I thought we’d start the first week of December with some statistics on social media from 2012.
There are some interesting ones in this particular infographic:
+350 millions users suffer from Facebook Addiction Syndrome
Not sure what that is then perhaps you should read about the Bergan Facebook Addiction Scale (BFAS).
The technology correspondent for the BBC, Rory Cellan-Jones, was challenged to a 24 hour detox from the Internet (interestingly for a series titled Lonely London). It’s a really facinating read from someone who is clearly connected for every waking hour.
How does he start his detox, he announces it on twitter of course:
Rory then goes on to describe the highs and lows of being disconnected with some really interesting findings.
Having done this type of thing myself I think that Rory’s conclusion is similar to my own experience:
After a few days back online and sometime for reflection, I have come to a rather different conclusion. I now realise that constant connectivity, while vital for my job, has plenty of negative aspects. It shortens your attention span and could prevent you from having any sense of perspective about what is important and what isn’t. So maybe a web detox is something we should all try from time to time.
How do you think you would cope with a 24 hour detox?
I’ve recently been doing some work with Concept Maps.
My work life is spent reading documents. Documents have, for centuries, been the way that organisations have defined and communicated things. For the most part documents have been based on a huge volume of words. For a long while now I’ve had a deep conviction that there has to be a better way when it comes to describing many things. It’s an efficiency question, it takes a long time to read words and if a picture is worth a thousand words perhaps it can also take less time than reading a thousand words.
Speaking as someone who would much rather see a diagram than read a description my investigations into better ways of communicating have gravitated towards graphical methods. For some time now the most popular posts on this site have been the ones about Rich Pictures, a tool that I use regularly. I like Rich Pictures but, like all tools, they have their place. Concept Maps are different a different tool for a different purpose.
A description from Wikipedia (which is a subset of the information from the Florida Institute of Human and Machine Cognition):
A concept map is a diagram showing the relationships among concepts. It is a graphical tool for organizing and representing knowledge.
Concepts, usually represented as boxes or circles, are connected with labeled arrows in a downward-branching hierarchical structure. The relationship between concepts can be articulated in linking phrases such as "gives rise to", "results in", "is required by," or "contributes to".
The technique for visualizing these relationships among different concepts is called "concept mapping".
Concept Maps work in a similar way to Rich Pictures in that there power is in joining together different ideas. A concept map is normally structured around a question. They are supposed to be more structured that Rich Pictures and arranged in a hierarchy flowing from top to bottom, with the important concepts being at the top. Sometimes, in defining the ideas and their connections you get to see what the important ones are.
As an example: Michael Hyatt recently wrote about planning an ideal week, that got me thinking, what would be my ideal working day (I’m not sure I’m structured enough to think about a whole week). The following concept map is my attempt to understand, for myself, what the elements of a perfect day were:
I was surprised by some of these. My working day tends to be on my own, but as I considered this question I realised how important team-work was. You’ll also notice how low down on this chart personal benefit appears, I’m not that motivated by money or individual recognition, I’d much rather be adding value. What this map has allowed me to do has been to assess my day and to make some changes that I’m unlikely to have seen if I’d tried to describe a perfect working day in a sentence. The power is in the diagram.
If you want to have a go the free cmap tool is quite straightforward.
The IHMC documentation also includes a lot of information about why mapping is so successful, but I’ll let you read the report for that, and let you decide on its validity.
I’ll leave Dilbert with the final word though in this classic:
Following on from my post – Relating to the machines – do you see yourself in this infographic of The Social Media Sickness.
I must admit, I do have a tendency to be a bit like The Constant Checker:
Following on from my piece The March of the Freelancers – the New York times has an article on the extent of freelancing focussing on the people who work online through online staffing agencies:
Recently two of the biggest online staffing companies, oDesk and Elance, have released surveys concerning the companies that hire workers over the Internet to do things like write software, and the mindset of online workers themselves.
Between them, oDesk and Elance claim to have more than four million coders, Web designers, marketing professionals and other workers. Some even spot porn on Facebook at a rate of four for a penny. In the second quarter of 2012, oDesk says, its contractors worked over 8.5 million hours, a 70 percent increase over a year earlier. The average freelancer at Elance, meantime, expects to make 43 percent more money in 2013, as more employers come online.
That’s lot of people working a lot of hours. Freelancing is already big business and getting bigger.
Like many of my blogs this one is a coming together of a number of thoughts and events.
It starts with reading the Gollum Effect by Venkatesh Rao which links to a video of a hand model. The video is the creepiest thing I’ve seen in a long time:
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As Venkat puts it:
The concrete idea is something I call the Gollum effect. It is a process by which regular humans are Gollumized: transformed into hollow shells of their former selves, defined almost entirely by their patterns of consumption.
Imagine that the woman in the video is holding an iPhone and tell me that you don’t know someone who treats it in a similar way? Now ask yourself who’s in charge, the iPhone or the person?
The other day I watched Andrew McAfee’s presentation at TED – Are droids taking our jobs? (covering some of the content from his book: Race Against the Machines):
Within [our lifetimes], we’re going to transition into an economy that … doesn’t need a lot of human workers. Managing that transition is going to be the greatest challenge that our society faces.
But McAfee is an optimist:
So, yeah, the droids are taking our jobs, but focusing on that fact misses the point entirely. The point is that then we are freed up to do other things, and what we are going to do, I am very confident, what we’re going to do is reduce poverty and drudgery and misery around the world. I’m very confident we’re going to learn to live more lightly on the planet, and I am extremely confident that what we’re going to do with our new digital tools is going to be so profound and so beneficial that it’s going to make a mockery out of everything that came before.
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About the same time I came across this quote from Marshall McLuhan:
“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us."
Marshall is also the person who penned oft used phrase – "the medium is the message". It’s interesting to note that Marshall died in 1980 before much of the current change was envisaged.
And then another quote, this time, from Danny Hillis:
“In some sense you can argue that the science fiction scenario is already starting to happen. The computers are in control. We just live in their world.”
The final circumstance was reading about a jacket that gives you a hug when someone likes you on Facebook.
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What each of these observations and events have in common is that they are all highlighting the changing relationship between ourselves and the machines around us. The pace of change has been building for some time. There was a time when information technology was limited to the work place, but that day has long gone. We are now in a world where information technology is connecting us into the machines wherever we are and whatever we are doing.
What impact is that change having?
We are relationship beings and we build relationships with people, animals, objects and substances. Technology is no exception but the relationship is changing as the machines change. It seems to me that we have a choice in how we approach this changing relationship. We can either become subservient (and become Gollumised) or we can become liberated (as Andrew McAfee hopes). We can choose a relationship where we hand over all of the responsibility to the machine and let them make us sub-human, or we can use the power of the machines to enable us to do new things. Either way there’s a huge change already in progress.
Some of these changes are seemingly innocuous, how
many people have you bumped into in the street because they were too busy interacting with their smart-phone? But even these changes have consequences. Commenting on a new safety campaign, here in the UK, Martin Gallagher, head of level crossings for Network Rail, said:
"Although we have thousands, if not millions of people who use level crossings every day, we’ve seen a trend in incidents and accidents where distraction, because people are wearing headphones, or walking dogs, or sending text messages, has become a causal factor."
That’s right, people are being killed because they are too encapsulated in their technology to notice a train speeding towards them.
Other changes are going to be more fundamental. I quite like the idea of self driving cars, but that’s going to radically change the roads and our day-to-day travel. What happens when the automated cars are so sophisticated and accurate that it’s too dangerous for us to drive alongside them? What happens when we have to hand control of the roads over to the machines?
We are in pioneering days and we still don’t really understand what it is that we are dealing with. We are giving people increasingly powerful tools but I’m not sure that we are yet giving them the necessary training on how to handle those tools. I’m not sure we even know what the required training is or what the necessary safeguards are. Every time I see another person prosecuted for writing something malevolent on Twitter or Facebook I wonder whether it was really malice or stupidity that was the primary factor.
On the whole I’m an optimist, but I think that we’ll make some pretty big mistakes along the way. Our relationship with technology is shifting and I’d prefer it became one that was similar to the relationship we have with the car rather than the one we have with heroine.
Choose freedom!
As I look around the changing workplace the more I see evidence that we are moving away from the large monolithic organisation of the industrial age to one which is dominated by freelancers – people who work for themselves.
A couple of things have caught my attention recently:
Is this change a good thing or a bad thing? Like all change, it depends a lot on your perspective. For many people I think that the large organisation is a constraint that they would do better without. I wonder, though, about people with disabilities or other constraints on their work, how are they going to compete? What about people who have just left education and still have a lot to learn?
As I consider these questions I see a future that’s not dissimilar to the one that craftsmen of old used to operate with the guilds. My reasoning on this isn’t that well formed yet other than to say that we can learn a lot from history.
Early into the 21st century it was time to leave the working location that I’d spent nearly all of working life in.
Although I’d moved from one company to another and worked in many different offices (5 at this point I think) I’d still been based on the same site. I’d worked with people from different sites for the same customer, but most of my focus had been on this one location. It was a large site and there was plenty of work to do but it was time to move on.
I’d been asked to lead a team of engineers working with the Microsoft technologies that were growing in popularity with our customers and the ones that we had successfully deployed already. This was a new team that didn’t yet exist and needed to be built.
There was a location where some engineers already existed, they were near to another customer who wanted to deploy the latest Windows 2000 technologies both client and server.
It was time for me to get on the road, partly to build the team, but also to help out with the Windows 2000 project. It was time to move from a desktop working life to a laptop working life. It was time to move from a desk-phone to a mobile-phone. My workplace was starting the steps away from being a location towards being an activity that took place wherever I was.
There was still a strong mind-set that was convinced that someone was only working on a project when they were there in person. This meant that I was on the road a lot travelling from project to project, customer to customer. Most of the time was spent on the A14 towards Cambridge because that was where the major project was and the only way to work on the project was to be there.
Windows 2000 included a number of new technologies but the one that would dominate most of our discussions was Active Directory. It’s hard to imagine now the extent of the change that the move from Windows NT 4.0 domains to Active Directory was. There were new skills to learn and new organisational interfaces to work through. Take DNS as an example; most organisations already had some form of DNS but it was run by the networks organisation to support a relatively small number of devices. Windows 2000 would increase the reliance upon DNS, the requirements for DNS and also, potentially the technology on which DNS was hosted. Like most Microsoft technologies the abilities of Windows 2000 as a DNS was viewed by the networks organisation with suspicion. They had existing, mission critical, requirements that they didn’t want to compromise with some ‘immature’ PC technology.
There was still a divide between so called enterprise-class technologies and the perception of the PC technologies as less mature and less stable. A maturity split also existed between the groups of people who looked after the technologies. A good example of this was the different approaches to change control. No mainframe systems programmer (where I started my technology journey) would dream of making a change without going through a management process which required them to think through the impact of the change and how to back-out of the change. PC people were used to working on individual machines without having to think too much about the impact of the change because there was only one person impacted. As the PC server technologies moved into the server room and eventually into the data centre we went through a period of time where there was to much of the PC approach and not enough of the mainframe approach. My background was on the sys-prog side of things and it fell to me to try and instil the correct disciplines. Not only did the technology have to mature our approach to that technology had to mature too.
This split made my job of recruiting interesting too. We saw many people who could build and rebuild a PC with there eyes closed but had no experience working in a managed environment like the ones we were wanting to build. We saw another set of people who’d worked in a smaller organisation and supported a small number of servers but still had a mind-set that if something needed changing they could change it there and then, and would.
The technology was maturing, the processes were maturing and perhaps I was maturing too.
As time progressed I spent more and more of my time travelling around building teams and managing people. This meant that I spent less of my time doing technical things. For some people this is a natural progression but it wasn’t the path for me. I came to the point where I realised that every time someone needed a technical authority I would launch in and get the problem resolved, I’d do this to the detriment of my management duties. Given the choice I would pick the technical challenge every time. While I was providing technical leadership I was happy and motivated, when it came time to do some administration for the team I would make it wait. In time a new role was being discussed, I’d always thought of myself as an engineer, but this new role had a different tile – architect.
There were other shifts that were reaching maturity too. UTP was the only way to wire a building. Ethernet was now the only transport. TCP/IP the only protocol. The Internet was becoming the way to connect things. AltaVista, MSN Search and Google were the options for search.
An interesting infographic on working from home with a collection of interesting statistics. I was particularly interested to see the split of people and where they think they are most productive – pretty much a third at home, a third in the office and third at either. For me, it depends on what I am doing at the time.
Daniel W. Rasmus has started an interesting series of blog posts on the design of meetings, or more specifically, the design of meetings that use collaborative software. He introduces his first post in a series with these words:
How to Design a Meeting: Lesson 1
We all run meetings like we know what we’re doing. We have been to so many meetings we just know how to run them. What we really know is how to model and perpetuate the poor habits and practices of our mentors and coaches, managers and colleagues. In the era of collaboration software our meetings need to be redesigned so they are driven through the collaboration environment in real-time, as the meeting takes place. Stop all the e-mails and document duplications, or even worse, handouts and get people to engage in a collaborative way through a meeting environment that captures all of the content, the tasks and the decisions in one view (not necessarily, as you will read, in one place).
The other day I finished work exhausted. As I sat and considered what I had achieved that day I realised that I had spent most of it in meetings, but what had I achieved? Honestly, precious little. Why was that? Well, and this is where I might be getting a bit too personal for some, boredom tires me out, and I’d spent much of the day bored.
I’m not saying that meetings are boring, but I am suggesting that many of the meetings that I attend are boring. Sometimes meetings need to happen that are in their very make-up dull, the context and the subject makes it difficult to make them interesting. These are the minority of meetings though, many meetings with interesting content are made colourless by the way that we run them. We spend so much of our time in meetings we should care that they are effective. If a meeting is effective it, at least, has a chance of not being boring.
I need to hold my hands up here and apologise for the drab meetings that I’ve run too, there’s a lot I need to learn, relearn and unlearn. Daniel has provided an infographic of where he is going with the series, I’ll read with interest:
As the 90’s turned to look towards the new millennium a new wave of change was about to occur.
I was now employed in an outsourcing company and for the first time nearly all of the IT people and resources worked in the same organisation. Sometimes before you can sort something out you need to put it all together to work out what you have and we had a lot. The desktop environment was varied and getting more fragmented by the month. We couldn’t even agree on the best way of connecting everything together. We were still an engineering organisation at heart and each device was individually engineered for each of the people who were likely to use it. There was a growing conversation about the cost of all of this technology but it hadn’t yet really impacted upon the ways that we worked.
At some point in the later 90’s we were approached by some people from the customer’s Engineering department who were used to buying UNIX workstation, VMS workstations and X-Terminals. They wanted to explore the possibilities of delivering the capabilities that the engineers required in a different way – using PC’s.
(This is where we will get into a social experiment on selective memory. A number of the other people on the team at this time read this blog, I still work with some of them. I wonder if my memory will align with theirs?)
My first memory of this project was being asked to attend on behalf of my boss who was somewhat against the whole idea. There’s was a bit of politics between the site where I was working and the site where this idea had been birthed. I’m not going to say any more than that other than to say that I noticed it again in a meeting recently some 20 years after the people concerned even worked in those locations. I was a bit too naive to recognise it in those days, it would have saved me some hassle if I had, but I might not have had quite so much fun.
The meeting was in yet another portacabin which had the disadvantage of being at the end of a runway that was in use for flight testing. Meetings and phone calls were occasionally interrupted by the noise of jets. It was an interesting working environment, I sometimes wondered whether you could measure the productivity impact of each take-off and landing. I don’t remember everyone in the meeting, but I do remember some of them. There was an external consultant who’d been recruited specifically to run the project from a technical perspective, I found him quite intimidating the first time I met him, it didn’t take long to get beyond that and build a mutual respect. There was a programme manager type who had quite clearly previously been in the armed forces, he had a way of talking that gave his background away. There was another gentleman who I had worked with before and had a lot of respect for his ability to think through issues. There was a gentleman who was the customer and later became a colleague and a friend.
This was the first time I’d worked in this type of team construct with dedicated people to run the project and other people to work through the solution. It was also the first time I’d worked within formal project management techniques. The organisation I now worked for had an extensive methodology framework that would soon become embedded into my day-to-day work.
The project wasn’t going to be run in the portacabin though, it was going to be based on the first floor of a building in the middle of the campus. In some ways this felt like full circle for me because this office was right next door to the one I had started out in. The group was quite small and became a lesson in the power of a small, well focussed, highly skilled team. Different members of the collective had different skills and the blend was great. Some people were contractors who had some experience in this type of project, some were people I’d known for a while and understood the customer quite well.
The team was also given quite a high level of autonomy. Some decisions were made for us, we didn’t have completely free reign. The outsourcing organisation that I worked for had a preferred desktop management approach using the CA Unicenter toolset and we weren’t going to change that. I’m not sure where the decision to use Windows NT 4.0 and Office 97 were ultimately made, but I do remember there being a whole load of discussions about it.
There were other discussions about what capabilities the engineers required and which applications would be provided to let them do their work. Terminal emulation software capabilities were one that we spent a lot of time on. We also spent a lot of time thinking about file sharing with personal file areas and team file areas. 
Then there was the domain structure that we would use and the trust hierarchy. This was in the days before Windows used DNS and address resolution was done using WINS; WINS required a whole load more dialogue. Naming standards also needed consideration and designing. Then there was printing, server sizing and location, support processes, alerting, anti-virus, application deployment, remote control, security, peripheral support, imaging, packaging and so on.
We had to design many of these things from first principle, there wasn’t a model we could just pick and replicate, neither was there much best-practice around. Much of todays normal was considered novel then. It was a fabulous place to learn.
Things went so well that people started to ask questions about how relevant the work we were doing was for all of the other people in the business, or for other businesses and customers.
That work paved the way for many more projects and a whole stream of thinking that has been with us ever since (outliving its usefulness in places). But they are stories for another day.
I don’t think that there’s anything startlingly new in this graphic, but it’s good to see them all together:
Via Mashable.
Graham Chastney 