Digital Digressions

Think Eco-Systems not just Issues

Take global warming or government regulation as examples - these are all very complex topics, collections of variables where solving the problem cannot be achieved through solving one issue alone, but in fact the solution rests in addressing the eco-system tying together all the inter-linked variables. In fact, seeing things on purely the issue level may in fact be contributing to the problem.

In the book Freakonomics the authors quote numerous examples of cases where seemingly complex phenomena have very simple origins, but often in an entirely different field and the eco-system magnifies the impact through all the inter-related variables and creates an impact on local, sometimes national and international levels. One of the striking examples is their analysis of crime figures in large cities in the US. The numbers were growing at epic proportions year-on year until sometime in the mid-eighties the trend suddenly stopped and began a steady decline. Experts tried to attribute this reversal to anything from an increase in spending on the police, a growth in numbers of staff, prisons, different governments, new laws etc. but the biggest impact came from the legalisation of abortion.

How could this have anything to do with crime figures you may wonder? Here the eco-system comes in: the women most likely to have an abortion back in the 60s where women in low-income households with several children already and who before the legalisation either had to risk their lives to have an abortion by often unqualified people in unsafe conditions and risk prosecution or not have one at all. Many didn't and subsequently struggled to look after their children, who often ended up in crime from a lack of opportunity in life. As abortion became legal in many states, the numbers of these 'unwanted' children dropped and the sheer numbers of disadvantaged youth decreased, thus decreasing the populace likely to commit crime. It's not to say that the other measures had no impact at all, but collectively they helped solve the problem as the eco-system of ideal conditions leading to crime gradually became more untenable.

Biofuels are another example of where eco-system thinking really needs to be applied on a much larger scale than today - touted as the solution to the West's reliance on fossil fuels, the growth of crops destined for biofuels is now accelerating across the world, leading to an increased rate of rain forest destruction (these are our most efficient weapon in clearing CO2 from the atmosphere) as land is being cleared to grow palm oil - a crucial ingredient in biofuels. Much agricultural land previously home to food production is being converted to grow crops for biofuel, putting food production in danger. The biggest irony of all is that the process of producing biofuels has a greater negative impact on global warming than fossil fuel use - proving that there is no simple 'solution' to global warming, in fact simple solutions may in fact be aggravating it further, instead we need to think in eco-systems, not just locally, but nationally and internationally.

Nancy Gibbs of Time, talks in her column about the Vatican reflecting on its mortal sins for the modern age (24th March 2008) of the fact that back in the past sloth, lust, greed, envy and anger accounted for virtually all the crimes of mankind, whereas today the issues that once were the clear culprits behind our follies and misfortunes are far more complex than the 7 deadly sins alone. Causes and consequences come together to form eco-systems, where one problem feeds another and addressing consequences is meaningless without understanding and addressing the causes. Contextualising what was once simple in our now increasingly interlinked world - Quoting Mohandas Gandhi's version of the 7 deadly sins:

• Wealth without work
• Pleasure without conscience
• Science without humanity
• Knowledge without character
• Politics without principle
• Commerce without morality
• Worship without sacrifice

The responsibility rests with the individual, but that includes the duty to take care of others as well as yourself.

Things for sale I will mail you

This little site caught my attention today, because not only is it witty, but fun too. We all knew the next frontier of business development is in providing and designing experiences, but you don't need to be a big business to do it. Perhaps you go and have the experiences and send the proof to people who paid you to go have it - the ultimate archair experience.

Below are some of my favourites, but go to David's site for the full menu:

If you give me $1,626 I will go to the small Okinawan island called Taketomi and send you an envelope filled with star-sand (don't worry, I've been there before, I know where to go). I will send it from there.

For this project, anyone can make a donation until I reach the amount. So, anyone can donate to this, and I will put how much I have raised here. You can donate any amount, but, I will only send you the sand if you donate over $100. Thank You!

If you give me $250 I will read the Little Prince in front of the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street in the middle of a work day. I will send you photograph documentation of this. (or: if you give me $1000 I will buy as many copies of the Little Prince as I can and give them away to people leaving the New York Stock Exchange after a days work)

If you give me $30 I will walk around New York, and the first homeless person I see I will buy him or her whatever he or she wants to eat (as long as it is less than $30). I will mail you back the exact change (minus the paypal fee and the cost of the postage stamp) with the receipt for the food and the name of the person who ate it.

      

• Kris Efland bought a really big Kentucky Fried Chicken meal and an orange drink from Nedick's for Regional Keith on W 33rd and Broadway on February 24, 2008.
• Joie Mikitson bought a bunch of groceries from Park Avenue Food Court for Francis on E 10th and 4th Ave on February 25, 2008.
• Bart Schouten bought a pizza full of every topping except anchovies from Johns' of Bleeker Street for Marvin who was in the Houston train stop for the 1 on February 28, 2008.

Institutional hubris meets the empowered consumer: The Terminal 5 song

A while ago I treated you to the full transcript of my own experience with British Airways on my return journey, which got delayed a full 28 hours. Back last summer that was an epic delay and worthy of headlines, but it pales in comparison to the debacle known as Terminal 5.

Newspapers here in the UK have been full of articles cataloguing the events that transpired when the new Terminal was finally opened to the public, mass-scale computer failures preventing anyone from logging in to check in passengers, an incomprehensible baggage-handling system that failed as soon as it was turned on, an elaborate and beautiful glass-covered building with inadequate signing and logic to handling vast quantities of people needing to move from one floor to the next, the list is endless.

Outraged consumers have filled columns and airwaves venting their spleen about how this kind of behaviour can be tolerated and how come no one has sued the pants off BA and BAA by now - it surely would happen in the States. The most creative expression of consumer-generated discontent is the Terminal 5 song that captures brilliantly some of the madness that this episode in the history of disasters known as BA/BAA ventures and service - it's even catchy! Bring on the empowered consumer!

Hello world... and a new book: Groundswell

No, contrary to popular belief i have not fallen off the edge of the planet (just yet) although my silence recently could have given you that impression. Things have just been bonkers, I have been travelling too much and at times been so tired I have had absolutely nothing to add, which knowing my ability to talk may actually come as a blessing to my colleagues..

Things are looking up though - for those of you who followed my efforts to use this blog to recruit someone to join me, the news is: it worked! Surprisingly social networks and namely Facebook came to my rescue in that a friend came across the blog post and thought of a friend who would be perfect for the job (and he is!) and told me to get in touch (via Facebook). Sounds serendipitous and it was - but it turned out to be the best bit of sideways recruitment I've ever done. Now we both owe him a beer so Alex, when you do stop twittering and feel the onset of a beer, let us know.

Apart from that many things are afoot, which I need to share with you in the coming weeks, but in the meantime I wanted to build on the topic of communities, social networking and the lot and introduce you to a new book, Groundswell where my colleague, Tormod Askildsen, head of community development at LEGO has been interviewed too. read a little here on the topic of AFOLs or Adult Fans of LEGO:

Groundswell on Social Media Today

Avoiding the 3 pitfalls of Innovation based on Insight

Don't get me wrong - I'm a fierce proponent of innovation based on insight. How else would you be able to frame your innovation and understand whether what you are proposing is even relevant, unless you understand the competitive landscape in which you operate? The purpose of this post is not to question whether you need insights or delve into how innovation works or how to fuel it, but instead, assuming you have a smooth running innovation machine - and you work from solid consumer insight - how come things can still go wrong?

Interestingly, cognitive science can help us here, specifically the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who three decades ago explored the benefits and risks of heuristics, or shortcuts in thinking. Heuristics help to explain the time we get it wrong even when having been presented with all the reasonable information and insight, which presumably should have led us to make the right conclusions rather than the wrong ones. There are three errors, which are common when this happens:

Anchoring error - This is when you seize on the first bit of information and basically make your mind up before you have heard the whole argument, even when some subsequent findings may be contradicting what you seized on initially.

Availability error - This is when some surprising findings emerge that remind you of a dramatic past case and you mistakenly apply mental models or conclusions from that case to new findings and rationalise them in the same way, again leading you to potentially make the wrong conclusion.

Attribution error - Despite getting a ton of insight, it can sometimes be very tempting to group these findings into stereotypes and grossly generalise, to see information as ways of confirming what you already know, rather than seeing the little inklings that your stereotypes aren't correct. Here again the information may be correct, but your use of it incorrect.

These mistakes are all very human and can easily happen, but research in other fields are showing just how dangerous these mistakes can be. In the engineering field these errors can lead to countless hours spent hunting for a technical problem in the wrong place, in the medical fields the very same mistakes can lead to gross misdiagnosis and potential patient deaths and of course in design, to redundant products and solutions. To err is human, but to err without learning from your mistakes is plain stupid.

Debunking Popular Myths about Creativity

Like innovation, there are plenty of misconceptions about creativity out there, which makes it all the more confusing when people are extolling the importance of creative skill in the 21st century. To continue my quest to unravel these complex topics this instalment is all about explaining what creativity is NOT.

• You have to be an artist to be creative There are many creative engineers, scientists, financiers etc. creativity is not a privilege reserved to poets and artists alone. Nor is it a characteristic of loners, misunderstood geniuses or crazy people. It is about invention and innovation, often by teams!
• Creativity is a talent that some have and others don’t Viewing creativity as a talent is one of the best excuses for doing nothing. True, some people have a natural curiosity; an active imagination; a relentless energy; and a desire to think differently. But these qualities can be learnt!
• Creative people are mostly rebels (won’t play the game, play mostly by their rules) As we begin to understand the ‘game’ of creativity, we know how minds form patterns [in which they then get caught] and what it takes for people to move across patterns to generate new ideas (serious play). You don’t need to be a rebel to enjoy the sense of freshness that arises from unlocking stifling thought-patterns.

• Creative people are ‘liberated’, free-spirited and child-like. The ‘liberation’ myth is based on the notion that freeing people up from their inhibitions, and encouraging them to be playful and child-like will unleash their creative fibre. Comparing adult creativity with the playfulness of children is difficult. Children are endowed with a creativity bourne out of innocence because their minds have not yet formed as many stifling patterns. The minds of adults, on the other hand, are filled with many useful patterns to be cracked and bridged for the purpose of innovation.
• Tools and techniques are confining This myth rests on the notion that systematic tool-use is contrary to the nature of creativity, which must be ‘free’. According to this view, materials should be malleable (like clay) and user-friendly (like clay). Contrary to belief, however, materials with an integrity (a ‘logic’ of their own) are often more useful in boosting a maker’s creativity - provided, of course, the maker is a fluent user of that tool!
• Creativity occurs as a single burst of genius Despite the plethora of myths pertaining to this, extensive research into both artists’ most famous works and numerous inventions attributed to a single stroke of genius have shown that instead, ideas emerge through a process of fabrication that evolves over time and through hard work

Instead creativity:

• requires both divergent and convergent thinking
• is not a matter of left brain vs. right brain alone
• involves both problem-solving and problem-setting
• balances tradition and innovation, continuity and change
• combines/blends individual and collective contributions
• involves making the familiar strange and the strange familiar

For those interested in finding out more, have look at  Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation by Keith Sawyer, which gathers all the most recent findings in the field of creativity research and also outlines how different disciplines view creativity.

Understanding Innovation

Innovation is one of those words that are very hip these days. Granted, even I have it in my title. Interestingly, it is also one of the most misunderstood words in business today, so perhaps it's worth spending a little time understanding exactly where it comes from.

If you look for the definition of creativity on Wikipedia, you'll find over 60 different versions - most will agree on the basic premises below and beyond that, the views are radically different depending on your scientific or cultural background. Summarising:

• At the simplest level, creativity is about bringing into being something that was not there before
• Creativity is a mental process involving the generation of ideas and concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts
• Creativity occurs when a person thinks a thought that is outside the space of thoughts that is even conceivable to that person Margaret A. Boden

Now creativity is not innovation, although the two are frequently confused for one another. Innovation is actually made up of two halves:

• Imagination: No new ideas can be generated without a person’s abilities to ‘ think outside the box’ or envision alternative ways in her mind
• Creativity: No insights, however brilliant, will ever be realised unless they are projected out, i.e given material form

A person’s creative expression is the visible face of imagination at work.

Imagination and creativity are each faces of a coin called innovation

With this in mind, innovation becomes a process of fueling the imagination and using creativity to bring into existence the ideas at imagination gives rise to. The two go hand in hand and innovation becomes very hard if a) your imagination is stifled or b) you lack the creativity to bring to life the ideas that you've had.

Therefore fostering innovation is about a process to ensure that there is enough food and stimuli for individual and collective imaginations to engage and about creating avenues for creative expressions to materialise and be improved iteratively either by individuals or collectively. Some past blog posts to inspire you:

Avoiding Creative Apartheid 

Why Innovation cannot remain in the realm of the few

The 7 Must-Do's of Innovators

How to Encourage Innovation in Business

The Conditions for Thriving Innovation

That is not to say that these traits all need to exist in a single individual, instead they can collectively emerge in a community, in an organisation, a film crew, and so on. Successful organisations, communities or creative groups accommodate both the acquisition of stimuli to inspire the imagination of members as well as individuals with an ability to creatively realise those ideas. Collectively or individually, an essential part of innovation is the social dimension that fuels imagination and creativity as well as the process of iterative improvement. None of us are as smart as all of us.

Go LEGO!

Today my feet touched down in Billund again, the home of the beloved plastic brick, and a very special day it was too. 50 years of the brick was the occasion, and what 50 years it has been. In those years much has changed in the world around us, technology is everywhere and indeed this very notion of having a blog, to be read by people on the Internet, was not even a glimpse in the eye of Godtfred Kirk Christiansen when he decided to gamble all on the LEGO brick as the toy for the future.

So today was a great day of taking stock, celebrating a little (not as much as we did last August when the company turned 75 years old), but enough to crack open the champagne and eat some cake, as is the Danish tradition for virtually any occasion when more than 2 people meet. (what I do marvel over is that the Danes do manage to eat more cake than virtually any other European nation, yet they are one pretty slim and trim nation.. oh well. Must be all that brain work of playing with LEGO..:) )

Today also saw an unprecedented acknowledgement from arguably the most creative on-line company in the world, where the Google doodle was taken over by bricks and a mini-figure to celebrate LEGO and its profound impact on the founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin. Some of our craftier fans speculated whether Google is simply an anagram from Go LEGO, put I wouldn't go that far although it's a funny thought what a spelling mistake can lead to.. as I think the origin of Google the name came about. In any case, more proof of the pudding just what creativity can accomplish so a big toast to all you out there who still have stacks of bricks hidden in the cupboard, or under your bed - take it out and make something and you will be surprised what you'll come up with!

The Dilemma of Recruitment

As you've noticed I've been having my private writer's strike and not posting anything here for almost a week - a crime punishable by law in the blogosphere. This inactivity is partially due to tons of work, (for some reason January is always a nightmare!) and due to the process of recruitment I'm doing at the moment. And no, this is not going to be a post where I deplore the lack of intelligent candidates or anything like that - it's more the opposite; the dilemma offered by some great candidates and the crafting of a role where people can make the most use of their skills and abilities.

This is the heart of successful recruitment as I see it:

• A clear and honest understanding of the requirements of the role - not just skills and background required, but also what kind of person (personality, preferred way of working etc.) is most likely to succeed given the demands of the job.
• A balanced and diverse enough process for recruitment to enable a holistic view of each individual, to not only ascertain what s/he can do, but also what s/he is motivated/likes doing. Thinking being that even if you are great at doing something you don't enjoy, you still won't do it very well. Also, interviews that only take into account say your CV and a verbal discussion, take into account half or 1/3 of the reality, the challenge is to find out the other pieces of the pie. Moreover, some people are great at talking about themselves, others are not and if there aren't any other tools at your disposal to balance the view, you will be stuck.
  
• A fair and honest matching of requirements of the role with a clear understanding of the person and their strengths It is not about luring a highly competent person in to do a job which requires only 2/3's of their skills and trying to pay them as little as possible. It's about recognising the knowledge and skills that people already have and crafting a role where they can not only operate from a position of strength, but also with wide enough horizons to explore and to grow into. There is nothing more depressing than making people jump through hoops and hoops and then locking them into such a tight box that they will never grow beyond it or there isn't scope for them to do that. That's like having a door slammed in your face already at the first day of work.

So to do all this, requires nothing short of hard work. Being utterly frank about the pro's and con's of the role - also recognising that there are people out there who would be great to have on-board, but to have them locked in only performing to half of their potential is not fair on them nor is it good for you either, you just create a source of frustration, not of positive contribution. So I'm in the process of narrowing down on the person with not only the greatest growth-potential, but also the one most naturally capable of performing in the demands of the job, with an innate curiosity to learn and ability to bridge the unlikely bedfellows of research and design.

So there we are - I'd rather do my recruitment well than do it half-hearted and pay for the consequences later and first and foremost I want to create something with not only a lasting impact on the organisation, but a situation where a person who joins me will have a chance to grow and to really make a difference. That takes time, but rather take the time upfront than waste time later.

A Portrait of the Digital Teen

A recent report published by Pew Internet creates a fascinating picture of the on-line media habits of the 12-17 year olds. Some findings at a glance:

• The use of social media – from blogging to on-line social networking to creation of all kinds of digital material – is central to many teenagers’ lives. 
• Girls continue to lead the charge as the teen blogosphere grows; 28% of on-line teens have created a blog, up from 19% in 2004. 
• The growth in blogs tracks with the growth in teens’ use of social networking sites, but they do not completely overlap.
• On-line boys are avid users of video-sharing websites such as You-Tube, and boys are more likely than girls to upload.
• Digital images – stills and videos – have a big role in teen life. Posting images and video often starts a virtual conversation. Most teens receive some feedback on the content they post on-line.
• Most teens restrict access to their posted photos and videos – at least some of the time. Adults restrict access to the same content less often.
• In the midst of the digital media mix, the land-line is still a lifeline for teen social life. Multi-channel teens layer each new communications opportunity on top of pre-existing channels.
• Email continues to lose its luster among teens as texting, instant messaging, and social networking sites facilitate more frequent contact with friends.

Some curious facts about teen blogging
Apparently, girls continue to dominate the teen blogosphere; 35% of all on-line teen girls blog, compared with just 20% of on-line teen boys. The gender gap for blogging has grown larger over time. Virtually all of the growth in teen blogging between 2004 and 2006 is due to the increased activity of girls. Older teen girls are still far more likely to blog when compared with older boys (38% vs. 18%), but younger girl bloggers have grown at such a fast clip that they are now outpacing even the older boys (32% of younger girls blog vs. 18% of older boys). 

Beyond gender and age, two new developments emerged in this survey in the demographics of teens who blog. While there was little or no variation in blogging activity among teens according to household income or family structure in 2004, both variables have become important indicators in the 2006 data. Teens living in households earning less than $50,000 per year are considerably more likely to blog than those living in higher-income households; fully 35% of on-line teens whose parents fall in the lower
income brackets have created an on-line journal or blog, while just 24% of those in the higher income brackets have done so.

An even more pronounced contrast is evident when looking at teens who live with single parents vs. those who live with married parents. On-line teens living in single-parent homes are far more likely to have shared their writing through a blog; 42% of these teens keep a blog compared with 25% of teens living with married parents.

Hmmm.. curiouser and curiouser as Alice would have said. I particularly wonder about the propensity of kids of divorced parents to be blogging, are they just venting their spleen or have they learnt to express their thinking more as a result of the complexity of their family life compared to those with both parents still at home?

For more information visit the Digital native research project.