Airline hamster wheel slowing

I just got a letter from Virgin Atlantic. They're trying to put a cheery spin on the fact they're downgrading me from Silver to Red in the frequent flyer programme. I'm expecting the same soon from United, where I plummeted from Gold to Silver last year and now will fall to some shamefully non-metallic category. I've been flying less lately.

I feel like an addict in recovery. I used to get very excited about those little perks like using the premium lounges... but when I really examine the experience, there was also stress in structuring my travel to make sure I span the airline's hamster wheel fast enough. And I think all that worrying whether I'd get comped an upgrade caused more stress than the occasional success ever really gave me. And to be honest, I always found something a bit depressing about those lounges, that we'd all sold a tiny little piece of our soul to be there. Likewise in Business Class: I wonder if secretly we all know we don't really BELONG and are all faking it.

We'll see how my recovery progresses. I could easily have a relapse.

Social object lesson

Rob passes on a great story from Chris Matyszczyk at cnet about Ikea's campaign to launch a new store in Malmo.

They opened a Facebook profile for the store manager and started uploading pictures of IKEA furniture. And announced that the first person to tag their name to a product in the pictures, won it. The result?

Before Facebook could take credit for its own wonderful ingenuity in creating the world's most needed Web site, thousands of Swedes were spreading pictures of IKEA showrooms all around the personal galaxy known as their profile pages.

Agnostic internet

John Naughton reports on Dave Winer's frustration at Twitter blocking one of his accounts.

His offence? His tweets being mainly links. John makes a good argument:

Dave is right to point out that this kind of behaviour runs directly counter to the spirit of the Internet — which is a technology that is entirely agnostic about the uses to which it is put. That’s a feature of the system, not a bug: it’s what was designed into the architecture of the network. It’s part of its DNA. If the guys who run Twitter want it to enjoy the same kind of organic growth as the Net and the Web had, then they had better learn the same kind of agnosticism.

Hat tip: Charles Frith

Silliness, period.

Jeff Jarvis has a pithy rant against corporate fussiness over how their names get spelt. Apparently, "AOL" has just become "Aol." with some hoohah about the importance of the period, or full stop as they may or may not allow us Brits to call it. This kind of thing has always made me laugh.

Years ago, when dinosaurs walked the land, I worked for an ad agency called Valin Pollen. It insisted on always presenting its name in capitals: VALIN POLLEN. You don't need much imagination to imagine the impact of VALIN POLLEN trumpeting its self-importance this way, in every single document spewing out of the bank of word processors (heady technology in those days). It seemed out to keep tripping over a large VALIN POLLEN recommendation to its far, far bigger and richer clients, most of whom were happy to settle for modest upper-and-lower case.

VALIN POLLEN was a remarkable place to work in all sorts of ways. But I don't think many of us really thought this capital letter vanity was much of an idea. At least, I didn't find myself in the pub with any who did.

Jeff, needless to say, finds all this name fetishism absurd. One of his commenters alludes to the notion that having rigid control over your logo/name is meant to imply you have the same rigorous control over your organisation.

Now even supposing that were true, does anyone really think that's such a good thing these days?

And sorry but I can't resist the obvious Python reference.

The Tyranny of the Explicit

Bob Sutton has an interesting post linking to this New York Times story: After Bankruptcy, G.M. Struggles to Shed a Legendary Bureaucracy. A manager relates how the company's legendary bureaucracy is being cut down to size: his massively extensive performance review has been cut down to a single page. I liked his explanation for this:

We measured ourselves ten ways from Sunday. But as soon as everything is important, nothing is important.

My feeling is that what appears to be happening at GM needs to happen in a lot more places. It often seems to me that everytime we experience a crisis, the solution is to write more rules. A child dies due to failings in care, and more forms have to be filled in. In absurd extremes, a council bans parents from entering a play area as they've not had a criminal records bureau check.

Alongside this is a creeping extension of the need for academic qualifications, the ability to write clever essays. Social workers will have their initial training extended to four years; nurses will have to get a degree level qualification in future. Soon, psychotherapists will have to get a masters degree in order to practice.

The intention is good, but the practical effect is to engulf people in explicit, complicated systems and reduce their freedom - based on an unconscious assumption that everyone is not to be trusted. We give ascendancy to people who are really great at theory and effectively degrade practice. I think its rooted in the idea that one person or a group of people can effectively oversee a system and control how it works with written instructions.

In order to get things done people have to find elaborate work arounds for the rules, often with anxiety. The result: it's actually harder to create real trust the human way, using our judgement and instincts.

Of course, language is a wonderful thing, but I see us getting horribly out of balance. I call it The Tyranny of the Explicit. I've made that a category here, linking a few related posts on the theme.

Random deletions

With all this talk of looming battles or alliances between the behemoths of Google, Microsoft, and various Media Empires, let's keep an eye out for the little guy.

In which spirit, I was troubled by my friend Jack Yan's series of issues with Google's Blogger subsidiary unilaterally deleting content.

Japan and micropayments

After linking Alan's passionate defence of the commons, I should also highlight James' thoughts on how Japan has trailblazed micropayments.

And so in Japan's mobile world, media is turned on its head from a place where the bills are paid by brands splashing advertising cash, to a realm paid for by consumers' micropayments. This has plenty of repercussions for the marketing and media world, not least the way in which commercial messages are displayed. Historically, the cover price of a magazine has been a tiny part of its overall funds, while display advertising has provided the real cash. However, when the readers become the paymasters, brands need to tread much more carefully.

More to chew on when reflecting on Rupert Murdoch's plans to monetize his online content.

Peaceful Warrior

I decided to have a very quiet day yesterday, stayed in bed a long time and left the computer off all day. Subsisted on healthy meals interspersed with comfort food (fruit and nut chocolate).

I'm an intermittent meditator, but I put in some practice which felt much needed.

I then went searching the bookshelves for The Way of the Peaceful Warrior. It's been years since I read it, but I'd been reminded of it by the more recent movie (quite good but no substitute for the book). It was calling out to be read.

I don't know about you, but I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with spiritual stuff, but yesterday I was hungry for it.

The bit that most stuck in my mind were the nuggets of insight around meditation from the mysterious character, nicknamed Socrates. The first:

There are two simultaneous processes: One is insight- the willing of attention, the channeling of awareness to focus precisely on what you want to see. The other process is surrender - letting go of all arising thoughts.

My sense is that lots of people say they have a bad meditation because they are interrupted by so many thoughts; I'd say that's ok. Yesterday I had lots and lots of thoughts and many of them were anxious. But I found I could release them. It's not quite the right image, but it was like I was diving and lots and lots of air bubbles were flying up past me; the practice was surrender. The more there were, the easier I found it let them go, and when I could I returned to my focus. The more thoughts there were, the less I sensed they mattered. (Of course, your mileage may vary).

The second thing that stuck in my mind was this:

Consciousness is not in the body; rather the body is in consciousness.

I find it a wonderfully challenging idea. I want to say something about it relating to the practice of allowing ourselves to be held, and to the holding of space in Open Space, but can't quite put words to it just now.

Enclosing the commons?

Alan Moore has a long and thought-provoking post on what seems like a looming battle between forces of openness and control when it comes to the future of networks. Central point:

Enclosing the commons and locking down culture will do massive and irreparable damage to this country.

One step at a time

I saw a lot of myself in Viv's description of indecision, and the wisdom of accepting offers and doing something... one step at a time.

Innovation with a capital I

I've been enjoying James Gardner's blog, especially since he moved from his bank to the Department of Work and Pensions. I get the sense that with this move he's able to speak more clearly about the issues of supporting innovation in organisations.

His latest post, Innovation Backlash recounts the catch-22 in which Heads of Innovation find themselves.

The innovators have no clout when their diaries don’t have meetings with senior people. They know they can’t “deliver” (they are scared the backlash will take out their projects) so they only commit to things which are small enough not to get noticed. Of course, being small, they are also not worthy of the attention of senior folk, so no meetings get set up.

I wonder if the problem is partly the expectation that people with innovation in their title must drive innovation. That so easily puts them in a bind where they're supposed to be powerful but often in practice aren't. It also may reinforce the notion that innovation is something to be organised from above by specialists, and that it is a grand thing, not the sum of a series of small ones occurring in day-to-day conversation. It becomes Innovation with a capital I.

I fondly remember John Jay's brilliant essay on obliquity. Here's the set up:

Paradoxical as it sounds, goals are more likely to be achieved when pursued indirectly. So the most profitable companies are not the most profit-oriented, and the happiest people are not those who make happiness their main aim. The name of this idea? Obliquity.

Jay focuses particularly on profits, and how companies that ruthlessly pursue them end up losing them. I can't help thinking the same may apply to Innovation.

I somehow think that framing Innovation as an exercise in successfully wielding power is not the right approach. I think networking technologies are allowing a lot of innovations (some you may like, some you may not) to emerge peer-to-peer where the drive is a sense of tribal enthusiasm rather than delivering on a corporate goal. Often the sort of stuff that established hierarchies want to put a stop to... in which case, where does your head of Innovation stand if his aim is get top-level buy-in?

Using this fabulous scene from Casablanca is an exaggerated rhetorical ploy and a shameless oversimplification - but it captures something of what I'm trying to articulate.

Selling paper

More pith from Paul Graham:

We can all imagine an old-style editor getting a scoop and saying "this will sell a lot of papers!" Cross out that final S and you're describing their business model.

I think he's on the money with this conclusion:

I don't know exactly what the future will look like, but I'm not too worried about it. This sort of change tends to create as many good things as it kills. Indeed, the really interesting question is not what will happen to existing forms, but what new forms will appear.

Hat tip: David Smith

Learning now vs success/failure

This resonated with me this morning:

Roethlisberger argues that people who are preoccupied with success ask the wrong question. They ask, “what is the secret of success” when they should be asking, “what prevents me from learning here and now?” To be overly preoccupied with the future is to be inattentive toward the present where learning and growth take place. To walk around asking, “am I a success or a failure” is a silly question in the sense that the closest you can come to answer is to say, everyone is both a success and a failure.

Source:Weick, Karl E. How Projects Lose Meaning: The Dynamics of Renewal. in Renewing Research Practice by R. Stablein and P. Frost (Eds.). Stanford, CA: Stanford. 2004.

Reflecting on this a little more, sometimes it may be better to ask "what am I experiencing now?" and see if the learning emerges from that. I'm in a Zen frame of mind I guess.

Hat tip Bob Sutton, via David Smith.

High status deadens experience

That Bob Sutton piece on GM also has a great attack on how the company dishes out free cars as perks. The higher you are in the company, the more attractive the deal. At low levels, you buy your own car and look after it. As you rise, you get a free car but you still have to look after it. Rise further, any you get better freebies and don't have to take care of servicing. As you get near Mount Olympus you get a limo and a driver.

As Bob points out, the higher up the company you go, the less experience you have of what it's like to own a GM car. Crazy.

Bonus link: a previous post inspired by Bob on how easily the smallest amount of power corrupts - as measured in cookie crumbs.

Social recruiting

Jon Husband spotted this story in the Toronto Globe and Mail: Employers sidestep recruiters to tap social media.

An entrepreneur seeking to fill 17 positions asked his employees to share them on Facebook and LinkedIn, and tweet them and encourage re-tweeting. He'll host an open house, expecting a thousand people to show up. His costs will be massively lower than running newspaper ads or forking over commission to a recruitment firm. Not to mention the likelihood of other word-of-mouth opportunities arising, nor the degree to which new faces will be somewhat verified by a social network.

We live in interesting times.

Starfish revolution?

Michael Ledeen suggests suggests the protest movement in Iran is following the model of the starfish, from the book The Starfish and the Spider.

If you decapitate a spider, it dies, but if you lop off an arm of a starfish, it regenerates. In like manner, despite a massive crackdown from the Iranian regime–thousands of arrests (now termed “kidnappings” by Iranian Tweeters), scores of executions, mass rape and other forms of torture, show trials and stern intimidation from political and military leaders, judges and clerics, the Green Path moves on, with its next publicly announced challenge to the regime set for December 7th. Meanwhile, demonstrations and strikes continue across the country.

Hat tip: Alan Moore and Smartmobs.

Arguing for change?

Shawn at Anecdote discusses how emotion often trumps reason in our thinking. He cites research comparing how party loyalists respond to inconsistent statements by politicians. They're much more likely to pounce on inconsistencies by opposition speakers. And neuroscientists who had them wired for the experiment got an insight into what went on:

The brains did register the conflict as an unpleasant emotion but for the political partisans they were able to shutdown that distress quickly through faulty reasoning. But here's the thing. Once the negative emotions turned off, the positive emotions turned on. They weren't just feeling a little better, they were feeling good.

So it seems what we think is often a rationalisation to make us feel more comfortable.

I think I've mentioned this before, but I remember from years ago watching a laborious powerpoint pitch from a famous firm of management consultants. They were doing a change programme for a big company, and the whole theme was "making a compelling case for change". It was entirely rooted in a mindset of argument.

Among its horrors was a little matrix dividing the organisations employees into three levels of sophistication. For each level, the analogy was made to a national newspaper. Thus top management would be addressed like readers of the Financial Times; mid-levels would get Daily Mail treatment; and the rest were set to be addresssed like Sun readers.

So apart from relying over much on "rational" argument it also nakedly reflected a hierarchical notion of how change would take place. Wrong in so many ways.

Authors of our own experience

An ariticle in Seed magazine forsees a future where we will all be authors.

By 2000, there were 1 million book authors per year. One million authors is a lot, but they are only a tiny fraction, 0.01 percent, of the nearly 7 billion people on Earth. Since 1400, book authorship has grown nearly tenfold in each century. Currently, authorship, including books and new media, is growing nearly tenfold each year. That’s 100 times faster. Authors, once a select minority, will soon be a majority.

Here's how they plot the changes:

They speculate about the implications of this, and I agree that the general impact could be to distribute power more widely and away from small elites. (Though I don't want to get too wide-eyed).

It reminds me of what I wrote four years ago, linking the notion of being an author with that of authority. If more of us become authors of our own experience, that must represent a significant shift in how power is used in the world.

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan

Congruence

Sam Deeks writes about leadership and congruence. Makes sense to me.

The problem is a preference for avoiding the discomfort of looking at and considering changing our own behaviour. Unsurprisingly, many leaders prefer to support other people and groups to change rather than work on themselves; those other people, in turn, prefer to help other people change … and so on.

It's an easy trap to fall into. Sam sees two problems arising from this:

The first is that when they avoid exploring the discomfort of change before asking others to, they miss the opportunity to equip themselves with the kind of skills, empathy and understanding that would be invaluable for supporting change in others. The second is that when they don’t work on their own behaviours, leaders lose the ability to lead by example and are perceived as incongruent.

I would add, and I guess Sam would agree, that we must also avoid the trap of just blaming leaders for ineffective change processes. The challenge to be congruent is for everyone.

Structure and freedom

Dave Snowden has good post about putting tools in their place. The essence of his argument is this:

If you pick up a tool and it fits your hand its useful, if you have to bio-rengineer your hand to fit the tool something is going badly wrong.

He argues that with new technologies, overenthusiastic early use often forces too much change on the human beings in the system and actually constrains their ability to collaborate. He sees Sharepoint as a case in point. He makes a good case for "modular" technology, where (as I would put it) there are structures or tools, but they are controlled locally rather than centrally. I suppose blogs would be a case in point.

In Improv, people talk a lot about the paradox of structure and freedom. With no structure, there is chaos, with too much structure there's no creativity or life. They are not opposites. This video shows me playing a little improv game in the pub with my friend Jesper Bindslev. I set out a few bits of structure at the start, but what then emerges is improvised within that structure, and (I think) is playful and very human. (Click here for video if you don't see it embedded below.) Having used this activities hundreds of times, I can assure that the outcomes vary wildly from one iteration to the next, but nearly always conform to the rules of thumb set out at the start. However, if people do the activity repeatedly, they naturally start to push against the initial set of rules and/or spontaneously decide to try variations of the game. If you look in the comments when I first posted this clip, someone suggests doing a mindmap collaboratively with similar constraints. It's a small example of our natural desire to adjust structures to support our natural desire to experiment and learn.

Dave elaborates on his theme using a gardening analogy:

With too much structure there is no space for novelty. The dilemma at the moment is that social computing considered overall is a wild flower garden, richly diverse and constantly changing. On the other hand most corporate computing environments are the equivalent of the highly formal gardens of the 17th Century, before they were swept away by the naturalistic movement of the 18th Century.

This reminded me of Rob's excellent post about permaculture, with some very sophisticated examples of highly effective systems that use constraints intelligently to let nature work its full magic whilst meeting our needs for sustanable food.

Ruzuku interview

A couple of weeks ago, Rick Cecil interviewed me for his blog, Ruzuku. I was pleased to do it because I thought his other interviews there were fascinating - this one with Patti Digh is a favourite of mine.

It was also slightly unnerving as Rick's style encourages a lot of openness and reading his transcription I think he got a fairly unpolished version of me. There's bits I would probably say differently now, but that wouldn't be in the spirit of the piece. And I think it does give some insights into why I do what I do.

The perils of certainty

Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide explores committee decision-making as a metaphor for what goes on inisde our minds when we make individual decisions. He gives the example of a New Hampshire newspaper editorial board choosing its preferred candidate in the last Democratic primary. Differing individual preferences end up presented in the newspaper as a unified decision. But the simple presentation belies the underlying dissonance. Our minds work in a similar way: presented with a choice, different bits of the brain fire off differing signals, and somehow out of the conflict a choice is made. Experiments suggest strongly that we then rationalise the choice and deny the internal dissonance, in order to get the comfort of certainty.

It's not easy to make up your mind when your mind consists of so many competing parts. This is why being sure about something can be such a relief. The default state of the brain is indecisive disagreement... certainty imposes consensus on the inner cacophony.. Being certain means you're not worried about being wrong.

Lehrer examines how partisan political supporters unconsciously reinterpret factual information to confirm their prevailing world view, which is why they very rarely change allegiance. He also cites Philip Tetlock's research on the general fallibility of experts. Mark Earls described that here. And Bob Sutton had a good post recently suggesting that, if anything, confidence in self-evaluation tends to correlate with being wrong.

Many people want their meetings to work like this: listen to many opinions and then reach a confident, united decision. I think the danger of such ideals is that they may increase the likelihood of being wrong.

My own hunch is that good teams can function with greater tolerance for dissonance and don't force "positivity" and decisiveness. I also find that when meetings take place within rigid hierarchies, the shadowy need to give the boss something certain (the "measurable, implementable, deliverable") can completely sabotage that kind of high quality functioning.