

A while back, Mark posted some good provocative challenges to notions about behaviour change. Geoff has just weighed in with some good thoughts of his own.

The gist of it is (for me) that huge amounts of hand-wringing conversations go on in organisations about how to make people behave differently. These overlook the statistical evidence, and common sense experience, that most of these efforts fail and/or have unintended consequences. Yet we continue to while away the time devising the next experiment in alchemy.

Our organisations seem to have a surplus of very intelligent people who are, unconsciously, sweating blood trying to sort out the perceived issues of lots of other very intelligent people, in a series of recursive loops of dizzying complexity.

Meanwhile, we're so busy dreaming up desirable futures for each other, that we don't notice all the subtle changes that are going on around us anyway. And while we craft our master strategies, we don't even think about the little experiments we could make to nudge the system and see what happens.

You know, stuff we could do right now, or at least in the next day or so.

I'm starting to notice that the more discussions revolve around the importance of strategy, purpose and other such abstractions, the more likely I am to start daydreaming about what to have for tea or going for a nice walk somewhere.

Yes, I'm being a little facetious but I guess I'm saying it might be more productive to focus our energies on stuff in the here and now, to do with our immediate personal impact and well-being and possibly that of people we actually care about.

Heaven knows, the world faces some awesome problems but grandiosity is definitely not the answer.

/rant

CW, debunked

James Gardner left his bank job a few weeks ago to work for the DWP. It may be my imagination, but it seems his blogging has become spunkier since then. I like his latest post about some tired conventional wisdom about making money from ideas. A couple of snippets that caught my eye:

One comment from a particular individual struck me. He was saying that he sees a lot of start-ups who have no IP, nothing at all they can protect. Nothing, in fact, that makes their idea valuable. “They are interesting ideas for a websites”, I think he said...Never have I heard a more telling statement from the old school. The ones who think that building new technology – technology that can be protected with patents and then licensed – is the only way to build successful businesses.

James goes on to cites lots of examples of successful enterprises that seem fairly light on IP. Then he has an entertaining pop at the fetishisation of business models and monetisation. Highlights:

The argument here, from the same individual, was that so many “nice web sites” didn’t have any clue how to monetise themselves. Apparently, this is a cardinal sin. Firstly, I’d suggest that anyone that’s worked for a large corporate has no clue how to monetise anything. Big successful corporations got that way because of clever people at the start. Once the model is in place, the product developed, and the users recruited, what’s left? Yes, operations.