WOWNDADI » productivity

Going Hyper-Local - Location Based Internet

Benjamin — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 16:33:35 +0000

Over the last year I’ve been playing with a number of location based services. I should explain my fascination, since it is even stranger than you think. Way back when I first encountered communications networks I was gripped by the way they enabled me to reach across geographies. Suddenly I could speak with people all around the world. This was in the days when international phone calls were the reserve of the few, and even speaking to people ‘all around the UK’ was prohibitively expensive. The Internet was a global thing, transcending governments and breaking down national boundaries - and all the challenges that came with that.

New Services

Skip forward three decades and things are evolving in a different direction. Services like Fire Eagle enable a number of applications to understand where you are, and Brightkite (in closed beta - email me for an invite), Dopplr and a swarm of others mean that you can ‘discover’ nearby friends/contacts or even total strangers. Other services like Flickr (best known for its photo sharing - although it now does video too) and even Twitter are location aware.

The Benefits?

How does that help with productivity? The answer is: a lot. Dopplr can reduce travel by enabling you to identify fellow travelers, potentially sharing transport or eliminating trips all together. If I discover that Sharron, from the Paris office, is going to be in London this week that might save me a trip. Brightkite helps me quickly find a local Internet cafe or the hotel where friends are staying. At the other end of the spectrum, finding photos ahead of time on Flickr might save me getting lost, or change my holiday plans!

The Practicalities

Many of these location based services are dependent on access to data on your current location, but constantly typing in where you are can become a drag. However, with more and more devices having built in GPS, reporting your location (we’ll come back to that) and tagging photographs and videos with geographic information is now a relatively simple task. Geo-tagging has become a major geek fad. It is still not as seemless as I’d like on my Nokia N95, but perhaps that isn’t such a bad thing. This week I signed up to Pachube (currently in beta), which is a service that enables a device to stream environmental data and share it globally. I was hoping to get some wind data for my home hacking activities, in preparation for homecamp this weekend. No joy so far, but it is still early days.

Near Me

So, we have location based data behind location based services. Lots of data means an opportunity for lots of searching, an opportunity not lost on Google. If you use the latest version of the Google app for the iPhone (or iPod touch), it takes your location into account when it selects search results for you. Google searches have been location aware for a long time, but with more location aware devices, and the marketing fraternity on the case, it is going to a whole new level.

Google maps are an interesting way of discovering things. From a creating a ‘find us’ page with a pin in the map, to searching for local shops, Google’s map functionality has become almost as ubiquitous as their traditional web search engine. Putting your site onto Google Maps is relatively straight forward (give it a try).

Nice as all that is, that isn’t the most exciting thing about location based services. Back to those social networking services. Adding location into the mix provides the opportunity to rekindle local communities, connecting people in neighbourhoods, who might otherwise have never met. At this point, some of you might be perplexed. Meet people in the locality? Your either thinking “but everyone knows everyone anyway” or “but no-one talks to anyone”. There again, you might be comfortably in the middle of the two. It depends where in the country (and in which country) you live. Where I am, the commuter lifestyle and long working hours mean that much of the local sense of community has dwindled away. There is little engagement in local matters. A few brave souls attempt to keep a bit of a fire going, but it is a battle against apathy and that lack of time.

Cue location based services. From Facebook to Brightkite, from blogs to Twitter, local people are rediscovering each other. More than that, they are finding common causes. What is a community after all, if it isn’t a group of people centred about a common purpose? It was during a conversation with Tom Watson MP - Minister for Digital Engagement - last week that I realised the significance of these communities mapping on to geographical political infrastructures: influence. Just as the communities described in Cause Wired were able to organise on-line to create changes in the off-line world on an international level, local groups can affect the local level.

The space is not without its issues (see this post about post code data), with access to data and privacy being major concerns. However, the next few years will be about the Internet becoming an increasingly local phenomenon, rather than a global one. We have local community based blogs and websites, groups on social networking sites and local meet ups and that is all before the new wave of location aware devices are in broad use. We going hyper-local, and it may just be the most disruptive phase of the Internet yet.

Get Innovating. Start Asking Stupid Questions.

Benjamin — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 09:03:58 +0000

A confluence of thoughts on innovation and questions running around my head, so it must be time for a blog post. Innovation is further up the hype-o-meter than social media in UK business. Everyone wants to be innovative, and quite rightly so. There are innovation conferences, innovation consultancies and innovation workshops springing up all over the place, of varying quality. Innovation is a core survival skill, isn’t it?

Actually innovation comes from taking risks, and opening yourself up to making mistakes. That doesn’t sound like a survival instinct. Survival is about not taking risks. That is one of the reasons innovation is such an anathema to businesses - failure is an almost inevitable consequence of innovation. On average 4 out of every 5 start ups fail. New projects usually fail. Inventions often don’t work out. That is just statistical fact. I might have evaded the odds from time to time personally, but the fact still remains that not all risks pay off.

Innovative startups turn into cautious businesses as they grow, in order to survive. Then, when new competition appears, innovation because critical once more. How do you go back to being innovative again? Listening to Phil Smith (of Cisco Systems) and Ian Smith (of Oracle) today, at the Thames Valley Innovation Day, provided a perfect example of big companies looking to do just that. But the kind of “submit your ideas here” initiatives they mentioned don’t create innovation - they are just idea-harvesting - they move innovation from one place to another. In their case it does keep ideas within the business, rather than seeing them head out, to be the next start up they end up buying back. Sadly, there won’t be much innovation if no-one is coming up with good ideas to collect and execute.

At the same event, Sir John Chisholm talked about QinetiQ, what was once the innovation engine of the UK defense industry, now a private company. Innovation is about “thinking new things”, he said. It isn’t so much about innovators, as it is about having an innovative environment. To that end, Cisco is moving from a command and control management structure to a more distributed ‘tribal’ model, with mini-boards responsible for smaller areas of the business. It was sobering to note that the current down turn is at least in part due to (poor) innovation in the financial markets. It was a financial product innovation that enabled huge amounts of capital to flow into economies, funding innovation and growth in a way not seen in any previous civilization. Sadly, it was not sustainable.

“Most new things don’t succeed. That’s just a fact. The more radical the invention, the lower the statistical chance of success.” Sir John Chisholm.

How do you innovate then? Consultancy ?WhatIf! came close to hitting home. In a very entertaining talk, they spoke about the issues of fear and the “yes, but…” mentality which can kill innovation at birth. Our attitudes, the behaviour of others, and the organization around us are all key components in enabling innovation.

From my perspective, there is a simple thing we can do to foster innovation, and it is this: Ask stupid questions. Time and time again, when I get involved in a new business, I end up asking stupid questions. Of course the questions aren’t really stupid. Questions are a tool to check assumptions, and to fill gaps in our knowledge. They have other uses too, but for stirring innovation, challenging questions are the golden dust that brings things to life.

Have a “stupid question” allowance for yourself, and for those around you. Questioning challenges the status quo. Questioning enables us to fill gaps in our knowledge. Start asking questions, it isn’t a stupid thing to do, it is the beginning of innovation.

Gordon Brown at NESTA - The Innovation Edge

You Can Predict the Future Too

Benjamin — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:04:28 +0000

I’ve talked about the way anyone can be lucky enough to predict the future. That breaks down at the individual level of a person or a company. So, barring the use of a time machine, how do you predict the future, or at least get an idea of what might happen? In short, there are two ways, and they cleverly support each other. Think of it like a success formula.

The first way is to transcend ‘now’. One of the reasons I encourage everyone to blog, even if it is just on a private blog or in a text file on your machine, is that doing so clarifies your thinking. It captures it too.

Conversations are very fleeting things. We talk. We move on. The only artifact left is whatever might have permanently changed within the minds of those there, and however that might propagate along to other individuals. Some conversations are world changing, but they are the exception rather than the rule. Most thinking and conversation is completely transitory, with little lasting impact. The process of committing things to media refines and captures them for future benefit.

One of the reasons I am usually seen with a camera, a recorder, or a piece of paper and a pen in my hand, is my growing passion for capturing things. Maybe I’m teetering towards kleptomania, but I believe our thoughts are too valuable to loose. Our creativity is a unique and valuable gift, and a key problem solving tool.

“Past performance is no guarantee of future success”

No comment on that, with regard to the finance markets at the moment. However,

“The race is not always to the swift, or the fight to the strong, but that sure is the way to bet.”

Extrapolating “now” is a tricky thing to do, but I mentioned that capturing conversations and thoughts allows us to transcend ‘now’. When we are predicting what might happen next, rather than limiting ourselves to current thoughts, we can call on our previous thoughts and decisions. They help to shake us free of any momentary bias, and also provide a check against past predictions.

Keeping a journal is nothing new, people have kept journals and sketch pads since writing began. What is new is the ability to make them more social, to open up those thoughts to others to augment that data. This blog has 192 posts that I can draw on when I’m thinking about productivity, and communication (and social media of course). But that’s not all, there are also 433 comments from people around the world. Likewise I have posted almost 1,000 photographs to Flickr, 95% of them have been commented, notated and tagged by both friends and people I have never met (if we did meet in the last year, there might even be a photograph of you there). That’s not to mention the 30,000 people a month who read the blog and look at those photographs.

Blogging has helped me learn more about my friends and co-workers. Now I am better able to support them and they are better able to support me. If I have a question I don’t know the answer to, I can usually find the right person to ask to get a good answer from. Sometimes I get an answer to a question I didn’t even know I should have asked. The combination of historical context, and a wise crowd, gives me much more certainty in predicting the future.

I mentioned that there was a second way to predict the future. It is a harder path, but one that the most successful companies and leaders follow: If you want to know your future, then create it.

You Can Predict the Future

Benjamin — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 23:19:32 +0000

One of the amazing things about the last few weeks is the number of experts that have surfaced who not only predicted what has happened, but also predicted how it would happen. Amazing isn’t it? To do that must be genius, mustn’t it?

Or must it? One of the things that troubles cosmologists, and others who ponder how we got to be here, is the weak anthropic principle. It runs like this: If things hadn’t happened in such a way as to enable us to be here, then we wouldn’t be having this conversation. As much of a social nicety as it is to say “isn’t it amazing that the two of us are here!”, it actually isn’t. It just is. You see, our very existence functions as a selection effect. If things had happened differently, we might have been a collection of scattered sub-atomic particles. No conversation to be had. Don’t worry, I like you just the same!

It is a bit of a brain teaser, so let me put it another way, then I’ll get to my point. Let’s say we meet when we are 21. You say “what’s the chance that we’ll have a meal together when we are 100?” I have no idea. It’s a tricky question. All sorts of things could happen, some of which are not the kind of happy thoughts one likes to think about in polite company.

Let us say we meet again on the eve of our 100th birthday. Then what’s the chance that we’ll eat dinner together when we are 100? Pretty likely, right? Look, don’t nit pick, it’s just one of those paper thin illustrations. You wouldn’t want to upset a blogger trying to make a point. We are friends after all.

OK, now we’ve got our heads around the anthropic issue, let’s go back to those experts and add them to this mix. Instead of asking two 21 year olds that question about dinner, let’s get 2 million people in a room. A decidedly big room. Now what’s the chance that at least 2 of them will live to be 100 so that they can have dinner together? Pretty high? Barring acts of mass unkindness, I’d say yes.

It is a variation of that adage about the army of chimpanzees. You know the one about a million monkeys typing would eventually reproduce the works of Shakespeare? Although, as one wit noted, now we have over a million bloggers we know that simply isn’t the case.

But I digress. Those experts aren’t looking so clever now, and neither are we. Maybe they just got lucky, rather like a few CEOs out there. You pick up the right rock and you find gold. You see how we fool ourselves into thinking we predicted the future. Of course, I don’t want to detract for the genius that is out there. I’m looking at “The Black Swan” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb on my desk (you could feed my book habit by buying it from Amazon UK or US). Now there’s a smart man. Incidentally that book is partly how the Redcatco name came about. People that successively predict things are either very smart or very ‘lucky’. We listen to them, and we follow what they say.

All of this happens in microcosm inside our businesses everyday. There are some ways we can predict the future, but that is for the next post and after the comments…

Out of Hours - September Gone

Benjamin — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 23:34:45 +0000

There is something of a WOWNDADI blog tradition that I write an end of month wrap up post. This month’s is a little extended and a little late, since September was no ordinary month.

It was not so much because of Web 2.0 Expo and the Digital Mission, although I learnt lots from them, but because of events in the financial world. It gives pause to think.

Having been in both London and New York during the last few weeks, I watched the layoffs in both places at first hand. I’m not going to attempt to give advice on what to do if you have been laid off, plenty of others are better placed to do that. However, it is worth thinking about what you can do before hand.

This week, during Wiki Wednesday at the BCS, I heard the phrase: “out of hours time”. The BCS awards points to members who invest their personal time into learning and development. The points can be used towards qualifications. What do you do with your “out of hours” time?

Clay Shirky (author of here comes everybody) talks about “cognitive surplus”. Society, or more specifically we as individuals, waste a huge amount of time on television. I’d argue more widely that we waste a huge amount of time full stop. Why?

We don’t have a clear purpose, and even if we do, we don’t point our time effectively at it.

If you don’t resemble that statement, then let me tell you that you are someone who is going to change the world, you are almost unstoppable. Whatever the nice folks at CERN discover, as far as our everyday life is concerned, we can’t create or destroy time, we can simply waste it or use it.

Time is much like the very best sale items, once it is gone, it is gone. In this part of the world we to lead very ‘busy’ lives. I use the quote marks advisedly. We are very active-busy, but not very purpose-busy. The idea of packing more things in, like investing some time into learning and development, causes us to throw up our hands in dispair.

I haven’t got enough time!

Now we both know that statement is bonkers. Seriously, it is like a fish in the sea saying it has no water. We have loads of time. We’ve just filled it with things. Creating time can’t be done (although I’m still holding out hope CERN folks!), all we can do is the next best thing: Change how we use it; Swap out some things.

At Web 2.0 Expo both Clay Shirky and Gary Vaynerchuk, in their own way, urged people to ditch the TV and do something else with that time (Gary used a bit more adult anglo saxon in his talk than Clay did in his).

To create the time to learn and develop means giving up other things. But, going back to New York, in today’s changing changeable world, we need to invest in our own learning and development more than ever. We don’t know when we’ll be looking for a new job, or even a new line of work.

Having a broad range of skills, and being in the practice of acquiring new ones, is the best we can do towards keeping ourselves valuable in the market place. All that said, we still need to give ourselves time to relax and enjoy life. Another piece of advice I am trying to take onboard myself.

The Power of Being There

Benjamin — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:40:22 +0000

1… 2… 3… And I’m back in the room. Or more accurately, back in the country. If you want to read about last week’s adventures on the digital mission, then check out my guest post on TechCrunch UK: “21 Digital Companies hit New York..” A big thank you to Mike Butcher for letting my scrawl interweave with his. As you would expect, you can see the week in pictures on via the digitalmission Flickr tag.

It was a most interesting week to be in New York, and I use the term interesting in the very best chinese proverb sense of the word. Walking past Lehman Brothers and listening to the chatter on the street, it felt like I was in the middle of the tumultuous events that threaten the world economy.

It is easy to get thrown off course by events around us, or overly caught up in details. I picked up an iPod touch whilst in New York, and was looking at the applications to download when I spotted an app called “f/8″. You see what I mean? Anyway, I had no idea what the name meant, other than it must relate to photography, since f/8 is a camera setting.

If you are a DSLR fan or an old school photographer, this is familiar territory. If you are not, then welcome to the world of photography, it is surprisingly geeky. There are loads of technical terms and dozens of settings to fiddle with: Shutter speed, ISO, focal length, aperture (f-number of which f/8 is one). A photographer can spend hours finding the perfect settings, fiddling with tiny details to get a slightly better result. F/8 is an application to help with those settings, but more interestingly, it comes from a famous photojournalism phrase:

f/8 and be there

[if you want to know more about photojournalism, there is stunning site here - thanks to @documentally for the pointer] F/8 and be there essentially says forget about the settings - F/8 works for most photographic situations. Instead, focus on making sure you are there. That means rather than fiddling with the camera, notice what is happening. As any photojournalist will tell you, if you aren’t on the scene and you don’t spot the shot, it doesn’t matter how perfect those camera settings are, you’ve missed it.

In today’s digital world, how often are we ‘there’? We have newsfeeds, digital photos, video and a myriad of other things that call our attention to the past or to somewhere else. There is certainly value in those things, but if we become pre-occupied by them, rather than by what is happening right here and now, then we loose our only control over what happens next. We are fiddling with the camera settings, rather than taking the photographs.

There is little productive value in living in the past or fussing about details which might never be relevant. They set context, and provide lessons, that’s good, but turning things over and over rarely helps. Similarly just wishing for things to happen has little value either. Mentally constructing alternative views of possible futures without pulling them into the here and now has, as far as I know, never changed anything for the better.

“I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act. The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.” - Abraham Maslow

Be right here, right now, shaping your piece of the world. Leaders look to the future, sure, but they are aware of the moment and act. Notice the moment you are in, what you are able to do and do it. Don’t sweat the details: F/8 and be there.

How to Write a Speech in 5 Minutes

Benjamin — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 20:59:33 +0000

Making a really great speech or presentation requires a great deal of preparation and practice. In an ideal world, you would always have time to plan, rehearse and perfect your words of wisdom. However, sometimes things don’t work out that way.

A number of times in my speaking career I have had to pull something together at very short notice, either because another presenter dropped out, or because I was visiting an office where the local manager unexpectedly asked me to make a speech to all of the local staff. Here is a simple process to enable you to prepare a speech at very, very short notice (or presentation - its a presentation tip too)…

Getting Started on the Speech

Ideally you will need eight post it notes. If you haven’t got them, just grab a sheet of paper and fold it in half. Fold it in half again. And once more. Quickly, there’s no time to waste! Now, tear along the folds. Either way, you now have eight pieces of paper, and hopefully a pen. You’re ready to star(t).

Who is the Speech for…

Always begin with the audience. What do you know about them? What do they know about you? Write down a few bullet points on the first piece of paper. Who you are, in the context of how it is relevant to the audience.

What is the Speech for…

Does the audience or the person who invited you have an expectation of what you will talk about? Be sure to meet it, or cover it as best you can. Failing to do so will definitely cause angst.

Now think about what will be in the speech. Let your brain free wheel for a minute. Write each of your main ideas on one of the remaining pieces of paper. You don’t want more than seven. Research suggests that we can deal with 7 things in our head at once, plus or minus two. This isn’t the time to go stretching your cognitive abilities, so stick with 5-7 main ideas.

If you come up with more than seven, look through your earlier ideas, then find the weakest one and cross it out, replacing it with the better new one. It is a neat way to refine your speech.

Think back to what you were expected to cover and sanity check what you have written. That clock is still ticking, so…

When and Where

Check how long the speech should be. 7-15 minutes is a great length. It will seem substantial, but shouldn’t drag on. Check where you are. Can you link your speech in to the location? Perhaps based on a piece of local news you have read.

Now, to the when and where of each of your main points. Lay out the pieces of paper. They should fit one of three structures: topical, chronological or spatial. That will give you a natural order for them. In a topical structure you will see that some things must be covered before you touch on the other topics, or that some link together. In a chronological structure you probably want to start at the beginning and more forwards from there. In a spatial one there will also be a natural flow too. You now have your main points arranged in order.

How

Now you have the sequence, think about how you will make each point, and how you will bridge between each point. Jot down your proof points, or for a longer speech your sub-points, on the relevant piece of paper. At the end of the piece of paper for each point, make a note of your bridge to the next point. The bridges should help to create the story, and will make your points more memorable if done well. If you can’t think of a bridge, the next step may help…

Why is the Speech Relevant

Why are you giving the speech? Look back to your first piece of paper where you wrote about the audience. Why are you making the speech, and why are you the right person to give it? This should constitute your introduction. For example,

“As I have started and sold a number of high value companies, Dave has asked me to say a few words about how to create a valuable business, now that you have secured your funding.”

Well, you get the idea. It should establish your ethos (in Aristotle’s Rhetoric this is your expertise and knowledge).

Check back over the pieces of paper with your main points. The ‘why’ should tie them together. You might need to make a quick adjustment if it doesn’t. In the introduction to a longer speech you can also briefly run through the points you will cover in it, if not, just a summary in a couple of sentences. Remember:

“Tell ‘em what you’re going to tell ‘em. Tell ‘em. Then tell ‘em again.”

You now have your introduction and your middle (main points). Finally, think about your conclusion. Ideally it should draw on your key points, without introducing any new ones. It should also provide some sort of call to action: a response or a commitment. You aren’t speaking just to generate warm air, you are there to make something happen. Make it so. Note it down.

Say it!

You now have your completed speech, and read through the points a few times. Congratulations. If you have time between now and speaking, then practice your speech. Nothing beats a rehearsal for finding problems (it also helps with memory). Practice on the taxi driver on the way if you have to, but speak it out loud. The physical process of ‘out loud’ rehearsal is much more effective than just running it through in your head. If you need slides and have time, try this:

Slide 1 - Your speech title and name.
Slide 2 - x. One bullet point in the middle of one slide, with that one point in bullet form. But without the bullet.
Last slide - Copy and paste slide 1. Save it. Done.

If you know of an image that will effectively support your point, it is to hand, then add it. Otherwise, you’re done. Who, What, When, Where, How and Why - a speech in 5 minutes.

Enjoy!

Randomness, Virtualisation and Getting Things Done

Benjamin — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:01:29 +0000

This may be random. For once, I am speechless. Or at least wordless. You know me. That doesn’t happen. Ever. I might go quiet, but that is different from not having something to say. Perhaps it is all the different threads in my head?

There are big Redcatco projects in the wings, new blogs to feed, articles to write and a fair collection of other things to be done too. Is it all making sense, or is it random, like stones on a forest floor.

Do you ever get too many things in your head at once? Perhaps it’s just me, although given the popularity of How to Deal with Being Overwhelmed at Work, I’m not so sure.

When we get overloaded things start to look random. All the gaps get filled, and the patterns that gave us a sense of order start to disappear. Randomness is a curious thing. I’m not talking about the mathematical science of it, but rather its effect on the brain.

There’s a nice review of Nassim Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness” here, which is a great read on the subject. Essentially we try and predict randomness. Its in our nature. Our brains see patterns everywhere, that’s how they work. The only way we can know if a pattern is valid is from its success in predicting future events. However, we rarely wait that long.

Some things that look random are actually patterns. I was trying to get a close up shot of a bee (in relation to “Do your employees dance“), when I realised that often life is only random until you study it carefully.

Getting the picture was either going to involve waiting at a flower and hoping to luck-out, or knowing where the bee was going to go next, and getting there first. After a quick trial, it was clear the former method was going to involve significantly more time than I had planned to spend. I needed to be able to predict the bee’s movements to get to the flower first. That or hope for a matrix-like moment of speed and dexterity.

After watching the bee a while, I came to the conclusion that they were pretty random critters. So much for my pattern-making brain. But then I got a little closer in, and followed one of the more industrious looking fellows. I was just starting get a feel for what he was up to, then ‘whoosh’, he was gone. Ok, on to the next. As I got closer and started to see the world from a bee’s-eye view (minus ultraviolet sight capabilities), I suddenly spotted the pattern. Click.

This bee progressed around in a very orderly spiral, until the lavender flower was cleaned out, then hopped on to the next. The randomness? Well, the bee could see which flowers had accessible pollen and simply ignored those that didn’t.

Have you ever watched someone and thought ‘why on earth did they do that?’ - it may well have been for a very logical reason, part of a well ordered pattern. Until you understand the motives and assumptions athe person is working with their actions will seem random.

Patterns actually make us productive. At least, productive people seem to follow patterns (as a tangential piece in The Economist indicates: “Every move you make“). It might be cause and effect, or simply a correlation, but patterns do bring a sense of order, and a sense of order helps to get more done.

So, how to get order and efficiency out of business overload? Take a leaf out of the computing book. I was writing up a webcast for BusinessTechFeed on Data Center Efficiency, which included a section on virtualization. A very useful technology for making more efficient use of computing resources. Virtualization lets you move from lots of under-utilized machines to one efficient, highly utilized one. The machine runs separate instances that each behave as a fully fledged computer.

Taking the virtualization concept across to productivity, rather than looking at your life as a whole (which is a good thing to do by the way, so don’t stop!), spend a while dividing it down into chunks. What are your different roles and responsibilities? Are there distinct areas to your life? Try writing down a set of objectives for each area, if that is something you haven’t done before. Now try slicing your time into segments for each of these areas. When you are working in one segment, don’t let the others invade it, unless it really is an emergency.

After a few days the technique should result in a fresh level of clarity and efficiency. When everything is thrown together, it feels random and things are hard to make sense of. Separating out the different things helps you to see patterns and order more clearly, and reconnect with their purpose. Remember those stones on the forrest floor. Let me put a few of them off into a different pile. Does the picture make more sense now?

The 9th Habit of Highly Effective People - Look after your data!

Benjamin — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:00:45 +0000

Stephen Covey has already published the The 8th Habit, so I’ll have to put this down as the 9th habit of highly effective people.

These days we have more knowledge than we can comfortably fit in our heads, so we depend on our trusty computers to keep all of that overflowing information safe. From important e-mails, to irreplaceable family photos, or even the music collection to keeps us going through the day. It’s all there in those tiny magnetic particles.

Needless to say, it’s no laughing matter when it goes wrong. Hard disk failures, flat batteries and lost laptops are becoming everyday events. It isn’t that the technology is getting less reliable, it just that we are increasingly reliant on it. That should make the limitations of storing data on a PC or laptop obvious:

When the machine is destroyed, stolen or fails, all of that data is lost (or at least compromised).
Data is inaccessable to others (unless you are doing some form of funky personal file sharing).
Data isn’t available when you are away from the machine or it is off with a flat battery.

These were some of the reasons that IT departments installed LAN servers in the 90s. Data was kept somewhere safe and backed up regularly. You won’t know how valuable your data is until it is lost, and by then it is too late to do anything about it.

A laptop is stolen from the car.

A hard drive fails for no apparent reason.

Data is corrupted by poor software.

A flat laptop battery and a lost power supply.

The list goes on. In the last week I have come across nearly a dozen people who have lost days, if not weeks, of productive time. You might have the most well organised to do lists in the world, but if you loose your data, your productivity goes down the drain.

Data storage continues to plummet in price (see ”the exploding digital universe“), which means we consume more and more, but also that a backup system needn’t be expensive. Consider one of these ways to protect your data:

Back up data onto an external drive.
- External firewire drives are fast, although a little more pricy. A USB drive is fine.
- Store it somewhere safe, but different (a friend down the road?).
- It is no good if you loose the drive at the same time at the computer.
- Consider using encryption to keep the data safe.
Set up a file server or NAS.
- If you have enough machines to make it worth while.
- Ethernet and wireless connected storage systems are affordable.
Back up data with an on-line back up service.
- They are surprisingly affordable.
- Some services double as a way to share files with others.
- You’ll need a decent amount of bandwidth, and the first back up will take a while.

It is all basic stuff, but human nature means that we say “it won’t happen to me.” Trust me when I say that it will. A few hours choosing and setting up a system for backing up all of your data will save you hours if not days in the future. A few more things to think about:

Ensure that you back up often, to minimize what you might loose.
Test that you are actually able restore from the back up.
A backup system is only useful if it is workable, usable and used.

I’ve been pointed to Tom Olzak’s post on TechRepublic: Four reasons to validate your backup processes which has a good rational for checking that your backups work.

Open Learning - Determined People with Tenacious Goals

Benjamin — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 20:29:04 +0000

The Open University learning environment is a technology-mediated communication role model. Even so, the OU still brings learners together for ‘real-world’ events. That has been the reason for a no blog posts this last week - I have been working my little socks off at Bath University, conducting research projects with a few hundred other people.

I was bowled over by the tenacity of my fellow learners. People who had been studying towards their degree for years, on top of their day jobs. People who were still 5-7 years away from getting their professional qualifications (which involve a PhD and chartering for some). This was a group of people who are committed to learning. There again, tenacity is at the very heart of the Open University.

The roots of the OU go back to the 1920’s, when educationalist J C Stobart envisaged a ‘wireless university’. Those words mean something different today - it sounds more like someone using a wifi enabled laptop in the back garden to do literature searches. However, back then it meant using the cutting edge technology of the day to create an open learning platform.

It look a few more decades for the OU to be born, predominantly driven by the tenacity of Jennie Lee (you can read the full story on the OU site). It’s that tenacity again. Today the OU continues a tradition of technology-mediated learning, using social software tools to connect students and tutors to form a gigantic learning organisation. It is the largest Moodle deployment in the world (Moodle is an on-line social-learning platform - think of a blogging, forum and content management system on steroids).

Non-technology industries work on different timescales. A couple of decades working in the technology industry has twisted me into believing that 2 years as a long-time, and 3-5 years is a time window beyond which predicting change is futile. Technology means that software and hardware develop rapidly, driving quick changes. Building institutions and companies takes longer. Much longer. When was the last time you took on a 10 year project? It takes tenacious long-term goals.

The long-term path of the start ups, now grown ups, I have worked with has been relatively predictable. Likewise, the major technology trends of the last few years have been too. Yes, 20-20 hindsight does make predictions simpler, but technology has strong homeostatic tendencies. After all, it is driven by people and people change slowly, if at all. Today, people drive (or hold back) technology, rather than the other way around.

The emerging web-browser and cloud computing model isn’t that different from my early experiences of computing with dumb terminals and mainframe computers. What is new this time around is a greater emphasis on people-centric design. The nature of application and systems design is being changed by rafts of new technologists with user experience qualifications (many of whom studied the same Psychological theories I was wrapped up in last week).

The area of science that I am most interested in doesn’t really exist yet, but it will, because it must. How does all of this technology change the way that we work? How can we build companies that make better use of technology, and technology that makes better use of people? We can’t do all of our learning at school or university anymore. Successful businesses and people will have to make continuous learning part of their very being, just to keep up.

There is still a long way to go in all of these things. It involves big goals. But tenacious long-term goals have always been how big things get done.

Do Your Employees Dance?

Benjamin — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 23:46:30 +0000

Have you studied bees? Our family has fantastic friend, Dave. Dave keeps bees and supplies us with honey from his local hive. The pollen rich honey does wonders for the hay-fever sufferers in the household.

Like most people, I’ve not had much reason to study bees. At least, not until I started studying the psychology of language. Dave’s bees do fascinating things, like building the honeycomb pictured here. Bees are viewed as hyper productive, industrious creatures, working away industriously. The hive is the very model of business, full of busy bees.

But did you know that bees spend a fair bit of their time wandering about aimlessly, and a fair bit dancing too? Bees major product is honey. Producing honey requires nectar, which the bees stumble upon by foraging. This is where the dancing comes in. The dancing gets work done efficiently.

When a bee finds a source of nectar it comes back to the hive and does a ‘waggle dance’ for its co-workers. The dance communicates the location of the nectar, indicating the direction and distance. The dance also communicates the type of nectar, by including a sample of the newly found treasure as part of the communication process. The co-workers then mobilize to bring back the rest of the new find.

It is a process of innovation and discovery. A single bee, with the time to wonder, makes a discovery. It then shares the discovery with the hive. The process maximizes the return on the new discovery, while minimizing unfruitful searching by other bees.

Do your employees dance? Do they have the time and tools to communicate where the nectar for your business is to other employees? Do they celebrate and communicate success? It is as important to the modern business as it is to the bee hive.

It always makes me sad when I hear a business shutting down communication channels that employees use - be it instant messaging, video conferencing or a community forum. In the wake of that decision is a hive of workers with less information to make them successful, and a less productive community.

Internal blogs and wikis and open communication channels (rather than closed point to point e-mail systems) are an essential tool for showcasing the steps to success. Did you just make a big business win? Then make sure everyone in the business knows. Let them know why it was a big win, and what enabled it to happen. Do a waggle dance!

It isn’t just for the benefit of current employees. Hopping back to the bees for a minute, the nature of the waggle dance is unique (if you want to know more, check out Karl von Frisch who pioneered the study of bee communication). If you take a different sort of bee and introduce it to the hive, it will not be understood. Although eventually, after some mis steps, the bees will learn to communicate again.

How are new bees in your hive able to learn the language to communicate with the existing bees? Wikis and blogs provide a place for new staff to come and absorb the culture and language of a business. That gets them productive more quickly. They are called business wikis for a reason.

New employee hire orientation isn’t a one off event. It is about binding people into a community and enabling them to be part of it. That is a two way process, requiring good communication tools.

Bees have a specific place where they can come to dance. For some species it might be at the entrance to the hive, for others it is vertically on the comb, but there is a place.

Does your business have somewhere for employees to dance?

Avoiding a Business Communication Crisis

Benjamin — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:58:17 +0000

Hey, that’s your business! Or it could be. Vandals pulled a large number of BT cables out of the ground in our local town (Camberley), leaving thousands of people and hundreds of businesses without their phones. It will take weeks to repair all of the damage. Sadly, with the increasing value of the copper in phone lines, this sort of incident is becoming increasingly common.

It used to be an issue in developing countries, where a few hundred Kilos of copper were worth a day’s wages. That equation now holds true in Europe as well. Systems do get broken, and good businesses should plan for that - see Seth’s post this week: “What do you do when your systems break?“.

Expect the unexpected isn’t just an aphorism, it is good business productivity advice. Many of these people that lost their phone lists also lost their broadband connection at the same time. That means people and businesses with no phones and no Internet.

Now that copper is so valuable, what’s your communications back up plan? Given that most people have mobile phones, the ability to make calls isn’t lost - it just becomes slight more expensive. Also, with many service providers it is possible to divert a landline number to a mobile one. Watch out for how you activate the divert - if it requires Internet access or the phone line, that’s going to be a problem. For the call centres I used to run, the divert process was automated.

So, what about Internet access? Well, the good news is that mobile data services are becoming more and more affordable, even here in the UK. Another alternative is to know where your local WiFi hotspots are, or have an exchange agreement with another business or friend in a nearby town. That way there is somewhere to go to get those critical e-mails out (or in!), and let people know what is happening, if you need to.

As Seth points out in his post, you also need to give staff (and yourself) flexibility about how to deal with the ‘normal’ day to day business. You may not have access to all of the usual systems and information, but make sure that remains your problem, not the customers.

It’s amazing how dependent us business people are on e-mail and web these days. Services can be vulnerable, so it is worth having a good recovery plan worked out ahead of time. That way you are prepared when things do go wrong, minimizing the impact on productivity.

Future of The Web - Part I - A History

Benjamin — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 21:45:51 +0000

Last night NESTA played host to Tim Berners-Lee, with a talk under the title “Future of the Web“, followed by a Q&A and panel discussion. I’ll come back to the talk, because I want to start somewhere else first: in the past. The history of the web may well provide the best insight into its future. During the Q&A, Bill Thompson, asked a question that reminded me of a meeting I missed a few decades ago.

My brain is great at holding complex, interconnected models, pulling up random associated facts and remembering faces, but my episodic memory is awful. Seriously, ask me what I had for breakfast. I have no idea. May be you have no idea too? Ok, you don’t know what I had for breakfast, but you know what I am driving at. So, when my brain reminds me of things from three decades ago, I pay attention.

A long, long time ago, I opened a very large package. A very, very large package. In one part was something that looked like a typewriter, except for a sad lack of space to put paper or ink in it. In the other was something that looked like a television, but it was completely unable to receive even BBC1 (in the days when we had less than 4 TV channels in the UK). My dad told me it was going to change the world, and that I should figure out how to use it. My dad was smart like that. He still is.

So, I got to work. I fell in love with that box. Most people that know me will tell you I am still in love with its offspring and distant relatives today. However, there is something in particular that captivated me about it. It wasn’t the ability to type in words and get it to do things - although I did use that capability a lot, and made some very good money in the process, thank you. No, the magic moment for me was when I got another, inauspicious beige box, called a MODEM. A clever box of tricks that allowed the computer to abuse a BT telephone line to talk to other computers. That might have seemed a little pointless to most around me back then, but connecting computers together was rocket science. And everyone knows that boys love rocket science.

I could dial into something called a PAD, and from there, I could hop to another pad (landing pad, get it?) and so on, until I arrived at a big computer on the other side of the world. This was in the days when international phone calls were inconceivably expensive, and when the only americans I had seen were in movies. In fact, even the local phone calls to those PADs resulted in a £1,000 phone bill.

Now, strictly speaking, I shouldn’t have been on that system. In fact, I’d been a little creative in getting the numbers and codes to access it. That sort of creativity wasn’t illegal back then, and truth be told, the administrators knew that I was there and seemed quite ok about it. What harm was a kid like me going to do? They sent me nice messages, and we got on ok.

Later, they did start to get a little fussy. So I, and many others like me, started to write programs for our little machines to do some of the things that those big machines did. And much more too. Some of us got a couple of phone lines and MODEMs. We made our systems available for others to dial in to, creating places where they could leave messages for each other and exchange programs. A kind of electronic bulletin board system, or BBS for short. Those phone lines ran at about 1/1000 the speed of the first version of bluetooth - if you think moving pictures off of your phone is slow, you’ll know why there weren’t any pictures at all.

Now, of course, we could have got in our cars and met up, but many of us didn’t have cars. To be frank, many of us weren’t the kind to strike up a conversation with a stranger, or to go out and find people to get to know. We weren’t in the social ‘in crowd’. We didn’t know it yet, but we were geeks. Real geeks.

We exchanged ideas, we explored new ways of using these machines and were generally pretty excited about what we found to do with them. So excited, that we started to meet up face to face, to talk about it all and to swap programs. Then we started to connect our machines together, so that our conversations weren’t isolated in little islands, but flowed like rivers around the world. Mostly, all of this all happened for free, powered by volunteers.

A little while later, I got dragged back to that world of PADs and the systems that belonged to the big people. This time, I was on the inside, as a student and then a lecturer. Those systems were connected together too. A sort of network of networks, or inter-net. Some years later, that was where I first came across hypertext (I’ve written about that before). One of my friends even wrote a program that bypassed the electronic message system and let you send messages directly to another user’s terminal. This was all before the thing that we call the worldwide web.

There’s something about that story. It was all about the people, not about the systems. Together, we steered what happened with the technology, both consciously and unconsciously. A few decades from now, this system I have in front of me, and the Internet it is connected to right now, will seem as alien as that first PC and those early bulletin boards seem now.

Last night Charlie Leadbeater drew some parallels between Internet users and the Levelers, a 17th Century pseudo-political group, who had an agreement to support freedom of the people. I think those early Internet pioneers, the ones who sweated over the fuzzball routers and the ones who ran the BBSs were levelers at heart - creating something much bigger than themselves. Working with high ideals, connecting people in an attempt to build knowledge. It didn’t always go according to those ideals, and some things failed. Charlie said levelers failure was caused by the lack of an economic model. Well, the Internet has an economic model, all be it a very complex one. However, whatever it becomes, it is all about the people.

To be continued…

Communicating Feelings on the Future of the Web

Benjamin — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:03:56 +0000

Two things in one here: A heads up on an event tomorrow (don’t worry, you can still catch it), and an interesting way to look at things.

Tomorrow sees a talk from Sir Tim Berners-Lee (recently voted the most important technology innovator of the last century), focussing in on web science. It is an area I am fascinated by, so I’m chuffed to be going along. Web science looks at the impact of the web on our society and economy and combines a number of disciplines dear to my heart.

He will be joined by Andy Duncan (Chief Executive of Channel 4) and Charlie Leadbeater (author of “We-think“: The Power of Mass Creativity’) for discussion on the role of governments, business and academia in safeguarding the future of the web as an open platform. The session is fully booked, but panic not, there will be a live webcast, tomorrow from around 4pm GMT (or a bit earlier to be sure!). Here is the URL:

http://www.nesta.org.uk/the-future-of-the-web-with-sir-tim-berners-lee-8-july

The NESTA Innovation Edge team polled a number of people about their hopes and fears for the future of the web, and used these to produce a Wordle cloud. I’ve seen a few Wordle clouds recently, and they can be quite thought provoking. It is essentially a word cloud (just like a tag cloud, if you are familiar with those), but more graphically rich.

Take a look and you’ll get the idea. Here are people’s hopes for the future of the web:

And here are people’s fears about the future of the web:

Word clouds are a useful stimulus for conversations. The words, freed from their semantic context, stimulate all sorts of thinking. How about building your own word clouds about your hopes and fears and then see what they tell you? Just go to Wordle - Create and paste in your text.

Here’s the wordle for this blog:

June Top 10 Links and the Month Ahead

Benjamin — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 11:19:51 +0000

For this month, I’m putting a slight twist on the usual top 10 post: I am going to split it between the Top 5 posts here on WOWNDADI and my favorite 5 posts from blogs that mentioned the blog.

Is Broadcasting Something to Shout About?

Benjamin — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:14:40 +0000

What is happening to traditional broadcasters? Who are the new broadcasters? How should we use broadcast media? What is broadcast media becoming? How do companies communicate in the emerging broadcast world order? These were just some of the topics from the Rebecca Caroe/Creative Agency Secrets ”Should Brands be Broadcasters?” event.

It stimulated lots of thinking, and there are certainly some big issues to deal with. The three speakers were:

Charlie Robertson of Red Spider.
Andrew Howells of Zype.
Quentin Boyes of Honeycomb Software.

For those that missed then, Qik’s Mireira Fontbernat vidoed the sessions: Videos from “Should Brands be Broadcasters?”. I’m not sure the event being broadcast via Qik falls into the “ironic” bucket or not. Regardless, very useful, and a sign of the times: One person with a mobile phone can broadcast an event across the globe, receiving questions in real-time from the viewers. It feels a little like the future.

Traditional broadcasters are moving into community building.
The big brands are using their own broadcast media to create interaction.
Individuals themselves are becoming broadcasters (via blogs, vlogs, Facebook, Twitter, …).

Charlie spoke about some of his work in creating more interactive, community-based experiences for broadcasters. Enough to be worth a whole separate post on the nature of community. Andrew talked about Honda’s recent marketing (see the Honda channel on YouTube to see some of their content) and the use of Homechoice (owned by Tiscali) as an interactive TV platform. The fact that a company most known for being an Internet Service Provider bought an IPTV service provider tells you something about the changes afoot.

Of course, the idea of broadcasters and brands having a conversation is really an illusion. The problem with conversations, as Twitter users know, is that they don’t scale well. The reason brands used broadcast media in the first place wass the ability for a few people to reach several million.

There are costs to that efficiency. Traditional broadcasting is one-way. That makes broadcasting efficient for the sender, but not for the receiver. When I watch a broadcast, it isn’t tuned to my needs or where I am at right now. My only control is to turn it off, just as I turn it on. Broadcast is also a time sink. If 100 of my friends start broadcasting even 1% of their life, keeping up with it all would consume 100% of mine. I wouldn’t even have enough time left to do my own broadcasting! Shocking. Some would say that might be a good thing. Just one minute of broadcast video could consume hundreds of hours worth of other people’s time.

When media was expensive to create, there were man barriers - good and bad. Volume was low, quality was (usually) high. With low cost broadcasting, thanks to the Internet and much more affordable video kit, those barriers have moved. Loose a day watching YouTube and you’ll feel how.

New media is blurring the lines between broadcast and personalized two-way communication. I can watch a Qik video broadcast and send comments back to the person filming. With services like Blogstar the producer not only has chat, but they can also turn the camera on the audience members - as I discovered during Phil Cambell’s The Gravity show. It certainly ramped up my participation!

What conversations have, that broadcasting looses, is that ability to listen. Listening creates interaction and context. In a conversation, I can listen to the other person and understand where they are coming from. And perhaps what they want too. I can tailor what I say to take account of what they already know, and better explain what they don’t. That conversation is unique.

A conversation is a kind of negotiation, or a knowledge journey. Traditional marketing fails at this, spectacularly. That is why it wastes so much time (for the receiver and the sender). Being efficient is more about the listening than the speaking, and listening takes an investment of time.

In the workshop I ran this week, looking at creating service level agreements and managing to them, the big take away was the importance of listening. Companies and people are all too keen to ‘get their message out there’. More often that not, a little listening saves a lot of talking. We need some technologies to balance all of this new broadcast media - filtering or switching off is only part of the answer.

When we listen more, we need to do less.

From Low-Tech to Hi-Tech - Lifehacking with SpinVox

Benjamin — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 09:49:24 +0000

It has been a manic couple of weeks - I’ll plead for your forgiveness for the lack of blog posts. My main time sink last week was preparing for an exam at the beginning of this one. It was a very curious experience. Hours and hours with no web, no phone and no conversation. I can assure you that Twitter could have been quite a productivity boost if it were allowed during the exam. I would even have settled for just a few pages from a text book or two.

In today’s hyperconnected world it is all too easy to forget what a few hours of zero distraction, zero access to external information and 100% focus are like. That and writing in volume with just a pen on paper (about 14 sides of A4 in all). My arm is still aching.

Back to business. It is all to easy to see technology as the answer to every problem around us, especially when you spend your life using it to fix problems. Last week we were working on the logo design for Redcatco (things are progressing here at a pace - more new soon). I fired up the computer to make a few changes to the proposed design. It seemed easier to edit the graphic, rather than trying to put what was in my head into words or use my poor drawing skills.

I fiddled and twiddled for ages, much to the annoyance of everyone. I just couldn’t get it looking the way I wanted. Eventually I was persuaded into using a low tech solution. I printed what I had, then got out the scissors and glue. A few minutes later, we had what we were after to send back to the designer.

Technology is wonderful stuff, but not when it is inappropriate. Projects and tools always carry some inherent risk, and if the business return isn’t good enough to cover that, then the user looses out. It is always worth stepping back from a solution and saying “is there a simpler way to fix this?”

One simple piece of technology I am really enjoying is SpinVox. It is actually quite sophisticated, but it happens to be simple from a user perspective - as all good technology solutions are. It takes my voicemails and turns them into SMS messages and e-mail. Let’s take yesterday. At the end of the first meeting of the morning I had 11 voicemails to pick up. I read them as SMS messages on my phone, as I stood on the underground train platform waiting for a train, out of mobile coverage. It took me 1 minute and 59 seconds to read them (just for fun I’d timed myself using the stopwatch on my iPod).

I listened those same messages this morning via voicemail. It took 7 minutes and 21 seconds. For reference also I read them via e-mail, which took 1 minute and 9 seconds. The last e-mail time might not be 100% fair - I was obviously familiar with the messages by then. However, a bigger screen and less button clicks required did make it faster than by SMS. Putting aside the ten minutes I sink into my pseudo-experiment, I processed my voicemails in less than a third of the time by getting them as text. I’d argue I saved even more time than that, as I dealt with them in dead-time. Oh, and it saved me having to write the messages down, for which my aching arm is thankful. A very nice Low-Tech Hi-Tech lifehack!

Never Loose Your Voice Again - It’s Your Future

Are You Paying Attention?

Benjamin — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 20:17:46 +0000

As we are supposedly living in an attention economy (amongst other things), and I am reading a few books on perceptual psychology, it seemed like a good idea to do a quick blog post about attention. I say seemed like a good idea… I got distracted! That’s the problem with all of these things competing for our attention…

But what is attention? Start by thinking of two book ends. On one side are our senses, on the other is our perception of what is going on. Think of your senses for a minute: Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. Thankfully we haven’t entered the era of smellivision yet, so let’s focus on sight and sound.

There are different theories about how we perceive what we see and hear. Some theories say we shape what we sense to fit our knowledge (experience, biases, expectations and the like). Other theories say we perceive the world more directly. Still others say that we perceive ‘wholeness’ - even if there isn’t quite a ‘whole’ to be perceived, we join up the dots (see “understanding the reality of the situation“).

One thing is for sure, we don’t take everything in. Can you remember the time you arrived at work with absolutely no idea how you got there? Don’t worry, it isn’t that unusual. You were still using your senses (notice you didn’t drive into something or fall off of the train station), you just weren’t paying attention.

We can’t take in everything that goes off - our brains are big, but not that big. We have to apply some filters to the information our senses supply us with, to avoid getting overwhelmed. Again, there are different theories about how this filtering might work. It may be early or late in the scheme of things, but it does happen. We ignore most of the things that go off. Of course, you might argue that some people do this more than others!

This is where attention comes in to play, and why there is a whole industry trying to grab it. Attention controls how we apply the limited mental resources we have. There are two forces at work on your attention. On one side is the concious effort to attend to things - paying attention to what someone is saying or to what we are reading. On the other side, there are unconscious processes that direct our attention. These forces are just as relevant to social media and technology as they are to anything else we do.

If we want to read something, understand it and remember it, we need to direct our attention to it. About two thirds of our brain are dedicated to dealing with what comes in through our eyes, and we need nearly all of that to perform the rather tricky task of reading. On the other hand, if some one wants our attention, they just need to grab it, using one of these unconscious forces.

If you see a police car stopped on a multi-lane road in the UK, you’ll notice it is usually stopped diagonally to the traffic. Why? It is being attentionally conspicuous. Based on road safety research, police cars became very visually conspicuous here in the uk, with bright day-glow stripes across the their backs. However, dozens of people each year still managed to drive straight into the back of them when they were stopped. This kind of accident is so common that it even has a name :- LBFS (looked but failed to see). How many times have you looked at something, but not actually seen it?

You see, these days it takes a lot to grab out attention. We might be used to bright colours, but a car diagonal to the road is very unexpected, and grabs our attention. BP succeeded in grabbing my attention this week with this rather clever direct mail piece:

It’s sometimes called the cocktail part effect. When you are at a party there may be dozens of conversations all going of at once, but the second someone mentions our name? We tune into that conversation. Our brains are tuned to spot ‘interesting’ or unusual things - even more than the bright and the loud.

Designers are getting better and better at grabbing our attention, especially in the on-line world. Slightly moving images, changing text, and a myriad of other subtle techniques. At the computer screen, the expanding number of social communications tools are proving more and more to distract us as well. Bings, beeps and boings from incoming e-mails, alerts and updates all compete for our attention. Everyone and everything seems to want a slice of us.

We can’t control all our attention completely, but we can minimise some of the distractions. Turning of audio and visual alerts that aren’t needed. Running the program we are using in full screen mode (if it has one). These are both tricks.

Thank you for your attention - it’s valuable stuff.

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