Digital Digressions

3 Types of Productivity - Making the Most of a Working Day

Few weeks into my new job I have had a rare treat to enjoy - working from home. Now, don't get me wrong - I have been blessed with the business warrior's tools of trade for a while, such as a laptop and mobile phone, but mainly because of the habits of my previous team, it always felt awkward to suggest working from home. To be precise: it felt like my boss didn't think I would be doing as much work as he thought I was doing in the office. Interesting take on the issue of trust - but I reserve that to another post.

Working from home? Well, never mind how far we have got with information technology, computing and connectivity - there is still some stigma attached to this form of working, particularly in a work-obsessed country like Britain, where true men don't go home before at least 8pm. There has been numerous discussions about this in the press, where working hours have been compared with countries in Europe and conclusions made about the fact that our working hours are in fact getting longer, not shorter despite the advent of so much 'labour-saving' technology. In many ways it seems that the ubiquitous connectivity through laptops, blackberries and email means we are perpetually stuck checking them and thus inadvertently our working days stretch far into the evening and our spare-time than they would if we could leave them behind when leaving work.

Back to working from home though - this seems to be either a recipe for extreme productivity in the case of some and the recipe for perpetual distraction for others, all depends who you talk to. This also colours the response you get from people when you inform them that is what you will be doing. Some tell me that the office is an escape mechanism, they actually get some work done when not continuously interrupted by their children or pets, for others home is a cave, a lair where thinking and strategic planning can occur - away from the distractions of office routines. Others struggle with motivation when alone at home, others struggle with it at the office surrounded by chatty or catty colleagues. In any case - it seems that much of this depends on the kind of work you do.

First, you need to be able to assess the type of input your current tasks require. Often our to-do lists are a mixture of all three approaches listed below, but simply being aware of which type of concentration they require makes it easier to plan your day or even plan your 'Cave'-moments.

1. If your work requires long periods of un-interrupted concentration:
Such as planning, designing, programming, writing proposals, reports and analyses - you need to find a location where you can best do this. The office may not be the perfect place at all, as colleagues like to wander over, ring you or drop you emails which land right in the middle of your flow of consciousness and jolt you from whatever trail of thought you were trying to follow. In those cases, it is important to minimise the amount if distractions, wherever you happen to be;

• close the email and set your messenger status to away or busy:
• run only the application you need at that particular time
• have a comfortable area with a clean desk and nothing around you other than things connected to the task you are working on right now
• listen to music through headphones
• just wear headphones anyway (to make people less inclined to start talking to you from across the room)
• set your phone to forward to answering machine or on silent
• have a cup of coffee or some water handy
• keep a list of the things you need to be thinking about when doing this job
• sketch things out on paper first (think!), move to computer later (execute)
• avoid personal calls or chatting
• have lunch at your desk if necessary
• if you feel stuck, take a break and a piece of notepaper and a pen with you and go sit outside, in the canteen, in the park, another room and let your thoughts focus on some simple pointers: what are the objectives, the deliverables, the enablers, the obstacles, and the time-line?

2. If your work requires short bursts of intensive activity:
Such as phone calls, emails, meetings, routine tasks etc,

• Keep a list of things you need to do, follow the GTD method if necessary
• Avoid scheduling meetings whenever you can, make a habit of dropping by people's desks instead, particularly if you only need to speak to one person. Most things can be covered this way and followed up with an email if necessary. Meetings are often conducted whilst sitting down, which means people's thinking slows down too - and time is wasted unnecessarily.
• Meetings are useful if you need to talk to two or more people at the same time - but unless you distribute an agenda before hand and stick to it, meetings can drag on and be inconclusive, so always make it clear what you want to achieve, make everybody aware of this and stick to the plan rigorously
• Meetings with more than 8 attendees can rarely accomplish much more than be a form of information distribution and quick questions and answers, so use them for what they are. Again, have an agenda, be strict with timing and stop discussions going round in circles. Conclusions and actionables is what you want.
• If your intention is simply to update people on the tasks for the week or day ahead, there is nothing wrong with stand-up meetings. I know these have acquired an 80's yuppie-tinge in some circles, but again - they are very useful for what they are. If you have a set of instructions or information to give your team, gather people up, tell them and get on with it. These meetings should not go on for more than 15 minutes, but it is amazing how much information you can cover in 15 minutes standing up with everyone standing up around you, as opposed to all of you sitting down.
• Before making a phone call, make a list of things you need to cover, accomplish, agree upon or delegate and keep your eye on the list to make sure you cover all the points
• Try to avoid falling into the email trap where virtually all your communication is done via email, talk to people, ring them up and use email as a summary tool wherever possible - not as the tool for first contact.
• Be clear and to the point in your communication, make it clear what you need, and what you will do and want others to do
• Do 3 - 4 short tasks, have a break and come back - persisting too long makes you get slower the longer you persist. If you cannot finish a task in 30 minutes, allocate another time-slot for it later in the day or the next day (depending on your deadlines). If it's a big task, revert to point one and find yourself space and time for some un-interrupted thinking and concentration.

3. If Your Work Requires Creative Team Input:
Such as brainstorming, problem-solving, concept development, new product development etc.

• These things can seldom be accomplished in busy office environments as the many distractions around us prevent the un-interrupted concentration required not just by you, but the entire team.
• Some good tips on the prerequisites for running good creative brainstorms can be found here
• Get yourself away from the office to a place which is considered 'neutral' i.e nobody's 'homeground' so all team members are equal and devoid of all the usual office politics of rank, status and so on.
• Set aside solid time for this, but no more than an hour and a half at the time followed by a break
• End the day summarising your conclusions and be clear about what happens next. When things are fresh in people's minds, this is also the best time to mobilise people and make it clear who needs to do what. Give people ownership of the outcome.

All in all it's about analysing each project or task you have, understanding how you need to tackle it, i.e through long periods of intense concentration, short bursts of activity or through creative input and most projects require a combination of all three, which means you need to break the project down into constituent components that can be tackled in one of the three ways mentioned.

If you have a team, these activities apply to them too so it helps if you can be open about your thoughts and planning and make sure people know when all of you need to be together and when it is OK to be in Mode 1 and perhaps work from home, if that is the most conducive place for the person to be able to concentrate and think without being uninterrupted. What works for one person doesn't necessarily work for everyone else, so be accomodating here.

Big projects in particular come down to planning and not just planning in the sense that you stick some deadlines in a calendar and leave people to it. It's up to each and every one of the members in a team to assess their to-do lists and decide which of the three modes they need to engage in order to accomplish the tasks and communicate them openly so the team doesn't end up disintegrating because each member is engaged in their own deliverables and forget that time together is as important as time apart, provided there are clear goals for both.

The Curse of the Bored Brain

A friend of mine recently mentioned that reading one of my blog posts, he realised that his tendency to be grumpy on occasion was in fact a reaction to underlying procrastination. In many ways he is being very hard on himself, because he has a relentlessly inquisitive mind and yes, there are days when I used to just let him get on with things, but then - we all have days like these. Interestingly, what his statement reminded me of is what I call the curse of the bored brain.

Looking at what our brains have to cope with on a normal day - not only do we have to put up with  blurring industry lines and confusing responsibilities, ever shortening times to production, cost-cutting, redundancies - you name it - along with it come also the various frustrations caused by feature-rich and experience-poor technologies. A disproportionate amount of our time is taken up by computers, blackberries, mobile phones and email and these all have a capacity to distract us from more productive tasks. In fact, the whole process of checking emails first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening is a habit I certainly have got into, but probably many of you too - because of it's sheer unpredictability. We feel obliged to keep dipping into them so as to 'stay on top of things' , but we often find ourselves firefighting to keep the floodgates down and not getting completely swept away by an avalanche of 'actionables' that nobody mentioned until you clicked that Outlook shortcut on your desktop. Emails have an enormous capacity to jolt you from your plan of what you wanted to achieve that day - load your mind with sudden emergencies or simply make your mood swing from good to bad in about 3 milliseconds. Therefore there is an art to writing good emails - but more on that in another post.

Moreover, weeks and months of this same routine along with a predictable flow of meetings, office intrigue and other miscellanea are in fact quietly boring our brains. I know this about myself - too much routine kills me and I start fighting back. I don’t know about you, but I hate routine and the notion of predictability and those destructive behavioural patterns of procrastinating, pushing things close to the deadline and then suddenly almost drowning myself in work to deliver just-on-time, are in fact a reaction towards a sense of not learning or having enough challenges (a bored brain).

Actually, knowing this about myself is quite useful, a ‘boredom’-meter if you like so when I start behaving like that I know I need to think up new things to immerse myself in to keep my mind flexed. What I was getting to is the fact that modern life and the rich media we are surrounded with are in fact stimulating our minds in such a way that our brains continuously expect more stimuli and get bored more easily when lacking stimuli. On one hand life and all it's challenges keeps us on our toes - on the other hand, many things are repetitive, automated and predictable and we struggle to gain more control over them so we could make them less boring. So on one hand we are extremely capable and empowered and expected to behave as such - on the other hand things are not flexible or challenging enough to continuously engage our brains and keep us focused or interested. We are caught in the void between these two opposites.

Dr. Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist, investigating our perception of time, has come to the conclusion that we feel that time passes more and more quickly the more and more of our lives are taken up by routine events and behaviour. We switch to a kind of auto-pilot, where having performed the same activities and tasks so many times before, makes us do it without paying a lot of attention. We almost become automated. This means we don't form memories about events like we do when something is new to us. Less memories formed means a greater sense of time simply rushing past and inadvertently, our inability to control it, which of course makes us feel more powerless.

Thus, when people keep banging on about life-long learning they do have a point - but not in the traditional sense. If we can ensure there are components in our life which we find challenging, awaken our curiosity and desire to learn - we are also forming memories, which means we slow down our perception of time. This means we feel more in control of the passage of time than we do when simply engaged in routine tasks. So yes, you could say life-long learning is pivotal for your continued career-progression and all that, but somehow it sounds quite boring. It sounds like we should always take cues from whatever our role at work demands and direct our learning initiatives to continuously bolster our professional skills.

Yes, maybe - but more importantly, I think it is about finding something, anything you love doing, whether it is connected to your work or not. If it is something you are curious and interested about, you will devote the necessary energy towards figuring things out and continuously be learning more and more, which keeps your mind engaged and active, which means you don't get bored. This means your brain is busy creating memories, which means you remember each day more distinctly and time doesn't just rush past in a blur. Boredom is a curse, it makes people cynical, angry, depressed, shopaholics, TV addicts, you name it - so fight it by finding something you are curious about and make time to delve into learning more and mastering it. A curious mind is a healthy mind.

And a hilariously insightful article on Structured Procrastination - by John Perry on how to turn procrastination into a method of getting things done.

Tenori-On: Coolest Electronic Music Interface since the Invention of the Synth!

Some of you know I like to dabble with music and mixing every now and then. Anyone with an interest in this field knows that electronic music these days is a collection of computers, cables, USB midi-controller interfaces, software, plug-ins, compatibility issues - never enough performance and many more challenges placed in our way of masterminding the field of digital music making. Intuitive is in fact a word that seldom springs to mind, as there are so many components to use concurrently that it is often easier to get stuck reviewing a library of samples or simply trying to make things run smoother than it is actually making music.

This is why this movie of a collaboration between Toshio Iwai and Yamaha really caught my eye - it's extremely simplistic dotmatrix interface seduces one into thinking this is some sort of pre-wacom type of tablet, until you realise that not only is it an incredibly intuitive way of playing music, but it also doubles up as a sequencer and synth all in one beautifully simple interface. Moreover - you can hold it in your lab AND it makes for interesting watching by the audience! Gone are the days of some geek with sunglasses standing behind the keyboard pressing keys and twiddling knobs - for all we know, he could have just been pretending. Not with this thing though - making music becomes a visual spectacle as well as an interface for experimentation and play. I want one!

Many thanks to prof. Edith Ackermann at the MIT for bringing this to my attention.

Using the Factors Affecting Change to End Procrastination

Recently I wrote a post on the Getting Things Done-methodology by David Allen, a surefire way of ending procrastination. Someone commented to me since that they would have preferred reading more about procrastination itself than how to get things done - which, in itself is an interesting spin on the subject and reminded me of this most excellent article by Alan Deutschman of the FastCompany. His article delves into details on recent neuroscience studies, highlighting how people change and what makes people change. Interestingly, he also indirectly points to things that lead to people failing to change, which in other words could be seen as procrastination. Let me give you and example:

Dr. Edward Miller, the dean of the medical school and CEO of the hospital at Johns Hopkins University, delivered a speech at IBM's Global Innovation Outlook Conference last November - where he turned the discussion to patients whose heart disease is so severe that they undergo bypass surgery, a traumatic and expensive procedure that can cost more than $100,000 if complications arise. About 600,000 people have bypasses every year in the United States, and 1.3 million heart patients have angioplasties -- all at a total cost of around $30 billion. The procedures temporarily relieve chest pains but rarely prevent heart attacks or prolong lives. Around half of the time, the bypass grafts clog up in a few years; the angioplasties, in a few months. The causes of this so-called restenosis are complex. It's sometimes a reaction to the trauma of the surgery itself. But many patients could avoid the return of pain and the need to repeat the surgery -- not to mention arrest the course of their disease before it kills them -- by switching to healthier lifestyles. Yet very few do. "If you look at people after coronary-artery bypass grafting two years later, 90% of them have not changed their lifestyle," Miller said. "And that's been studied over and over and over again. And so we're missing some link in there. Even though they know they have a very bad disease and they know they should change their lifestyle, for whatever reason, they can't."

Why could that be? My argument is that they procrastinate about changing - they know they should, but for some reason they just don't get around to it. Why could it be - or is it that in the absence of certain key factors, we all fail to change our behaviour or do certain things, even when we know we should? Let's recap on the points Deutschman mentions as being key to change:

1. Emotion
2. Framing
3. Radical change
4. Support
5. Practise

1. Appeal to people's emotions, not just logic
The conventional wisdom says that crisis is a powerful motivator for change. But severe heart disease is among the most serious of personal crises, and it doesn't motivate -- at least not nearly enough. Nor does giving people accurate analyses and factual information about their situations. What works? Why, in general, is change so incredibly difficult for people? What is it about how our brains are wired that resists change so tenaciously? Why do we fight even what we know to be in our own vital interests?

John Kotter, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied dozens of organizations in the midst of upheaval, has hit on a crucial insight. "Behavior change happens mostly by speaking to people's feelings," he says. "This is true even in organizations that are very focused on analysis and quantitative measurement, even among people who think of themselves as smart in an MBA sense. In highly successful change efforts, people find ways to help others see the problems or solutions in ways that influence emotions, not just thought."

Look again at the case of heart patients. Dr. Dean Ornish, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco and founder of the Preventative Medicine Research Institute, realised the importance of going beyond the facts. "Providing health information is important but not always sufficient," he says. "We also need to bring in the psychological, emotional, and spiritual dimensions that are so often ignored." Ornish published studies in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals, showing that his holistic program, focused around a vegetarian diet with less than 10% of the calories from fat, can actually reverse heart disease without surgery or drugs. Still, the medical establishment remained skeptical that people could sustain the lifestyle changes. In 1993, Ornish persuaded Mutual of Omaha to pay for a trial. Researchers took 333 patients with severely clogged arteries. They helped them quit smoking and go on Ornish's diet. The patients attended twice-weekly group support sessions led by a psychologist and took instruction in meditation, relaxation, yoga, and aerobic exercise. The program lasted for only a year. But after three years, the study found, 77% of the patients had stuck with their lifestyle changes -- and safely avoided the bypass or angioplasty surgeries that they were eligible for under their insurance coverage. And Mutual of Omaha saved around $30,000 per patient.

2. Framing the Change
Why does the Ornish program succeed while the conventional approach has failed? For starters, Ornish recasts the reasons for change. Doctors had been trying to motivate patients mainly with the fear of death, he says, and that simply wasn't working. For a few weeks after a heart attack, patients were scared enough to do whatever their doctors said. But death was just too frightening to think about, so their denial would return, and they'd go back to their old ways.

So instead of trying to motivate them with the "fear of dying," Ornish reframes the issue. He inspires a new vision of the "joy of living" -- convincing them they can feel better, not just live longer. That means enjoying the things that make daily life pleasurable, like making love or even taking long walks without the pain caused by their disease. "Joy is a more powerful motivator than fear," he says.

Pioneering research in cognitive science and linguistics has pointed to the paramount importance of framing. George Lakoff, a professor of those two disciplines at the University of California at Berkeley, defines frames as the "mental structures that shape the way we see the world." The big challenge in trying to change how people think is that their minds rely on frames, not facts.

"Neuroscience tells us that each of the concepts we have -- the long-term concepts that structure how we think -- is instantiated in the synapses of the brain," Lakoff says. "Concepts are not things that can be changed just by someone telling us a fact. We may be presented with facts, but for us to make sense of them, they have to fit what is already in the synapses of the brain. Otherwise, facts go in and then they go right back out. They are not heard, or they are not accepted as facts, or they mystify us: Why would anyone have said that? Then we label the fact as irrational, crazy, or stupid." Lakoff says that's one reason why political conservatives and liberals each think that the other side is nuts. They don't understand each other because their brains are working within different frames.

3. Radical Change is Better Than Incremental Change
Reframing alone isn't enough, of course. That's where Dr. Ornish's other astonishing insight comes in. Paradoxically, he found that radical, sweeping, comprehensive changes are often easier for people than small, incremental ones. For example, he says that people who make moderate changes in their diets get the worst of both worlds: They feel deprived and hungry because they aren't eating everything they want, but they aren't making big enough changes to quickly see an improvement in how they feel, or in measurements such as weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol. But the heart patients who went on Ornish's tough, radical program saw quick, dramatic results, reporting a 91% decrease in frequency of chest pain in the first month. "These rapid improvements are a powerful motivator," he says. "When people who have had so much chest pain that they can't work, or make love, or even walk across the street without intense suffering find that they are able to do all of those things without pain in only a few weeks, then they often say, 'These are choices worth making.' "

While it's astonishing that most patients in Ornish's demanding program stick with it, studies show that two-thirds of patients who are prescribed statin drugs (which are highly effective at cutting cholesterol) stop taking them within one year. What could possibly be a smaller or easier lifestyle change than popping a pill every day? But Ornish says patients stop taking the drug because it doesn't actually make them feel any better. It doesn't deal with causes of high cholesterol, such as obesity, that make people feel unhealthy. The paradox holds that big changes are easier than small ones.

4. Support Makes All the Difference
Even when leaders have reframed the issues brilliantly, it's still vital to give people the multifaceted support they need. That's a big reason why 90% of heart patients can't change their lifestyles but 77% of Ornish's patients could -- because he buttressed them with weekly support groups with other patients, as well as attention from dieticians, psychologists, nurses, and yoga and meditation instructors.

5. Practise Makes Perfect
Neuroscience, a field that has exploded with insight, has a lot more to say about changing people's behavior -- and its findings are guardedly optimistic. Scientists used to believe that the brain became "hardwired" early in life and couldn't change later on. Now researchers such as Dr. Michael Merzenich, a professor at the University of California at San Francisco, say that the brain's ability to change -- its "plasticity" -- is lifelong. If we can change, then why don't we?

Merzenich starts by talking about rats. You can train a rat to have a new skill. The rat solves a puzzle, and you give it a food reward. After 100 times, the rat can solve the puzzle flawlessly. After 200 times, it can remember how to solve it for nearly its lifetime. The rat has developed a habit. It can perform the task automatically because its brain has changed. Similarly, a person has thousands of habits -- such as how to use a pen -- that drive lasting changes in the brain. For highly trained specialists, such as professional musicians, the changes actually show up on MRI scans. Flute players, for instance, have especially large representations in their brains in the areas that control the fingers, tongue, and lips, Merzenich says. "They've distorted their brains."

How, then, to overcome these factors? Merzenich says the key is keeping up the brain's machinery for learning. "When you're young, almost everything you do is behavior-based learning -- it's an incredibly powerful, plastic period," he says. "What happens that becomes stultifying is you stop learning and you stop the machinery, so it starts dying." Unless you work on it, brain fitness often begins declining at around age 30 for men, a bit later for women. "People mistake being active for continuous learning," Merzenich says. "The machinery is only activated by learning. People think they're leading an interesting life when they haven't learned anything in 20 or 30 years. My suggestion is learn Spanish or the oboe."

A Procrastinator's Guide to Getting Things Done

So there we are, a week into a new job and my head is buzzing with trying to get a hang of all the things that have been done, will need doing (probably by me) and may be nice to do once I get that far into the job. If you wonder what I'm doing - that is a fair question and this post may hopefully illuminate a few things or then not, as the case may be. More on that later as I get around to updating my profile page on this blog and all that jazz. Back to this post - I thought that starting afresh with a new job would be a brilliant opportunity to start a crash course into the 'Getting Things Done' methodology avidly debated and evangelised the web over and originally devised by David Allen in a book bearing the same name. Doubtless this guy's made it big and it amuses me that he's done it simply by devising a system that supposedly is the enemy of all procrastinators: a tool to get stuff done.

My musings aside, new job - plenty to get my head around so plenty of potential opportunities to feel anxious and stressed about all the things that need doing - I feel like a textbook candidate for the methodology so I shall take you on a journey of my findings so far.

Apparently the great enemy to our peace of mind is collectively defined as 'stuff' -  anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn’t belong where it is, but for which you haven’t yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step. [pg. 17]. Sounds fair enough and if you are anything like me your mind is a zoo of ideas that like to wander up and down the pathways of your mind, collide with each other, create strange new connections and generally think about anything and everything all at the same time. The difference is of course that over the years I have got quite used to this and certainly, as things became more predictable in my old job - I also learned the ebb and flow of demand, tasks, deliverables and that sort of thing. My coping mechanisms weren't very elaborate, merely a diary with a page devoted for each day, so I could keep a running to-do list - things I would get done I would cross out and things pending would get moved to the next day. Not too complicated and more over, quite beautiful in its simplicity.

However, a new situation prompted potentially changing this simplicity, because I have been inundated with project outlines, time-lines, facts, figures, contacts, FYIs and all that sort of thing and because I'm still new to it all, I struggle to decipher which of the information is pivotal to me right now and what is more 'nice to know' and something I can refer to later. So how does Getting Things Done work then? Quite simply:

1. identify all the stuff in your life that isn’t in the right place (close all open loops)
2. get rid of the stuff that isn’t yours or you don’t need right now
3. create a right place that you trust and that supports your working style and values
4. put your stuff in the right place, consistently
5. do your stuff in a way that honours your time, your energy, and the context of any given moment
6. iterate and re-factor mercilessly

Sounds straight forward enough, but then there is an awful lot of talk about folders and in-boxes and categorising stuff - something which the geeky side of me didn't quite warm to. Instead, there are a number of solutions to this same dilemma available in program-form on the web, so as to allow for the same recording and categorising of information, but devoid of all the papers. I'll get back to those in a moment. To recap on how the system works MineZone Wiki have created an excellent set of notes from the book, summarising the methodology in beautiful simplicity:

1. collect things that command our attention (anything personal or professional, big or little, that you think should be different than it currently is and that you have any level of internal commitment to changing)
   1. get it all out of your head
   2. minimize your collection buckets
      • physical in-basket
      • writing paper and pads
      • electronic note taking
      • auditory capture (answering machines, voicemail, dictating equipment)
      • email
   3. empty the buckets regularly
2. process what they mean and what to do about them
   1. what is it?
   2. is it actionable?  YES or NO
      • No
        1. trash
        2. incubate
           1. someday/maybe list
           2. tickler file (suspended or follow-on file; a 3D calendar)
              • 43 folders:
                • 31 Daily Files
                • 12 Monthly Files
                • Tomorrow's Date at the front
        3. reference (reference should be information that can be easily referred to when needed)
      • Yes
        1. What is the next action?
           • do it
           • delegate it
           • defer it
           • Project (anything requiring more than one step to accomplish the desired outcome)
        2. actionable tracking
           1. list of projects
           2. storage or files for project plans and materials
           3. calendar (time specific actions [appointments], day specific actions, day specific information)
           4. list of reminders of next actions
           5. a list of reminders of things you're waiting for (only review as often as they have to be in order to stop wondering about them)
3. organise the results
4. review the options
5. do
   1. choosing actions in the moment
      1. context
      2. time available
      3. energy available
      4. priority

Work is Play and Lasting Value Can Only be Co-created

As some of you know I've recently started a new job with Community development and specifically experience design - a fairly 'new' area on corporate radars, but rapidly gaining momentum all over the world as companies realise the limited growth opportunities associated with competition on price and features alone. Interestingly, delivering experiences to consumers is more than simply scripting or staging events around the company's various offerings. It is also more than merely outsourcing activities to customers and moreover, it is significantly more than marginal customisation of products.

Alas, things are close to boiling point in many industries and product categories - companies generate more goods and services than at any point in history, delivered through an ever-growing number of channels. Ironically, the large product variety has not necessarily resulted in better consumer experiences. For senior management, the situation is no better - ubiquitous connectivity, globalisation, industry deregulation and technology convergence means industry boundaries are blurring and so are product definitions. These discontinuities are releasing worldwide flows of information, capital, products and ideas, allowing nontraditional competitors to upset the status quo. Managers have to focus on more than solely costs, product and process quality, speed and efficiency - for profitable growth, we also need new sources of innovation and creativity. Paradoxically consumers have more choice that yield less satisfaction and management now has more strategic options that yield less value. We, in fact, need a need frame for value creation - co-creation of value.

Traditional business thinking starts with the premise that a company creates value. A company autonomously determines the value that it will provide through its choice of products and services and consumers represent the demand for the offerings. We are talking about an exchange process - value is extracted from exchanging ownership and thus companies have developed multiple approaches to extracting this value - increased variety of products, efficient delivery, customising them for individual consumers or wrapping contexts around them and staging the value creation process, as themed restaurants do. Ultimately we are talking about a linear build-up of cost and thus decisions on what to make, what to buy from suppliers, where to assemble and service products and a whole host of other logistics issues derive from this perspective. Employees focus on the quality of products and processes and innovation invariable entails technology, products and processes.

What if you turn this concept on its head and start with the premise that the consumer and the company co-create value and the value-creation process centres around individuals and their co-creation experiences. Thus it is no longer the exchange of products which is the locus of value creation, but instead it is the interaction between consumers and company. Context and consumer involvement contribute to the meaning of a given experience to the individual and to the uniqueness of the value co-created. So we are no longer talking about merely the quality of products and processes, but the quality of co-creation experiences. This quality depends on the infrastructure in place for the interactions between company and consumer, oriented around the capacity to create a variety of experiences. So what we are talking about is a need to build 'experience environments', places, contexts, situations, opportunities where experiences can take place and also 'experience networks' that allow individuals to co-construct and personalise their experiences.

Pine and Gilmore famously stated that 'Work is theatre & every business is a stage' - but I believe we can go much further than that. Through enabling active participation in the co-creation of value, through numerous interactions - not just with the company, but with an entire network of individuals and thematic communities, through events bringing everyone together, a multitude of different contexts that cater for the heterogeneity of individuals and their preferences and ultimately through a variety of experiences we are talking about far more than theatre. Theatre implies scripts and rigid production - improvisation on the other hand is much like play - it happens according to rules agreed on by the players and therefore I would like to postulate that 'Work is play and lasting value can only be co-created'.

For consumers the benefits of co-creation are numerous: greater level of knowledge and expertise about the product and with it greater self-esteem. This leads to emotional bonding with product and company and enhances customers' readiness to trust the company and believe in the quality of its products and not to mention the access to a community, which greatly increases a consumer's enjoyment of the product. Ultimately the experience of co-creation is markedly different from traditional product purchase and the value shifts from the price of the physical product to the value of co-designing it and the interactions between consumers, company and community.

For companies the benefits are equally dramatic and in addition to new business opportunities, co-creation offers greater consumer insight as well as ideas for design, engineering, manufacturing. Employees gain greater understanding of consumer aspirations, desires, motivations, behaviours and agreeable trade-offs regarding features and functions. Ultimately this means reduced insecurity in capital commitments. Of course there are issues that also need to be solved, such as how to interact intensively with consumers and maintain operational efficiency, how to maintain high standards and cede some control over design, how much access to give consumers, what the legal responsibilities are and how to forecast accurately - but the benefits are potentially huge if these can be solved in a satisfactory manner. Just look at Harley-Davidson.

Freak Fact: If You Are Goodlooking You Will Have More Daughters*

Some time ago I did a post on the book Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner. It pulls together freaky facts from figures in a way only an economist can and makes for some interesting reading. Following their success, they have a Blog filled with more controversial facts and findings to stir you up and today's freaky fact is a study on why attractive women sometimes marry unattractive men. Why? Apparently a simple issue of supply and demand - there are more attractive women in the world than there are men (apparently).

But this is not the crux of the post, instead they delve further into the findings of Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, who argues it’s because

good-looking parents are 36% more likely to have a baby daughter as their first child than a baby son—which suggests, evolutionarily speaking, that beauty is a trait more valuable for women than for men. The study was conducted with data from 3,000 Americans, derived from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, and was published in the Journal of Theoretical Biology.

According to this news article, “Selection pressure means when parents have traits they can pass on that are better for boys than for girls, they are more likely to have boys. Such traits include large size, strength and aggression, which might help a man compete for mates. On the other hand, parents with heritable traits that are more advantageous to girls are more likely to have daughters.”

To me this article flies in the face of other studies conducted, some which have found that after WW1 and WW2 lots of boys were born and the likelihood of having boys as opposed to girls were linked to the amount of sex the parents (especially the father) had had. The theory was that if you had sex more frequently, you were more likely to have a girl than a boy. Or maybe good-looking parents have sex more frequently and thus we get back to the study above? Or the only survivors after the war are men who were physically strong and aggressive and thus more boys were born after the war?? Sounds fair enough, yet we know that modern wars don't distinguish their victims - if you are in the way of a bullet or bomb you die, regardless of whether you are fit, aggressive, strong or not.

Another study I read not too long ago linked the occurrence of tomboys (girls who are not girly-girls) to higher than normal levels of testosterone in the womb. Speculations on the causes of higher levels of testosterone included raised stress-levels, anger, physical exercise and so on. Interestingly, tomboy girls in tests appear to be better at visual-spatial tasks than their girly-girl counterparts, and generally think in a more logical fashion than the typical female stereotype. So how does this correlate to the study above - if your parents are good-looking, but stressed - you may end up with a girl who is a tomboy rather than a girly-girl?

Speculation aside the comments section to the blog post emerges yet again as the more interesting part to the post by miles.. quoting Starfish:

How many ways is this “study” flawed? We do not have a working definition of beauty, let alone any way of measuring it. We do not have a working definition of intelligence, nor any way of measuring it. We don’t have any reason to believe that either of them are hereditary, to any interesting degree (the most attractive people, by my lights, often have relatively unattractive parents, and lots of smart people have dumb kids (and vice-versa)). However we define or describe them, we certainly don’t have any reason to think they’re mutually exclusive. This seems to me to be almost a parody of social science in its most meretricious form: the construction of a monument of cliches on top of a foundation of sand.

Alas, if this freaky fact wasn't sufficiently shot down in your opinion then the the tyranny of statistical methodology and how it can lead even well-intentioned sociobiologists astray should surely do the trick..