Downsview Park: Imagine What This Could Be

Posted on June 5, 2007 by Dave Pollard
downsview park
Downsview Park, in the NorthWest part of Toronto, is probably unknown to most of the city’s residents. It’s the former site of Canadian Forces Base Toronto (the airport it wraps around was the military airport, and is now used irregularly as a testing site by Bombardier Aerospace, the airplane manufacturer who co-owns the ‘airport’ with the Canadian government.

There have been weird projects hosted by the Crown Corporation that owns the 572 acre (232 ha) site, and grandiose, bafflegab plans for years to redevelop the ‘park’, which is occasionally used for special events (the Pope, the Rolling Stones), but which is now mostly just mowed and vacant. Famous architects and designers like Bruce Mau were brought in, but have since left, and today a new chairperson was announced for the park’s owner. The CBC has been asking listeners to call in and tell them what they think should be done with the site.

The site has a subway station right on its doorstep (at Allen Road and Sheppard Avenue W). It has one of the country’s largest shopping centres a mile (and one subway stop) away. It is two miles (and one future planned subway stop) from York University, Toronto’s second largest.

My answer is simple: Make Downsview Park a Model Car-Less Community. No roads (dig up the military roads on the property now). No parking lots. No garages. No cars allowed period.

And no non-renewable energy. Wind, solar, and geothermal power only. No gas lines. No connection to the grid, except for emergency purposes through a community non-profit Energy Co-op that would buy, sell and redistribute around the community the electricity it needed.

And a large co-operatively owned, permaculture-based organic garden. It’s a ‘park’ now, but nothing like the grassland it was in its natural state. Lots of green space (with walking and bicycle paths) should be part of the design, but that green space should all be native species. This has been done in other places in the Greater Toronto Area, and it’s beautiful and needs almost no maintenance (no watering, no cutting, just weeding out invasive species). The organic garden should blend in with that.

The entire site would be self-managed. The land would be leased to the community, which would self-select its members and agree upon certain principles of intentional community (no private ownership of any of the property, pledge to buy local, eat local, live simply, and develop a balance of workplaces and shops — owned by community members — and living spaces that minimize the need to travel, etc.) It sounds chaotic, but it works — principles of intentional communities are well-established.

The site is perfectly situated to accommodate this, and it could be a laboratory for the world after the End of Oil. This is a modest proposal, and hence it will probably be rejected by government owners who want something flashy, something that will bring in the tourists. I say fuck the tourists, fuck making this a ‘recreation destination’, a ‘set of integrated experiences’, and fuckthe ‘advanced sports complex’. Let’s make this a place where people can live when the reckless and unsustainable way we live now is no longer possible. And a modest showcase for what is possible.

What do you think? Help me flesh this idea out, and perhaps I can get the new chairperson to listen.

Posted in Collapse Watch | 10 Comments

The Thing About Technology

Posted on June 4, 2007 by Dave Pollard
(This article is a heresy, especially coming from a self-proclaimed champion of innovation. It’s not quite polished enough to be a Dangerous Little Meme yet. But there’s definitely something here. I’m expecting a rough ride for it, but I’m ready.)
 rusty screw
The thing about technology is that, since the dawn of the human species, every technology we have introduced has ultimately, and inadvertently, made things worse. That statement sounds categorical, so let me explain.

 
The human species is not very well endowed with natural gifts for survival. Compared to most other creatures, we are slow, clumsy, earthbound, and lacking in both fur and claws. Prior to the ice ages, we managed to do quite well regardless, largely by sticking to our natural habitat (the tropics, mostly tropical rainforest), eating mostly vegetarian, and using our unusually large brains and unusual ferocity to compensate for our lack of physical gifts.
 

With the onset of the ice ages, however, life for us (and most other life) became quite quickly more difficult. Our solution was to invent (usually copying models from nature) technologies that extended our speed, agility, ability to fly, ability to stay warm, and ability to find and hunt prey. Each of these technologies improved our short-run ability to survive, but each unintentionally created huge, intractable long-term problems:
  • The invention of the arrowhead and knife allowed us to kill and tear the flesh of, large mammals. This provided an abundant source of food. It also ultimately led to the extinction of these large mammals, and produced as a consequence the first true famines.
  • The invention of agriculture allowed more people to live per square mile, but, as Jared Diamond has explained, it produced as a consequence the first instances of human slavery, massive malnutrition, desertification, soil exhaustion, factory farms, the End of Water, malnutrition (and a much shortened life expectancy), a huge number of new and debilitating human diseases (like previously-unknown tooth decay), and the need for political hierarchy and military force.
  • The invention of transportation technologies allowed us to move ourselves and our food and other needs to places we would not naturally be able to live in. This produced as a consequence the ability to move slaves around the world, and to send prisoners of war to death camps. It has also produced the death of the oceans, thanks to transportation inventions like factory super-trawlers and the Exxon Valdez.
  • The invention of human-controlled fire allowed us to keep warm in places we would naturally freeze. But as a consequence it has brought about massive and global deforestation (as much a contributor to global warming as manufacturing and transportation) and habitat destruction.
  • The invention of the steam (and later electric) engine allowed great increases in production and productivity. It has also led to the commoditization and devaluation of human labour, a quantum increase in pollution (which in turn, along with mining processes, produced new, deadly chronic diseases), a fragile and severe dependence on oil (and because of that dependence, many of the major wars of the last century), and infrastructure and energy grids that are hugely vulnerable to attack, natural disasters and supply-outs.
  • The invention of medicines and other health technologies has eradicated some terrible diseases and reduced human suffering. It has also produced staggering human overpopulation, gender selection of babies (that has skewed population in many countries heavily in favour of males), novel and effective new forms of torture, vulnerability to old and new (overcrowding-related) pandemic diseases, hugely increased risks of bioterror attacks, and murders of the poor and homeless for organ harvesting.
  • The invention of communication technologies has enabled a breathtaking increase in our knowledge of the world. It has also enabled the rapid and effective spread of propaganda, which has sparked global wars, increased disinformation (“Saddam was behind 9/11”) more quickly than information, and enabled genocides to be more effectively provoked and carried out.
  • The invention of money has enabled effective trade in goods around the world that cannot be produced locally. It has also ushered in unprecedented disparity of wealth, currency and stock speculation and frauds that have ruined millions of lives and produced the Great Depression.
  • The invention of nuclear power…(well, you get the idea).
We’re in a constant race to keep up, and political, economic and media propagandists keep telling us we’re winning, that ‘good’ technology has outpaced and will outpace ‘bad’ technology. But we cannot win this race. All technologies have unnatural consequences that are unpredictable and readily exploitable. It is not in our nature to understand and preempt the dangers that any new technology can introduce (just look at the untested ingredients in our unprocessed foods, the recalls of improperly tested drugs and foods deliberately poisoned for profit, the tens of thousands of chemicals introduced into our air, water, food and homes with no knowledge of their long-term effects). The Precautionary Principle (which says ‘don’t do anything unless there is compelling evidence it will cause no harm’) is a brilliant idea, but one that is preposterously impossible to enforce — it is contrary to everything we do, everything we believe in, and everything our modern systems are built on.
 
And we’re just getting started with technology’s ‘promise’. In the next few years, new technologies like these will be introduced (because they can, and because there’s a human market for them):
  • Robots designed to wage war, with no moral scruples, and quite possibly with biological parts
  • Freak animals grotesquely bred to ‘grow’ replacement, harvestable human organs
  • Fully genetically selected (gender, hair colour, eye colour, other attributes) babies
  • Experiments among the obscenely rich to achieve immortality, and to escape the Earth for another planet
  • Security-compound communities for the affluent, completely closed off to non-members (“just leave it by the gate and go away”)
  • Mandatory sedative and other behaviour-modification drugs administered by the state, initially to unruly children and prisoners, and then to the ‘difficult’ aged and anyone deemed by the psychological orthodoxy of the day to be ‘mentally unfit’
  • Mini-nukes and bioweapons, developed by affluent states, with the same so-called ‘deterrent’ and ‘preemptive’ purpose that the bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima were developed for
We will initially express revulsion at these technologies, because they don’t seem to have any positive or popular function. But then we’ll shrug and realize that they are just extensions of technologies developed for ‘good’, and that if there’s a ‘market’ for them, or if the propagandists developing them can argue (as they will) that their end purpose (portrayed in glowing, or urgent, terms) justifies their unsavoury means, we will simply insist that, like factory farms and foreign torture prisons, they be kept out of our sight and mind, so we don’t get stressed about them.
 
A couple of years ago I gave up believing that top-down political or economic changes, or spontaneous social revolutions, will save us from ourselves. They never have. But I’ve always had a soft spot for innovative technology. In the short run, it can work wonders. It’s like the addictive painkillers taken by the terminally ill — for awhile, everything seems wonderful, but then the pain is back with a greater vengeance, and you need even more, of a different, stronger drug because you’ve built up a resistance to the old one. The one that worked for awhile is now worse than useless, because it longer has any effect, yet you’re still addicted to it. It’s no longer enough.
 
It’s never enough.

Photo: from Wikipedia, under Rust
Posted in Using Weblogs and Technology | 32 Comments

Sunday Open Thread – June 3, 2007

Posted on June 3, 2007 by Dave Pollard
our house
Our house

What I’m thinking about, and planning on writing (and podcasting) about soon:

The Problem with Technology & Innovation: Without technology and innovation, we as a species would have become extinct before civilization had even begun. The technology and innovation we’ve introduced since is now almost certain to make us extinct. I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and why it’s so.

Vignettes: I’m going to try to pay attention while I’m in Denver this coming week, and come up with material for vignettes #3 and #4.

Improv: What makes us good or bad at improvising (‘acting in the moment’)? What kinds of things do we do impromptu (conversation, flirtation, artistic creation, collaboration, imagination)? When we practice bad improv habits does it actually makes us worse at it instead of better?

Good Working Models of Social Networking: Last week I hinted that social networking practices and tools only work when they’re simple and ubiquitously used, which may be why there are so few success stories of blogs, wikis etc. being introduced in organizations. I also hinted that it doesn’t meet a perceived urgent need in organizations, but does in our broader society, and that perhaps therefore (especially large) organizations will be the last, not the early, adopters of social networking. More thinking on this to come.

Blog-Hosted Conversations: Plan is for 30-minute conversations, once a week, on the subject of identifying and acquiring the essential skills and relationships we need to be models of a better way to live, and what those models might look like. The first few will be practice podcasts, and may not make it to the blog.

It seems as if the changes that were starting to manifest themselves globally last winter have ground to a halt. We’re not going backwards, but we’re not changing direction in a positive way either. It’s as if we’re just quietly, hands off the controls, driving off the edge of a cliff, andnobody’s saying anything. Even Al Gore‘s sounding kinda tired, as if his heart isn’t in it anymore. Anyone else noticed that?
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 1 Comment

Saturday Links for the Week – June 2, 2007

Posted on June 2, 2007 by Dave Pollard

dave's raccoon
My photo of a very young raccoon in our back yard this week. As I watched him dig for sunflower seeds beneath the bird feeder, a red fox twice his size suddenly ran up towards him. The raccoon glared at the fox, and then chased him away. More of my back yard wildlife photos here.

What’s Important This Week:

Politics as Usual: A discouraging indication at how inept we are at change, as all the important news this week is about not learning from our mistakes:

Plus Áa change…

Thoughts for the Week, from two gentlemen and working partners decades ahead of themselves; read their thoughts carefully, because these ideas are unintuitive but profoundly important:

“Seek visions, not solutions” – Humberto Maturana (via Andrew Campbell)

“We are loving animals that cultivate aggression in a cultural alienation that may eventually change our biology… we are not yet robots”  – Humberto Maturana (via Hugo Urrestarazu, from Sol)

“Just as conventional biology understood the nervous system as an information-processing system, classic immunology understands immunology in military terms — as a defense system against invaders. I’ve been developing a different view of immunology — namely, that the immune system has its own closure, its own network quality. The emergent identity of this system is the identity of your body, which is not a defensive identity. This is a positive statement, not a negative one, and it changes everything in immunology. In presenting immunology in these terms, I’m creating a conceptual scaffolding. We have to go beyond an information-processing model, in which incoming information is acted upon by the system. The immune system is not spatially fixed, it’s best understood as an emergent network.” – Francesco Varela (via Andrew Campbell, from Edge)

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | Comments Off on Saturday Links for the Week – June 2, 2007

Dangerous Little Memes

Posted on May 31, 2007 by Dave Pollard

Bastish Swans
Swans photo by Kevin Cameron
“You’re very quiet these days, Dave.” Three times I’ve heard this recently, from three different friends. It got me thinking about Flemming Funch’s recent comment:
The more in balance we ourselves are, the less we feel a need for correcting everybody else’s worldviews. The more enlightened you yourself are, the less you are obsessed with making everybody else be like [and think like] you.
As I pondered this, I wondered at first whether the silence of those of us who’ve made peace with our own radical, grim worldviews was a bit selfish, or lazy: If we know something important the rest of the world should know, and act upon, isn’t it our duty to stand up and shout it from the rooftops?
 
But then I thought how difficult it is to explain, within the attention span of the average listener, how one arrived at these conclusions. It’s taken me years, and a ton of reading and thinking that the average person has neither the time nor inclination for, to come to my current assessment about how the world works, what the real problems are, and what we should be doing. I’m delighted at the number of people, readers of my work and composers of their own, who seem to be on the same wavelength that I am on, but they’ve reached that point by their own arduous and tortuous journey, and we wouldn’t be nodding at each other’s ideas and comments based on a few articles, no matter how well written or reasoned. We are, all of us who concede that our civilization’s time is probably running out and the best approach now is local, community-based, model-creating actions, not a new political, economic or social movement or revolution, too far ahead to be able to explain to others, easily or simply, how we have arrived at the philosophical space we currently occupy. And we are, as well, too far ahead to go back, or to wait for the rest of the world to catch up.
 
So we shut up and, in the company of those not yet ready for what we believe and what we have to say, we say nothing. We have given up arguing with the deniers, the apologists, the technophiles and rhapsodists who still think our manifest destiny is to be ‘saved’, by our own ingenuity or some higher power. I talk to my children, now in their thirties, about the fact that their suburban lifestyle is utterly unsustainable and headed for a wall, and that our economy is so stretched out and fragile that it’s inevitably going to come flying apart. But while they are attentive and respectful, their hope that I’m dead wrong far outweighs their fear that I’m right. I love them dearly, but they are not yet ready to listen. And my granddaughters, who will bear the brunt of our generations’ irresponsibility, are too busy acquiring the competencies they will need to be distracted by the awful truth of the world they will soon inherit. They know me, already, by reputation, and they will come to me with their questions, when they’re ready.
 
So in the meantime, I’m very quiet these days. I’ve become the person I said those ‘too far ahead’ must become: accepting, responsible (without laying guilt or blame), joyful (alive in the moment) and purposeful (towards a full, natural life). And quiet, reflective, thoughtful, attentive, even patient.
 
As a result, I don’t engage in enough oral conversations on matters that are important, because those to whom I could talk about these things are either (a) not ready or (b) already know. Daniel Quinn’s advice rings truer all the time:

People will listen when they’re ready to listen and not before. Probably, once upon a time, you weren’t ready to listen to an idea than now seems to you obvious, even urgent. Let people come to it in their own time. Nagging or bullying will only alienate them. Don’t preach. Don’t waste time with people who want to argue. They’ll keep you immobilized forever. Look for people who are already open to something new.

When presenting a new idea, you don’t have to have all the answers. It’s better to say ‘I don’t know’ than to fake it. Make people formulate their own questions. Don’t take on the responsibility of figuring out what their difficulty is. We each internalize information differently. If you don’t understand a question, keep insisting they explain it until it’s clear. Nine times out of ten they’ll supply the answer themselves.

Above all, listen. Your close attention is sometimes more important than your articulateness in winning converts. And learning is always a good thing.

So while I’ve become a better listener, my conversational skills (never my strong suit) are not getting much exercise, and without practice they’re not going to improve. Perhaps I should practice talking about things that aren’t important, but my heart’s not in it.
 
Or perhaps I should practice conveying some small, important, easier messages. Jim Kunstler is a master at this, and he’s developed a knack for hammering on some very basic, vital lessons, repeatedly and eloquently, in ways that are memorable. Recently, Sharon Astyk (thanks to Michael Yarmolinsky for the link) picked up on this Kunstler riff:
“It only made me more nervous, because this longing for ‘solutions’ strikes me as a free-floating wish for magical rescue remedies, for techno-fixes that will allow us to make a hassle-free switch from fossil hydrocarbon power to something less likely to destroy the Earth’s ecosystems (and human civilization with it). And I think such a wish is, in itself, at the root of our problem — certainly at the bottom of our incapacity to think clearly about these things. I said so, of course, which seemed to piss off a substantial number of my fellow festival attendees.”

I, like Kunstler, think that the [approach of seeking] “solutions” as “ways to keep things mostly the way they are” is completely mistaken.

This idea is an explosive, innocuous, dangerous little meme that somehow worms its way into your worldview, even if you’re not ready for its implications. Read the rest of Sharon’s article to hear her thinking out loud about these implications (such as the need to pursue a lifestyle of radical simplicity), and then read the offended response from some of her readers who are clearly unnerved by these implications.
 
So I’ve decided to build a collection of explosive, innocuous, dangerous little memes and, whenever I can, drop them gently into conversations about ‘unimportant’ things. Beyond that, I’ll continue to be mostly quiet, and see what happens. Contributions to this deliciously subversive experiment are welcome.
 
Posted in Collapse Watch | 14 Comments

How to Make a Living

Posted on May 30, 2007 by Dave Pollard
Working Naturally
Several readers have asked me for a five-minute summary of the iterative, lifelong process of learning what we’re meant to do for a living, and making that living through Natural Enterprise. I thought this was a reasonable request, so I’ve illustrated it above. Here’s the five-minute walk-through:
  1. Now What? You’re newly-graduated, outsourced, chronically underemployed or seeking to start your ‘second career’. Start with yourself. Most of us have just fallen into the careers we’ve followed, or taken the easiest or most obvious path. We don’t know what else we could be doing. We don’t know what other people do for a living, what their work is really like. We don’t know what capacities (many of them untapped) we have, or that we could develop that would open up worlds of meaningful work. So step one is a two-way exploration, of our own current and prospective competencies, and of the whole wide world of work.
  2. Why are You Here? The next step is identifying your Gift (what you are uniquely skilled at), your Passion (what you love doing), and your Purpose (where that Gift and Passion intersect with real, unmet human needs). These change as you grow and learn, but without knowing what they are, at least here and now, there will be no focus to your search for meaningful work.
  3. How Does Someone Make a Living? Most of us have bought into all the myths about making a living: fitting into and competing in the soul-destroying ‘job market’, or struggling with risky ‘self-employment’ — beaten up by unreasonable customers and impatient investors, indebted forever and forced to grow ruthlessly or die. But there are models of joyful, responsible, sustainable, egalitarian enterprise where you are beholden to no one, where you work with people you love as an integral part of a healthy community. All you need to do is find them, study them, and follow their example.
  4. Who Do I Make a Living With? The greatest challenge for Natural Enterprises is finding partners whose Gifts and Passions complement your own, and who share your Purpose. Many hands make light work, and the entrepreneur’s greatest mistake is often trying to do everything alone. For some, it makes sense to start with this decision, to decide first who you want to make a living with, and then, collectively, cycle back and discover what’s possible, what you really want to do, and how best to do it. The process is continuous, and it doesn’t really matter where you start. And the best thing about Natural Enterprise is you can always change your mind, and it will evolve with you.

The four steps above are inward-focused, about self-direction. Next you turn your attention outward, to filling a need:

  1. What Does the World Need? Real market research is about answering this question, and also about understanding why that need isn’t already being met by some other enterprising group. This is the most difficult step in the process, but answering it will guide you confidently through the rest of the steps.
  2. What Could Possibly Meet That Need? We live in a world of great imaginative poverty, but with practice you can become very good at the critical skill of imagining possibilities. There are all kinds of tools that can help you, and nature, which has hundreds of millions of years’ experience evolving imaginative approaches to seemingly impossible challenges, is full of ideas, free for the taking.
  3. What’s the Business Model? Finding the way to convert a brilliant idea into an affordable offering that meets the need, simply and effectively, is the hard work of innovation. But we are inherently very competent innovators, and with practice, patience and help from others, you can excel at it. Where there’s a will there’s a way.
  4. Who Do We Work With? This is different from step 4, in that it brings in customers, colleagues, the people in other Natural Enterprises whose offerings mesh with your own, and the whole community you are a part of. It entails extending your business partnership to include the rest of the world, and learning important skills in collaboration and networking, and new (or long forgotten) ways of working like Open Source and Peer Production.

This process is not easy, but it can be great fun, it’s always rewarding, and it’s never impossible. It’s a continuous, creative process of learning, discovery, paying attention, practice and innovation. Those of us who do one job our whole lives follow this process, in a simplified way, intuitively, and there is no rocket science here. Creating a Natural Enterprise is, well, natural. Watch what creatures in the wild do to make a living, to care for and provide for themselves and their communities, and it’s identical to this process. We’ve just (most of us) forgotten it.

We are problem-solvers by nature, and all this is hard-wired in us. Justwaiting to come out.
Posted in Working Smarter | 7 Comments

Communication Tools: Make Them Simple and Ubiquitous or They Won’t Be Used

Posted on May 29, 2007 by Dave Pollard
Communication Tools Map

As part of my current work contract, and in some of my blog posts, I’ve grappled with the ineffective and inappropriate use of the various communication tools that are available in the workplace. I’ve developed a variety of ‘tool choosers’ — decision trees and charts that identify the criteria for use of different tools. And I’ve written articles on when not to use e-mail.
I didn’t expect enormous success in using these levers for change in information behaviours. Things are the way they are for a reason. In studying the use (and non-use, and mis-use) of various tools, I’ve come to the realization that some pretty simple rules govern whether, and how, communication tools are used:
  1. A tool has to be both simple (intuitive to learn, comfortable and versatile to use) and ubiquitous (everyone needs to have access to it) before it will be extensively used.
  2. Most people are looking for just enough tools to manage both 1-to-1 and group communications, and both synchronous (real-time) and asynchronous communications. The fewer the better as long as they cover those bases.
  3. Most people will tolerate more than one tool in a category if and only if each offers unique and important functionality that is absent in the others.
  4. Comfort with and access to various communication tools varies between generations, and with it their propensity to use certain tools.
These four rules are captured in the charts above, the top one for most of the baby boomer generation (most of the people I’m working with) and the bottom one for generation millennium (and for more tech-savvy older people). Each chart shows the communication tools most appropriate for 1-to-1 versus group communication, and for synchronous versus asynchronous communication. Tools that are relatively simple to use are shown with a green circle on the left side; tools that are relatively ubiquitous are shown with a green circle on the right side. Tools that are both simple and ubiquitous (the ones most people prefer to use) are in bold.
I’ve recently come to realize that virtually all business communications are conducted with these simple ubiquitous tools, and that, no matter how well marketed, or how extensive the available training, tools that are either complicated or not available to everyone on the businessperson’s ‘mailing list’ just won’t be used.
When part of your job is to sell people on using complicated and/or exclusive (restricted access, pilot) tools in the workplace, this is a dismaying realization. So what I’m now focusing on, to bring about information behaviour change, is this approach:
  1. Make complicated tools easier to use: Strip out unneeded and confusing functionality. Use templates. Set people up with one-click, one-step mechanisms to use the tool the way they most often use it. You want to get the geezers in your company to blog instead of sending bulk e-mails to everyone? Make the blog site an e-mail address, so that all s/he has to do is e-mail to that address and voilý, s/he’s a blogger. Want people to share their stuff on the Intranet? Make saving documents on, and sending documents to, the organization’s websites the default, automatic, so that you have to do something extra in order not to share.
  2. Make limited-access tools ubiquitous: Give everyone default access to all the tools in your company’s communication toolkit: Skype, IM, desktop videoconferencing (with a personal meeting-space URL for every employee), personal web pages, RSS aggregator pages, etc. If they’re simple enough to use and available to everyone, a certain number of people will start using them, provided they meet a need that other tools cannot. Usage will likely steamroller from there, as the pioneers keep exposing others to these tools until they become second nature to everyone.
  3. Only once you have done the above, help people differentiate when to use the various tools that are simple, ubiquitous, and somewhat interchangeable (i.e. which are in the same quadrant of the charts above). Each tool has its unique advantages, and each is inappropriate in some situations. Once everyone has IM, for example, people will be open to understand when it is preferable to use that tool instead of the phone or e-mail, and when IM should not be used.

I’d always expected that the younger and more tech-savvy people in any organization would be able to show (not tell) the older and more tech-wary people how to use new tools easily and effectively. But in thirty years in business, I’ve almost never seen this happen. Generation Millennium will use IM, blogs, and personal web pages (internal or on public sites like LinkedIn, MySpace and FaceBook) whether they’re officially sanctioned or not, but they won’t be evangelists for these tools.We therefore need to look at each group in the organization as a separate cohort with different levels of comfort with (and possibly different degrees of access to) various tools. That means the larger and more risk-averse the organization, the slower the likely adoption curve of new communication tools will be, because (a) giving everyone access to a new tool is a more expensive proposition in larger organizations, and (b) there are more likely to be laggards, especially in the senior ranks, who will refuse to use a tool because they still perceive it as too complicated, and they will hold everyone else back.

There’s a lesson here for those designing and experimenting with new social networking tools, too:

If a tool is complicated or if it’s not freely available to everyone, or if it doesn’t fill some important need that current popular tools don’t fulfil,  it won’t be extensively used.

It doesn’t matter if it’s better designed or has more functionality, or even if it’s clearly ‘best of breed’ — it won’t be used. Each new tool, to be introduced successfully, must meet all three of these stringent tests.

Come to think of it, this lesson probably applies to all new innovations, not just communication tools. I’m going to call it Pollard’s Law of Innovation.
In my current assignment, this means I have my work cut out for me. I have to:
  • simplify the functionality of our commercial groupware tool, and provide simple, automatic access to it to everyone in the organization
  • simplify the process by which employees can post information to our (bewilderingly many) web sites
  • create simple templated weblogs that will allow our subject matter experts, newsletter publishers and community of practice leaders to publish their stuff easily and automatically
  • provide simple, automatic access to IM, and to our licenced desktop videoconferencing tool, to everyone in the organization
  • and then create simple ‘cheat sheets’ explaining when to use IM (or face-to-face conversations) instead of e-mails, when to use blogs, groupware or a post to our websites instead of the endless bulk e-mails, and when to use desktop videoconferencing instead of teleconferencing.

This goes part-way, perhaps, to explaining why it’s so hard finding success stories of social networking tools in organizations — it’s just too hard for them to meet the stringent criteria. It took the ‘simple’ fax fifty years from its invention to achieve ubiquity, only to be obsolesced by e-mail a decade later.

And dare I suggest that, in so many of today’s hollowed-out organizations, for all the lip service paid to them, networking and communication just aren’t apriority?
Posted in Using Weblogs and Technology | Comments Off on Communication Tools: Make Them Simple and Ubiquitous or They Won’t Be Used

A Note to Writers: Choose Your Voice and Your Media Carefully

Posted on May 28, 2007 by Dave Pollard
 the wild trees Richard Preston
Photos: From richardpreston.net : Top: Author Richard Preston in the forest canopy 310 feet up a redwood called Poseidon.  Bottom: Botanist Marie Antoine 310 feet up in a redwood called Adventure.
Richard Preston’s new book contains some important lessons for writers. Preston is an accomplished storyteller, and his biological exposÈs The Hot Zone and The Demon in the Freezer are riveting. His latest book The Wild Trees is the story of the young men and women who have, recently and without much support or acclaim, discovered a phenomenally rich ecosystem within and atop the world’s tallest trees — the Coast redwood, Douglas fir, and mountain ash — by climbing them. It’s an interesting story, since these pioneers had to invent much of the technique and many of the tools they use to climb these 350-foot giants, and the idea that the canopy of these trees is so strong and intertwined that you can play in it like a huge jungle gym (see top photo, of Preston, above, taken from his website).
 
Preston tries to create a sense of urgency for learning about and preserving the thousand-year-old redwoods (which are 96% gone thanks to logging) but this is a much harder task than the sense of danger and urgency he taps so successfully in his earlier books about virulent, infectious, largely unknown diseases. He also tries to create intimate portraits of the pioneers, including Marie Antoine (lower photo above). These characters are brilliant, courageous, dedicated and quirky, but (with due respect) they aren’t heroic enough to build a biographical story around.
 
I’m an impatient reader, and I was just about to abandon the book when Preston, about two thirds the way through, started a new and personal thread. It seems the unassuming Mr Preston has become, himself, at about (I would guess) twice the age of his story’s lead protagonists, one of the pioneers in this quest, one of the few to have scaled the tallest of the giants, both in California and Australia. What’s more, he has infected his teenage kids, his wife and even his parents with his passion. Now there’s a story. What would inspire a successful author to so step outside his comfort zone that he would take up a new, complex and dangerous hobby, relatively late in life, and pursue it to the limit? And what is so compelling about climbing trees that just about everyone exposed to the opportunity to do so gets hooked on the hobby, to the point Preston has to conceal the whereabouts of some of the trees, and information about some of the more advanced techniques and inventions, for fear recreational climbers will overwhelm the last remaining stands of ‘wild trees’ and bring about their demise before this newly-discovered ecosystem can even be mapped?
 
The answers to these questions are the story screaming to come out of Preston’s book, and, either out of humility or perhaps because such speculation is outside his area of interest, Preston leaves them unanswered. As I closed the book I thought immediately of biologist and ultra-marathon runner Bernd Heinrich’s semi-autobiographical Why We Run. Heinrich’s work is immensely educational and interesting precisely because he tells his story in the first person; you can relate to the emotions he feels as he discovers kinship with other creatures, and he is more than willing to generalize from his own passion for marathons to speculate on our universal penchant for movement and speed.
 
Preston, ever so briefly, describes his children’s fascination with climbing. He tells stories about their astonishment and delight at discovering that some of the creatures who live in trees (e.g. saw-whet owls and flying squirrels) are so unaccustomed to human contact that they are unperturbed by human presence in their tree-canopy homes, coming right up to Preston and his family and even climbing over them. What I would have loved to read is whether and how they overcame an instinctive fear of heights, and whether his children have any plans to do something with this unique new skill, in their own words. I want to hear Preston’s own story — what led him to go to such extraordinary and seemingly-courageous lengths, beyond the need to do research for his book. I want to learn the basics of climbing, step by step, enough to decide if it’s something I want to do. The real story here is one of personal discovery, challenge and transformation, and what it tells us about ourselves.*
 
The other major lesson for writers (and publishers) is the fact that this is largely a visual story. The book has some useful black-and-white maps and sketches, but what Preston is describing is unimaginable, even with the help of an excellent story-teller, without rich visual images. And in the 21st century, there is no excuse for not providing them. Preston’s site has some excellent photos that not only add immediate clarity and drama to his story, but also introduce us personally to the climbing pioneers he profiles in a way that no rich biographical information can do. Marie Antoine and Michael Taylor, particularly, look nothing at all like how I pictured them when I read the book.
 
The publishers could have put the colour photo spread inside the book. But they could have done something even bolder and richer: National Geographic is making a TV special based on Preston’s book. The book could be cued to images and video clips from the special, so that the reader pauses at prescribed points and goes online for the next clip. The resulting multimedia experience would have been amazingly rich. The merging of online and print media could, just like Preston and his brave climbers, have pioneered something rare, extraordinary and important.
 
It’s not too late. If Preston were to work with National Geographic to do this, and add in some video clips of his family talking about their passion for climbing and how it emerged, and some video clips teaching us how to climb safely (just small trees will do), and then sync this with a second edition of his book, I’d go out an buy another copy just for the URLs of the clips positioned appropriately throughout the book. And then this book could be as revolutionary and eye-opening as The Demon in the Freezer.
 
Anyone currently writing, or thinking of writing, a book should imagine the possibilities of enriching it with video clips, interviews and other multimedia content. It is no longer awkward to have both a book and the Internet at your fingertips at the same time. There are things that a hard-copy book just cannot do, and things that only a hard-copy book can do. It’s now possible to have your cake and eat it too.

*Interestingly, one of the major reviewers of the book takes the opposite perspective, arguing that Preston should have kept himself out of the book entirely. I can imagine the agonizing discussions Preston must have had with the publisher! The reader has no idea until two thirds through the book that Preston has become a world-class climber himself, a player in thedrama he has, until then, told exclusively in the third person..
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 3 Comments

Sunday Open Thread – May 27, 2007

Posted on May 27, 2007 by Dave Pollard
still life
Photo: My own, taken last night while sitting out on the patio.

What I’m thinking about, and planning on writing (and podcasting) about soon:

Vignettes: Did two this past week, and I have more to come.

Improv: What are the ways we practice improvisation? Spontaneous conversations. Spontaneous flirtations. Spontaneous artistic expression. Unplanned brainstorming, collaboration, innovation, creation. Is there a danger that doing these things badly actually makes us worse at it instead of better?

Natural Enterprise: Time to update some of my earlier articles on a better, more joyful, responsible and sustainable way to make a living.

Good Working Models of Social Networking: When it comes to good working models of wikis and blogs in organizations, I’ve found very few good success stories, and some of the ones I’ve investigated are suspect. Is social networking unable to make its case in big companies, or are the managers of big companies just not listening? Or is this another case of ‘we do what we must’, and social networking is merely nice to have, not must-have, not urgent?

Blog-Hosted Conversations: Plan is for 30-minute conversations, once a week, on the subject of identifying and acquiring the essential skills and relationships we need to be models of a better way to live, and what those models might look like. The first few will be practice podcasts, and may not make it to the blog.

What are the skills you’ve been trying to develop, the changes you’ve been trying to bringabout in yourself, the important conversations you’ve had recently?

Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 5 Comments

Saturday Links for the Week — May 26, 2007

Posted on May 26, 2007 by Dave Pollard
ducklings philosopea
Ducklings — photo by my friend & colleague Karen’s twin sister

What’s Important This Week:

AprËs Nous Les Dragons: The experts on Extinction believe that, when we are gone from the planet, Earth will be dominated by insects and birds, two very resilient life forms. The latest story on consequences of The End of Oil (a story which was suddenly and inexplicably pulled after it was published, but is still in the archives) suggests that high gasoline prices are grounding aerial spray planes, leaving entire monoculture crops threatened by insects. We may have to find another way to get our daily dose of malathion poisoning. Oh, and this is the year of the 17 year locusts.

Corporatists and Criminals Bilk the Elderly Together: Big corporations assemble phone lists of vulnerable, lonely and confused elderly people and then pitch them to ‘telemarketers’. ìOnly one kind of customer wants to buy lists of seniors interested in lotteries and sweepstakes: criminals,î said Sgt. Yves Leblanc of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. ìIf someone advertises a list by saying it contains gullible or elderly people, itís like putting out a sign saying ëThieves welcome here.í î

Inoculating Yourself Against Disk and Computer Crashes: Slowly but surely I’ve been migrating the content of my machine to cyberspace, so I can do everything that I do on my ‘home’ computer, on any machine anywhere. Thanks to Google and others, we no longer need to retrieve and store e-mail on our machines, nor do we need to buy or maintain MS ‘productivity’ software anymore. I’ve moved ‘My Documents’ to Box.net. My music files and blog backup files are on my mp3 player and flash drive, and I’m migrating all my photos to Flickr or Picasaweb. My bookmarks are on spurl.net and my future podcasts will be on archive.org. Freedom! (Now I need a ‘Google Virtual Desktop’ to find my stuff wherever in cyberspace it is.)

The Real Dangers of Pandemic Outbreaks: An excellent article by Sharon Astyk explains that the greatest threat from pandemic disease is not loss of life, it’s economic collapse, the excuse to institute martial law and further extinguish civil freedoms, and the backburnering of vital work to address Peak Oil, global warming and other threats. She goes on to talk about pandemic preparedness, with a prescription much like mine, except more optimistic that people will actually prepare. Thanks to whoever pointed me to this, and apologies for not noting who that was when I bookmarked/spurled it. If you live in the US and want to speak up on why pandemic preparation is important, Lugon and his Flu wiki colleagues tell us the government says it’s willing to listen.

Big Pharma Pays Doctors to Test Psych Drugs on Child Patients: The young can complain, but they can’t vote or sue, and no one listens to them anyway. So they’re the perfect guinea pigs for testing expensive psychological drugs on, without regard for side effects, and it’s as easy and legal to bribe doctors to do it.

No New China Poisoning Scandals This Week: But maybe that’s because corporatists like Murdoch have the order out to squelch all bad news stories about China.

Another Silent Spring: Meanwhile, the cancer prevention network reports we’re still pretty good at letting domestic corporatists poison us. Excerpt:

It is infinitely harder to identify causal links between the substances that body burden tests say are in our flesh, blood and bones, and their health effects. This complexity has protected the chemical industry for decades, and has served up a perfect excuse for many politicians to avoid taking tough, decisive, preventative action.

The hundreds of millions of dollars donated annually to cancer agencies are funnelled mainly into research for better treatments and “cures” for cancer; far less is targeted to preventing the disease in the first place, and only a negligible fraction to reducing our exposure to carcinogens in everyday products, in our food, water and air, and virtually everywhere. Just last week, researchers from five U.S. institutions named 216 chemicals that can induce breast cancers in animals. Of these, humans are highly exposed to 97 of them, including industrial solvents, pesticides, dyes, gasoline and diesel exhaust compounds, cosmetics ingredients, hormones, pharmaceuticals and radiation.

Thanks to David Parkinson for the link.

Thoughts for the Week:

Grab a coffee or tea and settle in for 45 minutes to watch Robert Newman’s deliciously entertaining and informative History of Oil. It will change the way you understand Middle East and global news forever. Thanks to Craig De Ruisseau for the link.

And then, take a look at what Flemming Funch and Tom Munnecke have to say about framing your conversations around the “Yes, and…” principle instead of “Yes, but…”. It’s all about accepting what you really cannot change, and instead adapting and/or letting yourself change. Excerpt:

It almost never works to negate [argue with] what other people really believe in [no matter how persuasively]…[And] the more enlightened you yourself are, the less you are obsessed with making everybody else be like [and agree with] you. Ironically, as we could say you had allthe more reason to do so…
Posted in Our Culture / Ourselves | 8 Comments