More research indicating that our inner capabilities for perception, understanding, and imagination are not three separate activities in our brains – but rather an intertwined set of abilities directed at prediction.  We have an efficiency unmatched by any computer: we notice and process only that information about our world that does not match our predictive assumptions.  If the environment around us is unchanging, we are spared the banal status report.  Compare this to mind-numbing staff meetings, where “we go around the table and update everyone.”

But wait.  While mind-numbing as so many organizational rituals can be, aren’t these status meetings a chance to think?  To question status updates that may contain a hint of shift?  To think is to learn.  To think is to be intentional about questioning our predictions.  If the world around us presents us with unexpected information, it gains our attention.  This is how we are wired, but our attention is generally focused only on this ‘exception handling.’  We have to exert ourselves to devote attention to the status quo, to look for minor signs of shift.  Our brains are fantastic at predicting the effects of our movement through our immediate environment, most likely the purpose for this predictive ability, but are famously also able to trap us in bigotry, mistaken assumptions about abstract concepts such as economics or love, or to help us miss out on opportunities to learn.

The picture here represents one of the great corporate slogans from over 100 years ago: Think.  In all things, focus the mind on questioning its assumptions, its expectations.  Our world is famously unpredictable, thinking moves us from reacting to the potential for proactive change – to a place where we notice the quiet signals in our environment that deserve our attention and imagine change.

Today we honor a man who shared his Dream with humanity.  Who demanded we think about our actions, our assumptions, and to change the nation’s ways towards a moral path.  To dream is to think.  To think is to question.  What do you question today?

I stumbled across an interesting perspective this morning – one that argues perhaps we are “over thinking” the notion of a social enterprise.  “How different I wondered was the social capital I build up when I share a Word problem work-around on the company social network from when I lend my neighbor the proverbial cup of sugar.  In both instances, I’m sharing because it’s the proper social thing to do and because I likely believe the next time, that person might help me when I need it.”

The author goes on to posit that our social capital management is probably the same offline as offline.  All these efforts to identify behaviors and set expectations for enterprise social behavior is misguided, we’re making things too complicated.  Invariably, (although not in the piece I reference here), we come to impugn the motives of those who are “making things complicated.” The author, as I say, does not fire that bullet, but sums up thus: “Maybe we are just doing what we’ve always been taught to do, to share and cooperate with one another.  If we tap into these simple ideas, all enterprise social software is doing is taking advantage of the way most of us were brought up.”

Ahem.  In addition to reflecting almost none of the case studies of enterprise social software, the author of this piece misses two critical points: your workplace is not your neighborhood, and the cup of sugar examples fails because sugar-sharing is a 1:1 endeavor, while the Word problem work-around sharing is 1:n.

Taking the second point first: You are much more likely to share assets, resources, knowledge, etc., when approached and asked within the context of an individual’s need – than you are to “share” with no immediate reciprocity or other statement of value.

In other words: you may give your neighbor a cup of sugar upon request, but I doubt you place cups of sugar outside your door on a regular basis.  Nor would you drive to the mall and leave a cup there.

The mall?  To my first point: Yes, the mall is another created social construct, just like your workplace, that drives certain behavior.  When we place ourselves into purposeful social constructs, such as a mall or a workplace, our identity / role / time management (etc.) all change.  The mall is designed to facilitate retail commerce; dropping bags of sugar hither and yon would, among other things, violate the intention of the sugar merchant therein.  Similarly, in your workplace, you are motivated by what is measured and valued. For many reasons, there is a gap between the rate and quality of what is should be shared for organizational value and what is actually shared.

Understanding the organizational incentives, and the degree to which they force us away from our natural good nature sugar-sharing selves, is critical to solving this gap. Social constructs and contexts matter, and comparisons invariably fall down when they ignore the context.

A few years ago, I answered the phone.  I’ve since learned my lesson and silenced the landline.  When someone leaves a message there now, the tiny blue light flickers forlornly until I log on to the interwebs to listen and laugh at the voice mail.  For those particularly entertaining, I forward to my wife’s email for her bemusement. 

But on this day, I answered the phone.  On the other end I found an individual conducting a survey on behalf of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.  For reasons I can neither recall nor fathom, I listened and agreed to participate.  Once told of the subject, I told the person that I had no connection or experience with these organizations.  It turned out, that did not matter.  She continued to ask me questions about the firms (whose names she read en toto for each question for the next ten minutes); probing all around my completely vacant perception of them.  I wondered aloud how useful this information was, and briefly considered making up outrages or plaudits just to make her day more interesting.

Today, there are new stories about these firms’ attempts to improve their branding and message.  I suspect my interview was part of that, and no doubt rolled up and considered insight into the public mind.  Some unnamed (and named) consultants made serious coin analyzing these results and suggesting ideas to improve the numbers.

How does my experience resemble political polls, which today make up approximately 67% of all news stories? (Statistics are fun to make up, try it yourself!)  How do people respond to questions about how they will vote in a little less than a year?  How many of them take that call as seriously as I took my Fannie Mae / Freddie Mac survey?  How is it so many people still use landline phones, apparently the only method by which these survey firms reach people?

A student of mine opined recently on the qualitative method by declaring it inferior, only useful for setting up the hypotheses for more grownup quantitative methods.  These quantitative methods feature, often, scientific polls with established margins of error.  Far better to consider the aggregate of poll results, careful diced and analyzed; over the anecdotes and full narrative of experience.  Such is the domain of the soft science.  Where “data” relies on those people who are eager to give honest answers to a stranger interrupting their day with a ten-minute questionnaire.

I don’t mean to impugn completely the survey method.  I just wonder how much of what passes for ‘data’ should be taken with a few grains of your favorite seasoning.  Layering time-honored mathematical models on top of an individual’s representation of their thoughts and intentions may not affect, it turns out, the quality of that information.

On occasion, I am honored to present a three-hour course on decision science as part of a regular seminar for senior feds who are in important jobs.  I once heard a comedian remark that absolutely nothing is worth doing for more than two hours, but while the gentleman obviously is not a football fan – in general I have to agree.  I always approach these speaking engagements with some trepidation, knowing how little I enjoy sitting through multi-hour training sessions or other Festivals of Talking Heads.  One of the compelling things about the Ignite series is the fact that speakers have to be off the stage in five minutes.  TED talks are worthwhile partly because their speakers take up no more than twenty minutes of your time.

Plenty has been written about PowerPoint etiquette, how some styles actually prohibit retention.  This comes about when you put a lot of text on a slide, and then compound the injury by reading the text to your audience.  This almost guarantees low retention, as the brains in your audience do not know whether to focus on reading or listening.  More often than not, they tune out.

Relying on the good work from Garr Reynolds (“Presentation Zen”) and Nancy Duarte (“Slide:ology”), as well as other research on how brains behave, I try to follow a few rules when I can.  One is to surprise the audience every ten minutes or so – although I can’t promise I always succeed at this one. The other is to use eye-catching photos and very little text.  My presentation at this seminar consists, for the most part, of embedded videos (it’s always nice to give your audience a break from you) and slides that are mainly a photo with a pithy phrase.  I don’t even read the phrase on each one, preferring to tell a story or anecdote that demonstrates the point of the slide – or sometimes offering the dry theory with a pointed reference. “Emotion plays a central role in decision-making, when we ask an expert to relate the decision logic they used in a specific situation, they lie. They don’t mean to, they can’t help it because so much of their personal decision process is unknown to them.”

What drives me to write this on a rainy football Sunday?

Well, I wanted to share with you the result of an experiment I ran this past week.  Mindful of the retention theory, I chose to demonstrate it in practice.  Since I didn’t think of it until the morning of the presentation, I went without a net.  At the end of the three-hour presentation, I showed photos from the course without any text.  One at a time, five in all. “Tell me what you learned while this slide was up.”

During the breaks, a few students asked if there was a reason for the strange approach to PowerPoint (I didn’t have the heart to tell them it was Keynote).  I had set this up perfectly, and the disappointment would be crushing. I dreaded silence, blank looks.

The class knew every slide.  By the third one, they were answering in unison.  This wasn’t just the eager students at the front of the class; every one of the 20 or so in the audience could speak to the message given on slides they had seen once, briefly, and then not again for over two hours.

I had a conversation last week with someone on Facebook who argued for the ‘standardized’ project brief format.  We all know this one.  The position was that every project used a standard brief format, the information was on the slides, and the briefing team did not spend excessive time creating unique content.  I sympathize with this approach, but cannot escape the fact that my little experiment demonstrated the theory.  If you think the ‘creative’ approach to slide-ware is not worth your time, so be it.  But if you are briefing people with some interest in having them retain your information, I dare you to repeat my experiment.  Be careful if you do, however.  Now that I’ve seen this work in person, it’s going to be hard to go back to boring my listeners.

——

Photo from Rob Lee’s collection on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/roblee/374517948/

Some time ago, some media sources characterized the U.S. Administration’s military involvement in Libya and Syria as ‘leading from behind.’  I heard this phrase and thought:  ”interesting, they’re taking a nuanced and shared approach to a conflict where our national security interests may be threatened but not clear.”  Having been honored to spend a good chunk of my career around national security policy analysts and leaders, I consider nuance to be a useful tool in a president’s utility belt.

Far more heard the phrase and thought:  Since when does America fight from the back of the pack?  Leading from behind makes no sense!  The mental image was a platoon where the leader is marching behind his troops, or placing a steering wheel in the rear of the car.  The metaphor was jarring and we stopped listening to one another.  Not only did the phrase fail to trigger upsetting mental images for me, I failed completely to appreciate how many people would respond to the strategy.  Having immersed myself in the implications of complexity in policy analysis for several years now, I no longer hear things the same way as before.

I am Beltway.

This is a town that lives on the shared metaphor – We declare war on drugs, war on poverty, and consider the energy crisis the ‘moral equivalent of war.  For a President to fight an actual war in a way that sounds ‘unAmerican’ violated a shared metaphor for many of us.

What’s the role of metaphor in our understanding?  Lakoff & Johnson claim that understanding ‘takes place in terms of entire domains of experience and not in terms of isolated concepts.’  We cannot separate our understanding from context, and our context is extraordinarily personal.  You can try to influence how someone understands your message, but you cannot enforce the metaphor they use to understand it.  Nevertheless, you should be at least aware how your words may trigger a metaphor broadly shared everywhere in the nation – except for inside BeltwayTown.

I’ve been away from blogging for most of 2011’s summer.  A summer that found Beltway Town struggling to place their policy objectives into metaphors that would stir the voter – or at least the voters who are called by pollsters.  We heard of hostage-taking, credit card limits, and blank checks.  Marketing and politics seek to establish shared metaphors in order to persuade.  Some decry the language and wonder why we cannot just agree on data used for our self-governance experiment – including yours truly – but this leaves the metaphor-fit exercise to the individual voter.  It is inevitable that as our politics become increasingly divisive (a regular campaign season event), the effort to enforce and influence a shared metaphor will increase as well.

The effort to navigate through personal metaphor is a personal one, and requires intention.  The effort to avoid triggering unintended and unflattering metaphor requires understanding on all sides.  More to the point, understanding requires continued conversations with those who do not share your viewpoint.  Challenge your metaphors by conversing with those with whom you disagree – lest your personal context obscure truth.

—-

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

How do you “engage stakeholders” and “gather requirements” in 2011?

Outside the workplace, people and technology have co-evolved.  We Facebook,” we text, we tweet, some of us “check in,” all while listening to music that is streaming to us on customized or micro-segmented “radio” channels.  We connect with friends long moved away, we coordinate over space and time and find projects and opportunities – and occasionally love (authorized and not).  These are not the people we were five or ten years ago.  Certainly not the people we were twenty years ago.  This is not a good or bad thing, despite regular claims that Google or Facebook or Twitter is the latest thing “making us stupid.”  It just is.

For example, I own a Pizza Acquisition Device.  No, really.  I speak into it, saying “nearest pizza” and it shows me the phone number to the pizza place nearest to where I am standing. One click, and I’m talking to the nearest pizza professionals. It’s pretty cool, you probably have one too.  Thanks to a simple mash up of my “phone’s” microphone, GPS chip, and internet connection with Google’s use of computational linguistics, machine learning, voice recognition, massive geocoded databases, etc. – plus the dialing function of my phone – I can always find the nearest pizza.  (This is not strictly true, as the nearest real pizza is 250 miles away in Brooklyn, but go with me on this.)

Imagine if someone came to me with the need to gather functional requirements.  “I understand you want us to build a pizza acquisition device.”  The result would be, I imagine, a fairly expensive and clunky unit that I would wear in some fashion.  It would not be as elegant as my iPhone, because it would begin with what I think I need absent the technology experience.  The difference between a platform and a point solution is salient here, but I am making a different case:  I am co-evolving with the technology around me.

I saw an article recently detailing how Google spent some time considering how their voice search would work, presuming that people would speak to it as if it were a friend, in full sentences.  Turns out they need not have worried – we’ve already been trained to speak in search terms.  I don’t say, “Hey, I’m standing here in downtown DC, do you know where I can find pizza?”  Automatically, without thinking about it much, I instead say; “nearest pizza,” because I know how search engines work.  We all do.  Google found that the majority of their voice searches are framed in short phrases, as if they were typed into a search box.  Google has trained us on how to speak to the Google machine.

If we are trying to ‘engage stakeholders,’ let’s start with where they are, and recognize that they are evolving based upon their regular interactions with consumer technology. (Keeping in mind the ever-present but often overlooked ‘digital divide,‘ not everyone has the opportunity to evolve at the same pace.) In the public sector, this means understanding that even “non-technologists” have become masters at using smart phones, auto navigation devices, music streaming services, etc.  Ignoring this means you are starting not on the 1-yard line, but from somewhere out in the stadium parking lot.

If we are trying to ‘gather requirements,‘ well, let’s begin with the understanding that they are not lying about on the ground like swollen grapes.  Your users aren’t waiting for you with a list of requirements that you can capture and transcribe. In fact, it’s time to retire the verb “gather” with respect to requirements and move from the hunter-gatherer to an agricultural model of civilization: We need to cultivate requirements based on the evolutionary path of users as they interact with emerging and interconnected technologies.  Put more simply: We need to co-design solutions with users who are often unaware of their status as cyborgs.

I’ve been wrestling with a thought lately – if organizations are complex systems, and complex systems are continuously self-organizing, then why do we believe formal processes make these complex systems more efficient? Worse, when an organization is in need, why do we engage in process improvement – when what may be needed is process reduction or elimination?

This is not the first paragraph to question process improvement, this is not some original Eureka moment.  This is a personal journey, and the enormity of the mistake is beyond what I had considered previously. Friends, more erudite than I, have used similar words before – but for some reason I’m realizing, only recently, a simple truth: the implications for the baseless faith in the machine-based approach to management and the firm are global and profound.

A process-heavy enterprise isn’t cold and impersonal – because humans are still warm and social.  Instead, a process-heavy enterprise creates the need for larger social networks.  Formal processes do not capture the natural evolving paths people take to confront their tasks.  In response, people do what is natural, they use their social network to navigate the workplace – looking inward to find others who have succeeded despite the process.  We know that excessive time spent focused inward leads to burned-out employees, who must work the “second eight” to comply with organizational reporting and the like.  On a larger scale, this wasted effort presents – at the limit – an opportunity cost for the enterprise as a whole.  Perhaps the path to efficiency is to set the conditions for processes to emerge at the point of need, rather than Six Sigma-ing the (majority of) tasks that require creativity and agility.

In the famous early mistakes in business process re-engineering, managers believed once their processes were “streamlined” and “documented” (and embedded in enterprise software tools), they could realize savings by reducing the number of humans.  For routinized tasks, this may be a reasonable assumption – however, what percentage of your workday is routine?  Look to your own environment – do you rely on your social network to find the informal work-arounds for corporate process?  When faced with a challenging problem, do you find solace in the documented process?

Work to Rule. In labor relations, there is a term called “work to rule.”  Simply stated, this means that union workers have a negotiating tool that enables them to paralyze an enterprise – by merely doing only what is considered ‘by the book.’  No creativity, no work-arounds, no focus on task accomplishment – just fealty to the process.  Consider this message:  the way to crash some enterprises is to do what is expected by procedure manuals and process charts.

Business Development. In one company, I observed a set process for preparing contract proposals:  with clear roles, authorities, assignments, formats, and process steps.  Chokepoints were established along the way, when “pencils” down would precede a murder board review to assess the quality of the proposal against the procurement specifications.  These comments were returned to the writing team, who would tackle their task anew. The information technology consisted of shared folders, and the writers laboring over each section would be required to post their documents in the appropriate folder at the required hour.  The work was intense and draining, writers were often unaware of each other’s work, and the review team invariably excoriated the team for the lack of a “single voice” or “storyline.”

In another company, the proposal response was visible at all times to the entire proposal team.  In a shared online space, the sections were worked in parallel, each writer able to observe the other’s ongoing work.  The team met daily to talk through issues, but kept in touch throughout the process through instant messaging and email. There were roles and authorities, assignments and formats here as well – but the process was determined by the writing team, and emerged and adapted based on the demands of the work and the schedule.  As the storyline evolved transparently, there were fewer surprises, people were able to lend value across the work throughout – and the end product was coherent and compelling.  This without a review team’s intervention.

Software Development. In software development, Agile methods are triumphing over waterfall or other linear methods – users are happier because their approach to their work changes as they learn what is possible from the technology solution.  The human and the software evolve together.  The old approach was to gather what people thought they needed, build the software according to specifications, and then train the humans to operate the solution.  There may be a correlation between how much training is needed and how disconnected the solution is from how people work.  When software methods allow the humans and technology to co-evolve, when humans are co-designing the solution during “development” – we seem to have happier humans.

The thoughts bouncing in my head now are:  what needs to be in place to allow for emergent processes? Formal process has a small place – compliance processes dictated by, for example, government regulation come to mind.  However, value-creating processes must emerge from the interaction of the work and the humans.  They cannot be formalized absent the humans or the situational context – if they are, then humans will circumvent them, creating a more inefficient enterprise… or follow them to the letter, and destroy value.  In a real sense, process improvement should be replaced by process enablement.  Let the approach to work emerge from the situational context.