Today’s Internet is a curious mix of problems seeking answers and answers seeking problems. Later in the week, the EPSRC Research Cluster on Innovative Media for the Digital Economy held it’s Springboard Event. Both were thought provoking, and I will come back to them, especially the session with Charlie Leadbeater in another post. First though, some thoughts on the recurring challenge that came up in both events: The issue of trust in the on-line world.

What Does Trust Mean On-line?

Trust is a troublesome topic to study, partly because it occurs in so many different contexts, but also because it is so hard to nail down a definition. Rousseau and her colleagues offered up the following definition:

“Trust is a psychological state comprising the intention to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations of the intentions or behavior of another.” Rousseau, D. M., Sitkin, S. B., Burt, R. S., and Camerer, C. (1998). “Not so Different After All: A Cross-Discipline View of Trust,” in Academy of Management Review, 23, 393-404.

Quite a mouthful. Let me simplify a little: Trust is being ready to do something (risky), in the hope that it will work out. It is something we do everyday, especially when we carry out a interactions on-line. However it is something we probably understand less well than we would like to think.

Personality theorists have argued that some people are more likely to trust than others, based on how their trust has been rewarded in the past. That doesn’t tell us much about the mechanisms of trust, at least not in a way that we can action personally, or use in running a business.

Most academic papers divide trust into two types. At the early stages of a relationship, trust is “calculus-based“. We carefully calculate how the other party is likely to behave, looking at the rewards and punishments for being trustworthy or untrustworthy. In other words, trust is driven by some form of accountability. We are more likely to trust if we know that when the other party does something ‘bad’, then something ‘bad’ will happen to them in response. In these days of blogs, on-line review sites and social networks you can see how that can work on-line – even if imperfectly.

As a relationship develops, shared values and goals start to emerge. This allows trust to move to a different level, towards what is sometimes called “identification-based trust“. At this point, both sides have grasped and digested the other’s desires and intentions. They understand what the other side cares about to the point where they can act in each others interest. This kind of trust forms an emotional bond between the parties, one that drives valuable things like loyalty and the desire for mutual satisfaction.

In one direction, trust, in the on-line world at least, points towards accountability, and from there to transparency, openness and confidence. Trust is traditionally based on social relations, but in the on-line world that anchor is often substituted for another one: Confidence – the belief that things will unfold as expected. There are distinctions between trust and confidence. Confidence is based on familiarity, and it is something that can be designed for. An important point when building websites.

In the other direction, trust points towards compliance. This is perhaps not as obvious, but think about it for a moment. If you carry out a transaction on-line, you have effectively complied with the desires of the other party. Be it purchasing something via a web site, registering for a whitepaper or just signing up to join the latest social networking site, you essentially did what that other party wanted you to do. That might sound a little oppressive, but it is never-the-less a fact, and a very useful one if you want to understand how that happened.

From Trust to Persuasion

The more friendly face of compliance is persuasion, and recently I reread an old Robert B. Cialdini book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion“, although I’ve lost my copy somewhere between London and Austin. I hope I can replace it, as it’s a good read. Cialdini introduces six principles of ethical persuasion:

• Reciprocity
• Commitment/consistency
• Scarcity
• Liking
• Authority
• Social proof

These concepts have become so popular that you are probably familiar with the terms. They are techniques used by sales and marketing professionals day in and day out around the world.

Reciprocity is an extremely powerful influence. That’s hardly surprising, since it is one of the underlying behaviours that enables us to have a society where we can have specialist roles and engage in trade. People generally feel obligated to return a favour. This tendency is often played on by offering a small gift to potential customers. Studies show that even if the gift is unwanted, it will influence the recipient to want to reciprocate, usually by buying something. A variation on this theme is to ask for a particularly big favour. When this request is turned down, a smaller favour is then asked. Having refused the first request, it becomes that much harder to refuse the second.

Ever been given a “free” taster and then ended up buying something you wouldn’t have otherwise? Or recommended or helped out as a result of a service that gave you a “free” account. You were probably motivated by reciprocity.

Commitment and consistency are important factors in trust, and also compliance. Our desire to appear consistent in our words, beliefs, attitudes and actions is very strong. Society values personal consistency exactly because it enables trust – if we are consistent, our future actions are predictable, and that leads to confidence and so to trust.

Being consistent in our decision making also provides a useful shortcut: By sticking with decisions that we have already made, we don’t have to go through the stress and effort involved in continually reprocessing all the information that enabled us to make the decision in the first place. Consistency gets us through the complexity of our modern existence. One merely needs to recall the earlier decision and respond in keeping with it. Given the choice between deciding we are wrong, and simply changing our opinion by rearranging the facts to support our existing opinion, we will generally re-arrange the facts. As an additional shortcut, we are completely unaware that we re-arranged the facts. Google ‘cognitive dissonance’ if you want to scare yourself.

Scarcity is a fairly self-evident motivator: Offer closes today. Last 5 places remaining. That exclusive event that has tickets that always sell out before you get a chance to buy them. We hate missing out, and that influences our decisions.

The last few factors (liking, authority and social proof) can also be interpreted in terms of social influence or social trust. People trust, and comply with, people they like and that they perceive are like them (i.e. have similar values). That is why broadcast media advertisers pay large sums of money to have celebrities feature in them. Similarly, sales people look for shared interests between themselves and you.

This is simply another way of reducing the complexity we are faced with daily, using the decisions other people have already made, to reduce the ones that we have to make. People affect other people and are affected by other people. Social media and social networking sites almost codify this practice. We conform and comply based on the perceived views of others. Social Impact Theory (Latane, 1980) suggests that the amount of influence depends on:

1. The number of people who agree (although as the number of people increases, the number is less significant).
2. Strength (the status, expertise and power of the influencers).
3. Immediacy (the proximity of the influence).

Conformity from social proof is immensely powerful. If you are in any doubt, look into the origin of the phrase “Don’t drink the Kool – Aid” often kicked around in tech circles. It comes from the Jonestown tragedy, a mass suicide in 1978.

The most common form of social proof used in marketing is case studies – people like you purchased this product. Social proof is most influential at moments of uncertainty. If a situation is ambiguous, people are more likely to look to other’s behaviour and follow it. Further, people are more inclined to follow the lead of ‘similar’ people, see liking, above.

We also respond to perceived authority and expertise. The exact nature of our compliance varies by the situation, but generally we are most influenced by job titles, clothes, and even the cars that people drive. Again, these are techniques commonly used in advertising. Thumb through the adverts in any glossy mainstream magazine and count the examples.

There are two takeaways here. Firstly, as a company looking to build trust in an increasingly on-line world, there are a number of mechanisms open to you:

• Be open and transparent.
• Be predictable and consistent.
• Be visibly accountable.

Summarising Trust for Businesses On-line

In short, be part of your customers’ community. Yes, in the short term, you could get away with just the ‘appearance’ of these activities, but if you want to get to the highest levels of trust with customers, you will actually need to carry them out fully.

As individuals, we need to pay careful attention to how social media influences us, and where we place our trust. Social media plays curious games with otherwise highly effective psychological mechanisms. Just because a number of people write a positive review about a product on-line doesn’t actually make it good, although it may feel that way. At the very least, you are looking at a self-selecting group: people who chose to buy the product, rather than ones who chose not to because they perceived it to be poor.

People writing reviews are prone to exactly the same mechanisms that you are: Consistency and commitment means that they are unlikely to write a bad review for a restaurant they have patronised, since they have already paid for a meal there. Sometimes trust is broken so much that other forces come in to play, hence the occasional ranting negative review.

In face to face communication, as an effective barrier against many of these compliance techniques is to congratulate the persuader on their skill in using them. That isn’t so easy when you are dealing with a website. Give yourself time and space when making decisions. A simple self-enforced cooling-off period can work quite well.

Our life experience has probably made us suitably cynical about advertising in broadcast media. The on-line world is evolving so rapidly that we haven’t yet settled on well-adapted behaviours to deal with it.

I’m not intending to be negative here, just keen that we build real trust and real communities via the on-line world. With that in mind, I am off to the Centre for Applied Positive Psychology’s Creating Flourishing Communities Conference this week (details here), more on that later.

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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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There is an Easop’s fable I rather like. It goes something like this:

Two pots, one made of clay, the other of brass, were swept down a river in a flood. The brass pot said to the clay pot, “stay by my side and I will protect you.”

“Thank you for your offer,” said the clay pot, “but that’s what frightens me. If you’ll just keep your distance, I’ll be able to float down the river in safety. If we come into contact with one another, I’ll surely suffer.”

In a business (and the world in generally), we need clay pots and brass ones. Different personality types each have their (complementary) strengths and weaknesses, but they can be abrasive to one another. The brass and the clay pots need to get along together; not by being separate, but by working together without damaging each other. It is probably one of the reasons we have culture and etiquette – some rules of engagement that help to protect us from our individual differences.

In the same way, successful social mediums have some basic rules to enable people to work together without too many breakages. Often these simply evolve over time, and they are implicit norms it has been fun as twittequette has evolved in the new communication medium of twitter. It will be interesting to see where services like plurk go, which have different communication metaphors (you’ll have to look at the plurk site to see what I mean). They might be the daftest of names, but they are the cutting edge of computer-mediated communication right now!

The most common reason I have seen for the failure of some enterprise wikis has been the failure to establish appropriate social norms, but that is a topic for another post. Safe to say that an understanding of personality (your own and others) and working social norms is a key success factor in social media and collaboration.

In Part I I mentioned that a number of Twitter folk posted their MBTI(R) in their profiles. Not really anything scientific you can tell from that (reporting bias, uncontrolled tests, and so on), but I was a little stunned to see the vast majority report themselves as introverts. As a reminder, Twitter is a service where you post short messages that the world can read. Not something that seems very introverted at first glance.

One of the wonderful things about blogs and wikis is they seem to put introverts and extroverts in a level playing field (if not unlevel in the opposite direction to the normal). Just as the introvert musician will happily get up on stage in front of a thousand people, the introvert will blog or tweet to a crowd of millions. It is a very different thing than engaging in a conversation in a crowded room, even though it is taking place in the most crowded room of all (the Internet). Just as being on stage is just the musician and their instrument, blogging is just you and your computer. Finally we can harness the thinking of the introverts as well as the extroverts in the world!

That brings me to my next point, and back to the beginning of the topic. There is some evidence that points to our behaviour being situational. Thus some psychologists have argued that all of this trait theory is just bunk, since we change our behaviour (and thus personality) according to the social context. The word “personality” comes from the greek “persona”, literally, putting on a mask or a face.

We all put on masks, to one degree or other, and understanding ours and others is helpful in getting things done more easily. We are, after all, social creatures more than we are individuals and that is even more apparent now that we have more social media to interact through.

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This post is for Lobelia and others, in response to her blog post on personality types “personality types, can you be sorted?“. The aim is to provide some background on individual differences and, hopefully, some insight in part II.

Personality type inventories seem to be one of those things that have entered into the popular conciousness – I was surprised at how many people had their MBTI(R) listed in their profiles on Twitter (Update, August 2009: There is now a Facebook application the publishes people’s MBTI as well). However, we are not normally that aware of our own personality type, and rarely have an accurate view of it.

The study of personality pre-dates psychology itself, by a long long way, but first became more academic with Jung’s work (and this is what the popular Myers Briggs MBTI(r) draws from).

There are two major approaches to looking at personality. One looks at the individual as a unique person (the idiographic approach), and is the basis for psychotherapy and self-discovery tools. The second approach (nomothetic) looks at personality across groups and populations, looking for ‘similarities in differences’. More properly, looking at personality traits that can be used to group similar personality types together.

Trait theories of personality are popular in business, since they can identify people suited to particular roles, at least in theory, by making use of psychometric tests – essentially closed questionnaires that aim to produce reliable results – ie valid and repeatable. They are built from a lexical approach, looking at the words we use to describe ourselves/other people’s behaviours and traits. Similar traits are grouped (eg friendly and sociable might be put together) into dimensions of personality. The ones that appear (by the magic of statistics) to be most significant across populations are then labelled as personality factors. These personality dimensions are the basic structure of personality.

Cattell’s16PF(r) model (sixteen personality factor) is probably the most widely used, but I frequently enounter Myers Briggs, with its four bipolar dimensions ( (I)ntrovert/(E)xtrovert, (S)ensation/i(N)tuition, (F)eeling/(T)hinking, (J)udging/(P)erceiving). When people cite results in the Myers Briggs model, they are crushed down into ‘either or’, eg I or E, N or F, resulting in 16 ‘distinct’ personalities. However, these are dimensions, and people (including yourself!) could be anywhere on those scales. My point here is that people don’t fit into neat boxes, these are just constructs to make it easier to digest the subtleties of personality. Even though Cattell used computers to identify his sixteen personality factors, it is a fairly analogue thing, and sometimes the outcomes can be surprising, if not puzzling (as you’ll see in part II).

OK, that’s the hard bit over, apart from one side note. Most of these theories were developed within the English language (an etic approach). Spot a problem? If you are Spanish, Italian, …, you might choose different words, or have different personality groupings in your culture. These could, quite literally, be lost in translation. Because of that, some psychologist have started to work within each language (an emic approach), the most famous of these is Goldberg. We’ll come back to him in a minute, as he’s a useful chap, Internet-wise.

So, what do we know so far? Well, you have your unique personality, and in that there are some key factors which you have in common with other people. The more dominant factors link to personality traits, which in turn lead to behaviours, beliefs and biases. What we are looking at is things that remain fairly consistent over time, and can form patterns across different groups of people. How did we get these personality traits, and what can we do about them?

This is the nature, nurture debate. There have been some biological theories of personality (Eysenck and Gray), with varying degrees of success. One one hand, our central nervous system might account for extroversion/introversion, and there are also theories with regard to the effect of our sensitivity to particular neurotransmitters (dopamine and the like). On the other side, there is evidence from studies of separated twins, that environment is more key – although that isn’t straight forward either, since we are partially responsibly for creating our environment, and everyone’s environment is completely unique to them as an individual.

There are problems on all sides, but it is probably fair to say our biology does not totally determine our personality. However, the heritability of major personality factors is probably around 20-30%. In other words, you can blame your parents for around a third of the nature of your strongest personality attributes (plus a little bonus responsibility for their control of the environment they put you), but the majority is down to your environment and what you did and do with it.

In our early years, personality evolves rapidly, but by the time we reach our 30′s it is fairly stable, although still open to gradual change and major life events. So, by the time someone is established in the work place, they are “who they are” – That means being aware of your own biases and behaviours, and being able to accommodate other people’s, is key to being effective and productive. You are unlikely to change them, and they are unlikely to change you, so best make the most of the situation.

A little self-awareness goes a long way (he says, knowing he has some way to go! I appreciate those that have accommodated me over the years). Now, I said I’d come back to Lewis Goldberg, so I better had do. The 16PF(r) has been popular for a long time in industry. While dealing with 16 different personality factors might be useful, having something simpler and more cross cultural would also be useful too.

Goldberg came up with a five factor model (often called the Big Five) and independently so did Costa and McCrae (the OCEAN model – for Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neurotisism). While most personality inventories are closed, commercial products, Goldberg has provided his out to the world. There are pros and cons of this approach. Some would argue there is reason to control access to the tests in order to stop them being misused by the untrained, or cheated on by people trying to reverse engineer answers.

I better come off of the fence for a minute and point out that I am a bit of a fan of the OCEAN/Big five model (they differ in one dimension – openness versus intellect – but may eventually converge with more research). I can grasp the five dimensions in my head, and it is a practical way to understand how to deal with myself and others:

• Openness – How will I/this person deal with change. Will help and encouragement be needed, or is it “dive in” time.
• Conscientiousness – Will I/they get it done or do I need to flag for follow up and add gentle reminders.
• Extroversion – Do I/they need to plan in time away from other people, or is the hustle bustle needed.
• Agreeableness – What sort of negotiation is required? Am I being fair.
• Neurotisism – This isn’t a bad thing. A neurotic hand glider pilot will live longer! Do I/they need time to think it through?

You can take the Big 5 Personality Test yourself on the out of service web site (not actually out of service, that is just what it is called).

When you think about these dimensions and a team of people working on a wiki or a blog/blog network, you start to get a sense of the dynamics that can take place, and your own part in them. Before part two and some interesting stats from twitter, I’ll leave you with this quote, adapted from Kluckhohn and Murray:

“Every person is in certain respects like all others, like some others and like no other.”

Continued in Personality Sorters and Social Media Part II

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The podcast makes a number of interesting points from the evolutionary psychology perspective. The whole reptile brain things doesn’t work for me, but many of the points can be made from other perspectives too, and they resonated with some of my recent observations about technology.

The general consensus is that we are adapted to living in small groups – 20-200 individuals – with lifelong interaction within those small groups. Today’s environment is dramatically different, for all sorts of reasons. The Internet enables us to interact with millions, if not thousands, of individuals – how meaningfully is another question. Communications technology has also made business more global and employees more mobile. Being born, living and dying in the same town is a very rare life journey these days (it would be interesting to have a good data source on this).

Brain chemistry has become the primary approach to mental health issues, by which point things are at a severe stage. I wonder if we are too focussed on treating symptoms, rather than causes (Bob Eckridge has some interesting thoughts in this area on his blog). Another approach is to assume that we are maladapted to our environment, and see what we can do to change in it, and ourselves.

Evolutionary psychology is a curious beast, and I think a fair few Psychs would debate the reptilian brain idea. However, there are other perspectives that help us understand what is going on. Social constructivism is a different psychological approach. It argues that we create our idea of who we are through our social interactions (identity is a rather complex issue), and that we also create knowledge that way. That starts to make a lot of sense out of social networking and software.

Thinking about identity as rooted in who we interact with, and how we interact with them, starts to enable the creation of some useful software applications. Creating interactions (on and offline) that enable people to express their identity is an essential part of building a community – just take a look at people’s facebook profile pictures, then get them to talk to you about them, and you’ll see what I mean.

We are, whichever psychological perspective you take, social beings. Isolation does us no good, at least not beyond short bursts. So far, technology has enabled us to be more ‘connected’, but actually resulted in us being more isolated (one-way media such as TV, physical social isolation such as Internet enabled remote working). Social software to the rescue, hopefully!

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My memory has improved since I started using GTD to keep my head clear. If you are using GTD, you’re not using your memory for trivia anymore, so it must be storing important things! That is a good reason to get better at using it and understanding how memory works will do that. Did you know you can improve your memory?

It is OK to forget

It is actually good that we don’t remember everything. Exceptional memory can be a problem. Imagine if you recalled everything, all at once, all of the time. It would be completely distracting, making it hard to focus on the moment or to step back and look at the bigger picture. You would be overwhelmed by memories.

You see, it is actually OK that we forget some things. The important thing is that we can recall the things that we do need to recall. That is all we need to achieve with our memory.

You might have heard that there are three types of memory. An immediate, sensory memory, which is very fleeting. A short term memory, which deals in seconds or tens of seconds. It remembers things just long enough for you to dial that phone number, or to do the next action. Finally, there is long term memory.

When things make it to long term memory, we can pretty much remember them for life – with a bit of practice. That is the magic place for remembering things.

Remember, it is all part of the process

The process of remembering things is clearly key. It turns out that there are three parts to this as well.

Firstly, there is what is termed encoding. It sounds a bit technical, but it is basically the process by which your brain sorts and processes things, and links them to other memories, ready to put them inside your brain. This is the second piece, storing things. Then the third piece, of course, is actually remembering it or recalling.

There are different ways of getting things back from memory. There is recognition, the way that we recognise someone’s face when we see it. It is quite easy isn’t it? It is intuitive, because we are better at it. That is what is so easy about multiple choice questions. We only have to recognise the answers, rather than recalling them.

Recalling is the important bit for your productivity. That is when you have to go inside your brain and find the piece of information you want, digging it out. The discrepancy between recognition and recall tells us that there is more stuck in our head than we can normal get out.

Getting better at remembering (recall)

There are two things we can do to improve the situation. The first is to work on putting things into our head, the encoding. The trick here is to work at it. The short cut to success is hard work, right?

If I give you a phone number, you will probably have forgotten it in a few seconds. However, if you start to think about the number more deeply, to engage with it, it enhances the encoding process and helps get into your long term memory. Is the phone number like somebody else’s? Are there patterns in the number? What are they? Any rhymes or rhythm?

Break the number down into chunks and see if you can visualise those chunks in your mind. Make the image vivid and colourful, perhaps use animals or objects related to things about the number to make the shape of the digits (there is a great trick for this in an old post about memory on litemind). Think deeply about the number and try and make some logical sense of it.

Getting the information linked to things we already know, and thinking about it at different levels, improves recollection. If you are trying to remember information from a textbook, write the information out in your own words. This puts the information through more of your brain, engaging at a higher level than just reciting it.

You’ll remember I said there are three parts to memory function. We can’t do much about the middle bit, storage, our brain just does that. However, the last bit we can also perform some magic on: recalling.

Get to the right place to remember

Godden and Baddeley (1975) performed an experiement which used two groups of people. One half stayed on the beach (sounds good to me), the other half went 15 foot underwater.

Both groups had to memorize information. The groups then split again, with half the people from underwater going to the beach, and half of the beach people going underwater. Who remembered things the best? It was the people who were in the same place they were before. Recalling the information in the place they learnt it was more important than the effect of being underwater. Now, before you rush off to try and revise for your next exam in the actual exam hall, we can approach this another way.

It is a state of mind

One of the tricks about recall, and this is a wonderful technical word, is ‘salient cues’. It essential means that if there is something relevant to a memory, based on how we encoded it, it will help cue (or trigger) that memory.

If you are stuck trying to recall something, rather than focussing on that thing, think about where you were when you learnt it or any related facts you are able to bring to mind. Anything at all related, even what you were concious of when you learnt it. What was the emotion? Was there a particular smell or location? Were there any other things you can bring to mind?

Try ‘walking backwards’ through time. Remember how you lost your keys; you mentally retraced your steps and then you suddenly remembered where you put them. It works. Look for associations, anything related to the memory. If you learnt it when you were 15 feet under water, go back under water! In fact, if you learnt something after a little alcohol, you’ll remember it better after a little alcohol. The reverse is also true, but you’ve probably figured that out already,

You see, we can greatly improve our memory, just by working at the way we put things into it, and the way we fetch things from it. No there’s something to remember.

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Depending on your background, you might understand identity in the sense of personal identity, or in computer security or perhaps even corporate identity. What is your identity? Why is it so important?

From an IT perspective, identity is critical in making sure that the right people have access to the right information, protecting the user and the information. From a personal productivity perspective, understanding our identity helps us work with our nature, rather than against it.

The Start of Identity

When I began using computer systems, shortly after the dinosaurs roamed the earth, I had a ‘login’ and password. It was a curious set of letters and digits, dished out by some guy in a lab coat with a particularly bad haircut. It didn’t tell the computer much about me, but it kept the riff-raff out of the system and my data reasonably private. My first encounter with identity was when I started working in the security arena. There was a need for a more meaningful view of ‘who’ a user was. Identity captured additional information, such as the user’s role and their membership of various ‘groups’. This meant the system might know that the user was an administrator in the marketing department. Adding properties made life as an IT manager simpler, because the computer or the firewall had a better concept of who that user was. The users could be managed in groups, rather than as individuals.

As the Internet blossomed and more on-line services emerged, I ended up with multiple identities. Today the number of identities I manage has exploded. Thankfully things have started to converge on the email address as an identifier, although I have even built up a large collection of those. OpenID is an initiative that will simplify the management of identity on-line by pulling all of these identities together (see the article on Lifehacker here for an example). That may or may not be a good thing. If you want to understand where on-line identity is going, do check out the presentation “Identity 2.0” from OSCON2005, and also get an example of Dick Hardt using the Larry Lessig presentation method as a bonus.

Understanding Our Identity In The Real World

If you think identity is a complex issue in the computer world, just wait until you think about it in the real world of flesh. and blood If I put my psychology hat on, I get a completely different view of what identity means. Psychologists have been researching the human identity for over a hundred years, although there still isn’t a unified theory to understand it. One psychologist, Manford Kuhn, created the twenty statements test as a simple way to capturing a snapshot of our identity. Try it for yourself and see what you learn: Open up a text editor or grab a piece of paper and a pen and give yourself twelve minutes to write down answers the following question: “who are you?”, use statements starting “I am…”, you don’t need to write more than 20. That is, if you get that far in the twelve minutes. Give it a try now.

Look back at your answers and see if you can group any of them together or sort them. What do they tell you about yourself? Does it reveal what is important to you? You can use this information to inform your personal goals and to help yourself be more motivated, by connecting with who you are. Even in the real world, we have multiple identities. This is an interesting discussion tool in the business context for teams: “who are we?”, “we are…”

The psychologist Erik Erikson put forward the theory that we create our identity as we resolve various crises at different stages of life. This is the origin of the term ‘mid-life crisis‘. Well, I always wondered what that was all about. Whilst our core identity that remains fairly constant, our identity does evolve as we grow up and grow old. One of the big shaping factors is the social groups we relate to. By the way, that the twenty statements test only tells us what we bring to mind at a single moment in time. We are much more complex than that. You might write something completely different a few minutes later.

You Are Who You Are, Or Are You?

Our identity is a totally unique thing, computer IDs rely on that, but it is also true in the physical world. I can find a dozen Benjamin Ellis’ using Google. We might have DNA that is 99% identical, but we are still totally different. Actually, another 1% difference and one of us could be a chimpanzee. How unique are we? Even if you are a twin, you have a unique finger print and a unique set of experiences and values. To date computers have only just got as far as understanding fingerprints, increasingly used in computer security.

A new generation of web applications, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Plaxo are changing this. They are enabling computers to add social information to their concept of identity. They map out our relationships or “connections”. This is sometimes referred to as social graphing, an exciting new technology with lots of possibilities. These new services aren’t a passive thing, because they feedback into those relationships and affect our identity, by changing our relationships.

Early services, such as Friends Reunited, create ‘long tail’ relationships (thanks to Jon Bains and Fred Bassett for the conversation at a recent Chinwag Live event). They have enabled us to resurrect old friendships by reconnecting us. In the case of Friends Reunited, it was friendships from school days. With services like Facebook and Linkedin, it is via friends of friends, as the social graph grows.

The services also make it easier to sustain a greater number of relationships, by narrow-casting our lives to each other, and supporting an ‘outer ring’ of friendships that would not otherwise be sustainable, using traditional communication methods. They affect the inner ring of relationships too, by increasing the volume and reach of our daily ‘chatter’; we know more of what is happening in our friends’ lives, enabling us to communicate within more of a common context.

The Social Media Social Experiment

We are all unwitting participants in a grand experiment that will profoundly affect identity in the next decade. Who we are connected with affects who we are, because it affects what we know and how we view ourselves. Change your friends, and you change who you compare yourself to.

With the advent of social media, a new set of social norms are forming. As a blogger, I am watching with interest as this new medium and its norms evolves. Ann Michael’s recent post, connections and respect raises an interesting point. Bloggers blog about each other, but they don’t blog about business associates. For people who straddle both worlds this can be a fine line. Recently I had a discussion with Sarah Blow on this, but I’m still not sure how it will all map out. I’ll have to ask Mike of Techcrunch UK next time I see him, as he runs around with his 3G connection. If my business is blogging, or I am blogging for my business, what goes and what doesn’t? What is ‘private’ and what is ‘public’. It isn’t just blogging. Another of Ann’s posts raised some of the workplace challenges of Facebook: “your boss on facebook“. Who to connect with and what to share with them on social networking sites? Facebook has some granularity with its “view limited profile” feature, but this is hardly matches the complexity of our real-world relationships. This just the tip of an iceberg. The boundary between what is private and public is increasingly fuzzy in the new world of social media and Internet search engines. Recently, the mystery of where a man that had been missing for five years had been was solved. Someone found a picture of him with his wife on the Internet: Google solves the missing man mystery.

New Rules for New Media

There is a whole new set of social rules to evolve in this complex world. If I post a comment to a friends wall on Facebook, all their friends see it, but some of them aren’t my friends, they might be people I’ve never even met. Communication is becoming increasingly asymmetric and unbalanced in nature with social media. What parts of your identity are personal, and what are ‘public’? It isn’t binary, we have different ‘roles’ and ‘groups’ to our real identity, different pieces of information that we share with different people. If there is a feint line between the persona you have at work and the one you have for your friends, it will blur – just look at Facebook’s beacon. How do you feel about your Facebook friends all knowing what you have been buying? For those that don’t blog or do facebook, you aren’t immune. Digital information is leaky (just ask HMRC, who write a rather sad letter to me about loosing my personal data). It can be copied, pasted, forwarded and it doesn’t decay. There are comments on-line that I made in email conversations two decades ago, that is another form of long-tail. We all leave digital artefacts behind us on a daily basis.

One thing is for sure, we are heading for a time of increased and extended transparency, regardless of wanting it or not. Computers and other people may end up with a better sense of what our identity is than we have ourselves: “you are a blogger, you are a fan of Snow Patrol, you are a purchaser of violent games, you are friends with…”. There is a positive side to all of this. Through social graphing, we can more easily discover new friends, reconnect with old ones and keep in touch with new ones. We can gain a greater sense of our identity and be part of a community. Without blogging, I wouldn’t have met any of the people mentioned in this post.

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Three things in two days. First, I loose contact with my phone. Second, my MacBook Pro dies. Then, in a third and final twist, traffic on the blog increased by 2000% (yes, two thousand) and I get locked out of WordPress. Coincidence? Of course. I got a free lesson in personal productivity in the process; How do you survive when your options are shut down?

Day One

On day one, I headed into London, having agreed to phone everyone I was meeting when I located a suitable coffee shop to gather in. I arrived and reached for my phone. No phone in my pocket. No phone in my bag. Generally, no phone anywhere. How did we survive before we had a phones in our pockets? Perhaps we were more organized, perhaps we just wondered around lost. We only had certain opportunities to communicate, so we planned a little more and were a little less spontaneous. We certainly weren’t sending a text when someone was trying to talk to us! When we got opportunities to communicate, we made the most of them.

There I was with one pound in my pocket. Now, the way the dollar is going, one pound may be worth about $5 at the moment, but it still only gets you one phone call from a UK phone box. As I stood in the pouring rain in central London, staring at the phone box, I didn’t know who to call to sort out the mess. Miraculously, it all worked out fine. I was still glad when I got my phone back later in the day.

Day Two

On day two, I flipped open the lid of my trusty MacBook Pro to do my semi-regular backup and… Nothing. Bright light on front, but black screen. 18 months old and it was dead. Cue raised blood pressure and a trip to the Apple store. Despite mouth-to-mouth from the man at the genius bar (note to self: they really don’t like it when you call it the geek bar), there was no getting any sense out of the thing. The result? A very productive day of phone calls and ticking off items on the to do list that had been left undone because I’d been caught up in email, slide creation and the wonders of the Internet. The MacBook story is to be continued… For now, my trusty G4 is helping me through, sans Microsoft Windows.

The Psychology of Happiness

So, a little bit of Psychology, to fuzz up your day, specifically the psychology of choice and of happiness. Two gentlemen, Barry Schwartz and Dan Gilbert, have made these topics more accessible via their TED talks last year. To summarize and synthesize the two: The more choice we have, the less happy we are. When we do get choices, we don’t use them well, and when we make mistakes, we rationalize them to ourselves, but still we worry that we didn’t do the right thing.

And Finally

We are at our most happy when we aren’t given too many choices, because choices cause stress. Despite that, we always want the ability to have lots of choice, we call it freedom. We want the freedom to keep our options open. Together that creates some interesting insight into why all of this technology causes us to procrastinate. Technology creates so many different possibilities, and with it a whole range of new decisions for us to worry about.

See also: 5 Ways to reduce stress, by reducing choices.

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I think the concept of their being a reality to any situation, which can be described by a set of facts, is a key foundation to getting a grip on life. The next step is understanding that we don’t perceive reality directly. We perceive the situation via other people’s words, as they describe what they have seen with their eyes and ears. A side note here: Even if we were there we don’t perceive the world directly ourselves, since we are also perceiving it via our our eyes and ears.

The senses can be funny things, they can be influenced by our assumptions and beliefs. If you are not sure what I mean, then think of a magic show that you might have seen, particularly something involving objects appearing or disappearing. That kind of magic, sometimes called close up magic, depends on the expectations of our brains overriding what our eyes really see, or misdirecting our eyes to one place. As that happens, we miss something being moved or hidden in another place. More often than not, we see what we want to see (because of Gestalt – see coincidence?). We also hear what we want to hear, again there is some experimental evidence for this. This tendency is something to be very conscious of when we are communicating with other people. We hear what we want to hear. They hear what they want to hear. Usually, nobody is any the wiser. For the modern knowledge worker, who deals almost exclusively in information, this can make work into hard work.

A thought experiment for you to try. In a minute, imagine a situation where we are in a near-by forest, right in the middle of February, standing on the ground facing the sun. Shut your eyes now, and imagine the sights, sounds and feelings. Done it? Was it nice there? Was it peaceful? Let’s compare notes. In my forest, there was a sprinkling of snow on the ground, it was dry and there was a row of brick houses behind me. At this point I have probably lost half of you. In the northern hemi-sphere, February is winter, in the south it is summer. Our experience creates assumptions of what February is. Your forest might have had no houses, or it might have had houses all around.

We have different experiences, which lead us to different expectations and assumptions about a situation. There are lots of reasons that our forest example is silly, we weren’t recalling the same situation of course, but you would be surprised how many details people fill in even when recalling a real situation.

Now, let’s go riding in the our forests. How is the ride? Are you on two wheels, four wheels or four legs? Notice how we fill in the blanks, it is just natural. If we didn’t, we would struggle to function. You can start to see why understanding the reality of a situation via a third party is so hard. Assumptions can sneak in and knock us off track. It is good to ask ourselves “that is interesting, how do I know that?” and “is that really the case?” at regular intervals. Not to cause us to doubt ourselves and get into a muddle, but to sift the facts from the assumptions, the beliefs.

Facts always have some form of proof or evidence. A fact stated without evidence is just an assertion, it is a claim that something is true, which requires further investigation. The speaker might not even think that it is a fact, it could be just speculation – a suggestion of what the facts might be. To be sure, we must find the evidence, we that supports the claim. For example, a news reader on TV says “Carbon dioxide is resulting in global warming, causing the polar ice caps to melt”. That is an assertion. How do we know it is the carbon dioxide causing the ice caps to melt? We may have video evidence of the ice caps melting, but the polar ice caps melt every year for a season, and then they reform. The idea that carbon dioxide is causing it is an assertion by the news reader. It happens to be a common, or ‘shared’ belief, so we are comfortable with it. It might be true, but how do we know it is true? Actually, we don’t, since all we have is some second hand opinions about it, based on some facts and some assumptions that we are probably unaware of. We take it on faith, trusting in what we have read or been told by people we often haven’t even met. Lots of people believe it to be true, but based on the diagram, does that give any more reason to believe that it actually is?

See also: Wikipedia – A Means not an End

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My big take away for the moment is this: A change of context is the quickest way to change your thinking. Do you remember me loosing my car recently (shaken, not stirred)? I had a different replacement vehicle for a few weeks. And I mean completely different. A fraction of the size and power and a very different driving experience. The strangest thing is that it completely changed the way I thought about things. It altered my perspective, and if you drove it and experienced its (non-)braking capabilities, you’d know why. I’m back with my own car now, but my attitude to driving and my habits have changed.

Effecting personal change can be tough, especially if it involves creating good new habits or trying to break bad old ones. Be it habits of doing or of thinking, sometimes, if you want to change, the easiest thing to do is to start by changing your point of view. A different point of view creates a fresh perspective. That different perspective shifts your thinking, and destabilizes old habits by creating fresh new thought patterns. When using ThinkingRock, I have found that when I get stuck breaking down or planning projects, printing out the project reports and going somewhere else with a paper and pen helps me get unstuck. I now even have a specific thinking and planning place, just going there gets my planning and mission juices going. Keeping a context seems to be a good way to support (good) new habits.

Changing the context can completely break a habit or a stuck thought. Addicted to the Internet? Change context. Go to a place that has no Internet for a week or two. Less extreme, try changing where you spend your time or even just changing the colour of a room. It can be a fantastically effective way to loosen your mind up enough to make those big planned changes. From now on, if I am struggling to make a change, I’ll start by changing something else! Do something different, to create a change.

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The answer is simple… It is because sometimes we make it for ourselves, let me introduce Gestalt Psychology.

Gestalt Psychology (nothing to do with the therapy of the same name) basically says that the brain tries to make sense of the things that it experiences. In fact, it is very good at it, which is why we can watch a TV screen which is really just a bunch of crude dots, and we can have a phone call even though there is lots of noise, distortion and half of the speech is missing. The brain is amazingly made! It always tries to find meaning in things – the law of pragnanz.

We have to watch ourselves with pragnanz, because we often end up justifying things that really don’t make sense, which is no way to get things done! Gestalt is the german word for form (shape). Some of the basic ideas in Gestalt systems are as follows:

• Emergence – we perceive the whole, grouping items, then fill in the details (making up the gaps if necessary).
• Reification – we perceive the parts and construct a whole to create closure (again, making up the gaps).
• Multistability – we can flip between conflicting interpretations rapidly.
• Invarience – we can reconstruct disparate images to find the similarities in them.

The wikipedia link has a couple of good diagrams that illustrate these points, for example this one on Reification. You might have heard the phrase “Escher’s world”. He was an artist that used many of these concepts to create optical illusions (nice gallery here, you can even buy Escher stuff). Illusionists and magicians also use these properties of the brain to trick us into seeing things that are not there.

The concepts seem to apply at higher levels as well, so we have to watch this in our communication with others. I’ve watched experiments that show how you can even cause someone to miss hear words if the context is wrong. If you expect that someone is going to give you a particular message, for example a preconception that someone will be calling to deliver some bad news, body language or tone of voice. When that message arrives and the tone of their voice is downcast, you may hear what they say as bad news, even if it isn’t! So, be careful out there, it isn’t all as it at seems. We need to be mindful what we communicate with our body language.

So, enough on coincidence, now you can sleep more easily, without worrying about coincidence anymore. You’ll just see it everywhere. Mystery solved. Not that marketers don’t pass on your phone number, email address and clothes size as well, of course!

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Procrastination isn’t ‘not doing things’, it can be ‘doing the wrong things’ rather than the right things right now. If we are honest, the majority of us procrastinate to some degree or other. However, highly successful people generally don’t. That makes procrastination a prime issue to tackle on many people’s self-improvement journey. I am no exception.

Procrastination is touched upon in so many books, but it is a very hard thing to deal with. A good remedy seems hard to find. So far my favourite book has been The Now Habit: Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-free Play by Neil Fiore, Ph.D.

I had not read one of Neil Fiore’s books before, but “Dealing with the Emotional Side of Cancer” had been recommended to me, so I purchased the Now Habit. Perhaps I was procrastinating?

The Now Habit isn’t perfect as a book or as a system, but nothing is. However, I and many other people have found The Now Habit remarkably helpful. It was written out of Neil’s own struggles and his work with clients.

Here is a brief overview, but there is no substitute for reading the book in full. Hopefully this will provide some encouragement to you, running through the content of the chapters:

Introduction to The Now Habit

Starting with a Maslow quote, the introduction sets out a positive philosophy for dealing with procrastination – The Now Habit. How to move from being a procrastinator, to being a producer.

1. Why we procrastinate.

The warning signs:

• An impossibly long “to do” list and talking to yourself in “have to’s”
• Being unrealistic about time and vague about goals and values
• Feelings of depression, low self-esteem and fear.

Our worst critic is ourselves. We judge ourselves a failure, before we have even started. Procrastination is inherently rewarding – you escape the object of your fear and do something that you ‘want’ to do, rather than something that you ‘have to’. Sometimes the object of the procrastination even goes away, because circumstances change, or because someone else deals with it. Procrastination is a self-reinforcing, vicious circle. It can express resentment, or it can defend against fear of failure or the fear of success. A really helpful productivity quote:

“The drive for success involves setting a goal, making it a high priority, and then investing time and energy towards its achievement.”

2. How we procrastinate

Explaining and understanding how procrastination happens, with the procrastination log. Neil suggests you just carry on procrastinating for a week, but keep a log of how you do it. This is actually a surprisingly hard exercise to do! It is always a good idea to keep track of how you use your time. Those with a background in time-billed professions are good at this, but the rest of us have a bit to learn. Start by creating safety – This is the first step out of procrastination. We naturally avoid doing ‘dangerous things’, the way to get them done is to make them less dangerous. The book gives some powerful illustrations.

3. How to talk to yourself

Avoid counter productive messages:

• “have to’s” send messages of stress. Contrasting the language of the procrastinator with that of the producer: ” “I choose”, “I decide”, “I will”.
• “should’s” are messages of depression. should looses its original meaning and instead focusses on resentment and anger, disappointment. Just like “have to’s” it is out of line with the “choice” of the producer.

The power of choice – moving from resistance to commitment. Start learning how to say no. Five self-statements that distinguish procrastinators from producers, with ways to transform your self-talk:

1. The negative thinking of “I have to.” Becomes “I choose to.”
2. The negative thinking of “I must finish.” Becomes “When can I start?”
3. The negative thinking of “This is so big.” Becomes “I can take one small step.”
4. The negative thinking of “I must be perfect.” Becomes “I can be human.”
5. The negative thinking of “I don’t have time to play.” Becomes “I must take time to play”

4. Guilt-Free Play, Quality Work

Procrastination leads us to put off living, and this is a huge tragedy. Procrastinators and workaholics have much in common. Neil introduces the ideal of the Pull Method of Self-Motivation. A sense of mission is the ultimate in the pull method. We work productively when we can anticipate pleasure, rather than just pressuring ourselves into doing things. Play is important. Guilt-free play leads to quality work. My personal version of this is to play the game of seeing what I can do in a hour.

5. Overcoming Blocks to Action

There are three major blocks to action:

1. The terror of being overwhelmed
2. The fear of failure
3. The fear of finishing.

These are three tools to tackle them:

1. Three-dimensional Thinking, the Reverse Calendar.
2. The work of worrying, worry constructively and have it over with.
3. Persistently starting, just keep on starting.

6. The Unschedule

This powerful concept gets you to look at what you are not going to do and to firmly book in play (leisure, socialising, …), to make it guilt-free. There is lots of comment on this around the blogosphere:

• On DirtSimple.
• and on Jim Gibbon’s blog in a great post on the Top 5 Productivity Tips of 2006.

7. Working in the Flow State

Learning to focus and relax, to work productively. The whole area is a massive topic in its own right, this is a great introduction.

8. Fine-Tuning Your Progress

Plan for setbacks – accept that you will fail sometimes and make a plan to get you back on track, to give you resilience.

“Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task” – Willian James.

9. The Procrastinator in Your Life

Now you are cured, the book runs through some tips on how to deal with those other procrastinators in your life.

The Now Habit – In closing…

The Now Habit is a fantastic book, well worth reading. We can feel that procrastination protects us from others judging our efforts, or from change, but actually it just holds us back. I think the net net for me is this: The secret to busting procrastination is to understand the truth, the action reality of each situation. Realise when you are procrastinating. Realise why you are procrastinating. Then confront those reasons with the truth of the situation. Also that it is ok to fail, it is ok to be human. It is OK to succeed too. And lastly, that it is OK to have things change. You have a choice, don’t be afraid to use it.

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This was all sparked by an interesting post over on Web Worker Daily on the merits of instant messaging versus email, which lead to quite a few comments. It reminded me of how easy it is to forget the basis of good communication. There is a good maxim:

• Walk over and talk with the person face to face…
• If you can’t do that, pick up the phone…
• If you can’t get them on the phone, then, and only then, write to them.

I’m sure someone must have written this somewhere, but I’ve yet to find a source. It is great advice, for some very simple reasons. Modern communications are blurring some of the issues, but when selecting your means of communication there are still some basics to bear in mind.

Speed!

If you were sad enough to look up words per minute on wikipedia and dig around a bit, you would find that:

• People handwrite at about 31 words per minute (wpm).
• A basic typist can reach 50-95 wpm, an advanced one above 120 wpm.
• Conversations are around 200 wpm
  (adults can listen with full comprehension at 300 wpm – so that means most people have about 100 wpm of ‘not listening’ capacity!)
• The average adult reads text at about 250 to 300 words per minute.

So, whilst we take in the most with reading, we output the most with speaking. That makes conversation the fastest mode of two-way communication that there is. That said, the fastest of typists can get close! If you rely on typing for your communication, invest in getting good at it.

Working on a daily basis with people in the area of perceptual psychology leads to the occasional discussion about the quality of communication, rather than the quantity. Communication is much more than the number of words per minute exchanged, and much has been written on that subject. There are many aspects to human communication, such as:

• Verbal cues. Your voice, tonality, pitch, volume etc… Provide much additional information.
• Visual (non-verbal) clues, from subtle ones like body language, to less subtle guestures and the use of physical props (drawings etc…).

These cues can provide emotional information that can be critical to the communication. Many of these things are just not present with im, email and phones. Unless you try to put them back in of course!

Words are generally only meaningful with some context around them. A common physical location, or an existing relationship can provide context. References to relevant past conversations, meetings or assumptions, also provide context.

An employee walks up and says “I want a copy of my job description.” – You might drawn one conclusion if it came after a dispute about an assignment, and they look tearful and angry. You might draw a very different conclusion if they were asking just after a conversation about the exciting new role you had just given them, with a happy smile on their face and a spring in their step.

Context provides reference points that help the listener to draw correct conclusions. Without this, the listener can come to the wrong conclusions and what needs doing, doesn’t get done. Context and emotional content help to provide the intent of the communication, which is critical to a sucessful outcome.

Maximise your communications…

Use the highest bandwidth possible - talk face to face whenever you can. It minimises misunderstandings and enables miscommunication to be dealt with straight away. Use a good quality communications link – a desk phone beats a mobile/cell phone conversation any day. Try to provide visual communication, even if you can’t talk face to face. Video conferencing, or even forwarding a diagram can work wonders.

Provide context for your communication – Explain the purpose of the communication, and verify that the background is understood. If it is not, then supply it. Explain your emotions too, if they are not clear and it is appropriate.

I have enjoyed sharing my thoughts with you, I hope they help!

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