 Take a Few Paragraphs to Describe a Perfect World: That’s the challenge from zaadz. This is the subject of my novel-in-progress (the illustration above is from my draft), so if anyone can capture it in a few paragraphs I want to hear it. The responses on the zaadz site don’t do it for me, but read them over — they’re inspirational, and they’ll get you thinking. Thanks to Siona for the link and the one that follows. Women Fight Stress Through Companionship: A UCLA study suggests that hormones produced by stress, which in men trigger fight-or-flight responses, in women also trigger a female bonding response. There is strength, and safety, in numbers committed to a common cause. No Longer Out of Touch: Mike Morris tells his personal and slightly troubling story of how reconnection to the land generated renewed respect for it, and everything living on it: Excerpt: The simple connection of bare feet and hands in contact with the soil… The simple connection of watching water fall from the sky, the music of it trinkling into your water tanks. Often, when it rains, I go into the kitchen, pour myself a glass of water, and drink it as I watch the rain fall outside the window: Now this rain falls through my body. No other water ever tastes as good. Then go outside and return the water to the Earth. Hard not to feel connected, then.
The Road to a Community-Based Economy: Bill McKibben joins the bandwagon, hoping his descendants will have the sense to realize that community self-reliance offers the only way to cope with looming and cascading social, economic and ecological crises. Huge Bee Die-Off Linked to GM Corn: Not yet proven irrefutably, but until recently neither was the connection between human activity and global warming. Monsanto does it again, and this time the consequences for farmers who don’t grow from sterile trademarked seeds, and for wild plants everywhere, could be catastrophic. The Looming War Against Iran and the Looming US Debt Crisis: Jeff Vail makes the connection. A half trillion dollars in high-risk US mortgage debt coming up for renewal over the next two years at much higher interest rates. And Bush determined to start yet another catastrophic Middle East war, this time with nukes. Yet the stock market is at record highs. Students of history are shaking their heads. Not a Nation as We Know It: John Robb explains that the concept of a ‘virtual’ caliphate, which underlies much of the political and religious ambition in the Middle East, is utterly different from our notion of a nation-state, in that it has no firm borders or boundaries, political, social oreconomic, and is less hierarchical than rhizomic. Latin American Assesses Gonzales: And they don’t think any more of him than we do. We Don’t Know What We Need: Roger Schank’s observation that we need to observe and converse and understand what people need, instead of just asking them, has applications far beyond business. When Global Warming Floods the Coasts, Will You Be Underwater?: Check out this Google Maps mashup to see. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link. (Corrected): Hear me blather live April 26 at 11am EDT (GMT-5h) during an online forum on innovation. Get free tickets by e-mailing me or requesting them in the comments below (I have 20 to give out). More on this soon! |
March 31, 2007
Saturday Links for the Week – March 31, 2007
March 30, 2007
Three New Trends in Innovation
Disrupting the Disrupters Paul Paetz at The Anti-Marketer does a brilliant analysis of the paradox Starbucks has got itself into. In line with the classic Christensen model, Starbucks, which introduced a series of New Market disruptive innovations, is now under threat from Low End disruptive innovators. To indicate how bad it’s getting, Consumer Reports’ expert panel recently rated McDonalds’ new coffee as nearly as good as the premium coffees, at a much lower price and (depending on circumstances) faster as well. The diagram above shows partial strategy canvases (as I see them) for the two companies. Starbucks’ differentiation as a ‘third place’ offering a home-away-from-home experience has fallen off as a result of the ubiquity and sameness of its establishments, at the same time McDonalds is starting to offer some low-end ‘third place’ amenities like free wireless. McDonalds has also significantly improved its coffee quality, and is reportedly starting to use more wholesome foods, environmentally-friendly and fair-trade practices. So now, of the 8 differentiating qualities on the Canvas, Starbucks’ has lost its substantial edge over McDonalds on three qualities, and has a strong lead now only in coffee variety. Meanwhile McDonalds has maintained its edge on three qualities: price, speed and the variety of other foods served. This doesn’t bode well for Starbucks. I’m not a coffee nut, and don’t patronize either of these places, and I prefer to make my own tea rather than buy it (I’m cheap, and sweeten with stevia). But my sense is that Starbucks’ best opportunity is to re-engender its ‘third place’ advantage. To do that they need to become even more ethical — no trans fats, nutritional focus, fair trade, no buying from factory farms (which Burger King has just announced they will do), etc. And they need to start sponsoring community events and running local community activities ñ customized to each community. That will be tough if the store managers don’t live in the community. They need to capture the wisdom of crowds by getting to know their local customers as intimately as British pub owners know theirs. What would your advice be to Starbucks if it was your job to give them a strategy to sustain their innovativeness and market share? New Innovations in Peer-to-Peer Technology The BBC reports on a German company’s plans to introduce a combination of sensors, GPS-based dashboard notification systems, and peer-to-peer communication tools that will allow cars and their drivers to convey important information to each other, automatically and just-in-time ñ accidents ahead, dangerous drivers, traffic hazards etc. What intrigues me about this is that it involves person-to-person, machine-to-machine and machine-to-person communication and the coordination of all three, and also the fact that as much as possible this communication is automated and presented in real time. I can envisage similar innovations in health-care (sensors to detect and report personal health emergencies, including those in accidents etc., and connection to systems that could pinpoint the nearest doctor, hospital, laboratory etc.). What other examples can you think of? Next-Generation Biomimicry
The focus that interested me most, though, was that on biomimicry innovations, that draw on how nature has evolved solutions that, for example:
I continue to believe that nature has millions of other answers to perplexing problems awaiting our discovery, answers that don’t pollute, waste, or demean us. All we have to do is learn to pay attention. Andto stop destroying nature before we learn what she has to teach us. Category: The Innovation Process
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March 29, 2007
Knowledge Management: Finding Quick Wins and Long Term Value
  Dilbert, by Scott Adams Two questions Iím most often asked by people just given responsibility for Knowledge Management in their organizations:
Most people are surprised that none of my answers involves creating big central ‘knowledge bases’, or websites, or community of practice ‘collaboration spaces’. While every organization is different, my experience is that these types of initiatives tend to produce disappointing results. As the top cartoon above suggests, these are easy to do, and often fun, which is perhaps why theyíre so tempting. Again, itís dangerous to generalize, but I think programs that focus more on context than content, and more on connection than collection, often pay the biggest dividends. So hereís a list of possibilities that I think would apply in most organizations:
If you’re new to KM, or an ambitious information professional striving to make a difference, you have a real challenge ahead of you. I hope thelists above can make your task a little easier. Categories: Knowledge Management
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March 28, 2007
The Evolution of Attention
 I had an interesting discussion with some of my colleagues this evening about how they, and the people they know, pay attention, and divide their attention, and how this appears to be changing from generation to generation. Some of their observations were not new: We are all splitting our attention more finely than we used to. Younger generations are learning to do this even more finely than ours has, the phenomenon called continuous partial attention, though there seems to be some consensus that this dividing of attention is more a rapid sequential process than a simultaneous one. We seem to become bored more easily if there is insufficient stimulus to demand our constant, full attention, and start to browse the room (physical or virtual), consciously or subconsciously, for more stimulus when our minds and/or emotions are not fully engaged. Some of their observations were, I thought, novel and provocative: Partly because we’re always fighting for attention, perhaps, the nature of spoken and real-time written (IM) communication seems to have evolved from relatively slow, thoughtful, considered communication to more rapid-fire, stream-of-consciousness, iterative, successive-approximation communication. Efficiency and economy are sacrificed for effectiveness. Whereas I think I understood what you used to say, the first time you said it, today I know what you’re saying, because after ten clarifications and restatements there can no longer be any doubt. And maybe it takes longer today for that greater certainty, in the spaces between the clarifications and restatements I also understood what six other people told me on other subjects, interwoven with my conversation with you. If you were the only person I was conversing with at the time, I might well have become impatient with you. But increasingly, we constantly juggle and interleaf multiple conversations. What is lost in this splitting of attention? When we pay attention to more and more things in rapid succession, we must inevitably stop paying attention to something else. I suspect that successive-approximation communication interferes with our ability to fully listen — there just isn’t time, enough mental cycles for us to do so. We are therefore, I’d suggest, missing nuances in the conversation — the meaning that is contained in silences, hesitation, inflection, tone, and the semi-subconscious awareness of what is implied by the choice of one word over another, by phraseology, by the connotation and implication and what might have provoked a statement, not just its denotation. Even more, because we are scanning words while we’re listening, we’re missing the important visual clues that accompany a message in face-to-face or videoconferenced conversation: facial expression, body language, and what we can ‘read’ in the eyes of the person we are talking to. In fact, I suspect that some of the discomfort I see in young people engaged in one-on-one, face-to-face conversation is because they’re just not experienced or practiced in such conversation, and find its intimacy alarming and disorienting. At age 55, when I’m speaking with a woman who is looking at me intently as we talk, for example, I don’t think I am likely to misconstrue her attention (e.g. as coming on to me, staring at me because of something peculiar about my appearance, or angry at me). I’ve learned to interpret these signals in context, from practice. I’m not sure many young people who practice rapid sequential language processing have that acuity, and I’m a little concerned that, for lack of practice and attention, they may never develop it. And if so, that’s a shame, not only because some important communication need not or cannot be verbal*, but because I think the intimacy of non-verbal communication is important for our emotional well-being. But maybe I’m just getting old and nostalgic. Have you noticed any of this in your own conversations? In what other ways are the ways we communicate, and theways we pay attention, evolving, for better or for worse? *Verbal means oral or written, i.e. using language. This word is often misused to mean just oral, spoken. Painting “In Deep Conversation” by Irish artist Pam O’Connell Category: Conversation & Language
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March 27, 2007
Finding People to Make a Living With: Some More Thoughts
A few people whose opinions I value highly have told me they’re disappointed with the model I proposed yesterday for finding people to make a living with. Their concerns fall into three categories:
These are very valid criticisms, and they explain why the model I propose hasn’t received more traction already, and why a lot of us are still pursuing our passion alone. Let’s look at each of these in turn.
So what should you do if you’ve done all this work? How about this:
Or suppose your passion is to find a cure (or the cause) for some chronic, perplexing disease. You’re going to stick to this task, even if you have to do it in your basement, burning the midnight oil. This one’s a little easier to see, isn’t it? The truth is that things get done when a group of people with a shared sense of purpose and passion, who between them have the gift to make it happen, get together and make it happen. That’s not to say you don’t need to hone your craft, and make time to practice your gift until you truly do it better than anyone else. That’s a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one. There’s always a need for great art, and great science, but collaboration, using a model like this, is far more likely to being that genius to light than waiting for serendipity.
An issue I haven’t spoken about is: Where and how do we collect the needs? I’ve already said that an online database isn’t enough, that we need to engage the majority who are on the other side of the digital divide, and that we need to facilitate a million conversations to surface, articulate, qualify, and refine the needs. On this issue, I’m stumped. Maybe we need more than one place to collect, and more than one mechanism to discuss, these needs. How can we reach everyone, on a regular basis, often enough and long enough to get them sync’d up with people who share their purpose, and their passion, so that they can discover if they were destined to makea living together? What do you think? Category: Finding and Creating Meaningful Work
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March 26, 2007
Finding People to Make a Living With: A Methodology, Take One
 For some time I’ve been thinking about ways we could more effectively find ‘like minds’ to make a living with or even just to work on projects we have a shared passion for. Too many of us are working alone, and if we’re going to make a real difference, and experience the full joy of Natural Enterprise and Intentional Community, we need to start working with others whose talents complement our own, and who we can come easily to love. This search for partners need not (indeed it must not) involve compromising what we want to do, or our values. It should enable us to do what we do best, connecting and collaborating with others, on our own terms, in our own context, developing our own plan of action, doing our own thing in sync, in community with others. Though it does require knowing yourself: What your personal Gift, Passion and Purpose are! I concluded quickly that the mechanism for finding others won’t be a website, database or other online technology: It needs to draw on a broader pool of talent and passion, including those on the other side of the digital divide. Likewise, the mechanism for finding others cannot be one of agency, because person-to-person connection agencies are fatally flawed by their intrinsic conflict of interest. As James Surowiecki has explained, the agent gets rewarded for making connections, and for that reason s/he will always be tempted to exaggerate the potential of every relationship, and to accept bribes to favour some parties over others. So what we need is a low-tech, peer-to-peer mechanism. That had me stumped for a while, but now I think I have a first iteration (illustrated above) of a method that might work. Here’s a walk-through; tell me what you think:
OK, I know you’re asking What’s the Business Model? How can anyone make a living off this? Well, in the first place, this solution co-development process will give those who want to make a living a huge amount of research and ‘qualification of need’ at little or no cost. And if some of the experiments need some additional investment of time or money to get from the successful experiment to the ubiquitous product or service stage, it should be pretty easy to find partners to provide it, since the risk has been largely eliminated. The network that has been immersed in qualifying the need and brainstorming solutions will provide ready-made viral marketing for commercial solutions. And ultimately this is a reputation system: Your involvement co-developing both the articulated needs and qualified approaches and solutions will give you instant credibility to partners and customers alike. Yeah, it’s an open source co-development and the intelligence is all out there. But you have the inside track because you’ve been immersed in the details since day one, so you (and your new partners) can do what even the richest and cleverest outsider can’t: implement first and best. No, you won’t make a million from this approach. There is an element of the Gift/Generosity Economy here. But there is no reason you can’t make enough, easily, with minimal risk, to let you keep doing what you love, what you’re uniquely good at doing,with people you love, and make the world a better place in the process. That’s all I’ve got so far. Additions welcome. Let’s co-develop this thing. Category: Finding and Creating Meaningful Work
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March 25, 2007
Sunday Open Thread – March 25, 2007
What I’m planning on writing about soon:
What I’m thinking about: What do you think? Dilbert cartoon by Scott Adams. He and I will both be in Denver presenting at SLA 2007, June 3-6. Oh, Al Gore will be there too. |
March 24, 2007
Saturday Links of the Week – March 24, 2007
 What’s Wrong with Environmentalism: Curtis White starts off a two-part article in Orion with a brilliant and moving explanation of why we environmentalists are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Excerpt:
We can, however, look at ourselves and see all of the ways that we conspire against what we imagine to be our own most urgent interests. Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs. We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called ’Äúthe visible God’Äù: money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out. It creates a hole in our sense of ourselves and of this country, and it leaves us with few alternatives but to try to fill that hole with money and the things money buys…
Needless to say, many people with environmental sympathies will easily agree with what I’Äôve just said and imagine that in fact they do what they can to resist work and consumption, to resist the world as arranged for the convenience of money. But here again I suspect we are kidding ourselves. Rather than taking the risk of challenging the roles money and work play in all of our lives by actually taking the responsibility for reordering our lives, the most prominent strategy of environmentalists seems to be to ’Äúgive back’Äù to nature through the bequests, the annuities, the Working Assets credit cards and long distance telephone schemes, and the socially responsible mutual funds advertised in Sierra and proliferating across the environmental movement. Such giving may make us feel better, but it will never be enough… We’Äôre willing to be generous in order to ’Äúsave the world’Äù but not before we’Äôve insured our own survival in the reigning system… Even when we are trying to aid the environment, we are not willing as individuals to leave the system that we know in our heart of hearts is the cause of our problems. We are even further from knowing how to take the collective risk of leaving this system entirely and ordering our societies differently. We are not ready. Not yet, at least. Read the whole article, and stay tuned for Part Two. And in the meantime, the NYT tells the story of a couple of writers in NYC trying hard to be really green (thanks to Melisa Christensen for the link). “We’re Sitting On a Powderkeg Here”: George Packer’s astonishing article from the New Yorker about the horror of modern Lagos (my review here) is finally available online — on a Nigerian discussion forum. How Cuba Survived Peak Oil: The combination of the collapse of the USSR and the US embargo left Cuba in a crisis, bereft of the essentials that had made its economy work, with starvation omnipresent. A new film shows how the Cuban people clawed their way back through The Power of Community, and in so doing developed a model for survival that may be valuable to us when we all face the End of Oil. Thanks to Don Hayward of the Green Party for the link. Peak Oil Movement Speaks to Big Oil: Randy Udall‘s and Richard Heinberg‘s respectful, credible and expansive comments to the National Petroleum Council on Peak Oil. Excerpt from the former: Humans have always sought perpetual motion, and for a moment, the petroleum industry has given it to us. The problem is that you have 300 million Americans who take $2.50 gasoline for granted in a country whose architecture, land use patterns, agriculture, prosperity, and cast of mind have been have been built around cheap oil. These oil tribe people, and their political leaders, don’t care about peak oil, they care only about price. Meanwhile, the Chinese are where we were in 1910, with car sales doubling every three years.
Thought for the Week: To demand that our children feel well in the world which we leave them is an insult to their dignity.
– Ivan Illich (cited at altruism.org) Photo: A ‘beauty strip’ at the edge of a devastated clearcut forest, used to hide the destruction from the view of canoeists and (when usedalongside highways) drivers; photo by Steve Gorman for Orion. |
March 23, 2007
Lovely, but What Does it Mean?
 Readers of How to Save the World know that I’m a big fan of visualizations as a way of adding meaning and value to information, and as a vehicle for reintermediation and the re-emergence of a critical business and social role for information professionals as specialists who do their craft better than any generalist can hope to do. Likewise, I’m a fan of Rob Cross’ approach to social network mapping — focusing on the assessed quality of relationships rather than just their quantity or frequency. And I think the most important value of social network maps lies in self-assessment — what a map of others’ perceptions of your social networks tells you about yourself and the nature and quality of your own relationships.. So I was intrigued to discover that one of the most popular social network maps on the web (reproduced above) looks utterly different from most of the maps I’ve seen before, which tend to be hub-and-spoke type drawings with a few overly-busy people with too many links and a few loners with too few. This particular map was developed by a professor in the US based on a survey of every student in a typical American high school, and depicts all their ‘sexual or romantic’ relationships over the past half-year. Far from hub (the sexual athletes) and spoke (their conquests) with disconnected outliers (the school nerds et al), the picture is one of remarkable fidelity and many tiny, almost nuclear clusters. Sixty-three couples (126 students) had sex only with each other, and 63 other students were involved in closed triads — one or two partners with no overlap with anyone else in the school. Another 94 students were involved in other small clusters, and of them 79 had only one sexual partner in that cluster. Then there was a long, thin network connecting 288 students with up to 37 degrees of separation, the vast majority of whom also had only sexual partner. Most of the students in this giant cluster would have been flabbergasted to realize they were part of such a network, and (unless shown otherwise) would justifiably perceive their relationship map no differently from those in the nuclear clusters with two or three participants. What does this mean? The link above is illuminating, but it is quite narrowly focused on preventing STDs (i.e. forget looking for hubs to teach/treat; a much broader approach is needed). I think this map raises more questions than it answers, and also has some important implications for the value of network maps in the first place:
As intriguing as the map is, to me it poses the same huge risk as any other analysis of complex information: the risk that people will draw simple conclusions and propose complicated ‘solutions’ by misinterpreting or oversimplifying or placing far too much importance on this tiny, flawed, partial picture of a profoundly complex phenomenon, in this case the phenomenon of human networks and relationships. It reminds me a bit of the old John Saxe poem about the six blind men trying to describe an elephant. We cannot hope to fathom human relationships, so we try to simplify them down in some way that will allow us to see the patterns and therefore come up with a course of action that, if imperfect, is better than doing nothing. The problem is that it isn’t necessarily better than doing nothing. AsJames Cascio said (perhaps quoting someone else — thanks to Martin Cleaver for the citation) the map is not the terrain. Category: Complexity and Discovery
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March 22, 2007
much less than real
 Photo from the Ontario SPCA. i look into your faces: i do not know what frames of thought give structure to our lives? my fellow humans, we who have words’ magic seems to lie in purposed ambiguity - while nature’s creatures, dog and bird and deer and rabbit and so of late i talk much less: content with silent company, it seems somehow less lonely when there is no noise when i’m alone i often stare at mirrors, what i see in that mirage so i am left much less than real. Category: Creative Works: Poetry
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