Category Archives: Innovation

The Move to Mobile (in the UK)

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Google has made a new set of data available at their Our Mobile Planet site covering research into the use of smartphones for 2012:

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The site contains a set of reports on mobile usage by country, but also makes the entire dataset of the research available as both a file and also via an interactive charting tool.

Being from the UK I was particularly interested in the report for here which has the following observations in its Executive Summary:

  • Smartphones have become an indispensable part of our daily lives
  • Smartphones have transformed consumer behaviour
  • Smartphones help users navigate the world
  • Smartphones have changed the way consumers shop
  • Smartphones help advertisers connect with consumers

There are a number of really interesting statistics too:

  • Smartphone penetration has grown from 30% in 2011 to 51% in 2012
  • 78% of smartphone owners don’t leave home without their device
  • 72% of smartphone owners use them at work
  • 64% of smartphone owners access the Internet at least once a day and emailing is still the most popular usage
  • 21% would rather give up the TV than their smartphone
  • 80% of people use their smartphone while doing other things, 55% of them while watching the TV
  • and many more…

This would ring true from what I am seeing out-and-about, and the observations are similar across the globe.

Here’s one of the charts for men of my age group and the importance of the smartphone, 74% won’t leave home without their phone and 20% would rather give up their computer than give up their smartphone:

ourmobileplanet.com_chart_1a584681

“40 hours a week is just about right”

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Productivity is the key to business success, not working hours.

Derwentwater RootsFor centuries we’ve known that productivity is heavily influenced by the number of hours we work. We know that we have to put in the hours if we are going to produce anything, but we also know that if we work too many hours our productivity decreases. Put simply – there’s a limit to how much you can produce in a week.

Inc. returned to this subject this week – Stop Working More Than 40 Hours a Week:

The workaholics (and their profoundly misguided management) may think they’re accomplishing more than the less fanatical worker, but in every case that I’ve personally observed, the long hours result in work that must be scrapped or redone.

This article was written on the back of the announcement that Sheryl Sandberg the Chief Operating Officer at Facebook leaves work at 17:30 every day to be with her family. That this is newsworthy is itself a testament to the state of the modern working environment.

The Inc. article is a good summary of the issue, but there’s one part that I’d quite like to comment on:

Proponents of long work weeks often point to the even longer average work weeks in countries like Thailand, Korea, and Pakistan–with the implication that the longer work weeks are creating a competitive advantage.

However, the facts don’t bear this out.  In six of the top 10 most competitive countries in the world (Sweden, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom), it’s illegal to demand more than a 48-hour work week.  You simply don’t see the 50-, 60-, and 70-hour work weeks that have become de rigeur in some parts of the U.S. business world.

As a worker in the United Kingdom I can tell you that while these details are technically correct, they aren’t practically correct, as least not from my perspective. I know many people in Britain who regularly put in 50, 60, 70 hour working weeks and have done so for an extended periods of time. For them these kind of working hours have become de rigeur. We have traditionally had quite a lax implementation of the working time directive so it’s not really appropriate to assume that people work less than 48 hours because that’s what the law says.

It’s personally very interesting that five countries (50%) who, I understand, implement the working time directive in a more stringent way are ahead of the UK in the Global Competitive Report. So in that respect the article still makes a very valid point, we still have a lot of lessons to learn.

Releasing creativity through doodling

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An interesting article in the Wall street Journal entitled Doodling for Dollars says:

YewPut down that smartphone; pick up that crayon.

Employees at a range of businesses are being encouraged by their companies to doodle their ideas and draw diagrams to explain complicated concepts to colleagues.

While whiteboards long have been staples in conference rooms, companies such as Facebook Inc. are incorporating whiteboards, chalkboards and writable glass on all sorts of surfaces to spark creativity.

This is something I have noticed too. People are so distracted by technology these days that they need to be drawn into a meeting before they really engage. The most productive meetings I have are ones where there are a small number of people all contributing to a whiteboard. It’s not possible to be a part-time member of that type of meeting, you’re either in, or you are out.

The most popular posts on this site continue to be ones on Rich Pictures which is a form of doodling to communicate a concept. I regularly walk into meetings with sheets of A3 paper in order to draw out what I think I’m hearing, this often takes the form of a mind-map, but is just as likely to be a spider diagram linking together the conversations.

“Companies need to help employees unplug”

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This is a quote from Ndubuisi Ekekwe in the Harvard Business Review talking in an article entitled Is Your Smartphone Making You Less Productive?:

Companies need to help employees unplug. (Of course, every business is unique, and must take its own processes into consideration. But for most companies, giving employees predictable time off will not hurt the bottom line.) In my own firm, when we noticed that always-on was not producing better results, we phased it out of our culture. A policy was instituted that encouraged everyone to respect time off, and discouraged people from sending unnecessary emails and making distracting calls after hours. It’s a system that works if all of the team members commit to it. Over time, we’ve seen a more motivated team that comes to work ready for business, and goes home to get rejuvenated. They work smarter, not blindly faster. And morale is higher.

Give it a try in your own company. As a trial, talk to your team and agree to shutdown tonight. I’m confident that you’ll all feel the benefits in the morning.

How do you try to create shutdown times and unplug?

(May I apologise for my ramblings last week, there was way to much information in one post, I promise to be get back to my normal approach of little and often)

Conversation, Connection, Communication, Rudeness, Isolation, Etiquette and Technology

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This is probably more than one post, but all of the thoughts came at the same time and they kind of fit together so here they are as a single stream:

I have a rule, if I’m in a conversation with someone and they start to look at their mobile device or laptop I stop talking. I used to just sit there until the person came back, but after a couple of occasions where I’ve sat for a few minutes waiting for the person to come back I’ve modified my behaviour and I now leave. I give them a little while to come back, but if they have clearly left the conversation I will leave too.

Castle Stalker BayPreviously I’ve written about being In the same room, but not together when observing the interactions in my own family. At this year’s TED Sherry Turkle gave a talk on Connected, but alone? She has some very interesting, and worrying, things to say about our relationship with our devices:

Our little devices are so psychologically powerful that they don’t only change what we do, they change who we are.

She makes a much better job than I did of explaining the worry that I was expressing in my post Post 1000: Thinking about thinking, the brain and information addiction.

She goes on to say when talking about the way that we flit between being present and being somewhere else:

Across the generations I see that people can’t get enough of each other if, and only if, they can have each other at a distance in amounts they can control. I call it the goldilocks effect – not too close, not too far, just right.

In other words – we are desperate to connect but we want to do it on our own terms and in a way that provides immediate gratification.

Sherry Turkle: Connected, but alone?

If you watch the recent Project Glass video posted by Google you’ll notice many of these same characteristics in the interactions that they envisage. Notice how long it is before the person wearing the glasses interacts with a real person and how many opportunities he had to interact that were replaced by technology.

Project Glass: One day…

In a report from August 2011 Ofcom highlighted our changing attitude towards technology and, in particular smartphones:

    • The majority of smartphone users (81%) have their mobile switched on all of the time, even when they are in bed.
    • Teens, in particular, are likely to have high levels of addiction to their smartphones, with 60% rating their level of ‘addiction’ to their phone at seven or higher. Teen girls are more addicted to their phones than boys.
    • There are indications that smartphones are encroaching upon ‘traditional’ social interaction, with 51% saying that they ever use their phone while socialising with others and 23% using their smartphone during a meal with others. Twenty-two per cent of smartphone users even claim to use it in the bathroom/toilet.

I wasn’t sure about the statistic on usage in the toilet until the other day when I went into a toilet and noticed the gentleman (teenager) at the latrine next to me had one hand dealing with normal latrine activity while texting/tweeting with the other.

In a recent InformationWeek article Cindy Waxer describes 6 Ways To Beat IT Career Burnout and what’s #6:

6. Take a week off. Seriously.

"By off, I mean off," says Russell. No smartphone, no email, no telephone calls.

It’s been interesting over the last couple of week talking to colleagues returning from an Easter holiday break. Some of them have said something along the lines of "it was great i completely got away from it all" while others have said "I stayed on top of my email while I was away so the return was much easier". To the second set of individuals I’d like to ask the question – "what was the person you went on holiday with doing while you were staying on top?"

Most of my posts have a conclusion on them, but I’m struggling to work out what it should be on this post. We need to start to understand where we are letting the technology take us to, but what does that mean? We need to work out what our relationships are going to look like in the future, but how do we do that? We need to understand what the new etiquette is going to be, but how? I think, though, I’ll finish off with Sherry’s words "it’s time to talk".

"Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation." Mark Twain

“Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change”

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In a follow-up to here very popular TED talk on vulnerability Brene Brown talks about the impact of that first talk and the power of shame.

In talking about the impact of the initial talk she talks about requests from the business community to go and speak, but not to speak about vulnerability to talk about innovation, creativity and change, it’s then that she uses these words:

“Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change”

How true those words are.

Brene Brown: Listening to Shame

Post 1000: Thinking about thinking, the brain and information addiction

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Today is my birthday, it also happens to be the day on which I have reached 1000 posts, so it seems like a good time to reflect a bit on previous post themes.

Morecombe Bay SunsetWe are currently going through a revolution that is being fuelled by technology but is primarily a social and economic change.

I first posted about this back in 2006 when I started with a couple of posts:

Both of these posts put forward the view that the people we are going to need in the new economy are people who are versatile generalists and people who are creative. In other words we are going to move from a left-brain economy to a right-brain one, at least in the traditional developed economies. This, in turn will make the brain ever more important.

I have a nagging fear and it’s this: The brain is ever more important yet we make people work in ways and subject them to technologies for which we really have no idea of their impact. In other words, I worry that we will, in years to come, see employees suing their employer for the damage that they have received through the impact of current technology much like we have seen mine workers receiving compensation for the impact of their chosen trade on them.

I worry that the millions of people constantly being interrupted by Facebook and Twitter are doing themselves unseen and yet to be understood damage.

We are already starting to know about some of the impacts and they are concerning.

It’s already accepted wisdom that people’s attention span is shorter than it used to be. In a post from 2010 Nicholas Carr stated that The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains.

There’s impacts such as information addiction are starting to be documented, researched and understood. But we are only at the beginning of that journey. I know of a number of young people who rarely leave their bedrooms and think nothing about putting in 10 hours solid on a particular game. I know of people who can’t go for more than a few seconds without having to check-in to one or other of the social media networks. Anyone else heard the phrase Facebook widower?

Then there are impacts such as the drive to multitask even though we are awful at it and it causes us all sorts of problems. One of the more popular posts on this blog is entitled

“Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy”. I wrote that post back in 2008 and then Walter Kirn estimated that workers wasted 28 percent of their time "dealing with multitasking related transitions and interruptions". Multitasking has become a huge epidemic everything from the woman who was driving behind me yesterday while on the phone (in her hand) and doing her lipstick through to the conference calls which you know would only take 10 minutes if everyone just concentrated.

There is immerging evidence to show that the brain of digital natives is different to that of digital immigrants like myself, but do we know that’s a good thing?

There’s also the physical impact that I know a number of people are already experiencing, I explain my experience with in blogs about Tension Headaches. There’s also the current conversation and research on the dangers of sitting for long periods of time.

It’s time to look after ourselves and especially to look after our brain.

(I was amazed how much I had written on this subject once I started looking into it, but I’ve kept the post short because I know how short an attention span you all have Smile)

Focus on one thing – it’s much better for you

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I sit in an open plan office and look around. There are many people sat with headphones on participating in one or other of the constant stream of teleconferences. They’re all sat in front of a screen browsing around, replying to emails, participating in instant message chats. They’re all multitasking. They’re all telling themselves that the call doesn’t require their full attention so they can use some of their attention on some other worthwhile distraction. I’ve done exactly that for many years but the reality is that it’s exhausting, unproductive and ultimately destructive. The call suffers, the worthwhile distraction suffers, we suffer.

RydalI’ve talked about multi-tasking before:

Tony Schwartz recently wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review titled The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time.

Tell the truth: Do you answer email during conference calls (and sometimes even during calls with one other person)? Do you bring your laptop to meetings and then pretend you’re taking notes while you surf the net? Do you eat lunch at your desk? Do you make calls while you’re driving, and even send the occasional text, even though you know you shouldn’t?

The biggest cost — assuming you don’t crash — is to your productivity. In part, that’s a simple consequence of splitting your attention, so that you’re partially engaged in multiple activities but rarely fully engaged in any one. In part, it’s because when you switch away from a primary task to do something else, you’re increasing the time it takes to finish that task by an average of 25 per cent.

But most insidiously, it’s because if you’re always doing something, you’re relentlessly burning down your available reservoir of energy over the course of every day, so you have less available with every passing hour.

Tony also links to this video from Stanford University which demonstrates what we do to ourselves when we do multitask:

Media Multitaskers Pay Mental Price

(A short break in writing because I was interrupted by an Instant Message from a colleague, which took me through to the start of a call into which I tried to be focussed, for once, without worthwhile distractions. It would be ironic to write a blog post on the dangers of multitasking while multitasking.)

I see myself multitasking all of the time, I’ve certainly not got this one cracked, but one thing I am certain of, I need to spend much more time on one task and far less time flitting between activities. It’s very easy to fill your life with worthless frittering, but that’s draining, unfulfilling and destructive. There are all sorts of pressures to dance from one thing to the next, but the primary challenge is with my own resolve. I suspect I’m like many people, I know that this way of working isn’t good for me, I could do something to resolve it, but choosing to leave things as they are feels like an easier route. In 12 step groups they call this denial and you have to overcome that before you can get too much further.

It’s time to move out of denial, anyone else coming with me?

PowerPoint, the Bullet Points and the Story

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Does the bullet point enhance the story, or destroy the story – the choice is yours.

Many things are best communicated through humour and Rowan Manahan has a great way of communicating the absurdity of much of what I see every day.

Rowan Manahan at Ignite #6

I’m not one of those PowerPoint bashers who blame the tool for the things that people create with it. People need much more help than they currently get with presentation skills. In the hands of a good presenter the tool can make the experience wonderful. I sat in a breakfast session on Saturday morning where a friend amazed us with an overview of the sun. It might not sound like the most exciting subject, but believe me, we were all transfixed. The experience simply wouldn’t have been the same without the wonderful videos and picture, there wasn’t a bullet point in sight. The point that people miss time and time again was that the presentation was complementary to the story, enhancing our experience.

(I suspect my friend wasn’t using PowerPoint, but using Keynote instead, the point still applies though. I’ve seen some pretty dreadful Keynote presentation too)