User Innovation – Page 3 – Graham Chastney

Relationship is power

Once upon a time man roamed the earth looking for food in those days the ability to find food was power.

Then we learned how to cultivate crops and farm animals. Land became power.

As the land became used up we needed to protect our land so weapons became power.

Then the industrial revolution happened making facilities and factories power.

Then we saw the dawn of the Information Age and facilities became less important because we didn’t need them to process information. Information became power.

Then an interesting thing happened – information became FREE. If information is free it can’t be power.

All along people were connecting with people, making deals, giving the inside track, offering advice, ignoring organisational structures, giving and receiving favours, dining together. People were making relationships.

Then along came the start of something new, it got fancy new names like “social media”,“social networking” and even “business networking”, but really it was just another way of making relationships.

It’s those relationships that make things happen. Relationship is power.

Concept of the Day: Cognitive Surplus

Today I watched Clay Shirky presenting at TED (via their excellent podcasts). Clay outlines a number of challenges to the way that we imagine people’s motivation. He explodes the premise that we all love to be “couch potatoes” and highlight a number of examples that demonstrate that as he says:

We like to create and like to share

People don’t just contribute when there is payment at the end, they contribute when they are creating, and with the currently available technology the opportunities for creating are becoming ever broader.

This effect creates a global surplus of cognitive ability of “a trillion hours a year”. There’s a lot you can do with a trillion hours of creativity if only we treat it in the right way. he calls this Cognitive Surplus.

Not only is this concept a huge challenge to the way we approach social projects, but it’s also a challenge to the way we approach business projects.

My perception of many business projects is that they are constructed with the assumption that people won’t want the change, and hence a stick is required to get them to change. If people truly do" “like to create and like to share” then engaging people in a creative constructing way in the change process will turn them from blockers to enablers. It might even get them to invest some of their own cognitive surplus.

The latest example of this, for me, is the location tagging of a Glastonbury picture that is underway. Thousands of people are tagging themselves in a picture taken at Glastonbury. The reward for this is little more than the feeling that you have been part of something. They’re all using their cognitive surplus to create a shared experience.

Coming to think of it – why is it that I write this blog?

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

Stories in Business

I seem to be surrounded by long documents and large spreadsheets again. People have spent hours on these pieces of work, but I’m unlikely to read them. It’s a shame, but it’s the reality.

The other day Shel Israel wrote in “Story Telling VS 10,0000 years of PowerPoint” about the challenge of the bullet-point culture that we are in and the stories that are deep within our human nature.

If you’ve been reading this blog, and my twitter updates for any length of time, I am not a fan of large documents or bullet-points, but I am a huge fan of stories (here)

The following story is a caricature of a real meeting:

“Oh no, It’s that Tuesday in the month again, that one when Bill gets to talk us through the standard 84 page bullet-point fest that he loves so much.” I think to myself as I look at my diary and the day that is ahead.

I know that this two hour green block in my diary means that I will be entering into a form of torture chamber once again. A torture chamber where I want to stand up and say “who cares”, but know that I will, as always, sit there like a good boy and say nothing. I will start the meeting determined to focus and to be constructive, but I know that over time the BlackBerry will get more and more attention, and the meeting will slip steadily into the background.

Sure enough that is exactly what happens. After reading through the contents of the first 10 slides I’m almost 100% focussed on anything other than the never ending stream of bullet-points set out before me.

My BlackBerry flashes, I know what it is going to be before I even look at it, it’s from Mike who’s sat across from me. His phone is getting a similar amount of attention to mine and he has sent me a text – it’s not complementary. My reply isn’t exactly constructive.

I know that I will never get back the seconds, minutes and hours that are passing before me. I set there ashamed by my lack of courage – “why don’t I say something? Anything?” – but I don’t. I let the time tick on and drip away.

And then someone does say something, out of the blue they ask a question. They break right in – mid-bullet-point.

“But what difference does all this stuff make to Mary?”

“Mary? Why Mary?” says Bill

“Because she’s the person who complains the most to me about all of this. There isn’t a week goes by when she isn’t telling me how useless it all is? The other day I could see how stressed and frustrated she was. It’s not like her so I asked her what was wrong, and she told me. She told me about the time it takes to get things done. She told me about the lack of answers she gets from the people running the service. She told me about how no-one else will use the system because it’s so bad, but she doesn’t have a choice. What difference is this going to make to her?”

“Well I don’t know?” said Bill looking a bit flustered

“She’s just in the next office why don’t a get her and she can tell us”

Mary joined us and tells us about her challenges, her problems, her frustrations, her annoyances. She has some great ideas about how it could be so much better too.

At first Bill tries to get us back to the slides that he is determined that we should get through, but he soon realised that he has lost. We wanted to hear Mary’s story, we wanted to know how we could make her life better, we want to hear her ideas.

We had our story and we were going to get as much out of it as we could.

There are all sorts of techniques for introducing stories into business, and in particular, into the system architecture and design business where I find myself. These stories are far more powerful than a slide deck of bullet-points could ever be. I think I’ve said it before, but it’s worth saying again, one of the reasons I love Rich Pictures is because done well they tell a story.

People stand around gossiping and will happily do it for hours, but I can’t imagine people spending the same amount of time discussing the contents of page 46 paragraph 4 of the latest technical tome.

Tell the story.

Story, Biography and Metaphor

I’m looking through a document today that is 744 pages long and i know one thing for sure, I’m never going to read this document.

At home I have another book that I am reading, it’s quite a long document. I am definitely going to read this document.

What’s the difference between the two: story.

One is a business document talking about repositories, artefacts, entities, capability and continuum.

The other is a biography of Guinness, that’s right a biography of the Dublin based brew. It’s a story of the founder Arthur Guinness, about his children and their impact on an organisation and the broader Irish society.

I’ll wrestle with one of these documents to get to the valuable lessons that it needs to teach me; the other book will teach me things without me even knowing it.

I was watching Griff Rhys Jones in Hong Kong on ITV’s “Griff’s Greatest Cities” last night (before turning over for “Outnumbered”). He was sitting in a class doing complicated mental maths in the blink of an eye. He was staggered by the speed that these kids could add and subtract complex number strings. What was the secret of their success, it was the teaching method. Their teacher had brought them up to use a special kind of abacus. Over time the teacher had removed the abacus and told the kids to imagine it. When doing their maths the kinds just pictured the abacus and read out the answer that it gave them. He had found a very powerful metaphor and the kids were exploiting it to great effect.

The other night I noticed a book on the bookshelf that I hadn’t read in a long time. It was a set of stories about a bear. This bear has taught me a number of lessons about life. This is a bear who says that he has very little brain, but there is wisdom to be found in his dealings with the other characters.

I spend most of my life simplifying things so that people can comprehend the essence of them and sometimes it’s to help them to subscribe to the vision that is being painted. I try my hardest to find a a story, a biography or a metaphor to communicate. These analogies have two very powerful results, they allow people to comprehend, but they also live on in peoples thoughts, they allow people to explore beyond the simple into the more complex. They can venture to the end of the metaphor, even if it breaks at that point, they’ve learnt something, if it doesn’t they can venture further. It’s a bit like a seed starting to germinate, as the leaves grow skyward, so the roots grow down into the ground.

I have one simple request, lets stop writing 744 page documents of business speak, let’s tell more stories.

Found In Translation: The Case for Pictures in Business

One of the most popular blogs on this site is the one on Rich Pictures. I think that pictures are fabulous, so I really liked Dan Roam’s article on ChangeThis called Found In Translation: The Case for Pictures in Business.

In this article Dan tells a simple story about getting directions in Moscow and the four different ways in which he could have been given the directions.

The Narrative
The Checklist
The Map
The Landmark Sketch

and Dan describes each one of them:

All four of these sets of directions are correct. Following any one of them should in theory get us to the Gagarin Museum in the same amount of time. But here’s my question: I’d like you to look over the four options again, really think about it for a moment, and then ask yourself this: if we actually were in Moscow, which option would you prefer?

The powerful communication methods are the map and the landmark sketch – without a doubt. We all know it’s true, so why do we use so many words in business?

I believe that for practical, business-oriented problem solving—when you and your team need to address something right in front of you right now, the visual options—the map and the landmark sketch are without question the way to go. The fact that we so rarely see these kinds of pictures used in business is why I write my books.

Over the last two days I’ve filled sheet after sheet of flipchart paper with diagrams. We’ve been talking through a solution with a customer, a solution that takes thousands of words to document. The documents don’t communicate, they just document. I had presentation slides and charts, but I knew that they wouldn’t communicate either. Simple blocks and lines on a chart with a commentary – that’s what communicated.

There’s something very powerful about a conversation held over a piece of paper, and I think it’s something intrinsic in who we are, but something that we suppress as adults. My reason for saying this is the difference that I see in the way that children react to paper table-cloths and the reaction of adults. What do children do with paper table-cloths? They write and draw on them, they get creative. What do adults do? They protect them, even though we know that paper table-cloth is going straight in the bin as soon as we have left. Why is that? One of the reasons, I think, is that the children’s need to be creative is fresh and unimpaired, as adults we’ve come to suppress it so much that we don’t even think about it.

If you haven’t come across ChangeThis before then you really are missing out on a treat. I really like their manifesto.

We all have a perspective

Whatever we are looking at, whether we are near to it, or a long way away from it, we have a perspective on it. We can’t see the back of it, we might not even be able to see the side of it. We are limited to our perspective.

The same issue of perspective can also apply to our attitudes and ideas.

I know of people who write off an application or web site after only a few minutes of looking at it. I know other people who regard everything from a particular company as being the best at whatever it is that the product is doing. I myself would prefer never to see a product from certain companies ever again.

Each one of these opinions is formed from a perspective built up from an experience.

Whether this perspective is a good one, or not, is difficult to assess, particularly by ourselves. We can’t see what we can’t see.

Some of these perspectives are formed from our irrationality. Even when we know something that would change our perspective we don’t.

Standing at the bottom of a cliff our perspective towards the cliff could be completely different. We could see it as an adventure to overcome, we could also see it as a dangerous place to move quickly away from.

In many work situations we try to gain the perspective of others, but often we choose people who will reinforce our perspective to review our understanding. We need to do a better job of valuing diverse views and opinions.

Sometimes perspectives are called “experience” because they’ve been held for some time. But often this type of perspective isn’t built from experience at all, it’s built from an experience.

We use statistics to support our perspectives and reinforce the words of Einstein: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” Spend any time at all looking at the statistics that surround the issue of global warming and you will find people who people who’s perspective, no matter what it is, is supported by one statistic or another.

When I am reversing my car into a tight parking spot my perspective is very limited. Sometimes someone will off to show me the way in. These people don’t sit next to me an use the same perspective that I have, they stand outside the car to give the situation another perspective.

Many of the words innovations have happened by someone taking what already existed and seeing it in a different perspective. One example is this video from Ikea:

I quite like this quote, it seems to sum up what I’m trying to say:

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

There’s lots of power in connecting with the field of vision of someone else.

We’re all journalists!

Yesterday Jonathan was involved in a bit of a news incident. One of the buses at his college exploded into flames as it was sitting waiting to leave the college where he studies.

This happened around 4:30pm. According to the local press the fire services were called at 4:26.

By 17:44 the first comments were being added to a Facebook group.

A bit later than this an article was being written on the local newspaper’s site featuring photos and videos taken by students on their mobile phones. The article was posted to Twitter at 18:17.

By 18:44 one of the students (Sam Pratt) posted:

Within two hours and 10 mins since the Runshaw bus fire, a Facebook group was created, 4 videos and 12 photos were on it and the LEP had already covered it on their website. How’s THAT for social media?

By 20:48 it was in the BBC web site with what looks like a security camera picture.

The BBC site has a single 150 word article with a single picture.

The Lancashire Evening Post site has a 650 word article a single video and 7 photographs. There’s also 8 comments (mostly pointing people to the Facebook group)

This morning there are nearly 1200 members of the Facebook group. There are 30 photographs and 8 videos. There are are over 180 different comment threads as well as comments on lots of the photos and videos. Some videos have also been posted to YouTube.

I’m sure that this scenario is being played out all over the world right now because we’re all reporters of the news now.

The Lancashire Evening Post sites say: “See The Evening Post on Friday for exclusive pictures and comments from eyewitnesses", why should I? I’ve already read the eyewitness reports from hundreds of students and seen more than enough photographic evidence.

I’m sure that there is still a need for journalists, but it needs to be about adding value.

We’re all irrational!

How many rational decisions do you make? Do you think that most of your decisions are rational?

Do you worry about anything?

Did you know that people feel less safe in a highly guarded airport than they do in a less well guarded one?

Have you ever worried about illness? Do your worries reflect the reality of the risk?

Do your death worries reflect the size of the bars in this chart?

Are you twice as worried about cardiovascular issues compared to cancer, or over 1000 times more worried about cancer than swine flu?

I work in IT and I see irrationality everywhere I look.

On a weekly basis I see projects that people expect to “revolutionise” the way that they work. This is a completely irrational expectation. Tell me the last thing that completely “revolutionised” anything? No I can’t think of anything either. I can think of things that have made a positive contribution, and some thing that have made a negative contribution but nothing that on its own could be regarded as truly revolutionary. There is a cumulative effect that could be regarded as revolutionary but that comes over time and it the outcome is normally unexpected.

Another area of IT irrationality is the area of cost control. The only factor that seems to influence whether something is worried about as a cost is it’s size. You might say that that was a rational response, but it isn’t – the real measure should be value. Microsoft software, as an example, gets managed quite tightly because it’s a big number, but this software is used all day, every day, by most organisations. Very little control is normally placed upon the thousands of other bits of software that most organisations use and that’s because the software tends to go out in small chunks, for a project here and a project there. The overall cost of the little bits is itself a big number, but the amount of value that is being generated from it is quite low. I see many of these applications, that get delivered as “vital”, ending up dormant and waiting to be used.

Another area of IT irrationality is how few of the capabilities that people have available to them get used, even when they could add value. I’m becoming very intolerant of the people I see using an application like PowerPoint who draw a box and then put on top of the box a text box and then put the words into the text box. I want to scream – “just right click and add the words straight into the box” (and I must admit that sometimes I do).

I’m not immune from this irrationality. One of my irrational acts is checking my Blackberry at completely inappropriate times. These are times when I know that I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do anything with what I have just read. Why do I bother looking then?

How many organisations are there out there that are running business critical processes on platforms that are out-of-support, unsupported and unsupportable. Why don’t they do the rational thing and replace them?

Having said all of that, I’m not sure that rationality is always a good thing. Most of the successful innovations I have seen have been a complete surprise to the people who created them. If they had been rational they wouldn’t have done what they did. We need some things to fail to know that they are failures. Perhaps we need to regard the next great thing as “revolutionary” to give it a fighting chance of being just that.

(Thanks to Information is Beautiful for the charts, I really like charts and visualisations, so much better than words)

We’re all lazy!

If someone is going to do something for us we are likely to let them, even if they don’t quite do as good a job of it as we would like. That’s the way we are wired.

There are, of course, exceptions to this situation, but in general we would rather be lazy.

In IT our aim is to make things easier for people (I know it doesn’t always seem that way). The problem is, we often make it easier by taking away the responsibility from the consumer, making them lazy.

I was reminded of this again today by an article in Computerworld by Mathias Thurman. Mathias is talking about the creation of a policy within his organisation that enforces screen lock-out. Most people would regard this as good practice, and I’m not advocating that it’s not, my challenge and one that Mathias recognises is that the enforcement of this policy will make people lazy.

Some of the people within his organisation already have a setting that is more stringent than the policy that he is going to enforce. He says of these people:

They have shown the sort of awareness of security issues that I try to instill in the entire workforce, and now we’re rolling out a policy that seems to say that their security consciousness was unnecessary.

He’s right to be concerned, these people will start to see that the responsibility for security is no longer theirs and has shifted to be the responsibility of the policy set by the IT department.

There’s a greater challenge with this type of policy, and that is that all of the people will now rely upon the policy to lock their screens, including all of the people who used to manually lock their screens when they left their desks. For this group of people the security risk has actually increased, instead of the device being locked when not attended it will be left unlocked for a period of time until the policy kicks in.

This shift of responsibility means that people treat IT as something that is delivered to them, rather than something that they are responsible for.

Lack of responsibility has many facets to it that influence the behaviour of those consuming the services. These include:

Abuse of the services – “why should I look after this stuff it’s not my responsibility”
Working around the services – “if they won’t let me do it, I’ll just go and do it somewhere else”
Apathy to the service – “I’ll just have to use this service because that’s all I’ve got available to me”

We need to find a new way of working that protects the business, but doesn’t remove the responsibility from those consuming the services. We need to do this recognise people’s innate laziness.

Engaging with Paper and Interactivity

I was at a session on Friday with a client and a number of our own people.

I could have presented my material (I think I knew most of the answers) and told them my opinion. But I wanted a bit of engagement and I find that people don’t engage with presented material, they become passive, sit back and just receive.

Why did I want engagement? The main reason was that I wanted them to start to own the things that we were talking about.

My solution was simple, but the impact was profound – I got A1 sized print-outs of uncompleted slides and asked everyone to get involved. Rather than starting with a completely blank piece of paper we had somewhere to start from, but there was still plenty to do.

Straight away people were engaged, they were so engaged that it took us a good 15 minutes to explain what we were doing. From the start the discussion was about “we” not “you” – “What are we doing?” Everyone was hooked in right from the beginning.

Armed with the A1 sized pieces of paper and a pen we went on to fill in the information with everyone contributing as we went along, even arguing vehemently about the content. Different people added value and it became a team effort with everyone contributing.

I don’t think that anything was put on the paper that I wouldn’t have put on the slides beforehand. What was different was the commentary that went with it, different people stating one opinion over another. I’m sure that each person who left that session learned something that they wouldn’t have done with a presentation.

The material wasn’t any different, only the media.

I’m not suggesting that we should do all sessions this way but what I am saying is that we still have a lot to understand about interactivity.

How would this session have turned out if we had used a 3D world?
What if the material had focussed on scenarios?
Was it the paper that made it interactive?
Was the interactivity partly because the set-up was a bit like a school classroom?
Would the session have been the same if we had interacted with a virtual piece of paper?
When are you best to simply present?
What does art have to teach us?
What does journalism have to teach us?

I still have a lot to learn.

Please make me one of these: Universal read count

I see information in many streams, email, IM, twitter, RSS reader, etc. Unfortunately my brain isn’t good enough to remember everything that I have already read so I regularly find myself going to the same piece of information more than once.

Within each stream I’m unlikely to go back more than once because I get visual indicators that I have already read it. The main problem is between streams. That’s not to say, though, that people won’t send me the same piece of information more than once in the same stream.

I’d quite like a service that handled the read status for me, across all of the streams.

I should get a visual indicator that a link in twitter points to the same content as the blog post in my RSS reader, and they should both show anything that I have already consumed from a browser. Oh, and while I’m at it, it needs to do that across any one of the devices that I’m likely to use, and it needs to handle shortened urls.

My RSS Reader (FeedDemon) does a reasonably good job of keeping the read count in-synch across devices, but nothing between streams.

What I am looking for is to be able to mark parts of the Internet as “read”.

I’d also like this status consolidation capability to be searchable, especially by date. I am reasonably good at remembering when I read something, but not so great at remembering where I read it.

I’m sure there are a load more functional requirements that I would surface if I had time to think about it, but for now, this will do.

Has anyone done anything like this?

Understanding the value of things

Interesting questions, interesting responses:

£50 today or £60 in a month?
£350 in 12 months or £360 pounds in 13 months?

It’s interesting what our response to some questions are.

You have a ticket to the theatre which cost £20 and a £20 note in your pocket. When you get to the theatre you have lost the ticket. Do you buy another ticket?
You have two £20 notes in your pocket. When you get tot the theatre you have lost one of the £20 notes. Do you buy a ticket to the theatre?

Your first reaction to these questions and your considered response might be significantly different. The problem with estimating the value is that we use very strange (complex) logic.

I spend a lot of time helping people to change there business by bringing extra value to the way that they do things. These changes normally involve IT, because that’s my area of expertise, but not always. Understanding and agreeing what the value of any particular activity is can be quite a stressful exercise, particularly when it comes to the decision to spend money.

The values that people place on things has always fascinated and frustrated me. Surprisingly few decisions are based cold hard economics. The value is often much more subjective, or so it appears to me. Perhaps I’m just not seeing the complicated value judgement that they are making. Perhaps my value judgement is missing important elements.

I don’t have any answers here, I’m just making an observation, but I’m not the only one that sees the paradox. Dan Gilbert does a much better job of explaining than I do.

http://static.videoegg.com/ted2/flash/loader.swf

If you ever want to extend your thinking TED is a really good place to start.

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