Category: Collaboration

Is Facebook making you glum?

Interesting conclusions to some research from August 2013:

On the surface, Facebook provides an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social connection. Rather than enhancing well-being, however, these findings suggest that Facebook may undermine it.

Facebook Use Predicts Declines in Subjective Well-Being in Young Adults

The important term in the title of this research is Subject Well-Being which is referring to how people experience well-being. In other words the research is assessing how people perceive their thoughts and emotions.

The way that the research did this was to send people text messages to survey how they were feeling over a 14 day period. The responses lead to the following conclusion:

The more people used Facebook at one time point, the worse they felt the next time we text-messaged them; the more they used Facebook over two-weeks, the more their life satisfaction levels declined over time. Interacting with other people “directly” did not predict these negative outcomes. They were also not moderated by the size of people’s Facebook networks, their perceived supportiveness, motivation for using Facebook, gender, loneliness, self-esteem, or depression.

Personally I think that we are conducting a huge psychology experiment on the human race without too much in the way of risk assessment or training for those involved. As the evidence builds I suspect that our attitude to participating in these experiments will shift to be far more cautious.

INSTA, TWIT and BOOK – The Fellowship of the Recipe

INSTA, TWIT and BOOK were sisters. They weren’t biological sisters, they were sisters in a fellowship.

This fellowship of sisters held a secret recipe.

This was a powerful recipe that once mixed had the power to create and alter emotions. Sometimes it would produce delight, at other times it produced anger. The recipe regularly had the power to create temporary stupidity; less often displayed was its ability to produce wisdom and wonder.

The recipe wasn’t absolutely specific in some areas and each of the sisters mixed their particular version of the recipe in different ways. The different mixes produced differing results; INSTA’s recipe produced visual results, TWIT’s recipe produced short succinct results, BOOK’s recipe produced a different result every time.

Different people preferred the results of one recipe to another, but many people liked to sample the recipe from each of the sisters. Once experienced most people found the recipe very difficult to resist. The flavour in the recipe, once tasted would draw people back time and again. The demand for the recipe was so great that it was constantly being mixed. It flowed constantly out of INSTA, TWIT and BOOK’s kitchens. Sometimes they changed their recipes a little causing people to complain at the change in flavour.

There was no monetary charge for the recipe but to get a portion people were expected to contribute to the next mix, without their contribution the mix would die. Many people had wonderful things to add to the recipe, but there were also many who were so desperate to contribute that they would contribute anything. Some people’s contributions became valued above those of others for the way that they added to the flavour of the recipe, but the recipe itself was always owned by INSTA, TWIT and BOOK.

The more people contributed to the recipe the more it flowed, soon it was flowing across the whole world and it began to feel like it was impossible to get away from the clamour of people contributing to and consuming the recipe.

INSTA, TWIT and BOOK weren’t biologically sisters, but INSTA and BOOK were related by marriage. Day by day INSTA and BOOK become closer friend, this meant that sometimes TWIT felt a bit left out. TWIT worried that her recipe would get forgotten as the popularity of the other sisters increased so TWIT set about adjusting her recipe so that it too was more visual like that of INSTA’s. However they felt about each other, though, the sisters would never reveal the secret of the recipe, the secret itself was too valuable.

Other people would come along with a recipe of their own and tried to join the fellowship. PLUS, TUM and LINK each came to display their results but none of them made it into the fellowship. INSTA, TWIT and BOOK were the Fellowship of the Recipe and it was going to take a lot to let someone else join. If they were going to join they would have to show that they too understood the recipe.

People would question whether it was healthy to spend so much time consuming the recipe; others were concerned by the amount that was being contributed to the recipe. The recipe was so compelling that some people would let their life away from the recipe diminish into neglect. INSTA, TWIT and BOOK said that all they did was mix the recipe, what people contributed and how much time they spent consuming it was nothing to do with them.

The recipe remains strong. The Fellowship continues to be strained by the relationship between TWIT and the others, but the recipe stays secret – for now.

"You'll never believe what she did next?"

“Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Have you seen any of these (they’re all real)?

  • You’ll Never Believe What She Did To Stop The Baby From Crying
  • You WON’T Believe What They Caught The Cashiers Doing
  • You’ll Never Believe What Happened When A Girl Did Gymnastics For A Dolphin.
  • You’ll Never Believe What The Parrot Did Next!
  • What This Man Did To His Attic is Unbelievable.
  • 8 Celebs Who Have Killed People
  • Wow! I can’t believe he just did that!
  • 10 Tips from the Pope for Becoming a Happier Person
  • Father is Shocked When He Discovers The Horrifying Letter from His Son
  • 15 Images You Won’t Believe Weren’t Photoshopped
  • Watch a Paddle Boarder’s Crazy Experience with Orcas in the Wild

YouTube has nearly half a million videos with “You Won’t Believe” in the title!

Each title is deliberately structured to poke your curiosity, many intend to turn you into clickbait.

George Loewenstein defined curiosity as a function of information gaps and our need to fill those gaps. A gap in the information that we know produces a feeling of deprivation that we label curiosity. That feeling of deprivation motivates us to fill the gap. The feeling of deprivation is created by the most basic inner workings of the brain. To be asked “did you see what she did?” is a powerful motivator because everyone wants to know what she did. The information gap can’t be too large though because that would be too much work to fill and our curiosity would slip away, it needs to be easily attainable. To be asked “did you see what she did?” is a relatively small gap for us and the addition of a link to a video that shows what she did makes for a very powerful motivator.

Type curiosity gaps into any search engine and you’ll get thousands of helpful articles telling you how to create post titles that will result in people clicking on your page (most of these articles also use the theory of curiosity gaps in their titles).

You are on the receiving end of all of this curiosity manipulation. Curiosity is a powerful thing, we can use it usefully, or we can spend our life clicking on pictures of cats.

“Curiosity is the most superficial of all the affections, it changes its object perpetually; it has an appetite which is very sharp, but very easily satisfied; and it has always an appearance of giddiness, restfulness and anxiety”

Edmund Burke

No Email Initiatives – In the Trough of Dissilusionment and Obsolete Before Plateau

No Email Initiatives are an approach taken by a number of organisations to improve communication be eliminating email. In many organisations email is used as if it were the only communication tool and applied to every problem even when there are far better ways of communicating. Rather than getting people to change the way they use email some organisations have decided that elimination is the only answer.

Proponents of this approach exist, some examples:

  • Luis Suarez has lived outside his inbox for many years now. He’s managed to dramatically reduce the amount of email he received and spent much more time utilising the value of social software in his time at IBM. Luis is no longer working at IBM, but is still a huge proponent of living outside the inbox.
  • Atos launched a zero email initiative in 2011 and received much press coverage because of it: “Its aim is to transform towards a social, collaborative enterprise where we share knowledge and find experts easily in order to respond to clients’ needs quickly and efficiently, delivering tangible business results.”

Reading the latest Gartner Hype Cycle for Unified Communications recently I was intrigued to note that they place No Email Initiatives in the Trough of Disillusionment and in the category Obsolete Before Plateau. Reading through the details they estimate that the Market Penetration will be Less than 1% of target audience. Talk about kicking an idea when it’s down!

I used to have a manager who called email BATS – Blame Allocation and Transfer System. Anyone who’s used email in a corporate setting can relate to that definition.

Jack Madden recently proposed banning attachments as an alternative approach with enterprise file sync and share (FSS) and collaborative document editing being a better way of collaborating. He does this whilst acknowledging that there is no escaping email.

The value and the challenge of email is that it is universal. It’s rarely the best answer, but it’s regularly the easiest answer. The alternatives are nowhere near as universal. Neither Twitter or Facebook; nor Google Drive, Office 365 or Dropbox; not even Skype, Lync or WhatsApp are as ubiquitous. With one piece of information you can send someone an email and be pretty confident that they will receive it; add a file and your level of confidence will remain high.

Email is embedded into so many processes; when was the last time you ordered something on-line and didn’t receive the receipt in your email?

To be clear, Gartner isn’t saying that organisations shouldn’t try to radically change the way that people work and to dramatically cut the amount of email but they are saying:

Given the ubiquity of internal email communications in businesses today, elimination of it would truly have a transformational effect, although we believe that few organizations will (or even should) actually achieve it.

The point being that it’s the transformation that organisations should be looking to, not the elimination of email. Organisations need to adopt new ways of collaborating and the result will be a drop in email. It is my belief that organisations that don’t will be overtaken by those that do.

What are you doing at the restaurant?

This is a great example of the impact that technology is having on our social interactions (from The Meta Picture):

Social Media and Social Change

Flicking through the news today I read these words:

Complaints originating from social media make up “at least half” of a front-line police officer’s work, a senior officer has told the BBC.

Chief Constable Alex Marshall, head of the College of Policing, said the number of crimes arising from social media represented “a real problem”.

He said the police and public were still trying to understand when online insults became a crime.

About 6,000 officers were being trained to deal with online offences, he said.

Mr Marshall told BBC Radio 4’s Law in Action: “As people have moved their shopping online and their communications online, they’ve also moved their insults, their abuse and their threats online, so I see that it won’t be long before pretty much every investigation that the police conduct will have an online element to it.

“It’s a real problem for people working on the front line of policing, and they deal with this every day.

“So in a typical day where perhaps they deal with a dozen calls, they might expect that at least half of them, whether around antisocial behaviour or abuse or threats of assault may well relate to social media, Facebook, Twitter or other forms.”

Social media crimes ‘at least half’ of front-line policing

That’s a lot of policing we are needing.

The real challenge here isn’t the social media, it’s the social change that it enables and we haven’t been trained for that new society; nor do we have the control mechanisms for that new society.

The report goes on to explain that many of the offences are the same as they ever were, it’s the medium that has change. There are also  a lot of people contacting the police because they don’t know what else to do.

One of the conclusions of the article is this:

Mr Marshall said a combination of police training, public education and enforcement by social media companies was required to combat the problem.

I’d agree, policing on it’s own is not a good way of dealing with social change, it requires education as much as it requires control.

Office Speak and Buzzword Density

A few things came together the other day:

I was looking at some of the statistics on this site and found that a post I created back in 2009 on Buzzword Density had recently become popular again. This post contains a cartoon that goes like this: “Mashups are SOA in the Cloud” – “3 out of 6 not bad”. It made me smile to realise that two of the buzzwords in this illustration had lived there life and were now mostly superseded by other terms.

This was followed by an email in which there was a sentence that had 32 words in it which is a problem in its own right but 13 of the words were buzzword. In a Gunning Fog Index this sentence scores 23 (for reading by a wide audience you’d normally aim for an index of less than 12, and less than 8 for universal reading).

In my normal reading I came across this article in the Atlantic: The Origins of Office Speak subtitled What corporate buzzwords reveal about the history of work (and what a corporate-buzzword quiz reveals about you).

The article starts by highlighting the famous Dilbert Buzzword Bingo cartoon from 1994.

According to this article there are a number of classification of buzzwords that have grown up through our history since the war and the influence of different groups:

  • The Self Actualizers
  • The Optimisers
  • The Financiers
  • The Marketers
  • The Disruptors
  • The Creatives
  • The Life Hackers

It’s interesting to see the history behind some of the phrases that we take as axiomatic.

Like most people I know I have had a love-hate relationship with buzzwords and office speak for most of my working life. The Atlantic article concludes like this:

But this seems to be the irony of office speak: Everyone makes fun of it, but managers love it, companies depend on it, and regular people willingly absorb it. As Nunberg said, “You can get people to think it’s nonsense at the same time that you buy into it.” In a workplace that’s fundamentally indifferent to your life and its meaning, office speak can help you figure out how you relate to your work—and how your work defines who you are.

I’m off now to sync-up in a disruptively agile way as part of a scrum of innovative thought leading passionate entrepreneurs, circling back and downloading so we can drill down and mind-meld about an ideation event looking for low-hanging-fruit (Gunning Fog index = 22).

It’s not just in offices where cliché becomes a problem though:

Dilbert on Facebook Friends

BYOD and Personal Knowledge Management

Not so long ago people would go to work at a set time and work exclusively on equipment and applications provided by the employer. At the end of the day they would go home and do whatever they wanted to do using their stuff. But now the line between work and life is now a complete jumble for many.

Wintry Walk on Fare Snape Fell(I am going to refer to work-and-life in this post as if they are two distinct things as a way of contrasting the challenge, but that whole concept is also going through significant disruption which I may cover at a later date)

Personal knowledge management used to be similarly straightforward with work stuff in one place, life stuff in another place. Take diaries as an example, I used to run a home diary and a work diary. If truth be known, Sue used to run my home diary and I would focus all of my energy on the work diary. This situation was only complicated when either the work requirements or the life requirements would break into one of the other’s area. School plays during the day would require a special entry in my work diary to make sure I was there. Likewise overnight business trips would need a special entry in the life diary.

This situation was never ideal, but worked quite well with few issues. One of the huge advantages of this situation was the people at my employer could see my availability and schedule meetings with me because my availability was visible to all.

In a BYOD world it would be, just about, acceptable to make both my diaries available on all my devices, but that’s not really resolving the challenge or addressing the changing culture. Running multiple diaries has never been ideal and leads to all sorts of issues when things clash.

The real requirement is for me to see a single diary, I don’t mind whether it’s made up of a number of diaries, but I need to see it as one. That diary needs to be embedded into my mobile experience so that I can use all of the functions of my mobile device. Portions of my availability need to be visible to different interested groups. I need to be able to set parameters on my availability for those groups because I don’t want a completely blended lifestyle where I’m available to everyone 24 by 7. I want event information from one group (project team) to be available to another group (family) so that sensible decisions can be made. In other words I want a completely blended diary experience which has been personalised to my requirements and way of working.

I could just opt out and run a single personal diary with no visibility to others but that would not be very helpful to people who want to schedule time with me. I used to have a boss who did that and it was impossible to schedule anything with him, particularly as the only diary that he regarded as truth was the paper one in his hands at all times.

Another alternative is to run two diaries and to copy everything from one to another. The natural choice for doing this would be to make the life diary the master and to copy everything from the work diary into it, but that just leads to another challenge, what to do about data privacy. Would my employer really want my family to have access to a report with sensitive financial information in it? A diary entry isn’t just about the scheduling information; it’s also about all of the associated content.

My purpose in this discussion is to use diary information as an example of the complications of running any form of personal knowledge management system in a world where work technology and life technology are the same, and where the separation between them is a complete jumble. The same challenges apply to to-do lists, note taking, reading lists, document stores, and all manner of personal knowledge management techniques.

These challenges are multiplied when we want others to collaborate with us in our personal knowledge management system.

We are going to see many ways of resolving these challenges that break the current paradigms and move us to a far more personal way of working. Doodle is an example of a different way of thinking about team scheduling that works across personal diaries. There are many people thinking about the to-do list and note taking most of which are being delivered as cloud services built to interact with personal applications. This continued shift to personal is going to significantly change the way that individuals and teams interact, collaborate and do work. As always the technology shift is the smaller part of a much larger cultural shift.

As a person I’m the one who is enabled and approved for access to all sorts of data. In the future I am expecting to be able to have a personal life assistant which is going to need access to all of my sources of data to enact upon them, but that’s another challenge requiring another paradigm shift.

BYOD Concept Map (Version 1)

Continuing the theme of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) I wanted to capture some of the thinking that was going on in my head.

One of the ways I use to bring my thoughts together are Concept Maps.

Here’s the one I produced for BYOD:

Bring Your Own Device Concept MapThese maps are useful because the highlight, challenge or re-enforce things. Here are some things I observed:

  • It re-enforced my view that it’s not really about the device hardware, or even the operating system. As such BYOD is not the correct name, but I’ll stick with it for now because that’s what others are using and it wouldn’t be the first thing that’s misnamed.
  • It highlighted the dangers of restrictive controls and their impact on the overall benefits of BYOD. If the real value is derived from personal choice and, in particular, application choice then restrictive controls that remove these freedoms crush the overall value.
  • It challenged my lack of thinking about the broader changing cultural. Are the millennial changing the way they work because technology is enabling it, or would that change be happening anyway? What is the best way of approaching different generations that work in different ways?
  • It also challenged my lack of thinking about the increased creativity and increased collaboration aspects.
  • It re-enforced my view that the high focus on operating system security is misplaced and we should really be focussing on applications and data, particularly the security of data when stored in data stores embedded in applications. What do you do when someone leaves an organisation? Is it no longer realistic to expect that they will remove all of the data that they have access to from their personal applications?

As with all Concept Maps it’s limited in scope and complexity to help in understanding, hence it’s a work-in-progress, but I’m calling it Version 1 because it’s good enough for now. Some of these things are likely to change as I think about them. I’m happy to be challenged on any of the elements within the map if you think it can be improved.

If you prefer a PDF of the map it’s here: Bring Your Own Device Concept Map.

 

Acronyms: BATS

In the early days of email my manager referred to it as BATS by which he meant Blame Allocation and Transfer System.

When he first used the phrase I wasn’t sure what he meant but over the years I have had many reasons to refer to email as BATS.

Chatworth with the FamilyAnyone who has been involved in email for any period of time has seen the situation where someone sends an email to a whole host of recipients for the sole purpose of CYA (Cover Your Ass).

In later discussion on the subject the sender says – “well I sent you an email about it”. The sending of the email is regarded as the ultimate seal of the transaction. This is often done without discussion or agreement, lack of decent it regarded as agreement.

This behaviour drives a culture where people are petrified of getting behind on email just in case someone has sent a BATS that they didn’t notice and now find themselves responsible for. This, in turn, leads to a culture where people find themselves attached to email 24 by 7.

Poor behaviour is driving poor culture which is driving poor behaviour. It’s about time we kicked the BATS habit because it isn’t doing any of us any good.

Perhaps it’s time to go without email completely – some people already have (almost)?