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.

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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.

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

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.

I’ve been reflecting lately on my brief sojourn into education reform prior to returning to “the world.”  Several things I learned there, including the idea that how brains work and how people interact represent new fields of study to the Field of Education. (With apologies to any of my new Ed friends, please correct me if I heard wrong!)

Yeah, I was appalled too.  Turns out it’s called there “The Learning Sciences,” and while I don’t know when it started to gain traction, people in education somewhat recently started to compare the education system we have with the stuff we’re learning from cognitive science, sociology, etc.  Pretty exciting stuff, and I can’t help but compare this welcome attention to interdisciplinary studies to the breakthrough in economics when – RECENTLY – leading economists began to realize that people are messy and don’t have consistent utility functions.  (In both cases, the system failures become a tad obvious using this lens.)

So the world is changing.  All around us.  One meme in education making the rounds is, attributed to The Learning Sciences:  “All learning is social!”  As someone mentioned this weekend on Twitter: The learning that isn’t social, isn’t worth our time studying. This remains controversial – what about human instinct, core behaviors, the idea that some of our personality traits may be inherited?  Surely these aren’t learned! But then we read that an infant, long before she can understand a language, is able to discern WHICH language is spoken by her tiny tribe.  And before she understands that she belongs to the same animal group as her parents and siblings, she can discern individual faces among primates.  Once she learns that she is one of the naked apes, the individuality among chimpanzee faces becomes invisible to her, as it is to us.

Ponder that one for a minute.  Heady stuff.

This weekend, I was struck by a logic stick.  If all learning is social, is all social learning?  We know this is not automatically so, learned that in the intro to Logic, Sets and Numbers (an actual college course I took in the 70’s).  But when we engage in a social setting, online or offline, are we ever not learning?  Let’s add in a third statement: we are constantly learning.  Even while asleep, some research indicates, the brain assembles and makes sense of what it experienced that day.  There isn’t a time when our brains aren’t rewiring themselves based on input from our environment.

We learn something from every experience.  If events occur as predicted, we reinforce that cognitive pattern for the next use (naturally, we have the ability to learn the wrong things here).  If they do not, we reconsider our pattern assessment logic.  We descend the stairs at 3 am differently once we learn the fourth step from the landing squeaks now – and will subsequently do that in another’s home without thinking.

So we’re constantly learning, and all learning is social.  (Is it?  We learned that squeaky stair avoidance thing on our own, didn’t we?  Hint:  No.)

Enter social media!  What is your social media strategy?  Does that question even make sense anymore?  Or should we ask now:  What is your learning strategy, and what role is played therein by social media, happy hours, phone calls, email, downtime, etc.?  If all social is learning, shouldn’t any associated strategy for socializing tools be focused there?

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24 Nov: Update, thanks to the great comments I’m getting here.  Here is a another great resource exploring this notion that all learning is social, and questioning the value of corporate training methods as a result: http://www.lifescapes.org/Papers/0212_from_training_to_learning.htm

Remember the first time you rode a bike without help?  When the steadying hand came off the seat or your training wheels were unscrewed and set aside for a future toddler?   Remember what you were wearing?  For me, it was a tweed suit, with shorts and a cap.  And the hand coming off the seat belonged to a sibling who eased me down a driveway and into the street unattended.  The bike was a black Schwinn RollFast.

Or so I remember.  The tweed suit memory may originate from a picture from sometime during that period, and “my brother pushed me into traffic” is an oft-told story that garners the desired comic effect.  I know the bike is the right memory, as I have corroborating evidence.  The rest is suspect.

Why?

I’m afraid I just played a dirty trick on you.  If you did call to mind your first bike ride just now, you are now re-creating the memory as you ‘re-store’ it.  Your memories are not movies in a vault that you watch from time to time, while not disturbing the film itself. Instead, you interact with long-term memory, and what is then ‘stored’ is the memory as you recalled it, not necessarily the ‘truth of what happened.’  Error is magnified and becomes embedded.  I may have just mucked with a precious memory of your childhood.  Sorry about that.

Our personal long-term memories are recreated when we recall them, often imperfectly.  This all comes to mind as a friend attends a week-long training course in Six Sigma (don’t get me started), and after I was honored to observe a security training course a few weeks ago.  (It is always an honor to sit among the heroes working in the intelligence or warfighting community – these occasions help me remember why I am obsessed with public sector problems.)

What are the implications for training, then, if long-term memories are subjected to this imperfect storage method – and are often triggered by seemingly unrelated stimuli?  (If I smell clove, I am back at a Thanksgiving table, immersed in those memories.)  How do we truly provide “training” that will be remembered, hopefully with some degree of accuracy, long after the PowerPoint dims?  How do we brief colleagues and supervisors without putting them into a poorly lit coma?

For my part, I use methods informed by people like Garr Reynolds, Nancy Duarte, and John Medina.  For the small group who sat through my Ignite DC talk in February, the charming fellow in the picture above makes them think of “high school diploma.”  I used the auto-associative function of the neocortex to embed the notion that what we hand high school graduates is less than attractive as they proceed to tackle college and life.

I could have used a simple PowerPoint slide with terrifying statistics to get the same point across, but it turns out storing an image with a simple accompanying message is a better way to cement the idea. Each of my slides consists of an image with very few words, since forcing someone to read your slide as you talk ensures they absorb little.  Reading the slides to your audience reduces this absorption rate to near zero.

In education, the field of ‘learning sciences’ is tackling (finally) the problem of education/training with an eye to how the brain actually works.  Perhaps it’s time to bring the ‘learning sciences’ to bear for corporate/agency training.  Perhaps your slides need to be crafted recognizing that your audience is not bored by you, but by a delivery method that ensures inattention.

Realizing we don’t have a wetware version of SharePoint in our skulls is the first step towards crafting training, briefings and conversations that will resonate, excite, and cause our colleagues to store the information more completely.  What they do with that information, as they call it to mind over time, is utterly out of your hands.  And theirs.
Duarte, N. (2008). slide:ology – The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.

Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2002). The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York, NY: Basic Books, Perseus Books Group.

Hawkins, J., & Blakeslee, S. (2004). On Intelligence. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Medina, J. (2008). Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. Seattle, WA: Pear Press.

Reynolds, G. (2008). Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery: New Riders Press.