Twitter played host to a passionate discussion about social media experts earlier this week, kicked off by a blog post:  6 Reasons You Shouldn’t Brand Yourself as a Social Media Expert by Dan Schawbel, who describes himself as “the leading personal branding expert for Gen-Y” – reading the post I would say he’s wrong on most of the points he makes, but  what do I know, I’m just a social media expert.

Suw Charman-Anderson wrote a thoughtful post that provides a narrative on the issues, of which there are many. Picking up from a tweet in Suw’s post:

In the Twitter conversation this morning, @BenjaminEllis said  “@Suw It’s hard for the true experts when people with 6 months experience and no results to show for it call themselves experts too.”

Sadly, the social media scene is full of self-proclaimed experts. As opportunists jump on the TwitterLinkedFaceInMySpaceBook bandwagon, much of Twitter and the Blogosphere has become a torrent of misinformation and blatant  nonsense, most of it promulgated by “experts” – it is frustrating for those that have been making a living, rather than a noise, with the technologies.

Dan’s post says “When everyone in the world is a social media expert it loses meaning” I agree with the sense, but strictly speaking he’s wrong. When everyone calls themselves a social media expert, including people that clearly aren’t, it causes people to question the credibility of people making the claim. At least it should, and that isn’t a bad thing. It also makes it much harder to find the people who are actually the experts. Suw continues:

I can’t think of any other professional field where is is frowned upon to simply call oneself an expert. Indeed, in every other field I can think of, we actively seek out experts. If you have a bad problem with your drains, you call a drainage expert without even thinking about it. If you want to learn about the nuances of the Bard’s great works, you seek out an expert in Shakespeare. If your MacBook conks out, you take it to an Apple expert.

There’s nothing wrong with being an expert in these fields, so why is it wrong in social media?

Now we get to the troublesome thing about being an expert, and it’s a problem that isn’t specific to social media: How do you know you are an expert? How do you know if someone else is an expert?

You start off knowing, roughly, nothing. You learn something. You learn some more things and you start to feel a bit of an expert. You learn a few more things, and you start to call yourself an expert. You learn a lot more things and you realise that you weren’t an expert before, and you probably still aren’t one now. You learn a huge amount more things, and you aren’t so bothered about calling yourself an expert anymore, but everyone else starts to call you one, so you start to call yourself one too. You’ve earned the right too.

I’m trying to gently say that expertise is generally established by a third party. Traditionally, it was a matter of formal qualifications. However, the academic system struggles to keep pace with technology. It will be a while before we see the first degree course in social media, and even the thought of it causes an uneasy sensation in the pit of my stomach, so don’t get any ideas. Academic qualifications aren’t it then, although there are some highly relevant ones.

I jokingly mentioned the word “pundit” as a substitution in the maligned “social media expert” phase. Strangely it didn’t go down too well! Interestingly through, it is one of the words listed under “expert” in my trusty Mac OS X Thesaurus, and whilst I’m in that reference library, here is a quote from the dictionary definition of expert:

In specific fields, the definition of expert is well established by consensus and therefore it is not necessary for an individual to have a professional or academic qualification for them to be accepted as an expert. In this respect, a shepherd with 50 years of experience tending flocks would be widely recognized as having complete expertise in the use and training of sheep dogs and the care of sheep.

Please note, for the avoidance of doubt, someone who got their first sheep 6 months ago, herded them into a pen once using their dog, and tells lovely stories about herding sheep, is not an expert. Twitter account or no. 30,000 followers or not.

There is still the Naive Consumer Problem: Say I need to buy a skateboard. Shocking as it may be, I know very little about skateboards, other than they have wheels attached to a board, and that you skate with them. After talking with a few people that seem to know about skateboards, I quickly grasp that I may be missing some details. The kind of important details that justify a set of wheels costing slightly more than my first car. Perhaps.

I know just enough to know that I don’t know enough, so I rely on other (independent) people to tell me who the experts are. Usually we really on other experts to tells us who the experts are. The nature of social media makes that process hard. As new entrants scramble for links, mentions, follows, retweets and generally anything that will give them credibility – that much needed “social capital” – objectivity flies out of the window, and everybody calls the person with three months more experience “an expert”. Meanwhile, new tools and best practice move on like an express train, on a day without strikes or leaves on the line.

Social media is such a young space that in some areas there may not be anyone with direct experience or knowledge. This is a new frontier, still under construction in many places. Someone once quipped that “everyone wants an expert, even when there isn’t one to be had” – I remember seeing an ad wanting someone with 5 years experience in a web application. I’d been the product manager from the start of its development, and I didn’t have 5 years experience with it.

BenjaminEllis: @euan When I needed surgery that involved going close to my optic nerves, I was looking for someone who was called an expert in the field.

euan: @BenjaminEllis and I was nearly fitted with a pacemaker I didn’t need by someone who was also called an expert.

The nature of expertise means that experts still make mistakes. Expertise is domain specific too. Social media is a huge and vaguely defined area, covering much of what constitutes the web today. I don’t think many would argue against calling Sir Tim an expert on web matters. However, even he says that we know longer understand the web. An expert knows their bounds.

Incidentally, Gordon Brown has appointed Sir Tim Berners-Lee to help “open up” government data. Great news.

Back to a definition then, since finding a social media expert is starting to have all of the characteristics of a wicked problem. The root of the word expert is  ”expertus”, which means to have tried. Trying implies something else: failing. As noted by Charles Cohen at Being-Digital this week, the most valuable lessons come not from success, but from failing.

The advantage of getting into the game early is that you can make mistakes that enable you to learn. That’s one of the reasons that business should get on board now, not later. Another couple of years and you’ll be doing the equivalent of putting animated gifs on your home page in 2003.  The fact that I didn’t “get it” when I first saw Sir Tim’s prototype browser didn’t matter… Two years later and I was building web sites. By the time I was designing connectivity and security for on-line banks, making mistakes was no longer an option, for anyone. The web had matured.

I got to know what worked and what didn’t, not because somebody had told me, but because I had done both. There is more to expertise than just experience tough, back to Suw’s post:

A super-user is not the same as an expert – it’s not about knowing how the tools work, how to make a new blog post or set up a new wiki. It’s a much more nuanced job and involves constant learning from sometimes unexpected sources. I never thought I’d end up talking to psychologists about email when I started as a consultant, but understanding why people are wedded to their inbox helps me to understand the problems I will face when trying to introduce them to a wiki. Being an expert in social media means that you are constantly pushing to understand the non-obvious, constantly questioning the assumptions and the so-called common sense explanations for why things happen the way they happen.

I have to confess that I had retreated to calling myself a social media practitioner recently. It was a vague attempt to make the point that I have “walked the talk” as opposed to just talking it. However, “practitioner” isn’t it, as friends have gently pointed out. Mastery is a process, and doing is just the first step. Being an expert means knowing when to break the rules, and eventually helping to making the rules. That only comes from experimentation and experience.

Perhaps the best question to ask the next expert you meet is “tell me about your failures, and what you’ve learnt from them.” The answer will tell you a lot.

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Google Search?

It isn’t Google though, and it isn’t trying to be Google either. If you type “Benjamin Ellis” into Wolfram Alpha, you don’t get a list of web pages, you get some curious statistics about the names Benjamin and Ellis:

And so on… If you want to really understand what WolframAlpha is about, I suggest watching Stephan Wolfram’s Screencast about it (thanks to @ryancarson/Carsonified for the pointer). Stephan is the man behind WolframAlpha, and the reason for its strength in computational data – as  the screencast shows wonderfully.

Google, on the other hand, is a web search engine which has become so successful that it has become THE search engine. That is a little ironic given that Google is really in the advertising business. Once upon a time there were many different ways of searching the web (and in reality there still are), but Google has come to define the way that we think about ’search’ in the context of the Internet, and what we expect a search engine to do. That’s the power of being a leader.

We’ve even evolved a specific way of interacting with Google that we inflict on other search tools “good places london photograph” “cheap photocopying surrey” – or may be it is just me that does Googlish queries like that? Actually, I’m sure that it is not, based on some of the searches that journalists and bloggers have written trying in WolframAlpha this week.

From Web Search to (Re)Search

No, Wolfram Alpha is more akin to Wikipedia in it’s nature, as Paul Bradshaw points out, but it isn’t that either. Wikipedia is a Wiki. Wikis have an audit trail that enables you to see who made changes and when. Yes, you can click through and see what WolframAlpha used as sources for its calculations, but raw number sources don’t give much of a story.

Wiki entries emerge and evolve organically as people contribute to them. Wikipedia is a means not an end, and very useful if it is viewed as a work in progress. You can click on the “history” tab and see how a page has been modified over time, and who changed fragments of text. There is a discussion page for conversation about the entry, so users can interact without changing it. This kind of background information is invaluable meta-data that gives insight into the provenance of the information, and answers important questions like: Is it controversial? Has it been kept up to date? And so on.

Those same attributes make Wikis great tools for collecting and managing knowledge inside a business, or for working collaboratively with people outside of it. People can interact, make small additions, corrections or deletions. All with a clear audit trail. The collection of knowledge grows organically, and becomes available to anyone with access to the site.

From Data to People

There is something more important hidden in the nature of Wikis. They add a social dimension to information, and to search as well. Knowing who offered a piece of information and where it came from is essential if you need to rely on it. That sounds like a job for social technology.

“when computers were young, people assumed that
they’d be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have
it compute the answer. I’m happy to say that we’ve successfully
built a system that delivers knowledge from a simple input field,
giving access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of
curated data and millions of lines of algorithms. Wolfram|Alpha
signals a new paradigm for using computers and the web.”
Stephen Wolfram, Wolfram founder and CEO

That sounds very nice, but I think it misses the challenge of managing and accessing knowledge. Very little of what we deal with day-to-day is hard, quantifiable data. Even the things that appear to be, quickly crumble under inspection. It isn’t that there are no hard facts, there certainly are, it is that we rely on heuristics like authority to shortcut the process of fact checking.

We are more connected than we ever have been. Twitter, Facebook and even SMS mean we can get a message out to hundreds of friends and contacts in just a few seconds. These days I will usually send complex questions out via Twitter, rather than searching via Google. The answers I get back aren’t anything like those I’d get from a Google, Wikipedia or even a WolframAlpha. They are tailored to me, and I get them in the context of the person providing the answer. If I asked for good places to take a photograph in London, and I get answers from people I know to be brilliant and experienced photographers, then I’m probably  on to a good thing.

Going Real-Time

Search Twitter for answers then? Well, yes and no. Search Twitter, but not for the reason I’ve just given. If you use Twitter search the results you get are “real time” – as new messages are added  the results update “3 more results since you started searching. Refresh to see them.” bleats the results page.

Twitter search values fresh, recent content; Google search values mature, old content. Pages go up in the Google search result rankings based on how many people have linked to the site, and even how long the site has been around and is registered for. That has served Google well, until now.

As the web moves from a giant document archive to interactions on real-time social media, real-time search is becoming the in-thing, and with good reason. There is a danger that Google may have missed the Real-Time Web, and they know it. At their recent (and excellent) Zeitgeist conference Google’s Larry Page admitted they had done a ‘relatively poor job’ in making the most of real-time trends – even praising Twitter for cornering the market. Twitter isn’t standing still, they are already discussing their plans to extend their real-time search beyond Twitter itself.

Search is evolving, after a long period with little progress. It is no longer one-dimensional. Whilst you can entertain yourself with the Top 10 Easter Eggs in Wolfram Alpha, or these 10 even better ones, it is a tool that aims to give one-time answers, with data. Google will help you find pages on the web. Twitter search will let you explore real-time conversations (or monitor the most popular topics of the moment). Tools like Yahoo! Answers make use of user contributed answers to answer questions. Microsoft are jumping in with a new tool for search as well.

The End of The Beginning

It isn’t clear that Google’s reign is anywhere near over, much as that makes for a good headline. While WolframAlpha might not knock it from the top spot, there is a huge opportunity for new technologies that can embrace the real-time nature of today’s Internet, and link into social concepts related to trust and relevance.

In the mean-time, there is plenty of opportunity to explore a range of search tools to see if they give you better results than the obvious.

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Argue to The New from The Old

Too often change makers expect people to jump from A to B on the basis that “B is better for all of these reasons about B”. From marketing materials to social innovators, from business managers to parents, that’s what you see. Here’s the thing: That kind of approach is highly unlikely to create change.

Switching to the new approach requires starting from the existing one. Many of the social media advocates I meet and debate with describe a wonderful utopia of conversation and information flow, based on its use. It’s great. However I don’t know of a single business that can “jump” to that spot. Whilst social media will definitely change the way that businesses interact with customers, and even how intellectual property is managed, businesses have to operate within today’s legal frameworks. As the old joke goes, ”Well, if I was going to there, I wouldn’t be starting from here.”

You Must Get There From Here

I’m absolutely not saying that new methods shouldn’t be persued. Quite the opposite. They have to be, but within today’s frameworks. That means the transition isn’t always smooth. Ask David Schlesinger of Reuters. Recently he broke a news story via the Twitter service, posting it before it had hit the Reuter’s wire (see the story on Silicon Alley Insider - although David’s own post explains more):

I’ve been tweeting from the World Economic Forum, using the microblogging platform Twitter to discuss the mundane (describing crepuscular darkness of the Swiss Alps at 5 a.m.) or the interesting (live tweeting from presentations). Is it journalism? Is it dangerous? Is it embarrassing that my tweets even beat the Reuters newswire? Am I destroying Reuters standards by encouraging tweeting or blogging?

(These aren’t rhetorical questions – I’ve been challenged by many people who would answer those questions as No, Yes, Yes, and Yes! I answer them as Yes, Potentially, No and No.)

Although the example is based on twitter and journalism, it applies across many domains, and David illustrates it well. Effective change pushes at the barriers of the existing system. It doesn’t ignore them. It tests them, validates them, and then expands them where they are found wanting.

That kind of change is adaptive. It promotes growth. If you aren’t adaptating and changing, growing, then be sure that others are. Very soon you’ll be left behind. As David puts it:

If I don’t beat the Reuters wire with a live tweet because I deliberately hold back, someone else will. If I don’t beat the Reuters wire because I’m slow or inattentive, someone else will.

Taking No Risks Is The Best Way to Guarantee Failure 

Several times a week I have conversations with businesses terrified about using social media, “what happens if we let something out via a blog by accident?” It’s a valid concern, especially for a listed business (if you are in any doubt read the  SEC rules on Selective Disclosure - nothing like a multi-million dollar fine to focus the mind). Business do have to operate within today’s legal frameworks. However, many of the “barriers” that traditional businesses market and communicate under are not really barriers at all. If they are tested, they will be found wanting. The old rule was: “Appear great.” The new rule is: “Be great.” Actually, it isn’t a new rule, it is just one which mass media allowed to be bent for a while. Social media (generally) makes things more transparent. Are you ready for people to see inside?

The Best Way to Look Great is to Be Great – One Step at a Time

Here is the rub: This applies at the personal level too. Let’s say I want to be fantastically fit and wonderfully organised. It’s easy to see the benefits of the new system. The “position B” looks like a great place to be. I read the fitness books. I read the books on being organised. And what happens? Well, nothing of course. That’s not how you change from A to B. Start with A, find the boundaries and push them.

Maybe you don’t feel you can be organised? find a place where you almost are – a routine that exists already – and build from that. Every Saturday morning I drive the kids to a class, where I wait for them to finish. It was the perfect place to plan in a weekly review, looking back at my diary and planning the next week. I was there already, I just needed to push. I know I’m not going to make it out to a gym, but I know that I can choose to walk. Walk up the stairs. Get off the train a stop early (see this lovely post on the London Underground Tube Diary). Then I might even be ready to run too.

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A Tortoise Enclosure

John Cleese talks about creating an enclosure, a safe space where it is safe for the tortoise – our creative mind – to come out of its shell without its head being knocked by a passing object. An oasis in which we can be creative – free from interruptions and distractions (like the constant drip of incoming emails and other interruptions):

“You have to create boundaries of space, and you have to create boundaries of time.”

Boundaries, and the space that results from them, are essential. For me, that means taking a walk out of the office – either in my local woods, or wherever I can get away to. For others, that might be closing the office door or putting in ear phones and playing music.

After space, the other dimension is time. Creating time boundaries, a defined starting time and a stopping time, is actually great for productivity and creativity. After a brief twitter exchange with Amanda Rose (organising the Twestival for charity:water) and Bastian Lehmann  I realised I haven’t specifically blogged about time boxing (although it is the idea behind “…see what you can do in an hour“). Setting aside a fixed chunk of time enables you to focus on getting something done.

Learning New Things

The talk touches on learning, and that is really my subject here. John says:

“To know how good you are at something requires exactly the same skills as are required to be good at something.”

He then states that in reverse: if you are not good at something, you lack the skills to know that you are. A much better way of stating something I often have to tackle: We don’t know what we don’t know.

“Most people who have no idea what they are doing, have absolutely no idea that they have no idea what they are doing.” John Cleese.

The Science of Lifelong Learning

Behind his usual dry humour, he is making a very serious statement. Learning, life long learning, is an essential skill. We need to be like tortoises, not like hares, when it comes to our education. I was brought up in a generation where we hared our way through school, and for the privileged few, university. A learning sprint, then work. The pace of change in society and business, and the speed at which new knowledge is being created, means that is no longer sufficient. Learning must now be a life long process. Like the tortoise, we need to plod on, in a steady and sustainable way. As John Cleese says, again with his unique humour:

“I try, today, to learn something new. Each day I want to learn something new – because I am very, very old… and I’ll be dead soon. So, I want to be as well informed as I can possibly be, when I die.”

Part of what drove me to start Redcatco was the concept of build learning organisations empowered by technology . Disparate communities linked by what is often called collaboration or social software today.

Businesses need to be places where people learn new things everyday. The only sustainable way for that to happen is as a result of people gaining knowledge from each other by sharing it. Those learners then build on that knowledge and share it in turn. That process is at the heart of innovation and development, from design and marketing to effective sales. I believe that learning best takes place in a social context (and Bandura and a number of other Psychologists would tend to agree).

This week I attended a panel at the RSA on the subject of life long learning, looking at what new research, especially in neuroscience, can tell us. There are lots of questions: What is the scope for lifelong learning, and what are the best methods to support it? We live in an ageing society, where people are staying in the work force for longer and longer periods of time. Can we still learn, even when we are old? Is the explosion in brain training (from 10 minute newspaper mental workouts to Kawashima’s brain training game) based on good science?

The speakers included Andrew Pollard, ESRC Institute of Education; Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL; Paul Howard-Jones, University of Bristol; Usha Goswami, Centre for Neuroscience in Education, University of Cambridge; Matthew Taylor (Chief Executive of the RSA); and was chaired by Tom Schuller, Director of IFLL -  the Inquiry into the Future of Lifelong Learning. The session was recorded – will be on the RSA website in due course. You can read Matthew Taylor’s blog post on the evening too. 

From my own investigations of brain plasticity (the ability of the brain to adapt and change), I know that understanding has changed dramatically in the last few years. Developments like Project Prakash (which restores sight to people who with life-long blindness) has shown that our brains can learn and relearn significantly later into life than previously thought. 

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, UCL institute of cognitive neuroscience, asked if it was meaningful or helpful to reduce accounts of educational events to neural level. All the current “brain training products” are sold with the promise, but there have been no randomised, controlled trials on most of them. She talked about an article from Weisberg et al, “The Seductive Allure of Cognitive Neuroscience“, from 2008 which shows an interesting psychological phenomenon: we are suckers for pseudo science. We fall victim to specious explanations. Adding “brain words” into a bad explanation made people believe it more. Sarah-Jayne finished her talk with a slide of images of developing brains. While scientists used to think brain development stopped early in life, scans show that the brain actually continues to develop for decades. 

Andrew Pollard argued from a very  different perspective, saying that we need to acknowledge the place of biography and identity in the learning process. It can’t just be studied at the neurological level, although such study does help – a point that all the other speakers seemed to agree with.

Matthew Taylor hypothesised that neuroscience will make a huge difference to our lives. The only threat is that there is too much hype around neuroscience. By the way, the same could be said for social media and Web 2.0 as well. What are the things that give us a desire to learn? “Collaboration and the use of technology are the meta-learning skills that will be critical to life long learning.” We can learn from arcade games. If we get up to 85% we are motivated to try again. How many people in schools are at that point? We need to keep ourselves at the point where we are doing well, but know we could do a bit better. Then we are motivated to try.

Usha Goswami, centre for neuroscience, University of Cambridge (who specialises in developmental dyslexia) talked about the developmental origins of flourishing. It is a well know list, including warm, responsive, contingent care and a family embedded in social network. I think that actually extends out to businesses that want to be learning organisations. They need to be supportive environments, with good networks into a broad community that can support their learning.

New research will and should be more interested in the emotional self regulation system. Early capability makes later learning more efficient. So  enhancing early capability at the outset of learning also increases the complexity of what can be learned. Small differences in perceptual systems can make big differences in the developmental trajectory. Think about a ship going off course. 1 degree off course, caught early, makes little difference. If it isn’t caught for a long time, you are miles from where you need to be. Early intervention is important – something else that extends out to be a business truth as well.

The interventions which promote cognitive reserve and resilience education might surprise you. It is a case of use it or loose it, another reason that we should be lifelong learners like John Cleese – learn something new everyday. Another very significant factor is physical exercise. Yes, you heard it. Before you go chasing after those cognitive enhancing drugs, get out for a walk or a run. Neurocognitive activation or cognitive training may be useful (i.e. brain games), but it really remains to be determined. What is known is that poor nutrition and poor quality of sleep can impair cognitive function. So, if you want to learn well, eat well and rest well too.

Paul Howard-Jones,  University of Bristol,  asked if brain training can help. There is research to show that practice on a cognitive function can improve that cognitive function, the bigger question is does that generalize out to other activities. Does your executive team being great at Sudoku mean that you are going to be better at strategic planning? The ACTIVE Study (Willis et al., 2006) showed some improvement in  ”fluid intelligence.” That is a good indicator of how well you will do academically.  Jaeggi’s results showed that some training improved working memory and fluid intelligence, so there is the possibility to produce brain training products that do work, but products on the market today have insufficient published evidence. Again, Paul noted that exercise helps with learning, academic achievements and motivation. Psychology is the link between neuroscience and education.

The Q&A was lively, with Peter Cook asking about “learning, unlearning and relearning” for businesses – something institutions like banks are going to have to do quite a bit of after recent events. One point that came up is that if you believe that there are hard neurological limits, you are actually less likely to reach them. Disposition and agency (believing in and taking responsibility) are critical learning factors. Likewise, learning is better when there are discussed objectives and clarity.

The word education literally means to bring on, in the sense of “to bring out” or “lead on”. It is something that we can continue to experience, and to expect for others, for the duration of our working lives, at the very least.

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We have the technology!

As it turns out it is very easy to build a blogging mirror, and there are a number of different ways to do it. It is useful not just for blogging, but for anyone who has to produce a large amount of text content. Sometimes it is just easier to talk, rather that type. It leaves our brains free to think great thoughts, without having to try and remember where the ‘j’ key is, or check the that the spacebar is still working after the last cup of coffee was spilt on it. Unless you are a touch typist, you can talk faster than you can blog (see the figures in IM or E-mail? How to get your point across?).

How can you turn your speech to text? Speech recognition software. This is another one of those technologies that will become a more and more familiar part of our lives over the next decade. The major OSs already support text to speech (reading text) and speech to text (voice recognition). Both OS X and Windows (at least Windows XP on my tablet PC) have some of these features built in, even if a little hidden away in the accessibility settings. You’ll need a good quality mic, and a reasonably quiet environment.

Beyond what’s in the box.

The built in software isn’t always been the best – it can’t always keep up with full speed speech, and can take a while to train. In the case of OSX, it is for controlling menus, rather than transcription. There are more specialist applications around that out perform (and predate) bundled software. The most well known of these is Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking software. These packages give very high performance and they work in even tricky application areas, such as legal dictation.

Putting it in the cloud?

There are other routes too, for example Internet or phone network based services. You don’t need to buy anything, it lives out “in the cloud” My favouroute example is Spinvox (see “Never Loose Your Voice Again”), which allows you to call a dedicated number and then dictate a short memo. This is converted and emailed to you. It is a great way to capture thoughts, or send yourself reminders, when you are on the run. A quick phone call, utter a couple of sentences, and then relax in the knowledge that your thought is captured and waiting for you in your inbox when you get back on-line.

There are ever more options, such as commercial transcribing services. The wave of outsourcing and global connectivity has made these services more affordable by providing access to lower cost skilled labour (see what Matt Cornell did with $100 a while back). You record your speech as a wav or mp3 file, then email it  or upload it to the service. They usually email the results back to you after a few days.

Speak once, read twice.

For all of these methods, you’ll need to set apart a little time to proof read it and correct the inevitable mistakes. If you talk technobabble like me, a 100% transcription is very unlikely – I even mistype myself. Unless you are a 100% accurate typist, this is something you would have had to do anyway.

Mirror mirror on the wall…

So, there you go, a blogging mirror! Perhaps you should put one in your entrance lobby? The great thing about converting speech to text is that it can be archived, searched, sorted and annotated to anyone’s heart’s content. Combine it with any of the ways of keeping a record and you get to reap the benefits of the sort of blogging mirror I started out thinking about. You can look back on your thoughts and ideas and see how they have evolved, building on what you have learnt and marking your progress.

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After every difficulty, ask yourself two questions:

‘What did I do right?‘ and ‘What would I do differently?‘

- Brian Tracy

The gap between Christmas and New Year is a time of reflection and planning for me. It is a time for going a little slower, a time for looking back over the year. A space to think about what I have learnt and what has been achieved. It is a time for looking forward to the year ahead too, thinking about goals and new projects.

The transitions and pauses in presentations and speeches are one of the keys to a great delivery. The transitions and pauses in life can be used to the same effect. The gaps aren’t there simply to cram more things into. Sometimes they are meant to be gaps. Pauses to be appreciated. A chance to notice little things that would otherwise be missed.

It is hard to make many predictions for 2009, other than that it will be very different from 2008. The world will remain competitive, but the terms of that competition will shift subtly. Knowledge will be as important as ever, and social software will continue to become an increasingly central part of our personal and work lives.

The shifts will remind us that people are more important than systems and processes. That communities create more sustainable change than individuals. That reflective learning wins out over blind striving, in the long run at least. Notice the little things, because the little things are often the ones that cause the biggest changes.

Love the gaps. Use them well. Even if it wasn’t a great ‘08, you can still plan for a fine ‘09. Plan it well, but leave some gaps.

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The Pitchers

You can see the pitch videos in all their glory here on TechCrunch (and my photos of NewsPepper / TechFluff.tv’s  Hermoine Way filming them here). I’m not going to say much about the companies themselves, watch the pitches or visit their websites if you want to know more :-  BookingBug, CardCode, Jupidi Date-Coach, Rendezviewonline, Socialibrium, Soundcloud, Quick.tv and Worldeka - a very broad range of company types!

Here are my thoughts on giving effective pitches, based on watching the companies in action (interesting to compare with  The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Pitchers from last time).

Tackle The Obvious

In any situation there will be some obvious questions. Make sure that you head these questions off by answering them or neutralising them (by making them irrelevant). The best way to find out what these questions are is understanding the interests of you audience, ideally by sounding out some friendly advisors who have a similar perspective. If you are pitching your business to an investor, they’ll want to know how your business is going to make money and increase in value. Pre-empt any objections you are likely to encounter, and handle them up front, and positively! 

Win The Audience

In a 90 second pitches there isn’t enough time to convince your audience what a wonderful person you are. Actually, people do a worse job of this given more time. Win the audience over by proxy: Get a laugh or get to you will make my life better. If you can do that, you’re likely to seen as a good egg, even though we’ve don’t actually know you. Make sure we can see the benefit (to us). Soundcloud used a recorded testimonial from Hammer (aka MC Hammer) to kick off, which won the crowd’s attention. There was more social referencing, in listing the company’s big name investors. Nick Bell, from Quick.tv , used a shock joke to very good effect and won the audience with laughter – Nick went on to win the evening’s voting.

Get The Good Stuff in – Early

CardCode got the biggest reaction and cheer for something that wasn’t in their 90 second main pitch: that they had built a QR code reader for the iPhone. It only came out during the Q&A. In a real-world elevator pitch, you don’t know when you are going to run out of time, so don’t leave your most compelling benefits until the end or for next time. If you do, their might not be a next time. Be sure you understand what people are most likely to get excited about, and get it in early. 

Be Conversational – Not Corporate

By conversational I mean two way communication, look at how your audience is reacting. Frame things in a way that engages people as individuals (avoid this list of phrases as a minimum: most annoying business speak phrases in the UK). Watching the crowd’s face during Socialibrium’s pitch was telling. The sizzle and the human element was missing. Jupidi’s Date-Coach pitch was very human, perhaps overly so! It got laughs and silence (intense listening!). Both apps were people-centric, but only Jupidi told the story from a human perspective. Socialibrium spoke from a business/corporate angle. Whatever your product or service, always talk about it’s emotional impact. You’ll get listened to more.

Where Were We? Oh… Don’t Get Side Tracked

You only have a short time, be polite, but don’t beat about the bush. This isn’t the time to get distracted or fall down a rat whole. Mike gave (most of) the speakers a “30-seconds to go” prompt. Each speaker dealt with that differently – some were quite distracted by it. Don’t be put off by time running out or by interruptions. Use your time as best you can. If you have 90 seconds and you spend 5 seconds of it lost in commentary about somethingelse, then that’s 5% of your time wasted. Whenever you are presenting, don’t make interuptions any bigger than they need to be. Deal with them if they need dealing with, but then get straight back on track.

Be Concise – Keep It Simple

An elevator pitch isn’t the time to be wordy or elaborate a complex idea. You might feel compelled to talk about the unique object-oriented approach to PHP coding that you used to build your app, but do I really need to know about that to get why your product or service is compelling? If I do, then you better go back and redesign it, because your heading towards a sales and marketing fail. Most struggling start ups I have encountered were held back because they didn’t have a good, solid elevator pitch. It usually took several hours to figure out what it was that they did and why it was beneficial enough to purchase or invest in. That isn’t a receipe for business success. 

Last, but not least…

Have a compelling call to action at the end of your pitch. What’s next? A trial? A cash investment? Tell friends about the company?

Not a bad set of pitches, but I’m sure each of the companies will walk away with lessons to be learnt. Nick Bell of Quick.tv had the added benefit of walking away with a nice bottle as a prize!

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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.

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Where Does Innovation Come From?

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.

Where Does Innovation Go?

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 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 innovation.

“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.

How Do You Keep Innovating?

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.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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?

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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.

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.

• 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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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…

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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:

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Top 5 links

1. Getting Organized by Mark of Productivity 501 featuring interviews with myself and a number of other productivity bloggers. An epic post with some gems in there.
2. Blogger Advocacy – Employ Yourself by Steve Lawson. A different mindset for solo workers.
3. Links of Interest  from Productivity 501 – featuring Speeding Your Email.
4. Karl Bunyan, who was on the marketing panel at the social media business: blog post about the event (glad you liked the photo Karl).
5. The Successful Blog Directory welcome to you if you found the blog this way.

Following on from Five Quid and a Crate of Beer – Starting the New New Business it was interesting to read the New York Times article yesterday: no flotations this quarter (US side at least). The world is changing. Speaking of which, check out this post to see how social media is getting in on the recruitment process works:  ”pick-me“ - and fill in the survey while you are there.  I think that interviewer is going to be in for a surprise, unless of course they’ve already read the post!

The coming month is busy from an events perspective, so just the highlights: On Saturday the 4th of July is MediaCampLondon. Registration is free and it is a great opportunity to experience an unconference first hand. I look forward to catching up with some familiar faces, as well as meeting some new ones. Then on July the 10th is TechCrunch Pitch, I’ll be there watching the 10 slides company pitches/presentations. Should be interesting.

Lastly, Saturday and Sunday 19-20 July 2008 in Birmingham is WordCamp UK. The first Wordpress WordCamp in the UK and a great opportunity for the Wordpress community to get together. Book yourself in quick (register here). Not only will I be at WordCamp UK, but redcatco are an event sponsor, as well as providing the audio setup, we’ll be producing some podcasts of the event, if all goes to plan.

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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.

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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!

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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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• 3G Support
• More Countries
• Enterprise Support
• 3rd Party Application Support
• And…. GPS!

Following on from the post a few days ago that mentioned the iPhone (It’s the User Experience as much as the Technology!) it is pretty clear these days that Apple is after the business user. They have provided integration with Exchange e-mail, so you can get your corporate e-mail on the run, and they are creating a very compelling application development environment, which includes a top notch simulator to test out apps.

There is a huge deal of promise in mobile devices to increase productivity, but not without challenges. Lots of different platforms and handset incompatibilities to overcome (see Mini-bar Meet Up – Some New Technologies). Either Apple or Blackberry, or both of them, are likely to crack this one in the next few years.

As I am in the process of choosing a new phone, this is all of great personal interest right now. Apple has been enabling location aware applications, and demonstrated connecting your position and your address book to enable you to locate nearby contacts. I also expect we’ll see more and more social applications coming to the iPhone (there are already a number of blogging apps). The Apple Appstore will enable easy distribution of applications and be in a huge number of countries. Apple also introduced the secure delivery of enterprise custom applications via their own intranets to authorised phones.

Will the Blackberry keep up? In terms of raw handset sales, the iPhone hasn’t flown off the shelves quite as fast as some expected. That good sized user base is key for good support and an a healthy application ecosystem, and there Blackberry has a lead – so far.

That said, Apple users are used to being in the minority from the desktop world (especially at the hight end, according to this report). There too, Apple has been making in roads into business. The Mac might be in the minority, but it seems to be the tool of choice for productivity addicts both at home and in the office – judging by the readers of this blog at least.

All worrying stuff for Microsoft, although given the Yahoo activity, they probably have bigger fish to fry, of the Google variety. They also have some tricks up their sleeve too, but that is for another day. Microsoft have the tablet PC format, which is proving itself in many business applications. The iPhone now have very good support for document reading, and makes good use of the touch screen, but I like having something in between my MacBook Pro 17 inch and the iPhone – the Samsung Q1 I’ve been using is just right. Bring back the Apple Newton (for those old enough to remember that).

Apple also introduced a cloud-based service – MobileMe – which syncs between different devices and enables synchronised e-mail for those of us that don’t have our own Microsoft Exchange servers. It works with PCs (outlook) as well as Macs. It also gives a slick web interface to all of the functionality, and integrates with iDisk as well. It might make for a nice disaster recovery mechanism for solo-workers or small/medium businesses. The usual cloud-based service caveats apply of course. It is $99 per year and there will be a free trial from release in July. Today I use Plaxo to provide this syncing for me, but I’m watching them carefully, post acquisition.

As a side note, it was also nice to see a UK technology company featured during the event (with their Band app, and yes there is even an actual band that use iPhones for their music). A Spanish company was featured too, so a bit of European flavour! Roll on July 11th, when all this should be in our hands…

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“I have nothing against iPhone. It’s great,” says Manjit Singh, CIO at Chiquita Brands International Inc. “But we’re a BlackBerry shop, and I don’t think iPhone brings anything new to the table. It has a great user experience, but that’s all.”

From Computerworld: iPhones trickle in the enterprise (emphasis mine).

It really does explain much of the error in corporate IT these days. Web 2.0 consumer services know this, and the next generation of users coming into business expect this: It is all about the user experience. I have used and deployed some awful tools in the past. I will never do so again. They can near bankrupt productivity, be it an information tool for getting things done or an expenses or payroll system.

Let’s say you have 100 employees. If a tool saves a member of the IT department an hour a week, but costs each member of staff just 60 seconds a week, you have lost productivity – and wasted time and money. What if you have 1,000 employees? Think about it.

If you spend a hour downloading, setting up and learning to use a new task management or GTD tool and it saves you a minute a week, it is going to take over a year to get a payback on it. I’m being kind here and assuming the tool stays the same for a year. How many times have you changed your personal productivity system in the last year, or spent time fiddling with new software?

I’m not saying avoid new technology, quite the opposite. If businesses are going to be productive and effective, then they must innovate with the Information technology they use, but it should be from the perspective of delivering productivity not technology. I see a new generation of workers who will bring change, and an older generation who are demanding it. There will be no mercy for IT departments or businesses that get in the way. Technology is meant to improve productivity, not get in the way of it.

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Without further a do… episode II of the WOWNDADI Podcast:

[display_podcast]

If you would rather read than listen, that is quite understandable! Here are the podcast notes:

Podcast II – Bootstrapping

• Looking at bootstrapping – starting to make change, and planning. Or, looking at it another way, moving from accidental to intentional – making a concious choice.
• Bootstrapping is the best way to start – using the choice to speed up progress as the starting point. I’ve tried all sorts of other methods, but you generally end up over committing to yourself with them.
• Start from where you are, with what you have.
• As human beings we have an amazing capacity to create change – check out the biographies of people you admire for some inspiration.
• We have an unusual ability, which is ‘meta-thinking’, the ability to think about thinking, and to plan. It is a capability worth using more! Step up a level and take control.
• We can even change the shape of our brains, through study and effort (as brain scans of London taxi drivers have shown).
• Change comes at a cost – the taxi drivers had to dedicate a year of their life. You need to commit to change and investing in it. There is no point starting unless you intend to carry on and finish.
• Bootstrapping means starting with what you have – the assets and the talents you have to hand – and maximising the return or impact of applying them.
• Initially the only thing you can do is to rearrange that, unless there are other resources you can call on (friends and co-workers are good).
• The initial investment is time and commitment, just as with the taxi drivers.
• Write time in the diary, right now, that will be used for planning and improvement.
• Put it in as the first priority. Feel that you can’t make the time? You don’t manage your way into a crisis, you get into a crisis through lack of management and planning. It is a worthwhile investment.

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At the time, networks were new and exciting things – they were the web 2.0 of their time. Ethernet, Bob Metcalfe’s technology, had some unusual properties, which are still true nearly 30 years on, now that it connects almost every computer in the average office:

• Everything ON an Ethernet network is connected TO everything on the network (hold that thought).
• All connections are equal, in as much as it didn’t matter where you connected, you got the same.
• Everything on the network receives everything sent to the network (this one has changed slightly).

Compared to point to point or ring based networks most of us fought with at the time, this was revolutionary stuff. Metcalfe asserted that the value of such a network was the square of the number of nodes on it: n^2 (or n x n for the benefit of Windows calculator in basic mode). A picture explains better:

Matcalfe’s law

Matcalfe’s law has been held up along side the likes of Moore’s Law as the foundation of Internet growth, but there are at least a couple of problems with that:

• A. It was never really an empirically proven law.
• B. If it was, we have well and truly broken it.

Alan points to some of the reasons for that, but I’d like to dissect it another way, in thinking about social networks and social media. There are some implicit assumptions in Metcale’s law:

1. All nodes start equal (a node here could be a computer, person, etc…).
2. Every node is equally connected.
3. The interaction of the nodes does not change their value (all nodes stay equal).

If these three things aren’t true for today’s Internet or for social networks, then Metcalfe’s Law probably does not apply. Are they true? Do they reflect a network with people as nodes? One by one:

1. In today’s Internet, as with many things, it turns out that not all nodes are equal. In fact it is often an inverse power law, or a 1/n rule. You see this with blogs, where a small proportion account for the majority of traffic. On most computer networks you have desktop machines (clients) and servers. In people you have introverts and extroverts. Definitely not all equal.
2. The bandwidth or connectivity between nodes is not just about how much is available, it is also about how much is used. We may be able to phone each other, but do we? Also, today’s networks, social or otherwise, have nodes that are connected to more than others – be it Scoble or a Google server. This is the most asymmetric part of social networks and the Internet today.
3. Transactional models have made a huge difference in Psychology. They apply equally well to social computing. The way that nodes (or people!) interact with each other changes their value, and how they interact with other nodes. I start commenting on a blog, I change its value to others. This interaction is one of the very dynamic things in the blogosphere. A complex dynamic, but a key to the value.

A Different Law of Social Media Networks?

By the way, I’m not throwing stones at the law, that would be far too fashionable, as a quick search would show! Two related laws, which Alan picked up on are Sarnoff’s Law (for broadcast networks – their value is proportional to the number of viewers, nice straight line stuff) and Reed’s Law (which is highly exponential, essential saying that Metcalfe’s law understates the value of a network). Somewhere inbetween Sarnoff’s Law and Reed’s Law is the value of a network. Remember, all of these Law’s say that the value is proportional, we aren’t talking absolutes – we can’t say your network is worth “12″ – whatever the units for such a measurement might be.

It was the thinking around uncapped exponential models which caused much of the dot com madness – the myth of infinite scale and near infinite value from huge scale. The reality is that networks actually reach a point of diminishing returns. Some have argued for an inverse of Metcalfe’s law for social sites. It is interesting to think about why this is, at least from looking at computer networks:

• Broadcast noise – this is the reason really big (Ethernet) networks don’t work well. Broadcast packets which go out to everyone, if you get too many devices on the network, sending too many, you end up spending your whole time trying to take it all in. Nodes have no processing power left to get processing done or to send data. This is probably familiar to Twitter addicts! For broadcast media to be two way requires ‘turn taking’ and that gets harder as there are more involved.
• Finite (global) bandwidth. Bandwidth is finite, based on technology and physical infrastructure (if you want to argue this one, go and look at how many under sea cables there are/aren’t). As you add more devices, they share than bandwidth pool, however it is constrained. That means less and less information can be sent. Think of it this way, what happens if you open 100 web pages at once, or if you had 4,000 friends and a single phone was your only means of communication.
• Networks in networks. The Internet provides universal connectivity – pretty much everything is connected to pretty much everything, give or take the occasional blip and governmental intervention. However, the network we experience is not the servers and routers that make it up, it is the applications on them. Web servers running blog software and other applications. These are not universally connected. At the high layers, we revert to point-to-point communication, which puts everything back to a linear model. When the conversation moves from the blog to IM or the phone, others loose out, but at scale that is how it has to be.

Metcalfe’s Law and Dunbar’s Number

This all brings me to Dunbar’s Number, which Alan just had to drag into it! For background see earlier posts on the complete bounds of our social networks: Part I and Part II. Many tout the Dunbar number. I it might be better off throwing around Metcalfe. The law was valid at the time, and in the context, but the way that networks work have changed and evolved means that Metcalfe’s law needs to be evolved accordingly, and many a postgrad is pursuing that one. Likewise with the Dundar number.

Dunbar took research on primates, then scaled the numbers to reflect our larger brains. However, we no longer interact as apes do. Our day to day communication is not just face to face, but increasingly mediated by technology. Ambient communication (like Twitter), blogs, photosharing, Dopplr and Instant Messaging are changing the nature of our communications and relationships.

Welcome to the global beta program, there is no planned release date, little support, no product manager and no uninstall option. We need to take the best that we know, from psychology, systems theory and wherever else we can find, and hold on tight for the ride!

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Happenstances are a problem, because they are useful, but they come from being inefficient. Many a workday breakthrough comes from a chance encounter by the coffee machine, or from an overheard then interrupted conversation. These aren’t, in themselves, a productive activity. You’d be worried about me if I spend the whole day hanging around by the coffee machine, waiting for a chance conversation. At least I hope you would!

These things are lost when someone works alone or away from the office, which is one of the reasons I have been looking at how social media can recreate these chance work encounters. They are also lost if we are 100% focussed on the to do list.

So, once you start down the path of creating randomness, where do you stop? Productivity seems to be about good planning, as any GTD practitioner knows. Neat lists and clear goals. Order. Predictability. Logic. These are the things of productivity. So, what are Chaos, Randomness, Irrationality? Why… They are the things of creativity.

In all of our systems and processes, we need to leave the space to be creative. Knowledge workers produce thoughts; in the olden days, so I have learned, this was called being creativite. And it is good.

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