Tag: social media

businessinnovationpsychologyscience & technologysocial systems

The logic of a $1000 iPhone

on September 12, 2017

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Today Apple is expected to release a new series of iPhone handsets with the base price for one set at more than $1000. While many commentators are focusing on the price, the bigger issue is less about what these new handsets cost, but what value they’ll hold. 

The idea that a handset — once called a phone — that is the size of a piece of bread could cost upward of $1000 seems mind-boggling to anyone who grew up with a conventional telephone. The new handsets coming to market have more computing power built into them than was required for the entire Apollo space missions and dwarf even the most powerful personal computers from just a few years ago. And to think that this computing power all fits into your pocket or purse.

The iPhone pictured above was ‘state of the art’ when it was purchased a few years ago and has now been retired to make way for the latest (until today) version required not because the handset broke, but because it could no longer handle the demands placed on it from the software that powered it and the storage space required to house it all. This was never an issue when people used a conventional telephone because it always worked and it did just one thing really well: allowed people to talk to each other at a distance.

Changing form, transforming functions

The iPhone is as much about technology as it is a vector of change in social life that is a product of and contributor to new ways of interacting. The iPhone (and its handset competitors) did not create the habits of text messaging, photo sharing, tagging, social chat, augmented reality, but it also wasn’t just responding to humans desire to communicate, either. Adam Alter’s recent book Irresistible outlines how technology has been a contributor to behaviours that we would now call addictive. This includes a persistent ‘need’ to look at one’s phone while doing other things, constant social media checking, and an inability to be fully present in many social situations without touching their handset.

Alter presents the evidence from a variety of studies and clinical reports that shows how tools like the iPhone and the many apps that run on it are engineered to encourage the kind of addictive behaviour we see permeating through society. Everything from the design of the interface, to the type of information an app offers a user (and when it provides it), to the architecture of social tools that encourage a type of reliance and engagement that draws people back to their phone, all create the conditions for a device that no longer sits as a mere tool, but has the potential to play a central role in many aspects of life.

These roles may be considered good or bad for social welfare, but in labelling such behaviours or outcomes in this way we risk losing the bigger picture of what is happening in our praise or condemnation. Dismissing something as ‘bad’ can mean we ignore social trends and the deeper meaning behind why people do things. By labelling things as ‘good’ we risk missing the harm that our tools and technology are doing and how they can be mitigated or prevented outright.

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Changing functions, transforming forms

Since the iPhone was first launched, it’s moved from being a phone with a built in calendar and music player to something that now can power a business, serve as a home theatre system, and function as a tour guide. As apps and software evolve to accommodate mobile technology, the ‘clunkiness’ of doing many things on the go like accounting, take high-quality photos, or manage data files has been removed. Now, laptops seem bulky and even tablets, which have evolved in their power and performance to mimic desktops, are feeling big.

The handset is now serving as the tether to each other and creates a connected world. Who wants to lug cables and peripherals with them to and from the office when you can do much of the work in your hand? It is now possible to run a business without a computer. It’s still awkward, but it’s genuinely possible. Financial tools like Freshbooks or Quickbooks allow entrepreneurs to do their books from anywhere and tools like Shopify can transform a blog into a full-fledged e-commerce site.

Tools like Apple Pay have turned your phone into a wallet. Paying with your handset is now a viable option in an increasing number of places.

This wasn’t practical before and now it is. With today’s release from Apple, new tools like 3-D imaging, greatly-improved augmented reality support and enhanced image capture will all be added to the users’ toolkit.

Combine all of this with the social functions of text, chat, and media sharing and the handset has now transformed from a device to a social connector, business driver and entertainment device. There is little that can be done digitally that can’t be done on a handset.

Why does this matter?

It’s easy to get wrapped up in all of this as technological hype, but to do so is to miss some important trends. We may have concern over the addictive behaviours these tools engender, the changes in social decorum the phone instigates, and the fact that it becomes harder to escape the social world when the handset is also serving as your navigation tool, emergency response system, and as an e-reader. But these demands to have everything in your pocket and not strapped to your back, sitting on your desk (and your kitchen table) and scattered all over different tools and devices comes from a desire for simplicity and convenience.

In the midst of the discussion about whether these tools are good or bad, we often forget to ask what they are useful for and not useful for. Socially, they are useful for maintaining connections, but they have shown to be not so useful for building lasting, human connections at depth. They are useful for providing us with near-time and real-time data, but not as useful at allowing us to focus on the present moment. These handsets free us from our desk, but also keep us ‘tied’ to our work.

At the same time, losing your handset has enormous social, economic and (potentially) security consequences. It’s no longer about missing your music or not being able to text someone, when most of one’s communications, business, and social navigation functions are routed through a singular device the implications for losing that device becomes enormous.

Useful and not useful/good and bad

By asking how a technology is useful and not useful we can escape the dichotomy of good and bad, which gets us to miss the bigger picture of the trends we see. Our technologies are principally useful for connecting people to each other (even if it might be highly superficial), enabling quick action on simple tasks (e.g., shopping, making a reservation), finding simple information (e.g., Google search), and navigating unknown territory with known features (e.g., navigation systems). This is based on a desire for connection a need for data and information, and alleviating fear.

Those underlying qualities are what makes the iPhone and other devices worth paying attention to. What other means have we to enhance connection, provide information and help people to be secure? Asking these questions is one way in which we shape the future and provide either an alternative to technologies like the iPhone or better amplify these tools’ offerings. The choice is ours.

There may be other ways we can address these issues, but thus far haven’t found any that are as compelling. Until we do, a $1000 for a piece of technology that does this might be a bargain.

Seeing trends and developing a strategy to meet them is what foresight is all about. To learn more about how better data and strategy through foresight can help you contact Cense. 

Image credits: Author

 

innovationpsychologysystems thinking

Decoupling creators from their creations

on June 1, 2017

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The world is transformed by creators — the artists, the innovators, the leaders — and their creations are what propel change and stand in the way of it. Change can be hard and its made all the more so when we fail to decouple the creator from the created, inviting resistance rather than enticing better creations. 

If you want to find the hotspot for action or inaction in a human system, look at what is made in that system. Human beings defend, promote and attend to what they made more than anything. Just watch.

Children will rush to show you what they made: a sandcastle, a picture, a sculpture, a…whatever it is they are handing you. Adults don’t grow out of that: we are just big kids. Adults are just more subtle in how we promote and share what we do, but we still place an enormous amount of psychological energy on our creations. Sometimes its our kids, our spouses (which is a relationship we created), our ideas, our way of life, our programs, policies or businesses. Even something like a consumer purchase is, in some ways, a reflection of us in that we are making an identity or statement with it.

Social media can feel like one big echo-chamber sometimes, but it’s that way because we often are so busy sharing our opinions that we’re not listening — focusing on what we made, not what others made. Social media can be so harsh because when we attack ideas — our 140 character creations sometimes — we feel as if we are being attacked. This is one of the reasons we are having such traumatized, distorted discourse in the public domain.

Creations vs creators

The problem with any type of change is that we often end up challenging both the creator and the creation at the same time. It’s saying that the creation needs to change and that can hurt the creator, even if done unintentionally.

The interest in failure in recent years is something I’ve been critical of, but a positive feature of it is that people are now talking more openly about what it means to not succeed and that is healthy. There are lots of flaws in the failure talk out there, mostly notably because it fails (no pun — even a bad one, intended… but let’s go with it) to decouple the creator from the creation.  In many respects, creators and their creations are intimately tied together as one is the raw material and vehicle for the other.

But when we need to apologize for, make amends because, or defend our creations constantly we are using a lot of energy. In organizational environments there is an inordinate amount of time strategizing, evaluating and re-visiting innovation initiatives, but the simple truth is that — as we will see below — it doesn’t make a lick of difference because we are confusing the creators with the creations and the systems in which they are creating.

Sometimes we need to view the creator and creation separately and that is all a matter of trust – and reality.

 

A matter of trust, a matter of reality

If you are part of a team that has been tasked with addressing an issue and given a mandate to find and possibly create a solution, why should it matter what you produce? That seems like an odd question or statement.

At first it seems obvious: for accountability, right?

But consider this a little further.

If a team has been given a charge, it presumably is the best group that is available given the time and resources available. Maybe there are others more suited or talented to the job, perhaps there is a world expert out there who could help, but because of time, money, logistics or some combination of reasons in a given situation that isn’t possible. We are now dealing with what is, not what we wish to be. This is sometimes called the real world. 

If that team does not have the skills or talent to do it, why is it tasked with the problem? If those talents and skills are unknown and there is no time, energy or commitment  — or means — to assess that in practice then you are in a truly innovative space: let’s see what happens.

In this case, accountability is simply a means of exploring how something is made, what is learned along the way, and assessing what kind of products are produced from that, knowing that there is no real way to determine it’s comparative merit, significance or worth — the hallmark tenets of evaluation. It’s experimental and there is no way to fail, except to fail to attend and learn from it.

This is a matter of trust. It’s about trusting that you’re going to do something useful with what you have and that’s all. The right / wrong debate makes no sense because, if you’re dealing with reality as we discussed above there are no other options aside from not doing something. So why does failure have to come into it?

This is about trusting creators to create. It has nothing to do with what they create because, if you’ve selected a group to do something that only they are able to do, for reasons mentioned above, it has nothing to do with their creation.

Failing at innovation

The real failure we speak of might be failing to grasp reality, failing to support creative engagement in the workplace, and failing to truly innovate. These are products of what happens when we task individuals, groups, units or some other entity within our organizations, match them with systems that have no known means forward and provide them with no preparation, tools, or intelligence about the problem to support doing what they are tasked with. The not knowing part of the problem is not uncommon, particularly in innovative spaces. It’s nothing to sneer at, rather something that is a true learning opportunity. But we need to call it as it is, not what we want it or pretend it to be.

My colleague Hallie Preskill from FSG is big on learning and is not averse to rolling her eyes when people speak of it, because it’s often used so flippantly and without thought. True learning means paying attention, giving time and focus to what material — experience, data, reflections, goals and contexts — is available, and in . Learning has a cost and it has many myths attached to it. It’s difficulty is why many simply don’t do it. In truth, many are not as serious about really learning, but talking about learning. This is what Hallie sees a lot.

The material for learning is what these innovators, these creators, are producing so if we are valuing creation and innovation we need to pay attention to this and entice creators to continue to generate more quality ‘content’ for us to learn from and worry less about what these creators produce when we task them with innovation missions that have no chance to ‘succeed’ just as they have no chance to ‘fail’

A poor question leads us to poor answers.

Consider what we ask of our innovators and innovation and you’ll see that, if we want more and better creators and if we want more and better creations we need to see them in a new light and create the culture that sees them both for what they are, not what we want them to be.

Image credit: Author

behaviour changepsychologysocial mediasocial systems

My troubled relationship with social media

on April 1, 2016

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Do you care about donuts? I did, once. I’m not so sure anymore.

I used to love donuts, was passionate about donuts and spent the better part of my early career looking at the power of social media to transform our understanding of and engagement with donuts. Just this week, I had a paper published that I co-authored with colleagues looked at Twitter is being used to engage audiences on donuts, er vaping and it’s potential public health implications. I’m still into donuts, but the question is whether donuts are still serving the purpose they once did. It’s left me asking….

Is it still time to make the donuts?

Twitter turned 10 this past month. When it was founded the idea of communicating short 140 character chunks of content to the world by default (unlike Facebook, where you could restrict you posts to your ‘friends’ only by default), the idea seemed absurd, particularly to me. Why would anyone want to use something that was the equivalent of a Facebook status update without anything else? (Keep in mind that link shorteners were not yet in wide use, the embedded pictures and lists that we have now were either not invented or highly cumbersome).

However, social media is a ‘participation sport’ as I like to say and by engaging with it I soon realized Twitter’s enormous potential. For the first time I could find people who had the same quirky collection of interests as I did (e.g, systems science, design, innovation, Star Wars, coffee, evaluation, soccer, politics, stationary and fine writing instruments – and not necessarily in that order, but in that combination) and find answers to questions I didn’t think to ask from people I didn’t know existed.

It was a wonder and I learned more about the cutting edge of research there than I ever did using traditional databases, conferences or books much to the shock, horror and disbelief of my professional colleagues. I’ve often been considered an early adopter and this was no exception. I did research, consultation and training in this area and expanded my repertoire to Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn and pretty much everything I could including some platforms that no longer exist.

I developed relationships with people I’d never (and still have never) met from around the world who’s camaraderie and collegiality I valued as much or more than those people I’d known for years in the flesh. It was heady times.

But like with donuts, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. And also like donuts, where I once loved them and enjoyed them regularly consuming them now starts to not sit so well and that’s maybe for the better.

I’m left questioning whether it’s still time to make the donuts.

The river I stand in

This river I step in is not the river I stand in – Heraclitus

Like with donuts the experience of social media — the context of its use — has changed. As I age, eat better, exercise more wisely and am more mindful of how I feel and what I do, donuts lost appeal. They probably taste the same, but the experience has changed and not because the donuts are different, but my dietary and lifestyle context is.

The same is true for social media.

I have never been a techno advocate or pessimist, rather I’ve been a pragmatist. Social media does things that traditional media does not. It helps individuals and organizations communicate and, depending on how its used, engage an audience interactively in ways that ‘old media’ like billboards, radio, TV and pamphlets do not. But we still have the old media, we just recognize that it’s good at particular things and not others.

But the river, the moving and transforming media landscape, is much faster, bigger and bolder than it was before. Take the birthday girl or boy, Twitter, it’s grown to be a ubiquitous tool for journalists, celebrities and scholars, but saw a small decline in its overall use after a year of flatlined growth.

TwitterMonthlyActive 2016-04-01 13.50.14(Twitter monthly users via Tech Crunch)

As for Facebook, it’s faring OK. While it still has growth, I’ve struggled to find anyone who speaks in glowing terms about their experience with the service, particularly anyone who wishes to change their privacy settings or wishes to stem the flow of ads. Over at Instagram, my feed has seen the rise of ‘brands’ following me. No longer is it the names of real people (even if its a nickname) it’s usually some variant of ‘getmorefollowers’ or brands or something like that. This is all as I see more ads and less life.

Information overload and filter failure

Speaking to an audience in 2008, author and media scholar Clay Shirky spoke to the problem of ‘information overload’ which was a term being applied to the exponential rise in exposure people had to information thanks to the Internet and World Wide Web. At the time, his argument was that it was less about overload of information, than a failure of our filter systems to make sense of what was most useful. 

But that was 2008. That was before the mobile Internet really took off. That was when Twitter was 2 and Facebook just a couple years later. In the third quarter of 2008, Facebook had around 100,000 users and now its got a population of more 1.6B users. The river has got bigger and more full. That might be nice if you’re into white water rafting or building large hydro-electric dams, but it might be less enjoyable if you’re into fly fishing. I can’t imagine A River Runs Through It with a water feature that’s akin to Niagara Falls.

As journalist Douglas Rushkoff has pointed out in many different fora, the Internet is changing the way we think.  Indeed, ‘smarter technologies’ are changing the way we live.

This all brings up a dilemma: what to do? As one who has studied and advised organizations on how to develop and implement social media strategies I would be a hypocrite to suggest we abandon them. Engaging with an audience is better than not doing so. Humanizing communications – which is something social media can do far better than speaking ‘at’ people — is better than not. Being timely and relevant is also better than not. Yet, the degree to which social media can answer these problems is masked by the volume of content out there and the manner in which people interact with content.

Walking through any major urban area, take public transit, or watching people in line for pretty much anything will find a substantial portion of humans looking at their devices. Even couples or friends at restaurants are left to concoct games to get people paying attention to each other, not their devices. We are living in the attentional economy and what is increasingly valuable is focus, not necessarily more information and that requires filtration systems that are not overwhelmed by the volume of content.

Emotional pollution and the antisocial media

I recently wrote about how ‘the stream’ of social media has changed the way that social activism and organizing is done. While social media was once and invaluable tool for organizing and communicating ideas, its become a far more muddled set of resources in recent years. To be sure, movements like Black Lives Matter and others that promote more democratic, active social engagement on issues of justice and human dignity are fuelled and supported by social media. This is a fantastic thing for certain issues, but the question might be left: for how long?

Not so long ago, my Facebook feed was filled with the kind of flotsam, jetsam and substance of everyday life. This was about pictures of children or vacations, an update on someone’s new job or their health, or perhaps a witty observation on human life, but the substance of the content was the poster, the person. Now, it is increasingly about other people and ‘things’ . It’s about injustices to others and the prejudices that come with that, it’s about politics (regardless of how informed people are), it’s about solidarity with some groups (at the willful ignorance of others) and about rallying people to some cause or another.

While none of these are problematic — and actually quite healthy in some measure — they are almost all I see. On Twitter, people are sharing other things, but rarely their own thoughts. On Facebook, it’s about sharing what others have written and the posters emotional reaction to it.

Increasingly, it’s about social validation. Believe my idea. “Like” this post if you’re really my friend. Share if you’re with me and not with them. And so on.

What I am left with, increasingly, is a lost sense of who the ‘me’ and the ‘them’ are in my social media stream. What it feels is that I am increasingly wading into a stream of emotional pollution rather than human interaction. And when my filters are full, this gets harder to do and I’m not sure I want to be less sensitized to the world, but I also don’t want my interactions with others to be solely about reacting to their rage at the world or some referendum on their worldview. It seems that social media is becoming anti-social media.

In complex systems we might see this is as a series of weak, but growing stronger, signals of something else. Whether that’s collective outrage at the injustices of the world, the need for greater support, or the growing evidence that social media use can be correlated with a sense of loneliness, I’m not sure.

But something is going on and I’m now beginning to wonder about all those donuts we’ve created.

Photo credit: Chris Lott Social Media Explained (with Donuts) used under Creative Commons License via Flickr

About the author: Cameron Norman is the Principal of Cense Research + Design and works at assisting organizations and networks in creative learning through design, program evaluation, behavioural science and system thinking.

 

complexitydesign thinkingpsychologysocial systemssystems thinking

Collective action, impact, intelligence & stupidity

on February 4, 2016

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Collective impact is based largely on the concept that we can do more together than apart, which holds true under the assumption that we can coordinate, organize and execute as a unit. This assumption doesn’t always hold true and the implications for getting it wrong require serious attention. 

Anyone interested in social change knows that they can’t do it alone. Society, after all, is a collective endeavour — even if Margaret Thatcher suggested it didn’t exist.  Thatcherites aside, that is about where agreement ends. Social change is complex, fraught with disagreements, and challenging for even the most skilled organizer because of the multitude of perspectives and disparate spread of individuals, groups and organizations across the system.

Social media (and the Internet more widely) was seen as means of bridging these gaps, bringing people together and enabling them to organize and make social change. Wael Ghonim, one of the inspirational forces behind Egypt’s Arab Spring movement, believed this to be true, saying:

If you want to liberate society all you need is the Internet

But as he acknowledges now, he was wrong.

Ghonim’s beliefs were not illogical as he discusses in the Ted talk above. He espoused a belief about collective action that echoes what leadership consultant and author Ken Blanchard proclaims:

None of us is as smart as all of us

Blanchard’s quote is meant to illustrate the power of teams and working together; something that we can easily take for granted when we seek to do collective action. Yet, what’s often not discussed are the challenges that our new tools present for true systems change.

Complex (social) systems thrive on diversity, the interaction between ideas and the eventual coordination and synchrony between actions into energy. That requires some agreement, strategy and leadership before the change state becomes the new stable state (the changed state). Change comes from a coalescing of perspectives into some form of agreement that can be transformed into a design and then executed. It’s messy, unpredictable, imprecise, can take time and energy, but that is how social change happens. 

At least, that’s how it has happened. How it’s happening now is less clear thanks to social media and it’s near ubiquitous role in social movements worldwide.

Complicating complexity

The same principles underpinning complex social systems hasn’t changed, but what we’re seeing is that the psychology of change and the communications that takes place within those systems is. When one reviews or listens to the stories told about social change movements from history, what we see over and again is the power of stories.

Stories take time to tell them, are open to questions, and can get more powerful in their telling and retelling. They engage us and, because they take time, grant us time to reflect on their meaning and significant. It’s a reason why we see plays, read novels, watch full-length films, and spend time with friends out for coffee…although this all might be happening less and less.

Social media puts pressure on that attention, which is part of the change process. Social media’s short-burst communication styles — particularly with Tweets, Snapchat pictures, Instragram shots and Facebook posts — make it immensely portable and consumable, yet also highly problematic for longer narratives. The social media ‘stream’, something discussed here before, provides a format that tends to confirm our own beliefs and perspectives, not challenge them, by giving us what we want even if that’s not necessarily what we need for social change.

When we are challenged the anonymity, lack of social cues, immediacy, and reach of social media can make it too easy for our baser natures to override our thoughts and lash out. Whether its Wael Ghomim and Egypt’s Arab Spring or Hossein Derakhshan and Iranian citizen political movement or the implosion of the Occupy movement , the voices of constructive dissent and change can be overwhelmed by infighting and internal dissent, never allowing that constructive coalescing of perspective needed to focus change.

Collectively, we may be more likely to reflect one of the ‘demotivation’ posters from Despair instead of Ken Blanchard:

None of us is as dumb as all of us

Social media, the stream and the hive

Ethan Zuckerman of the MIT Media Lab has written extensively about the irony of the social insularity that comes with the freedom and power online social networks introduce as was explored in a previous post.

The strength of a collective impact approach is that it aims to codify and consolidate agreement, including the means for evaluating impact. To this end, it’s a powerful force for change if the change that is sought is of a sufficient value to society and that is where things get muddy. I’ve personally seen many grand collaboratives fall to irrelevancy because the only agreements that participants can come up with are broad plaudits or truisms that have little practical meaning.

Words like “impact”, “excellence”, “innovation” and “systems change” are relatively meaningless if not channeled into a vision that’s attainable through specific actions and activities. The specifics — the devil in the details — comes from discussion, debate, concession, negotiation and reflection, all traits that seem to be missing when issues are debated via social media.

What does this mean for collective impact?

If not this, then what?

This is not a critique of collective activity, because working together is very much like what Winston Churchill said about democracy and it’s failings still making it better than the alternatives. But it’s worth asking some serious questions and researching what collective impact means in practice and how to we engage it with the social tools that are now a part of working together (particularly at a distance). These questions require research and systemic inquiry.

Terms like social innovation laboratories or social labs are good examples of an idea that sounds great (and may very well be so), yet has remarkably little evidence behind it. Collective impact risks falling into the same trap if it is not rigorously, critically evaluated and that the evaluation outcomes are shared. This includes asking the designer’s and systems thinker’s question: are we solving the right problem in the first place? (Or are we addressing some broad, foggy ideal that has no utility in practice for those who seek to implement an initiative?)

Among the reasons brainstorming is problematic is that it fails to account for power and for the power of the first idea. Brainstorming favours those ideas that are put forward first with participants commonly reacting to those ideas, which immediately reduces the scope of vision. A far more effective method is having participants go off and generate ideas independently and then systematically introducing those to the group in a manner that emphasizes the idea, not the person who proposed it. Research suggests it needs to be well facilitated [PDF].

There may be an argument that we need better facilitation of ideas through social media or, perhaps as Wael Ghonim argues, a new approach to social media altogether. Regardless, we need to design the conversation spaces and actively engage in them lest we create a well-intentioned echo chamber that achieves collective nothing instead of collective impact.

Photo credit “All Power to the Collective” to Mike Benedetti used under Creative Commons licence via Flickr (original artist, Graffito)

emergencepsychologysocial mediasocial systems

Mental health: talking and listening

on January 27, 2016

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Innovation might be doing things different to produce value, but there’s little value if we as a society are not able to embrace change because we’re hiding from mental illness either as individuals, organizations or communities. Without wellbeing and the space to acknowledge when we don’t have it any new product, idea or opportunity will be wasted, which is why mental health promotion is something that we all need to care about. 

Today is Bell Let’s Talk Day in Canada. Its (probably) the most visible national day of mental health promotion in the world. The reason has much to do with the sponsor, Bell Canada, who happens to be one of the country’s major providers of wireless telecommunications, Internet, and television services in addition to owning many entertainment outlets like cable channels, sports teams and radio stations. But this is not about Bell**, but the issue behind Let’s Talk Day: ending mental health stigma.

Interestingly perhaps, the line from the film and novel Fight Club that is most remembered is also the one that is quite fitting for the topic of mental health (particularly given the story):

First rule of Fight Club: Don’t talk about Fight Club.

Mental health stigma is a vexing social problem because it’s about an issue that is so incredibly common and yet receives so little attention in the public discourse.

The Mental Health Commission of Canada‘s aggregation of the data provide a useful jumping off point:

  • In any given year, one in five people in Canada experiences a mental health problem or illness bringing a cost to the economy of more than $50 billion;
  • Up to 70 per cent of adults with a mental health problem report having had one in childhood;
  • Mental health was the reason for nearly half of all disability-related claims by the Canadian public service in 2010, double what it was in 1990;
  • Mental health problems and illnesses account for over $6 billion in lost productivity costs due to absenteeism and presenteeism;
  • Among our First Nations, youth are 5-6 times more likely to die at their own hands than non-Aboriginal youth and for Inuit, the suicide rate is 11 times the national average;
  • Improving a child’s mental health from moderate to high has been estimated to save society more than $140,000 over their lifetime;

And this is just Canada. Consider what it might look like where you live.

It seems preposterous that, with numbers this high and an issue so prevalent that it is not commonly spoken of, yet that is the case. Mental illness is still the great ‘secret’ in society and yet our mental wellbeing is critical to our success on this planet.

Like with many vexing problems, the place for change to start is by listening.

Mind over matter: Dr. Paul Antrobus

Last year one of the most incredible human beings I’ve ever — or will ever — meet passed away. Dr. Paul Antrobus was the man who introduced to me psychology and was the wisest person I’ve ever known. Paul was not only among the greatest psychologists who’ve ever lived (I say with no exaggeration) by means of his depth of knowledge of the field and his ability to practice it across cultures, but he was also someone who could embody what mental health was all about.

In 2005 Paul fell off the roof of his cottage and was left as a paraplegic, requiring ventilation to breathe. For nearly anyone this would have been devastating to their very being, yet for Paul he managed to retain his humour, compassion and intellect as well as sharp wit and engagement and put it on display soon after his accident. He demonstrated to me the power of the mind and consciousness over the body both in the classroom and, after the accident, in his wheelchair.

Paul lived a good life, by design. He surrounded himself with family and friends, built a career where he was challenged and stimulated and provided enough basics for life, and gave back to his community and to hundreds of students whom he mentored and taught. Much of this was threatened with the accident, yet he continued on, illustrating how much potential we have for healing. He learned by listening to his life what he needed and when he needed it, tried things out, evaluated, tinkered and persisted. In essence: he was a designer.

Paul would also be the first to say that healing is a product of many things — biology (like genes), personality, family upbringing, access to resources (human, financial, spiritual, intellectual), and community systems of support. He made the most of all of these and, partly because of his access to resources as part of being a professor of psychology, was able to cultivate positive and strong mental health while helping others do the same. Although he might not have used the term ‘designer’, that’s exactly what he was. One of the reasons was that he discovered how to listen to his life and that of others.

And because he was able to listen to others he recognized that nearly everyone had the potential for great health, but that such potential was always couched within systems that worked for or against people. Of all of the things that contribute to healing, a healing community had the potential to allow people to overcome nearly any problem associated with the other factors. Yet, it is the community — and their attitudes toward health (and mental health in particular) — that requires the greatest amount of change.

That’s why talking and listening is so important. It creates community.

Listening to your life

Paul wrote a book and taught a course on listening to one’s life. Part of that approach is also being able to share what your life is teaching you and listening to what your body and the world is telling you. For something like Bell Let’s Talk Day, a space is created to share — Tweet, text, post — stories of suffering, hope, recovery, support, love and questioning about mental health without fear. It’s a single day and part of a corporate-led campaign, but the size and scope of it make it far safer and ‘normal’ on this day than on almost any day I know of.

A couple of years ago a colleague disclosed to the world that she had struggled with depression via Twitter on Bell Let’s Talk Day. She was so taken by the chance to share something that, on any other day, would seem to be ‘oversharing’ or inappropriate or worse, that she opened up and, thankfully, many others listened.

Let’s Talk Day is about designing the conversation around mental health by creating the space for it to take place and allowing ideas and issues to emerge. This is the kind emergent conditions that systems change designers seek to create and if you want to see it in action, follow #BellLetsTalk online or find your own space to talk wherever you are and to listen and to design for one of the greatest social challenges of our time.

This post is not about innovation, but rather the very foundation in which innovation and discovery rests: our mental health and wellbeing. For without those, innovation is nothing.

Today, listen to your life and that of others and consider what design considerations are necessary to promote positive mental health and the creative conditions to excel and innovate.

As for some tips in speaking out and listening in, consider these five things to promote mental health where you are today:

  • Language matters – pay attention to the words you use about mental illness.
  • Educate yourself – learn, know and talk more, understand the signs of distress and mental illness.
  • Be kind – small acts of kindness speak a lot.
  • Listen and ask – sometimes it’s best to just listen.
  • Talk about it – start a dialogue, break the silence

Thank you for listening.

** I have no affiliation with Bell or have any close friends or family who work for Bell (although they are my mobile phone provider, if that counts as a conflict of interest).

food systemsjournalismpublic healthsocial mediasystems science

Frogs, Pots, Blogs and Social Media

on December 30, 2015

Frog_and_saucepan

Our information landscape has been compared with our diets providing an ample opportunity to compare what we ‘consume’ with how we prepare food and perhaps draw on the analogy of the frog and the boiling point of water. Are we slowly killing our ability to produce independent thought through vehicles like blogs as we draw our gaze to and focus on the social media stream?

Iranian-Canadian blogger Hossein Derakhshan was one of the few who opposed the state-imposed media messaging about what was (and has been) happening in Iran. For that, he was jailed. Writing in the Guardian news service, Darakshan, once referred to as Iran’s ‘Blogfather’, discusses how blogging enabled him to be this voice and how he’s become increasingly concerned with how that option is getting slowly silenced not necessarily by governments but by social media.

Darakhshan’s perspective on social media is made all the more interesting because of his role as a prominent blogger before his arrest and the 6-year prison term that disrupted that role, offering something of a time-travel experiment in social media that he illustrates with a story from the Qur’an (known as the tale of the Seven Sleepers).

Upon his return online, Darakhshan noticed that the patchwork quilt of perspectives that were present in the blogosphere was being replaced by ‘The Stream’ that social media provides.

This stream is no longer about a diversity of perspectives, but rather something custom-tailored to meet our preferences, desires, and the needs of corporations seeking to sell advertising, products and services that align with their perception of what we want or require. This stream also allows us to shield ourselves from perspectives that might clash with our own. Groups like ISIS, he suggests, are enabled and emboldened by this kind of information vacuum:

Minority views are radicalised when they can’t be heard or engaged with. That’s how Isis is recruiting and growing. The stream suppresses other types of unconventional ideas too, with its reliance on our habits.

The Stream & our information diet

What’s interesting about The Stream is that it is about bits and bites (or bytes) and not about meals. Yet, if we consider the analogy of information and food a little further we might find ourselves hard-pressed to recall the snacks we had, but (hopefully) can recall many memorable meals. Snacking isn’t bad, but it’s not memorable and too much of it isn’t particularly healthy unless it’s of very high-quality food. With no offence to my ‘friends’ and ‘follows’ on social media, but most of what they produce is highly refined, saccharine-laden comfort food in their posts and retweets, with a few tasty morsels interspersed between rants, cat videos, selfies, and kid pictures. To be fair, my ‘offerings’ aren’t much better when I look across many of my recent Tweets and posts as I am no more than a box of sugar-topped Shreddies to others’ Frosted Flakes. (Note to self when composing New Years Resolutions, even if they are likely to fail, that I need to add less sugar to my stream).

Yet, we are living an age of information abundance and, like food abundance (and the calories that come with it), we are prone to getting obese and lethargic from too much of it. This was the argument that political communicator Clay Johnston makes in his book The Information Diet. Obesity in its various forms makes us slower, less attuned, more disengaged and often far less mindful (and critical) of what we take in whether it’s food or information. And like obesity, the problem is not just one of personal choice and willpower, it’s also about obesogenic systems that include: workplaces, restaurants, communities, markets and policies. This requires systems thinking and ensuring that we are making good personal choices and supporting healthy, critical information systems to support those choices.

The Stream is actually antithetical to that in many regards as Darakhshan points out. The Stream is about passing content through something else, like Facebook, that may or may not choose to pass it on to someone at any given time and place. I’ve noticed this firsthand over the holiday season by finding “Getting ready for Christmas” messages in my Facebook feed on Boxing Day and beyond.

The problem with The Stream is that everything is the same, by design, as Darakhshan notes in an earlier post on his concerns with his new post-imprisonment Web.

Six years was a long time to be in jail, but it’s an entire era online. Writing on the internet itself had not changed, but reading — or, at least, getting things read — had altered dramatically. I’d been told how essential social networks had become while I’d been gone, and so I knew one thing: If I wanted to lure people to see my writing, I had to use social media now.

So I tried to post a link to one of my stories on Facebook. Turns out Facebook didn’t care much. It ended up looking like a boring classified ad. No description. No image. Nothing. It got three likes. Three! That was it.

An information food web

Diversity of perspective and content is critical for healthy decision-making in complex systems. Our great problems, the wicked ones from terrorism to chronic disease to mass migration to climate change, will not be solved in The Stream. Yet, if we push too much toward creating content in social networks that are no longer controlled by users (even if the content is produced by users) and designed to facilitate new thinking, not just same thinking, our collective capacity for addressing complex problems is diminished.

Wicked problems will not be solved by Big Data alone. We cannot expect to simply mine our streams looking for tags and expect to find the diversity of perspective or new idea that will change the game. As Ethan Zuckerman has pointed out, we need to rewire our feeds consciously to reflect the cosmopolitan nature of our problems and world, not just accept that we’ll choose diversity when our information systems are designed to minimize them.

Much like a food web, consideration of our information ecosystems in systems terms can be useful in helping us understand the role of blogging and other forms of journalism and expression in nurturing not only differences of opinion, but supporting the democratic foundation in which the Web was originally based. Systems thinking about what we consume as well as produce might be a reason to consider blogging as well as adding to your social media stream and why more ‘traditional’ media like newspapers and related news sites have a role.

Otherwise, we may just be the frog in the boiling pot who isn’t aware that it’s about to be cooked until it’s too late.

Postscript

It is interesting that Darakhshan’s piece caught my attention the day after WordPress delivered my ‘Year in Blogging’ review to my inbox. It pointed out that there were just 4 posts on Censemaking in 2015. This is down from more than 90 per year in past calendar years. Clearly, I’ve been drawn into the stream with my content sharing and perhaps it’s time to swim back against the current. This blog was partly a response. Stay tuned for more and thanks for reading.

Image: Frog & Saucepan used under Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Foundation.

science & technologysocial innovationsocial systems

Social innovation, social inclusion

on August 27, 2015

Inclusion means everyone

Social innovation is about bringing new ideas, products and services out into society with others for social benefit and improving the lives of our communities. While not every innovation will benefit everyone, there is a need to examine more deeply the question of who benefits(?) when we consider social innovation and that means taking some hard looks at who we are innovating for. 

On August 15th 2015 the New York Times ran a feature story titled Inside Amazon, which looked at the corporate culture inside one of the largest, most innovate retailers in the world. In the piece written by award-winning journalists Jodi Kantor and David Strietfeld, they interview more than 100 current and former employees of Amazon and find a culture that is fast-paced, exciting, dynamic, creative and sometimes cruel, relentless in its expectations of its employees, overwhelming and harsh. What was interesting is that many interviewees spoke in conflicting terms about working for the company which offered great compensation and a stimulating workplace with lots of opportunities to grow while simultaneously burning them out and challenging their sense of self in the process of delivering feedback that wasn’t always experienced as constructive.

Across the news aisle we find another example of innovation in the news. In the September issue of the Walrus Magazine, editor-in-chief Jonathan Kay returns to the front lines of reporting with a feature story called Uber v. Taxi (or The Truth about Uber on the cover), which takes a comparative examination of changing business models and culture around cars-for-hire comparing tech start-up Uber with the traditional taxi model. The piece involves Kay signing up to be an Uber driver and also completing the City of Toronto taxi school to get a first-hand look at both systems from the perspective of driver and passenger. In an interview on CBC Radio, Kay was asked about the differences between the two and commented on how Uber was working well for the young, the mobile and able-bodied whereas traditional taxis were left with the others, creating a gap in income and opportunity between the two services:

That’s where drivers make a ton of money. Uber is taking that. Taxis are being left with older people, people with special needs, people who require wheelchair access and the visually impaired. Those are the people who require special training and vehicles that taxi fleets can provide but that’s not a particularly profitable part of the trade. Those trips take a lot of time and effort and passenger care. There’s not enough money on the table left for the taxi drivers to make a living.

Innovating for whom?

What these two stories have in common is that it profiles the way innovation spaces can divide as much as unite. On the surface, we see two examples of ways in which new thinking, careful product design and marketing, and a focused attention on user experience can generate value for consumers. However, what they also illustrate is that what is perceived as value is largely contingent on whom it is being asked and that this perception is not a minority position. This is not a case of blacksmiths getting outraged at the dwindling market for horseshoes due to the automobile or manufacturers of picture tubes castigating people for buying digital televisions. This is a case of entire segments of the population being left out.

Both of these examples are based on age to illustrate a point of commonality.

In the case of Uber, its the young, urban professional who does well by its innovative model. It’s the person who has few things to carry, needs little assistance, and likes to travel to the popular places where there are many others like them, which creates an ideal marketplace. For taxis, they are being asked to go to out-of-the-way places (like doctors appointments), deliver people and their parcels (for people who aren’t highly mobile), and are bound by a set of rules that Uber is not to ensure that they assist those who need it in using their service. Uber gets the cream of the market, while taxis are left with what’s left and that is mostly older adults.

But what ‘older’ means is a matter of perspective as we see with Amazon. As the reporters explain, old age isn’t what it once was:

In interviews, 40-year-old men were convinced Amazon would replace them with 30-year-olds who could put in more hours, and 30-year-olds were sure that the company preferred to hire 20-somethings who would outwork them. After Max Shipley, a father of two young children, left this spring, he wondered if Amazon would “bring in college kids who have fewer commitments, who are single, who have more time to focus on work.” Mr. Shipley is 25.

Every innovation produces ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, but what is striking in both articles is that the ‘winners’ are a very narrow band of the population, young, urban professionals. A look across what we often gets heralded as innovation (pick up any issue of Fast Company magazine to see it) and you’ll see a world dominated by (mostly) young, (mostly) white, (mostly) male, (mostly) middle class, and (mostly) tech-driven innovations that come from places and cultures like Silicon Valley. Facebook, Apple, Google, Uber, AirBnB — they are all based in Silicon Valley.

How we design innovations and the cultures we create in that process can have enormous implications. Are we creating our own silicon valley for social innovation?

“Slamming the Door on Silicon Valley”

Jess Zimmerman, writing in The Guardian, remarked on how Silicon Valley’s culture is one of entitlement and male hegemony, pointing to work of women’s groups aimed at making the work culture in the valley more female-friendly. Even though Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In is a product of that environment, it not of that environment. “The Valley” is an environment that fosters both Uber and Amazon (which is should be noted is based in Washington State and not Silicon Valley, but nonetheless is part of the same cultural milieu discussed here). That ethos is one that is characterized by cultures of hard work, long hours, dynamism and youth. As a result, a path dependence is created based on the design specifications proposed at the start and leads to products that are, no surprise, a reflection of their makers.

Facebook’s features of ‘extreme openness’ as evidenced by it’s settings that make it hard to keep things private and rules against using pseudonyms can be traced back to Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room at Harvard and his personality and personal belief system about what social life is to be like. As a result, Zuckerberg’s design has influenced online interactions of more than one billion users worldwide and continues today.

So what does this have to do with social innovation? Consider the literature — wide in scope, thin in detail as it may be — on social innovation methods and tools from social labs to design thinking. What we might find is an incomplete list of items that looks something like this:

  1. Be bold, bring wild ideas to the table and lots of them to the table; no idea is a bad idea
  2. Co-create with others
  3. We live in a VUCA (Volitile, unpredictable, complex, ambiguous) world and need to work accordingly
  4. Flat organizational structures work best for innovation
  5. Innovation doesn’t happen during 9-5, it happens anytime
  6. Information technology will leverage creative innovation potential everywhere, anywhere: it always wins
  7. You have to ‘move fast and break stuff‘, including the rules

The list can go on.

While I have  belief in what is contained in this list, it’s a restrained belief. Each of these points (and there are many others) can be upended to illustrate how social innovation can exclude people, ideas, cultures and possibilities that are as harmful as helpful. As I’ve argued before, social innovation has embedded in it an ethic of social justice if it’s to truly be a true social innovation. This requires attention to the ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ of innovation in ways that go beyond a call to innovate and change, it means paying attention to the cultures we impose through the innovation process.

Do we place too much emphasis on disruption vs harmony?

Where is the role for contemplation in the speed to create new things?

Is there a place for an introvert in the innovation table?

While innovative ideas might not respect the 9-5 clock, many paycheques, office spaces, commuter schedules, daycares and employee benefits do, what does that mean for those who rely on this?

Are these values those of innovation or those of a particular type of innovation from a particular context?

The Trickle of Innovation Streams Through the Valley

If we are to adopt social innovation on a wide scale we need to create a culture of innovation that is more than just a new version of a trickle-down model. Indeed, as Geoff Mulgan from Nesta writes, innovation has the potential to be another ‘trickle down theory’ that rewards the most advantaged first and then eventually to others in some modest form, creating inequities.

Yes, we now know much more about how to cultivate buzzing creative industries, universities, knowledge intensive industries and so on. But we have almost nothing to say to around half of our population who face the prospect of bad jobs or no jobs, and look on with dismay and envy at the windfall gains accruing to the elite insiders.

Silicon Valley is currently the place of privilege in the innovation world. If you have the privilege of not needing add-ons to your taxi ride, require assistance or have to drive to a neighbourhood that’s off the beaten path or have to pay by cash, Uber is great. If you can work flex hours and long hours, are gregarious and extroverted, and aren’t temporally limited by the needs of a spouse or partner, children, a loved one who requires care, or pets (that can’t be brought to work for obvious reasons — and I’m thinking of you cat owners) then a place like Amazon is maybe for you.

When we use these spec’s as our models to design innovation more widely, including social innovation, we create systems that exclude as much as include and that might get us innovations, but not necessarily real social ones.

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