 The word model means literally a ‘miniature form or provisional representation’. It’s the small-scale draft version of what will become the final, larger, perfected product. To describe a model as ‘full-scale’ or ‘final’ is hence oxymoronic. It is almost ironic that what we call a model today is a mannequin, a full-size (or nearly so) human person reduced to an object, a hanger. And those we call ‘role models’ are often not at all provisional, but fully-formed and (to all appearances) unchanging. What’s more, we don’t want them to change. I have argued that what we need, if we are going to make the world a better place, is not more plans and movements and top-down reforms, since all these things tend to be stillborn and futile in the real, complex world, but rather working models:
I think by prefixing the word ‘working’ to ‘model’ we get closer to that provisional, unperfected, forever evolving and becoming sense that the word model was meant to mean. It is the small scale nature of true models that, I think, most discourages us from creating, being, and studying them. We despair of the possibility that, at any meaningful scale, even the most beautiful and appealing model could replicate, reproduce, proliferate and connect, network-like, with others until it became the prevailing way of making community, or making a living, or sharing and organizing, or living our lives. Nature reproduces cellularly, of course, from true models, but the dominant human constructs of our modern world have not evolved that way. Rather, they have been imposed on us by hierarchy — our political systems, economic systems, business systems, educational systems, health systems were not chosen by us but for us, and we have had no say in their construction. And these systems are quite monolithic, stubbornly resisting change, because with their hierarchical structure and top-down ‘management’ they are inflexible, unresilient. Rather than evolving, these rigid, imposed systems collapse, to be replaced by other rigid, imposed, unsustainable systems that, for a brief time, beat the incumbents at their own game. In these systems we are told, not shown, what to do. So what does it mean to be a model? This is what Gandhi was getting at when he said we must be the change we want to see in the world.
I can’t think of any other criteria for a true and great model. When I look at all of the hierarchical, imposed systems that we struggle under in our modern, civilized world, I can’t think of any that meet even half of these criteria. Nor do any of the organizations I know well enough to judge. And I think these criteria apply equally to all kinds of models: communities, enterprises, exchanges, and individuals. I was tempted, when I put together this list, to grade myself against these six criteria. But then I realized that the ‘grade’, the current, measured state at any point in time, doesn’t matter. What is important is the journey, which never ends, the striving to be a little better at being a model every day, and the learning of how to do that. “For us”, as Eliot said, “there is only the trying — the rest is not our business”. (Postscript: As I was about to post this article, it suddenly occurred to me that, because of its title, it might attract, through Google, some people who would never otherwisestumble upon HtStW. I wonder what they will think?) |
September 20, 2006
How to Be a Model
September 19, 2006
We’re Not Aware of What We’re Not Aware of
 This is a very peculiar (for me), meandering post. There’s something important here. I’m just not quite sure yet what it is. “If only (company x) knew what (everyone in company x) knew”, goes the lament of many organizations that have tried to implement Knowledge Management. My sense is that the problem is more fundamental than that: We’re not aware of what we’re not aware of. Case in point: I have started a routine to check my posture, breathing, hydration and state of mind, and to do a couple of simple stretching exercises, once an hour. To remind myself, I have set my watch to ‘beep’ once at five minutes to each hour. I’ve been pretty diligent at doing this, but not once have I not had to correct my posture and breathing. For a few minutes every hour, I’m aware. As soon as I go back to whatever I was doing, I cease to be aware and quickly revert to bad habits. I am incorrigibly unaware of my body’s subconscious actions, my state of mind (including the stress that manifests itself in insidious ways in my body), and my disconnectedness to the ‘real’ world, whenever I am ‘living inside my head’ (which is most of the time, at least when I’m conscious). There are many other things we’re not aware of not being aware of:
As Stewart & Cohen argue in Figments of Reality, we are a complicity of the separately-evolved creatures in our bodies organized for their mutual benefit i.e. we are an organism. And our brains, our intelligence, awareness, consciousness and free-will, are nothing more than an evolved, shared, feature-detection system jointly developed to advise these creatures’ actions for their mutual benefit. Our brains, and our minds (the processes that our neurons, senses and motility organs carry out collectively) are their information-processing system, not ‘ours’. So when it comes to being aware of what we’re not aware of, ‘we’ really have little say in the matter: Our bodies’ collective organisms adapt as they see fit to external forces, changes and stimuli, and have no inclination to consult ‘us’ about it. Our minds are in their service. In Straw Dogs, John Gray calls the belief that we as individuals and as a species have control of ourselves and our world The Deception. We labour under an error. We act in the belief that we are all of one piece, but we are able to cope with things only because we are a succession of fragments. We cannot shake off the sense that we are enduring selves, and yet we know we are not.
This conceit of ourselves as separate, enduring selves, apart from others and from ‘the environment’ and under ‘our’ control, is hard to give up. If we concede that it is an illusion, a falsehood, we are left with the worst of both worlds: We have little real ‘free will’ (control or authority over ourselves) yet we still have responsibility for our actions (and inactions), since ‘we’ as organisms, watery bags of skin, are in turn integral parts of the larger organism that is all-life-on-Earth (what I call Gaia) and are hence responsive and responsible to ‘us-all’. This seems profoundly unfair. As wonderful as the gift of life is, responsibility without authority is a steep price to pay for it. If our bodies or our instincts or something in our subconscious drives us to madness, to sudden horrific knee-jerk violence, to infidelity, to procrastinate, to suicide, to substance addiction, to respond to stress by ‘making ourselves ill’, or other ‘unconscionable’ behaviour, why should we be held responsible and accountable for it when ‘we’ were unable to do anything else? The answer is that ‘we’ do have some influence over what our watery bag of skin and organs does. Some of us need no alarm clock — we simply ‘tell’ ourselves that we need to wake up at 6 a.m. and somehow we do. A couple of years ago when I was recovering from back spasms, my physio ‘taped me’ into a proper posture, and until the tape was removed, my body adopted such a posture instead of the stooped, slouched one it had practiced for nearly fifty years — every time ‘it’ tried to go back to that bad posture, the tape told ‘me’, and I told ‘it’, to resume proper posture, and ‘it’ obeyed. But for the most part, our attempt to command and control our bodies and change our behaviour is as futile as our culture’s attempt to command and control and change the external environment of which we are a part. Things happen the way they do for a reason, and as Pascal said, “the heart has reasons of which our reason knows nothing”. And just as the answer to most of the world’s most intractable, complex, social and environmental problems is to achieve a deep understanding of why and how they have arisen, and adapt ourselves (Let-Self-Change) and work with the rest of humanity (and Gaia) to exert, from the bottom-up, such influence as we can, the answer to working with, instead of against, our bodies, our instincts and our subconscious (and our emotions, which manifest the tension between our rational and visceral ‘selves’), is probably to understand them, Let-Self-Change to adapt to them, accept them, and go with them. Even when, like teenage children, ‘they’ act foolishly, irrationally, in self-defeating ways. They are independent of ‘us’ and they do what they must. We need to give ‘them’, and ‘ourselves’, a break. ‘They’ will learn, probably far more quickly and effectively than ‘we’ will, and, if we’re wise, we’ll pay attention and learn with ‘them’ and from ‘them’. This is what might be called ‘ecological consciousness’, and it applies equally to the cosmos within us and the cosmos all around us. ‘We’ are a part of both, and fighting ‘them’, as if they were apart, ‘other’, is in every sense of the word self-defeating. This is not a matter of forgiveness, or self-forgiveness, or ‘salvation’, but rather integral understanding, letting go, letting be, letting come. It’s a part of re-becoming a part, of re-belonging. The prerequisite for Let-Self-Change is Let-Self-Be-Aware. That includes becoming more aware of what we are not, and probably cannot be, aware of, what we cannot hope to understand. And knowing that we’re not aware, and being aware that sometimes we’re not aware of not beingaware, is OK too. There is a reason for that. It’s bigger than all of us, and we’re all in this together. Photo from the Ontario SPCA. |
September 18, 2006
“Your Graphic Caught My Attention”
 In my recent article on Adding Meaning and Value to Information, I summarized the processes, ‘end-products’ and tools that we use to understand, to derive meaning from information. A lot of the end-products and tools mentioned in that article are visualizations, organizations of information into tableaux. Such visualizations, like the extraordinary one above from Lawrence Livermore National Lab that effectively captures forty pages of data on a single page, not only add meaning and help us understand, they are useful for capturing and holding our attention (long enough to understand) in the first place. Here’s a very subjective chart showing 25 methods of attracting attention to written material, how successful, on average, these methods are at grabbing (“eyeballs”) and holding (“stickiness”) our attention, and how much, on average, these methods actually add to reader comprehension: So what is it about the media and techniques at the right end of the chart above that grabs our attention, even when they may not have much to say? They say brevity is the soul of wit, and what characterizes the attention-getters most, I think, is their conciseness. Even the energy chart at the top of this post, while it takes some effort to absorb, is concise compared to the mind-numbing and un-navigable forty pages of tables it effectively replaces. We are attracted to information that is simple, memorable and easy to absorb. That makes us suckers, alas, for oversimplifications, a weakness that politicians and corporate marketers exploit well, and which the mainstream media pander to. We are likewise attracted to information that engages us interactively in its interpretation and use. When we see tables of survey results we compare where we stand versus the respondents in the survey. We print out the checklists so we can check off each box later. We take self-quizzes and participate in (well-designed and interesting) polls and surveys, even the most inane ones — it’s fun, and it’s almost as if we can’t help ourselves. We bookmark top 10 lists and memorize and forward on to others clever, pithy quotes, because they’re memorable and make us sound witty and profound by association. Crafting visualizations and other reorganizations and syntheses of information in such a way that they are both attractive and meaningful takes a rare talent, and it is more an art than a science. The energy chart at the top of this article, or the famous Charles Menard graphic depicting Napoleon’s losses on his march to Russia, are works of extraordinary thought, skill and imagination. There is no course that teaches you how to invent such brilliant, compelling and meaningful representations of mounds of tedious data. There should be, however. These are true masterpieces. Sometimes a representation of information can be compelling because it resonates with the worldviews, the ways of perceiving and understanding, of others. The following systems thinking graphic of mine, showing the vicious cycle of depression, has popped up all over the Internet since I posted it a couple of years ago: But just as we are prone to oversimplifying complex information, we need to take care not to try to apply systems thinking, mindmapping and other techniques where they are not appropriate. Among the features of complex systems are the impossibility of knowing all the variables, the absence of simple causal relationships, and the inability of predicting outcomes in such systems. A systems thinking diagram of any social or ecological system (e.g. one that purported to show ‘the solutions’ to global poverty) would necessarily be incomplete and misleading, a dangerous oversimplification that would inevitably lead to ineffective or even dysfunctional decisions and actions. Unfortunately, while our intuition and subconscious (if we listen to them and trust them) are pretty good tools for dealing with complex system problems and challenges, I know of no visualization or similar tool that is helpful in such situations. The closest thing I know of to a shareable, social tool that helps us address complex situations is narrative, the detailed, context-rich stories that indigenous peoples (and the rest of us, if we’re wise, and if we have the discipline to listen) tell each other. Open Space and other methodologies for grappling with ‘wicked’ problems depend significantly on story-telling as a means of knowledge transfer, learning, and hence personal decision-making in such situations. If you know of other tools, techniques and methodologies that work well in complex systems, please let me know. (That’s another way of getting people’s attention: asking questions and asking for help — again because it engages us to interact.) Why are the tools and techniques in the top half of the attention/meaning chart above so effective at adding meaning and understanding to information? I think this is relatively easy to explain: show me don’t tell me. We understand better when we’re shown what something means, or how to do something, rather than just told. All of these high-meaning-adding tools demonstrate rather than simply relating meaning, which ties directly into the cognitive learning processes we have used since we first appeared on the planet. What other tools exist, and what else can we do, as writers with important information to convey, to catch readers’ attention (honestly, not deceptively), and to demonstrate its meaning to them without oversimplifying? If you had a friend who’s idea of interesting information was what Brad Pitt’s baby had for breakfast today, or the stuff in the local crime blotter, how would you go about getting their attention on global warming, or disease pandemic preparation, or the End of Oil, or ending global poverty, and then conveying these terribly complex challenges and some of the approaches that might address them, in a way that would have meaning to them? If we can answer that question, it could change everything. |
September 17, 2006
Patient-Centred, Patient-Controlled Health Care: How the System Should Work
 Yesterday I commented on the intriguing health care ‘value chain’, shown above, that Verna Allee’s group has constructed, seen from the perspective of Big Pharma. This perspective assumes that ‘the patient’ is basically helpless, passive, ignorant and uninterested in taking an active role in the management of his/her own health. That’s a very patronizing perspective, though I admit I know many patients who give it credence. I would argue, however, that this is changing, and changing quickly. What is precipitating this change is:
Last week I contrasted, a bit simplistically, the traditional approach and the emerging ‘Edge’ approach to being healthy:
This emerging approach is entirely consistent with the recommendations of the US National Institute of Medicine’s 2001 Crossing the Quality Chasm report which laid out these ten ‘rules’ to govern effective health care:
So what would a health-care system ‘value network’ look like that honoured these rules? Certainly not like the one above. Here are two charts that show, first, how I think an increasing number of (cynical) patients see the ‘value network’ operating today, and then, below it, what a reformed health-care system ‘value network’ would/could/should look like:
The significant new ‘ingredient’ in the bottom chart, the Health Info ClearingHouse, is an example of what I have called a peer-to-peer information exchange. The ClearingHouse would be largely Internet-based (though also accessible through other media), not-for-profit, and not owned or controlled by anyone. It would aggregate and objectively assess health information provided by everyone in the system — customers (patients), doctors and other health-care providers, pharma companies, regulators and other government bodies etc. It would allow us to second-guess the hype we’re getting from for-profit providers and bureaucracies, get second opinions, and form support groups and share information and resources with other customers dealing with the same ailments. Under this system, as in most countries today other than the US, Big Pharma would no longer be able to ‘push’ its drugs through the mass media (“despite these 147 side-effects, ask your doctor if new overpriced toxic XanthamPlus is right for you!”) nor would it be able to bribe doctors with ‘incentives’ to prescribe its brands. The other big change would be in the relationship between doctors and other health-care providers and their customers (mere ‘patients’ no longer). The new relationship would be a continuous one, with factual information (data about customers’ health, analysis reports, new medical reports, etc.) being transmitted continuously between the customer and the health-care provider (perhaps even, as in some places in Japan now, automatically and electronically). The three-way information flows between customers, health-care providers and the ClearingHouse would enable the establishment of a co-developed ongoing personal program for every individual that would include (a) activities to prevent illnesses from occurring, (b) activities to self-diagnose illnesses in their very early stages, and (c) activities to treat illnesses when they occur. These would be joint activities with the customer actively engaged in the process. Such a system is almost a no-brainer: it would generally result in a healthier populace and much lower costs to the system. But its evolution has been, and will continue to be, blocked by the special interests who would lose out in such a system: Big Pharma would find less need and market for its products, and its influence in the system would be drastically reduced. The HMOs, of course, would be out of business. Many of the lawyers who make their living on both sides of patient-health-care-provider litigation would also be out of business, since along with greater control over their own health, customers would also have to accept more responsibility, and not be able to hide behind ignorance and helplessness when suing doctors and drug companies. Doctors with God-complexes would not handle such a system well. Predatory snake-oil and wonder-therapy ‘alternative’ health-care providers would find themselves exposed by the ClearingHouse. As you can see, then, there are plenty of reasons why the current dysfunctional system continues to squander our money and our health. And this is another complex system, that cannot be fixed by government fiat or by any group acting alone. We need to get to the system in the bottom chart above by evolutionary means. That evolution needs to start with bottom-up awareness, organization and information exchange, probably beginning with both (a) an insistence, when dealing with health-care providers, on complete two-way information exchange, total honesty and active customer involvement in all assessments and decisions, and (b) the establishment of the beginnings of what will eventually be the Health Information ClearingHouse. Instead of opting out of the system in favour of alternative medicine, we need to demand a greater role in our own health management from practitioners, and refuse to take no for an answer. My guess is that many practitioners will welcome rather than resist this change. In other words, we need to become our own holistic ‘general practitioner’. We cannot expect doctors to know what is happening, and what we are doing, in alternative health-care and in our own lives, unless we tell them. We need to tell everyone we involve in our health what everyone else we involve is doing and saying and prescribing, and what we are doing about it. That means that what our doctor, our physical and/or psychotherapist, our herbalist, our pharmacist, our personal trainer, our dietitian knows, they all should know, and we should know not only what they have told us to do, but why, and what else they considered and ruled out. And there, of course, is the rub. This requires more candour than a lot of us are willing to exhibit, and an investment in time and energy and learning that is more than many of us areprepared to make. But until we do, the system will remain dysfunctional and insolvent. And we’ll keep getting needlessly ill. |
September 16, 2006
Links for the Week – September 16, 2006
 Photo by the extraordinary German nature photographer Tanja Askani. Business: Breaking Free From Professional Services Co-Dependency: From InfoWorld, an amusing but chillingly accurate portrayal of corporate addiction to big consulting and other ‘professional services’ outsourcing firms, and a surprisingly useful ’12-step’ program to break free. I especially like Step No. 3: Donít let money already spent spook you, Step No. 7: Be prepared to buy your way out, and Step No. 8: Hire knowledge you need. Thanks to my KM colleague Greg Turko for the link. How Big Pharma Sees the Patient’s Role in Health Care: My KM colleague Verna Allee has an interesting chart (reproduced above) depicting how Big Pharma sees the ‘value networks’ in US health care. Notice that the patient’s role is minor and passive. In an article later this week I’ll contrast this with how an increasing number of patients (no, customers) see these ‘value networks’ — hint: on my chart Big Pharma hardly appears at all. Andrew Leonard Prescribes How to Save Ford: “Tax the rich. Fix the unemployment insurance system, beef up wage insurance, and pay for healthcare. Maybe then we can successfully avert our eyes from the sorry spectacle of Ford begging its entire workforce to quit.” Politics: The NYT Doesn’t Get the Disconnect Between Civil Freedoms and Capitalism: “[New oppressive Chinese censorship rules] appear, at a minimum, to violate [China's] W.T.O. pledges to liberalize access to financial information. Trade officials and foreign business leaders need to remind Beijingís leaders of those promises. And they need to warn them that a country that keeps a stranglehold on information is not a great place to invest.” Sorry, guys, actually a place where the people are kept ignorant, timid, and obedient is a great place for corporatists to invest. That’s why the US corpocracy, which is pretty good at keeping its own citizens off-balance, fearful and ignorant, has such a cozy co-dependent relationship with China’s. Can the Blogosphere Provide Needed Oversight of Government Pork?: Richard Wolf at USA Today would have us believe so. I’m not so sure — elected officials have developed pretty devious means to keep back-room deals with lobbyists secret, and to bury their sell-outs and paybacks in anonymous ‘omnibus’ bills and off-the-books regulations. The blogosphere has neither the access to information nor the resources to open that up very much. In fact, when I saw the headline of this article (“Blogosphere spurs government oversight”) I mistakenly thought it was about another attempt by the corporatists to spy on, interfere with and shut down the blogosphere before it can threaten its information hegemony. Olbermann’s On a Roll: Keith Olbermann continues with his brilliant and scathing editorials eviscerating the incompetence, carelessness and heartlessness of the Bush Administration, this time with his thoughts on the anniversary of 9/11. Wonder how long before the right wingers at MSNBC get him silenced? ExxonMobil Gets Homeland Security to Arrest Greg Palast: It seems the barbed-wire ‘camp’ for 73,000 homeless semi-incarcerated New Orleans refugees sits right beside one of ExxonMobil’s most toxic sites, and it came into viewing range while Palast was filming the camp. Apparently DHS doesn’t want Osama learning anything about “critical infrastructure” that could be subject to future attacks or other terrorist operations. No, not the camp, silly, the refinery. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link, and the one that follows. Air Force Chief Wants to Test New Weapons on Domestic Demonstrators: From CNN: “Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before being used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary said Tuesday. The object is basically public relations. Domestic use would make it easier to avoid questions from others about possible safety considerations, said Secretary Michael Wynne. ‘If we’re not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation,’ said Wynne.” Hmm, I wonder who appointed this guy. Must have been a compassionate conservative. Project Censored Top 25 Censored Stories of the Year: What’s surprising about this list is how few of the stories are surprises to those of us who have found other ways to get our news than the MSM. Justifiably #1 is How Internet Freedom Got the Federal Ax, and Why Corporate News Censored the Story. Thanks to David Parkinson for the link, and the one that follows. Energy and Environment: Solar Wireless Lets Struggling Nations Leapfrog Ahead in Education: Solar-powered wireless routers promise to help children and adults in struggling nations access Web-based knowledge to educate themselves, at their own pace, even in areas with no electricity. Thanks to Innovation Weekly for the link. Invention of Civilization a Desperate Adaptation: A new report for the British Association for the Advancement of Science agrees with a growing consensus of anthropologists that agriculture, settlement and the other trappings of civilization were a desperate adaptation to shortage of resources and adverse climate change, “built on fear, not the need to socialize“. More support for the Story of B. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link. Just for Fun: Some Hilarious Advice for the Young: Fifty-something WaPo columnist Gene Weingarten brilliantly satirizes advice columns by telling his young readers what he wishes he knew when he was in his twenties. (Apologies — I can’t recall who sent this link to me). Thought for the Week: From Kevin Beavers, a Buddhist story about relieving internal conflict: There once was a young monk who went to his teacher in tears. He blurted out that he was having a terrible experience with his meditation practice. Every time he settled down, took a deep breath, and closed his eyes, all he could see were two dragons fighting each other. One dragon was a deep blue and it was filled with anger and greed and lust. Even its fire was terrifying. It was ferocious, this dragon. The other dragon was just as ferocious. Only the other dragon, pale white, was filled with love, wisdom, and compassion. Its fire was a deep, deep yellow. The young man was terrified of what would happen. Which dragon would win? He couldn’t tell and was afraid to watch them fight, which made him afraid to sit. Could the teacher please give him some advice?
The teacher smiled. He looked at his student, his eyes filled with compassion. ‘Do you want to know which dragon will win?’ The young monk nodded. ‘Why the one filled with love and compassion and wisdom, of course.’ But how did he know asked the young monk. ‘Because that’s the one you’ll feed’. Update: Andrew Campbell tells me this story circulated in many different versions after 9/11. He prefers the following version, as do I: A Cherokee elder sitting with his grandchildren told them, “In every life and heart there is a terrible fight between two wolves. One is full of fear and anger, envy, greed arrogance, self-pity, resentment and deceit. The other is full of joy and serenity, humility, confidence, generosity, truth, gentleness and compassion.” And here as a bonus is a story from Chris Corrigan, also from late 2001: Grouse Watch: Our friendly neighbourhood grouse invited herself inside the backyard dining tent as I was writing this, and perched beside me on my standing-height desk while I composed this article. She was unimpressed by the toys I brought her (a ball with a rattle, and a shoelace) and by the handful of sunflower seeds I offered (she ate the nearby dandelion leaves instead). When she got tired of watching me type (and briefly trying out the keyboard herself) she jumped down and waited patiently for me to unzip the tent door. I’ve decided to ‘name’ her for the sound she makes when ‘speaking’ to me (a cross between clucking, cooing and purring) but I can’t figure out how to represent it phonetically. |
September 15, 2006
September 14, 2006
Living On the Edge, Comfortably
 I was sitting outside one evening last week with an impromptu gathering of neighbours. We had all started out going for a walk around the block, but ended up congregating at one neighbour’s house (he was getting opinions on a new wine he was importing, so it didn’t take a lot of arm-twisting). When we started talking about jobs, half of the group lamented that, because they worked for assholes at dysfunctional (mostly foreign-owned and neglected) companies, they longed to start their own companies. The other half, who are entrepreneurs who do own their own companies, lamented the high stress, long hours and sometimes unreasonable customers of their companies, and fondly recalled when they could go home at 5:30pm and leave all their cares at the office until the next day. The grass, as they say, is always greener on the other side. It occurred to me that this tension between living in thrall to corporatists, and living with the great responsibilities and uncertainties of entrepreneurship, extends to all the critical decisions we make in life between a ‘traditional’ conformist lifestyle, addicted to consumption and debt, and one of Living On the Edge. Here’s how this tension plays out, a struggle between gravitational force luring us inwards and centrifugal force hurling us outwards. Those in the middle band in the graphic above feel those forces most equally, and it is for them that this tension is strongest:
I think most of us, like my neighbours, will have to admit that the choices are not cut and dried. But neither is it a choice between comfort (in the centre) and discomfort (at the Edge) — the decision is more complex than that, and many of us come down close to the tipping point between going one way and the other. And some of the factors (marked with question marks on the chart) are dubious: Shopping for non-essentials is only ‘fun’, and an essential part of your social life, if you lack the imagination to find healthier fun and (arguably) live a pretty socially impoverished life. Driving a gas-guzzler is only faster if your home, work, shopping and recreation are long distances apart — and there are ways to bring them together. And driving a gas-guzzler is no fun in traffic jams and grinding daily commutes. I’ve said before that, in making important life decisions, we do what we must, then we do what’s easy, and then we do what’s fun. In the chart above, I’ve marked the easier choice with an (E), the more fun choice with an (F), and the cheaper choice with a (C). (In the decisions on What to buy and How to be healthy, the cheaper choice depends on your circumstances and perspective, so neither is marked (C)). Not surprisingly, the easier choices (E) are all at the centre, while most of the fun choices (F) are at the Edge. So as long as we do what’s easy before we do what’s fun, we’re going to be prone to make traditional choices (how to make a living, how to be healthy, how to be educated, and what community to live in). Why do we make such choices? I would argue that we’re too busy and too tired to do otherwise — if we have no time and no energy, we’re going to choose what’s easy over what’s fun. And that’s exactly what the corporatists are counting on. I would bet that the proportion of people living at the Edge is inversely proportional to the length and stress of the average work-week (including commuting). As more and more of us learn to value our time more highly, and seize back more of it for ourselves (even if that requires lowering our material wealth and consumption), we will start to choose what’s fun over what’s easy, and slide over to the Edge. The decisions what to buy and how to get around are more complex, and they’re the two that will prevent a lot of us from moving to the Edge. We may know that locally made, organic, fairly-priced products are better quality and better for us, and in the long run (because they last longer) will cost less. But the more expensive products cost us more now, and no matter how conscientious we may be that’s tough to swallow (perhaps impossible if you’re on a fixed income). Besides, there are plenty of discouraging examples of locally-made crap, too. Similarly, the decision how to get around isn’t entirely ours to make if we live more than walking or cycling distance from work, shopping and recreation. In this, those who live in revitalized downtown cores are wise and blessed, but that lifestyle is not for everyone. For the most part, however, we do have a choice, and there are encouraging signs that more and more of us are choosing to wean ourselves off our addiction to consumption, debt, and being too busy and too tired for our own good. Out at the Edge, it’s getting more comfortable, more fun, and even a bit more crowdedall the time. |
September 13, 2006
Discharging Stress: Not That Simple
 As part of my colitis self-experimentation program I’ve been studying several techniques for reducing my ambient stress level and for discharging higher levels of stress when they arise. My aerobic exercise, posture, stretching/physiotherapy, breathing improvement and other stress management activities seem to be helping, and my yoga classes start next week, but I know I need to do more, so I’ve been trying a variety of meditation and mind-body awareness exercises, including those suggested by David Abram and Feith Stuart, Kabat-Zinn’s concentration and mindfulness exercises, Nick Smith’s hourglass meditation, an NLP-inspired technique suggested by Mariella Rebora, and the ‘intentional’ meditation and emotional release exercises from Indigo Ocean’s book. These techniques and exercises have a lot in common: Their purpose is to get you to focus your attention on and to connect with your body, your senses, your emotions, your unconscious behaviours, and/or your being-apart-of-nature. They enable you to better understand the why and how of your emotional reactions and your subconscious physical reactions, and through that understanding to take some conscious control over those reactions — moderating and discharging them. This is particularly difficult for me. I find it difficult to concentrate on one thing, or for very long on anything, and I’m very uncoordinated (e.g. I know very well conceptually how to swim, to dance, and to play a musical instrument, but my body just doesn’t seem to be able to act on that understanding). And just as different methods of learning to swim, dance, or anything else work for different people, there’s no one right way to learn to meditate. I haven’t found that any of the above techniques work especially well for me, though they all have very strong adherents who swear they work for them. So I can’t recommend any particular method for managing stress. But I have learned a few things from practicing these methods, and perhaps my learnings may be of value to others who are challenged trying to mitigate, moderate or discharge the stress in their lives:
I haven’t had a lot of success trying to manage autonomic behaviours in past. My bad habits and fidgets have withstood fifty years of attempts to change them, and my recent process of reminding myself to check my posture, breathing etc. is not yet producing any permanent changes either. But I’m not giving up. We do what we must, and, with the euphoria of the adrenal-suppressant drugs ending as I taper off them, I must find ways to manage stress better. Does any of this resonate with you? Am I the only one whose stress is caused mainly by things that are not immediate, local and personal to their life? Am I the only one who can’t seem to Let-Self-Change easily? And am I the only one that feels that the line at the end of the Beatles’ Abbey Road — “Boy, you’re going to carry that weight, carry that weight a long time” — was written just for them? |
September 12, 2006
How We Understand: Adding Meaning and Value to Information
 One of my presentations at next month’s KM World & Intranets conference is about adding meaning and value to information. This article reflects some of my early thinking on this subject. The word ‘understand’, which does not appear to have a precise counterpart in any other language, literally means “comprehend (=grasp) and appreciate(=be able to evaluate) sufficiently to pass on to others”. It is about instructions and the passing on of those instructions down the hierarchy. In English, then, there is a sense that “Do you understand?” means more than “Do you comprehend?” — it means “Do you know what you must therefore do and tell others to do?” I’ll avoid the temptation to infer how this reflects on both the exaggerated importance of hierarchy, and the sometimes perverse purpose of the education system, in anglophone nations. Most other languages use the term comprehend (=grasp) instead, though most have a second word equivalent to the French entendre (=stretch toward) to convey a nuance of the learning process that English seems to ignore. The ‘understanding’ process in other languages, then, is not just a means for passing on instructions, but rather a means of coming together, a meeting of minds, for no necessary purpose than the sheer joy of communicating, sharing thoughts powerfully and effectively. It was of course an anglophone, GB Shaw, who said ”The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred”. To us anglophones, I guess, the only way we know if our communication was ‘understood’ is if it was effectively conveyed on and carried out by our subordinates. No wonder there’s no precise English translation for joie de vivre! So how do we ‘understand’? By what process do we ‘grasp’ and ‘stretch toward’ each other to gain meaning and value from the information we convey? And what tools and devices can we employ to do so more effectively? To answer these questions I went through a cross section of my library, and websites about learning, comprehension and communication, and compiled the following table of processes, results of those processes, and supporting tools that can be used to enhance understanding. It’s strictly a subjective sampling, but I think you’ll find it interesting:
(You may have noticed that newspapers and other news media and ‘feeds’ don’t make my table at all. That reflects my bias, I suppose, that this information is meaning- and context-free, and hence for the most part has no value at all.) I’m still thinking about all this, so if I’m missing any important processes, tools or end-products that help add meaning to information, please let me know and I’ll add them. This adding-of-meaning is mitigated by a lot of endemic dysfunctional information behaviours that we are all prone to (arising from information politics, information unawareness, faulty sense-making and poor information-sharing reward systems), and specifically the five hurdles to effective communication that tend to impede meaning from being conveyed:
Collectively, all the ‘end-products’ in the middle column of the table above constitute our ‘understanding’ of the information and the issue behind it. These end-products allow us to ‘make sense’ of the information we read, see and hear. The more extensive and effective the processes followed (from the first column), therefore, the greater will be our understanding. Our preference for, and the amount of value we get from, the different ‘end-products’ varies greatly by individual, and is a function of how we learn — some learn best by reading, others by synthesizing, listening, visualizing, observing, or doing hands-on. No one process, tool or end-product ‘fits all’. As information professionals, and as educators, we need, I think, to develop a greater appreciation of how we come to understand (and sometimes misunderstand) information. If we want our co-workers, and those we love, to be more understanding and more effective learners, we need to study the processes that they use (and fail to use, or use badly) to process information. We need to appreciate the learning/understanding ‘end-products’ that they value, and help them become more adept at using the tools that support the mental processes that underlie these end-products. We need to work with them, one-on-one, to help them improve their information processes, and hence produce more valuable information ‘end-products’, for their own comprehension and for conveying it to others. We need to become more adept as using these tools ourselves, and, as information intermediaries, we need to use these tools more extensively to enhance and add value to the content we manage before we disseminate it to others. And we need to develop new and better information processing tools — tools that add meaning and value to information, rather than just shuffling it around in its ‘raw’ state. Currently, we spend the lion’s share of our time acquiring, storing, compiling, organizing, and disseminating information, with little or no thought of how the ‘listener’ will use it. If we can get away from our ‘content’ role and start devoting more of our time in a ‘context’ role — observing and teaching people how to use the content effectively in the context of their own jobs and lives — we might just find that our value to the organizations we serve and the people we love will go up immeasurably. Postscript: The final version of the table above will include hotlinks to web pages on each of the tools in the right column. When I’ve done that, I’ll repost this article to include these links. |
September 11, 2006
The REAL Innovator’s Dilemma
 (Innovation & Technology commercialization process, from Credit Suisse First Boston New Economy Forum 1999 Synthesis) In his celebrated book The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clay Christensen explains how successful companies can be “held captive” by their customers to the point that they become vulnerable to disruptive innovation from competitors and new entrants, and unable to sustain the types of innovation that brought them those loyal customers in the first place. He’s absolutely correct, but there are a set of business dilemmas around innovation that are even more profound, pervasive, and cultural entrenched. It is only when you get past the heady idealism of innovation (“the entrepreneur’s competitive advantage”) that the gravity of these dilemmas becomes apparent, and the reasons for the current dearth of innovation in our society become clear. Things happen the way they do for a reason. There are thousands of writers, consultants, business advisors and social reformers out there calling for more innovation as the means of improving organizational performance, productivity and resilience, and achieving breakthroughs in how we tackle social, political, educational, health, economic and environmental problems. They say we need to learn to be better innovators, hire more innovative people, employ more innovative processes and tools, and they’ll tell us how to do it. But somehow, when you look past the hype, this is mostly wishful thinking: There is astonishingly little true innovation happening anywhere in our society, or in business. The more I study this, the more I work with entrepreneurs and the more I think about it, the more I realize there are three, terribly discouraging reasons for this, reasons that have more to do with our modern human culture than economics, marketing or any conspiracy of the established anti-innovation corpocracy. Before I summarize these three reasons I will predict that this article will provoke a minor storm of protest. It goes totally against conventional wisdom and the current wave of popular, euphoric thinking about the untapped potential of innovation. Unlike Christensen’s Dilemma, there are no ready solutions for these three Dilemmas — and people don’t like to hear about problems with no ready solutions. These Dilemmas suggest that innovation consulting and innovation change programs may be largely a waste of time, energy and money. I will probably be accused of being a defeatist, of sour grapes (because I’m not as successful as Christensen and the innovation-touters) or of being discouraging at precisely the time we need to be encouraging organizations to be more innovative. No matter. I just call it as I see it. I’ve seen these Dilemmas played out again and again. I blamed myself for not being able to help my clients and colleagues imagine better, research better, or implement better. I blamed myself for not being able to persuade them that more, bolder innovation was critical to their success, and even their survival, and for not getting them to see the value in imaginative, innovative ideas. But it wasn’t my fault at all. These Dilemmas are insuperable, endemic, and totally engrained in our culture. The three Dilemmas are:
I’m not saying that there aren’t a lot of people who ‘get’ the value proposition for innovation, and are full of good ideas and good intentions. But most of those people are marginalized in our society — they lack the wealth, the connections and the key skills to bring those good ideas to market. And even if they do manage to find some interest for their idea, they are likely to be told that there is no commercial ‘market’ for it, or launch their own business unsuccessfully to find that out for themselves, or have their idea so watered down in the commercialization ‘process’ that it becomes an incremental novelty rather than an innovation. Or, if it’s a really great idea and actually does get close to realization and start to attract buzz, it will be bought out and shut down (or starved of resources, or mismarketed, or unmarketed) by some big corporation who offers the potential entrepreneur an offer she can’t refuse. And since most budding entrepreneurs have none of the skills (and relationships, and self-confidence) needed to start their own business (and no money to acquire those skills in the ‘market’), most great innovative ideas will never get off the drawing board, or even out of the heads of their imaginers. Many solutions have been touted for these Dilemmas (I’ve touted most of them at one point or another): Education is proposed in entrepreneurship, and in imagination, for everyone, starting in high school while it’s ‘free’. Not going to happen — the education system is a poster child for lack of innovation, and has no capacity or incentive to teach these essential skills. ‘Best practices’ in entreprepreneurship and innovation fill the Business shelves of the bookstores, but these (even when they’re honest and not exaggerated to stroke the ego of the author or case study interviewee) are devoid of context, and without a major investment in time and money learning how they apply and how to apply them, they’re useless and often even dangerous to the reader. Governments promise R&D credits, government/university facilities, and other incentives to promote ‘innovation’, but the process for evaluating and operating these programs is so political, bureuacratic and otherwise flawed that the money generally goes to the company that has learned the ‘system’ of writing creative, conforming applications and getting them sponsored by influential people, not to the one that could actually benefit from such programs. Solutions have been proffered to make customers more open to and savvy about innovations, too, but for the most part they haven’t worked either. We all know products that are designed to be simpler and more intuitive are taken up by customers more readily, but designers and developers are so disconnected from customers that they can’t resist adding unneeded, complicating functionality (in response to louder voices inside and outside the organization) that the size of the unfathomable manual ends up exceeding the sixe of the product. And while true innovators focus on ‘must haves’ — real needs — in their design and development, they are usually overruled by marketing and advertising types who find it much easier and more profitable to sell ‘wants’ — to those with so much money that they have no real needs. Customers are so used to being conned by false PR and advertising hype that they don’t believe anything they hear about new products anyway. So, being wary, most follow their neighbours (or kids) in what they buy, rather than buying what it truly innovative. And of course there are lots of foundations and advocacy groups trying to persuade companies and governments to invest in supporting the development of, and subsidizing, products and services that go to those who can’t afford the ‘market’ price. With 90% of all government subsidies and contracts going to a tiny handful of mostly oligopoly companies with deep pockets and politicians at their beck and call, you know how successful most of them have been. They end up spending most of their time competing with other foundations and NFP groups all begging for the dollars of the few tapped-out citizens who care enough to support any altruistic endeavours and the funds of parsinomious government sponsors facing annual double-digit budget cuts. The economy simply and relentlessly mitigates against innovation for those who really need it. As I said at the outset, I see no solutions for these three Dilemmas. I still believe in the innovation process I have been writing about on these pages for the last four years. In an ideal world, this prescription should work. Unfortunately, our world is far from ideal, and perhaps its time for innovation enthusiasts, advocates, consultants and pundits to get real. Our culture, and the economic, political, educational and other systems that support it, are all stacked against true innovation. We need to find a better way, a more practical and realistic way, to bring about the changes that our world so desperately needs. I’m not yet sure what that is, and I’m sure open to suggestions. |
