Month: August 2013

art & designcomplexityjournalismscience & technologysystems science

300: Crises in Complexity, Opportunities in Design

on August 31, 2013
Designing ideas

Designing ideas

In 2009 Censemaking was launched as a platform to explore issues in complexity and ways we can make sense of it to design for better futures and a sustainable world. After 300 posts it has become evident that there is much more to write as we see ever-new crises from complexity and ever-greater design opportunities to deal with it all.

As I was reflecting on what to write for my 300th post  for Censemaking I found myself — as I often do — drawing some connections between disparate experiences as I started my daily reading and listening. Within moments of sitting at the table with materials, turning on the radio, and scanning online I found the following semi-related stories:

  • On the Stack, the Internet radio show about magazine publishing on Monocle 24, panelists were exploring the crisis of reporting that comes from citizen journalism and the generally lower quality of photography and detail that comes when professional work gets pushed out for reasons of economics and expediency;
  • This followed a profile of Ghost Lab – a hands-on architecture program that runs every summer to teach architects ways to link what founder Brian McKay-Lyons calls “the world of ideas and the world of things”  – a space that many designers are surprisingly disconnected from;
  • In the Globe and Mail newspaper (tablet edition), a column by Kathryn Borel, writes on reading both Miley Cyrus and Syria and the sanctimony that comes when we judge what is worthy reading;
  • The brilliant web comic The Oatmeal has circulated an insightful, funny and sad piece looking at what it takes to draw people’s attention to Syria’s conflict and the crises it promotes;
  • An email exchange from a group of colleagues — journalists and scientists — on how to collectively present the state of research and journalism to an audience of policymakers and peers at the upcoming Canadian Science Policy Conference;
  • Thumbing through two new magazine options that seek to bridge the gap between science, design, and public affairs by relying on quality content and publishing than advertising (The Alpine Review and Nautilus – below)
Premiere Issues of Nautilus & The Alpine Review

Premiere Issues of Nautilus & The Alpine Review

Within each of these categories is a reflection of some form of crisis — an unstable situation affecting many people — particularly the worlds of science, journalism, politics, publishing, policy, and design.

Patterns of complexity

This motley collection of tidbits loosely connects science, design, public affairs, knowledge translation and communication, and the complexity that comes when they intersect. It seems fitting that this greeted me as I sat down to write post #300.

The Censemaking name is a riff on both the name of my social innovation consultancy (CENSE Research + Design) and the term sensemaking that is a trans-disciplinary field / practice of making meaning from complex, divergent data points and experience (which is what I help my clients, collaborators and students do). It has been a vehicle that has allowed me the freedom and pleasure to explore the knotty intersections of these disparate areas of practice and scholarship that don’t fall under any particular umbrella, yet are things that are wrestled with in health promotion, industry, publishing and media, social services, policymaking, the military and social enterprise (to speak of a few).

And as I often do, I find the strangest threads are often the most useful in understanding complexity and our world.

Taking Miley Cyrus seriously

That I would even put those four words above together above might have already turned you off, but stick with me. While the Miley Cyrus reference in the above list of media notes might be the most disparate of them all, complexity science teaches us that there is often gold in looking at weak signals and Miley Cyrus might be the best example of that in this list.

In a week where the once Hannah Montana actor and singer has garnered enormous attention in the media for her moves, her behaviour and her attitude at last weekends’ MTV Video Music Awards, particularly her performance with singer Robin Thicke it seems there is little left to discuss. Or not.

Some media sources commented on Ms. Cyrus’ actions as a tasteless media ploy.

Others jumped on the fact that it was Miley Cyrus who got all the flack for the acts performed while Robin Thicke, a married father, gets away with little public condemnation despite being the main performer of a song with a deeply sexist, near misogynistic lyrics, message and related video.

The Belle Jar Blog points to how Miley’s appropriation of black culture is a racist and patriarchal act that deserved the real condemnation as much as any sexual act that it was associated with, something that only adds to the slut-shaming says the Washington Post who nevertheless seek to question the fuss.

Reading and contemplating Miley’s performance could at once be seen as juvenile, offensive, and racist, while also represent shrewd marketing, behaviour not inconsistent with previous VMA awards and its time-honoured practice of female sexualization to draw eyeballs (and commentary) , and a situation reflective of a woman growing up at a time and place where the lines between activities rooted in a particular racial, ethnic, geographic, socio-demographic heritage are — no pun intended — quite blurred and may be genuinely obscured to her.

This is a rather banal, yet clear example of the way complexity and wicked problems rise up from an interconnected, multimedia, 24/7, global culture of communication that we’ve created for ourselves. Miley is at once a perpetrator, a victim and a bystander all at the same time. She is a social construction and a real person who is accountable for what she says and does (but to whom and for what?). That is complexity in the modern age of public engagement, expression and media.

It’s one example. We are facing similar thorny, hairy issues with vaccination, big data, chronic disease, community planning, social media, journalism’s independence and viability, educational policy and the structure of learning, private-public partnerships for social benefit and beyond. There is no simple answer or simple problem. Sensemaking is a way to understand complexity and then determine what it means.

Designing compelling futures

When you know better you do better – Maya Angelou

Better knowing is the biggest step towards better doing. Sensemaking complexity means looking broadly and deeply, consulting widely and taking the time to reflect on what it means. Being mindful of our time, and its disruption, is critical.

What comes from that is the possibility not just to understand our world, but to shape it into something we deem to be better for us all. This motivation to shape is what makes us human. We are the one species that creates for enjoyment, expression, and practical need. We are makers and designers and often both at the same time.

Design is the conscious intent to shape things while design thinking is a means of engaging complexity to foster more effective designs. We cannot control complexity, but we can design for it (PDF) and work with the emergent patterns it produces. This process of design for emergence and developmental design, which brings together sensemaking, structured feedback through ongoing developmental evaluation, and foresight methods allows us to take account of complexity without letting it take hold of us. It helps us make the world we want, not just accept the world we get.

Thank you

Thank you to all of my readers — the tens of thousands of people who have come to Censemaking since it started and the many of you who come regularly and share it with the world. In a world of attention scarcity, I am deeply appreciative of you spending some of your time with my work.

I am a believer in what popular math video-blogger Vi Hart says about blogging: do it for yourself.

Create your own audiences.  I am honoured to have been able to create the audience I have; thank you for being a part of it. I hope to continue to provide you with things to contemplate and help you make sense of.

I look forward to the next 300 posts and finding new ways to navigate and contemplate complexity and design for innovation.

Image: Thinkstock used under license & Cameron Norman

complexityinnovationpsychologysocial systemssystems thinking

Kindness Confusion in Collaboration and Co-creation

on August 26, 2013
Hidden Love?

Hidden Love?

An emerging look at evolutionary behaviour is suggesting that we are better suited for survival by working together than in competition. This cooperation imperative has been called “survival of the kindness” which risks lumping affective social generosity and goodwill with effectiveness and desirability and, in doing so, risks the entire enterprise of collaboration-based efforts. 

A recent article in Mindfulness Magazine* profiled work of behavioural scientists who’ve looked at the evolutionary patterns of humans throughout the ages and see convincing evidence that the ‘survival of the fittest’ metaphorical explanation for human development is misleading at best or even outwardly wrong altogether. We are socially better off working together than competing.

What I found disconcerting was the term Survival of the Kindest which has been used multiple times in Mindful in its early issues.  As attractive as this idea is, it a lens. In the photo above love is visible if you look for it. Indeed the lens is literally focusing on what the photographer wants you to see – love. That we see love through the trees (and in our work) is notable, but it doesn’t mean that collaboration and co-operation is necessarily a loving act. In the case of the picture, it draws our attention past the man sleeping on the street with his cardboard donation placemat lying beside him.

And that might be the problem. Framing co-work as necessarily imbued with a set of qualities like kindness or love may mean we miss seeing the forest, the trees or the people sleeping beneath them.

Why might this idea of linking the two together so emphatically be problematic? After all, who doesn’t want a little more love in their life?

Cruelty of kindness

There are many utilitarian reasons to cooperate, co-create and work with others, which has a lot to do with the kind of problems we face. Collaboration requires co-labour — working together. For complex (sometimes wicked) problems that is usually necessary. For complicated problems (or very large ones like healthcare [PDF] ) that is also usually required. But for simple problems and small ones — of which we encounter in abundance every day and are often embedded within larger, complex ones — working alone might be sufficient and efficient.

Working together requires a set of skills that are often assumed, but not rarely paired up. Working together requires different motivational structures, leadership and coordination efforts than working independently. These are not better or worse, just different.

Coupling kindness with the ‘co’s’ of working together — cooperation, collaboration and co-creation — takes a human experience of generosity and imposes it on our work situations**. Certain contemplative traditions emphasize the role in kindness, generosity and love in all things and that embracing kindness in our daily lives we are enabling greater equanimity with our world around us. But to equate one with the other is to betray another saying from the Buddhist tradition:

Do not confuse the finger pointing to the moon with the moon itself

Thus, do not confuse bringing kindness to co-work with cooperation, collaboration or co-creation itself.

Another issue is the ‘est‘ part of the term survival of the kindest. By placing kindness on some form of evaluative gradient where one is either more or less kind we impose a very specific set of cultural parameters around our work. Who is the kindest in the bunch? Assuming we had some tool to measure kindness (which I don’t know exists) are we really comfortable rating and ranking people’s ability to be kind in their work? Should we reward the kindest of the bunch? What does it mean if we are not the kindest?

You can see where this might go.

Working smarter is kind

Min Basadur and his colleagues have been studying work preferences for over 20 years doing research on how people work together. His Basadur profile (below) is based on rigorous psychometric tested data and allows teams to see what kind of preferences their members have for certain types of work. These are preferences only, not value or competence judgements and amenable to change over time. It can be a tool to validate the way we like to work and help us guide how we work with others as well as potentially identify what parts of the problem finding, framing and solving process so important to design and complexity that we might be best suited for.

For example, some are more amenable to generating ideas, while others are more comfortable organizing them or putting together plans of action that are useful to those who are ready to act. While everyone draws on each quadrant in their life, there are spaces where they feel more at home and what the Basadur profile does is help us identify those so we can use our talents well and provide guidance on areas we might wish to develop. I’ve used the Basadur profile with my own work, my academic learning and with clients to helpful effect in spotting problems. Like anything that can ‘type’ people it needs to be used with care and like the Buddhist quote above, it is important to remember that this is pointing to something (work preference) as opposed to being those things.

The Basadur Profile

The Basadur Profile

Just as the Basadur profile shows preferences for certain type of work there are also aptitudes for certain kinds of work that leverage these preferences, for leadership, and for social engagement. Some are better working in groups and some just prefer it.

Collaboration and it’s co-siblings are frequently touted as desirable, positive qualities, yet like many forms of work it is the context in which they are used that matters as much as whether they are used. Certain problems — as mentioned above — are more likely to need co-work to address, but not all. Perhaps more importantly, not all facets of problem solving require co-labour; some may simply require coordination.

The personality of creative work

Co-work makes many assumptions about people’s work preferences and capabilities that are often untested. It also places certain implicit value judgements on personality type. In her popular TED talk and book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts, Susan Cain speaks to the often hidden, but large segment of our population of people who draw energy from contemplation, solitary work, or reduced social engagement rather than other people.  As she points out, there are myths and prejudices placed on those who don’t want the attention or are quiet rather than boisterous in this age of social broadcasting. That has enormous potential implications for our work and quietly excludes those who don’t fit the profile of the innovator, the leader, the ideator or whatever archetype we hold in our cultural minds.

Just as the knee-jerk reaction of many in the social innovation community to bringing things to scale, so too is our push to collaborate and co-create everything all the time. And like scaling, there are well-intentioned motives behind this push. Working together brings in many voices to the problem and appears not to exclude people, however if those people we bring in are not as comfortable (indeed, dislike or feel uncomfortable with) working closely together or not skilled at doing so (it is a skill regardless of your personality) we are creating a new set of inequities in the process of trying to fix others.

The point isn’t that we shouldn’t work together; indeed, many of the problems we face demand it. Rather, it’s worth being creative and reflective about what that means in practice and explore ways to work together closely and also apart in a coordinated manner.

How do we honestly, genuinely, and appropriately engage the voices we need and recognize their work styles, personalities, and preferences in a manner that supports the best co-creative aspects rather than imposing a work-together-at-all-cost approach that can sometimes come through in our rhetoric? How can we foster kindness in what we do organically rather than impose it as a value on our work and recognize that co-work is simply working together, not good or bad or kind or unkind?

In being clear about our intentions and how we create the conditions for us to all meaningfully contribute to social transformation efforts in our own way will be more effective in the long run. By allowing all parts of the system — the big and boisterous, the collaborative, the quiet, the solitary — to come together in ways that fit how we actually work and how we like to work we are much more likely to bring about the innovation and systems change we seek.

* link is to supporting ‘extra’s’ not the original article, which is available only through subscription.

**  By work I am referring to any activity that requires some effort to accomplish and not necessarily paid employment

Photo: Cameron Norman

Link: Basadur profile

Uncategorized

Systems Innovation | Geoff Mulgan and Charlie Leadbeater | January 2013 | Nesta

on August 24, 2013

A terrific synopsis of a recent paper authored by social innovation leaders Charlie Leadbeater and Geoff Mulgan from NESTA in the UK as told by David Ing. There are many systems thinking takes on social innovation that get both the innovation wrong and the systems thinking, but this isn’t one of them. Leadbeater and Mulgan have a more sophisticated view of systems than many out there and it is refreshing to see it. David’s summary is outstanding, too for those not able to get to the full paper right away (which is a good read).

In brief. David Ing.

For innovators looking for an applied view of systems thinking, @GeoffMulgan and @LeadbeaterCh have written chapters for Nesta (the UK innovation foundation) on Systems Innovation.  The chapters are bundled in a single volume.

Systems Innovation (Nesta, 2013)

Here’s an outline, with some highlights from the text.

Joined-Up Innovation:  What is Systemic Innovation and How Can It Be done Effectively (Geoff Mulgan)

  • Introduction
  • 1. Background and definitions
    • Definitions
      • … we can define systemic innovation as an interconnected set of innovations, where each influences the other, with innovation both in the parts of the system and in the ways in which they interconnect.
    • The impulse to be systemic
      • Figures like Norbert Wiener, Gregory Bateson, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Stafford Beer and Geoffrey Vickers turned systems thinking into a coherent field. [….] Complexity thinking provided a parallel set of ideas from the 1980s onwards, led by figures such as Ilya Prigogine and Stuart Kauffman, while one strand…

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behaviour changedesign thinkinginnovationsystems thinking

No Contest: The Cost of Crowd-based Social Innovation

on August 23, 2013
The madness of crowds (sourcing)?

The madness of crowds (sourcing)?

Contests are seen by many in the social sector as a way to engage audiences and generate new thinking about important issues, yet in generating all of these contributions from the crowd are we undermining the very aims of work in social innovation when the fruits of these ideas largely remain to rot on the vine and what is the true cost of harvesting them? 

Kevin Starr, writing on the Stanford Social Innovation Review blog, recently pointed to the many ways in which well-meaning contests for public engagement in social innovation ideas undermine their very goals. After watching many a contest come and go I felt he was channeling my inner curmudgeon:

After years of watching and participating in this stuff, I’ve concluded that it does more harm than good—and by “this stuff” I mean the whole contest/challenge/prize/award industry. Yes, this lumps together way too many disparate things; yes, there are exceptions to everything I say here; and yes, it deserves a more nuanced discussion. That’s all true, but on the whole, I think we could dump it all and not miss a thing.

His reasoning is four-fold:

  1.  It wastes huge amounts of time.
  2.  There is way too much emphasis on ideation* and not nearly enough on implementation.
  3. It gets too much wrong and too little right.
  4. It serves as a distraction from the social sector’s big problem.

Starr makes reference to a scenario posed by futurist Thomas Frey who comments on the false wisdom of crowds by considering the idiocy of having crowds vote on how to fly a plane as it was en route as a way of democratizing the experience of flight.

Crowds and their crowds

Crowd-based anything seems to be popular. With the rise of behavioural economics, social network influence maps, and the popularity of crowd-enabled funding projects proliferating there is much to be found for those looks at how the ‘wisdom of crowds’ . The popularity of opinion-based journalism reveals that you need not have to know much about anything you’re talking about, just having an opinion matters. Indeed, we are asking people for their opinion on things they know nothing about, yet are making enormous decisions based on feedback.

This is not about experts vs novices, it’s about knowing when expertise or more information is needed and when new, fresh thinking is necessary. The two aren’t always incompatible, but there is a place for knowing what information to trust, when and where. The madness of crowd enthusiasm has lost this subtlety.

In the case of contests, Kevin Starr remarks:

The current enthusiasm for crowdsourcing innovation reflects this fallacy that ideas are somehow in short supply. I’ve watched many capable professionals struggle to find implementation support for doable—even proven—real-world ideas, and it is galling to watch all the hoopla around well-intentioned ideas that are doomed to fail. Most crowdsourced ideas prove unworkable, but even if good ones emerge, there is no implementation fairy out there, no army of social entrepreneurs eager to execute on someone else’s idea. Much of what captures media attention and public awareness barely rises above the level of entertainment if judged by its potential to drive real impact.

There is this common notion that ideas will change the world. That’s nonsense.

Doing something with a good idea is what changes the world. It’s what Seth Godin and Scott Belsky and his group at 99u have been pushing: it’s making ideas happen that counts most. The world has never been changed by inventions that were left solely in people’s minds. Putting ideas out into the world also allows for their critique and other types of innovation through additive elements, iteration and prototyping.

Ideas themselves are plentiful, easy to cultivate and a seed, not a tree.

As the late George Carlin put so well (as he often does):

Ideas? I have plenty of amazing ideas! I have lots of ideas. Trouble is, most of them suck

There is a crowd of cheerleaders that presume crowdsourcing ideas or problem-solving will work for almost anything and that is a myth. Much of the data on effective crowd-based decision-making points to very specific circumstances and where there is an ability to average decisions. Thus predictions of movement or assessment of quantity or dichotomous outcomes are all good areas for crowdsourcing. But what has happened is that this effective use of crowds to make sense of large phenomena has been over-extracted to areas it is less adept at dealing with. There are also processes that facilitate effective ways to engage crowds to get better data.

Contests play into this mindset when they seek the ‘best idea’ from many on issues where very often people are ill-informed about the scope of the projects.

Systems thinking about impact

Some might argue that enlisting many people’s involvement in a topic is still good value because it gets people thinking about an issue. This might be true for some things, but does that thinking produce any change in something else? Starr points to another recent work by the Knight Foundation that looks at the energy that went into its contests and the wider impact that it saw when it stepped back at looked at the contests winners and losers in its totality.

The Knight Foundation recently released a thoughtful, well-publicized report on its experience running a dozen or so open contests. These are well-run contests, but the report states that there have been 25,000 entries overall, with only 400 winners. That means there have been 24,600 losers. Let’s say that, on average, entrants spent 10 hours working on their entries—that’s 246,000 hours wasted, or 120 people working full-time for a year. Other contests generate worse numbers. I’ve spoken with capable organization leaders who’ve spent 40-plus hours on entries for these things, and too often they find out later that the eligibility criteria were misleading anyway. They are the last people whose time we should waste.

Putting aside the motivation for giving to a prize, the bigger issue is what these prizes cost the social benefit sector by drawing out so much energy that ends up stored in one place, for one purpose and likely never for use again. Unlike academic science grants — which introduce their own system of waste, but generally have calls every year that allow people to rework failed project proposals — there is often a one-shot opportunity with these contests that mean creating large amounts of content from scratch to meet the idiosyncratic circumstances of the contest. Starr adds:

And it’s exploitive. For social sector organizations, money is the oxygen they need to stay alive, so leaders have to chase prizes just like they do other, more sensible sources of funding. Some in the industry justify this as a useful learning process. It’s not. Few competitions (with some notable exceptions) provide even the most rudimentary feedback. Too many of these contests and prizes seem like they are more about the givers than the getters anyway.

If we are looking at creating impact perhaps we need more systems thinking and design thinking about what it is we are intending to produce and how we can better design our initiatives to produce them. Otherwise, we’ll create much creative noise, very little innovation signal while reducing the impact of the system as a whole in the process.

* Starr uses the word ‘innovation’ in the original text, however my definition of innovation is one that necessitates implementation — you must actually do something different than before to innovate, not just have a good idea. It requires some rearrangement of the social and technological relationships to the product or service being designed.

complexityemergencejournalismsystems thinking

Disrupted Time: Review of Present Shock

on August 18, 2013
Present Shock by Douglas Rushkoff

Present Shock by Douglas Rushkoff

Most simply, ‘present shock’ is the human response to living in a world that’s always on real time and simultaneous. You know, in some ways it’s the impact of living in a digital environment, and in other ways it’s just really what happens when you stop leaning so forward to the millennium and you finally arrive there.

The above quote is from journalist and author Douglas Rushkoff speaking to NPR in March 2013 about his book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. It has been some time since I read a book that shocked me as much as this one did (pun intended). It’s not how Rushkoff points out how much attentional energy we spend on Tweets, texts, posts and digital beeps from our devices that shocked me.

Nor is it about the enormous energy that is spent in the media and in its social media wake poring over the salacious news item of the moment.

It wasn’t how he pointed out the near absence of historical context being places around the news of the day represented in media or policy discussions made in public reflecting a sense of perpetual crisis among our politicians and business leaders.

I also wasn’t surprised to read about the movement towards technological determinism, the singularity and the way some have abdicated their responsibility for shaping the world they live in today for a believe in a future that is already on course to a particular apocalyptic outcome.

The compression of time and its representation — from kairos to chronos – and how it changes the way we see our world (something I’ve discussed before) is also not new or shocking to me.

And it certainly isn’t about the way systems thinking, complexity, emergence and seeing the world as fractals is taking hold.

These are all areas I’ve spent a lot of my time thinking about, writing on, and studying.

What shocked me was the way this was all woven together and punctuated with a self-reflected note to the reader on the final pages of the text. It brought home the message of living in the present to the detriment of the past and inspiring some cautious thinking about how to create a future in a way no one else has done. Rushkoff is a journalist and thus is a trained storyteller and observer of the world around him and this book provides evidence of how well he does his job.

Sensemaking is a systems-level means of looking at feedback in light of history and possible futures and few books are best suited to Rushkoff’s masterpiece Present Shock.

Reflecting the future

Let me begin with the end. In the final pages of the book, Rushkoff reflects on his decision to write Present Shock and the challenges that it posed to him. He writes:

In the years it has take me to write this book — and the year after that to get it through the publishing process — I could have written dozens of articles, hundreds of blog posts, and thousands of Tweets, reaching more people about more things in less time and with less effort. Here I am writing opera when the people are listening to singles.

This is the crux of the book. Indeed, here I am writing a review that Rushkoff already foresees pre-empting readers’ interests in the book:

I began to think more of the culture to which I was attempting to contribute through this work. A book? Really? How anachronistic! Most of my audience — the ones who agree with the sentiments I am expressing here — will not be getting this far into the text, I assure you. They will be reading excerpts on BoingBoing.net, interviews on Shareable.net, or — if I’m lucky — the review in the New York Times. The will get the gist of the argument and move on. (italics in original)

Rushkoff the soothsayer has proven correct. You can read about the book on BoingBoing, Shareable and reviews from the New York Times.  Many bits have been utilized in reviewing Present Shock for what it says and I am hoping to add to that by reflecting on what the words in that book might mean, not just what it says.

For the record: I loved the book and suggest anyone interested in better understanding our present world, the media landscape within it, and how to appreciate the discussion of complexity in social life pick it up and read it to the point of seeing Rushkoff’s words above.

Timecodes

What Present Shock presents is a multidimensional view of how we view, live and manipulate time. It is about being in the present moment, but not in the way that is necessarily mindful. Indeed, mindfulness and contemplative inquiry is about being cognizant of the past, yet focused on present awareness of the here and now. Rushkoff writes of a present condition (the shock) almost devoid of history in its expression, one that amplifies everything in the present with little semblance of a narrative that connects the macroscopic patterns and rhythms of history.

Instead of a flow of narrative,our present shock offers a pieced-together set of truths that reflect the most convenient form of reality available to us. Whereas a system is often greater than the sum of its parts, present shock puts us back into a system that is all about parts and coherence created based on what is most present in the moment. Hence, we have conspiracy theories rapidly proliferating based on piecemeal information constructed through a lens of immediacy. We have exaggerated responses of shock, horror, delight and disgust at nearly everything from political decisions, celebrity fashions to cat videos.

Immediacy also provides a balm to complexity. It is easier for some to consider things like 9/11 as staged events rather than accept a more complex narrative that combines intelligence failings, misinterpretations, technical failures, noise, strategy and random chance. Many find comfort in believing in a nefarious governmental plot to harm its own citizens than to accept a more complicated, less controllable reality of individuals and groups acting unpredictably. Present shock keeps our focus on the ‘facts’ as presented to us in whatever biased, incomplete, ahistorical context and suggests the meaning of them rather than encourage us to step back and make sense of it ourselves.

Present shock also stuns our sensemaking capacities by creating attractors of immediacy amplified by social media. When you’re on Twitter and suddenly the feed gets overwhelmed by content around a particular event or phenomenon (e.g., Boston Marathon bombings) it is easy to see it as an incredibly powerful event. As callous as it might seem at first, the bombings had little impact outside of Boston. That’s how most of these events happen. As the world watches the events in Egypt unfold right now, the immediate impact on most of the world’s population is nil, yet there is a sense of urgency created among those around the globe who neither are from there, have friends or family there, or are economically or socially impacted by those events.

Now, we are drawn into every event as if it is life or death overwhelming our sense of what is really important to us — which will be different depending on who you are or where you are. Yet, present shock activities treat all of this as the same. We are all Bostonians now. We’re all Egyptians now. And when we are everything, we are nothing.

Last week the news was about Blackberry and its possible break-up, which seems urgent until one realizes that possibility has been discussed for years. Rushkoff points to how events are amplified through media to create a sense of urgency. It is ultra-important and not at all important.

Narrative collapse

The book begins with the collapse of narrative and how we’ve created ongoing storylines in work, games and media to keep us in the present moment. Even video games that once had clear goals, objectives and endpoints are being changed to accommodate to an ever-adapting co-construction of a present moment that simply continues onward until people leave the game for the next new title. This was made evident by commentary on fashions and how the dress of many 40 year olds is not that different from their 20 year old selves. Gone are the social markers of age and time that clothing once had and along with it are jobs, roles and responsibilities that are also no longer consistent with age. We are creating an ever-present world of presentism where people don’t age, but nor do they have a future or past.

None of this is presented as judgement as if there is some ‘appropriate’ way to dress, rather as a means of flagging that we are quickly blurring the lines between what is and is not appropriate by taking away the lines altogether. What does that mean for society?

The danger of this present shock is that it keeps us blinded to the impact of our present moment and ignorant of the past. By de-historicizing ourselves, we lose the knowledge gained from experience, but also fail to use that knowledge to enhance understanding of pattern shifts towards the future. It’s this thinking that gets us buying ever more consumer green goods to save the planet someday, but not today. But what happens to tomorrow when we only pay attention to today?

Mindful sensemaking

Many think that mindfulness is about the present only, but it actually acknowledges that we are products of our past. Psychodynamic theory looks at how past narratives shape present systems as does mindfulness. Contemplative inquiry and mindfulness allows us to attune ourselves to our present situation, acknowledge what potential past narratives brought us to the present moment, and see things more clearly so we can shape the future through present action. It is not just the present devoid of context, nor is it wishful dreaming about an as-yet created world.

Rushkoff’s book wakes us up to how we’ve managed to conflate a mindful present with presentism. The book is not a rant against technology or attack on media or techno-futurists rather it is a call to be aware — perhaps mindful — of what this means for us personally and socially and to remind us that we still have control. We are not technological zombies, but we could be if we are not careful.

It is that reason that I was so taken by the end of Rushkoff’s book.

In the final pages, Rushkoff reflects on his writing he notes how much harder it is to pay attention, to stay focused and to create a work of depth in an era where that is against the norm and possibly against the market. Yet, as he points out this book could not be written as a series of Tweets and less a series of articles lest we miss the bigger narrative he wants us to pay attention to. This is systems thinking about reading and if we are to get into these kinds of complex, important issues we need to be willing to read books or take the time to listen, share, watch, study, reflect, contemplate and write about these issues in the depth that they need.

As Einstein is reported to have said about simplicity:

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler

Rushkoff makes this complex argument as simple as possible and the book is thankfully not simpler.

businesscomplexitydesign thinkingevaluationinnovation

Developmental Design and The Innovator’s Mindset

on August 16, 2013
Blackberry Swarmed By Ignorance

Blackberry Swarmed By Ignorance

Blackberry, once the ‘must have’ device is no longer so and may no longer even exist. Looking back on how the mighty device maker stumbled the failure is attributed to what was done and not done, but I would argue it is more about what was unseen and not thought. Ignorance of the past, present and future is what swarmed them and a lack of developmental design in their culture.

Today’s Globe and Mail features the above-pictured story about how and why Blackberry lost out to Apple’s iOS iPhone and Google’s Android powered phones due in large part to their focus on their stellar enterprise security system and failing to consider what would happen when competitors yielded ‘good enough’ models.  It’s a tale years in telling and what may be the beginning of the end of the once globally dominant Canadian tech leader.

Getting out

Those I’ve known who’ve worked for Blackberry describe a culture devoted to engineering excellence above all, which emphasized technical superiority and attention to the technology over the users of that technology. Perhaps if more of those engineers got out a more beyond their own circles they might have noticed a few things:

  1. Facebook, Twitter and social media sites that all seemed fun at first were quickly becoming more than just pastimes, they were being used as communications tools for everything from family and friends to work;
  2. Cameras were being used to capture photos and videos, share them and edit them (like Instagram and now Vine) for purposes beyond social, but also to take photos of PowerPoint presentations at events, brainstorming whiteboards and prototypes;
  3. The rich media experience provided through other devices meant that the keyboards were less important — typing faster and easier was being weighed against screen dimensions for videos, photos and interactive content;
  4. Workers were passionate enough about these new tools that they would bear the cost of their own phone to use these tools and carry two devices than just rely on a Blackberry if they were required to have one.

I saw this phenomena all over the place. Embedded in this pattern were some assumptions:

  1. Email was the most important form of productivity. (This might also include learning);
  2. Email was fun;
  3. Email got people communicating

Few people I know like email anymore. We tolerate it. Almost no one who is in the work world gets too few emails. Email is a useful and highly embedded form of communication; so much so as to nearly be a form of dominant design in our business communications.

What a little anthropological research on RIM’s part would have produced is some insights into how people communicate. Yes, email is the most pronounced electronic method of communication for business, but it doesn’t excite people like a video does or engage conversation like Twitter can or enable re-connection to close peers or family like LinkedIn and Facebook do. These are all platforms that were lesser served by the Blackberry model. What that means is that email is vulnerable to those things that attract people.

In complexity terms rich media is an attractor; it organizes patterns of activity around it that stimulate creativity in the system. This meant that a lot of positive energy was being directed into these new means of engagement over others and that when given the opportunity to choose and use a device that supported this engagement better people (and eventually the firms they worked for) began to opt for them over Blackberry.

Ongoing innovation

Developmental design is a process of incorporating the tenets of design thinking with developmental evaluation, strategic foresight, business model innovation and contemplative inquiry. It means constantly evaluating, assessing, designing and re-designing your product offerings as things change and developing a constant attentive focus on where you are, where you came from and the weak and strong signals that indicate shifts in a culture.

This is a new way of doing innovation development, evaluation and strategy, but it is the necessary ingredient in a space where there is high levels of complexity, rapid churn in the system, and high demand for action. Increasingly, this is no longer just the domain of high tech, but banking, retail, healthcare, education and nearly every system that is operating in multi-jurisdictional environments. When we (the customer, patients, students…) were very much the same, we could treat our system simply. Now the ‘we’ is different and the systems are complex.

Developmental design is the praxis of innovation.

What would Steve Jobs do?

It is interesting to note that today is the day the bio-pic on Steve Jobs is released into theatres. Jobs knew developmental design even if he never named it as such. He famously ‘got out’ in his own, unique way. He went for walking meetings rather than sat in boardrooms. He watched what people did and channeled his own passion for creating things into a company culture that was designed to create things to help people create things. To that end, he was among the most outstanding innovators of the last 50 years.

Yet, Jobs and his team were good at paying attention to where things had gone (the computer), where they were (increasing bandwidth capability and demand with the Internet), and where they were going (decentralized production). Thus we had a number-crunching machine turned it into a suite for personal creativity (Mac), which spawned a music player (iPod) and online store (iTunes), which led to a multimedia communications handset (iPhone), which inspired a handheld tablet (iPad).

Apple is the most valued tech company in the world because of that vision, one that has been questioned in light of Jobs’ passing on and new leadership in place at the company.

Blackberry is not unique. The leaderboard in consumer mobile technology has changed from Motorola to Nokia to RIM (Blackberry) to Apple to Samsung (Android) in less than 15 years. That is enormous churn in a sector that touches over three quarters of the world’s population directly (more than toilets). While perhaps an extreme case, it is becoming a model to pay attention to for other industries on different scales.

Ask yourself: Are you Blackberry today or Apple yesterday?

If you apply developmental design to your work, you’ll have your answer.

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Google’s “20% time,” which brought you Gmail and AdSense, is now as good as dead

on August 16, 2013

Interesting to see that one of the most innovative companies that is responsible for so many of the most powerful technological/communication innovations ever is getting so focused on doing things with what it has and forgetting how it got there. Perhaps this new approach will work better and it challenges the idea that 20% time can scale and scale across conditions, but hearing things like “we are too busy” to take the time is concerning. What do you think of the future of 20% time?

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